school of psychologists. They have shown how
constantly the mind cloaks a deep meaning in a
shallow incident — how the superficial is all the
time being shoved into the light of consciousness
in order to conceal a buried intention; how in-
veterate is our use of symbols.

Between ourselves and our real natures we in-
terpose that wax figure of idealizations and selec-
tions which we call our character. We extend
this into all our thinking. Between us and the
realities of social life we build up a mass of gen-
eralizations, abstract ideas, ancient glories, and
personal wishes. They simplify and soften ex-
perience. It is so much easier to talk of poverty
than to think of the poor, to argue the rights of
capital than to see its results. Pretty soon we

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SOME NECESSARY ICONOCLASM

come to think of the theories and abstract ideas
as things in themselves. We worry about their
fate and forget their original content.

For words, theories, symbols, slogans, abstrac-
tions of all kinds are nothing but the porous ves-
sels into which life flows, is contained for a time,
and then passes through. But our reverence
clings to the vessels. The old meaning may have
disappeared, a new one come in — no matter, we
try to believe there has been no change. And
when life's expansion demands some new con-
tainer, nothing is more difficult than the realiza-
tion that the old vessels cannot be stretched to the
present need.

It is interesting to notice how in the very act of
analyzing it I have fallen into this curious and
ancient habit. My point is that the metaphor is
taken for the reality: I have used at least six
metaphors to state it. Abstractions are not
cloaks, nor wax figures, nor walls, nor vessels, and
life doesn't flow like water. What they really are
you and I know inwardly by using abstractions
and living our lives. But once I attempt to give
that inwardness expression, I must use the only
weapons I have — abstractions, theories, phrases.
By an effort of the sym.pathetic imagination you
can revive within yourself something of my in-

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ward sense. As I have had to abstract from life
in order to communicate, so you are compelled to
animate my abstractions, in order to understand.

I know of no other method of communication
between two people. Language is always grossly
inadequate. It is inadequate if the listener is
merely passive, if he falls into the mistake of the
literal-minded who expect words to contain a pre-
cise image of reality. They never do. All lan-
guage can achieve is to act as a guidepost to the
imagination enabling the reader to recreate the
author's insight. The artist does that: he con-
trols his medium so that we come most readily
to the heart of his intention. In the lyric poet the
control is often so delicate that the hearer lives
over again the finely shaded mood of the poet.
Take the words of a lyric for what they say, and
they say nothing most of the time. And that is
true of philosophers. You must penetrate the
ponderous vocabulary, the professional cant to
the Insight beneath or you scoff at the mountain
ranges of words and phrases. It is this that
Bergson means when he tells us that a philoso-
pher's intuition always outlasts his system. Un-
less you get at that you remain forever foreign to
the thinker.

That too is why debating is such a wretched
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SOME NECESSARY ICONOCLASM

amusement and most partisanship, most contro-
versy, so degrading. The trick here is to argue
from the opponent's language, never from his in-
sight. You take him literally, you pick up his
sentences, and you show what nonsense they are.
You do not try to weigh what you see against
what he sees; you contrast what you see with what
he says. So debating becomes a way of confirm-
ing your own prejudices; it is never, never in any
debate I have suffered through, a search for un-
derstanding from the angles of two differing in-
sights.

And, of course, in those more sinister forms of
debating, court trials, where the stakes are so
much bigger, the skill of a successful lawyer is to
make the atmosphere as opaque as possible to the
other lawyer's contention. Men have been
hanged as a result. How often in a political cam-
paign does a candidate suggest that behind the
platforms and speeches of his opponents there
might be some new and valuable understanding
of the country's need?

The fact is that we argue and quarrel an
enormous lot over words. Our prevailing habit
Is to think about phrases, "ideals," theories, not
about the realities they express. In controversy
we do not try to find our opponent's meaning:

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A PREFACE TO POLITICS

we examine his vocabulary. And In our own ef-
forts to shape policies we do not seek out what is
worth doing: we seek out what will pass for
moral, practical, popular or constitutional.

In this the Vice Commission reflected our na-
tional habits. For those earnest men and women
In Chicago did not set out to find a way of abol-
ishing prostitution; they set out to find a way that
would conform to four Idols they worshiped.
The only cure for prostitution might prove to be
"immoral," ''impractical," unconstitutional, and
unpopular. I suspect that It is. But the honest
thing to do would have been to look for that
cure without preconceived notions. Having found
It, the Commission could then have said to the
public: "This is what will cure the social evil. It
means these changes In Industry, sex relations, law.
and public opinion. If you think it is worth the
cost you can begin to deal with the problem. If
you don't, then confess that you will not abolish
prostitution, and turn your compassion to soften-
ing its effects."

That would have left the Issues clear and
wholesome. But the procedure of the Commis-
sion Is a blow to honest thinking. Its conclusions
may "square with the public conscience of the
American people" but they will not square with

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SOME NECESSARY ICONOCLASM

the intellectual conscience of anybody. To tell
you at the top of the page that absolute annihila-
tion of prostitution is the ultimate ideal and
twenty lines further on that the method must be
constitutional is nothing less than an insult to the
intelligence. Calf-worship was never more idola-
trous than this. Truth would have slept more
comfortably in Procrustes' bed.

Let no one imagine that I take the four precon-
ceived ideas of the Commission too seriously. On
the first reading of the report they aroused no
more interest in me than the ordinary lip-honor
we all do to conventionality — I had heard of the
great fearlessness of this report, and I supposed
that this bending of the knee was nothing but the
innocent hypocrisy of the reformer who wants to
make his proposal not too shocking. But it was
a mistake. Those four idols really dominated the
minds of the Commission, and without them the
report cannot be understood. They are typical
idols of the American people. This report offers
an opportunity to see the concrete results of wor-
shiping them.

A valuable contribution, then, must be moral.
There is no doubt that the Commission means
sexually moral. We Americans always use the
word in that limited sense. If you say that Jones

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A PREFACE TO POLITICS

IS a moral man you mean that he Is faithful to
his wife. He may support her by selling pink
pills; he is nevertheless moral if he is monoga-
mous. The average American rarely speaks of in-
dustrial piracy as immoral. He may condemn it,
but not with that word. If he extends the mean-
ing of immoral at all, it is to the vices most
closely allied to sex — drink and gambling.

Now sexual morality is pretty clearly defined
for the Commission. As we have seen, it means
that sex must be confined to procreation by a
healthy, intelligent and strictly monogamous
couple. All other sexual expression would come
under the ban of disapproval. I am sure I do
the Commission no injustice. Now this limited
conception of sex has had a disastrous effect: it
has forced the Commission to ignore the sexual
impulse in discussing a sexual problem. Any
modification of the relationship of men and
women was immediately put out of consideration.
Such suggestions as Forel, Ellen Key, or Have-
lock Ellis make could, of course, not even get a
hearing.

With this moral ideal In mind, not only vice,
but sex itself, becomes an evil thing. Hence the
hysterical and minute application of the taboo
wherever sex shows Itself. Barred from any re-



SOME NECESSARY ICONOCLASM

form which would reabsorb the Impulse into civ-
ilized life, the Commissioners had no other course
but to hunt it, as an outlaw. And in doing this
they were compelled to discard the precious values
of art, religion and social life of which this super-
fluous energy is the creator. Driven to think of
it as bad, except for certain particular functions,
they could, of course, not see its possibilities.
Hence the poverty of their suggestions along edu-
cational and artistic lines.

A valuable contribution, we are told, must be
reasonable and practical. Here is a case where
words cannot be taken literally. "Reasonable" in
America certainly never even pretended to mean
in accordance with a rational ideal, and "practi-
cal," — well one thinks of "practical politics,"
"practical business men," and "unpractical re-
formers." Boiled down these v/ords amount to
something like this: the proposals must not be
new or startling; must not involve any radical dis-
turbance of any respectable person's selfishness;
must not call forth any great opposition; must
look definite and Immediate; must be tangible
like a raid, or a jail, or the paper of an ordinance,
or a policeman's club. Above all a "reasonable
and practical" proposal must not require any im-
aginative patience. The actual proposals have all

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A PREFACE TO POLITICS

these qualities: If they are ''reasonable and prac-
tical" then we know by a good demonstration
what these terms meant to that average body of
citizens.

To see that is to see exposed an important facet
of the American temperament. Our dislike of
"talk"; the frantic desire to "do something" with-
out inquiring whether it is worth doing; the dol-
lar standard; the unwillingness to cast any bread
upon the waters; our preference for a sparrow
in the hand to a forest of song-birds; the naive
inability to understand the inner satisfactions of
bankrupt poets and the unworldliness of eccentric
thinkers; success-mania; phlllstinism — they are
pieces of the same cloth. They come from failure
or unwillingness to project the mind beyond the
daily routine of things, to play over the whole
horizon of possibilities, and to recognize that all
is not said when we have spoken. In those
words "reasonable and practical" is the Chinese
Wall of America, that narrow boundary which
contracts our vision to the moment, cuts us off
from the culture of the world, and makes us such
provincial, unimaginative blunderers over our own
problem.s. Fixation upon the immediate has made
a rich country poor in leisure, has in a land meant
for liberal living incited an insane struggle for ex-

176



SOME NECESSARY ICONOCLASM

Istence. One suspects at times that our national
cult of optimism is no real feeling that the world
is good, but a fear that pessimism will produce
panics.

How this fascination of the obvious has balked
the work of the Commission I need not elabor-
ate. That the long process of civilizing sex re-
ceived perfunctory attention; that the imaginative
value of sex was lost in a dogma; that the im-
plied changes In social life were dodged — all that
has been pointed out. It was the inability to rise
above the immediate that makes the report read
as If the policeman were the only agent of civili-
zation.

For where In the report is any thorough discus-
sion by sociologists of the relations of business
and marriage to vice? Why is there no testi-
mony by psychologists to show how sex can be
affected by environment, by educators to show
how it can be trained, by Industrial experts to
show how monotony and fatigue affect It? Where
are the detailed proposals by specialists, for de-
cent housing and working conditions, for educa-
tional reform, for play facilities? The Commis-
sion wasn't afraid of details : didn't It recommend
searchlights in the parks as a weapon against
vice? Why then isn't there a budget, a large,

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comprehensive budget, precise and informing, in
which provision Is made for beginning to civilize
Chicago? That wouldn't have been "reasonable
and practical," I presume, for it would have cost
millions and millions of dollars. And where
would the money have come from? Were the
single-taxers, the Socialists consulted? But their
proposals would require big changes in property
interests, and would that be "reasonable and prac-
tical"? Evidently not: It is more reasonable and
practical to keep park benches out of the shadows
and to plague unescorted prostitutes.

And where are the open questions: the Issues
that everybody should consider, the problems that
scientists should study? I see almost no trace of
them. Why are the sexual problems not even
stated? Where are the doubts that should have
honored these investigations, the frank statement
of all the gaps In knowledge, and the obscurities
in morals? Knowing perfectly well that vice will
not be repressed within a year or prostitution ab-
solutely annihilated In ten. It might, I should
think, have seemed more Important that the issues
be made clear and the thought of the people fer-
tilized than that the report should look very defi-
nite and precise. There are all sorts of things
we do not understand about this problem. The

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SOME NECESSARY ICONOCLASM

opportunities for study which the Commissioners
had must have made these empty spaces evident.
Why then were we not taken into their confi-
dence? Along what lines is investigation most
needed? To what problems, what issues, shall
we give our attention? What is the debatable
ground in this territory? The Commission does
not say, and I for one, ascribe the silence to the
American preoccupation with immediate, definite,
tangible interests.

Wells has written penetratingly about this in
"The New Machiavelli." I have called this fixa-
tion on the nearest object at hand an American
habit. Perhaps as Mr. Wells shows it is an Eng-
lish one too. But in this country we have a phi-
losophy to express it — the philosophy of the Rea-
sonable and the Practical, and so I do not hesi-
tate to import Mr. Wells's observations : "It has
been the chronic mistake of statecraft and all or-
ganizing spirits to attempt immediately to scheme
and arrange and achieve. Priests, schools of
thought, political schemers, leaders of men, have
always slipped into the error of assuming that
they can think out the whole — or at any rate
completely think out definite parts — of the pur-
pose and future of man, clearly and finally; they
have set themselves to legislate and construct on

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that assumption, and, experiencing the perplexing
obduracy and evasions of reality, they have taken
to dogma, persecution, training, pruning, secre-
tive education; and all the stupidities of self-suf-
ficient energy. In the passion of their good in-
tentions they have not hesitated to conceal facts,
suppress thought, crush disturbing initiatives and
apparently detrimental desires. And so it is
blunderingly and wastefully, destroying with the
making, that any extension of social organization
is at present achieved. Directly, however, this
idea of an emancipation from immediacy is
grasped, directly the dominating importance of
this critical, less personal, mental hinterland in
the individual and of the collective mind in the
race is understood, the whole problem of the
statesman and his attitude toward politics gains a
new significance, and becomes accessible to a new
series of solutions. ..."

Let no one suppose that the unwillingness to
cultivate what Mr. Wells calls the ''mental hin-
terland" is a vice peculiar to the business man.
The colleges submit to it whenever they concen-
trate their attention on the details of the student's
vocation before they have built up some cultural
background. The whole drift towards industrial
training in schools has the germs of disaster

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SOME NECESSARY ICONOCLASM

within It — a preoccupation with the technique of
a career. I am not a lover of the "cultural" ac-
tivities of our schools and colleges, still less am I
a lover of shallow specialists. The unquestioned
need for experts In politics Is full of the very real
danger that detailed preparation may give us a
bureaucracy — a government by men divorced
from human tradition. The churches submit to
the demand for Immediacy with great alacrity.
Look at the so-called "liberal" churches. React-
ing against an empty formalism they are tumbling
over themselves to prove how directly they touch
daily life. You read glowing articles In maga-
zines about preachers who devote their time to
housing reforms, milk supplies, the purging of
the civil service. If you lament the ugliness of
their churches, the poverty of the ritual, and the
political absorption of their sermons, you are told
that the church must abandon forms and serve the
common life of men. There are many ways of
serving everyday needs, — turning churches into
social reform organs and political rostra Is, It
seems to me, an obvious but shallow way of per-
forming that service. When churches cease to
paint the background of our lives, to nourish a
Weltanschaung, strengthen men's ultimate pur-
poses and reaffirm the deepest values of life, then

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churches have ceased to meet the needs for which
they exist. That ''hinterland" affects daily life,
and the church which cannot get a leverage on it
by any other method than entering into immediate
political controversy is simply a church that is
dead. It may be an admirable agent of reform,
but it has ceased to be a church.

A large wing of the Socialist Party Is the slave
of obvious success. It boasts that it has ceased to
be 'Visionary" and has become "practical."
Votes, winning campaigns, putting through re-
form measures seem a great achievement. It for-
gets the difference between voting the Socialist
ticket and understanding Socialism. The vote is
the tangible thing, and for that these Socialist
politicians work. They get the votes, enough to
elect them to office. In the City of Schenectady
that happened as a result of the mayoralty cam-
paign of 191 1. I had an opportunity to observe
the results. A few Socialists were in office set to
govern a city with no Socialist "hinterland." It
was a pathetic situation, for any reform proposal
had to pass the judgment of men and women who
did not see life as the officials did. On no impor-
tant measure could the administration expect pop-
ular understanding. What was the result? In
crucial issues, like taxation, the Socialists had to

182



SOME NECESSARY ICONOCLASM

submit to the ideas, — the general state of mind
of the community. They had to reverse their
own theories and accept those that prevailed in
that unconverted city. I wondered over our
helplessness, for I was during a period one of
those officials. The other members of the admin-
istration used to say at every opportunity that we
were fighting *The Beast" or "Special Privilege."
But to me it always seemed that we were like
Peer Gynt struggling against the formless Boyg
— invisible yet everywhere — we were struggling
with the unwatered hinterland of the citizens of
Schenectady. I understood then, I think, what
Weils meant when he said that he wanted *'no
longer to *fix up,' as people say, human affairs,
but to devote his forces to the development of
that needed intellectual life without which all his
shallow attempts at fixing up are futile." For in
the last analysis the practical and the reasonable
are little idols of clay that thwart our efforts.

The third requirement of a valuable contribu-
tion, says the Chicago Commission, is the consti-
tutional sanction. This idol carries its own criti-
cism with it. The worship of the constitution
amounts, of course, to saying that men exist for
the sake of the constitution. The person who
holds fast to that idea is forever incapable of un-

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A PREFACE TO POLITICS

derstanding either men or constitutions. It is a
prime way of making laws ridiculous ; if you want
to cultivate lese-majeste in Germany get the
Kaiser to proclaim his divine origin; if you want
to promote disrespect of the courts, announce
their infallibility.

But in this case, the Commission is not repre-
sentative of the dominant thought of our times.
The vital part of the population has pretty well
emerged from any dumb acquiescence in consti-
tutions. Theodore Roosevelt, who reflects so
much of America, has very definitely cast down
this idol. Now since he stands generally some
twenty years behind the pioneer and about six
months ahead of the majority, we may rest as-
sured that this much-needed iconoclasm is in proc-
ess of achievement.

Closely related to the constitution and just as
decadent to-day are the Sanctity of Private Prop-
erty, Vested Rights, Competition the Life of
Trade, Prosperity (at any cost). Each one of
these ideas was born of an original need, served
its historical function and survived beyond its al-
lotted time. Nowadays you still come across
some of these ancient notions, especially in courts,
where they do no little damage in perverting jus-
tice, but they are ghost-like and disreputable, gib-

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SOME NECESSARY ICONOCLASM

bering and largely helpless. He who is watching
the ascendant ideas of American life can afford
to feel that the early maxims of capitalism are
doomed.

But the habit of mind which would turn an in-
strument of life into an immutable law of its ex-
istence — that habit is always with us. We may
outgrow our adoration of the Constitution or
Private Property only to establish some new
totem pole. In the arts we call this inveterate
tendency classicalism. It is, of course, a habit by
no means confined to the arts. Politics, religion,
science are subject to it, — in politics we call it con-
servative, in religion orthodox, in science we de-
scribe it as academic. Its manifestations are
multiform but they have a common source. An
original creative impulse of the mind expresses
itself in a certain formula; posterity mistakes the
formula for the impulse. A genius will use his
medium in a particular way because it serves his
need; this way becomes a fixed rule which the
classicalist serves. It has been pointed out that
because the first steam trains were run on roads
built for carts and coaches, the railway gauge
almost everywhere in the world became fixed at
four feet eight and one-half inches.

You might say that genius works inductively
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A PREFACE TO POLITICS

and finds a method; the conservative works de-
ductively from the method and defeats whatever
genius he may have. A friend of mine had writ-
ten a very brilliant article on a play which had
puzzled New York. Some time later I was dis-
cussing the article with another friend of a decid-
edly classicalist bent. "What is it?'' he pro-
tested, "it isn't criticism for it's half rhapsody;
it isn't rhapsody because it is analytical. . . .
What is it? That's what I want to know." "But
isn't it fine, and worth having, and aren't you glad
it was written?" I pleaded. "Well, if I knew
what it was. ..." And so the argument
ran for hours. Until he had subsumed the arti-
cle under certain categories he had come to ac-
cept, appreciation was impossible for him. I
have many arguments with my classicalist friend.
This time it was about George Moore's "Ave."
I was trying to express my delight. "It isn't a
novel, or an essay, or a real confession — it's
nothing," said he. His well-ordered mind was
compelled to throw out of doors any work for
which he had no carefully prepared pocket. I
thought of Aristotle, who denied the existence of
a mule because it was neither a horse nor an ass.
Dramatic critics follow Aristotle in more ways
than one. A play is produced which fascinates

186



SOME NECESSARY ICONOCLASM

an audience for weeks. It Is published and read
all over the world. Then you are treated to
endless discussions by the critics trying to prove
that "It is not a play." So-and-so-and-so consti-
tute a play, they affirm, — this thing doesn't meet