What is man? The answer to that question is called anthropology, an ancient Greek word, the first half of which was anthropos, meaning man, and the second the suffix form of logos, meaning science, system of thought, organized knowledge. With such a subject matter anthropology is almost the largest, if not the largest, of those subjects, sciences, theologies, and organized systems of thought by means of which we understand the world. Within it are many departments, branches, divisions, specialities, among which are ethnology, the study of tribes and clans, sociology the study of the three institutions of family, school, and government, primitive culture, archeology, linguistics (study of languages); and in one of its aspects anthropology itself appears as one of the branches of philosophy. It is at the same time a necessary element or a necessary presupposition in other fields, in theology, ethics, psychology, aesthetics, physiology, anatomy, and medicine, because no one of these can work without some conception of what man is.
The question whether Freemasonry has an anthropology of its own belongs to the same category as the companion questions whether it has philosophy, theology, ethics, or politics of its own, and receives the same answer. It does not have one. There is no reason why it should have one because it is not a school, college, or association of scientists; the Ritual is not a discourse about races, tribes, clans, taboos, or tribal institutions; the subject is not mentioned in its Lectures or included in its Tenets. It is content to accept whatever is known to be true about man, but has no special theory or dogma of its own; no Masonic Frazer will ever be asked to write a Golden Bough about the Ritual, nor will any Hutton Webster be required to write a Primitive Secret Society as his Master Piece. The Craft consists of men, and does not consist of a set of doctrines or theories; it concerns itself with men, and as men, but it includes no anthropologic doctrine among its tests for membership.
Nevertheless Freemasonry cannot act without having certain facts and truths about man always at the front; if an anthropological theory contradicts those facts and truths Freemasonry is in disagreement with it, and at that point and to that extent Freemasons would concern themselves with anthropology and as Masonic literature shows they have more than once clone so. Freemasonry, we have said, consists not of theories or of books but of men; those men are active; they are always at work; they make plans, and they carry them out; they have purposes of their own, and they fulfill them; they have teachings, and they enforce them. None of these activities include anthropology, or even refer to it, but those things which Freemasons, millions of them, do and say and teach and feel and believe have their own anthropologic presuppositions.
It was not until one or two decades after the beginning of the present century that thinkers began to discover how transcendently important presuppositions are, and they did it by a new and microscopic analysis of the old Masonic subject of geometry in which they find that geometry is like our Masonic law, partly written and partly unwritten; or like our Ritual, partly exoteric and partly esoteric. The written, or, as it were, visible part of geometry are the rules, theories, and figures printed in the text; the unwritten part consists of a large number of presuppositions, axioms, postulates, assumptions which lie behind the written part, and which a geometrician assumes to be true although he cannot either prove them to be so, or define them. The revolutions which shook mathematicians in the Nineteenth Century were based on this part of assumptions, or presuppositions; Lobachevski (17931856) saw that Euclid assumed space to have three dimensions, and worked out a new geometry for more than three; Riemann (1826-66) devised one for only two. Einstein, in our own century, saw that Euclid had silently assumed that space is flat (or plane); he worked out a geometry for a curved space. When the great power of silent and undefined or unconscious or unwritten assumptions, postulates, axioms was discovered in geometry thinkers went on to show that they have a similar power in every other subject or field, and not only in exact thinking or in science but in daily life three-fourths of any editorial in a newspaper consists of not what the editor sets down but of what he assumes to be true but does not set clown. If Freemasonry has any presuppositions about the nature of man then any thinker in any field would immediately say that those presuppositions are among the most important facts in it. What are they? It is helpful to begin the answer to that question by showing what they are not.
As soon as the atomic bombs were dropped on two cities in Japan newspapers were instantly filled with the clamor of news and editorials and articles about atoms. Millions of Americans drew the conclusion from this spate of "news" that atoms were a recent discovery, and that the atomic philosophy is a recent development in science; whereas a full fledged atomic philosophy was developed in Greece 600 B.C., and for centuries was so influential that it almost became a religion-both Epicurus and Lucretius were among its adherents. Atom meant "it cannot be cut"; it was supposed that they are the ultimate particles out of which everything is made, that there is an uncountable number of them, that some are larger than others, and that if by chance a sufficient number of them happen to drift together and unite they become some object, a tree, a bird, a stone, a river, a man, what not; anything is "an accidental collocation of atoms." This would mean that everything is an illusion except atoms; that nothing is what it seems except atoms; if we say "There is a horse" we are mistaken, what we see is a thick, temporary cloud of atoms, and what we call "horse" is merely the shape it chances to take. A man is equally unreal; the believers in atomic philosophy shrink from that statement, they wriggle, and evade, and saw at words, but they ought to be held to it because if their theory is true a man, any man, you, I, is not in reality a man but is a conglomeration of some billions of atoms they are real, they are absolutely real, but that which we mean by "man" is not real except as the name for the form which those atoms chanced to take. This is the answer the atomists give to the question, what is man? and there could not be an answer more wholly in contradiction to Freemasonry's presuppositions, or one in which any Freemason would more completely disbelieve.
Materialism is another philosophy which is even older than atomism and has always been far more influential. According to this theory matter is the stuff out of which everything else is made. How are things made? By the activities and changes which go on in matter itself. Any piece or kind of matter, however small, is full of motions, expansions, contractions, crackings, splittings, and other changes of a like kind which are called physical; and also is full of molecules which this or that in it is changing into something else, as when one color changes into another, and other changes of a like kind which we called chemical. The fundamental theory of Materialism is that matter is the stuff out of which any tree, animal, bird, rock, river, light, etc., etc., is made, and that its own structure and function is owing to the physical and chemical processes in matter. This theory answers the question, what is man? by saying that man is matter, and that wherever there is a quantity of matter of just the right kind, and physical and chemical processes of a certain kind go on in it, a man is the result-this is not to say that a man originated in matter and then changed into something non-material, but that he continues to be matter from beginning to end. Materialism has been described as the favorite philosophy of stupid people. The history of the materialistic philosophy over the past 2500 years bears out that satirical judgment, because of the many philosophies it has always been the most stupid and the clumsiest and most riddled by self contradictions. It is in any event impossible for any Mason to be a materialist, even the kind of man who is a materialist without knowing it, because if Materialism were true everything in Freemasonry would be false.
Idealism is a systematized philosophy in the same sense that Materialism is, and its followers reason in very much the same manner that materialists do, but whereas materialists say that everything is made out of matter, Idealists say that everything is made out of mind. Plato and Plotinus were famous Idealists in Ancient times, Kant, Hegel, Berkeley, Green, Bradley, and Royce have been famous Idealists in Modern times. Every particular thing there is, the earth included, is not what it appears to be because it is a mere phenomenon; there is but one reality, a single absolute Mind, and what appears to be a stone or a star is not really such, is not real in its own right, but is merely a form or a movement in that one mind. "There is but one," say the Brahmins, "and that one is everywhere." Idealism is a seductive, subtle theory, very difficult to escape from if a man becomes encoiled within it, and it gains an advantage from having a name so similar to the world "ideal," and for this reason it sounds as if Idealism must consist of "ideals"; but it does not, it is as destructive of "ideals" as Materialism is, because it turns them into illusions. It answers the question what is man? by saying that he is a phenomenon in the absolute mind. If you and 1 are nothing but thoughts, dreams, or fancies in that Mind then we are not what we believe ourselves to be; we are not men, real in our own right, but are a mere camouflage or appearance of something not ourselves we have no selves of our own because there is only one Self, and what we call Mankind is nothing but Maya, or illusion. If any men in the world have been non-Idealists, or Anti-Idealists, it was the Operative Masons; they did not hate matter, they did not abhor material things, they never went about in a metaphysical stupor, but worked with metal tools, were sane and sound and healthy, and it could not have crossed their minds, not even as a fancy, that the building they worked on was an illusion; and so have Freemasons been ever since. In their Lodge Room the Ashlar is as sacred as the Altar, and is on a level with it, and an Ashlar is nothing other than a stone, not a delusive, or symbolical, or make believe stone, but a literal and ponderable piece of field stone mined out of a quarry.
What is the ultimate reality, the stuff out of which everything else is made? The three philosophies above answer variously that it is atoms, or is matter, or is mind. Another ancient and powerful philosophy has an answer of another kind; it is the theory that behind everything else, but not robbing them of their reality, is one, absolute Being, and that within this Being is the origin of man. It is itself, however, something which requires that men shall be not all of one kind but shall be of a number of kinds, or species; these species of men differ among themselves as much as horses differ from insects, and they stand in a hierarchy of worth or excellence, the most superior species at the top, the most inferior species at the bottom; when a man is born he is not born into a single mankind, so that all other men are equally his brothers because they belong to the same family, but is born into a species.
Once man is born into a species he remains in it forever, and can no more move into another species than a cricket can change itself into a horse. Therefore the whole world of mankind is divided up into eternal castes. This is the philosophy behind the old dogmas of rulership by divine right, of being nobles by right of birth, of aristocratic powers and privileges by right of an eternal caste system of society, of feudalism which gives one caste the right of ownership but denies it to other castes, so that men in the lower castes do not even own themselves; and it is the philosophy behind slavery whenever slavery is defended on the ground that slaves belong to a lower species than their owners. It is unnecessary to say that this barbarous philosophy is the foe of every anthropologic presupposition of Freemasonry.
There is also the philosophy, powerful during the past hundred years, which a group of philosophers made out of biology, although in strict and literal fact it was not out of biology in general that they made it but out of zoology, which is the biology of animals. Charles Darwin began by assuming that animals are in separate species neither he nor any other biologist could define "species" but he swept that difficulty aside and assumed it anyway. How, lie asked himself, does a species originate? his answer was that it originates by that process of variation, environment, struggle for existence, and survival of the fittest for which he coined the name "evolution." Darwin then went on to say that man is an animal; since he is, he is a species, one called homo sapiens; he then went on to argue that this species of animal called man originated as had every other species of animal, by evolution. Neither Darwin himself nor any other man who agreed with him ever dreamed of saying that in this evolution man ceased to be an animal; the very point of the theory is that he is an animal; the difference between him and other animals is of the same kind as the difference among other species of animals. This theory became, as a Medieval writer had once said of the Crusades, "the world's debate," and the end is not yet, though an ever increasing number of one-time evolutionists are forsaking the cause. Evolutionism as a philosophy of man never was well thought out; it fell apart inwardly from self contradictions and confusions; it was never open or frank or truthful, even Darwin himself was never candid about it; and it could therefore be shown by analysis that its anthropology, or answer to the question, what is man? is impossible; but the space is not available. It can, however, be suggested that the evolutionists ought, like other philosophers, to try their theory in practice the early Christians did so, the Communists have done so, almost every group of theologians or philosophers have done so; why should not the evolutionists? Let them, a few thousand, go somewhere and form a community, and let them go in for thoroughly treating each other as animals! They could find out if it is true by discovering how well it works out in practice. We Masons would not join their experiment; if there is anything abhorrent to Freemasonry, in its Lodge, or in its Landmarks, or in its Ritual, it is any sort of crudeness, or animalism, or sensuality, or callousness in which men treat each other as if they were mere animals.
These five or six philosophies, and a hundred others as well, differ among themselves almost as much as one opposite differs from another, yet they have in common, with only a small number of exceptions, the theory that a man never is "really" what we find him to be; he may appear to be a man, they say, "but in reality" he is not, he is always something else; he is an ex-angel, come into this world as a punishment for crimes committed in heaven; he is a wandering spirit, temporarily encased in a shell of physical body; he is an animal; he is an ex-animal; he is a very active and movable piece of matter; he is a thought in an Absolute Mind; he is a machine; always he is something other than he appears to be it is as if these men of philosophy had agreed among themselves to admit the existence of everything except themselves)
And this fact enables us to define the anthropology which Freemasonry presupposes. It would answer the question, What is man? by saying, man is man. He is not a form of something else, or an appearance of something else, or an agency or organ of something else, but is himself, original and wholly and absolutely real in his own right. And he is whatever we find him in actuality to be. We find that he thinks, speaks, feels, has children, works, moves, acts, associates himself with others, plans, makes, and constructs; we take each of those facts about him to be completely real; if we were not to do so we could not take facts about other things to be real either because we know the facts about him in the same way that we know the facts about them. We Masons believe that men are men; we have no desire for them to be anything else.
When Masons come to speak about that which is finest in their Fraternity, about that which is nearest to being what religion is elsewhere, which moves on high reaches level with the most exalted plateaus of thought, they begin to look anxiously about them to make sure that they keep their feet on the ground; they are great believers in masculinity, and hold it to be one of the best things in a man, and it belongs to masculinity to dread those flights of idealistic fancy which blow the sails away. But there is in the whole universe no better place on which to stand than on the ground, and there is nothing higher or better anywhere than sanity, good sense, and sound wisdom, and there is no better life possible in any earth or in any heaven than the life of work; but while our law is a set of rules and regulations for workmen, and our Landmarks are drawn close to the ground, we are as free as other men to believe that there are great things in Man; we bracket together the question What do you believe about man? with the question, What do you believe about God? because one is as important to us as the other. We say in our Rituals, "There is a Grand Lodge above." We know what we mean by that saying. We do not mean that after we have changed our Way of Being and are no longer in this world that we shall find there a Grand Lodge, with a Grand Master presiding over it; we do not mean that it is our picture of "heaven"; we believe that there is nothing better in this world than to be a man, and to be in fellowship with other men, and we do not believe that there will be anything better in any other world.
A Mason could if he wished (though he need
not) have an anthropologic creed of his own which he could recite
with complete sincerity on any of those occasions when the recital
of a creed is deemed the proper thing to do: "I am content
to be a man. I do not believe that I am a lump of matter, mysteriously
stirred, or that I am an interesting experiment in chemistry,
or that I was a plant which learned to walk, or an animal which
learned to talk. I am not in fear lest I shall fall through the
bottom of things to become less than a man, a devil, a demon,
or what not; nor do I desire to become a superman or an angel
or a disembodied spirit; I am a man here and now, I expect to
continue to be a man forever."
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