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art criticism, and moral criticism are in the last analysis identical activities.

A very important illustration of the Crocean logic of history is suggested by Albert Schweitzer's genial and fascinating "Geschichte der Leben-Jesu-Forschung", or history of the investigation of the life of Jesus. It would be not too much to say that for the part of the world called Christendom the life of Jesus is history's greatest problem. No field of historical inquiry has been overridden by a greater number of theories or by a stranger variety; and none has raised questions more poignantly personal. The world has never seen, says Schweitzer, such a bitter, intense, and selfdenying struggle for truth as we find in this field during the century or more past.

son.

What is the problem? The records of the life of Jesus are full of yawning gaps. How are they to be filled? At the worst, says Schweitzer, by phrases; at the best by historical imagination (historische Phantasie). The sources give us, so to speak, the pheno:nena; but we do not understand them historically-they are not history-until we comprehend them as consistent and intelligible and grasp them as expressions of the life of a specific individual perAnd this can be done, according to Schweitzer, only by an historical experiment; by which he means an experiment in imagination of the same kind as that which I have proposed in the last chapter as Royce's "thoughtexperiment". In other words, if we are to comprehend the facts of the life of Jesus in their true sequence and inner consistency, and if we are to distinguish fact from fiction, it will be through imaginative insight into the mind of Jesus. We must grasp the life of Jesus from the stand

2 See his introductory chapter, entitled "Das Problem", zweite Auflage, Tübingen, 1913.

point of his own self-consciousness, feeling that life as he felt it, seeing the world as he saw it. Now to the orthodox Christian this is almost suggestive of blasphemy; to the student of history I fear it may be equally suggestive of irony. Yet in all soberness it seems to me to state the historian's problem, a problem which is possibly never finally to be solved, yet to be solved more or less as other problems of life are solved. Could we once see Jesus as he saw himself, then all of the critical questions, the vexing questions of chronology, of sources, of genuine documents and spurious, of original accounts and interpolations-for all of these questions we should soon find the answer; and the key to the answer would be the happy insight.

And thus the life of Jesus is an artistic and aesthetic problem-a problem of the same order as the problem of painting a portrait of Jesus. The portrait could never by any scientific method be constructed from the "data", yet the successful portrait would account finally for all of the data.

So much, then, for the beauty of knowledge. I will close the chapter by suggesting a question. It will not be doubted that history is knowledge. Yet history is at once an exercise of intelligence, of taste, and of moral judgment -in a word, of imagination. But it seems that what is thus true of knowledge directed upon a world of persons is true also in some degree when knowledge is dealing with impersonal facts about "things". There too we have imagination. And what is more, it seems that, even in this impersonal region, whenever knowledge becomes eager and passionate, the assertion of an experience rather than of the fulfilment of a criterion, of realities rather than of "phenomena", it tends to personify its things. My belief

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is that Kant's "things in themselves" which scientific method could never know, were metaphorical persons. This suggests the deeply interesting question whether, if knowledge is to be an experience, and not the formal fulfilment of a logical requirement, we human beings can possibly have the experience of knowing anything but persons; or, putting it otherwise, whether a world of impersonal fact, or of inanimate things-an "unthinking substratum", as Berkeley calls it—must not always be a world which is thus far not known. A successful development of this suggestion would be the consummation of "the unity of the spirit".

CHAPTER XII

JUSTIFICATION BY KNOWLEDGE

§ 43. Judgment vs. criticism. § 44. Objectivity and rationality. § 45. The illusion of deliberate wickedness. § 46. "Tout comprendre" and "tout pardonner". § 47. The moral question and the practical.

"Y

OU do not receive an education that you may

learn to judge, but that you may learn to under

stand." These words of the peasant-mother

to her son (quoted above) might stand as the text for the present chapter. The motive of an enlightened morality is not "to award praise or blame" but to understand. Moral intelligence is not judgment but criticism.

Yet to understand is certainly in some fashion to discriminate, and thus to distinguish the real from the merely apparent, the true from the false. If morality is just anything you please-anything you choose to call "life"-the word is without meaning and we understand nothing. Morality cannot be "purely subjective". There must be an objectively real quality in any genuine morality even though we refuse to abide by any objective "criterion". Now in the first chapter my thesis was stated simply, by saying that morality is knowing what you are doing; it is not then a question of what you do. The present chapter is to show how the reality of the knowing constitutes the objective moral quality; how action or expression is justified by knowledge.

843

Morality, I say, is criticism. Let us look, then, at the logic of literary criticism. Suppose that you have a book to review. The authoritative method of criticism is to compare the thesis of the book with what is recognized by the best authorities and to measure its style by the recognized standards of style. But this method, while useful for disposing of the common run of inconsiderable literature, is not criticism. It is no true judgment of the book. For a true judgment it matters not at all whether the message of the book is warranted by the authorities. As for such "authorities", the history of any subject is a succession of conflicting authorities. The important question is, Is the author familiar with the authorities? This we mean when we ask, Does he know his subject? this. He may be one of those rare cases of the untaught genius who knows his subject without knowing any of the authorities; who by native insight has anticipated the authorities. And so the question is resolved into this: is he prepared to meet the authorities? Does the development of his position indicate that he is alive to the questions to which such a position is open and that he is is prepared to meet them? Or is he writing blindly and naïvely, repeating possibly what many have said before him, unconscious of pitfalls that await him? If he does know, he is writing intelligently; and his book, whatever its thesis, is worthy of respect. By virtue of his knowing his treatment of his subject is objective.

Or perhaps not even

And as for his style-I recall the words of an architect who once said to me, "You may break all the rules of architecture if you have mastered them." Likewise may 'you break all the rules of manners if you have mastered

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