ON THE GENTEEL ART OF COMBING

ASSES' TAILS

BY T. SWANN HARDING

SOME reformer or other ever and anon dons his most profound look, grows confidential and asks me to believe that religion is, for instance, an economic phenomenon, and that when all people get their economic rights it will vanish. Man, having satisfied his material wants, will cease to postulate supernatural powers, will cease to pray, will cease to worship. I incline to skepticism. The hypothesis is too delightfully naïve.

Primitives are usually much more intelligent than civilized people in the sense that they utilize their intellectual equipment far more efficiently to cope with their environmental problems. Thus, generally speaking, they see to it that all have enough to eat and to wear and are sheltered all of the time. Among many primitive peoples the economic problem has been solved quite Socialistically, often Communistically. Yet primitives are so decidedly religious that rites and superstitions and taboos fetter them in every trivial act of their lives.

Very rich people are often sincerely religious without ulterior motive. It just happens that most men usually have spells, perhaps due to inferior digestion, during which they poignantly feel their impotence, their unimportance and the futility of their greatest efforts. In such spells it often perks them up, fabricates a functional superiority for them and does them a vast deal of good to postulate a deity and to worship, thus feeling superior to other men and justifiably dependent upon a higher power at the same time. Other men, whom we shall discuss later, feel differently, but they are always numerically negligible.

Man has a natural gravitation toward the wonderful, the magical and the mystical. Emotionally I believe he vastly prefers them to the cold, prosaic operations of methodical science. Our race is afflicted with a congenital tendency to madness and

unreason.

As Anatole France, Aldous Huxley and the minor prophets have stated, "wherever the choice has to be made between the man of reason and the madman, the world has unhesitatingly followed the madman.”

Men like authority, too. They despise suspended judgment. They must be Methodists or Infidels or Atheists or Agnostics or Vegetarians or Socialists or Republicans. Skepticism horrifies the average man. Even philosophers of today have lost the valuable trait which Plato exhibited in the Parmenides when he made the experiment of demonstrating that his own fundamental principle was practically untenable. Yet even if that principle of ours be untenable, we may find it very useful. Since when has the validity of an idea placed limitations upon its utility?

Man is not a reasoning animal at all. He is, as Unamuno insists, a sensual or a feeling animal. A cat thinks and acts incisively. It never reflects, speculates nor philosophizes. It never exhibits remorse, feels impotence, hypothecates a feline deity. It is rationally sufficient unto itself and faces the great, indifferent universe gracefully unafraid, daringly bold, elegantly supercilious. The race of cats is therefore deliberately and habitually haughty to humans.

Solve man's economic problems and his chronic nostalgia, his yearning for the supernatural, his constant desire to justify himself to himself, will escape from material things only to long more fervently than ever for the gifts of godhood-omnipotence, omniscience, omnipresence and infinite leisure. "Expel religion forcibly and it returns under strange disguises," said Huneker in Unicorns.

For, as I have said, I am skeptical. Some of us are, by nature. In saying this I have rendered myself liable of course to the charge of Skepticism with a large S. For in being a skeptic I do not seem to have advanced one step beyond the Deist, the Idealist, the Socialist or even the downtrodden Methodist. That is to say, I have announced a theory and have classified myself. I also am a gregarious mammalian of the Genus Homo and am therefore bound to classify myself with my own subherd, to enunciate some theory or other of the universe and to justify myself.

But I should like to refrain from developing my individualistic

skepticism into a system. I want it to remain a mere method or technique. I have no desire to justify skepticism nor should I care for anyone to believe as I do because I do. If I can stimulate thought, well and good. I have no desire to dominate or to mould it.

We are now getting down to psychological bed rock. For the strictly rationalist infidel or agnostic or atheist often fails to see that he is psychologically at one with the dogmatic religionist. Buddhism has actually demonstrated that a perfectly effective religion may be founded upon acute agnosticism, the concept of Deity being there superfluous. In The World as Will and Idea Schopenhauer advances the notion that the concept of immortality is so highly desirable that it alone sustains religious faith, and that if the infidel could successfully synthesize a belief in immortality with a denial of Deity, infidelity would at once become a vastly more popular religion than it now is or ever has been.

For Schopenhauer of course observed that it is a religion. It is a response to those yearnings which we all have but which we gratify so differently. The psychic discharge which one man accomplishes through religious ecstasy, a second accomplishes through semi-rational religious contemplation, a third through blatant secularity or infidelity, and a fourth perhaps through philanthropy, ethics, conscientiousness, scientific endeavor, officious meddling with the private life of others, filial devotion, social consciousness or intoxicating liquor. The discharge is precisely the same psychologically, and the accumulation of psychic energy demanding the discharge essays the same qualitatively.

Some exceedingly interesting people, essentially sciolistic in character, take refuge in intellectuality or in Radicalism for this discharge, and make a religion of higher learning or Bolshevism. My good neighbor attends church five days weekly and on the remaining two evenings sits at home and plays gospel hymns to himself on the phonograph, meanwhile praying desperately and rather vociferously at intervals. The advanced sciolist would denounce this as absurd, atavistic and revolting. His wife declares that he is much more supportable in this phase than he is

when he drinks to excess. I do not know. But I do know that the advanced intellectual Radical is usually a sciolist in that he assumes he has become freely nonconformist and exceedingly scientific merely by exchanging one dogma for another and retaining bigotry and fanaticism unaltered. The latter, you remember, is aptly defined by Santayana as a process of redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim.

The sciolist assumes that by translating problems into an incomprehensible and highly artificial nomenclature he has achieved inerrancy, and that by abusing perfectly good scientific terms he has attained mathematical exactitude, whatever that may mean in a day of rampant relativity in mathematics and of growing empiricism in physics. He dons the verbal integument of scientific method, without inner change of heart, quite as some unregenerate priest might don the robes of office. He would scorn the priest, and yet himself says Mass before the very same altar of emotion that the priest utilizes. Moreover while doing these things the impenitent sciolist assures us loudly that he is very advanced, very profound, very original, very iconoclastic, very synthetic and, God save us, very scientific!

What has just been said amounts to nothing more then a restatement of well established scientific fact. Much older than James is the idea that "He believes in no God and he worships Him". Paul caught the Athenians adoring an Unknown God. James added that "the more fervent opponents of Christian doctrines have often shown a temper which, psychologically considered, is indistinguishable from religious zeal".

But attempt at this late day to include such an idea, sound and commonplace though it be, in an article for publication in even the most radical free thought journal available, and it will surely be deleted. You will be lucky indeed if your article is not cleverly emasculated to make you say things quite different from those you intended to say. I learned this by experience. Articles are usually so mutilated by smug free thought editors because they can no more bear strictures against their religion than can Presbyterians against theirs. You must not even whisper that infidelity is psychologically at one with religious conviction, for that is slander against the faith.

Yet our more bigoted radicals are obvious religio-neurotics in search of some new protective gregariousness to sustain them, or some caustic individualism to render them sadistic martyrs. Their very faces betray them; their snarling speeches and writings with symptoms of repression are an open book. They clamor for freedom of thought and of speech when their real need is an intellectual grasp which would give them something definite and useful to say.

The skeptic who does not insist upon making a philosophic dogma out of his skepticism is in a better position. He doubts sanely like a scientist, because he wishes to learn. In certain segments of human activity he is aware that he may really know truth as a terminal experience, and he cites fact and utilizes it accordingly. But in realms of metaphysics and cosmic philosophy he knows that one guess is just about as good as another, and no better. He therefore reserves the right to dally with whichever speculation momentarily produces in him the warmest glow of satisfaction. But in season and out of season he insists that his speculation is only a matter of personal comfort and that it is a speculation, however enjoyable, lacking compelling authority. He will gladly laugh with you at his speculation, provided you are genteel enough to laugh with him now and then at your

own.

For in these spheres we want comfort and satisfaction, not dogma, vindication and ill-temper. As Remy de Gourmont says in his Dust for Sparrows; "I have known very religious men in all professions, as I have known also convinced Deists and Spiritualists, who were nevertheless quite intelligent, very enlightened, very well-balanced in all manifestations of practical activity. Which may, all of it, serve to demonstrate that when one passes out of the realm of the knowable the knowledge of the atheist and believer are of perfectly equal equivalence." Both may be very serviceable indeed. Both gratify an urgent psychological whim which demands gratification on pain of making us very uncomfortable. But the individual who practises scientific skepticism is demonstrably less likely to emulate Dr. Kunastrokius than is the dogmatist of whatever brand.

For Laurence Sterne tells us that the good doctor took "the