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Updated: June 17, 2025
Indeed the conception of a natural order, like the Greek cosmos, which shall include all existences gods no less than men, if gods actually exist is one not yet current, although it is implied in every scientific explanation and is favoured by two powerful contemporary movements which, coming from different quarters, are leading men's minds back to the same ancient and obvious naturalism.
This is worthy of honour, but it implies a curious self-deception. For if naturalism be in the right, thought is not free, and if thought be not free there can be no such thing as truth, for there can be no establishing of what truth is.
There is a freshness and a depth of feeling in the best Madonnas of the late Spanish school, which puts to shame the mannerism of the Italians, and the naturalism of the Flemish painters of the same period: and this because the Spaniards were intense and enthusiastic believers, not mere thinkers, in art as in religion.
One disciple of naturalism recently denied his desire to believe in God because he wanted a risky universe. But the universe without God is not risky; it is a foregone conclusion; the dice are all loaded.
The convention will be more natural or more abstract according to the nature of the thing to be conveyed and the medium employed to express it. But naturalism is just as much a convention as any of the other isms that art has lately been so assailed with. For a really unconventional art there is Madame Tussaud's Waxworks.
Then Durtal learned, also by experience, that one cannot associate with thieves without becoming either a thief or a dupe, and finally he broke off relations with his confrères. He not only had no sympathy but no common topic of conversation with them. Formerly when he accepted naturalism airtight and unsatisfactory as it was he had been able to argue esthetics with them, but now!
Relatively it is easiest for ethical naturalism to establish a principle of virtue, inasmuch as we have to look upon virtue as the principle of individual perfection, and inasmuch as even naturalism, by means of the indestructible impulse of man to attain moral ideas, can postulate an ideal of human action. But on closer examination even the naturalistic idea of virtue vanishes under our hands.
We need not here concern ourselves with the difficult question, whether the mind can of itself act upon the body, and through it upon the external world. But in the logical consistence of naturalism there was implied not only a negative answer to this last question, but also a denial of the causality of the psychical, even within itself and its own domain.
James Ward, in his Naturalism and Agnosticism, makes this a ground of complaint against physics: the business of those who wish to ascertain the ultimate truth about the world, he apparently thinks, should be the discovery of causes, yet physics never even seeks them.
The diseases of superculture, impotent estheticism, the restless spirit of commercialism, and social conflicts are of the same kind in Berlin and Vienna as in Paris, London, and New York. Naturalism, which seized upon these themes, was international, as was socialism, which hailed this movement as its own.
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