Newman and Carlyle: An Unrecognized Affinity (original) (raw)

AN UNRECOGNIZED AFFINITY

THE dominant idea of nineteenth century thinking is summed in the phrase, — Life is growth. Whatever lives is born, not made; and being born, lives and expands its being spontaneously. In the lower forms of life this vital spontaneity is merely automatic; in the higher it is, or seems to be, self-directive. As a moral being, man prides himself on his ability to control his spontaneous nature. Whether he can or not is the great question; but in any case, he is coming more and more to realize that there are large tracts in his makeup quite outside of his self-conscious jurisdiction, which are yet centres of potent influence upon his whole life. More than that: recognizing spontaneous growth everywhere, he is coming to realize the impossibility of holding in subjection even the constituents of his own selfconsciousness itself, his own ideas. For they, too, born in his mind, grow there, and growing, change, it may be, beyond his own recognition.

Our usual habit of speech, indeed, misleads us here. We speak ordinarily of storing away an idea in the memory as we might check a parcel in a baggage room, and as if, presenting the proper check, we might naturally expect to receive back the self-same parcel in its original package. If the phrase “the storeroom of the mind ” is current, the analogy upon which it was built is obsolete. This analogy goes back to the mechanical psychology of Locke. For nineteenth century psychology, to put an idea into the mind is rather like planting a seed in the ground. If the idea falls upon good soil, and has life in it, — has interest, that is, for the recipient mind, — it will at once throw out roots and grow, feeding itself upon whatever is assimilable thereabout, until it may cease to be a mere seedling, and has become a flower, or a weed, or maybe a tree overshadowing the whole of that mind. Or, one may compare the receiving mind to an incubator, into which to-day an egg is put, and which to-morrow renders a chicken; and that chicken may in due time become a hen; and that hen lay a second egg; and that egg become a second chicken,—and so on through generations. Furthermore , in any incubating mind, there is, in fact, more than one egg, or one kind of egg, to hatch. There may well be bantam eggs and cochin eggs and dorking eggs, duck eggs maybe, and usually some goose eggs and bad eggs, not to say a china egg or so, which, though itself sterile, may induce laying in other fowl.

Suppose now that the farmer who owns this mental poultry-farm (I perceive that my “incubator” idea has spontaneously grown into such in my own mind), suppose, I say, that the farmer, self-consciousness, passes through to take account of stock. When last there he had left a few mute eggs. Now he is greeted by a chorus of cacklings, crowings, cooings, gobblings, quackings, chuckings, cluckings, clackings, squawkings, hissings. He may have various business: maybe to catch a fat pullet for some feast of reason he is setting out — like myself now; he pursues her desperately round the enclosure, only to trip over a lean, sprawling gander . . . absit omen !

Whatever the owner’s business there, he cannot fail, if he be at all observant, to take note how greatly, all independent of his own volition, his brood has grown, changed, multiplied, or mayhap died off.

Now, indeed, man’s realization of this spontaneous, and as it were independent, growth of his thought, is no new thing in these latter days. The divine madness of Pythian priestesses; the ejaculations of demon-obsessed boys; the dæmonic inspiration of a Socrates, — such phenomena, however superstitiously explained, have brought home to men the possibility of the mind working independently of its owner’s will. But such phenomena were regarded as abnormal, even miraculous; the normal man believed himself to be literally — and the phrase itself connotes normality, sanity — in full possession of his faculties. They were his; and with them, as with tools, he shaped and ordered his ideas at his own sweet will, subject only to the rules of his craft, Logic. What the nineteenth century has done, is to point out that this extra-volitional process of thought, this “unconscious cerebration” or “subliminal activity,” while it may be abnormal, even seemingly miraculous, in degree, is yet normal and universal in kind. Our conscious thinking is indeed a sphere of influence upon our lives; but, circumscribing this, spreads out a vague, unlighted land, whereof we have or can have no chart, but whence continually steal in, while our attention sleeps, ghostly visitants to blight or bless, deform or transform the subjects of our sovereign consciousness.

To trace the history of the recognition of this subliminal factor in mental life would be to run too far afield. There are hints of it in the doctrines of Rousseau; it is fundamental in the systems of Hegel and Schopenhauer; Coleridge probably was the first to insist upon it in England; but Carlyle was the first Englishman to feel and to reveal its vital and moral significance. Thus John Stuart Mill, who certainly was competent to speak with authority in such matters, speaks in his Autobiography of Carlyle’s “ Doctrine of the Unconscious.”

Carlyle not merely insisted upon the reality of “unconscious” thinking, upon the spontaneous growth of living ideas; he owes to this idea itself, spontaneously developing in his own mind, all that is consistent, and much that seems to be inconsistent, in his whole teaching; so that following the course in his teaching of that seed-idea of the “unconscious” may serve at once to see that teaching in a new light, and also to illustrate in action the principle of the spontaneous growth of ideas itself.

The principle itself first appears definitely formulated in one of Carlyle’s earliest publications, the Characteristics, which came out in the Edinburgh Review in 1831. In this too-little-known early review he put his case, not only first, but best. The vastly more famous Sartor Resartus, although it really implies as a foundation the same principle, nowhere definitely expounds it. In the argument of Sartor, the major premiss is suppressed. To this fact, as much as to the thick crust of picturesque verbiage, is due the bewilderment of the uninitiate reader.

Characteristics opens with a significant enouncement: “The healthy know not of their health, but only the sick: this is the Physician’s aphorism; and applicable in a far wider sense than he gives it. We may say, it holds no less in moral, intellectual, political, poetical, than in merely corporeal therapeutics; that wherever, or in what shape soever, powers of the sort which can be named vital are at work, herein lies the test of their working right or working wrong. ’ ’ Thus at the very outset not only is there asserted for every phase of our living an “unconscious” activity, but further this “unconscious” activity is pronounced the only right and normal living. Before speaking of this further pronouncement, I may quote a passage from the body of the essay, which is the clearest that Carlyle ever wrote in declaration of his first principle. It is as follows: ... we observe, with confi-

dence enough, that the truly strong mind, view it as Intellect, as Morality, or under any other aspect, is nowise the mind acquainted with its strength; that here as before the sign of health is unconsciousness. In our inward, as in our outward, world, what is mechanical lies open to us: not what is dynamical and has vitality. Of our Thinking, we might say, it is but the mere upper surface that we shape into articulate Thoughts; — underneath the region of argument and conscious discourse lies the region of meditation; here, in itsquiet mysterious depths,dwells what vital force is in us; here, if aught is to be created, and not merely manufactured and communicated, must the work go on. Manufacture is intelligible, but trivial; Creation is great, and cannot be understood. Thus if the Debater and Demonstrator, whom we may rank as the lowest of true thinkers, knows what he has done, and how he did it, the Artist, whom we rank as the highest, knows not; must speak of Inspiration, and in one or the other dialect, call his work the gift of a divinity.”

In this pregnant passage Carlyle’s recognition of “subliminal” activities of thought is clear enough. Nor need the twentieth century psychologist quarrel, I conceive, with that further recognition that “creative” thought, original thought, is at least more often the resultant of ideas gradually shaping, developing, and uniting spontaneously, than the product of self-conscious “ argument about it and about.” To the consciousness, into which this resultant of silently growing ideas may at length rise, evoked by some pertinent questioning, it may well seem to be what we call’a happy thought.’implying thereby a fortuitousness which is so only for the self-consciousness which knows not how or whence it came. Hence we shall have no difficulty in going with Carlyle as he continues: . . . on the whole,‘genius is ever a secret to itself;’ of this old truth we have, on all sides, daily evidence. The Shakespeare takes no airs for writing Hamlet, and the Tempest, understands not that it is anything surprising; Milton, again, is more conscious of his faculty, which accordingly is an inferior one.” And yet again, Carlyle is strictly logical in the corollary which he elsewhere draws in Sartor Resartus, thus: “ A certain inarticulate Self - consciousness dwells dimly in us, which only our Works can render articulate and decisively discernible. Our Works are the mirror wherein the spirit first sees its natural lineaments. Hence, too, the folly of that impossible Precept, Know thyself ; till it be translated into this partially possible one, Know what thou canst work at.”

This, I take it, is the deeper justification of Carlyle’s panacea of silent work. Critics have not rarely assumed that he recommended it on grounds somewhat like those on which David Harum justified fleas for dogs, — “to keep ’em from broodin’ on bein’ a dog.” Work for man has the converse value, — namely, to educe true and articulate self-knowledge out of his ‘ broodin’ on bein’ a — man.' “ Only our Works can render articulate and decisively discernible” that “inarticulate selfconsciousness” dwelling “dimly in us,” which is our “ soul.” For, as Carlyle elsewhere exclaims, “ ... it cannot be too often repeated, where it continues still unknown or forgotten, that man has a soul as certainly as he has a body; nay, much more certainly; that properly it is the course of his unseen, spiritual life, which informs and rules his external visible life.”

Probably here, indeed, Carlyle makes the logical saltum common to transcendentalists generally, in hypostasizing into a spiritual, immortal entity man’s “unseen” psychical activities. Quietly to transform these at work “underneath the region of argument and conscious discourse” into a divine something raying down into that region its influences from above, to transfigure the “subliminal” into the “supraliminal,” — this is an act not of reason, but of faith. It is to bridge the gap between science and religion by projecting across it the shadow of human desire.

But if thus reading out of his principle of the “unconscious,” or into it, intimations of immortality, of a divine soul, Carlyle runs the principle into the air, none the less his recognition that work, the putting of our whole selves to the revealing test, is the sole means of genuine selfknowledge, this corollary is not only logical, but in the spirit of science itself. It is the laboratory method applied to that composition of known and unknown forces which we call ourselves. By their fruits we shall know them.

By work we come bit by bit to know our true selves; by self-knowledge we come to be better workmen. To recognize this as Carlyle’s circle of aspiration, his “ Everlasting Yea,” is to recognize how imperfect was Matthew Arnold’s understanding when he labeled Carlyle, in contradistinction to Emerson, “pessimist.” Carlyle was frequently despondent, dyspeptically and splenetically despondent; but in refusing to admit happiness as the deliberate goal of human quest he is at one with all idealistic optimists. He never said that happiness is impossible; but that selfish satisfaction was an unworthy end in itself; and that in any case the right way to catch is not to chase it. Happiness partakes of the feminine contrariness, from which it follows that

. . . court a mistress, she denies you;
Let her alone, she will court you.

Whereas, the self-knowledge which is power is a masculine ideal: to win it, we must sweat after it, and for it; until in degree as we shall subdue it to our will, and our will to it. we at the last may

. . . work for an age at a sitting and never be
tired at all,

and

. . . each for the joy of the working, and each,
in his separate star,
Shall draw the Thing as he sees It for the God
of Things as They Are !

But is this consummation, however devoutly to be wished, more than a wish ? Through our works we may light up gradually that one dark other-world in us which lies “underneath the region of argument and conscious discourse;” so by working might we also light up that other still darker region which we dream of as lying beyond the grave; but what assurance has Carlyle to give that we shall be there to work ?

His answer, the one possible answer this side revelation, is the same which William James has given us in his doctrine of the Will to Believe. The state of man is like the state of the ass between the two wisps of hay, so placed as to make equal appeal. Being a wholly logical ass, the creature of the fable must to all seeming inevitably have starved. Yet, could he but have known, there was a way out: he might have shut one eye! So man before the issue of Doubt and Faith. And there is this advantage in his position over that of the ass. Only to the pure reason is the balance of doubt and faith an even one. To the practical reason, to the conscience, and to the heart, choice is easy. To return to our ass, it is as if while he saw both haywisps equally alluring, he smelt one musty. He might well have said to himself, modifying Pascal: the nose has its reasons as well as the eyes. So Carlyle: “The special, sole, and deepest theme of the World’s and Man’s History,” says the Thinker of our time, “whereto all other themes are subordinated, remains the Conflict of Unbelief and Belief. All epochs wherein Belief prevails, under what form it may, are splendid, heart-elevating, fruitful for contemporaries and posterity. All epochs, on the contrary, wherein Unbelief, under what form soever, maintains its sorry victory, should they even for a moment glitter with a sham splendour, vanish from the eyes of posterity; because no one chooses to burden himself with study of the unfruitful.” For Carlyle, as for James, it is the practical reason that breaks the deadlock of the pure reason. We must not merely wish to believe, we must will to believe. The right attitude is not one of sentimental yearning, but one of heroic strenuousness. “Here on Earth we are as Soldiers,” he says finely, “fighting in a foreign land; that understand not the plan of the campaign, and have no need to understand it; seeing well what is at our hand to be done. Let us do it like Soldiers, with submission, with courage, with a heroic joy.”

But there are on earth soldiers and soldiers: privates in the ranks, and staffofficers of God. Submission is due from those to these; but how to distinguish them ? Again in his answer Carlyle builds upon faith in the “unconscious.” The natural leader, the hero, the king by divine right, is he who dares to act spontaneously, from the convictions which rise up in him and dominate him. In otherwords, the conviction by which a man has power is the conviction in whose power he is. To such men, will we nill we, we must submit ourselves; “must speak of inspiration, and in one or the other dialect, call his work the gift of a divinity.” Whether, in a particular case, this “divinity” be angel or devil is again determinable only after the fact by its works.

These, then, are the main tenets of Carlyle’s “doctrine of the Unconscious:” faith in the spontaneous, the unapperceived, part of us; courage to let that spontaneous self work itself out freely and fully; worshipful submission to those in whom the spontaneous part has proved itself by its works potent. How nearly the three tenets are also the bases of Newman’s theory of belief, I wish now to show.

Extremes meet; and certainly Carlyle and Newman were temperamental extremes, — the one so without understanding of the other that their practical differences excluded any possible recognition of their theoretical affinity. “ John Henry Newman,” once remarked Carlyle, “has not the intellect of an average rabbit.” And the remark, if “somewhat untunable,” has yet some “matter ” in it. Newman certainly had not the intellect of any rabbit, average or other; nor had, in fact, an intellect, a concrete intellect, at all like Carlyle’s. For which very reason the same dominating idea, planted in his very unlike mental soil, budded, blossomed, and bore fruits as unlike the Carlylean variety as sour and sweet.

It were needless, even if space permitted, to detail the unlikeness of the two men, — of the rugged, irascible, hirsute Scots farmer’s son, and the subtle, delicate, low-voiced English priest, English, but with overtones French and Jewish, whom Matthew Arnold remembered as a “spiritual apparition . . . gliding in the dim afternoon light through the aisles of St. Mary’s,rising into the pulpit, and then in the most entrancing of voices breaking the silence with words and thoughts which were a religious music, — subtle, sweet, mournful.” Carlyle and Newman in conjunction would seem to be like a mastiff and a serpent in one harness. And no two conclusions could be more utterly at variance than his whose Sartor led Thomas Huxley “to know that a deep sense of religion was compatible with the entire absence of theology,” and his for whom a religion without theology were as a lamp without oil.

Of course, the conclusion’s the thing. No argument, other than sophistical, could harmonize two such discordant conclusions as these. It is the premisses, to these conclusions, however, that I wish to bring into conjunction; or, better, I wish to follow down the stems of the two doctrines to their vital roots, which, I conceive, will be found to mingle and become one in the original seed-idea. There are analogies in nature: Japanese gardeners have a way of dwarfing the growth from an acorn so that the forest oak is transformed into a drawing-room ornament.

Carlyle’s doctrine, ramifications, knottinesses, and all, grew from his belief of and in the “ unconscious ” as against the conscious. The unconscious does our really vital business; it is the man behind the counter; the conscious is but the cash register. As Carlyle most luminously expounds this theorem in almost the earliest of his published works, the Characteristics, so Newman says the same thing less highly colored in one among the earliest of his works, the Oxford Sermon on Explicit and Implicit Reason, printed in 1840, nine years after Characteristics. By explicit reason Newman means what Carlyle calls “argument and conscious discourse,” by implicit reason what Carlyle calls “unconscious meditation.” Forty years after his volume of Sermons, Newman in his latest and ripest theoretical work, the Grammar of Assent, again expounds the idea now declared to have grown to be the basis of his Catholic faith, and the guiding clue also for him through the mazes of the development of Catholic Christianity. It is interesting, and ought to be edifying, to hear this man, with hardly “ the intellect of an average rabbit,” according to Carlyle, insisting upon Carlyle’s pet notion in words that sound themselves like an unconscious echo. Carlyle had said, and had builded upon his saying: “ In our inward, as in our outward, world, what is mechanical lies open to us; not what is dynamical and has vitality;” and “The healthy Understanding, we should say, is not the Logical, argumentative, but the Intuitive.” Newman, in his shorter, neater, more transparent way, sums it in the Grammar thus: Man’s “progress is a living growth, not a mechanism; and its instruments are mental acts, not the formulas and contrivances of language.”

This identity of belief in the first ground of belief cannot but lead all along the line to phases of agreement between the doctrines of the two Victorians; and the easily demonstrable existence of such justifies the remark of Newman himself in a larger connection, that no number of books “would comprise a delineation of all possible forms which a divine message will assume when submitted to a multitude of minds;” justifies also a second remark of his, that “the more claims an idea has to be considered living, the more various will be its aspects; ” and also still another, that “it is probable that a given opinion, as held by several individuals, even when of the most congenial views, is as distinct from itself as are their faces.”

Pursuing the common premiss that mental, like all vital, “progress is a living growth, not a mechanism,” Carlyle and Newman arrive both at one highly practical conclusion, that all real conviction is through personal influence and example, not by any “syllogistic compulsion.” Accordingly, each of the twain, seeking to win over his fellows to his way of thinking, writes not an argument, but a selfconfession, — Sartor Resartus, Apologia pro Vita Sua. It is the one way, both think, in all live issues, especially in that livest and deepest-going of all issues, a man’s religion. “In these provinces of enquiry egotism is true modesty. In religious enquiry each of us can speak only for himself, and for himself he has a right to speak. His own experiences are enough for himself, but he cannot speak for others: he cannot lay down the law; he can only bring his own experiences to the common stock of psychological facts. He knows what has satisfied and satisfies himself; if it satisfies him, it is likely to satisfy others; if, as he believes and is sure, it is true, it will approve itself to others also, for there is but one truth.” So Cardinal Newman, theological dogmatist! anticipating the latest tolerant attitude of science, whereby, for example, Professor James in his Varieties of Religious Belief contents himself with bringing, as editor, to the common stock of psychological facts the self-confessed experiences of many.

There is still deeper justification of this true modesty of egotism, this method of the confessional, than that which arises from the difficulty of convincing men against their wills. It follows from the fact of the unconscious growth of ideas in individual minds that these ideas are but partially communicable in speech; and this communicable part is but the dead schema of the living thought. Or, to use the symbolism of Sartor itself, the words by which we intercommunicate are but the old clothes which our ideas have for a while worn, but continually outgrow, and in any case, loaned to another mind, may seem to fit a live idea quite alien. Therefore it is a true paradox that the idol of the eighteenth century, Common Sense, is, literally considered, no organon of conviction at all; since, precisely in so far as sense is common, it fails to reach the real springs of action in any individual, which are not precisely the same for any two individuals in the world. “ Je ne suis fait comme aucun de ceux que j’ai vus; j’ose croire n’être fait comme aucun de ceux qui existent.” This famous protestation of Rousseau is true in degree of every being; and in so far as the thought of every being is modified by the whole of the temperament in which it grows, and by which it is nourished, so far that thought is unique and incommunicable. Whenever one attempts to pass a thought from mind to mind, one puts it in danger of undergoing that defiguration which happened to the unfortunate baby which the Duchess flung to Alice, and Alice found to have turned in her arms to a pig. “ It will be our wisdom,” says Newman, “to avail ourselves of language, as far as it will go, but to aim mainly by means of it to stimulate, in those to whom we address ourselves, a mode of thinking and trains of thought similar to our own, leading them on by their own independent action, not by any syllogistic compulsion.” We may not safely fling our ideas at people’s heads, but we may fling ourselves on people’s hearts: if we can persuade them to accept ourselves, there is good chance of their accepting understandingly our real ideas also. The probable reason why the Duchess’s baby seemed a pig to Alice was a lack of sympathy between Alice and the Duchess.

“Personal Influence the Means of Propagating the Truth,” is the title of a sermon by Newman. Its maxim is a corollary of his principle of the supremacy of the implicit reason — Carlyle’s unconscious self; and this maxim itself, for both men, is the justification of heroworship. For both men, genius is, to use the quaint jargon of some recent psychology, a “manifestation of subliminal activity intruding upon the primary consciousness.” In point of fact, Mr. Myers, whose words I have just now quoted, like Carlyle and Newman both, actually proceeds to treat this “subliminal” inspiration as rather “supraliminal,” as an activity not lower, but higher, than that we consciously exert. The mysterious power, not our conscious selves, which moves in us, and makes us from moment to moment what we really are, is deified by an act of faith; and justified as such by the wonderfulness of the works of genius. So Carlyle comes to say of the Genius: “The ‘inspiration of the Almighty giveth him understanding:’ we must listen before all to him.” And Newman endows his “living present authority,” which every man instinctively and rightly takes as his “immediate guide,” be it “himself or another,” — endows this authority with the “illative sense,” that is, immediate, not discursive or ratiocinative, insight

Home, to the instant need of things.

Faith in one’s own nature, then, is the first great moral agreement of Carlyle and Newman, — in one’s own nature, so far as that is spontaneous and sincere, not cut to fit a consciously adopted pose. To one’s own self may with safety be given the license Candida gives to the enamored Poet in Shaw’s play: " . . . you may

say anything you really and truly feel. Anything at all, no matter what it is. I am not afraid, so long as it is your real self that speaks, and not a mere attitude, — a gallant attitude, or a wicked attitude, or even a poetic attitude. I put you on your honor and truth. Now say whatever you want to.” That is the ultimate moral authority. “There is,” says Carlyle, “no uniform of excellence, either in physical or spiritual nature: all genuine things are what they ought to be;” wherefore “let each become all that he was created capable of being; expand, if possible, to his full growth; resisting all impediments, casting off all foreign, especially all noxious, adhesions; and show himself at length in his own shape and stature, be these what they may.” And Newman: “ . . .in him who is faithful to his own divinely implanted nature, the faint light of Truth dawns continually brighter; the shadows which at first troubled it, the unreal shapes created by its own twilightstate, vanish; what was uncertain as mere feeling, and could not be distinguished from a fancy except by the commanding urgency of its voice, becomes fixed and definite, and strengthening into principle, it at the same time developes into habit. As fresh and fresh duties arise, or fresh and fresh faculties are brought into action, they are at once absorbed into the existing inward system, and take their appropriate place in it.” The passage is a precise commentary on Carlyle’s intention in the injunction, which has seemed to many either commonplace or cryptic: “Do the Duty which lies nearest, which thou knowest to be a Duty. Thy second Duty will already have become clearer.”

There is a second moral agreement : faith in other elect persons and spontaneous submission to their edicts. I say spontaneous submission. The cool, calculated submission of the judgment to the expert is not “hero-worship.” It is not submitting to him, but submitting him to one’s own use. Worship and love are so far identical that each is a spontaneous surrender of the self-will, the conscious will, to the will of another. It is the massing of dedicated spirits behind the great man that through him makes and marks epochs. “Universal history,” says Carlyle, “the history of what man has accomplished in this world, is at bottom the history of the great men who have worked there.” And Newman unwittingly completes Carlyle’s thought: “A few highly endowed men will redeem the world for centuries to come.”

Now this apparent blending into harmony of two such manifestly opposed doctrines may seem merely plausible, and at bottom sophistical. It may be said the balance-sheet shows up even only because the accounts are doctored. And there certainly is no harmony between the conclusions of the twain in their own minds. That is the point: to show the diverse growth in diverse minds of identical principles. They themselves, and too many of their critics, seem to have been aware only of the final diversity, not at all of the initial identity. Above all, in religious theory they were enigmas each to the other. Yet here, too, they stand upon a theoretic basis in common.

For Carlyle, God is the hero of heroes. His divinity is recognizable, provable, in the precise way the half-divinity of human heroes is recognizable and provable, — in His works. And the most intimate for us of His works is the human conscience, that mysterious something, not our conscious selves,making for righteousness. Carlyle’s faith is that God speaks and moves in conscience, just as conscience speaks and moves in us. Such faith, justified of its works, is his sufficient creed. For him, the rest is silence — and work — worshipful and obedient.

Thus far Newman by Carlyle’s side. For him also is God revealed only in His works, especially in the conscience. We may know God, at least at first, not as He is in Himself, but in what He can do, — just as we may know our real selves at first not in themselves, but only in what they can do. “Christianity is a history supernatural, and almost scenic: it tells us what its Author is, by telling us what He has done.” Carlyle himself might have penned these words of Newman’s.

Well, perhaps we may ask Carlyle and Newman separately: “What do you find God has done ? It is all very well to point us to history; but history is the sphinx; she asks, not answers, riddles. History reveals, doubtless, mighty forces at work among men and things, but why necessarily one force, and that divine rather than diabolical ? How do you know that this ‘subliminal self,’ this spontaneous, unconscious activity in us, before which you bow down, is no Messiah, but even Moloch ? Why may not the Schopenhauers and the Nietsches be right in evoking no Over-soul, but the Under-soul ? ”

Answering these root-questions, “the Calvinist without a theology” and the Catholic priest reveal their true disparity.

In effect, Carlyle’s answer is simply: I don’t know; I have faith; I will to believe. At times, indeed, he makes a lame appeal to fact, as when in Characteristics he declares that “ ... in all, even the rudest communities, man never yields himself wholly to brute force, but always to moral greatness.” But unfortunately, Carlyle himself blurs the distinction, and yields himself, or at least his heart, to what has been called, not with excessive exaggeration, “Big-Devil-Worship.” He loves effectiveness, the path-breaking manner of man, and so heartily that he does not always stop to look if the way is being cleared by his hero in a chariot of Elijah or a car of Juggernaut.

The courage of one’s own convictions, faith in one’s intimate self, is indeed a tremendous force for good or evil. The alternative Carlyle seems sometimes to forget. Newman does not forget it. Such courage, such faith has created, he says, “as the case may be, heroes and saints, great leaders, statesmen, preachers, and reformers, the pioneers of discovery in science, visionaries, fanatics, knight-errants, demagogues, and adventurers,” etc. Newman would assuredly agree with Carlyle that “ . . . it is the everlasting privilege of the foolish to be governed by the wise; to be guided in the right path by those who know it better than they. This is the first ‘right of man,’ compared with which all other rights are as nothing.” But how are the foolish in their foolishness to know the wise when they see them ? God may be on the side of the bigger battalion, but the bigger battalion is by no means certain to be on God’s side. Mere sincerity no more makes wisdom than mere might makes right. Newman, therefore, while entirely acquiescing in Carlyle’s hero-worship, asks shrewder questions about the testimonials of these “heroes.”

He notes in the first place that the genius which makes “ heroes ” in the Carlylean sense is special, not general, in its operations. “How a man reasons is as much a mystery as how he remembers. He remembers better and worse on different subject-matters, and he reasons better and worse. Some men’s reason becomes genius in particular subjects, and is less than ordinary in others.” Wherefore concludes Newman, “Cuique in arte sua eredendum est:” each is to be trusted in his own specialty, and therein only. A Napoleon might well be trustworthy “ in arte sua,” the specialty of military strategy; at the same time his judgment might be worse than fallacious in other specialties, such as the fine arts or morals. Carlyle, therefore, unwisely hails Napoleon as “our last great man.” He might fairly enough have hailed him as “our last great military genius.” Ne sutor supra crepidam.

In the specialty of theology the same principle holds. There may be theological geniuses, as well as military geniuses. Assured of their “special gift,” we may trust them in their specialty, however deficient they may prove to be in other respects. It is not their conscious reason that we listen to, but their unconscious, spontaneous reason, — their “illative sense,” as Newman prefers to call it. And their justification is precisely what the justification of all spontaneous activity is, — their success. “It is not too much to say,” declares Newman, “that the stepping by which great geniuses scale the mountains of truth is as unsafe and precarious to men in general, as the ascent of a skilful mountaineer up a literal crag. It is a way which they alone can take; and its justification lies in their success.”

The specialty of theological geniuses is revelation of divine truth. But in what sense can a revelation be said to be justified by success ? Manifestly, in a different way from the justification by success of, say, Napoleon’s strategy. That beat the enemy, which was all that could be asked of it. Revelation is asked to reveal God; it professes to do so; but we cannot collate its reading of Him with the true text; if we could, we might well enough dispense with the interpreter altogether. No, the “success” of a divine revelation is, humanly speaking, its instant and constant appeal to men, not “to their mere unstable reason,” but to that in them which responds spontaneously — despite themselves, as it were. And the measure of such success is in ratio to the universality of such appeal. Would all the world respond concordantly to one revelation, that revelation would indeed be perfectly justified. “ Securus judicat orbis terrarum.” There would remain the logical possibility of an universal delusion. Doubt is always possible. “There is no act on God’s part,” Newman admits, “no truth of religion, to which a captious Reason may not find objections.” Practically, there is no present basis of truth except consensus of belief.

Newman therefore is driven back to the appeal to history. Can history, recorded fact, show any such revelation accepted semper, ubique, ab omnibus ? Newman’s answer is the Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, in which he endeavors to prove that the revelation of Christ is progressively such an one. I cannot here enter into his argument; but I note its dependence upon the principle, common to himself and Carlyle, of the unconscious growth in the human mind of a living idea once therein implanted. He states the principle at the outset : “ When an idea, whether real or not, is of the nature to arrest and possess the mind, it may be said to have life, that is, to live in the mind which is its recipient,” that is, to develop organically, like all living things. The revelation of Christ is supremely such a live idea; but precisely because it is so, it is more or less transformed by every mind, every church, every age, in which it has been planted. In the imperfect conscious understanding of an individual, it may not only undergo transformation in identity, organic growth; it may rather suffer deformation, — just as at “the call of the wild,” — if the profane analogy be permitted, — a dog may revert to the wolf-type. Spontaneous transformation is the principle of all living growth; but when the mere conscious human understanding attempts to transform, it only succeeds in deforming. If it were true that ideas could be passed on from mind to mind unaltered, then the original Word, the Gospel, might be sufficient for the faithful. In fact, there are as many gospels as there are readers and generations of readers. How, then, distinguish spontaneous, organic growth, natural development, from willful logical alterations ? How distinguish that transforming process in all live things, which preserve their constant identity through continual change, absorbing what is assimilable, rejecting what is deleterious or unfit, from the mechanical simulacrum of that process, mere piecing together of the disjecta membra of the thing, and galvanizing the product into a lifelike, but really lifeless, automaton. Such is the problem which Newman sets himself; and his solution is at least consistent with his major premiss. This premiss is, to repeat once again, that there is no spontaneous, organic growth of ideas, except in the living mind, and not in its conscious, reasoning, mechanical activity, but in its spontaneous, unconscious, dynamical activity, — or in modern parlance, not in the primary consciousness, but in the subliminal. The living, growing depositum of Christian faith is in the succession of saints and martyrs, church-fathers and doctors, not in the dead incommunicable writings of them, but in their living thought communicated, each to his own living generation, by “personal influence.” The handing on of the credenda by such as these constitutes a process of development by interpretation by a “ living organon,” which, in Newman’s words, “is a personal gift, and not a mere method or calculus.” Hence the Catholic position, that the Word is to be interpreted to the many by the fit few, and not left open to the blind judgment of the unfit.

In other words, Newman reasserts the mediæval aurea catena, but verifies it by the nineteenth century biological principle of spontaneous or unconscious development. And the justification of the special ‘golden chain’ which constitutes the credenda of Catholic Christianity now reveals itself in accord with the further nineteenth century evolutionary test, — that of “the survival of the fittest.” The Catholic idea alone has in it the principle of survival, that is, capacity for vital growth toward universality, whereas all other religions, including Protestantism, are mechanical products of the conscious reason, made, not born, therefore local and temporary. Catholicism, alone surviving through change, is therefore fittest to survive change.

Whether Newman makes good his case for the supremacy of Catholicism is a story by itself, into which the present essay cannot enter. The queer thing is that Newman should base his apology upon the same principle as that which, growing in Carlyle’s mind, led Huxley to the opposite pole of belief from Newsman’s dogmatic theology, namely, to the belief that “ a deep sense of religion was compatible with an entire absence of theology.”

This essay began with the declaration that the biological principle of growth was characteristic of nineteenth century thought at large. Consequently, we might expect to find the corollary of the principle, spontaneous variation in growth, the mastering tenet of other Victorians than Newman and Carlyle, and in other departments of thought than moral or religious. It is so, I think. It may be that I am prey to a fixed idea, but I seem to meet this ghostly other self — under - self or over - self as you please — everywhere in Victorian literature: in Arnold’s criticism by trained tact, in Dickens’s “hallucinative imagination,” in Tennyson’s vision on the lawn in In Memoriam, in J. S. Mill’s “ unconscious ’’transmogrification of hedonism into virtually idealistic ethics. A friend, who happened to hear me speak of the theory of the unconscious in Victorian literature, remarked pleasantly: “Why don’t you call it an unconscious theory of Victorian literature?” Perhaps it is. Perhaps my own unconscious self, my subliminal self, comes poking me whenever I read these Victorians, and cries, “Tag!” At least, according to the theory itself, if my theory be truly “unconscious,” spontaneous, it ought to be right, and I possessed of at least the essential attribute of genius. But that idea is doubtless one of the “incommunicable” ones!