From the Translator’s Preface to Invertebrate Spain:

The first three essays herein presented were taken from the volume whose Spanish title, España Invertebrada, provided the subject as well as the title for this book. The others were chosen from other volumes of Señor Ortega’s work because they shed added light on problems which he indicated in that famous analysis, or because they were pertinent to aspects of the present struggle.

The only translation available, then, is not a full translation of España Invertebrada.

From Invertebrate Spain by José Ortega y Gasset:

Strict Catholic dogma limits itself to demanding that the faithful admit the canonical definition of God, and leaves each one’s fancy free to imagine Him and to feel Him in its own peculiar way. Taine speaks of a child who was told that God was in the sky. “In the sky, like the birds?” she exclaimed. “Then he must have a beak.” That child could be a Catholic; there is nothing in the catechism’s definition which prevents God from having a beak.

From Invertebrate Spain by José Ortega y Gasset:

It is well known that a region’s humidity is determined not by the absolute quantity of water it receives, but by the proportion between what it receives and what it gives back by way of humidity. In Castile there is four times as much evaporation as there is rain. If we translate this figure into terms of the imagination, we get the grotesque picture of a country where more water goes from the earth to the clouds than comes from the clouds to the earth. In Castile it must rain upwards.

Next at IWP Books:

• Selected Works of Artemus Ward, Edited by Albert Jay Nock
• Invertebrate Spain, by José Ortega y Gasset (tr. Mildred Adams)

Artemus Ward on Woman’s Rights:

“My female frends,” sed I, “be4 you leeve, I’ve a few remarks to remark; wa them well. The female woman is one of the greatest institooshuns of which this land can boste. It’s onpossible to get along without her. Had there bin no female wimin in the world, I should scacely be here with my unparalleld show on this very occashun. She is good in sickness – good in wellness – good all the time. O, woman! woman!” I cried, my feelins worked up to a hi poetick pitch, “you air a angle when you behave yourself; but when you take off your proper appairel & (mettyforically speaken) get into pantyloons – when you desert your firesides, & with your heds full of wimin’s rites noshuns go round like roarin lyons, seekin whom you may devour someboddy – in short, when you undertake to play the man, you play the devil and air an emfatic noosance. My female friends,” I continnered, as they were indignantly departin, “wa well what A. Ward has sed!”

Artemus Ward on Jeff. Davis:

Jeff. Davis is not poplar here. She is regarded as a Southern sympathiser. & yit I’m told he was kind to his Parents. She ran away from ’em many years ago, and has never bin back. This was showin ’em a good deal of consideration when we reflect what his conduck has been. Her captur in female apparel confooses me in regard in his sex, & you see I speak of him as a her as frekent as otherwise, & I guess he feels so hisself.

Two by Ambrose Bierce:

One can not be trusted to feel until one has learned to think.

Must one be judged by his average, or may he be judged, on occasion, by his highest? He is strongest who can lift the greatest weight, not he who habitually lifts lesser ones.

All the books by Albert Jay Nock now available at IWP Books:

• The Myth of a Guilty Nation, 1922
• The Freeman Book, 1924
• Jefferson, 1926
• On Doing the Right Thing, 1928.
• Francis Rabelais: The Man and His Work, 1929
• The Book of Journeyman, 1930
• The Theory of Education in the United States, 1932
• A Journey Into Rabelais’s France, 1934
• A Journal of These Days, 1934
• Our Enemy, The State, 1935
• Free Speech and Plain Language, 1937
• Henry George: An Essay, 1939
• Memoirs of a Superfluous Man, 1943
• A Journal of Forgotten Days, 1948
• Letters from Albert Jay Nock, 1949
• Things as They Are, 2023
• State of the Union: The American Mercury Essays, 2023

The Freeman, 1920–1924

“Fountains of Joy” by Albert Jay Nock (The Freeman, March 21, 1923)

Current discussions of the philosophy of art remind us that, according to Goethe, a little common sense will sometimes do duty for a great deal of philosophy, but no amount of philosophy will make up for a failure in common sense. It is usually the case that as analysis becomes closer and philosophizing becomes more profound, there is a tendency to obscure certain broad general fundamentals which to the eye of common sense are always apparent; and thus very often the complete truth of the matter is imperfectly apprehended. A great deal of what we read about the arts seems in some such fashion as this to get clear away from the notion that the final purpose of the arts is to give joy; yet common sense, proceeding in its simple, unmethodical manner, would say at once that this is their final purpose, and that one who did not keep it in mind as such, could hardly hope to arrive at the truth about any of the arts. Matthew Arnold once said most admirably that no one could get at the actual truth about the Bible, who did not enjoy the Bible; and that one who had all sorts of fantastic notions about the origin and composition of the Bible, but who knew how to enjoy the Bible deeply, was nearer the truth about the Bible than one who could pick it all to pieces, but could not enjoy it. Common sense, we believe, would hold this to be true of any work of art.

When Hesiod defined the function of poetry as that of giving “a release from sorrows and a truce from cares,” he intimated the final purpose of all great art as that of elevating and sustaining the human spirit through the communication of joy, of felicity; that is to say, of the most simple, powerful and highly refined emotion that the human spirit is capable of experiencing. This, no doubt, does not exhaust its beneficence; no doubt it works for good in other ways as well; but this is its great and final purpose. It is not to give entertainment or diversion or pleasure, not even to give happiness, but to give joy; and through this distinction, common sense comes immediately upon a test of good and valid art, not infallible, perhaps, but nevertheless quite competent. It is, in fact, the test that the common sense of mankind always does apply, consciously or unconsciously, to determine the quality of good art. Great critics, too, from Aristotle down, have placed large dependence on it. One wonders, therefore, whether more might not advantageously be made of it in the critical writing of the present time.

A work of art – a poem or novel, a picture, a piece of music – may affect the average cultivated spirit with interest, with curiosity, with pleasure; it may yield diversion, entertainment or even solace, not in the sense of edification or tending to build up a permanent resource against sorrows and cares, but in the sense that its pleasurable occupation of the mind excludes sorrow and care for the time being, somewhat as physical exercise or a game of chess or billiards may do. But all this is not a mark of good art. Good art affects one with an emotion of a different quality; and this quality may be rather easily identified, provided one does not make a great point of proceeding with the stringency of a philosopher in trying to define it. Joubert said that it is not hard to know God, if one will only not trouble oneself about defining him; and this is true as well of the profound and obscure affections of the human spirit – they are much better made known in the experience of the devout than in the analysis of the philosopher. A critic, indeed, might content himself at the outset by laying down some examples of classic art, and saying that the emotion he wishes to identify, the emotion of joy, is simply what is produced upon the average cultivated spirit by those; and that the difference in quality between this emotion and the emotion produced by another work of art, is a fair index or registration of the difference in quality of art between the two objects or examples. We have space but for one illustration, so for convenience we shall take it from the realm of poetry. Let us take two examples, both dealing with the valid and excellent poetic theme of the shortness of human life and the transitory character of its interests. First, this one:

How nothing must we seem unto this ancient thing!

How nothing unto the earth – and we so small!

O, wake, wake! do you not feel my hands cling?

One day it will be raining as it rains to-night; the same wind blow,

Raining and blowing on this house wherein we lie, but you and I,

We shall not hear, we shall not ever know.

Is the emotion wherewith this verse affects the average cultivated spirit, of the same order, the same quality, as the emotion produced by this –

The cloud-cap’d towers, the gorgeous palaces,

The solemn temples, the great globe itself,

Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve

And, like an insubstantial pageant faded,

Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff

As dreams are made on, and our little life

Is rounded with a sleep.

– or is the difference merely one of degree? Well, then this difference may be used at the outset by criticism, as the common sense of mankind does continually use it, as an index of the poetic quality of the two examples; and criticism can go safely on in assuming that to whatever degree a work of art succeeds in arousing just that emotion, so far can it justify its candidacy for a place as valid art.

We do not put forward this test as one to be used mechanically, nor have we any exaggerated notion of its importance. There are some very welcome signs that criticism, after long running derelict in fantastic extravagance, is beginning to come to its sober senses. Well, then, here, in this test that we speak of, is an implement of criticism that great critics have found extremely useful, but which has of late fallen into disuse – why not bring it out and use it again, not fanatically, but with judgment and discretion? It is primarily an implement for the critic to use upon himself in shaping the course of his criticism; the layman, as we said, has had the more or less conscious use of it all the time. When confronted with the claims of this or that work of art, the critic will be greatly helped to get his bearings if for the moment he puts all other considerations aside, and asks himself with what order or quality of emotion, precisely, does this work of art affect him. Is it with a pleasurable emotion due to interest, curiosity, entertainment, diversion, or is it the emotion of felicity, of joy? No matter about the degree, but is it or is it not, in any measure, small or great, the kind of thing that he gets out of “The cloud-cap’d towers, the gorgeous palaces”? We do not say that this test will ensure his judgment; all we say is that it will greatly assist it.

“Toadstools” by Albert Jay Nock (The Freeman, May 5, 1923)

In one of his earlier books Mark Twain tells of seeing a toadstool which in its growth had dislodged and pushed up into the air a mass of tangled roots and leaves, amounting to twice its own bulk. Commenting on this display of strength, he says: “Ten thousand toadstools with the right purchase could lift a man, I suppose. But what good would it do?”

There should be more of this strong common sense employed to make our estimate of our civilization less formal and more fundamental. One of the most striking differences between the Oriental mind and ours is seen here. The Oriental is struck with our way of regarding things and actions as good in themselves, without reference to individual and personal realization; and it seems strange and unnatural to him. Railways, banks, telephones, finance-companies, industrial development, newspapers – all such things are most commonly and generally accepted among us as absolute goods in themselves, quite irrespective of their effect upon the spirit of the individual life, and the quality of the collective life, which are lived under their influence. Let a new railway be laid out, or the postal service be increased, or some new device be invented for quickening communication or transportation, and our general tendency is to accept it at once without question as a good thing, not considering that its whole value is to be measured by its effect upon the spirit and quality of life, and that until this effect be ascertained our estimate of it is worthless and misleading. Our newspapers teach us to take this formal and mechanical view of trade-balances and the expansion of industry, never raising the question whether these actually tend towards a better spirit and finer quality of human life or whether they tend towards a spiritual impoverishment and vulgarization; nor is it regularly pointed out that unless they are so employed as progressively to improve life, unless they are practically interpreted in terms of personal realization, they are hardly worth having.

Surely common sense and the free play of consciousness upon the facts of the material world about us are enough to show that this formal view, almost universal as it is, is superficial and retarding. We read the other day a complaint from a railway-official about new trackage. It seems that only a few miles of new trackage have been laid during the past year. He spoke of this as a calamity, as indeed it may be, but the mere fact does not prove itself as such. One must go further and ask whether it can be shown that individual realization has at all profited, and if so how much, by what trackage we already have. How does the spirit of American life compare, indeed, with the spirit of life at a period when there was no trackage at all? Again, we read not long ago a statement by the president of a great chemical concern, in which he predicted that science would possibly before long enable us to produce synthetic food, cheap fuel, artificial wool; to store solar heat, to do without sleep and to prolong mental and physical vigour. The tone of the statement left no doubt that this chemist regarded all these matters as absolute goods in themselves, whereas clearly they are nothing of the kind. If they are made to tend towards the enrichment and deepening of the spiritual life of man, they will be good; if they are made to tend against it, they will be bad; if they are made to tend neither way, they are of no consequence except in point of curiosity, like Mark Twain’s toadstool.

Again, we lately saw the advertisement of a life-extension institute, headed, “Do You Want to Add Ten Years to Your Life?” Here once more the obvious assumption was that longevity is in itself a good and desirable thing. But is it? There is of course in all of us the primary instinct of self-preservation which speaks out strongly in favour of living as long as we can; and it is to this instinct, this irrational and almost bloodthirsty clinging to life, that the advertisement was intended to appeal. As such it seemed to us, we admit, a little ignoble; we were reminded, as all such enterprises which are now so much in vogue remind us, of Julius Caesar’s remark that life is not worth having at the expense of an ignoble solicitude about it. But instinct apart, the worth of such enterprises is measured, surely, by the quality of the life which we are invited to prolong. The content of the average life being what it is, and its prospects of spiritual enlargement and enrichment being what they are, may longevity be so indubitably regarded as an absolute good that one is justified in an almost ferocious effort to attain it?

We are not now concerned that these questions be answered; we are concerned only that they be raised. We are concerned with the habit, which seems to us unintelligent and vicious, of regarding potential accessories to civilization as essential elements in civilization. We insist that civilization is not to be measured in terms of longevity, trackage, the abundance of banks and newspapers, the speed and frequency of mails, and the like. Civilization is the progressive humanization of men in society, and all these things may or may not sustain a helpful relation to the process. At certain periods and places, indeed, the process has been carried notably further without any of them than it is now carried with all of them. When we learn to regard them intelligently, when we persuade ourselves that their benefit is potential and relative, not actual and absolute, then we are in the way of intelligently and quickly applying them to the furtherance of true civilization; but as long as we unintelligently regard them as absolute goods in themselves, we shall merely fumble with them.

“An Undelivered Address” by B. W. Huebsch (The Freeman, Aug 8, 1923):

The train stopped at a small station on the plains in a Western State, and the President appeared on the platform of the observation-car at the rear. There was some lively hand-clapping, but it stopped suddenly when the President signalled that he was about to speak.

“My fellow-citizens,” he said, “it is indeed pleasant to be welcomed by groups of citizens everywhere. It is plain that political friends and adversaries sink their differences in order to express their respect for the high office which I happen to occupy. I might easily delude myself concerning the significance of your enthusiasm, but from my knowledge of the past I am aware that you would greet any President in exactly the same way.

“You have been kind to me, and I will be frank with you. It has long been the custom of our citizens to demand that, when a plain man – one of you – becomes, oftener by a series of accidents than because of superior merit, the chief officer of the Government, he gives utterance to profound wisdom on every subject under the sun, early and often. The people like to ignore the fact that when a farmer or an editor becomes President he remains the same farmer or editor that he was before election. The office confers honour, responsibility and dignity, but not learning or wisdom. Too frequently the President permits himself to be blinded to this truth by the eager acceptance, by large numbers, of all that he says; and, once he has fallen into error, he begins to believe that his words are prophetic or otherwise important. Thus he is led to consider himself endowed, by virtue of his position, with gifts that are bestowed by an inscrutable power upon leaders of men but not necessarily upon politicians; and in his anxiety to respond to the clamour of his fellows for an opinion on all subjects, he is bound to say many things that are ill-considered, puerile and unworthy. Eventually he is found out, for, in the long run, the people do find out. Then the people laugh him into oblivion and contemn him.

“My friends, the fault lies with you. Every man who attains to this high place, even a petty man, enters it with a resolve to do his duty, as he conceives it. If you would but permit him to mind his own business he might step down, at the conclusion of his term, with a reasonable amount of self-respect, and with the respect of his countrymen. But you insist on his being a philosopher, a poet, a financier, a statesman, an historian, a bon viveur and – most reprehensible of all – you almost force him to become a dictator.

“Your good-natured importunity has ruined men who might have proved to be good Presidents, cobblers who intended to stick to their last, but whom you forced to be vicars of God. I speak thus to you because I seem to have seen the light for a moment, and I wish to unburden myself while the inspiration lasts. By the time we arrive at the capital of your State, in a few hours, I presume that the Presidential habit will have got the better of me, and I shall deliver the address prepared for me by one of my secretaries, on co-operative farming, Greek drama, the gold standard, a universal tribunal, vegetarianism and infant damnation. Give me your earnest prayers. Farewell.”

Like most of our contemporaries we have become so lost among the trees of new knowledge that we can not see the forest. When we take as a measure, the ratio between the knowledge of the individual man, and the sum total of human knowledge, it appears to us that men are becoming increasingly ignorant as the years go by; the world as it is actually known to the individual has been expanding, of course, but at a far less rapid rate than the “known world” of science. That this process of expansion has been also a process of disintegration, some of us have felt only too keenly as we have watched the specialists move outward and disappear from sight along a thousand new paths of knowledge which stand to the generality of human individuals as just so many new indications of things that they can never know.

Whether the totality of existence, known and unknown, constitutes universe or multiverse, is a matter of small consequence here. The point we are trying to make is simply this: that in a lawful and orderly universe, the method of the specialists tends to reduce the known world of the individual man to chaos; while on the other hand, even in actual chaos, a broader science might help to raise the known world of the individual man into something like a universe. Such, at any rate, is our belief; and if we had the opportunity to act upon it, we should shut the ablest men of science out of their laboratories for a decade or so, and force them to sit down together, with their masses of data in front of them, and think things over. If they did not eventually produce something like “a larger synthesis,” we should turn them loose again, and begin in our blindness to pray for the coming of a wiser generation. (Geroid Tanquary Robinson)

“Social reform is not to be secured by noise and shouting, by complaints and denunciations, by the formation of parties, or the making of revolutions, but by the awakening of thought and the progress of ideas. Until there be correct thought, there can not be right action; and when there is correct thought, right action will follow. Power is in the hands of the masses of men. What oppresses the masses is their ignorance, their short-sighted selfishness.” Henry George, 1883, Social Problems

“For there is no doubt that the most radical division that is possible to make of humanity is that which splits it into two classes of creatures: those who make great demands on themselves, piling up difficulties and duties; and those who demand nothing special of themselves, but for whom to live is to be every moment what they already are, without imposing on themselves any effort towards perfection; mere buoys that float on the waves.” Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses

Works by Albert Jay Nock at IWP Books:

• Jefferson, 1926
• On Doing the Right Thing, 1928.
• Francis Rabelais: The Man and His Work, 1929
• The Book of Journeyman, 1930
• The Theory of Education in the United States, 1932
• A Journey Into Rabelais’s France, 1934
• A Journal of These Days, 1934
• Our Enemy, The State, 1935
• Free Speech and Plain Language, 1937
• Henry George: An Essay, 1939
• Memoirs of a Superfluous Man, 1943
• A Journal of Forgotten Days, 1948
• Letters from Albert Jay Nock, 1949
• Things as They Are, 2023
• State of the Union: The American Mercury Essays, 2023

Soon:

• The Myth of a Guilty Nation, 1922
• The Freeman Book, 1924

New at IWP Books: Jefferson (1926) by Albert Jay Nock.

Also at JAYS (John Jay Chapman and Albert Jay Nock).

From Jeremy Adelman’s (2013) Wordly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman:

When Ursula once insisted that individual acts of resistance violated the norms of being “useful to the movement,” that it was better to wait for “objective conditions” to be ripe for action, Guia laughed back: “How important your language is for you! There is more value in one who rises and speaks out than in all your wise net of illegals [referring to refugees] who don’t open their mouths but murmur the news into each other’s ears.” Then came a fatal jab. When Ursula explained that the working class was defining the premises of revolutionary actions, he reminded her of the history of passivity wrapped in theory: “To hell with your working class! It seems to me the moment has come to lose a bit of faith…. Twelve million organized Socialists and Communists, the most powerful working class movement in Europe… then comes Hitler and all stand still, nobody moves! Is that your discipline? What is it worth?”

New at IWP Books: Constructive Citizenship (1927) by L. P. Jacks. “The chapters on Skill, Labour, and Leisure should be written in letters of gold on the tables of the heart.” Dorothy L. Sayers, Begin Here

“…when some months ago Huckleberry Finn was dropped from library lists by the New York board of education as likely to aggravate race prejudice, only two letters of protest appeared in the Times. The great hive of intellect which is New York buzzed on without notice. This was criminal negligence.” (Jacques Barzun, The House of Intellect)

“A barrister made a long speech in the course of which a boy fell asleep in the gallery and fell into the well of the court and broke his neck. At common law the instrument with which a murder was committed was forfeited to the Crown. Hence the indictment had to charge and the jury had to find its value. The barrister was indicted in the Circuit Grand Court for murder with a certain dull instrument, to wit, a long speech of no value.” (Roscoe Pound, The Lawyer from Antiquity to Modern Times)

What is a real book? “Quite simply: it is a book one wants to reread. It can stand rereading because it is very full – of ideas and feelings, of scenes and persons real or imagined, of strange accidents and situations and judgments of behavior: it is a world in itself, like and unlike the world already in our head. For this reason, this fullness, it may well be ‘hard to get into.’ But it somehow compels one to keep turning the page, and at the end the wish to reread is clear and strong: one senses that the work contains more than met the eye the first time around.” (Jacques Barzun, Begin Here: The Forgotten Conditions of Teaching and Learning)

From Doing the Right Thing by Albert Jay Nock:

To make the case clearer, let us introduce a couple of parallels from one, by the way, who is the unquestioned master in the art of showing “what goes on in a person’s mind” – from Tourgueniev. First Love, to begin with, is a story of low people; only one person in it, the narrator, is anything but a very poor affair. The heroine, Zinaida, is a flapper of seventeen or so. Here you have the real thing in flappers and the real thing in trollops. Qua flapper and qua trollop, Zinaida makes the candidates put forward by our contemporary literature look like Confederate money. The bare story is squalid and repulsive; a journalistic report of it would be unreadable. But as Tourgueniev unfolds it, the great goddess Lubricity gets not a single grain of incense. Not one detail is propounded for the satisfaction of prurience. The people, dreadful as they are, and the drama, weighted as it is with all that is unnatural and shocking in Zinaida and her paramour, are more than interesting; they are profoundly moving, they release a flow of sympathy that effaces all other emotions, and one lays down the book with a sense of being really humanized and bettered by having read it. Let the reader get it in Mrs. Garnett’s excellent translation, and experiment for himself. Then let him go even farther, and try Torrents of Spring. This is a story of the antecedents and consequences of adultery plus seduction, brought about under inconceivably loathsome circumstances. The three principal characters are detestably low. The foremost among them, Maria Nikolaevna, in my judgment the most interesting woman in the whole range of fiction – what would one not give to see her and talk with her for an hour? – is the world’s prize slut, if ever there were one. But the author has not the slightest preoccupation with her sluttishness, and hence he communicates none to the reader, and the great goddess Aselgeia goes begging again.

“L. P. Jacks: The Art of Living Together. Originally published under the title Constructive Citizenship. The chapters on Skill, Labour, and Leisure should be written in letters of gold on the tables of the heart.” Dorothy L. Sayers, Begin Here: A War-Time Essay

Jacques Barzun on Multiple Choice Tests (The House of Intellect):

They should go. They are an insult to Intelligence, except when played with as parlor games. And something else must go at the same time; I mean the form of such tests. Every man of education ought to take a solemn vow that he will never ‘check’ anything on a printed list. Students should not be asked to pass so-called objective examinations, which are the kind composed of mimeographed questions to be marked Yes or No, or to be solved by matching the right name with a definition. I have kept track for some ten years of the effect of such tests upon the upper half of each class. The best men go down one grade and the next best go up. It is not hard to see why. The second-rate do well in school and in life because of their ability to grasp what is accepted and conventional, the ‘ropes’ of the subject. They become pillars of society and I have no quarrel with them. But first-rate men are rarer and equally indispensable. They see into situations quickly, and with the fresh, clear eye of Intelligence, and they must be encouraged to continue. To them, a ready-made question is an obstacle. It paralyzes thought by cutting off all connections but one. Or else it sets them thinking and doubting whether in that form any possible answers really fits. Their minds have finer adjustments, more imagination, which the test deliberately penalizes as encumbrances. This basic difficulty occurs no matter how carefully the questions are drafted and how extensive their coverage. I sat and worked on a committee that prepared objective questions in history for the so-called Graduate Record Examination, which is now widely used to test college seniors’ readiness for graduate work. In committee, it was revealing to see how a question that seemed ‘foolproof’ and ‘obvious’ to two or three men, thoroughly trained in their field, struck others of the same caliber as ‘ambiguous’ or ‘misleading.’ Add modifiers and you can make the question so unwieldy that it can hardly be grasped at one reading; simplify and you reduce it to bare common fact. Neither extreme, moreover, brings anything out of the student’s mind; yet the power to relate, to think up, to see into, is what distinguishes the first rank from the second in all walks of life. The results of the Graduate examination no doubt correlate very satisfactorily with other indices, but they scarcely give data for the most needful kind of diagnosis. Nor have they ever been tried on the masters of the profession, which would be the test of tests, provided running comments were allowed. When one courageous man proposed just this at an institution that thrives on endless testing, the idea was dismissed as a joke in poor taste.