CHAPTER VII.
THE ORGANIZATION OF LIFE.
Die wahre Freiheit ist als Sittlichkeit dies, dass der Wille nicht subjektive, d. i. eigensüchtige, sondern allgemeinen Inhalt zu seinen Zwecken hat. — Hegel, Encyclopädie.
Unexpectedly we have been saved from our
ethical skepticism even in and through the very act of
thinking it out. Here, as elsewhere in philosophy,
the truth is to be reached, neither by dreading nor by
discountenancing the doubt, but by accepting,
experiencing, and absorbing the doubt, until, as an
element in our thought, it becomes also an element in
an higher truth. We do not say, therefore, to
commend our moral principle, as it has just been
propounded, that it is immediately acceptable to all
healthy consciences, or that it is a pious, or a
respectable, or a popularly recognized principle. We say
only this: Doubt rationally about moral doctrines,
and your doubt itself, if real, thorough-going, all-embracing,
merciless, will involve this very principle of
ours. We find the principle by means of the universal
doubt, and it is this method of procedure that
distinguishes the foregoing discussion of the basis of
morals from many of those that have previously been
concerned with this problem. To point out that the
average man, or the reputed saint, or the inspired prophet, or the great poet, or the reader himself,
whenever he is enthusiastic has or has had a given
ideal, is not to justify this ideal. Yet of such a
nature are the justifications that most moralists have
given for their ideals. If we have gained our
result by any better method, that was because we were
free to doubt all those pretended defenses of the
good. We have found the nature of the absolute
and universal will, by rigidly questioning the
significance of all the individual wills.
But our ideal must be made to do work in the
world. It must accomplish something, by solving
for us a few concrete moral problems, such as
actually trouble men. Even the present discussion must
consider some of these consequences of our general
principle; for religious philosophy, in seeking an
ideal for life, does not want a barren abstraction,
but such an ideal as can also be our guide. What
does our principle tell a man to do?
The principle, as is plain, may be viewed in two
ways. If by moral insight we mean what the last
chapter defijied, namely, insight into the fact of the
existence of other conscious wills besides our own,
coupled with full rational appreciation of this truth,
then our principle may be viewed as saying to each
of us: Get and keep the moral insight as an
experience, and do all that thou canst to extend among
men this experience. On the other hand, the
principle may be equally well viewed as saying: Act
out in each case what the moral insight bids thee
do; that is, as before explained, Having made
thyself, in so far as thou art able, one with all the conflicting wills before thee, act out the resulting
universal will as it then arises in thee. Two classes of
human duties are thus defined, one formal and
provisional, the other permanent. We must explain in
some measure each of them, in order that we may
show the practical applications of our moral
principle.
I.
The first class of duties comprises those that have
most especially to do with the moral education of our
race. We are, and must long remain, exceedingly
imperfect and blind creatures. If there is possible
any state of humanity in which all shall be ready to
act in accordance with the moral insight, that state
must be, morally speaking, better than any other.
Therefore the first demand that the moral insight
makes of us so soon as we get it is: So act as to
increase the number of those who possess the insight.
Here, of course, is a precept of a very formal
character, and plainly provisional in its nature. It is as
if one were to be among blind men, himself blind,
and were by some magical act, say by accidentally
washing in a miraculous fountain, to get at one stroke
and for the first time the power of sight, in all its
maturity and perfection. Such an one would
perhaps say: “How noble is this new sense! But to
what end shall I use it? For the first I must use
it to bring these other men to the fountain, to wash
their eyes, that they may miraculously learn in one
instant to see this glorious world.” But some one
might object: “In this way, if the only use to be made of a man’s sight is to extend the power of sight
to others, of what use is the power itself? The sole
aim of seeing cannot be to cause others to see. Else
what good would result to any one, if all followed
your precept?” The answer would be plain:
“When all or the most of us get the power, then
indeed we can use it for other ends. But because it
is the best of powers for all these other ends, therefore
the best provisional use to make of it is, not to
spend much time upon these ends, but to spend time
upon extending the possession of the power. When
this is done, then first will begin the real use of the
power for its own sake.” As in this case of the
supposed miraculous acquirement of a new sense in all
its maturity of power at one stroke, so it is in case
of the much more gradual acquirement of the moral
insight. To be sure, the ultimate aim of life cannot
be merely the extension of the power to realize the
wills that are active about us, but must at last be
found by defining the course of action that best
harmonizes these wills. But, provisionally, we have a
task before us that is easily defined, because
elementary. Harmony cannot be even partially attained,
the best human acti^dty cannot be even imperfectly
developed, until a very great number of men have
this, the very first, most elementary requisite of
conscious morality, namely, the power to see the facts of
human life as they are. So long as a man is bound
up in his individual will, he may be instinctively
upright, he cannot be consciously and with clear intent
righteous. So long therefore as this is true of him,
he will be dependent on traditions that are often pernicious, on conscience that is often brutal prejudice,
on faith that is often bigotry, on emotion that is the
blindest of all guides; and if he does good or if he
does evil, the power responsible for his deeds will
not be a truly moral impulse. To gain the moral
ends of humanity, the indispensable prerequisite is
therefore the moral insight in its merely formal
aspect, as an human power and as an experience of life.
When a good many more men have reached the
possession of this power, then more of life will be taken
up with concrete duties. Until that time comes, the
great aim must be this formal and provisional one:
to produce in men the moral mood, and so to
prepare the way for the further Iniowledge of the
highest good. If we put the matter otherwise we may
say: The moral insight, insisting upon the need of
the harmony of all human wills, shows us that,
whatever the highest human good may be, we can only
attain it together, for it involves harmony. The
highest good then is not to be got by any one of us
or by any clique of us separately. Either the
highest good is for humanity unattainable, or the
humanity of the future must get it in common. Therefore
the sense of conununity, the power to work together,
with clear insight into our reasons for so working,
is the first need of humanity. Not what good thing
men may hereafter come to see, but how they shall
attain the only sense whereby they can ever get to
see the good, is the great present human concern.
Starting with this duty, we can now examine
what rule of life this duty will give us. Extend the
moral insight among men, and in thy own life: this is the first commandment. The direct
consequence is that, so regarded, the first duty of man in
the present day cannot be either to get happiness
himself, or, in view of this present state of human
life, to make other people happy. All that he may
indeed be in some measure required to do, but not,
in the present state of the world, as an end, but solely
as a means to an end. This at all events is not the
day for contentment, but for work; and joy is now
a proper part of human life chiefly in so far as it
tends to preserve, to increase, or to foster the moral
insight. Here we have the present practical
solution suggested for all the questions about the right
and wrong of so-called hedonism. Hedonism is the
product of an imperfect understanding of the moral
insight. Benevolent hedonism springs from the
insight that men like to be happy. Realizing this, the
believer in universal hedonism says:
Make men happy so far as thou canst. But this principle of
hedonism is surely not the immediate truth for this
present time, whatever may or may not turn out to
be the case in future. For to labor to increase
happiness may for the present mean to increase the moral
blindness of men Some sorts of happiness tend to
make us blind, as has in fact been shown in a
former chapter. Unless a man experiences very
bitterly the reality of the conflict of wills in this world,
the moral insight is apt to forsake him. But until
the moral insight becomes practically universal, the
highest good for humanity cannot be got.
Therefore all forms of happiness that hinder rather than
help the moral insight are evil, and we ought to do what we can to get rid of them out of the world.
And all experiences, however painful, that certainly
tend to the increase of the power of moral insight,
are good for men; and if we see no other
experiences more suitable for this purpose, we ought to do
what we can to increase among men the number
and the definiteness of these pains.
Yet of course it will at once appear, when we
examine human emotional experiences in the light of
what we know of men, that there is a decided limit
to the morally educative power of painful
experiences, and that, on the other hand, very many
pleasant experiences are useful to the moral insight, either
by directly aiding it, or by preparing a man to
attain it. In considering this branch of the subject,
we at last reach the point where a scientific
psychology can give us a great deal of help. We
rejected the so-called “scientific basis” for morals
because it founds the ought to be upon brutal physical
facts. Now, however, we can turn to science to help
us in our present task, because, having defined our
ought to be, we are dealing with applied ethics, and
are asking how this moral insight is to be attained.
Psychology must tell us what it can as to this
matter. And here such suggestions as those in Mr.
Spencer’s “Data of Ethics” are indeed a useful aid
to applied moral doctrine. We reject wholly the
notion that Mr. Spencer or any like teacher has even
caught a glimpse of the fundamental ethical problem.
Mr. Spencer seems to be in the most childlike
ignorance that there is any such problem at all. But we
are glad to find that Mr. Spencer once having very illogically accepted a partially correct fundamental
notion about the ideal of life, does suggest a good
deal about this problem of applied ethics with which
we are now dealing. He does tell us some very
sensible things about the attainment of this ideal.
Among these sensible suggestions is the insistence
upon the value of pleasure as an indication of the
increase of healthy life in the man who has the
pleasure; and the further insistence upon the thought
that, since pleasure thus indicates in some wise
health and efficiency, and since efficiency is an
indispensable prerequisite to sound practical morality,
there must always be a certain moral presumption
in favor of happiness, and in favor of whatever tends
to increase happiness. Properly understood and
limited, this doctrine of Mr. Spencer’s is an obvious
and useful consequence from what we know of
psychology. Mr. Spencer dwells on it at tedious and
wholly unnecessary length, but he is surely justified
when he protests, against the ascetics, that their
ideal man must be in general a puny, inefficient, and
perhaps wholly burdensome man, whose ill-health
may make him, at last, hopelessly selfish. This we
know on good scientific grounds, and it is well to
have said the thing plainly in an ethical treatise.
But what is the result? Is happiness the only
aim of life because the permanently unhappy man is
apt to be a poor diseased creature, useless, or even
dangerous? No; the consequence of all this is that
the first moral aim must be to make a man efficient
in possessing and extending the moral insight.
Efficiency for moral ends is still oiir proximate goal. Happiness is, at least for the present, only a
subordinate means. Therefore we say: By all means make
men happy, so far as their happiness tends to give
them and to preserve in them moral insight. True
it is, as scientific psychology shows us, that a man,
in order to be as good as possible, must generally be
possessed of respectable health, of what he thinks a
good place in the world, of friends, and of numerous
pleasures. He must digest well, he must enjoy the
esteem of his fellows, he must be strong, and he must
be frequently amused. All this is true, and is in
fact a commonplace. When an ascetic denies this,
he maintains a pernicious heresy, that tends to
destroy moral insight by depriving men of the
physical power to get it. But these facts must not be
misinterpreted. Whatever might be true of a society
in which moral insight had been attained, nothing is
plainer than that happiness at the present time
cannot be regarded from our point of view as more
than a means to the present great end. If we try
to amuse our neighbors, to relieve their woes, to
improve their worldly estate, we must do so not as if
this were the end of the present life, but as workers
in a very vast drama of human life, whose far-off
purpose must govern every detail. The good
Samaritan must say to himself, as he helps the poor
wretch by the wayside: “In so far as I realize only
this man’s need, my purpose is indeed simply to
relieve him. But my purpose must be higher than that.
This man is not alone, but one of a multitude. My
highest aim in helping him is not to make him
individually happy, but to increase by this, as by all my acts, the harmony of mankind. Not alone that he
may by and by go away and enjoy himself do I help
him now, but because by so doing I hope through
him to increase among men moral insight.” Therefore,
notwithstanding Schopenhauer’s ridicule, Fichte
was right in saying that we ought to treat the
individual man not chiefly as an individual, but as an
instrument for extending and serving the moral law.
Because a certain kind of happiness means efficiency,
and efficiency morality, therefore and therefore alone
have we the right and duty, in this present
generation, to labor for this kind of happiness.
Equally, therefore, it becomes our duty to labor
to increase pain, whenever pain is the best means of
fostering the moral insight. Therefore, in this
present day, it cannot be our duty to labor to diminish
pain in the world, simply as pain. Again we must
appeal to psychology to guide us aright. The pains
that foster moral insight, although limited in
number and intensity, are numerous, and still
imperfectly defined. It would be a useful task to study
more in detail than psychologists have yet done, the
moralizing power of pain. This is a task for the
psychology of the future. In general, of course, we
can say that the range of such pains has been much
exaggerated by ascetics. Bodily pain, if severe, is
generally brutalizing, at least for most people, and
the moral insight is in it only in so far as the past
experience of bodily pain helps us to know the
significance of the suffering of others, not by giving
us that blind emotion of sympathy before criticised,
but by giving us the means to form a cool abstract estimate of the value of this evil of physical pain.
For thus we can realize the strength of the will that
seeks to escape it, and can act with due respect to
this will. But nature generally gives us enough
experience of pain to furnish excellent material for the
calculations needed. Therefore, bodily pains, save
as punishments, are seldom useful instruments for
our great purpose. Not thus can self be duly
mortified.
It is different with certain mental pains. All
those that tend to make the individual feel his own
necessary limitations, and thereby to approach the
realization of the great world of life about him, are
necessary evils. His will must be overwhelmed, that
the Universal Will may have place to establish itself
in him. Therefore, without considering whether
we are thereby increasing or diminishing the sum
of human misery, we all of us unhesitatingly set
about the work of contending with blind self-confidence
and self-absorption wherever it may appear.
Therefore it is right that we ridicule all pretentious
mediocrity that is unconscious of its stupidities.
Therefore, in fact, it is right that we should criticise
unsparingly all pretenders, however much they may
be pained by our criticism. Therefore it is well that
we should feel not a selfish but a righteous joy
whenever pride has a fall, whenever the man who thinks
that he is something discovers of a truth that he is
nothing. Therefore, also, do we put down excessive
forwardness and vanity in growing children, although
so to do hurts their sensitive young selfishness very
keenly. In all such ways we must ask and we must show no mercy, save when these keen pains of
wounded vanity are so given as to inflame and
increase this vanity itself. All healthy, truthful
criticism of individual limitations is a duty, even if it is a
present torture to the individual criticised. For this
individual is blind to other life because he is wrapped
up in himself. If by showing him his insignificance
you can open his eyes, you are bound to do so, even
though you make him writhe to see his worthlessness.
For what we here defends is not that ill-natured
criticism whose only aim is to gratify the miserable
self of the critic, but the criticism whose edge is
turned in earnest against every form of self-satisfaction
that hinders insight. Let a man be self-satisfied
when he is at rest, after dinner, or in merry
company. It is a harmless and even a useful amusement.
But when he is at work doing good he ought
to hate self-satisfaction, which hinders the moral
insight, which exalts his will above the universal will,
which takes the half-done task for the whole task,
and altogether glorifies the vanity of vanities. If
now my critic rids me of such self-satisfaction, he
may hurt me keenly, but he is my best friend. My
life may often be miserable in consequence, but then
I am an instrument, whose purpose it is to attain, to
foster, to extend, and to employ the moral insight.
My misery is a drop, evil no doubt in itself (since
my poor little will must writhe and struggle when it
sees its own vanity and the hopelessness of its separate
satisfactions), but a relative good, since through
it I may attain to the moral insight. All such pains
must be dealt with in the same way. Hence the utilitarian principle of benevolent hedonism, even if
right in its application to the far-off future, has but
little direct practical application to a life that must
to-day be judged by such standards as these.
II.
But has the principle of hedonism any truth even
in its application to a world where all had attained
the moral insight as an experience? If we
consider the higher human activities, whose worth is not
merely provisional, but permanent, the activities that
men will carry on when they have freed themselves
from selfish strife, is the aggregate happiness as such
the goal of the action of this unselfish society?
There are existent already among men activities
that belong to spheres where selfish strife is,
relatively speaking, suppressed. These activities are
foreshadowings of the life of the possible future
humanity that may come to possess the moral insight.
Art, science, philosophy, are the types of such life.
These activities form still but a small part of the
aggregate work of men, aud so it must long be; jet,
though subordinated in extent to the pressing moral
needs of an imperfect state, these activities are
already among the highest in our lives. But now, are
they valuable because of the aggregate happiness
that they cause, or for some other reason? To judge
of this we must study the definition of the second,
more permanent class of human duties.
Suppose then that the first and provisional aim of
human conduct had beeji attained, and that all men possessed the moral insight, what would this insight
then lead them to do? Here the hedonist will expect
to have his revenge for our previous neglect of his
advice. “My precepts have been set aside so far,”
he may say, “as having no immediate application to
the moral needs of the moment. To get this merely
formal condition of harmony among men, the moral
man has been advised to subordinate all direct efforts
towards making people happy, to the end of making
them first possess what you have called the moral
mood. But now at last, in the supposed case, the
great end has been attained, and men are formally
moral. Now surely they have nothing to do but to
be as happy as possible. So at last my plan will be
vindicated, and the ideal man will come to be a
seeker of ideal pleasures.”
The hedonist is too sanguine. His ideas of the
highest state may have their value, but they are
indefinite in at least one respect. When he says that
he wants all his ideal men, in the ideal state, to be
happy together, he never tells us what he means by
the individual man at all, nor what inner relation
that individual’s happiness is to have to the
happiness of other men. All men, in the ideal state, are
to be harmonious and happy together: this the
hedonist tells us; but he does not see how many
difficulties are involved in the definition of this ideal
state. He plainly means and says that in this ideal
state the good of the wiiole society is to be an
aggregate of a great number of individual happy states,
which the various men of the blessed society are to
feel. He assumes then that in the ideal state each man would be able to say: “I, separately regarded,
am happy, and so are all my fellows.” Now
possibly the very notion of an ideal state, in which the
separate selves are as such happy, and in which
the blessedness of the whole is an aggregate of the
blessedness of the separate individuals, is a
contradictory notion. At all events it is a notion whose
meaning and validity every hedonist coolly and
unquestioningly assumes. Yet it is an assumption that
we must examine with care.
If a man sets before himself and his fellows the
goal of individual happiness, as the hedonist wants
him to do in the supposed ideal state, can he
conceivably attain that goal? The hedonist supposes
that the only moral limitation to the pursuit of
personal happiness is the moral requirement of
altruism, according to which no one ought to seek his
own pleasure at the cost of a greater misery to
another. In the ideal state, as all would be in the
moral mood, and all disposed to help one another,
and to get happiness only together, this one
limitation would be removed. Then, thinks the hedonist,
the highest law would be: Get the most happiness, all of you.
This happiness the hedonist conceives as
an aggregate of states that would exist in the various
separate individuals. So each individual will strive
after his own joy, but in such wise as to hinder the
joy of nobody else. But we oppose to this the
question: Is there not some other limitation than this to
individual search for happiness? Is not the ideal
of individual happiness as such an impossible ideal,
not because the individuals in the imperfect state lack harmony, but because, even in the supposed
harmonious state, there would be an inner hindrance to
the pursuit of this ideal by any individual? Would
not the moral insight detect the hindrance, and so
reject this ideal? There are at least some very
familiar reasons for thinking this to be the case. These
reasons do not of themselves prove, but they certainly
suggest, that the notion of a progressive individual
happiness has in it some strange contradiction.
First, then, we have the old empirical truth that
individual happiness is never very nearly approached
by any one, so long as he is thinking about it. The
happy man ought to be able to say, “I am happy.”
He can much more easily say, “I was happy;” for
present reflection upon happiness interferes in most
cases with happiness. So here is an inner difficulty,
very well known, in the way of njaking individual
happiness the goal of life. We have no desire to
dwell here upon this difficulty, which has so often
been discussed. We do not exaggerate its
importance. We consider it only the first suggestion that
the hedonistic ideal of life has some inner
contradiction in its very nature, so that there is some deeper
conflict here going on than that between selfishness
and altruism.
In the second place, we notice that, if anybody
tries to sketch for us the ideal state of human life
as the hedonist conceives it, we are struck with a
sense of the tameness and insignificance of the whole
picture. The result is strange. Here we have been
making peace and harmony among men the
proximate goal of life, yet when this harmony has to be conceived in hedonistic fashion, when the hedonist
gives us his picture of a peaceful society, where, in
the midst of universal good humor, his ideal, the
happiness of everybody concerned, is steadfastly pursued,
we find ourselves disappointed and contemptuous.
That harmless company of jolly good fellows is
unspeakably dull. One listens to the account of their
happiness as one might listen to the laughter and
merry voices of some evening club of jovial strangers,
who had been dining at the hotel in which one
happened himself to be eating a late and frugal supper,
in sobriety and weariness. Those unknown
creatures whose chatter in the next room the traveler
dimly hears at such a time, — a confused babble of
stupid noises; how insignificant their joys seem to
him! Who cares whether that really wretched set
of animals yonder, with their full stomachs and their
misty brains, think themselves happy or not? To be
sure, among them the harmony seems in some sort
to have been momentarily realized. One would no
doubt seem to enjoy it all jnst as well as they, if he
were one of them. But one is viewing it at a
distance, from outside; and so looking at it he possibly
sees that a mass of individual happiness is not just
the ideal of ideals after all.
Just such, however, is the feeling that comes to one
in considering Mr. Spencer’s description of his ideal
society. And similar feelings have been awakened
in many reflective people when they have considered
traditional notions of heaven, and have tried to
estimate the value of the life of individual bliss therein
pictured. Professor William James has recently so well stated these objections in a few brilliant
sentences, that we cannot do better than to quote from
his recent article on “The Dilemma of
Determinism”: —
“Every one must at some time have wondered at that
strange paradox of our moral nature, that, though the
pursuit of outward good is the breath of its nostrils, the
attainment of outward good would seem to be its suffocation
and death. Why does the painting of any paradise
or Utopia, in heaven or on earth, awaken such yawnings
for Nnvana and escape? The white-robed, harp-playing
heaven of our Sabbath-schools, and the ladylike tea-table
elysium represented in Mr. Spencer’s ‘Data of Ethics,’ as
the final consummation of progress, are exactly on a par
in this respect, — lubberlands, pure and simple, one and
all. We look upon them from this delicious mess of
insanities and realities, strivings and deadnesses, hopes and
fears, and agonies and exultations, which form our
present state; and tedium vitæ is the only sentiment they
awaken in our breasts. To our crepuscular natures, born
for the conflict, the Rembrandtesque moral chiaroscuro,
the shifting struggle of the sunbeam in the gloom, such
pictures of light upon light are vacuous and expressionless,
and neither to be enjoyed nor understood. If this
be the whole fruit of the victory, we say; if the generations
of mankind suffered and laid down their lives; if
prophets confessed and martyrs sang in the fire, and all
the sacred tears were shed for no other end than that a
race of creatures of such unexampled insipidity should
succeed, and protract in sæcula sæculorum their contented
and inoffensive lives, — why, at such a rate, better lose
than win the battle, or at all events better ring down the
curtain before the last act of the play, so that a business that began so importantly may be saved from so
singularly flat a winding-up.”
Now not only does all this seem true in such cases,
but we have similar feelings about even so ideal a
picture of happy future life as is Shelley’s, in the last
act of the “Prometheus.” There are indeed many
deeper elements in that noble ideal of Shelley’s, for
he distinctly says that his true ideal is “Man — Oh!
not men”; or, as he again expresses it: —
“One undivided soul of many a soul
Whose nature is its own diviue control,
Where all things flow to all, as rivers to the sea.”
And when he says this, he gets far beyond mere
hedonism. But yet there are other elements in his
account that are not so satisfactory, and that are
decidedly hedonistic. Their expression is indeed
perfect. Surely if the noblest hedonism could ever
succeed with us through the noblest of statements,
such an advocate as Shelley would convince us. But
when the poet glorifies mere individual pleasure, as
he does in part of his picture, our clearest reflection
is that, after all, the end of the tragedy is petty when
compared with the beginning.
For consider what a world it is in which we begin
the poem. At first glance it is a gloomy and terrible
world of brutal wrong. But soon the picture
grows brighter, even while the wrong is depicted.
There is the glorious figure of the suffering Titan,
there is the sweetness of the tender love that watches
him; and above the tyrant himself one feels that
there is somehow a heavenly might, that does not
suffer him to do his worst. The world in which these tilings live is not intolerable. But then come
the spirits that sing to Prometheus, in his anguish,
of immortal deeds done on the earth, of great
thoughts and lofty passions. All these are born of
the conflict, and have their being in the midst of the
terrors of the tyrant’s dominion. It is indeed no
perfect world, this; and one needs some higher
light, such as Prometheus has, to prophesy that the
good will ever triumph; but one sees forthwith that
from the perfect world, if it ever comes, these great
strivings for good, this sublime devotion and love
and heroism, must not wholly vanish. These things
must not be laid aside like old garments whenever
Prometheus wins and is free; their spirit must be
preserved as an element in the higher life of the
future. If they are worth anything, their true
nature must be eternal.
And as for the real worth of this world in which
the evil is so far triumphant — we learn something
of that from Demogorgon. This mysterious being
has indeed no very definite religious philosophy to
offer. He meets plain questions with vague answers,
when Asia and Panthea catechise him; and
one feels it to be well for his reputation as a
profound teacher that his questioners are neither men
nor Socratic inquirers. But still what he tells of the
deep truth that is “imageless,” is enough to make
us feel that even this world of horrors is not without
a divine significance. Jove reigns, but, whatever the
visible world may be, the truth of things is a world of
hope and love, where the real God is somehow above
all and through all, a Spirit of Eternal Goodness. To have found this out in the midst of all the evil
is surely not to have found life wholly vain.
But then what happens? By the accident that,
according to Shelley, rules the world, the revolution
is accomplished, and Zeus is hurled headlong into the
abyss. What glorious life shall now begin? When
the deep and magnificent truth that was felt to be
beneath all the horror of the tyrant’s reign, comes out
into full light, what tongue shall be able to sing the
glories of that beatific vision? We listen eagerly —
and we are disappointed. Prometheus arises grandly
from his bed of torture, and then — he forthwith
bethinks himself of a very pretty cave, where one
might be content to rest a long time in the refined
company of agreeable women. There one will lie,
and wreathe flowers, and tell tales, and sing songs,
and laugh and weep; and the hours will fly swiftly
by. And then what will become of the rest of the
world? Oh, this world simply becomes a theatre of
like individual enjoyments. Everybody to his cave
and his flowers and his agreeable companions. And
that will then be all. No organization; just good
fellowship and fragmentary amusements.
No, that cannot be all. Shelley felt as much,
and added the last act of the play. There we are
to have depicted grandly and vaguely the life of
organized love. The world shall be all alive, and the
universal life shall join in the hymn of praise. All
the powers of reality shall feel the new impulse of
perfect harmony, and what shall spring from their
union shall be some higher kind of existence, in
which there is no longer to be any talk of thine and mine; but the “one undivided soul of many a soul,”
“where all things flow to all, as rivers to the sea,”
shall enter upon a life of transcendent significance,
upon a task of eternal duration, and of a meaning
too high for us poor mortals of this present world
well to comprehend. But this is no longer pure
hedonism, although the verses hereabouts are so full
of the joyous outbursts and of the anticipations of
rapture. In fine, the outcome is no perfect and
harmonious conception at all. We find the joy of the
freed and loving, yet still separate selves, and the
higher life of the all-pervading universal spirit, both
alike glorified; and we never get from the poet any
clearness about their actual relation. Is the world
blessed just because the tyrant no longer interferes
with each man’s flower-wreathing and other
amusements? Or is the sole source of bliss the
disposition of everybody to give everybody else everything?
Or is the real source of the perfection this: that
these souls, no longer oppressed by hatred, have at
last come to feel not only their freedom, but also
some higher aim of universal life? Shelley hints,
but does not consistently make us feel, what his real
result is. There was in fact always about Shelley
that childish innocence of benevolent hope, to which
the only evil seemed to be the hatred of men for one
another, and the highest good the outburst of
universal kindliness. Now that is the beginning of
moral insight, but cannot be all of it. As if the
benevolence would not turn out to be utter emptiness,
unless there is something beyond it! As if there
could be any value in this unity of life, unless there is something to be done by the one life after it is
united! As if the moral insight must not reveal
some deeper truth than can be seen in its first
moments!
One expects what we are coming to. In discussing
this problem of Shelley’s we are reaching the
sense that the moral insight must be yet further
completed, or else it will be all in vain. The moral
insight says to us all: Act as one being. We must
come to that point; but we must also go beyond.
We must ask: What is this one being to do, after
the insight has made all the individuals of one will?
And we already begin to see, in opposition to hedonism,
that it cannot be the end of this universal will
simply to make of us so and so many new separate
individuals once more. The mass of tediously happy
selves seems insipid to our common sense, just
because we all dimly feel the truth that we must now
come to understand better, namely, that
the universal will of the moral insight must aim at the destruction
of all which separates us into a heap of
different selves, and at the attainment of some higher
positive organic aim. The “one undivided soul”
we are bound to make our ideal. And the ideal of
that soul cannot be the separate happiness of you
and of me, nor the negative fact of our freedom
from hatred, but must be something above us all,
and yet very positive.
Had we deduced our principle in any other way
than the one we chose, we should be unable to take
this, our present necessary step forwards. The feeling
of sympathy, for instance, is concerned with the individual object of our sympathy. To sympatliize
with all men is to wish everybody happy, each after
his own fashion. But we rejected that emotional
sympathy as such. We said: The facts of life show
us a conflict of wills. To realize this conflict is to
see that no will is more justified in its separateness
than is any other. This realization is ethical
skepticism, a necessary stage on the way to the true
moral insight. The ethical doubt means and is the
realization of the conflict. But this realization
means, as we see on reflection, a real will in us that
unites these realized wills in one, and demands the
end of their conflict. This is our realization of an
Universal Will. The rest of our doctrine must be
the development of the nature of the universal will.
This will first says to each of the individual wills:
“Submit thyself to me.” Or otherwise put, let
each will be so acted out as if by One Being who
combined in himself all the other wills. Hence the
universal will must demand, not the indefinitely
conceived or dimly and sentimentally desired separate
satisfaction of everybody, but an organic union of
life; such an union as this our world would try to
make of itself if it were already in empirical fact
what the universal will demands it to be, namely,
one Self. This one Self, however, could no longer
will to cut itself up again into the separate empirical
selves, any more than it could in any narrow,
priggish fashion set itself up for a new specimen of
a lofty individual, to be obeyed as an arbitrary law-giver.
It would demand all the wealth of life that
the separate selves now have; and all the unity that any one individual now seeks for himself. It would
aim at the fullest and most organized life conceivable.
And this its aim would become no longer
merely a negative seeking for harmony, but a
positive aim, demanding the perfect Organization of
Life.
III.
But the postulate of all hedonism, utilitarian or
other, this postulate of the absolute worth of
individual satisfaction, finds its practical refutation for
every growing character in yet another form.
Everybody has tried to realize the ideal of individualism,
this ideal of a happy or satisfied self, either for
himself or for some loved one; and everybody finds, if
he tries the thing long enough, what a hollow and
worthless business it all is. If there is, or is possible
anywhere, a really satisfied self, it certainly has no
place in any fleshly body; and the reason is not
alone what disappointed people call the
“disagreeable order of things in this wicked world,” but the
inner contradictions of this notion of a perfected
human self. Let us remind ourselves of some of these
contradictions.
Hedonism has no meaning, unless the satisfied
human self is logically possible. The ideal of hedonism,
with all its vagueness, has at least one essential
element, in that it demands the satisfaction of
human selves by the free supply of all that they desire
for themselves. Hedonism therefore must and does
assert that what a man desires is his own contentment;
so that, if you could, physically speaking, give him all that he asks for himself, you would have
reached the goal for him. But now, if all this is a
delusion, if in fact a man does not really want his
own satisfaction alone, but does actually want
something more, that is not his individual satisfaction, and
that is not to be attained through his satisfaction,
then the hedonistic ideal does not express the truth
of life. And this paradoxical experience we all get,
sooner or later. We find that our little self does
desire something that, if gained, would be not its
own satisfaction at all, but its own destruction in its
separate life as this self. So the aim of life cannot
be ultimately hedonistic. For, if possessed of the
moral insight, we cannot will that each self should
get the greatest possible aggregate of separate
satisfactions, when in truth no one of the selves seeks
merely an aggregate of self-satisfactions as such, but
when each does seek something else that is unattainable
in the form of separate self-satisfaction.
But possibly a reader may incredulously demand
where the proof is of this self-contradictory desire
that all the selves are declared to have. The proof
lies in the general fact that to be fully conscious of
one’s own individual life as such is to be conscious
of a distressing limitation. This limitation every one
very shrewdly notices for the first in other people.
The knowledge of it expresses itself in personal
criticism. One first puts the matter very naïvely thus,
that, whereas the rule of life for one’s own person is
simply to get all the satisfaction that one can, the
appearance of anybody else who pretends to be content
with himself must be the signal not for admiration at the sight of his success, but for a good deal
of coutempt. One sees at once that he is a person
of serious limitations. One sees and feels perfections
that the other has not. One despises then the other
man’s complacency, because it is so plainly founded
in illusion. “If he could only see himself as others
see him,” one says, “he could not be self-satisfied.”
Criticism thus seems to indicate why he ought to be
discontented, and why he would, if he knew more,
feel a contempt for himself. All such criticism is
really an abandonment of the hedonistic principle.
If an individual ought to be dissatisfied, although he
is actually satisfied, and if he ought to be dissatisfied
merely because he has not some perfection that
exists in somebody else, then the doctrine that a self
reaches its goal in so far as ifc reaches inner
contentment is given up. No benevolent hedonist has any
business to criticise a happy man who is harming
nobody by his happiness. He is at the goal, or
approximately so. Let him alone. To do otherwise,
by criticising him, is a crime.
But no; every one feels that the true goal is not
attained for this man. And this feeling, though in
itself as feeling it proves nothing, is the first
suggestion to many of some deeper truth. This truth,
however, enters like iron into his soid, when
somebody else ably and justly and severely criticises him
in his turn. Here, for example, I have been for a
time content with myself, and have been saying to
my soul: “Soul, take thy ease,” and here comes one
who says to me, very justly, “Thou fool,” and points
out some great lack in my conduct, or in my characcharacter, or in my knowledge. And now I have a strange
experience of conflicting passions. This critic has
caused me a sharp pang. Perhaps I hate him for it;
but then, when I go away and think the matter over,
I see that as to the fact, he is right. This great
limitation does actually exist for me, and perhaps I
cannot remove it; so I can but suffer from the sense of
it. I was innocent and ignorant before, and
therefore happy. If the critic had not showed me to
myself, I should have kept this bliss. But it is in
vain now to think of returning to that innocence. I
am indeed a wretch and a fool; and how shall I
escape myself? Alas for my lost pleasure in
contemplating my fancied perfection!
But no: cannot I in fact return to that ignorance,
and to the blissful illusion of my own worth once
more? Surely I can if I but try awhile. To flatter
myself, to curse the critic, to talk of his jealousy and
of his blindness: surely this will bring me back to
my ignorance again in time. He will be forgotten,
and I contented. But once more, my enlightened
self revolts from this lie. The defect is real, and I
know it. Would my ignorance make it less real?
To have this defect and to suffer from it is bad
enough; but with horror do I now contemplate the
state of going on forever with this defect, but still
ignorant of it and so not suffering from it. My old
innocence seems really pitiful. It actually adds much
to my present pang of chagrin, that I previously
ought to have felt the chagrin, and yet had it not.
I tremble when I reflect how, amid all that selfish
complacency, I really was a fool the whole time, and appeared so to discerning people, and yet knew it
not. And therefore now, through all the pang of
the discovery, runs the feeling that I would not if I
could, no, not for any delight of complacency, return
to that state of hollow, delicious, detestable
ignorance. It was a fool’s paradise; but I have escaped
from it. I know my nakedness, and I prefer the fruit
of the tree of knowledge, with bitter exile, to the
whole of the delights of that wretched place. It is
a contradictory state, this. My knowledge is torture
to my foolish, sensitive self; yet while I writhe with
the vainest of pangs, I despise utterly the thought
of escaping it by illusion, or by forgetfulness, or by
any means save the actual removal or conquest of
the defect. And this I feel even when the defect is
seen to be utterly irremovable without the destruction
of myself. Better go on despising myself, and
feeling the contempt of others, than return to the
delights of foolishness; or, if the pain of knowing
what I am is insupportable, then it were better
to die, than to live in despicable ignorance. Oh,
wretched man that I am! Who shall deliver me?
Is all this mere emotion? or is it insight? In
fact it is a growing, though still imperfect insight,
a form of the moral insight. The pangs of this
wounded self-love are themselves in truth also
vanity, like the complacent self-love that they mourn;
but only through the gateway of this pain can most
people get beyond these vanities of individualism.
For this wounded self-love, that refuses to be
comforted by any deliberate return to its old illusions,
is, as Adam Smith long since pointed out, an emotional expression of the result of putting ourselves
at the point of view of our critics. We see our
limitations as they see them. Our will conforms
itself, therefore, to their contemptuous will concerning
us, because we realize the existence of that will.
In recognizing and sharing their contempt, we
therefore realize in part the universal will that must
condemn all individual limitations as such. We
practically experience the truth that a perfectly fair judge
of us all would not be satisfied merely with our
individual contentments as such, but would also demand
the destruction of all our individual limitations. We
thus get practically far beyond hedonism. We see
that as we are weak and wretched in the eyes of one
another, we should all be far more so in the eyes of
a ofod Our ideal of life must then be the notion of
a life where no one being could fairly criticise any
other at all. But such a life would be no longer a
life of separate individuals, each limited to his petty
sphere of work. It would be a life in which self was
lost in a higher unity of all the conscious selves.
Singular may appear this conception even now,
after all that we have said; but it is a practical
conception in our every-day human life. That we
criticise the limitations of others, and desire them to
sacrifice their pleasures for the sake of removing these
limitations, may be regarded at first as our cruel
caprice, if you will so regard it. But when the edge
of the sword is turned against us, when we, feeling
the bitterness of criticism and seeing our limitations,
long to be beyond them, hate ourselves for them, and
yet refuse to escape from the pain of all this by forgetfulness of the defect, we pass from capricious
criticism to something higher. We accept with
agony the point of view of the one who stands outside
of us. And, so doing, we pass in effect to the
acceptance of the demands of the universal will. If there
were a will that included in one consciousness all our
separate wills, it could not will our individual
defects as such. It woid.d be absolute critic, as well
as absolute harmonizer, of all of us. It would tear
down these individual barriers of our petty lives,
as the corporation of a great city may tear down
wretched old rookeries. It would demand that we
be one in spirit, and that our oneness be perfect.
But if we experience this universal will, we
experience that hedonism, whose life-blood is the insistence
upon individual states as such, cannot be upheld by
the moral insight, either now, or at any future stage
of our human life on this earth. We perceive too
that we all have a deep desire for self-destruction, in
so far as we recognize that our self-love means absence of perfection.
IV.
We have seen in general the moral outcome of
individualism. Let us study some of its forms and
fortunes more in detail. Individualism, viewed as the
tendency to hold that the ideal of life is the separate
happy man, is itself yery naturally the normal
tendency of unreflecting strong natures, to whom happiness
has been in a fair human measure already given.
Children and child-like men, full of vigor, are innocently
selfish; or, when they act unselfishly, their whole ideal is the making of others like themselves.
They fall into a notion about life that the author
not long since heard well-expressed by a cheerful
young friend, a former fellow-student, who, having
early plunged into a busy life, has already won both
influence and property. This man, full of the enthusiasm
of first success, v/as talking over his life with
the writer, and fell to defining his opinions on
various subjects, such as young men like to discuss. At
last he was asked about the view of life that he had
already formed in his little experience. He was
quick, honest, and definite in his answer, as he always
has been. “My notion of a good life is,” he
said, “that you ought to help your friends and whack
your enemies.” The notion was older than the
speaker remembered; for Socratic dialogues on the
Just, with their ingenious Sophists making bold
assertions, form no part of his present stock of
subjects for contemplation. But what was interesting
in the fresh and frank manner of the speech was
the clearness of the conviction that a world of
successful and friendly selves, whose enemies chanced
to be all recently “whacked,” would be at the goal
of bliss. Such indeed is and must be the individualism
of the successful and unreflecting man, by
whom all the world is classified as being either his
or not his, as to a cow all is either cow feed or not
cow feed. A man in this position has never yet
known the burden of Faust’s soul when he says.
Cursed he what as possession charms us. If such
a man gets any moral insight, it will be on this stage
imperfect. He will seek only to multiply himself in the forms of other men. These he will call his
friends. That in which he does not recognize
himself, he will “whack.”
But most men cannot keep this form of the
illusion of individualism. They pass most of their lives
in the midst of disappointment. The self cannot get
its objects. The ideal independence is hampered.
The stubborn world asserts itself against us. We
feel the littleness of our powers and of our plans.
The broken and despairing self has to seek refuge
elsewhere. And so individualism most commonly
assumes another shape. In inner self-development
we seek what the world refuses us in outer self-realization.
Thoughts at least are free. Our emotions
are our own. The world does not understand them;
but the world is cold and unappreciative. Let us
be within ourselves what we cannot get in the outer
world. Let us be inwardly complete, even if we are
outwardly failures. Then we shall outmt the cruel
world, and produce the successful self, in spite of
misfortunes.
The reader need not be reminded of what vast
development individualism has undergone in this
direction. Literature is full of accounts of struggles
for inward self-realization, made by men whose outer
growth is impeded. The Hamlets and the Fausts
of poetry, the saints and the self-conscious martyrs
of great religious movements, are familiar examples.
We have already in a former chapter studied the
outcome of this romantic individualism in a few cases.
There is no time to dwell here afresh at any length
on so familiar a theme, but for the present we may point out that all illustrations of the tendency fall
into two classes, representing respectively the
sentimental and the heroic individualism. These are the
forms of that Nobler Selfishness which benevolent
hedonism defends. They are efforts to find the
contented and perfected self. Their failure is the
failure of individualism, and therewith of hedonism.
As for the sentimental individualism, we have seen
already how unstable are its criteria of perfection,
how full of fickleness is its life. The sentimental self
admits that the world cannot understand it, and will
not receive it; but it insists that this neglect comes
because the world does not appreciate the strength
and beauty of the inner emotional life. The ideal,
then, is devotion to a culture of the beautiful soul,
and to a separation of this soul from all other life.
Let other souls be saved m like fashion. One does
not object to their salvation; but one insists that
each saved soul dwells apart in its own sensitive feelings,
in the world of higher artistic pleasures. Now
in fact such lives may be not uninteresting to the
moralist; but no moralist can be really content with
their ideal. Its best direct refutation is after all a
sense of humor strong enough to let the sensitive and
beautiful soul see once in a while how comical is its
demure pursuit of these subjective phantoms. This
miserable life of deep inward excitements and longings,
how absurd it seems to any critic who, standing
outside, sees that there is nothing more than froth
and illusion and hypocrisy in it. Heine’s anecdote
of the monkey boiling his own tail so as to get an
inward sense of the nature and worth of the art of cookery, is what first comes to mind when we see
such a man as this subjective idealist of the
emotions. You have only to get him to laugh heartily
once or twice, and his Philistine narrowness can no
longer content him. “Why is just my feeling worth
so much?” he will say. And then he will wake up
to observe that his ideal was all a bad dream; and
that an experience has no more or less worth because
it happens in connection with the decomposition of
his particular brain-stuff. Faust discovered that, as
we have seen; and so in time will any other sensible
man. The real reason after all why Mephistopheles
could not get Faust’s soul was that Faust could
understand the Mephistophelean wit, which was
throughout destructive of individualism. The
sentimentalist who has no humor is once for all given
over to the devil, and need sign no contract. He
stares into every mirror that he passes, and, cursing
the luck that makes him move so fast in this world,
he murmurs incessantly, Verweile doch, du hist so schön.
And so in the presence of the moral insight
he is forthwith and eternally damned, unless some
miracle of grace shall save him. It is noteworthy
that one or two of our recent and yoimgest novelists
in this country have gained a certain reputation by
sentimental stories of collegiate and post-graduate
life that precisely illustrate this simple-minded but
abominable spirit. May these young authors repent
while there is time, if indeed they can repent.
Less dangerous to genuine morality, and far
higher in the scale of worth, is the Titanic form of
individualism, the form that has given birth to such expressions as the Everlasting No of “Sartor
Resartus.” The name of Prometheus at once springs to
our lips when we think of this view of life.
Prometheus is so fully the representative of Titanism,
that there is no better way of characterizing its
whole spirit than to call it the Heresy of
Prometheus, the finest of all moral heresies, and the last.
The world will not grant you outward freedom, and
you see the hollowness of that inward life of blessed
emotions. You despise it in others; you see that
the moral insight cannot approve such a form of
selfish separation in you or in them. But there is
another form of self-development. You must be
something. Why not be heroic? Possibly the ideal
is a world of courageous selves, that find their
perfection in their independence of action. Prometheus
gave this ideal a peculiar emphasis by reason of the
fact that he had a Zeus to defy. But the same ideal,
in a more moderate expression, is the ideal of many
a quiet, matter of fact man, who has little happiness,
but much spirit and energy, who is too busy and too
healthy to be sentimental, who knows little of poetry,
who has never heard the name of Prometheus, but
who knows what it is to hold his own in the fight
with the world. This man you cannot put down;
he cares little for the opinions of others. There is
no judge above him save God or his conscience. He
is no saint; but he is at least an admirable fellow.
He belongs to the race of Achilles; he believes in
the gospel of eternal warfare against whatever seems
to him evil. He respects others; he wants to do
good in his way. But he thinks that the best good that he could do would be to make other men brave
like himself. This lonely, active, indomitable self
he thinks the ideal type of perfection. For him the
moral insight does not go beyond the approval of
such life as this, indefinitely multiplied.
It is always a delight to follow this Titanism in
its various shapes. Buddhism, as we know, is a
religion wholly founded on self-denial, and it counsels
austere self-extinction. And yet, by a strange freak
of moral dialectics, it is Buddhism that has given
us some of the best expressions of the Titanic
individualism. In a Buddhist homily in the Sutta Nipâta
one may find such an outburst as the following,
— one of the finest of the confessions of the
Titans: —
“Having laid aside the rod against all beings, and not
hurting any of them, let no one wish for a son, much less
for a companion; let him wander alone like a rhinoceros.
“In him who has intercourse with others, affections
arise, and then the pain which follows affection; considering
the misery that originates in affection, let one wander
alone like a rhinoceros.
“He who has compassion on his friends and confidential
companions loses his own advantage, having a fettered
mind; seeing this danger in friendship, let one wander
alone like a rhinoceros.
“Just as a large bamboo-tree, with its branches entangled
in each other, such is the care one has with children
and wife; but like the shoot of the bamboo not chnging
to anything, let one wander alone like a rhinoceros.
“As a beast unbound in the forest goes feeding at pleasure, so let the wise man, considering only his own will,
wander alone like a rhinoceros. . . .
. . . “Discontented are some ascetics, also some
householders, dwelling in houses; let one, caring little
about other people’s children, wander alone like a
rhinoceros.
“If one acquires a clever companion, an associate
righteous and wise, let him, overcoming all dangers, wander
about with him glad and thoughtful.
“If one does not acquire a clever companion, an
associate righteous and wise, then as a king abandoning his
conquered kingdom, let him wander alone like a
rhinoceros. . . .
. . . “Seeing bright golden bracelets, well-wrought by
the goldsmith, striking against each other when there are
two on one arm, let one wander alone like a rhinoceros.
“Thus, if I join myself with another, I shall swear or
scold; considering this danger in future, let one wander
alone like a rhinoceros. . . .
. . . “Both cold and heat, hunger and thirst, wind and
a burning sun, and gadflies and snakes, — having
overcome all these things, let one wander alone like a
rhinoceros.
“As the elephant, the strong, the spotted, the large,
after leaving the herd walks at pleasure in the forest, even
so let one wander alone like a rhinoceros. . . .
“Not adorning himself, not looking out for sport,
amusement, and the dehght of the pleasure in the world; on
the contrary, being loath of a life of dressing, speaking
the truth, let one wander alone like a rhinoceros. . . .
. . . “This is a tie, in this there is little happiness,
little enjoyment, but more of pain, this is a fishhook, so
having understood, let a thoughtful man wander alone
like a rhinoceros.
“Having torn the ties, having broken the net as a fish
in the water, being like a fire not returning to the burnt
place, let one wander alone like a rhinoceros. . . .
. . . “Not abandoning seclusion and meditation, always
wandering in accordance with the Dhammas, seeing misery
in the existences, let one wander alone like the
rhinoceros.
“Wishing for the destruction of desire, being careful,
no fool, learned, strenuous, considerate, restrained,
energetic, let one wander alone like a rhinoceros.
“Like a lion not trembling at noises, like the wind not
caught in a net, like a lotus not stained by water, let one
wander alone like a rhinoceros.
“As a lion strong by his teeth, after overcommg all
animals, wanders victorious as the king of the animals, and
haunts distant dwelling-places, even so let one wander
alone like a rhinoceros.”
. . . “They cultivate the society of others, and serve
them for the sake of advantage; friends without a motive
are now difficult to get, men know their own profit and
are impure; therefore let one wander alone like a
rhinoceros.”
When one contemplates the ideal of the heroic
individualism in this its purest form, rugged, empty of
sensuous comforts, yet noble and inspiring in all but
the highest degree, one feels how hard the decision
as to its worth will be, unless the moral insight gives
very definitely and authoritatively its ruling in the
matter. But fortunately, in trying to judge of even
so splendid a caprice as this, we are not left to our
individual opinion. The will of the Titan as to the
world of life is simply, by hypothesis, not the
universal will. The one being that included in his life all our petty lives, how must he regard this self-seeking
loneliness of disposition? What is this heroic life
but an overflow from the great stream of universal
life, a pool, that, left to itself by some subsiding
flood, slowly dries away in its shallow stagnancy,
until it becomes a mud-puddle? And as for the
proof of this, what becomes of your hero if you take
him at his word, and leave him to himself like a
rhinoceros? Then indeed he soon sinks to the level of
a peevish animal. His admirable character is what
it is by reason of his conflicts with his fellows, and
by reason of the respect that he excites in others.
Stop talking about him, cease admiring him, do not
even fight with him, ignore him utterly; and with
these external supports see his inner heroism vanish.
He exists as hero, in fact, only because he is in
organic relation to the world about him. His boasted
loneliness is an illusion. Could not Mephistopheles
have his laugh here too?
But the Titan is often properly the hero not only
of a comedy, but also of a tragedy; and a tragedy,
as we know, always discovers to us the gloomy
worthlessness of this individual life as such. Mortal man,
once brought to possess the moral insight, finds his
destiny not in himself, but in the life about him, or
in the ideal life of God. And the tragedy expresses
one way of getting this insight.
In short, just what the Heresy of Prometheus
asserts to be the perfect, namely, the complete and
all-sided development of life, just that can belong only
to the general, not to the individual life. Hence
Titanism always contradicts itself. It says that I, the narrow, limited self, who am dependent for every
quality of my life on constant living intercourse with
other people, must become perfect, independent,
practically infinite. But to ask this is to ask that I
destroy myself, and my Titanism with me. Unquiet
is and must be the life that seeks perfection in any
group of selves. And so the ideal cannot here be
found.
V.
Somewhat hastily, as our limits have required, we
have pursued the definition of our ideal through the
imperfect forms of individualism. And now what
must it be that the moral insight, with its Universal
Will, demands of the possible future moral humanity,
not as the negative task of preparing the way for
goodness, but as the positive ideal task of the
community in which the moral insight is attained? This
demand is: Organize all Life. And this means:
Find work for the life of the coming moral humanity
which shall be so comprehensive and definite that
each moment of every man’s life in that perfect
state, however rich and manifold men’s lives may
then be, can be and will be spent in the
accomplishment of that one highest impersonal work. If such
work is found and accepted, the goal of human
progress will be in so far reached. There will then be
harmony, the negative expression of the moral
insight; and there will be work, and organization of
work. And this work will be no more the work of
so and so many separate men, but it will be the work
of man as man. And the separate men will not know or care whether they separately are happy;
for they shall have no longer individual wills, but
the Universal Will shall work in and through them,
as the one will of two lovers finds itself in the united
life of these twain, so that neither of them asks, as
lover, whether this is his perfection or the other’s
that he experiences. For their love makes them
one. In such wise we must figure to ourselves the
ideal state of humanity. And anything short of
that we are required by the moral insight to alter in
the direction of that end.
The reader may ask, What work can be found
that can thus realize the universal will? It is not
for us to know the whole nature of that work. We
set before us the ideal task to discover such forms
of activity as shall tend to organize life. The
complete organization we cannot now foresee. But we
can foresee in what general direction that human
activity will tend, if it is ever discovered. For we
have certain human activities that do now already
tend to the impersonal organization of the life of
those engaged in them. Such activities are found
in the work of art, in the pursuit of truth, and in a
genuine public spirit. Beauty, Knowledge, and the
State, are three ideal objects that do actually claim
from those who serve them harmony, freedom from
selfishness, and a wholly impersonal devotion. Both
in art and in the service of the state, the weakness
of human nature makes men too often put personal
ambition before the true service of their chosen
ideal. The faultiness of all such individualism is,
however, generally recognized. The dignity and severely impersonal relationships and language of official
life are intended to express the sense that no
individual has as such the right to recognition at the
moment when he exercises an official function. He
lives at the time wholly in his office. The state is
just then everything. Even so all higher criticism
professes to disregard the personal pleasure of the
artist, and the personal whim of the critic. The
production and the criticism of Art are no
amusements of two individuals. They are work done
in the service of the one mistress, the divine art
itself. But still, notwithstanding the recognition of
this ideal devotion to one’s country or to one’s art,
our typical politician and our typical ambitious
artist show us that these activities still but imperfectly
overcome individualism, or lead men to the higher
plane of moral life. Better success in organizing life
one finds, when one passes to the activity of truth-seeking,
especially in fields where human thought
is best master of itself, and best conscious of its
powers. When one considers the work of a company
of scientific specialists, — how each one lives for his
science, and how, when the specialty is advanced
and well organized, no one in official expressions
of his purely scientific purposes dares either to give
himself airs of importance as an individual, or to
show any benevolence or favoritism or fear in
considering and testing the work of anybody else; when
one sees how impersonal is this idea of the scientific
life, how no self of them all is supposed to have a
thought about his science because it pleases him,
but solely because it is true, — when one considers all this, one sees faintly what the ideal relation
of mankind would be, if the ideal work for all men
were found. This devoted scientific spirit is itself
only an ideal even to-day; and all sorts of personal
motives still interfere to disturb its purity. But
here, at all events, one sees dimly in a concrete
instance what the organization of life may yet
become.
Now suppose a world in which men had some one
end of activity that united somehow all the different
strivings of our nature, — æsthetic, social,
theoretical. Suppose that in the pursuit of this end all
the petty, selfish aims of individuals had been
forgotten. Suppose that men said no longer: “I have
won this good thing for myself and my friends,”
but only, “This good is attained,” no matter by
whom. Suppose that thus all life was organized in
and through this activity, so that a man rose up
and lay down to rest, ate and drank, exercised and
amused his senses, met his fellows, talked with them,
lived and planned with them, built his cities,
wandered over the oceans, searched the heavens with
his telescopes, toiled in his laboratories, sang his
songs, wrote his poems, loved and died, all for the
service of this one great work, and knew his life
only as the means to serve that one end, then would
the ideal of the moral insight be attained. The
world of life would be as one will, working through
all and in all, seeking the ends of no one individual,
caring not for any stupid and meaningless “aggregate”
of individual states, but getting what as insight
it demands, the absolute Unity of Life. Then indeed we should have reached the ideal; and this
being the ideal, all is good that helps us in the
direction thereof, and all is evil that drives us in the
opposing direction.
The imperfection and the relative justification in
its place of benevolent hedonism are thus indicated.
The moral insight being attained by all men as an
experience, this insight could not will for individuals
such painful experiences as would degrade the
sufferers below the level of the insight itself, back to
the struggles and the illusions of individualism. It
would be the business of men then as now, to remove
useless pain out of the world, not however for any
other reason than that pain implies separation of
the sufferer from the consciousness of universal life,
and consequent disharmony of his will in its relation
to other wills. Pain that springs from selfish
disappointments we must often temporarily increase, that
we may lead a man out of himself. But for the
rest, the moral insight rejects pain, though only
because it means disharmony of the wills that are in
the world.
Thus we have completed the expression of our gen-
eral ideal. We must add a few concrete precepts
that this ideal has to give us concerning the conduct
of our daily life. Plainly, if such a goal as this is
what we aim at from afar, the acts of our lives must
be influenced by it. What relation between me and
my neighbor to-day does this moral law establish?
Thou and I, neighbor, have in this world no rights
as individuals. We are instruments. The insight
that begins in me when I find thee, must go further. I find not only thee, but also Life Universal.
Inasmuch as I do anything for thee, I do it also to
the life universal; but, even so, it is only because
I serve the life universal that I dare serve thee.
Thy happiness, however near and dear thou art to
me, is but a drop in this vast ocean of life. And
we must be ready to sacrifice ourselves to the Whole.
But while we live together, and while we may
without sin enjoy each other's presence, how shall we treat
each other? As mere masses of happy or miserable
states? As selves to be made separately perfect!
No, that cannot be. We must live united with each
other and the world. Therefore must we do our
part to find work vast enough to bring us all in so
far as may be into unity, without cramping the
talent of any of us. Each then is to do his work, but
so as to unite with the work of others. How may
we accomplish this? By seeking to develop every
form of life that does bring men into such oneness.
Our vocation, whatever it be, must not end simply
in increasing what people call the aggregate
happiness of mankind, but in giving human life more
interconnection, closer relationship. Therefore we
must serve as we can art, science, truth, the state,
not as if these were machines for giving people
pleasant feelings, but because they make men more united.
When we urge or seek independence of character,
we must do so only because such independence is a
temporary means, whose ultimate aim is harmony and
unity of all men on a higher plane. In all this we
must keep before us very often the high ideal that
we are trying to approach. And when we judge of a good action we must say, not that this was good
because it made some one happy, but that it was good
because it tended directly or remotely to realize the
Universal Will.
And so, however much mere harmony may be our
aim, we must be ready very often temporarily to fight
with disorganizing and separating tendencies, forces,
or men. When we fight we must do so for the sake
of conquering a peace in the name of the Highest.
And so we must fight resolutely, fearlessly,
mercilessly. For we care not how many stubbornly
disorganizing spirits are crushed on the way. The One
Will must conquer. But on the other side we must
be very careful of every soul, and of every tendency
that may, without destruction, be moulded into the
service of the Universal Will. The moral insight
desires that no hair fall from the head of any living
creature unnecessarily. The one aim is stern to its
steadfast enemies, but it is infinitely regardful of all
the single aims, however they may seem wayward,
that can at last find themselves subdued and yet
realized in its presence, and so conformed to its will.
All these rivulets of purpose, however tiny, all these
strong floods of passion, however angry, it desires to
gather into the surging tides of its infinite ocean,
that nothing may be lost that consents to enter. Its
unity is no abstraction. The One Will is not a one-sided
will. It desires the realization of all possible
life, however rich, strong, ardent, courageous,
manifold such life may be, if only this life can enter into
that highest unity. All that has will is sacred to it,
save in so far as any will refuses to join with the others in the song and shout of the Sons of God.
Its warfare is never intolerance, its demand for
submission is never tyranny, its sense of the excellence
of its own unity is never arrogance; for its warfare
is aimed at the intolerance of the separate selves,
its yoke is the yoke of complete organic freedom,
its pride is in the perfect development of all life.
When we serve it, we must sternly cut off all that
life in ourselves or in others that cannot ultimately
conform to the universal will; but we have nothing
but love for every form of sentient existence that can
in any measure express this Will.
VI.
We have done for the present with the ideal, and
must turn to reality. Our religious consciousness
wants support for us in our poor efforts to do right.
Is this real world that we have so naively assumed
thus far, in any wise concerned to help us in realizing
ideals, or to support us by any form of approval in
our search for the right? We must face this
problem coolly and skeptically, if we want any result.
We must not fear the thunders of any angry
dogmatic thinker, nor the pain that such researches must
cause us if they are unsuccessful. It is something
very precious that we seek, and we must run great
risks, if need be, to get it.
Let us begin to define a little better what this is
that we seek. By a support for moral acts in outer
reality, we do not mean merely or mainly a power
that will reward goodness. The moral insight cares not for individual rewards. Only the good intention
is truly moral. Good acts done for pay are selfish
acts. So the outer support that we want in our
morality is not reward as such. We want to know that,
when we try to do right, we are not alone; that there
is something outside of us that harmonizes with our
own moral efforts by being itself in some way moral.
This something may be a person or a tendency. Let
us exemplify what we mean by some familiar cases.
Job seeks, in his consciousness of moral integrity,
for outer support in the midst of his sufferings.
Now whatever he may think about rewards, they are
not only rewards that he seeks. He wants a
vindicator, a righteous, all-knowing judge, to arise, that
can bear witness how upright he has been; such a
vindicator he wants to see face to face, that he may
call upon him as a beholder of what has actually
happened. “Oh that I knew where I might find
him, that I might come even to his seat. I would
order my cause before him, and fill my mouth with
arguments. I would know the words which he
would answer me, and understand what he would
say unto me. . . . There the righteous might dis-
pute with him; so should I be delivered forever from
my judge. Behold I go forward, but he is not there;
and backward, but I cannot perceive him: On the
left hand, where he doth work, but I cannot behold
him: he hideth himself on the right hand, that I
cannot see him : But he knoweth the way that I
take: when he hath tried me I shall come forth as
gold.”
So again in the great parable of the judgment day, in the twenty-fifth chapter of Matthew, the moral
force of the story is not expressed by the rewards
and punishments described, any more than in Elijah’s
vision on Horeb, — the Lord was in the thunder and
in the fire. But the moral force of the scene lies in
the concluding words that the judge is made to speak
to the multitudes of just and unjust. “Inasmuch as
ye did it unto the least of these, ye did it unto me.”
That is, if we may paraphrase the words of the judge:
“I,” he says, “represent all beings. Their good is
mine. If they are hungry or naked or sick or
imprisoned, so am I. We are brethren; ours is all
one universal life. That I sit in this seat, arbiter
of heaven and hell, makes me no other than the
representative of universal life. Such reverence as ye
now bear to me is due, and always was due, to the
least of these my brethren.” The infinite sacredness
of all conscious life, that is the sense of the story;
the rest is the scenic accompaniment, which, whether
literally or symbolically true, has no direct moral
significance. Now the knowledge such as Job sought,
the knowledge that there is in the universe some
consciousness that sees and knows all reality, including
ourselves, for which therefore all the good and evil
of our lives is plain fact, — this knowledge would be
a religious support to the moral consciousness. The
knowledge that there is a being that is no respecter
of persons, that considers all lives as equal, and that
estimates our acts according to their true value, —
this would be a genuine support to the religious need
in us, quite apart from all notions about reward
and punishment. A thinking being, a seer of all good and evil, is thus desired. This thinking being
would still have religious significance, even if it had
no other attributes than these. Should we find it
necessary to regard this being as without affection,
sympathy, or even power to act, as without willingness
to avenge wrong-doing, if we had to deprive it
of everything else that is human save knowledge;
let this be a passionless and perfect knowledge,
an absolutely fair judgment of our moral actions,
and there would still be in the world something of
religious value. It is not affirmed that we ought
to rest content with such a conception as this, but
at all events this conception would not be valueless.
Even so again, the conception of some natural
tendency in the world that, being “a power not ourselves,”
“makes for righteousness,” this conception,
as Mr. Matthew Arnold has so well shown us, would
have a religious value. Something of this kind then,
more or less definite and full of life, is what we seek.
What indication is there that such search is not
hopeless? For the author’s part, he professes to be
quite willing to accept any result of research,
however gloomy or skeptical, to which he is led by
genuine devotion to the interests of human thought as
thought. But he insists that as moral beings we
should make clear to ourselves what are the
interests of thought, and that we should see whether they
do lead us to results that are not wholly skeptical,
nor altogether gloomy. There is no reason for
clipping our own wings for fear lest we should escape
from our own coops and fly over the palings into
our own garden. Let us get all the satisfaction from philosophy that we can. In truth we shall never get
too much.
But, for the rest, the reader must be reminded of
one thing that was said in the opening chapter about
the magnitude and boldness of the demands that
religious philosophy makes in coming to the study of
the world. We said that we will be satisfied only
with the very best that we can get. We want to
find some reality that our ideal aims can lead us to
regard as of Infinite Worth. If we cannot find that,
then the best possible aspect of reality must be
chosen instead. We will not be satisfied with little,
if we can get much. Our religious demands are
boundless. We will not falsify the truth; nor yet
will we dread any disaster to our ideal aims,
however great the disappointment that would result from
failure. But, while pursuing the truth with
reverence, we will not withdraw our demands until we see
that we can get no certain success in them.
We insist, therefore, that the religiously valuable
reality in the world shall be, if so we can find it, a
Supreme Reality, no mere chance outcome of special
circumstances, but an ultimate aspect of things.
Furthermore, the special form that our ideal has
taken demands another character in our object of
religious satisfaction. It must be such as to support
the realization of our particular ideal. If a power,
it must aim at the unity of our lives; if in some
other way approved as the deepest truth of thiugs, it
must show us how our ideal either can be realized
by us, or else is already realized at the heart of this
truth.
Such is the work of our second book. We
approach it not as if we expected any mystical
revelation, but solely as having for our one desire to find
out what a sensible man ought reasonably to think of
the world wherein he finds himself.
Notes
Uncharted Knowledge
Wisdom From Previous Realities
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