Part 9

But passing by these simple folk, we may yet find in the more serious-minded the sense of an inconsistency in the very conception, which puts it forever beyond our reach. We may be undertaking the difficult experiment of eating our cake and having it too. Yet even so there may be a refuge: for if paradox should prove to be the final form of truth--a union of opposites present in all living facts--inconsistency will have no devastating effect on it. The very fabric of truth may be woven of just such contradictions; reality may _never_ be consistent. But whether or no this be the way out, there are plainly difficulties to be considered, if we are to understand, and at the same time accept, the ideal of tolerance.

At the outset the distinction must be drawn between outward physical toleration and the inward spiritual grace of tolerance. In the first place, tolerance refers to thought, not to conduct. That heretics are no longer burned at the stake is the outcome of a change in social policy; in so far as this change is more than the discovery that heretics are after all not dangerous to the state, it is due to the obvious fact that where there is no clearly delineated, uniform orthodoxy, there can be no heresy--the species is extinct. Whenever the government in power concludes that an idea _is_ dangerous to the state, it does not hesitate to break through whatever safeguards to individual liberty of opinion may have been erected in the past. If such action is not legally justified, it is at once shown that laws are dead things, powerless against living human fears and needs. The application of the Defense-of-the-Realm act in England to distributing copies of the hitherto innocuous Sermon on the Mount, is evidence enough that the governmental attitude towards the subject has not changed in principle. And if, in addition to fear, we have a sharply defined orthodox view, we find that, though ordinary people no longer advocate capital punishment for doubting the Trinity, they did attempt to lynch Max Eastman for doubting the righteousness of the war. In other words, we have ceased to believe that religious opinions matter to social conduct, while still believing that political opinions do.

The genuine intolerance of the middle ages rested on a different basis. We say: Think what you please, so long as you act in conformity with what public opinion pleases. Plenty of anarchists and pacifists and upholders of the Susan B. Anthony Federal Amendment are still at large because their actions, though not their thoughts, are orthodox. The Inquisition struck deeper, because it was convinced of the genuine importance of thought, in relation to conduct. It was not content with binding the heretic to hold his peace--he must recant. It was so utterly convinced that not merely expediency, but final universal truth, lay in its keeping, that mere error, in the face of this revealed truth, became the ultimate sin.

The question of the meaning of tolerance, then, if it is not simply a matter of social usage, becomes the question, How far is it compatible with conviction? Tolerance may be defined as willingness to sanction the existence of views at variance with our own. The point at issue is not the expression of such views; the most intolerant man may egg on his opponent to complete expression, that he may argue him out of his error. The real tolerance refers to the relation of thought to thought, not of thought to speech. The above definition is one which, I believe, the seeker after tolerance will agree to accept (I have tried it on several). And yet, though presenting a fair idea of the attitude, it holds within itself the difficulty which puts the ideal out of reach.

This inherent contradiction may be stated, in the terms of our definition, thus: we are willing for an opposite view to exist _only_ when we are not entirely convinced that our own view is true. The real belief in absolute truth is a missionary state of mind, and carries with it the faith that truth is the one thing worth having. In our day, the infinite variety of ideas which custom does not stale, has long forced itself upon our attention. In consequence we no longer share the faith of Plato that knowledge, as distinct from opinion, can be secured. We cannot believe anything quite as firmly as the mediæval Catholic believed in an eternal church independent of argument, or indeed of humanity. If we could, we should be as intolerant as Billy Sunday, whom "the pale cast of thought" has never tinged, and, if we were metaphysicians, should go up and down the world preaching the dangers of neo-realism, as the evangelist fulminates against the blasphemy of biological evolution. But Billy Sunday is an inverted anachronism; it is not in the power of a modern of the _commencement de siècle_ to recapture his fine careless rapture.

If this be true, if we have grown too modest to declare the eternal constitution of the universe, what degree of conviction and what quality of tolerance are left us?

The first answer is, that we may be willing to admit a view differing from our own because we realize that both may be right. But such a realization, if it is to be more than verbal politeness, implies that the difference is only partial or nominal, and consequently that my opponent's error does not shut him out from acknowledging my truth. I may be a woman suffragist, and yet be tolerant of the views of a friend who opposes suffrage, not on grounds of sex, but because he believes that the suffrage is already too wide, requiring restriction rather than enlargement. If I also am in theory an aristocrat, I can admit the notion that both of us are in a measure right.

But the only real tests of tolerance are the far more common cases, in which, if I am right, you must be wrong. Present species are or are not the result of development or special creation; the world is or is not an intelligible order; our individual personalities do or do not survive bodily death. We cannot be content here to fall back on a different statement of the problem. When we say: "Oh, yes, we both believe in God; to me he is Life Force; to you, Jehovah," we know in our hearts that we are simply conniving at the draining of all definite meaning from the word, in order to confuse the issue and keep the peace. The one thing needful is, not that we should find blanket terms under which we seem to agree, but that we should drag our disagreement into the clearest possible light, and so find out what we are talking about. Not only our language, but our intelligence suffers from preferring vague unity to distinct differentiation.

Even in such cases there are, however, three conditions which make tolerance tenable. The first of them is, that we do not really care about the issue; we have taken sides, but only because it is necessary to hold some opinion, and so we have no active conviction. We are tolerant because, after all, we know little about the subject, and are willing to leave enthusiasm to experts. I have a friend who, even in the crisis of the present war, keeps critically aloof from questions of politics, seeming tolerant because his own position is held only "academically"; he does not care enough about the subject for that particular truth to seem supremely important. He is tolerant with the ease of indifference. It is easy to give free play to ideas in which we have no compelling interest. In consequence, many of us pretend to a general tolerance, when the fact is, that we carefully choose our examples from among the issues which least concern us.

Much of the modern religious tolerance is of this type. Our culture is so predominantly pagan that Christianity has ceased to play more than a nominal part in our tests of ideas and conduct. This tendency has infiltrated even those who are unaware of the influence; the saving of souls according to Christian theology has become less important than the preservation of good taste, whose standards are set by an unconsciously pagan public opinion. On the other hand, the prevailing paganism has not become self-conscious, since it is hidden behind Christian words; and few have the time or courage to look beneath words to test their consonance with things. Being the result, not of directed effort, but of drifting, the pagan element in our civilization is not eager to assert itself. So the avowed pagans are tolerant of Christianity, saying: "I do not care for it for myself, but it is good for the masses. As to the church, for people who like that sort of thing, why, that is the sort of thing they like." And the Christians are tolerant of pagan ideals of self-realization, of personal pride and the worldly splendor of luxury and art, on the ground that some of the ideals which they are supposed to accept are after all inapplicable to modern life. Since neither cares to assert itself for what it is, there is the mutual tolerance of indifference. If these two ideals dared to stand forth and contest the field, there would be an end of tolerance,--a holy war, and clearing of the atmosphere.

The second condition of tolerance implies deeper thought on the disputed subject than does the first. It relates to things, about which we are not indifferent; but it indicates a mental sophistication which is too cautious lightly to put Q. E. D. at the close of a demonstration. Our conviction has, as it were, a string to it. I read once in a novel a phrase like this: "He was as amazed as a Christian, who, waking after death, should look round the universe and find that there was no God." Imagination gives us tolerance by marring every faith with the suggestion that we may wake up and find ourselves mistaken. And this is just the faith that cannot remove mountains. The idea that the other fellow may be right, paralyzes activity. Only bigots and fanatics set fire to the world without scruple. We sit before the hearth, perhaps, and argue about the brutality and cowardice of much of our current morality, and the obstacles which convention often raises against a sincere and heroic life; and yet, unspoken behind our preaching, is the haunting fear that the wisdom of the ages may not be the hoary folly it seems, that the melodramatic novels may be true, that considerations unguessed may be involved--and we continue to sit before the hearth.

The presence of the little imp of skeptical imagination marks the difference between philosophical and religious convictions. For good or ill, the other person's point of view, once seen, cannot cease for us. Our most ardent idealism is not a belief for which we would willingly be martyred by the realists: for we might wake and look round the universe in vain for an Absolute. It may be a good thing that the quality of religious conviction has died out among us, or it may be a necessary evil of civilized thinking. But the fact remains that we have no need of tolerance towards views which, consciously or unconsciously, we admit may be more nearly true than our own. We are merely not sure enough of ourselves to risk annihilating the views of our opponents.

The third form of imperfect conviction on which tolerance may rest is the view of truth as purely personal or relative. Subjectivism has been used as a bad name in philosophy for so long that the suspicion of it is usually resented. But it peers out from behind the respectable robe of many a philosophy which has not learned to call hard names. To reduce truth to a fact in individual experience, is to destroy the problem. Genuine conviction, without which tolerance is a mere form devoid of substance, is impossible if the truth for me and the truth for you are isolated facts, having and needing no relation to each other. But little private truths are sufficient only for little private affairs.

All of us want, and most of us take for granted, a real beauty in whose light it is irrelevant that Longfellow is read by a larger number of people than is Shelley. If I really love Shelley, I must believe that in some impersonal sense _Prometheus Unbound_ is superior to _The Psalm of Life_. This insistence upon a standard is at the root of all our serious thinking; _de gustibus non disputandum_ is a foolish saying: for nothing as a matter of fact is more fiercely disputed than questions of taste. The social character of thought is so firmly rooted that a thought which is limited to a personal impression ceases to interest us. It has become a mere fact; and we live in a world not of mere facts but of facts which gain their importance only through meaning. It is only of the most trivial acts that we say: This is right for me but wrong for you, because you think it wrong. We do not really even then put the You and the I on the same level, but imply that you will, if properly educated, agree with me. Human nature demands that we habitually will that the maxim of our thought at least, should become a universal law. Only when we apply our convictions, æsthetic, ethical, or metaphysical, to others outside ourselves, do they become more than fancies.

If we go the whole way with Professor Sumner, for example, in the relativity of morals, we are not really, from the standpoint of modern Western teaching, looking tolerantly upon other theories which approve, for instance, the summary extermination of undesirable members of the family. We are simply refusing to adopt the morality of our own or any other age, more seriously than as a guide of conduct whereby we avoid punishment by society. The owning of slaves in the United States, says Professor Sumner, is no longer expedient; but, under changes of social and industrial conditions, it may again become so. Morality, that is, is what its etymology implies--simply custom.

The holder of such a theory has no real conviction of the position which, by geographical and temporal accidents, he holds. He is really trying to place himself at the center of indifference, and his one conviction is that all standards are relative. Of opposition to this, he is frequently intolerant enough. The man who holds that Buddhism best meets the religious needs of India, as Christianity satisfies the conditions of life in the West, thinks himself tolerant of religious differences, because all the examples are on his side; but he is intolerant--and on his premises justly so--of missionaries, who are his real opponents.

Such are the forms of incomplete conviction which make tolerance plausible. There remain those attitudes which frankly abandon, for both sides, the claim to truth in any absolute sense. Our opinions in any case, they maintain, are but aspects of an all-embracing truth which can be known only to a consciousness of the whole. Your opinion and mine are, therefore, in the limited sense which is alone applicable, equally true. But the only ideas which we can admit to have an equal claim to partial truth, are those which are not mutually exclusive, so that the different facets of the universal truth shall not interfere with one another. Unless we mean simply that a variety of opinion makes the world less dull, in which case conviction does not come in at all, we are unable to admit that a belief diametrically opposed to our own is "just as good," not as a foil, or a spur, to our own thinking, but in its own right. It may be that the Bradleyan Absolute can admit contradictories as equally true, but such mental acrobatics do not come naturally to human thinking. Since we cannot view the world as the Absolute sees it, we cannot, in practice, be guided by the theory that opposite answers to living problems, set in all their complex conditions, are equally true.

The conviction that is softened by an historic sense or by use of the terms of biological evolution, meets the same difficulty. In so far as there is any real demand for tolerance, it must be in the conflict of present issues. We do not need to be tolerant of the past, unless we imagine ourselves in that past, and regard its issues as, for the time being, contemporary with us. Ideas opposing our own may be gently dealt with, as necessary stages of civilization. But if a stage is now no longer necessary, the excuse fails. Cannibalism could not be defended as a civilized practice, simply because it represents a stage of development. Still less can we tolerate on the same ground what seems to us wrong in modern life. For we cannot without undue vanity maintain that the rest of mankind living under our conditions are less highly developed than we. So the sincere pacifist, for example, cannot properly be tolerant of war as an expression of prevailing savagery, beyond which he has himself advanced.

The theory that opinions and institutions are justified as "stepping-stones," survivals not yet quite outworn, always carries the presumption that we are the apex--an assumption, of course, which evolutionary theory does not bear out. It is possible that our seeming progress may be retrogressive, that the true apex may have been reached in Greece some two thousand years ago. When we look kindly upon (to us) impossible views, with some idea of thesis and antithesis in our minds, we are taking our own position as the synthesis, and, placing ourselves at the standpoint of the whole, implying knowledge of that far off, divine event towards which the Tennysonian creation moves. But if we really think the truth of our vision worth striving for, it is dangerous to hold our reputation for urbanity to be of more importance than insight, by smiling down on opponents as on children at play, not worth fighting. Imperfect as it is, our little truth must seem to us, as it stands, better than any other, without smoothing away the stark contradiction between it and its opposite, and without claiming for it a higher level than for them, if it is to be at once effective and humble.

To all of this it may be answered that our idea of tolerance has been an impossible ideal; that simply by making the definition unwarrantably strict, the quality has been pushed out of reach; and that, on these terms of course it cannot exist. Nevertheless the exact quality of current attempts at tolerance is made visible in the light of that extreme form which we have been considering: as Plato judged the success of actual forms of the state by comparison with that perfect justice which was to be found in none of them. But if, as the situation suggests, the degree of tolerance is in inverse ratio to the force of conviction, we cannot hold both as ideals. The question is, Which is the more valid?

By assuming tolerance as a possession or even as a goal, we have lost that driving power of conviction which more primitive, less imaginative forms of belief still hold. Perfect tolerance would be an anæsthetic influence; it would militate against that clash of open conflict in which alone are ideas tested. If tolerance is to be achieved only by proportionate weakening of conviction, the prevailing acceptance of such an ideal may be not merely a crying for the moon, but for a burning toy balloon which would be of no value to us if we had it.

The past few centuries have deepened the conception of tolerance, given inner meaning as a virtue to what was originally only a convenience of social conduct. Tolerance in act has been proved practically advisable. It rests on the recognition that the intolerant Calvin, burning Servetus, was a more positively objectionable member of society than the Greek sage whose skepticism was so complete that he would commit himself to nothing more than the wagging of his finger. But if we are right in maintaining the incompatibility of tolerance and conviction, each gaining ground only at the expense of the other, are we not following the wrong star? Calvin was doubtless less pleasant to live with than the Greek skeptic; but, since clear definition of issues is the first step in judgment, the following of the harsher example may clear the way for those battles of thought which change the boundaries of its territories, when diplomacies accomplish nothing.

Socrates, according to Plato, must have spent a good many hours and days in buttonholing young men on the streets of Athens, and pricking the airy bubbles of the catchwords which they used so glibly. His inveterate questioning often seemed to lead only to a deadlock. "What _is_ this justice, this temperance, this courage, of which you seem so sure?"--he would ask, and, after leading them a merry chase along the mazes of thought, brought them to the reluctant conclusion that virtue is not so simple, after all. There was something of the spirit of the detective in this sleuthing among ideas, this quick recognition and rejection of clues. What Socrates was chiefly trying to do--and no wonder he was accused of corrupting the young men!--was to cultivate in his interlocutors the rare art of questioning, to extirpate in them the prevalent stupidity of taking things for granted.

But Socrates did not cure the world of using catchwords. In war, in politics, in religion, even in science, they still pass for the coin of the realm. They are always dangerous: for they always delude one into thinking to be easy that which is in truth most difficult. There is hardly a virtue which we can have without crowding out another virtue. We of the twentieth century have taken tolerance for granted, as if it were as much to be expected as good manners. And we have scarcely thought to ask the price for which it is bought.

If it is only a utilitarian matter of social policy, to be relinquished when that policy changes, we have done foolishly to exalt it as a moral virtue. If we must choose between tolerance and our sense of ascertainable truth in the world, our eyes should be open to the terms of that choice; if we must have a slogan, shall it be, Live and Let Live, or The Truth is Mighty and Shall Prevail? If, on the other hand, the field of tolerance is limited to cases in which we are indifferent or skeptical, much is to be gained in humility and sincerity by the frank avowal. We may cut the Gordian knot, and boldly accept the paradox. In any case, something is gained, if only that we have asked, What do we mean by tolerance?

THE NEO-PARNASSIANS

"... But I would implore them to abstain from wearing their knees out before the shrine of the ugly and grotesque when there is all the beauty of the world for the choosing."--SIR JOHNSTONE FORBES-ROBERTSON.

Away back in the dark ages, when the kindergarten was still an experiment, a stern elderly person--doubtless a relic of the yet earlier age in which children addressed their mother as "Honoured Madam," and never sat down in their father's presence--a person of far-seeing but ruthless mind, would every now and then arise to predict that Froebel and his disciples, by making things too easy for the infant intelligence, would produce a spineless generation, with the mentality of rubber dolls. Changing the figure, with apparently an eye upon the dentist, this pessimist would point out that a pap-fed race could have occasion for, and therefore would develop, no teeth.