T. S. Eliot and the Hollow Men

Abstract

THE YEAR I925, unremarkable enough in most respects, deserves to be remembered for three events which together form a significant triad. In that year were published Theodore Dreiser's An American Trargedy, Alfred North Whitehead's Science and the Modern World, and T. S. Eliot's The Hollow Men. Here are three symbols of an end and a beginning: an end of the dominance of scientism and materialistic naturalism, and the beginning of the reconstruction of a livable and believable world out of the fragments. The Jazz Age may be said to slope up to and down from this pivotal date in a more than merely chronological sense. An American Tragedy marks the absolute dead-end in fictional naturalism: beyond it lay only neo-naturalism, assuming what Dreiser had preached and relying for novelty on exploitation of ever-increasing extremes of violent, abnormal, and bizarre subject-matter. Beyond An American Tragedy lay only The Sun Also Rises and Sanctuary and The Hamlet. Science and the Modern World, on the other hand, was at once a culmination and a beginning: the culmination of a long line of philosophical critiques of kinetic-atomic physics and the philosophy of science based on that physics; and the beginning in America of a series of rejections of scientism and materialistic naturalism by a constantly increasing and influential body of philosophers, scientists, and writers. Widely read and extremely influential, Whitehead's book spelled the destruction of the old order and laid the foundation for a new. Whereas Peirce had gone unread and James had been suspected of teaching that one should believe whatever proved most comfortable or most profitable, Whitehead was not ignored and could not be caricatured. Anyone who could follow the close logical reasoning and translate for himself the technical language of Science and the Modern World could scarcely miss the point: here was one of the great books of our century. For whether or not one agreed with or could even follow the constructive metaphysics in the book, if one were moderately perceptive one could