gestion now of this, now of that person under whose influence it accidentally falls; which suffers its fate to be determined for it by the accident of others' interference, instead of dragging reluctant fate by the collar whither it would have fate go; it means the life all cluttered up with false motions, motions dictated by convention, and fashion, by fear and fawning and policy, false smiles, false grief, false handshakings, false candidates, false platforms, all with an idea, so far as there is any idea, that it will all come out right in the zigzag, all defended by one sophistry after another until the sense for truth fades and finally there is no truth, but only the various refinements of the lie. The abode and temple of truth among men is and can be found alone in personal characters which hold their own helm and steer their own course. For them alone the stars are fixed.

You must choose for yourself the things that are worth while, and you must cast, though it may be with pain, the other things aside. You must plot your course and steer it through by light of the worth-while stars. To turn the face and look for applause or heed the sneers and detraction of men is to steer by the wisps of the fog.

THE INTERPRETATION OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY*

GEORGE PLIMPTON ADAMS

There is no surer approach to the intellectual and the spiritual ideals of an age than that which is afforded by an answer to the question, what meaning does that age attach to the pursuit of knowledge,-what place does knowledge occupy in the affections and the loyalties of the age? To understand why men wish to know, what they seek and what they believe themselves able to know, is to approach a center, perhaps the center from which radiate all of men's conscious interests and achievements.

It is fitting that we, who cherish a common devotion to the ideals and achievements of knowledge and true scholarship, and who here seek to do homage to those ideals, should ask how it fares with the search for knowledge in our own world, what does knowledge mean for our own age, what do men expect of it. Is knowledge looked to as the guide of life, as, in Wordsworth's splendid phrase, a "dear and familiar inmate of the household of man, or is it a means for the procuring of other goods, or perhaps a luxury, not indispensable to the serious concerns of men.

I propose here to depict, to illustrate, and to interpret a single characteristic-not of our own immediate age, but of the century which now lies well behind us. It is a char

* The Phi Beta Kappa address delivered at the annual meeting of the society on May 12, 1914.

acteristic which concerns the estimate which the nineteenth century placed upon the getting of knowledge, and the way in which it defined the relation between knowledge, and the other major interests of men. It is a characteristic which may serve as a touchstone in disclosing to us many of the deeper currents in the life of the nineteenth century, currents which in spite of their confusion we can still discern bearing our own age along, increasing the spiritual and intellectual distance between us and the culture of earlier centuries.

Although the nineteenth century was a period of intense devotion to the acquisition of new knowledge about nature and history, such scientific and historical achievements are not its distinguishing mark. They are, rather, a continuation and culmination of that devotion to the ideals of science which has its roots in the classical tradition, and which is increasingly dominant in European culture from the Renaissance till the age of the Enlightenment. There is indeed a shifting of emphasis from the mathematical and physical sciences to the biological and historical sciences as we go from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to the nineteenth century, and no doubt subtle changes in men's habits of thought follow in the wake of this shifting of emphasis. Yet such changes are not at all sufficient to explain the extraordinary differences in spiritual atmosphere, the new problems and new hopes, which everyone must feel as he turns from the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century to the Romanticism of the nineteenth century.

It is not loyalty to science and knowledge, with the whole-hearted devotion of the best minds of the Enlightenment that distinguishes the nineteenth century, but rather the retirement of the intellect, the distrust of knowledge, the appeal to energies other than those of reason and intelligence, which confronts us on every hand in the life of the nineteenth century. Let us notice some of the more striking aspects which this distrust of reason and of knowledge, this

abandonment of the Enlightenment ideal has assumed, and let us then ask for its meaning.

There is a dominant note in the strange mutterings.and outpourings of Carlyle,--that man who so keenly sensed the new burdens and the new hopes of the early century. It is an appeal away from the clear-cut and explicit leadings of reflective reason, to the sweep of the deeper, the more mysterious and impelling forces of instinct and of feeling. Reason and intelligence are mechanical, routine, and analytic; the vital and the mysterious, the creative and the synthetic activities are not reflective, not under the petty sway of conscious guidance. In his first important essay in the Edinburgh Review, entitled Characteristics, and published in 1831, Carlyle states his thesis thus:

"The healthy know not of their health, but only the sick.... The beginning of all inquiry is disease; all science, if we consider well, as it must have originated in the feeling of something being wrong, so it is and continues to be but division. dismemberment, and partial healing of the wrong. . . . Boundless as is the domain of man, it is but a small fractional proportion of it that he rules with consciousness and by forethought; what he can contrive, nay, what he can altogether know and apprehend, is essentially the mechanical, small; the great is ever, in one sense or other, the vital; it is essentially the mysterious, and only the surface of it can be understood.. In our inward, as in our outward world, what is mechanical lies open to us; not what is dynamical and has vitality. The ages of heroism are not the ages of moral philosophy; virtue, when it can be philosophized of, has become aware of itself, is sickly and beginning to decline."

This Romanticism-if one may use the term Romanticism in its loosest and most general sense to designate such mistrust of individual intelligence-has one specific implication. There is, running through the whole of the nineteenth century, a willingness to submit to tradition, to the past, to the larger experience of the race. To the

men of the eighteenth century this was the source of every abuse and the renunciation of the divine right of the individual to submit everything to the criticism of his own individual reason. Why this new appeal to the past and to tradition? Because the relatively unconscious, unrereflective, instinctive side of life, which Carlyle praises at the expense of reason, is the utterance and the echo, within the individual, of the experience of the race. In appealing to the unconscious and the vital, one is appealing to the traditional and the historical, and we are in a world, sensitive to the spiritual inheritances of the past, as well as to the subtle filaments which bind men together into social relations. The distrust of intelligence is also the distrust of the individual; the appeal to instinct and intuition, is also the appeal to tradition. Carlyle could speak of society as "the standing wonder of our existence, the true region of the supernatural." Men are no longer ignorant of their own past, of the historical sources of their life, as they were in the age of Enlightenment and individualism. How deeply this consciousness of a larger spiritual and historical tradition, transcending and surrounding and limiting the claim of the individual reason-how deeply this impressed itself on the thought and life of the new age is brought to mind by a bare mention of Herder and Winckelman, of Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, of Chateaubriand's Genie du Christianisme, and of Hegel, whose philosophy but utters this appeal to the larger life of tradition and of the race, in the language of logic and of concepts.

Nowhere in the nineteenth century do we witness the impelling nature of this common submission to instinct and to tradition any more clearly and dramatically than in the case of Cardinal Newman. In Newman's mind there stand over against each other reason and instinct, critical intelligence and submissive faith, individual self-reliance and a yielding to the voice of tradition, the supremacy of reason of the Enlightenment, the distrust of reason of Romanticism. It is slowly and reluctantly, and, as it were, against