GEORGE BURMAN FOSTER

Back to the Old Greek for a starting-point! Two seeds, of the same species, though distant in space and time, go through an identical development. Root corresponds with root, stem with stem, flower with flower, fruit with fruit. Something seems to control all this change. It is not mere change. It is change with a plan, a purpose, a pattern. Hence the Greek said that there must be an unchanging type, a fixed “idea,” a spiritual, invisible norm, the “first” and “final” cause of all this change, to which all concrete, particular plants of the species are true. Back of the visible tangible plant must be its Eidos, its eternal norm, form, idea, “species.” So with everything. An elaboration of this conclusion gives the real unchanging, fixed eternal world back of, underpinning, supporting this visible changing, temporal world.

Such a world-view as this was made more valuable and more imperative by the break-up of the traditional morals and religion of the Greek state. The search for the meaning of life was precipitated by the disintegration of social sanctions and of the guarantees of custom. This search was voiced in the questionings of Socrates. It was made serious by the menacing individualism of the sophists. The outcome was that stability, security, confidence were found in the Platonic doctrine. Back of this ephemeral world is the real world of “ideas,” the unchanging and eternal, upon which we may rest our minds and hearts amid all this disappointing and desperate flux.

Passing by the Middle Ages, which, mutatis mutandis, appropriated this scheme, we pause over the significance of the Renaissance period. Two things are uppermost in one’s mind and as one thinks of the tumultuous beginnings of modern life which characterized the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries. For one thing, the Renaissance was the culmination of a long period of absorption in which men had been gradually working their way back, by intellectual assimilation, towards the beginnings of the rich tradition which Church and Empire had stored up. This period of absorption was that five hundred years during which pagan hordes that had conquered Rome were conquered by the knowledge, faith, custom, civilization of their victims. From the cultural standpoint the new nations were hungry, the larder of the old civilization was replete, and hence authority on one side and absorption on the other became natural and inevitable. Thus, the philosophical preconceptions, the cosmological ground-principles, the whole general attitude toward life’s problems of the whole old world were fastened upon the mind of the young European peoples. It must not be forgotten that all this was aat the hatural achievement of the new European life and genius, but as foreign to it, as inherited (and at first as cherished) as grandfatherly ideas are in the mind of a child. If some day the child must shake off the old conceptions because he hears the call of life to go forth and achieve his own inner world, it would be only natural to expect that this young European giant should some day struggle to cast aside his intellectual inheritance and go forth to conquer reality for himself, in his own way, with his own weapons.

Well—and this is the second matter—it was just that very thing that was happening in the early “teens” of our era. The young western world began to look at life for itself, and a curious, astonished, wild-eyed look it was. Europe had learned at its mother’s knee to say: “The true world is fixed and final. Reality is static.” But looking out now in wonderment, seeing farther than the ancient world had ever seen, the new world said: “Ah, no! The world is not static. The world moves. Things change.”

Two well-known anecdotes are told of Galileo, which, if not authentic, are well invented. The one tells how, in the dome at Pisa during worship, the litany or the sermon boring him, he observed the cathedral chandelier move by the wind and, studying its vibrations, discovered a basic law of mechanics. The profound meaning of this anecdote is, obviously, that God spoke to the man more effectively through the self-moving pendulum than in the rigid, immobile litany from a rigid, immobile, hieratic heart; and that, if we do not understand such litany, and it bores us, we may still devoutly worship by meditating upon what we can understand.

The other narrative tells how, imprisoned, tortured inwardly by a compulsory recantation, Galileo gathered himself together and declared: “E pu se muove” (“it moves though”). Galileo never uttered these words; but the history of the world has uttered them for him! Yes, it moves itself, this earth, and in its motion it knocks everything down that is in its way. Not the earth alone moves—all that is in the world is eternal motion!

Man moves—in space, and time, extensively and intensively. Truth moves, and, moving, demolishes thrones and altars. Morality moves, making ancient good uncouth. Faith moves, the human heart putting into it the pulse beat of its life, and there is no way to stop this self moving Faith.

Those old stories are not true to fact, but they are true to truth. Galileo did say: “It is my opinion that the earth is very noble and admirable by reason of so many and so different generations and alterations which are incessantly made therein.” And Descartes joined him: “The nature of things physical is much more easily conceived when they are beheld coming gradually into existence, than when they are only considered as produced at once in a finished and perfect state.” Thus these men—and many others—voiced the changed temper that was coming over the world,—the transfer of interest from the permanent to the changing.

Slowly the new attitude was adopted in many departments of knowledge, but the facts of biology were apparently all against its becoming a general philosophical movement. The species of plants and animals had every appearance of being fixed and final, unchangeably stamped once for all upon the sentient world by the Creator. Not only so, but the wonderful adaptation of organism to environment, of organ to organism, a marvelous and delicate complexity of teleological adjustment, seemed to testify unanswerably to the reality of fixed and final types, to a static underpinning for all this changing order.

Origin of Species! That was the bomb with which Charles Darwin destroyed the last stronghold of a static world-view. “Species” is the scholastics’ translation of the Greek Eidos, the fixed and final type or idea which is first and final cause of the changing life of each creature. Species is a synonym and epitome of fixity and finality; it is the key-word of a static other-world reality. When Darwin said, “Origin of Species,” he was cramming the conflict of the ancient wisdom and the modern knowledge into a bursting phrase. When he said of species what Galileo said of the earth, e pu se muove, he emancipated once for all genetic and experimental ideas as an organon of asking questions and looking for explanations. He lifted the biological gates which had kept back the flood of change from inundating the old fields of fixity.

In sum: The world of thought is slowly, painfully making a change in its fundamental attitude toward reality such as is not made oftener than once in several millennia: One general conception of reality was all-controlling for 2,000 years. Then from Copernicus to Darwin many factors in a world-subversive change were struggling for recognition. Conceptions that had reigned in the philosophy of nature and of knowledge for 2,000 years rested in the superiority of the fixed and final: they rested on treating change and origin as signs of defect and unreality. In laying hands upon the sacred ark of absolute permanency; in treating forms that had been regarded as types of fixity and perfection as originating and passing away, the “origin of species” introduced a mode of thinking that in the end was bound to transform the logic of knowledge, and hence the treatment of all our values and verities and virtues.

But heaven and earth and species are not all. Shall there be no Copernicus of the moral heavens, no Galileo of the moral earth, no Darwin of the moral life?

Hove now Friedrich Nietzsche into sight!

Loyalty has ever been the basic virtue, foundation of life and of law. Naturally, in the moral world, the objects to which loyalty shall be related will be objects that are real. But, as we have seen, in the old world, the real was the unchangeable, the immobile, the finished, the final, the absolute. To these, therefore, the old loyalty was directed and dedicated.

Comes now Friedrich Nietzsche, a man in whose name the entire moral revolution of our time has found its most pregnant expression, and declares war upon that old loyalty, and does so in the name of a new culture, a new humanity. To him this loyalty is not only an empty folly; it is more than that—a crime against life, a weakening of human power. To him, not stationariness, but self-changing, is the life task of man. He feels himself akin only to him who changes. Every moment of life has an existence, a right, a content of its own. No present point of time has a right to lay claim, on its own account, to the next point. From what we now will, think, feel, no man may presume to require us to will, think, feel the same way tomorrow. And this preaching of Nietzsche’s on the duty of change as against the old duty to change never has found more ears to listen and more hearts to believe than any other preaching of our time. This new preaching is at once most influential and most dangerous. But its very dangerousness is a most wholesome and necessary part of the modern moral view of life.

Is loyalty, then, something about which there is nothing to be learned? Is there no counterfeit and caricature of loyalty? No mask behind which men hide their indolence and complacency and thoughtlessness? You meet a man whom you have not seen in long years, and you say to him: “Why, you have not changed a bit, you are precisely the same as in the old days.” Have you praised him, necessarily? If he left you as a child, looking and speaking and thinking and acting like a child, ought he not to have changed? Does a fruit remain what it was as bud and blossom? Life is development—but development is a constant self-changing. Development is an incessant dis-loyalty to what is already there. And if man, just because he is man, and has a will of his own and can set himself against the law of development, should sell his life to the force of inertia—would not that be a crime against life? And yet, even such a deed men call loyalty! Men say that they want to be faithful to the heritage of the fathers. Which is often enough simply to say that they mean to store away their heritage where it will be kept from the world’s light and air that would destroy it—but where, also, it can enter into no human intercourse, serve no life, fulfil no end of life. This loyalty of unchangeableness to the heritage puts the talent in a napkin, and there can be no increase. Men say that they mean to abide faithful to their faith unto death. Often enough this is only stubbornness and narrowness. It requires no art and no merit to exercise such faithfulness. All one needs to do is to close one’s eyes and ears to what lies beyond the bounds of this faith, to forego the questionings and uncertainties that others must pass through,—and then to send in one’s claim to the reward and gratitude due such loyalty! Today it is quite the thing at college commencements to spy out the men who are models of such loyalty and to say: “Look how firm and steadfast and rock-like they are!” But it cannot be denied that much of this illustrious loyalty is nothing but natural or voluntary incapacity to think more widely than others have taught them to think, or, for the matter of that, permitted them to think. Back of this bragging about principles which are vainly declared to be unshakable, there is frequently nothing but an ill-natured obstinacy whose so-called principles have no other basis than the self-interest to which they are contributary. It was this loyalty to the finished,—finished cult, finished belief, finished customs and practices, finished religion and morality,—that stoned the prophets and crucified Jesus. It was this kind of loyalty that the mediaeval church imposed upon the “Faithful,” imprisoning the conscience therein for time and for eternity. Bound by an oath of loyalty, the priest renounced the world; the monk and nun under monastic vows dedicated their lives to the church, their services to “heaven.” And hence it marked an epoch when Luther called their loyalty a sin, and went forth into the world, the home, the vocation, the business, breaking the vows of priest and cloister. Was such disloyalty to a sacred obligation loyalty in the sixteenth century, and shall it be blasphemy in the twentieth? Is it not rather a blasphemy to preach to men a loyalty which obligates them to forego the use of their best and noblest powers, which condemns them to spiritual standstill in the eternal progressive movement of life?

Take some illustrations which will test insight and courage. There is the constitution of the United States. Shall we assume toward it the loyalty of fixedness and finality, or the loyalty of change? No man of veneration and equipoise would favor capricious or precipitate or superfluous change in so noble a document. But, for all that, the experience of life made the constitution for life’s sake, and the maker is more than the made. If our national life pass—as pass it has—into new seas and under new stars, where life needs a change of the constitution, then the principle which prompted the people to frame the constitution in the first place requires them to change it to meet the new needs of our growing and changing national life. The superficial loyalty to the changeless letter must yield to the profound loyalty to the ever-changing spirit. The constitution is for the sake of the people, not the people for the sake of the constitution. They, rather than it, are sacred.

Similarly, there is the modern problem of marriage, the family, and the home. Shall ours be the old loyalty that holds the customs of the past inviolable, marriage indissoluble, the inherited patterns of home and family unchangeable—the loyalty of fixedness and finishedness; or shall it be the loyalty of change in all these matters to meet the changing needs and situations of our burdened and bewildered modernity? Again, no man of sanctity and sanity and stability of soul can favor any arbitrary radicalism that is subversive of time-honored institutions for no better reason than a fleeting fancy, or the passing of the romance of the honeymoon, or raw self-will, or an unanticipated burden or hardship. But, for all that, the marriage institution, like all others, is for the sake of man and not man for the sake of the institution. It was life that originated our domestic ideas and customs and conventions and codes; and if ever life, in the interest of its well-being and progress, requires changes suited to new needs and new days, then the “new loyalty” to life that ever changes must replace the old loyalty to codes that never change. Codes, too, are for the sake of life, not life for the sake of codes. No loyalty to the letter that means disloyalty to the spirit.

And there is the everlasting problem of education. Education in the past had for its subject matter symbols—reading, writing, arithmetic, grammar, rhetoric, logic, and the like. The new education has for its subject matter realities—nature and history. The old education taught topics or subjects; the new education teaches boys and girls. According to the old education, knowledge precedes action; according to the new education, action precedes knowledge. In the old education things were done to the pupils; in the new education the pupils do things.

The old school teacher was a “star and dwelt apart”—that is, his aloofness and superiority were indispensable. He taught from above. The new school teacher is down among the students, a democrat of democrats. The old school teacher communicated knowledge from without; the new school teacher develops interest from within. The old education was atomistic, the new organic. The old education was a donation to the pupils, the new is an achievement by them. The old education proceeded on the assumption that man is primarily intellect; the new that he is primarily will. The old education preceded life and fitted for it; the new education is a part of life itself.

It is a great change. According to the old theory, there was perfection to start with, perfection at the top. All that we needed was to pipe it down through aqueducts so well constructed that nothing that was in could get out, nothing that was without could get in; and thus—thus only—would the vain and empty world and life be filled with value and verity and virtue—donation on the one side, reception on the other.

But the time came when men asked: if there is perfection to start with, why start? Why paint the lily? And if there is perfection to start with, how does there come to be imperfection? How can imperfection come from perfection? Ugly questions, these! Soon the world was turned upside down.

The new theory holds that matters began very humbly and struggled and fought their way slowly upward. Ascent from below, not descent from above. No values or verities or virtues donated, all achieved. Education an evolution, not a communication.

Some business men favor the old education. Their world is one of mechanism and authority. They think that they do not need men with initiative, spontaneity, freedom. That is their prerogative, as it was of the king of old. They need the mechanical, the automatic, the impersonal in man. This fits into their world. This is what the old education stands for. The new education unfolds and matures personalities. Personalities make good masters but poor servants.

Business men as a class are perhaps our best men. But the very conditions of business economy and certainty are the impersonal, the unfree, the mechanical. So business has warped the judgment of some good men and led them astray on the most fundamental problem in the history of the race.

Were it not multiplying illustrations, the same point might be urged as to politics. Does not party loyalty often mean personal servility? As a matter of fact what is loyalty in one situation, or one age, may be simple cowardice or abjectness in another.

The upshot is that the modern man has to endure the reproach of not thinking and feeling and judging and acting as men formerly did—the reproach of perfidy toward the past, its solutions and its sanctities. In consequence, it would not be a bad idea for him to cultivate respect for the past, gratitude for its achievements, appreciation for its unfinished tasks. Still, he should learn to accept the reproach as praise,—recognition that, though problems remain the same, solutions change; though sanctity abide, the objects which are sacred change. Evolutionism no longer recognizes any fact as sacred. Man is inwardly working on ever farther, ever overcoming the old and conquering ever the new—this must also be recognized.

It is said that we ought to love the old, the finished. But is love blind? Does it consist in advocating the point of view of one’s friend, not because it seems true, but just because love requires it? Is loyalty of love the faculty of adaptation with which we remodel ourselves after the image of another? Is one disloyal in love if one affirm one’s self against another, or if another affirm himself against one? Surely fidelity of friendship, even of marriage, ought not to be the grave of one’s own being. Surely loyalty should be the life and not the death of one’s self! Surely we must all see with our own eyes, hear with our own ears, judge with our own judgments, love with our own hearts, for the quite plain reason that we have no others with which we can do these things.

And so, if we take up this great subject in a large way, as Nietzsche has done, we see that we have all broken with the old loyalty, and that the consummation of this breach has been life and blessing to us. We moderns all somehow live in a disloyalty which we have committed—imputed to us as transgression, viewed by us as our strength and pride. We have all become unfaithful,—as children to our parents, as pupils to our teachers, as disciples to our masters. We felt ourselves bound to them; we loosed ourselves from them. The paths they walked we have forsaken. In the strange untrodden land whither our vagrant feet have wandered, we “came to ourselves” in declaring disobedience to the laws of tradition, in breaking loyalty to the rules of the schools. It is precisely on this account that once again we have won spiritual life, a living art and science, a living religion and morality. We have snapped the fetters fastened upon us in the name of the old loyalty, and all that is great and fruitful and constructive in the life of the modern spirit is a monument of the disloyalty which its creators have built thereto. Nothing is gained any longer by our screening ourselves behind this word loyalty, and making believe that we shall not be found out! We owe it to ourselves and we owe it to the world to confess frankly that we have done with the old loyalty to the unchangeable and the finished, for that is to be loyal to an unreality, since there is no such thing. Even God, if he be the living God, cannot be the same yesterday, today, and forever. But we owe it even more to ourselves and to the world to strive for a clear position in reference to this question which is so profoundly agitating our entire moral world today. We may not abandon the field to those who would demolish the temple of the old goddess simply that they may celebrate upon its ruins the orgies of their caprice and inconstancy and characterlessness. If ever there was a doctrine whose right is easily turned into a wrong, whose truth into an error, whose blessing into a curse, it is this Nietzschean doctrine of the right and the duty of ceaseless change, of self-dependence, by which we are redeemed from slavery to the past. If the old loyalty—loyalty to the past—no longer holds men, wherewith shall they be held? Shall they be like the weathervane blown hither and thither by every wind of doctrine, or like the rudderless ship driven aimless and planless over the high seas by the midnight hurricane? Better a thousand times be tethered to the old loyalty than to be doomed to such a life of levity and poiselessness and flightiness.

But the new loyalty which we seek, without which we go forward into no future, should it not be more stable and enduring and loyal than the old? If a moment releases itself from what to it is past, and validates its right as a self-dependent life to its predecessor, a birth has transpired in man, and birth means pain. Without such pain, man has changed his situation, but not himself. A new color has come upon the motly manifoldness of his life—he has remained the same. Trees do not have their roots in the air. Weaklings cannot make the real change—it needs a strength that they do not have. The strength to change really—only he has this who bears the new loyalty in his own bosom; loyalty not to his opinion, not to his learning and heritage, but loyalty to his growth, to the great eternal goal of life, to the great sacred task which he has yet to fulfil in life.

Loyal to ourself? Would that it might be so! But the self that we would at first be loyal to is not our self at all. It is foreign wares, loaded upon us,—first even in the nursery, slyly slipped subsequently upon our shoulders,—foreign words, foreign worths! Loyalty to what satiates, not the better loyalty to our hunger! We begin to live only when we live in our hunger; our hunger is we ourselves. It is a good satiety only if a new hunger comes from it. Loyalty to our self—this is to keep our life alive in us—a young glad life, that never grows old, because the old is ever transmuted into a new. This loyalty to ourself,—it is to expel from every truth its error, from every boundary its limit which blocks the vision into the wide world, the blue sky, and the distant sea.

Loyalty to men? Would that it might be so! But such loyalty costs so much trouble and toil. For the faithfulness that is genuine and living, there is no law, no binding I must, only a glorious I will. One day we shall have done with the loyalty which means master and servant, leader and led—the loyalty of the dog that is loyalest to him who feeds him best or beats him hardest. One day we shall understand what the loyalty of man means—this new loyalty toward man, in which souls meet and chime and work together, and live in each other, yet each remains itself and true to itself.

So, then, the law of change and of growth is the law of the new loyalty, as the law of fixedness and finishedness and finality was of the old. It is the duty of such new loyalty to protect itself against the deadening force of habit and of petrifaction, to guard itself against any obedience by which it would become disloyal to itself. Such loyalty is too honorable to humor inertia and laziness under its banner, too courageous to conceal cowardice behind a slave’s patience.

But thought on our theme is usually lifted up to where the sky keeps company with the granite and the grass, to a religious elevation. Nor do we need stop short here. Ultimately the new loyalty is loyalty to God, the new God, of whom something must be said later. The God in whom all fulness dwells summons us to ever new truths, and reveals underground wells of living water throwing its spray aloft on life’s ferns and flowers. To be loyal to him is never to sunder ourselves from his fulness and freshness, but to co-work with him who is forever making all things new.

And now I think we are at the end. The result? It is needless to state it, but I would not shrink from the thankless task. In a word, then, the new loyalty—in harmony with the whole great changed view of the world and of life—is loyalty to change and becoming rather than to finishedness and finality; to the future rather than to the past; to ideals rather than to conventions; to freedom rather than to authority; to personality rather than to institution; to character rather than to respectability; to our hunger rather than to our satiety; to the God that is to be rather than to the God that is. Thus the loyalty abides, but the objects of loyalty change and pass.