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a moral base and ideal ends. A characteristic statement is "the reality
of ideal ends as ideals is vouched for by their undeniable power in action.
An ideal is not an illusion because imagination is the organ through
which it is apprehended. For
all
possibilities reach us through the im–
agination. In a definite sense the only meaning that can be assigned the
term 'Imagination' is that things unrealized in fact come home to us
and have power to stir us." As for Dewey on education, he has only to
be read. Most of what was done in his name he disavowed explicitly.
He writes of "continuity of 'attention and endurance. This attitude is
what is practically meant by will. Discipline or development of power
of continuous attention is its fruit."
Mr. Kirk hates the idea of "a
natural
desire to do, to give out, to
serve," and repeats throughout his book that man is
naturally
evil and
must be restrained by the state. This is as bad as the argument that
man is naturally good and is corrupted by social
i~stitutions.
We all
know the old question: who made the bad institution if man is good?
Why not another question: who made and accepted the good restraints
of the state if man is evil? When Dewey writes of natural traits which
are called good, he also writes of natural traits which are called evil.
He knows that both terms are moral judgments of human behavior, all
of which is "natural," and he asks the proper question: which institu–
tional channels best serve the cause of conduct we approve as good?
Mr. Kirk is impressed with Saintsbury's remark about conservatives,
"We
know brains when we see them, even if they belong to the enemy." It
would be better if he accepted it humbly as guidance, not complacently
as description of fact.
It is natural enough that liberals, with their faith in reason, should
today accept science and its method as the highest development of mind.
It
is just as natural that conservatives, with their faith in tradition and
precedent, should emphasize history and law. Unfortunately, the human–
ities suffer at the hands of some liberals; and science and analytic
thought suffer at the hands of some conservatives, more than they ever
did in the humanism of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. At its very
best, which it rarely is nowadays, this quarrel is the old one between
custom and nature, which cannot reasonably be continued. A social
and political theory adequate to our experience and our science must
have a place for both. Mr. Kirk takes his stand in the dispute by object–
ing to Darwin and Faraday as destroyers of conservatism. Does he want
science muzzled, so that it can bark only on conservative orders? Is truth
to be decided by politics? One begins to smell the brimstone of the
totalitarian demon.
