THREE POEMS. BY GUY BOGART. I strolled with my soul through the close Felt soft songs of silence, heard fountains. I paused on the hilltop, while dreams * Humanism! Next step in progress. Slowly through millenniums of toil Best of every age preserved In each succeeding stage. The good of most primitive time. Savagery developed man Barbarism saw man Farther on his way And passed. There is much good in each system, Each the best Man could grasp at the time. Heir of all good of all time, With the new world comes Meekness That shall inherit the earth. With the new race comes end of Oppression And claims of rights and privileges Love will be possible And democracy nearer: Spirits shall mingle freely with earth-dwellers And the barrier called death Shall lose all power In days of the new mysticism. Our oneness with the universe And growth in understanding Will make brothers of us all, While organizations and institutions Of Understanding: For in that hour has Humanism come. Man the master Becomes the servant : Man the god Becomes the slave, Because Man the creator Worships that his hands have wrought. God created heaven and earth And fulness thereof. Man is god-soul, Co-worker, Co-creator, With the Infinite. God created men And man forgot God. 1 Man created conceptions of God. And straightway worshiped what he had made. Groped his way to godward heights. Came fire, And man worshiped What he had discovered. Came the home And man became the servant To an institution he had builded. Church, school, factory. State--All builded by man Have Hounded Him to hell. Fetishes, Bugaboos, All belittling, dominate man, While the Frankenstein creations of his own mind Pursue him to destruction. Use, O man! The handiwork of your creation. Bow not before your institutions and creeds. They were made by a young race As crutches ere a few sensed power To rise above child-fears of primitive ignorance. These institutions you constructed Were-and are-but tools. Not one is sacred. Cast with the crumbling relics Of post-evolutionary débris Those which serve not humanism. A new age I proclaim When humanism prevails, When institutions serve man And man serves not one institution. MISCELLANEOUS. INTELLECTUALISM AND MORAL EVOLUTION. Certain reviewers have properly emphasized the essential thesis, or moral, of Mr. H. G. Wells's extraordinary, if superficial, Outline of History, while refraining from just and necessary criticism of that thesis. Mr. Wells is an intellectualist. He seems to have profound faith in mere knowledge, in science. He is a "collectivist" of the Fabian school, or evolutionary type, and he believes that ignorance and error are the chief obstacles to human and social progress. In particular, Mr. Wells deplores the harmful effects of popular ignorance of history. What ails lame, blind, halting humanity is the lack of a common tradition, he affirms, and the failure to realize that we are all members of one another, and that our salvation lies in brotherhood—the spirit of unselfish service. To quote one of the most striking passages in The Outline: "There can be no common peace and prosperity without common historical ideas....Our internal policies and our economic and social ideals are profoundly vitiated by wrong and fantastic ideas of the origin and historical relationship of social classes. A sense of history as the common adventure of all mankind is as necessary for peace within as it is for peace between the nations." What basis, we may ask, is there in history, in psychology, in sociology, or in our own direct experience, for these very positive, far-reaching affirma. tions? For more than nineteen centuries the Christian Church has preached the doctrine of the Fatherhood of God and brotherhood of men. Assuredly this preaching has been inspired by the sense of history as the common adventure of all mankind and the solemn responsibility of each for all and all for each. No organization in the world has a deeper sense of history as the common adventure of all mankind than the Catholic, or "Universal," Church. Yet what is the condition of the civilized and Christian world to-day? Moreover, if ignorance of the past were the root of all modern social and international ills, the educated, cultivated elements would naturally exhibit more unity, more solidarity, than the illiterate and vulgar. What are the facts? Are the educated persons in any country, or in the world at large, in agreement concerning any difficult economic, social or political problem? Were the German intellectuals and professors less prejudiced and blind in the critical days of 1914, when Junkerdom demanded war in the name of German and Austrian honor and prestige, though neither was affronted, than was the populace generally? How many of the educated Germans saw the situation steadily and whole at that juncture? Did a sense of history as the common adventure of all mankind tend to clear their minds of cant and poison? Was there ever a time in history when special privilege, injustice, wrong, narrow and bigoted forms of nationalism, were not supported by educated and cultivated men? The defenders of religious and racial persecutions, the champions of slavery, the apologists for anti-social monopoly have not been deficient in education. Hatred, malice, vanity and arrogance are not the especial vices of the ignorant. Intellectual education, with any amount of history thrown in, does not purge the human heart or substitute sweet reasonableness for passion and sentiment. Is it necessary to cite authorities on the question at issue? If so, the embarrassment that faces one is the proverbial embarrassment of riches. From St. Paul down to Spencer, John Morley, Anatole France, all serious thinkers have contended that intellectual culture alone will never insure moral and social progress. "The love of money is the root of all evil," said St. Paul. Dante, no mean psychologist, found the root of human evil in greed, pride and ambition. Herbert Spencer called the intellect a tool of the emotional nature and always stressed the need of educating the heart, the emotions. John Morley, in his Notes on History, argues that each school of thought draws from history what lessons or morals it finds suitable and convenient for its own purposes; that the same event is interpreted in different ways by different partisans or doctrinaires. Lord Macauley says somewhere that if the law of gravitation were deemed to be inimical to any considerable material interest, there would not be wanting arguments against it. Anatole France, who has recently declared himself a disciple of Lenin and a convert of Russian sovietism and communism, insists repeatedly in his critical essays that "passions and sentiments," not ideas and knowledge, govern mankind. By passions and sentiments he means racial and national and class hatreds, prejudices, antipathies, appetites, desires, and the like. Is it not true, then, that, in Mr. Wells' words, the history of mankind has been a race between education and catastrophe? Yes, it is true, and it is equally and sadly true that, as a rule, catastrophe has won. Revolutions, civil wars, wars of aggression, famines, economic crises-all these episodes in human history show that humanity learns only in the school of bitter experience, learns slowly and imperfectly even in that school, and too easily forgets its lessons. Too many of us-more than one is apt to imagine-are Bourbons-persons who resist necessary and inevitable change until a terrible explosion occurs. Would the study of history change the nature and the mental habits of the Bourbons among us? Education is indeed the only preventive of catastrophe, but the knowledge of the past is but a small part of the education that can save humanity from avoidable catastrophes in the future. The education chiefly needed is social, moral, practical. We must seek to understand one another, to graps each other's point of view, to sympathize with one another's difficulties and troubles, to recognize each other's honesty, sincerity, and right to his opinion. Capital and labor will get rid of many of the obstacles in the way of harmonious industrial relations by taking counsel together; by conferring and learning to know each other's needs and anxieties; by establishing direct and intimate contacts. In America we have no classes, and no wrong or ridiculous notions |