Davidson and Richard Middleton, both suicides, are striking examples.  Poor Middleton turned from naturalism to religion at the last.  When he had resolved on death, he wrote a message telling what he was about to do, parting from his friend with brave assumption of serenity.  But he did not send the postcard, and in the last hour of that hired bedroom in Brussels, with the bottle of chloroform before him, he traced across the card’s surface “a broken and a contrite spirit thou wilt not despise.”  So there was humility at the last.  One remembers rather grimly what the clown says in Twelfth Night,

  “Pleasure will be paid some time or other.”

This same revolt against the decencies and conventions of our humanist civilization occupies a great part of present literature.  How far removed from the clean and virile stoicism of George Meredith or the honest pessimism of Thomas Hardy is Arnold Bennett’s The Pretty Lady or Galsworthy’s The Dark Flower.  Finally, in this country we need only mention, if we may descend so far, such naturalists in literature as Jack London, Robert Chambers and Gouverneur Morris.  One’s only excuse for referring to them is that they are vastly popular with the people whom you and I try to interest in sermons, to whom we talk on religion!

Of course, this naturalism in letters has its accompanying and interdependent philosophic theory, its intellectual interpretation and defense.  As Kant is the noblest of the moralists, so I suppose William James and, still later, Henri Bergson and Croce are the chief protagonists of unrestrained feeling and naturalistic values in the world of thought.  To the neo-realists “the thing given” is alone reality.  James’ pragmatism frankly relinquishes any absolute standard in favor of relativity.  In the Varieties of Religious Experience, which Professor Babbitt tells us someone in Cambridge suggested should have had for a subtitle “Wild Religions I Have Known,” he is plainly more interested in the intensity than in the normality, in the excesses than in the essence of the religious life.  Indeed, Professor Babbitt quotes him as saying in a letter to Charles Eliot Norton, “mere sanity is the most Philistine and at the bottom most unessential of a man’s attributes."[15] In the same way Bergson, consistently anti-Socratic and discrediting analytical intellect, insists that whatever unity may be had must come through instinct, not analysis.  He refuses to recognize Plato’s One in the Many, sees the whole universe as “a perpetual gushing forth of novelties,” a universal and meaningless flux.  Surrender to this eternal flux, he appears to say, and then we shall gain reality.  So he relies on impulse, instinct, his elan vital, which means, I take it, on man’s subrational emotions.  We call it Intuitionism, but such philosophy in plain and bitter English is the intellectual defense and solemn glorification of impulse.  “Time,” says Bergson, “is a continuous stream, a present that endures."[16] Time apparently is all.  “Life can have no purpose in the human sense of the word."[17] Essentially, then, James, Bergson and Croce appeal from intellect to feeling.  They return to primitivism.