moderate and sensible and decent. It is much easier for a man to deceive himself and others regarding his supernatural lights than it is regarding the degree to which he is moderate and sensible and decent.

The past is not without examples of a positive and critical humanism. I have already mentioned Aristotle. If by his emphasis on the mediatory virtues he reminds one of Confucius, by his positive method and intensely analytical temper he reminds one rather of Buddha. When Aristotle rises to the religious level and discourses of the "life of vision" he is very Buddhistic. When Buddha for his part turns from the religious life to the duties of the layman he is purely Aristotelian. Aristotle also deals positively with the natural law. He is indeed a complete positivist, and not, like the man of the -nineteenth century, positive according to the natural law alone. The Aristotle that should specially concern us, however, is the positive and critical humanist - the Aristotle, let us say, of the "Ethics" and "Politics" and "Poetics." Just as I have called the point of view of the scientific and utilitarian naturalist Baconian,1 and that of the emotional naturalist Rousseauistic, so I would term the point of view that I am myself seeking to develop Aristotelian. Aristotle has laid down once for all the principle that should guide the ethical positivist. "Truth," he says, "in matters of moral action is judged from facts and from actual life.... So what we should do is to examine the preceding statements [of Solon and other wise men] by referring them to facts and to actual life, and when they harmonize with facts we may accept them, when they are at variance with them conceive of them as mere theories." 2

It is in this sense alone that I aspire to be called an Aristotelian; for one risks certain misunderstandings in using the name of Aristotle. The authority of this great positivist has been 1 I have explained the reasons for giving this place to Bacon in chapter II of Literature and the American College.

2 Eth. Nic., 1179 a.

I scarcely need remind the reader that the extant Aristotelian writings

invoked innumerable times throughout the ages as a substitute for direct observation. Aristotle was not only the prop and mainstay of dogma for centuries during the Middle Ages, but dogmatic Aristotelianism survived to no small extent, especially in literature, throughout the neo-classical period. It was no doubt natural enough that the champions of the modern spirit should have rejected Aristotle along with the traditional order of which he had been made a support. Yet if they had been more modern they might have seen in him rather a chief precursor. They might have learned from him how to have standards and at the same time not be immured in dogma. As it is, those who call themselves modern have come to adopt a purely exploratory attitude towards life. "On desperate seas long wont to roam," they have lost more and more the sense of what is normal and central in human experience. But to get away from what is normal and central is to get away from wisdom. My whole argument on the negative side, if I may venture on a final summing up, is that the naturalistic movement in the midst of which we are still living had from the start this taint of eccentricity. I have tried to show in detail the nature of the aberration. As for the results, they are being written large in disastrous events. On its constructive side, my argument, if it makes any appeal at all, will be to those for whom the symbols through which the past has received its wisdom have become incredible, and who, seeing at the same time that the break with the past that took place in the eighteenth century was on unsound lines, hold that the remedy for the partial positivism that is the source of this unsoundness, is a more complete positivism. Nothing is more perilous than to be only

which have repelled so many by their form were almost certainly not meant for publication. For the problems raised by these writings as well as for the mystery in the method of their early transmission see R. Shute, History of the Aristotelian Writings (1888). The writings which Aristotle prepared for publication and which Cicero describes as a "golden stream of speech" (Acad. 11, 38, 119) have, with the possible exception of the recently recovered Constitution of Athens, been lost.

half critical. This is to risk being the wrong type of individualist-the individualist who has repudiated outer control without achieving inner control. "People mean nowadays by a philosopher," says Rivarol, “not the man who learns the great art of mastering his passions or adding to his insight, but the man who has cast off prejudices without acquiring virtues." That view of philosophy has not ceased to be popular. The whole modern experiment is threatened with breakdown simply because it has not been sufficiently modern. One should therefore not rest content until one has, with the aid of the secular experience of both the East and the West, worked out a point of view so modern that, compared with it, that of our smart young radicals will seem antediluvian.

ROUSSEAU

AND ROMANTICISM

CHAPTER I

THE TERMS CLASSIC AND ROMANTIC

THE words classic and romantic, we are often told, cannot be defined at all, and even if they could be defined, some would add, we should not be much profited. But this inability or unwillingness to define may itself turn out to be only one aspect of a movement that from Rousseau to Bergson has sought to discredit the analytical intellect what Wordsworth calls "the false secondary power by which we multiply distinctions." However, those who are with Socrates rather than with Rousseau or Wordsworth in this matter, will insist on the importance of definition, especially in a chaotic era like the present; for nothing is more characteristic of such an era than its irresponsible use of general terms. Now to measure up to the Socratic standard, a definition must (not be abstract and metaphysical, but experimental; it must not, that is, reflect our opinion of what a word should mean, but what it actually has meant. Mathematicians may be free at times to frame their own definitions, but in the case of words like classic and romantic, that have been used innumerable times, and used not in one but in many countries, such a method is inadmissible.