THOMAS MANN
7
Thomas Mann's program, we said, is based on the traditions and
achievements of European man, on his magnificent researches into
freedom and on his bondage to the forms of social life. The European
man of Thomas Mann is frozen within his ideals and his fetters,
because, as Thomas Mann sees him in his art and morality, which
distinguish him from the man of Egypt or the man of Jerusalem in
kind but not in essence, he
i.e;
incomplete. He lacks science, the most
characteristic product of the European mind. Science has created the
form of our civilization; it built our cities; it provided our sustenance;
it refined our language;
it
guided our imagination and checked its
excesses; it rested the power of generalization on the scrupulousness
of fact; it enthroned reason as the principle of knowledge. In attempt–
ing to carry on the spirit of Goethe and Luther, Mann has forgotten
Newton and Galileo.
Art records our dreams of truth and freedom and our efforts to
attain them, and morality is the watchman of the social conscience;
yet both art and morality are powerless before the forces that shape
our fate. Nor can they guide us through the labyrinths of social doc–
trines and movements. Shall we inquire of art whether the coming
war will end wars or whether the existing democratic system can
stave
off
its own destruction at the hands of fascism? These are politi–
cal and economic question, scientific questions I-among which the
artist becomes a Hamlet of the laboratory. At most, art has acted
to keep alive the human purposes of science and to protest every sign
of their perversion.
If
the artist cannot himself arrive at a true an–
alysis, he can at least condemn those who would displace it with a
patent lie. These are the boundaries of art. Envisioning the most far–
reaching ideals, the artist is, nevertheless, isolated from those forces
which can realize them.
It is science which has enabled us to overcome the conditions of
OlIr existence. Not only in nature, but in history; for science has given
us some understanding of the necessities of social life. The extension
of scientific method into history, has helped to strip it of its legends
and prejudices, introducing order, direction, and law. We now see
that the present is a precarious balance between the past and the
future; and though the forces which transform the present are lim–
ited, there still remains for us a latitude of choice. We are approaching
a science of history, based on the costant refinement of the empirical
method as applied to the study of class behavior. Beginning with the
speculations of Aristotle, through Adam Smith, Ricardo, Hegel,
