As the new ideas find adequate expression in social life, they will be
absorbed into a moral background, and will the ideas and beliefs
themselves be deepened and be unconsciously transmitted and sustained.
They will color the imagination and temper the desires and affections.
They will not form a set of ideas to be expounded, reasoned out and
argumentatively supported, but will be a spontaneous way of envisaging
life. Then they will take on religious value. The religious spirit will
be revivified because it will be in harmony with men's unquestioned
scientific beliefs and their ordinary day-by-day social activities. It
will not be obliged to lead a timid, half-concealed and half-apologetic
life because tied to scientific ideas and social creeds that are
continuously eaten into and broken down. But especially will the ideas
and beliefs themselves be deepened and intensified because spontaneously
fed by emotion and translated into imaginative vision and fine art,
while they are now maintained by more or less conscious effort, by
deliberate reflection, by taking thought. They are technical and
abstract just because they are not as yet carried as matter of course by
imagination and feelings.
We began by pointing out that European philosophy arose when
intellectual methods and scientific results moved away from social
traditions which had consolidated and embodied the fruits of spontaneous
desire and fancy. It was pointed out that philosophy had ever since had
the problem of adjusting the dry, thin and meagre scientific standpoint
with the obstinately persisting body of warm and abounding imaginative
beliefs. Conceptions of possibility, progress, free movement and
infinitely diversified opportunity have been suggested by modern
science. But until they have displaced from _imagination_ the heritage
of the immutable and the once-for-all ordered and systematized, the
ideas of mechanism and matter will lie like a dead weight upon the
emotions, paralyzing religion and distorting art. When the liberation of
capacity no longer seems a menace to organization and established
institutions, something that cannot be avoided practically and yet
something that is a threat to conservation of the most precious values
of the past, when the liberating of human capacity operates as a
socially creative force, art will not be a luxury, a stranger to the
daily occupations of making a living. Making a living economically
speaking, will be at one with making a life that is worth living. And
when the emotional force, the mystic force one might say, of
communication, of the miracle of shared life and shared experience is
spontaneously felt, the hardness and crudeness of contemporary life will
be bathed in the light that never was on land or sea.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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