In his letter dated 13th November 1960, Rupert Hart-Davis challenges George Lyttelton: “here is a one-question exam-paper. Who wrote this and when?”
“If I am right it will be a slow business for our people to reach rational views, assuming that we are allowed to work peacefully to that end. But as I grow older I grow calm. If I feel what are perhaps an old man’s apprehensions, that competition from new races will cut deeper than working men’s disputes and will test whether we can hang together and can fight; if I fear that we are running through the world’s resources at a pace we cannot keep; I do not lose my hopes. I do not pin my dreams for the future to my country or even to my race. I think it probable that civilisation somehow will last as long as I care to look ahead – perhaps with smaller numbers, but perhaps also bred to greatness and splendour by science. I think it not improbable that man, like the grub that prepares a chamber for the winged thing it never has seen but is to be – that man may have cosmic destinies that he does not understand. And so beyond the vision of battling races and an impoverished earth I catch a dreaming glimpse of peace.
The other day my dream was pictured to my mind. I was walking homeward on Pennsylvania Avenue near the Treasury, and as I looked beyond Sherman’s Statue to the west the sky was aflame with scarlet and crimson from the setting sun. But, like the note of downfall in Wagner’s opera, below the skyline there came from little globes the pallid discord of the electric lights. And I thought to myself the Götterdämmerung will end, and from those globes clustered like evil eggs will come the new masters of that sky. It is like the time in which we live. But then I remembered the faith that I partly have expressed, faith in a universe not measured by our fears, a universe that has thought and more than thought inside of it, and as I gazed, after the sunset and above the electric lights, there shone the stars.”
George Lyttelton correctly guessed that it was Oliver Wendell Holmes (speaking at a Harvard Law School dinner in New York in February 1913). He writes, “it might well have been written by Judge Holmes, a very great man. In his letters there is often that deep bourdon note – he often looks at things sub specie aeternitatis, but not, of course, usually for as long a spell as this”. Indeed a very great man although I had never heard of him. I’m finding the GL/R H-D correspondence rewarding and this extract seems apt in the light of yesterday’s events in London. Judge Holmes saw things in perspective.
It is fascinating and moving that there is a whole mass of American thinking which had “transcendence” as its theme or sub-text. The British do it a bit with Carlyle and the French with (my own hero) Teilhard de Cardin. The Germans may be thought to have started it all. But the Americans, big-boned and no-nonsense as they seem, have had William James (let alone Henry) and a whole coterie of thinkers such as Peirce and Dewey who are rightly corralled together as Pragmatic Transcendentals (as odd a concatenation of ideas as one’s likely to come across).