First Personal
by RALPH BARTON PERRY
I BEGIN with “I,” and I fear I shall end with that same pronoun. I have attended many funerals; this is the first at which I have played the leading role. But I gather from the things that have been said tonight that, unlike Mark Antony, you came to praise, and not to bury, me. This gift which you have brought is a symbol of your kindly feeding. It symbolizes your kindness, and does not measure it. And it expresses a kindness which is not limited to yourselves, but represents the kindness of wider circles — including my many absent friends and the many friends who have gone before. Through you I feel the great current of this accumulated kindness of which I am tonight the object, and I might add, the victim the victim because of my sense of helplessness to respond. No response from me can be proportional to so much kindness.
Perhaps it is of the very essence of gratitude that it should feel itself unequal to the task — doubly inadequate because the feeling is unequal to the benefit received, and because the words which it employs are unequal to the feeling. These poor words of mine are a symbol and not a measure of my gratitude; and as your kindness comes not only from yourselves but also from the past and the distant, so 1 should like to thank not only you but through you all those who have showered blessings upon me — from my parents to my latest and youngest benefactor. In short, my gratitude, like your kindness, is cosmic.
I take this occasion to be an ordeal, in which I am called upon to disregard all inhibitions of modesty, reticence, and good taste. I assume that you are in an indulgent mood, and that you will judge me indulgently tonight, believing me when I say that it would have been easier for me had I been allowed quietly to disappear, as when a man goes on sabbatical leave and discovers on his return that his absence has been unnoticed. But since you are bound to have your Roman holiday, I will accept the butchery as bravely as possible. I suppose that as every man at least once in his life courts a girl, writes a poem, and sings a song — so he does an autobiography. If I must do it sooner or later, this is as good an occasion as any, and I shall have it over with — or at least begun.
My confessions, I fear, will have a flavor of Pollyanna. I have been very lucky. I owe what happiness and success I have had largely to what is called a “happy combination of fortuitous circumstances" — to circumstances beyond my control and for which I take no credit. I was born with good health and of good parents. Both of my parents were teachers, and my education began virtually in the cradle. It was a non-progressive education, based on the theory that being made to do what others think is good for you leads in the end to an interest of your own rn what is good. Thus, for example, my father forbade my reading the Henty books, which were my boyhood’s equivalent of the comics, and substituted Shakespeare and Pope’s Essay on Man. I came to like Shakespeare, and even Pope, and was saved a lot of time. Being forbidden to go to the theater, except to Shakespeare and Gilbert and Sullivan, also saved a lot of time.
I should explain that my father was a great, teacher of the old school, who was able to catch his pupils without baiting the hook—or at any rate without live bait. He could fire his pupils, his son included, by the utterance of precepts which in other mouths were cold; and convert correctness of English style, or the mastery of Greek, irregular verbs, into objects of passionate devotion and emulation.
In any case, I got an early start, entered college at fifteen, graduated at nineteen, took a master’s degree at twenty, a doctor’s degree at twenty-two, began my teaching at Williams in the same year, became instructor at Harvard at twenty-six with three years of teaching experience already behind me, became assistant professor at twenty-nine, Chairman of the Department at thirty-one, full professor at thirtyseven, and am now retiring just fifty years after graduation from college, and after forty-seven years of teaching, of which forty-four were at Harvard. I might add that by the grace of divers deans, presidents, and governing bodies, an increase of faculty salaries was usually so timed as to coincide with my promotions of rank.
It has also been my good fortune that in my professional career I should have been identified with what I felt to be the greatest department in the greatest of universities. When I graduated from college I was headed for the Princeton Theological Seminary, then the stronghold of Presbyterian fundamentalism. My wise father was here again the instrument of Providence, perhaps the most important of the circumstances beyond my control. He had named me after Ralph Waldo Emerson, and in my childhood had expressed the hope that I might some day become “a professor at Harvard University.”
And so, at my graduation from college — whereas most of my friends and teachers then regarded New England as a bleak Arctic region of heresy and effeminate snobbery — my father said, “Why not try a year at Harvard?” It happened that he had read some of James and Royce, and so he suggested that I make this short detour on my way to the Presbyterian pulpit. Once I was here, Harvard did the rest, not suddenly or violently, but by the gradual maturing of mv mind and the awakening of critical capacities which the Princelonian blend of Kant and Scottish realism, carefully attuned to Presbyterian theology, had left completely dormant.
I am sure that in the kindness of your hearts it occurs to you to say that I may myself have had certain capacities that enabled me to assist Providence in the making of my career. I acknowledge one such capacity: namely, a capacity for work. My father used to quote (I think from Matthew Arnold, but it has been said many times) that “genius is an infinite capacity for work.” If this be true, then, having a considerable but finite capacity for work, I have possessed something proportionally short of genius.
When I speak of a capacity for work I mean a capacity for sustained effort, whatever be the tank, a generalized capacity that does not require special talents or interests. I have been told that Royce said of me, “Perry is a retriever. Throw a stick anywhere and he will fetch it.
And, to conclude this theme, when in the second half of my first year of graduate study (February 11, 1897) I went to James to ask if he would send me students to tutor in elementary psychology, he said, “I am sorry you have to work so hard"; and then added, “but that is the way to the stars.” He was not referring to himself or others of the stellar galaxy of which he was a member, but when I returned to Harvard as a teacher in 1902, after three years in the less strenuous atmosphere of Williams and Smith, the thing that impressed me most about my famous elder colleagues — James, Royce, Palmer, Miinstcrberg, and Santayana — was their prodigious labor and the corresponding volume of their productivity. I fell in behind and did my best, somewhat breathlessly, to keep the pace.
I have referred to my change of career. There has never been any change of vocation. I was and remain at heart a preacher. I have become, I hope, less mindful of other people’s shortcomings and more mindful of my own. I know that in my thinking I have become less dogmatic and pugnacious, more disposed to look to ihe minds of others for their kernel of truth than for their shell of error. But I have always had the naïve, simple-minded, perhaps utterly foolish, idea of doing good. I believe that I have always hoped that if the universe were weighed in the moral scales before and after my life it might be found that I had added a milligram or two. I hope that I have acquired a lighter touch, and I may sometimes have successfully concealed my preaching under the guise of the history of thought, or the sober analysis of some technical problem; but I doubt if I have fooled anybody — certainly not any of you who know me well. And I feel reasonably sure that mv dying breath will be hortatory.
In any case, there is a man in every boy; and it. is equally perhaps more certainly — true that there is a boy in every man. Whether my boyhood would have recognized my manhood I am not so sure, but I can testify that my manhood recognizes my boyhood. I can see now that when I became a college and university teacher instead of a Presbyterian minister I merely substituted the platform for the pulpit, the lecture or public address for the sermon, and the class or audience for the congregation.
I was always interested in the use of the spoken or written word for that vague purpose of doing good to which I have just alluded. In school and college I took part in plays, trained myself in public speaking, participated in debates and oratorical contests. When in my youth I thought, of law, I thought of it as an occupation which might lead to politics. When I thought of becoming a historian I thought of it as an opportunity of writing books. And ihe deep contentment which I have felt in my chosen professional job has been due, I feel sure, to the fact, that it gave me an almost limitless opportunity of oral and written verbalizing.
And what a job it is! Granted a university such as Harvard (and I admit that this is an important condition), one has security without subjection; routine duties that bind but do not narrow or enslave; a fixed schedule that leaves large periods of leisure; and above all the sense of belonging to a great institution which does not prohibit personal initiative and choice, but lends its prestige to whatever influence its members are able to exert. An institution such as Harvard not only extends, permits, and allows freedom to its teachers, but promotes and implements it, and takes pride in those who exercise it. I can think of no form of social organization in which a man can make a living, and obtain reinforcement from mut ual aid, with so small a cost to his private inclinations. He does not even have to remain within its confines. If he feels cloistered it is his own fault. For the gates are wide open, and provided he keeps his occasional engagements, no one asks where or how far he may have gone abroad in the intervals. In short, once having enjoyed the privileges of this occupation, I have never been able to understand how anyone having it within his reach would be willing to do anything else.
As yet I have said nothing of the more personal side of my vocation. It is difficult to exaggerate the value of the human contacts which it creates. If I were asked to choose some section of mankind with whom I was forced by circumstance to associate most intimately, I would choose the members of the academic community — students, colleagues of all ages, and those select non-academic persons who find it agreeable to live in a college or university town, and mingle with their academic brothers. I am probably prejudiced, but it is my belief that there is no other society whose members have so high an average of character, intelligence, disinterestedness, wit, and personal distinction, or who have been so happy in their choice of wives.
This community of scholars, as we call ourselves (taking this to signify our standards and aspirations, rather than our attainments), is a world-wide community. It embraces all of the thousand colleges and universities of the land, with all their local differences, representing the rich variety of the national life. It embraces the colleges and universities of all the world. Travel at home and abroad for study or refreshment, or as visiting lecturer or teacher, forms a normal part of the academic career; and wherever one goes, whether to California or to South America, whether to Europe or to Asia, there one finds one’s brothers in the spirit, speaking some idiom of the same language. No errant professor need ever find himself friendless or (which for a professor is scarcely less important) speechless.
In all these personal and social values the Harvard of my time has been pre-eminent. I have served at Harvard under three presidents: from 1902 to 1909 under Charles William Eliot, from 1909 to 1933 under Abbott Lawrence Lowell, and since 1933 under James Bryant Conant — all great presidents, under whom Harvard has grown and prospered, and kept its high prestige even in the face of ever sharpening competition. I have known them all personally as well as officially. I will not here specify my different feelings towards these men, or attempt to characterize them individually. Suffice it to say that I have felt pride in them all. They have all been stubborn men, each with his own variety of stubbornness. Each has known how to plant his feet and not merely move with the crowd; each has succeeded in leading the contentious, ruling the ungovernable, and organizing the undisciplinable, under a constitution as mysterious and indefinable as the famous unwritten constitution of Great Britain.
I came, as I said, to a Department composed of William James, Josiah Royce, George Herbert Palmer, Hugo Münsterberg, and George Santayana. When the last of these celebrated men departed with the retirement of Palmer in 1913, they were followed by a no less celebrated man — Alfred North Whitehead — who because of his essential greatness of mind and character, and because of his rare capacity to feel, and show, and evoke affection instantly became not only our pride but the elder brother of the family.
This glorious epoch created difficulties for those of us who came after. It was natural that the world should make invidious comparisons and refer quite frankly in our hearing to the greater past. It was inevitable that we should ourselves feel not only that we had something to live up to, but that we could not possibly, by any straining of our capacities, succeed in living up to it. But I think we all agree that it was better so — better to have a high standard by which to measure our limitations than to be too easily satisfied.
Here again I have been peculiarly fortunate, for to me these great men were for fifteen years not a legend, a memory, or a shelf of books, but a living and vitalizing presence. I asked nothing better than to enjoy and profit by them and to model myself upon their virtues.
They were extraordinary men not only in their individual genius but in their collective variety, their cross-fertilization and inter-stimulation, and the atmospheric forces which their mutual opposition discharged, to the great delight and profit of their students and younger colleagues. They were alike in the wide range of their interests — embracing the techniques of experimental psychology and of logic, the history of the past, the systematic and speculative approach to basic problems of being and knowledge, the appreciation of art and literature, the study and application of morals, politics, and religion.
These interests were not divided among them, but combined in each. Each was a complete philosopher in himself, having something to say on every question, and saying it forcibly and profusely, each in his own peculiar terms, springing from his own peculiar insight. Because of this central core of personal conviction, they were all not only instructive, but eloquent. But how magnificently different! James empirical, voluntaristic, mercurial, genial, witty; Royce massive, overpowering, learned, humorous — to James as the diffused glow of heat lightning to the flashes of chain lightning, or as the paragraph to the sentence. James was a man of the world, by accident a teacher, whose lectures were always conversations; Royce a teacher, by accident occasionally astray in the world, whose conversations were always lectures. (It was said, I think by Dickinson Miller, that for Royce, lecturing was the easiest form of breathing!)
Münsterberg, who could lecture superbly in broken English, and who once illustrated a point by referring to “ze leetle cannery bird,” was so masterfully schematic and comprehensive that the International Congress of Arts and Sciences held at the St. Louis Exposition in 1994 was organized after his a priori pattern, leaders of culture from the ends of the earth being cast in the roles which he assigned them. Palmer was pat, tidy, powerful through simple lucidity, pious without dogma, reading poetry by his fireside to a small circle of the initiated, but called to all parts of the country to lecture and advise.
It was from Münsterberg and Palmer, who reigned as chairmen during my early days, that I learned what I have learned of the arts of academic diplomacy and politics. Münsterberg’s art was flagrant. He put others on their guard by introducing each latest move with the words “to be perfectly frank.” Palmer’s art reached the higher level of artlessness, and was always so clothed in benevolence that its victims could not complain without the appearance of ingratitude. From Palmer and Münsterberg I learned how to be a department chairman; from Royce I learned that anybody, however reluctant, can be a chairman if he accepts it as a duty; from James and Santayana I learned that there are more important things to do.
Santayana was somewhat detached, like his Epicurean gods. But he was faithful to all his academic tasks, and was a great lecturer in courses of the middle group — the best of all lecturers I have known, because of his ability to give to his extemporaneous talk the perfection of literary style. Through his lectures, and through a small circle of admiring students with whom he conversed, he played a greater part in the life of Harvard than, in his published reminiscences, he has given himself credit for. With James and Palmer, strikingly different as they were, he was responsible for what I like to think is now a part of our imperishable tradition: the idea, namely, that whatever is worth saying is worth saying well, and that philosophy is one of those subjects in which felicity of expression is inseparable from thought.
This congeries of extraordinary and unique individuals composed not a menagerie or a Babel of discordant voices, but, strange to relate, a department. They not only disagreed with one another on almost every debatable subject: they heartily disapproved of one another. And yet they were bound together— by their sense of humor, their enjoyment of one another’s idiosyncrasies, their loyalty to the Department and the University, their tolerance, and their mutual affection.
To these impressions I should like to add my memory of James Haughton Woods, and my testimony of gratitude and admiration. He was infinitely kind, exuberant, steadfast. He was a practical mystic who could gaze at the stars without taking his eye off the ball. As a teacher he possessed a gift in which he excelled all his colleagues: the gift, namely, of sympathetic understanding. When he lectured or talked about Oriental or Greek philosophy he spoke as one who identified himself with it, conveying the impression of authenticity of feeling as well as of thought.
The era of Whitehead and Woods was also the era of David Prall, versatile and devoted teacher, lover of the arts, knightly and self-martyred liberal; and of Ernest Hocking, salty idealist, empirical dogmatist, defender of the faith —sprung from the old philosophical nobility but indulgent toward he pragmatist and realist arrivistes of his day.
The associations within a university such as Harvard are happily not confined to a department. This is one of the compensations for the much lamented burden of administrative work, such as department meetings, the chairmanship of a department, or membership of a faculty committee. I can say that I regret none of these. The Committee of Eight, the Committee on Educational Policy, the Syndics of the University Press, the Radio Board, and American Defense-Harvard Group cost time and labor, but through them I made new and lasting friends, and enjoyed the exciting experience of reaching joint decisions on matters of policy through the give and take of discussion.
Because I lived in Cambridge for many years my colleagues were also neighbors and my neighbors included colleagues from all departments of the University. The number of my friends, even of my most intimate friends, has embraced members of the Faculties of Law, Medicine, and Business Administration, as well as members of all the departments of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. This has brought to me, as it brings to any Harvard teacher, not only a rich diversity of friendships but a direct and firsthand access to every form of scholarly achievement in its best personal embodiments.
I have left to the end what I feel most strongly of all, my gratitude, namely, to those younger than myself. A university affords, perhaps, the best of all exemplifications of that beneficent contrivance of nature by which the generations of men overlap and form a continuous stream. It is a good thing to live with one’s elders. It is an even better thing to live with one’s juniors, and to feel that through them you participate in the future. I am thinking of my thousands of students, and of my students’ students. I am thinking of my children and their friends, and of my friends’ children. I am thinking of my younger colleagues, most of whom have been my students, and all of whom are my friends.
And when I think of the younger friends and colleagues whom I leave behind — of Henry Sheffer, Clarence Lewis, Raphael Demos, John Wild, Donald Williams, Van Quine, Henry Aiken, Werner Jaeger, Harry Wolfson, Ivor Richards, Overton Taylor — I think of them (and I know you will all believe me) with no trace whatsoever of speaking from the heights, but with a sense that theirs is the greater role. It is a good thing to have both a past and a future. I hope that I, too, have a future — even now. Without that hope I should not know how to live. But if I were forced to choose between a past and a future, I would take the future.
It is a good thing for a university or department to have a past which can be remembered with satisfaction and pride; but only when that past is a source of strength for the future. And so I salute the future of Harvard and of its Department of Philosophy — with undoubting confidence, and with all my heart.