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THE CONTROL OF IDEALS
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THE CONTROL OF IDEALS
A Contribution to the Study of Ethics By H. B. VAN WESEP
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New York ALFRED- A- KNOPF Mcmxx
COPYRIGHT, 1920, BY -pv -7-0 7
ALFRED A. KNOPF, Inc. f -> ^ /
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMBEICA
PREFACE
In the few chapters that follow I have aimed at writing a reconstruction book dealing with first prin- ciples and concerned primarily with the matter of war prevention. Just as after an influenza epidemic it is one thing for a nation to regain its health and another thing to prevent future outbreaks, so after a war it is one thing to restore the piping times of peace and another thing to learn by what steps to avoid future conflicts. This book deals with principles of prevention rather than methods of cure.
The only way to outgrow war is through education; and the problem is one not so much of each man ed- ucating his neighbour, as of each man educating himself into independence of certain powerful tradi- tions and ideals that apparently make war inevitable. The crux of the situation is the personal problem of changing our attitude toward ideals. The attitude aimed at is expressed in the phrase that "we can af- ford to laugh a little at our own ideals and hold them no less dear."
The root of modern wars lies in the clash of ideals. Along with numerous scientific inventions and theories, the constructive imagination of man has,
during the last few centuries, been throwing off a
y
434551
vi Preface
mass of conflicting ideals. Our varying dreams of power, acquisition, beauty, culture, liberty, and what not have gained such a terrific hold on us that for them millions gladly lay down their lives.
The remedy is not fewer ideals but the control of ideals. Imagination and its ideals should be sub- jected to laws much in the same way that Aristotle long ago subjected ideas and the whole realm of reasoning to the laws of logic. A few of these laws, more particularly the fundamental one that dreams are not greater than the dreamer, or in other words that human life is prior to human ideals, I have tried to lay down.
The book falls into two parts: the first section takes up the origin, nature, and function of human ideals; the later chapters develop a theory of the supreme worth of the individual and of human life. This theory does not involve acceptance of any of the recent variants of socialism or anarchy. I have worked ahead on the well-established basis of in- dividualism.
As a contribution to ethics, this book represents an attempt at a fresh approach to some old problems. The aim has been to limit the discussion to funda- mental issues connected with the prevention of war. Abstruse and hackneyed terms peculiar to ethics or economics have been avoided, as the book is intended to appeal first of all to the average intelligent reader with no special training in technical terminology.
Preface vii
The book is not a complete practical ethics nor a metaphysics of ethics. It calls for a further state- ment on the detailed application of the principles laid down — a task which, however, is outside the scope of this short work.
My thanks are due to Professor R. M. Wenley of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Michigan for his kindness in accepting the time- consuming task of reading the manuscript of one of his former students. I am especially indebted to him for the thorough manner in which this was done, and for his many helpful suggestions and emenda- tions. I also wish to acknowledge my debt to the contagious enthusiasm with which Alieda van Wesep has served as my public in the preparation of this book to which she has contributed numerous valuable hints and ideas. It is impossible, of course, to ac- knowledge in detail my indebtedness to printed sources, but an exception should be made in the case of the published works of Professor Warner Fite of Princeton, one of the first and foremost expounders of individualism in America.
H. B. VAN Wesep.
New York, April 8, 1920.
CONTENTS
I. Variety of Ideals 1-14
Man an imaginative animal — Ideals the product of the imagination — Their classification into ideals of power, beauty, and truth.
11. Attitude Toward Ideals 15-26
Naive worship of ideals — Their human origin — Dan- ger elements if not used as a means to an end — Relation of war to ideals — Laughing at our own ideals.
III. Assimilation of Ideals 27-38
Multiplicity of ideals — Assimilated like food — Change into ideas, laws, customs and institutions — Philosophy, the history of successful ideals — Need of diversity in mental food — Life superior to ideals — Living hy not for ideals.
IV. The Survival of Ideals 39-49
Struggle for existence among ideals — Ideals bio- logical variations of the human type — Their envir- onment and proper battle field — Importance of keep- ing ideals in realm of imagination till ripe.
V. Nations 50-62
Tendency to limit ideals to a few great ones — Deification of supreme ideals — Nations the present day gods — A nation a psychological entity — Civil- ized and uncivilized nations — ^Vanishing point of nations — Earthianism.
Contents
VI. Development of Self-Consciousness 63-70
Individual self-determination. — Our business to be careful of the single life — Growth of self-conscious- ness means greater regard for the individual — Meaning of civilization.
VII. Society Versus the Individual 71-79
Present institutions the result of shallow coopera- tion— Feeble concerted action traceable to feeble individual action — Mankind not; anthropomorphic enough — Via media between animals and gods — Spiritual hunger — Case of Tolstoy — Spiritual growth.
VIII. Utopianism 80-90
Utopianism or exaltation of the State — Plato and Hegel compared — Christianity, science, and art — Deepening of the inner life.
IX. Democracy 91-100
Right of individual to life — Equality and inequality of men — Nietzsche and Christianity — Immorality of self-sacrifice — Role of persuasion in Greek democ- racies.
X. Tolerance 101-107
Religious tolerance and national tolerance — Mak- ing private issues out of public ones — Dangers of class consciousness and class intolerance.
XI. Harmony 108-120
Historical solution of the problem of harmony — Greeks, Leibnitz, Bergson — Ethical integration.
XII. Symbiosis 121-130
Natural organisms as a solution of inequality — Par- asitism and self-sacrifice — Division of labor — ^Func- tion of the expert — Mutual usefulness.
Contents xi
XIII. Atomism 131-138
Individual the atom of society — Unit of ethics — Destructive element in ethical growth — Considera- tion of arguments against individualism — Death — Self-realization.
XIV. Functions of Ideals 139-145
The hooks on the atom — Human character of ideals — Function to bind man to man — Uncrowning of dangerous ideals — Necessity of helpful ideals — Sanctity of individual as creator of ideals.
XV. Moral Courage 146-150
Game of life — ^Fight against nature and death — Moral courage — "Never say die" spirit in man.
THE CONTROL OF IDEALS
CHAPTER I
VARIETY OF IDEALS
Man is not so much a rational as an imaginative animal. Born from passion, rooted in mystery, and our lives a continual prey to conflicting emotions, it is almost a travesty that we should plume ourselves on rationality. The most distinctive thing about us is not our reason but the magic eye of the imagina- tion by which we look into the world, not of things as they are, but of things as they should be. There is no more deeply human quality about us than this supplementary vision which has turned us into denizens of two distinct and separate realms. The imagination is the source of that ethical uneasiness which has made thousands think that they were in this world but not of it; it is the root of that unrest which will not let us settle down either as animals or as angels. We have become so genuinely amphi- bious that we no longer know whether our true home is among the things we see with our eyes, or among the things we see with our imagination. So, at will we live now in the crass material world and then again in the world of our hopes and ideals. It is with the latter world that ethics is chiefly concerned.
Ethics treats of human ideals.
I
2,.. . The Control of Ideals
Ip their simplest form ideals are mental pictures of : oiirse'lves uot as w^ are but as we should like to be. The exact technique of how we originally- learned to fashion ideals is lost in prehistoric an- tiquity, but the first famished ape-man who, in club- bing his prey to death, saw a vision of himself roast- ing the bearsteak instead of eating it raw, achieved an ideal. Perhaps he was trying to imitate the all- scorching sun, perhaps he was merely recalling the taste of meat burned by accident, at any rate he was visualizing an event before it happened and to that extent he was seeing the invisible. He was learning to dream in the daytime and the ability to do that is still the hallmark that stamps us human beings.
Ever since men have learned how to make ideals they have gone on perfecting the art. Ideals have long since lost their primitive simplicity but they have never left us. Like a cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night they have throughout all ages been guiding the destinies of mankind, until we have gone too far along the winding road of idealism ever Jo return to the unimaginative life of animals which exist only in the world of things as they are. The habit of following the lodestar of some ideal or other has become second nature to us, stronger than the impulse toward self-preservation. For centuries it has been our joy to create us heroic patterns, fash- ioned in our own image, and to these patterns we have accorded an unstinted devotion that has in it ele-
Variety of Ideals
ments both of pathos and sublimity. Our most pro- found pastime has become to see ourselves bigger or smaller than we really are, either more beautiful or more ugly, either as devils or as gods. The lure of our shining ideals has made us long for such things as never were on sea or land, for through them we have become worshippers of the beautiful, the ter- rible, and the great. Our ideals have taught us to sacrifice the present for the glory of the future. They are the secret of our growth as human beings.
The variety of ideals garnered, discarded, and re- garnered by the human race is inexhaustible. Mun- dane activity runs the gamut from tinkering to in- vention, from hobbies to artistry, from barter to statesmanship, from children's games to the wars of nations; and every line of endeavour is guided by its appropriate ideal. The millions of little everyday ideals, like the shades and nuances in a rainbow, escape enumeration. Only the primary ones that underlie all others can conveniently be classified. The comprehensiveness of our ideals is best brought out by dividing them into groups of which there are three: ideals of power, ideals of beauty, and ideals of truth.
Ideals of power centre around a regard for that which is big. They are rooted in the individual and racial fear that played so large a part in the early history of mankind. To primitive man dealing with material things and constantly harried by the fear of
The Control of Ideals
objects more vaguely massive and powerful than him- self nothing is more natural than that his ideals and his very notions of what is valuable should group themselves around the idea of bigness. From the dawn of history comes the habit of bowing down be- fore wholes that are greater than the individual. Very early in the life of the race the supremely big and mighty entity with which human beings came into contact was symbolized as a deity. It is easy to laugh at the crude idolators of bygone days, but they worshipped and worship is ever sublime. Fear is never a laughing matter; and when fear deepens into respect and respect takes the shape of obedience to our own higher impulses, something akin to a natural law is bom. Without the rise of Judaism and Christianity, without the Roman Church, the Crusades, and the Reformation, whole eras are rudderless. Directing the lives of countless men throughout all ages has been their devotion to a deity whose com- mands might vary, but whose authority was unques- tioned, and whose guiding light shone out like an unmistakable beacon over rocks and cliffs treacherous enough to shipwreck any nascent race. This is clearly a case of being led by an ideal whose in- trinsic quality is greatness. Men have had many re- ligions and many gods, but all views of the Deity agree in making him bigger than man; and in doing this they set themselves an ideal that, like the Great
Variety of Ideals
Stone Face, was bound to render the worshipper more divine.
In lesser things also, man was early guided by a regard for size and quantity. On the materialistic plane it is hard to find a more elementary rule than that value is measured by size. The first slave who ever chopped down trees measured his wood by the cord; the first flocks that were ever owned were counted by number and weighed by the pound. The larger the animal the more meat on its bones — this has always been true — the more of them killed the greater the hunt, the more hunters the stronger the tribe, the stronger the tribe the greater its chances of victory; and since time immemorial the size of a vic- tory has been measured by the vastness of the spoils. The notion that value is in some way measured by size has entered into the fibre of the race.
It may be doubted whether in the very early his- tory of the race men had clear notions of themselves as individuals. Certainly they thought more of the family and the tribe and the customs of their ances- tors than they did of their private likes and dislikes. They blindly followed the biological law that first of all it is the type that must be preserved. The com- plete organism was instinctively considered to be greater than any of its members, and therefore it seemed fitting that no member should stand in the way of the development of tribe or nation. All the
6 The Control of Ideals
germs of the sublimest patriotism are there, based on this ethics of quantity.
Most of us are not so different today. It would be possible to build up a complete modem ethics on the theory that only big things are worth while. The millionaire's dollars are still counted by the old decimal system based originally on the ten fingers found on the hands of primitive man. We also hold that one swallow does not make a summer, that one kind act cannot get a miser into heaven, that a hope- less minority cannot elect a president. In matters of education, thoroughness and quantity still count. He goes farthest who knows most and can put this knowl- edge to the greatest number of uses. Many of our ordinary moral maxims are based on the unconscious feeling that size has value. Just as in geometry the whole is greater than the part, so in theories of gov- ernment the State is considered greater and of greater value than the individual. In politics it is an axiom that the majority must rule. The apparent truism uttered at the dawn of the Christian Era to the effect that it is better for one man to die than for a whole people to perish, has permeated whole stretches of our ethical life. There is still among us an instinc- tive and almost primitive regard for that which is big. Many of us never get beyond the ethics of quantity.
Some of the most sublime acts of human beings have occurred in response to this instinct of reverence
Variety of Ideals
for that which is bigger than us. We have only to think of the host of martyrs who died for religion and of the host of heroes who died for patriotism. The sacrificial aspect of this quantitative ethics is ter- rific. It seems as if the race has had to go through a long nightmare of vicarious suffering in which whole parts of humanity were ruthlessly sacrificed to others, in which the innocent went down with the guilty, and mighty limbs were pruned off, let us hope, for the good of the race. We owe eternal debts of gratitude to countless men who gave their lives to swell our heritage of spiritual riches, but there has been too much injustice and agony in the whole pro- cedure to say that the end attained has justified the means. The ethics of size is marked by sublimity, but too frequently sublimity is only a name for the esthetic side of awfulness and terror.
There are still other forms that the ethics of sublim- ity may take. Neither martyrdom nor patriotism is necessarily the final form of what the worship of greatness can give us. Greater than the nation is the race, and already certain men have toiled obscurely but supremely well in producing works of benefit to the race. The ideal of a human brotherhood that can be furthered by the puny efforts of a single per- son has worked like wine upon the human spirit. There have been universal geniuses whose work is plainly rooted in a feeling of solidarity with the larger mankind which transcends nations and ages.
8 The Control of Ideals
There have been men of all time whose accomplish- ments are imbedded in the civilization of mankind, and whose names live on in the choir invisible that never dies.
Bolder still and more imaginative is the spirit of man when it discards the choir invisible of mortal lives to find refuge in immortality. To dream of changing corruptibility into incorruptibility, of put- ting on life everlasting instead of life precarious, is but a venturesome working out of that same principle of believing only in that which is big. What is big- ger than eternity; what is greater than the infinite? Seen from the viewpoint of eternity, huge difficulties have seemed small, tragedies have been wiped out, pain has been overcome, and death itself has been greeted with a song. It is ideals of this fibre that have been stronger than the impulse toward self- preservation. All these ideals of power, of grand- eur, and of sacrifice have been especially character- istic of the earlier stages of the life of the race.
More modem is a second type of ideals clustering around the notion of beauty. Some things are wor- shipped not because they are big but because they are beautiful. Theirs is a worship not bom of fear but of mother love and of the mating instinct. The basic ingredients of this worship are pity, compassion, and adoration rather than respect and awe. The cult of beauty has become universal, because mankind now yearns as deeply over the children of its imagination
Variety of Ideals
as it yearns over its physical sons. In this sphere of the ethics of beauty the lesser ideals find their home, and often for being the lesser they are loved the more. The entire realm of artists and the artistic is involved.
An artist is a creator of beauty and there are really only three kinds of artists. There are first the hum- bler artists to whom no one gives the name of genius, but who nevertheless are of the lifeblood of the race because they create the values that to most of us make life worth living. The mass of humanity knows how to throw the transforming light of the imagination over trifles. Theirs is the lesser mythology of small ideals of the sort that crowd into every cranny of our waking hours. Theirs are the personal ideals. The world may not care whether a baby dies, but a mother does because the baby is her own. She is an artist as much as the painter of immortal pictures is an artist. An insignificant mite of humanity is her paintbox, whence come rainbows, Rembrandts, and undepictable glories. Between grown-ups and chil- dren, between men and women, there are many thou- sands of little things much bigger than the solar sys- tem; for the multitude possesses the truly artistic secret of making little things look big and big things little. To a poet the world can weigh less than a pebble; to a man of honour death is more insignifi- cant than a blow on the cheek; to a lover a glance is worth more than a fortune. The world is full of
10 The Control of Ideals
such miracles in which beauty triumphs over bigness. We are all workers in perspective. We are all artists because we can all see beauty, and the least of us loves the visions of his own imagination. Magic everyday artistry of this sort cannot be practised alone; it is the work of the masses.
The second class of artists are the men many of whom have become famous and whose names have gone down in the history of artistic achievement. In- stead of being gregarious they dwell somewhat apart. They deal with all humanity, either the people now living or the humanity of the future, in the same in- timate and heart to heart way as the ordinary man deals with his neighbour. Their hearts are for the world. They woo us with gifts that are high water marks of creation in the various fields of artistic endeavour. They cast into our laps jewels of beauty and originality for which the adoration of multitudes is but a spontaneous return. Without them we should have no spiritual luxuries.
The third type of artist is the man who lives close to the multitude, but whose mission seems to be the preaching of moral ideals of an exalted order. Such men are interested in the things which interest the multitude, but they have the imagination of the ex- ceptional artist. The result is that they make us Apocalypses and Utopias. They are the spiritual architects of the race who make us homesick after the unattainable. They may be condemned as fa-
Variety of Ideals 11
natics, they may be accepted as reformers, they may even become founders of religions ; but wherever they are, their attempt is to exalt humanity, to elevate the lowly, to promote love and happiness, and somehow, somewhere to bring about a paradise on earth.
There is a third group of ideals which concerns the worship of truth. These ideals have their origin in plain curiosity which is strong even in some animals. The struggle for existence has forced us to learn to see straight. In the long fight upward, it has often been important to brush all fancies aside and to see things as they inevitably appear to us in the daylight — not as we want them to be, but as they are. In minds of scientific bent the desire for unvarnished truth may rise to the heights of a passion.
Curiosity is peculiar in that it has no norms, makes no demands, does not ask that things be either big or beautiful; it only wants the facts whether they be tigly, mean, or noble. Under this heading come the ideals of science and of all impartial investigation. Here belong the many ideals that have to do with material welfare and economic improvement. To set our house in order, to lessen suffering, to increase joy, to make us more human and more humane, all that is what the restless search for facts and useful infor- mation attempts to do.
An important offshoot of the love of truth has been the creation of a spirit of justice in the world. Jus- tice is the essence of impartiality which aims at fair
12 The Control of Ideals
play everywhere. It is the sum total of the world's common sense, which in turn is the daylight residue of all the science and speculation and experience of the race. We are not bom with common sense, but we have it thrust upon us by the experience of our fore- fathers. Common sense like justice comes after the conflict of passions and desires. When the Romans had conquered the then known world, they were left with diverse and strange peoples to rule. The situa- tion called for an extraordinary fund of common sense. This the Romans had and the result was law and justice. The eff'ect on human institutions of this spirit of justice cannot be overestimated. Without justice there would be no fly-wheel to balance the machine of human ideals. Curiosity is the fount of sanity, common sense, and tolerance.
A still more curious off'shoot of the worshipping of the ideals of truth is the flower of renunciation. The scientist begins by attempting to suppress the emotions and to eliminate the personal equation, but the pes- simist ends by achieving this and sighing for Nirvana. Many strong spirits have been thus aff'ected. When life holds nothing more, when ambition fails, when long cherished ideals become for ever impossible, when through suff"ering the light of day darkens; then sometimes even in ordinary individuals a mo- ment of limitless acquiescence is born. Certain rare souls enjoy these moments always. For them the ac- ceptance of truth prepares the way for the empire
Variety of Ideals 13
of death; truth turns into fate and the keyword to the universe is resignation.
But' the present age is not a fatalistic one. Our notions of truth are less lugubrious. Modern opti- mists take a more cheerful view when through proph- ets of pragmatism, humanism, and creative evolution, they announce the world of truth itself to be largely a fiction of man's active brain. The world of solid fact is but a collection of phenomena that in the long run work as we want them to work. According to certain profound savants of mathematical leanings, it is becoming more and more clear that the whole body of modern science is but a collection of formulas that enable us to manipulate our practical world in such a way as to bring about results useful and pleasant to ourselves. The world of science with its atom and ether and perfect laws is at bottom profoundly imagi- native, and perhaps more than a little imaginary. In the last analysis it may turn out that scientific truth, like our other imaginings, is to a large extent a deep- seated creation of our own, a gradual making over of the world to suit ourselves. If physical laws are not infallibly immutable, the philosopher's stone is in sight. Viewed in this light the ideals of truth are the most far-reaching and certainly the most modern of all.
All of these ideals of power and beauty and truth are of incalculable importance to the human race. If today we have somewhat outgrown the animals, it is
14 The Control of Ideals
because our ideals have shown us the way. If we lived only in a one-dimensional world of things as they are, we should never change and never grow up. It is the world of the imagination that gives us both our problems and our civilization.
CHAPTER II ATTITUDE TOWARD IDEALS
All of our ideals have this in common that to all intents and purposes they are to us part and parcel of that outside world of things that we know so little and dread so much. They come to us from the great unknown, like the air we breathe and the storm that destroys our crops. Together with the lightning and the sun and all the other powers of life and death they rule us. Like invisible giants they stand beside and over us, and for the most part we worship them in a way not so different from the way in which our forefathers worshipped idols. Idols also fell from the clouds or came to us from we knew not where. If perchance they were made by human hands they were never treated as such. They were stiffly in- scrutable beings with the divine right to rule stamped upon their brows and mankind was ready to give them the unquestioned faith and obedience that small chil- dren give to their parents. We do the same to our ideals. ■
The explanation of this naive conduct is not dif- ficult to give. After the long evolutionary role of
quaking before a nature red in tooth and claw, we
15
16 The Control of Ideals
continue to wear the same frightened air toward our new worlds of the imagination. Great fears still live within us. Old habits remain. We are all bom wor- shippers, the saint in his world of the sublime, the artist in his world of beauty, the scientist in his world of truth; and the inveterate tendency is to go on worshipping whatever ideals are set before us. On the world as in primeval times we first dimly en- countered it, we have through the work of the imagina- tion superimposed a world of our own, more humane and less terrible than the primitive one;. and now we treat this world of our own quite as we treated that other and more hostile world in which things came to us grudgingly. To our ancestors the external world was a buzzing confusion of dominions, powers, and spirits to be appeased by blood and tears, the blood of bullocks preferably to our own, but if necessary also the latter; and in this day and age things have not changed materially, for just as their idols de- manded gifts so our ideals demand sacrifices. They would not be considered ideals if they did not! Whether one lives for family, tribe, state, race, science, or Deity, the result is the same — ^they are all ends to Which we dedicate ourselves. If necessary, we of today also are ready to make the supreme sac- rifice; for compared with ideals it is considered that the individual counts as naught. The devotion ac- corded these new creatures of the imagination has in it hints of the old fanaticism that we are just begin-
Attitude Toward Ideals 17
ning to weed out of our religions. One kind of in- tolerance has not yet been fully done away with before a new and perhaps more deadly sort is upon us. The hue and cry for sacrifices has passed from one comer of the imagination into another.
In all this there is something wrong. Pan and the old mythology are dead, but our new ideals are a new mythology whose keeper as of old is conscience; and conscience, the great accuser both of self and others, never changes. It has always needed watching with its deep dungeons, seldom aired, in which dwells the love of the horrible. Mankind is gruesomely fasci- nated by sacrifice of all sorts, and unless we rein in sharply on our ingrained tendencies, some of our new ideals may become accepted ground for that old, un- reasoning, racial self-sacrifice and sublimation of suf- fering that has haunted man since the primitive days when cruelty to self and others was our only form of sport. From the habit of regarding these ideals as strangers from another world, comes an undignified servility in our conduct towards them, a blindness toward their true meaning, a misapprehension of their possibilities, and a total failure to enter the doors that these new gods could open to us. Eventually our wrong attitude may lead to anesthetization, gradual paralysis, cessation of growth, and death. But none of these things need happen, for it is unnecessary that to our own gentle children we should accord an ex- treme worship and sacrifice such as they were never
18 The Control of Ideals
meant to receive. We are not alive to the human origin and function of all the ideals for which many so willingly give up even their lives.
After taking great strides in overcoming such pal- pable enemies as the wild beasts of the forest and the wild beasts of hunger, cold, and disease, we now enter upon a stage of existence where because of a wrong attitude which we adopt our greatest enemies are likely to become our own ideals. Just as highly imaginative children can hardly distinguish between fancy and truth, so in the present period which is still the youth of the race, we do not always distinguish between our own beautiful dreamworld and the other world of our physical bodies. We confuse the human and the non-human. We forget that the world of our precious illusions in which as human individuals we live, move, and have our being, is a world of our own, under our own control and made by us, though grafted on physical stock. Thus in making our ideals more rigid and more mandarinish than they need be we render them all extremely dangerous. Their tyranny is on the way to becoming no less terrible than the tyranny of nature which punishes all transgress- ions by death. An unsophisticated attitude toward ideals may end by changing them to idols, into whose unconscious and despotic hands we delegate the power of life and death, which is our own and which should never be wielded by anything but the most careful common sense and wisdom. After all, ideals, our
Attitude Toward Ideals 19
human ideals, are not apparently unchangeable veri- ties like the sun, moon, and stars; they are merely the latest spiritual fashions worn by us all and ex- tremely dear to us, but not so dear that we remain supine when they rise up and slay us. They are merely our discarded eggshells and cocoons, our changing robes, eventually the spots of colour on our wings and nothing more. This is not a disparage- ment of ideals — they are a priceless heritage — it is merely a warning of danger. Our ideals are dangerous because in reverencing them to the extent of being willing to die for them, we make our own ideals our executioners.
At a time when hosts of men have died at random in defence of their ideals, it is fitting that we should ask ourselves why it is that ideals run thicker than blood. It is time to render articulate the reasons why millions voluntarily die. It is admitted on all hands that war is a good thing to get rid of, but perhaps war, or rather the roots of war, are dearer to the hearts of each of us than we suspect. Making war impossible is a personal and painful matter because it involves a tearing at the roots of age-old habits; it involves a change of attitude toward ideals, than which on earth no other thing is dearer to us. Each of us will have to contribute his share toward the formation of new habits which generally are not learned except as the result of aeons of experience. History is full of mis- takes that apparently have had to be made over and
20 The Control of Ideals
over again, before we finally learned to overcome them. Perhaps in the end we shall see that wars, even the latest idealistic wars, are due to a confusion which time and suffering alone could make completely clear to us.
It is easy to see how our forefathers made a mis- take in worshipping idols of stone, or in rendering homage to one of the elements such as fire, earth, or water, but the mistake is worth studying; for how do we know that we have even now completely outgrown their habits? Our ancestors came to worship the elements, or something that represented them, be- cause these elements are of tremendous importance in human life. Earth, air, fire, and water are indispen- sable to life; and because we cannot live without them our remote antecedents perhaps made the na'ive and natural inference that these elements were the great- est thing on earth, to whom we owed everything, and therefore ought to be willing to sacrifice everything. Yet such an attitude is the result of a fundamental con- fusion. The mistake consists in making an end out of a necessity, a summum bonum out of a sine qua non. There is a radical difference between a condition with- out which a thing cannot exist, and the end for which it exists. The elements may be indispensable for life, but that does not make them the aim and end of life. We cannot live without food, yet we do not live to eat. The flower that grows in the mud is admired for its hue and its fragrance, and not for the indis-
Attitude Toward Ideals 21
pensable ooze in which it grows. Perhaps we are committing a similar error with respect to ideals, with- out which we cannot live and which seem of such transcendent importance to us; but here also because ideals make life worth while is in itself no reason why they should be worth more than life itself. It will at least be necessary to show that there is nothing in place of ideals that can make our life worth while or, better still, it ought to be made clear that in taking a less ponderous attitude toward ideals we can, with- out losing any of the advantages to be derived from ideals, bring about a state of affairs in which it will never be necessary to lay down our lives for them. We can begin to take toward them the same attitude that we take toward food, than which nothing is more necessary to our mortal bodies. Our ideals might be considered a kind of mental or spiritual food, and then here also it may some day dawn upon us that we eat to live and not the other way around. By giv- ing us constant indigestion, life may yet teach us not to be gluttons over ideals.
A different attitude is possible. Instead of con- sidering ideals superior to mortals, let us consider them the creation of mortals. Let them be our solace, not our fetish; our servants, not our masters. They may be the supreme tools for enriching our earthly existence, but for that very reason we cannot afford to let them tyrannize over us and thus by condemning us to death defeat the very ends that they are suited
22 The Control of Ideals
to accomplish. They should be humanized. Every now and then mankind has found it necessary to in- ject a glint of Homeric humour into its theology, lest the gods, who are the embodiment of our highest ideals, begin to play with us instead of we with them. Now and again we have even exchanged our gods for others more humane. No disaster followed. Man can without danger regard his own creations with a quiet sense of mastery, and when necessary he can reach out and destroy his handiwork rather than have it destroy him. It is possible to laugh a little at our own ideals and hold them no less dear.
Of course this attitude can be taken only by a some- what advanced race that has recovered from the first phases of hero worship and uncritical romance so often associated with youth. It may be that we are not yet grown up enough to take this attitude, but beyond a doubt this business of endless human sacri- fices, even to our most holy ideals, is a thing to be out- grown. In the past wars may have been necessary and we shall never cease to honour those who laid down their lives for others; but, since by common agree- ment the time has come to make an effort to avoid all future wars, it has become essential that we form a clear notion of the kind of ideals that must underlie the ethics of a post-bellum world; or, if it is not merely a question of changing an ideal or two and it should turn out that it is our entire attitude toward ideals that must be changed, then that fact must be
Attitude Toward Ideals 23
blazed forth clearly. The full implications of this new, universal desire which strikes at the heart of all our old ideals must be unravelled. Without spend- ing overmuch time on the details of the external ma- chinery that will aid in doing away with wars, ethics should for the present concern itself with the foun- dation on which all this machinery rests, with the dream of a post-bellum era itself, and its reception in the mind of the individual where it must take root and eventually fight for its life in competition with practically the sum total of our present ideals. Ac- cepting a world without wars will not be as easy as many people think. The anti-bellum complex, which is just beginning to emerge into the consciousness of the race, is much more subversive than is generally supposed. The new regime may yet turn out to be the Jupiter that Saturn could not swallow.
Getting rid of war, for one thing, is not a simple matter of pacificm or an absolute refusal to fight. Removing war by refusing to fight a murderous foe is like curing dyspepsia by refusing to eat. To be sure, never eating anything gets rid of all the evils oc- casioned by eating, but the insuperable objection is that it gets rid of all the benefits as well. The pacifist who says that he would rather die than fight is no different from the militarist who would rather die than give in. In principle their conduct is of the same kind. They sacrifice themselves to different ideals, but that does not change the nature of the
24 The Control of Ideals
sacrifice. Again it is not the choice between one or the other ideal that counts, but the whole matter of ideals and our attitude toward them is involved. By his drastic methods the pacifist is likely to rid himself at once both of the horrors of war and of the bless- ings of peace. He applies the method of last resort, submission to an untimely death, thus accepting the very thing that he is seeking to avoid. In one respect life is like a bad dream. There is always one way out. In dreams it is waking up; in life it is death. But death is no solution. Genuine evil is overcome by growth, and not by nonresistance. Even kindness will not do it; it takes courage and foresight, es- pecially the latter.
War belongs to the class of evils that cannot be cured but only prevented. Its contrariety lies in the fact that it is incurable but not nonpreventable. It is like a virulent disease that must be stopped before it gets a start, or it cannot be stopped at all. Our only safety from the fatal war bacillus lies in our ability to ward it off; once it is upon us, nothing can prevent a fatal ending. The presence of war means that we have allowed ourselves to get into a situation in which it is no longer a question whether lives are to be forfeited, but merely a question of whose life is to be forfeited, our own or that of the enemy. In the past such situations have frequently been unavoid- able. In dealing with robber nations, or with un- civilized hordes, wars cannot be avoided. A certain
Attitude Toward Ideals 25
amount of civilization must precede any post-bellum ethics, just as a certain amount of medical science must precede any cure for cancer.
Before wars can be quite done away with there must be added to our training a certain amount of harmless sophistication, an influx of that sober second sight that follows hard experience. In a world in which people only say, "Come, let us fight it out," and never say, "Come, let us reason together,*' agree- ment is impossible, and there is no alternative to a brute force regime. At the same time in a world where reasoning is taken too seriously, in a world composed of conflicting ideals tenaciously held by fanatics all more than willing to die in defence of their credo, harmony is equally impossible. A clar- ified common sense such as intervened to separate ecclesiastical questions from civil life, and thus put an end to religious intolerance, must once more step in. The era of taboos, of sacred bulls, of Napoleons and Alexanders, of Crusades and the Church militant, are all alike part and parcel of that muscular age of force that should be put away with other childish things. If this great fight against windmills is ever to come to an end, we must realize that we are now facing a new era, and that what was food for the grub and the pupa will not be food for the butterfly. There must be a change of front. In the former era there prevailed the law of the jungle ; but post-bellum ethics, instead of once more restating the law of the
26 The Control of Ideals
jungle, should try to decipher the new tables from Sinai that are to prevail to the post-bellum period and whose laws, I am assured, are to be based, first upon a new conception of the sacredness of human life and secondly upon a new attitude toward ideals.
CHAPTER III ASSIMILATION OF IDEALS
One difficulty in connection with our ideals is that there are so many of them and that they are all different. There are enough to lead us in a hundred ways at once. Patriotism, freedom, immortality, the race, chivalry, honour, beauty, art, godliness, science, truth and self-sacrifice may all be splendid ideals, but they cannot all be followed at the same time. A choice must be made. The more whole-heartedly any single ideal is pursued, the more necessary it will be to sacrifice, not to say oppose, some of the others ; for no amount of worship can prevent our ideals from clashing.
Formerly when men fought they fought for con- quest, but in recent centuries men have fought chiefly because of conflicts between their ideals. The ground is continually being prepared for just such wars. Men inherit their religion, their country, their ideals of liberty; and they are more willing to fight for these things than they are for their money. Economic interpretations of history to the contrary, in this age of deep-rooted romance men do not easily give up
their lives for economic reasons, while on the other
27
28 The Control of Ideals
hand death in defence of an ideal has become a noble commonplace. Behind the self-immolation of today- there always lurks an ideal, if only the ideal of duty, and one of the most frequent reasons why men fight is because they are defending different ideals. It is by this time a recognized doctrine that the modern man's burden is not so much a choice between good and evil as a choice between irreconcilable goods. Man cannot serve two masters even though both be irreproachable. Thus arise wars between such things as science and art, or between art and religion. The artist, the scientist, and the saint may each be sincere, yet it is hard for them to get along with each other; and if this is true of individuals it is even more true of groups. Races and peoples grow to love different types of ideals which each may be fine in their own way, but which consistently followed lead to clashes that too frequently can be settled only by arms. After civilization's fight with barbarism, comes the more perplexing fight between different civilizations. Just as a plethora of varied and inharmonious foods can give rise to indigestion in the individual, so the clashing of many ideals may cause serious and even fatal disturbances in the body politic. Spiritual food like ordinary food must on the whole be diges- tible. Ideals must build up rather than destroy the human race, or there is something wrong with our mental diet. The sum total of our ideals must stimulate healthy growth, and in that sense our ideals
Assimilation of Ideals 29
are true ideals only if they work together to produce a wholesome result. They must be assimilable.
The process of assimilation as applied to ideals is a continuous one, but for the sake of convenience a number of steps may be made out just as the process of digestion, although uninterrupted, can also be divided into various stages. Ideals spring from the imagination, and if they survive at all, they soon be- come familiar to a number of people and gain enough currency to be called ideas. When still further pop- ularized, the original ideal may become a doctrine. Accepted doctrine becomes law, and laws are em- bodied in institutions and eventually into the social habits and customs of men. Ideals end up by enter- ing into the very fabric of our civilization and even of our unconscious life.
A large part of the history of philosophy is the history of successful ideals conceived and expounded by exceptional thinkers. Philosophical truths consist largely of ideals concerning the aim, destiny, and nature of man, by which they hope to render man- kind more satisfied and less unhappy. It is eternal sustenance rather than eternal truth that philosophers are after. They find us food that works the miracle of adding cubits to our racial stature, thus establish- ing stages of growth that can never be undone. Even- tually our ideals enrich the lifeblood of the race. Thus the Greeks, in their initial fumbling after some sort of a solution for the problems of the universe,
30 The Control of Ideals
hit upon the notion of elements which were supposed to be the prime substance out of which all things were made; and we have never got rid of that idea. Atoms, ether, and the substrate are still with us. Plato launched the notion of an invisible world, an ideal but quintessential replica of this one; and there still stand the great religions of the world, none of which were great until they had assimilated Plato's idea. Aristotle among other things injected into our life the idea of logic. Who ever heard of logical thinking before Aristotle, and we may be sure we shall never get through hearing about it after Aris- totle. Logic means order, and order leads to classi- fication, and the art of classification is endless. By the merest introductory application of his logic to the then existing world of knowledge, Aristotle created a number of sciences that today still have an in- definite course to run. Descartes started the notion that mathematics could be applied to everything. There arose the first span of mathematical science with its lines now running, not from coast to coast, but from the bowels of the earth to the remotest star. Many a man is still working at the Cartesian dream. Locke, Hume, and Berkeley said things about the limitations of human understanding that have now become commonplaces in our everyday life. Thus new ideals and new ideas are continually penetrating our conscious life, coming often from we know not where, but enlarging our outlook, multiplying our
Assimilation of Ideals 31
thoughts, adding to our enjoyments, increasing our hopes and happiness, and yet making themselves at home so quietly that we sometimes think that they were never new. Sometimes a number of men at different periods take up the same idea, such as evolu- tion, and gradually bring it to a state of fruition where scientific verification is the only thing needed to make it enter into the daily life of every one of us. Traces of evolutionistic theory hark back to the Greeks, and long before modern science offered its aid, evolutionary doctrine had reached a point where verification was as easy as turning a telescope on to a star after a mathematician tells you just where it is to be found. In modern times James started pragma- tism. The end is not yet. Hegel with a difficult yet powerful jargon began to hammer away at the deifica- tion of the political State. This combined with cer- tain other teachings in which men were enjoined to be hard to the point of onesidedness, started something that all the Allies have barely succeeded in stopping by main force. The late war is an illustration of ideals clashing violently enough to produce a cata- clysm. The point is that almost any ideal can get started, but that the ensemble does not always work out harmoniously. The world can exist after a fashion on all sorts of ideals and dreams, until there comes a time when the potpourri produces indigestion acute enough to embitter the taste of certain ideals for ever. Then the task becomes to rediet ourselves
32 The Control of Ideals
and to study anew the whole subject of mental nu- trition.
In another respect ideals are not unlike the food we eat. Foods should not disagree, but at the same time they should not become monotonous. It is the same with ideals. Too many violently discordant ideals spoil the harmony of life, but at the same time there is no single ideal that is a panacea for all ills. Life is too complex for so simple a solution. The variety in our ideals should neither be absent nor be over- done. Ideals are like breakfast foods that pall, like crops that need rotating, like cosmic jokes that can be told but once. They must be easily assimilable and that means that they must be harmonious enough to be digested and varied enough to be stimulating.
And even if we should be well supplied with ideals both harmonious and varied, there always remains the danger that we consider these pleasant ideals the aim and end of all existence. To consider our food, even perfect mental food, of greater value than the life that it supports, is to place ourselves back among the animals that without compunction eat each other, and thus place themselves on the same level with their food. Many an animal lives to eat, but we no longer consider ourselves animals, although the habit that we have outgrown in the flesh still troubles our spirit. Physical cannibals are no longer tolerated but mental cannibals abound; for a race that inculcates, in the individuals composing it, a habit of dying for the
Assimilation of Ideals 33
Ideals of that race thereby declares itself to be of no greater worth than its own mental food. In fact in saying that ideals are worth more than life, we hold ourselves less dear than we do our spiritual food, thus selling our unique and only birthright for a mess of pottage. The result is that just as animals cannot rise superior to the world of the senses into the world of the imagination, so a being, that does not rise superior to the world of its own imaginings, cannot rise to dominion over the creations of the human spirit into domains of greater creativity than ever. By set- ting life beneath, instead of over, our ideals we check human development; for to cherish any ideal above all else, means that we accept the enjoyment of that ideal as the ultimate desire of human life beyond which we do not care to go. To a creature capable of unmeasured development, that cannot be other than the cardinal sin.
Yet it is easy to see that unless this new and infinite value is placed upon human life by the consent of all or at least of a vast majority, the sacrifice of life to our ideals must inevitably go on. It is only when we rise superior to our ideals that freedom is at- tained. Just as independence of the world of the senses gave man an undreamed of freedom to develop a world of ideals, to which now in turn man shows symptoms of enslavement, so independence of this world of settled ideals, which are fast becoming fixed ideas, will give rise to a new liberty setting free latent
34 The Control of Ideals
capabilities and new creative powers. It is only when we cease to overvalue our jumbled ideals that we can begin peacefully to arrange them into hierarchies with die most important ones on top, and no conflict any- where along the line. This task requires a clearness of vision that we do not yet possess. Once we learn that ideals are not to be fought over like bones, but rather to be equitably distributed, each ideal to the group or nation that can best develop it, there arises a possibility that new eras of uninterrupted prosperity and spiritual growth will ensue.
The reward of a well balanced diet is growth, and the process of growth that follows the right use of ideals is more akin to mental than to physical growth. Physical growth reaches a point where it stops and seems content merely to hold its own. A man at twenty may be physically mature, although his mind may have just started growing. Mental growth can and should go on as long as there is life. Life is growth. In the process of development more knowl- edge and more interests can always be assimilated; for when old ideas are assimilated there is always a hunger and a need for more; and in this respect the collective mind of man which makes for civilization is in no essential diff'erent from the mind of the in- dividual. Without interests a man dies; without vision a people perishes. It is not sufficient that our ideals be harmonious and varied; they must also be continually replaced by better ones.
Assimilation of Ideals 35
The aim of ideals is growth and growth should go on for ever. If it stops decay sets in. It is fatal to reach a point where we say, "This is enough; our present ideals suffice and we shall never give them up." As well say, "The innocent age of childhood is ideal, let us never grow any older." Whatever both as a race and as individuals we may do, we certainly do not stand still. "An instinct within us that reaches and towers" demands development; and our only sal- vation as human beings is that we found a way to keep on growing mentally after our bodies had stopped dead in their tracks. Some people have promulgated the doctrine that life is essentially a bal- ance between two factors, such as an inner principle and an outer environment, and that when this state of balance is reached there remains merely the unalloyed bliss of maintaining the status quo. That doctrine is a mirage, the result of imperfect insight. Life may be an adjustment, but certainly not an adjustment of this quiescent, Utopian sort. Never will we reach a point where we can be perfectly content with just ex- actly what we have and not one iota more. We are cast in different mould. We live, move, and have an eternal becoming. Not realizing this, has been the cause of countless false Utopias in which the life of man is pictured as a painted ship upon a painted ocean. The only alternative to life or movement of some sort is death, whose harbinger is ennui, epito- mized by Schopenhauer as the stage where men who
36 The Control of Ideals
have "cast off all other burdens, become a burden to themselves." This state of ennui, or incipient decay, can be warded off only by continuous growth which refuses to come to a stop until halted by death.
In the past there may have been long periods when the growth of the race seemed to have stopped, but generally such periods are immediately followed by a spring forward. One such advance occurred in the transition from animal to man, from unconsciousness or semiconsciousness to self -consciousness. Another occurred about the sixth century B.C., when we find a general awakening with prophets prophesying everywhere and preparing the way, among other things, for the coming of Greek civilization shortly thereafter. The rise of Christianity was another out- burst. Another was the Renaissance, and still an- other is the world war with its recasting of nations in the midst of which we are today.
The extent of our present leap forward will depend upon ourselves. It will depend on how well we understand what is happening, on how deeply our insight penetrates, and on how thoroughly we grasp ahead of time just what the possibilities are, and thus act not blindly but with a full foreknowledge of what we are trying to accomplish. The biggest step ever made was that first long one in which self -conscious- ness was established, and the first great declaration of independence of nature was made. A somewhat sim- ilar new epoch can be evoked at present. Just as in
Assimilation of Ideals 37
the past man nearly perished by being engulfed in physical nature, and then achieved his independence by waking up to a consciousness of self, so now signs are not wanting that man is once more mistakenly ready to engulf himself in a world of ideals and imagination, and that again the only thing that will save him is a new volte-face and a new awakening to even deeper levels of individual self-consciousness. The danger of being engulfed is by no means il- lusory. The fact that we are drifting into an ac- cepted creed whose main tenet is that self-sacrifice, even of masses counted by millions, is commendable — provided the sacrifice be to a worthy ideal — is in it- self enough to cripple us- back into the animal stage. Instead of getting together to cultivate ideals men kill each other for ideals and use the very imagination which alone can give them these ideals for inventing fearful arms with which to spread annihilation; and the point is that when the imagination of man sets out to find new engines of destruction it enters a by no means endless corridor. At any time in the near fu- ture the work in this restricted field may be com- pleted, and we shall have at our disposal absolutely unopposable mechanical means of destroying at will either the whole race or any part of it. At that stage ideals will have rendered themselves so dangerous that against the conflicts they engender there will be no other defence than that of self-control. Against that day it behooves us to prepare beforehand, for racial
38 The Control of Ideals
self-control is not learned in a day or in a year. Within this margin, which is no one knows how small, it is wise for us to declare our independence of ideals. Instead of perishing in the welter of our own creation, we must bring this world of our imagination to order and use it for our own enrichment, just as we do the world we tread with our feet. It is time to enjoy instead of fear the world of our imagination. It is time to live not for but by our own ideals.
CHAPTER IV THE SURVIVAL OF IDEALS
Until such time as we learn to regulate the products of our own imagination, the weeding out of undesir- able ideals must be left largely to the random struggle for existence which rages among them as it does among all living phenomena. It may seem strange to con- sider ideals as belonging to the world of living things, but that is exactly where they should be placed. They are living parts of living human beings. They are our future selves, both possible and impossible, struggling for adoption into the world of solid flesh; and until these untamed psychological entities are brought under the yoke of human guidance, chance instead of wisdom will rule among them, and the sur- vival of ideals will follow the law of the biologically strong rather than that of the humanly beneficial.
It will be worth while to go into more detail as to just what ideals are. Thus far we have merely given examples of them, called them the products of the imagination, and likened them to food, the food of the spirit. They are more than that. They are an intensely vital element in the life of the human race, the mainstay in our struggle for survival and pre-
39
40 The Control of Ideals
dominance; for no class of living beings could long survive unless it received aid from within, in the shape of some vital force enabling it to develop the where- withal to meet life's countless new emergencies. All animals have such a force or means of adaptation in some degree or other, in what biologists call fluctuat- ing variations; and what these are in the racial strug- gle of animals, our ideals are to us. Ideals are analo- gous to biological variations.
Of course we are more complex beings than animals lower in the scale, and therefore factors function among us in a more complex way. For instance one characteristic that we have developed, and which so far as we are aware no animal has been able to achieve, is a peculiar duality which enables the prin- ciple of variation to function in two different compart- ments of one and the same individual. Loosely speaking one is the sphere of the physical and the other the sphere of the mental, and variations occur in both. In the theatre that, as Carlyle says, stands under every man's hat, there are always two con- tinuous performances; the spectator can either look through the window of his senses into the world of the senses, or he can look through the window of the imagination into the world of the imagination; and that both of these worlds are separate can be seen from the different way in which the principle of variations functions in each sphere. In the imagina- tion this universal movement toward variations has
The Survival of Ideals 41
found a sensitive medium where the principle can work freely and without overmuch permanence, for existence here is spectral and volatile forms reach maturity with amazing speed so that sudden mutations as well as the regular fluctuating variations can flour- ish in abundance and live their little hour of glory peacefully side by side. Then from the ideals born in our imagination the ones best suited to survive are transported into the world of the body where the tempo of growth is much slower and conditions of survival harder, so that but few of our ideals eventu- ally find their way into our character and habits.
This double functioning of the impulse toward variation sets us apart from all lower animals. It is as if, at the dawn of consciousness, a part of the island of man slipped loose from its moorings and drifted out into the heart of a warm ocean current that brought it heat and rain and a fertility beyond belief, so that the wildest varieties of plants could grow in great profusion; and what was even more fortunate, the part that slipped its moorings did not utterly sever connections with the rocky mainland, so that occasion- ally favourable winds still waft over seeds from the new hothouse to the old island where those that can weather the climate and the sterner conditions take root and live on in a more sheltered area, free from the excessive competition that rages in the tropical part of us that floated out to sea. In other words, the imagi- nation is our experimental laboratory with artificial
42 The Control of Ideals
living conditions promoting the growth of all manner of sports from which only the safe and sane and beautiful ones need be selected for perpetuation in the more corporeal part of our being. Instead of having our entire nature, including our physical life, sub- jected to countless sudden variations that would render us unstable and of precarious existence, these varia- tions now have free play in a comparatively harmless medium from w^hich the hardier and more desirable forms may be grafted over into our daily life. Ideals are anticipatory variations.
This is the secret of our success as earth-dwellers : that consciousness has given us the priceless gift of seeing deeply into the world of the imagination which is really none other than the workshop of nature wherein are displayed a few of the secrets of ex- istence. This vision is of inestimable practical value, for it keeps us from being totally blind with regard to future possibilities. We have become to some ex- tent the architects of our own future. Just as out of nature we pick garments of certain cut and certain colours with which to clothe the body, so out of the pos- sible selves and parts of selves that range before us in the imagination, we pick and choose the ones that we like best. And that is enough to start tite whole machinery of human ideals.
Ideals are meant to be variations of the human in- dividual, and that means that at bottom they are pic- tures of ourselves, all at least in some way related
The Survival of Ideals 43
to ourselves. It means that our ideal world is thor- oughly human. Aeons ago in primitive man un- formed and unbalanced imagination may have con- jured up semi-insane forms scarcely relatable to hu- man life and unimaginable to normal minds; but our imaginations have long since been trained so that the prevailing type of ideals now clearly indicates that they are meant for this world. Through and through, in origin, nature, and function our ideals smack of this planet.
This human quality of ideals cannot be overem- phasized. Ideals are idealized human beings. Whole systems of religion and ethics such as Chris- tianity, Buddhism, Stoicism with its idealization of Socrates as the wise man, centre around some pivotal figure which approaches the gods in power, wisdom, and insight. Cosmogonies, mythologies, and theolo- gies are full of deities created in our own image, and their general trend has always been toward humani- zation. Our less lofty ideals are also human to the core. If a man has before him the ideal of building a bridge, he builds it for human beings to walk upon. His ideal is a picture of a man safely and esthetically crossing a stream. If a man makes a statue or a picture, he makes it for others to enjoy; for if we were all struck blind, painting as an art would disappear off the face of the earth. It is not pigments but the soul of the beholder that a painter manipulates. All the arts are rooted in the heart of man. In the ideals
44 The Control of Ideals
of science and practical life the human element is even more obvious, for their direct aim is to benefit our fellowmen. Man more comfortable, more healthy, more fleet, more sharp-sighted, more power- ful— these are the ideals expressed in Pullman trains, bacteriology, aviation, and telescopes. Always when a number of apparently unrelated phenomena are jumbled together as ideals, the common core of them is the human element that alone can give them mean- ing. They are all built around the same five foot column of sublimated protoplasm. Pictures of men in new guise and with new attributes doing new things are the substance of human ideals.
There is only one way that ideals can emerge from the brain of the original conceiver, and that is through a transmission medium. The individual is the unit of ethics but individuals are not isolated. They are like trees planted in a common soil and around them fly the bees and blow the winds of human intercourse, so that ideals cross-fertilize and blossom sometimes in regions far remote from those in which they first emerged. Art, action, and speech are so many links through which we communicate with each other and influence each other, and the most important and spontaneous of these is speech. Through speech each man plays the part of an environment to the ideals of his neighbour. Through speech our minds are opened to ideas, while at the same time our own ideas fly to meet those that come from other sources. The
The Survival of Ideals 45
significance of the minds of our fellowmen immedi- ately becomes apparent; they are our environment.
If it were not for other people our ideals would grow without environment, which is equivalent to say- ing that they would not grow at all. A man of our dual construction but alone and without companions would be a raving maniac, not knowing his dreams from his waking hours. He would be a man whose thoughts had no environment, and his only safety, like that of the animals, would be in having no ideals at all. We need human comrades both as a stimulus and a check. Love is the stimulus, censure the check, and the latter is as important as the former, for our ideals after all are much like decorations which can be easily overdone. They are our boast to our breth- ren who in turn have a wholesome way of demanding that we make good our boast. They ask of us that our dreams come true, or in other words that we check the dreams coming through the shining ivory door and cultivate only those that issue from the gate of horn ; for it must be remembered that imagination is the mother of language and that just as our mouth can utter lies, so the imagination can give us false ideals which like all lies will not travel a great distance in society.
False ideals are weeded out by interchange of thought. If they get by this thought barrier and suc- ceed in becoming parts of our institutions and habits of living, the laws that rule our mortal bodies take
46 The Control of Ideals
a hand in punishing us for false ideals; but the first and less Draconian tribunal is the hearts and minds of our fellowmen.
Here there arises a danger, and that is that our ideals may be transplanted too soon from the world of the imagination into the world of the physical. The tendency of all ideals is to be governed by the law of parsimony, or of quick results. They tend to avoid rubbing up against other ideals, especially those com- ing from other minds, and to get control of the physi- cal machinery of life as soon as possible. An unripe or perverse idea that ought to have matured or re- ceived its correct shape in the realm of competition with other minds, finds lax resistance here and spring- ing into general adoption grows to monstrous size and power in a world where possibilities for harm are staggering. A single disproportionate ideal can wreck the physical machinery of man and endanger the existence of all ideals and of human life itself. That is how mob insanity is bom. It is well-known that the man of one book or of one idea is a formid- able opponent, but a far more maniacal thing is a group of men, or a whole nation, under the spell of a perverse ideal. Taken up into the physical texture of the body politic too soon, a false ideal will act like poison or a parasite that gnaws the vitals of its host and ends by bringing about the destruction both of itself and of the organism on which it feeds. When ideals, by not being properly humanized, be-
The Survival of Ideals 47
come self-centred and cease to be the servants of man, they get to be the most dangerous things on earth.
The proper battlefield for ideals is speech and books and the imagination. In this medium a wealth of ideals can be fostered and encouraged until the right and useful ones appear. If out of impatience we adopt ideals too soon, what happens is that ideals fight the matter out, not on the plane of the ideal where alone justice and morality is found, but on the plane of the physical. In a world stricken with pov- erty of imagination there are but few ideals, and each has a firm control of a part of the physical life of the human race. The fight then goes on by pitting the physical strength controlled by one idea against the physical strength controlled by other ideas; and the result is a physical struggle in which the battle in- variably goes to the strong battalions. Might be- comes right. The combat falls from the moral plane of human intercourse to the unmoral plane of nature where it is true that might alone is right.
The moral is that we should keep our ideals well within their own environment until we are sure that in real life they will not do more harm than good. We should develop fore- instead of hindsight. It is cheaper to learn by prescience and experiment than by experience. In other words, the imagination should be developed to unheard of lengths. More and more as the race keeps growing, ideals are tested
48 The Control of Ideals
not by expensive experience but by free discussion and experiment. Education encourages the growth and improves the stock of our ideals, and the import- ance which is everywhere beginning to be attached to educating the multitude argues for a movement toward appreciation of the fact that by an abundance of clear ideas most of our difficulties can be overcome. For that is another fascinating feature of keeping ideals well and long within the realm of the imagina- tion; it makes them more prolific, for the reason that here ideals are in their native soil and still in a posi- tion where they can easily be reached and reinforced by ideals from the minds of others. The environ- ment here is infinitely more elastic than in the realm of the physical. Suppose we could arrange the clim- ate of the earth, the composition of the air, and the rate of falling bodies to suit our own convenience, then we should have an imperfect analogy of what is actually possible in the sphere of thoughts and images. Nowhere else in nature is the environment so com- pletely under control. Ideals have a way of chang- ing the resistance of other ideals into a co-operation that infuses new life and vigour into the original ideal. The art of co-operation in the production of ideas is still in its infancy. The Greeks caught a glimmer of the possibilities in this direction when in their original and well-planned democracy they ascribed an over- weening importance to eloquence. Every man had to be an orator so that in the realm of free minds he
The Survival of Ideals 49
might defend and improve his own ideas. There are no hard and fast limits to the production of ideas, and we can never get enough of them; for we can never tell when there will swim into our ken the new idea or ideal that will be the solution of age-old and stub- bom difficulties. If we want to find a solution that will overcome the world without overcoming us at the same time, we shall need all the aid that a multi- tude of original ideas can give us. Soul-stuff is precious and as yet not very durable. Stars measure time by aeons, but a creature whose span of life is seventy years should make full use of the imagination in whidh the production of ideas is loosened up, speeded up, and rendered more elastic. The imagi- nation is our shortcut to happiness. \
CHAPTER V
NATIONS
The past history of the race discloses everywhere a conservative policy of making our ideals few in num- ber but great in importance. We have had to be satisfied with making the most of the comparatively small number of really great ideals that have proved to be assimilable. PeAaps the fact that there were so few has helped to make them more important. Al- though this paucity of ideals is the root of all intol- erance, it has at the same time contributed immensely toward their intensification and growth. The tend- ency to venerate one ideal at the expense of all oth- ers has aided in establishing that exaggeratedly wor- shipful attitude that obtains full play when one ideal becomes supreme above all others; it has changed polytheism into monotheism, incipient nationalism into the Roman Empire, and the early Christian gath- erings into the all-powerful Church of the Middle Ages. As long as our ideals were viewed as ex- ternal things to lean upon and to adore, there has been this tendency toward reducing their number. One prop is enough to learn to walk by, and it has taken us a long time to learn to use our own legs and throw
our wooden props away altogether, or better still use
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them for something else such as material with which to build our house.
The prop upon which we lean in achieving our spiritual independence generally takes the form of our chief ideal. Out of our small stock of precious ideals we pick one and make that our summum bonum. There is no doubt that in the past this pro- cedure was absolutely defensible, for the human race cannot hope to escape the laws of evolution whereby it frequently happens that a bold new form is sud- denly achieved and all else risked to save it. A new and powerful trait even in our mental life has a way of bringing all others into submission. When ideals first became important to the human race not every little ideal was as important as every other. It was a great achievement if they were kept from dying out altogether by picking out one, the very biggest, and concentrating on that. Thus each cycle of culture has had its supreme ideal by which men have been hyp- notized and to which they have clung with all the fanaticism of grim life struggling to get ahead; and it was better that we should go through a period in which the individual was easily sacrificed to the ideal than that there should be no ideals at all. Nature, red in tooth and claw but always displaying enough wisdom to be careful of the race first and the in- dividual afterward, has followed a similar policy with respect to ideals when through some subtle, intra- mundial psychology men were led to render ideals
52 The Control of Ideals
inviolate by placing them among the things that, like the race, had to be saved at the expense of many an individual. The program has been race first, ideals second, and individuals third; in the hope perhaps that some day the individual would grow sufficiently mature to take care of himself and enter upon the double inheritance which has been prepared for him throughout all ages, the world of nature and the world of his ideals.
Looked at from a human point of view the history of our planet falls into four anthropological ages of which the first, embracing the preparation of the planet earth for the abode of man, corresponds to the geologic periods during which the earth took shape and became physically fit for human occupation. After being placed on earth we had to conquer it and endeavour to grow worthy of our conquest in the process, so that the second age is the period during which man obtained physical dominion over the earth. The third age comprises the preparation of a new world of human ideals and ideas, and the fourth age is the conquest of this new world.
It is the third age that begins at the dawn of history when ideals were still scarce and grossly materialistic. In the initial period the crudest objects could become totems or idols, and in doing so they obtained a new quality, that of being a symbol; and the significance of this is that a symbol always points to something other than itself, something unseen, and that an idola-
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trous race is therefore a race that is training its eyes to see the invisible. This training was kept up. The world over, men became worshippers of objects that somehow crudely stood for ideals. The process of further development is exhibited in records such as that of the Old Testament where it becomes plain how the growth of the inner life, and the tendency toward concentration on a single ideal, which has already been mentioned, led a truly religious people to in- tensify its idols until monotheism was born. And not only that. During development the material sym- bol retreats into the background, spiritualization ac- companies unification, and by the time monotheism is full-fledged idols of stone have changed into the one truly invisible God of the prophets.
The same growth with a certain softening down of harsh outlines continues after the period of Judaism, when large sections of humanity all over the world entered the monotheistic stage. The ensuing cen- turies of religious preoccupation served as an im- mense tonic to the imagination, which was in this manner strengthened in the struggle for life until nothing could again destroy or overthrow it. Through discipline and exercise such as that afforded by the establishment of great religions humanity was enabled to reach a stage where the world of the un- seen became more real than the world of the senses. These activities concentrated and solidified the nebulae of the new world of our imagination. Plato
54 The Control of Ideals
had toyed with the notion that there was a splendid world of ideals more glorious than the one beheld with human eyes in a body which was but the prison house for an immortal soul that "had else- where its setting and cometh from afar," but before this vein of thought was quite worked out this other world of our ideals not only became more real to us than the everyday world of the senses, but we also loved it more and felt more at home in contemplating it than in contemplating facts of nature. After Plato a period of other-worldliness ensued during which the habit of living by ideals had an opportunity to strike its roots into the marrow of our bones. The time finally came when reaction was both inevitable and safe ; we could be weaned from over-indulgence in an ideal world without at the same time losing our ideals and our capacity for spiritual growth.
There followed in the modem era new centuries bringing home to us the fact that the invisible is rooted in the dust. The beginning was the Renais- sance, which however in no way resembled an awaken- ing to sad reality. It was more like a return to consciousness after a strengthening sleep in which our powers of observation have increased. It was a new awakening to the joys of earth in which rekindled interest in terrestrial matters led to the discovery of new continents, of new revelations in astronomy, and of new treasures in an ancient world of letters which had long been submerged in oblivion, but which was
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no less new because it had merely been forgotten. There ensued the linking together of ages, the unifi- cation of men as planet-dwellers, and the loss of fear for the physically unknown. In unity there is strength and boldness. Abhorrence of the physical world gave place to admiration, and in proportion as the grandeur of this world increased the other world released men from its fetters.
The new and diversified ideals bom in the Re- naissance effectually placed in the background the su- preme ideal that had dominated the preceding cen- turies, although in the Reformation there did occur a feeble effort to revive our interest in other-worldli- ness. As an original movement of tremendous prom- ise the Reformation has been overestimated. The dis- integration of the Church was but its manner of ceding the centre of the stage to other interests. A short time after the Reformation, the bulk of European humanity ceased to be first and foremost members of a Church and became instead members of a political State. Even then for a While they clung to ecclesias- tical habits and ways of thinking. Kings replaced spiritual potentates, but they still ruled by "divine" right. This element of other-worldliness was sloughed off when kings also had to become secular or lose their heads. Then began the movement which ended in the birth of democracies, or popular govern- ment, in which the solid people as represented by a physical majority were enthroned. We enter the era
56 The . Control of Ideals
of democracy in the literal sense of that word, and the only remnants of other-worldliness still left to us now are the nations.
The gods of this age are the nations. Nations are not peoples; they are ideas. They are psychological entities. This has been best brought out by Israel Zangwill in his little book on the "Principle of Na- tions," w'here after illustrations and arguments he comes to the following conclusion:
"Thus, then, it appears, neither identity of race nor of language, nor of religion, nor of territory, nor of interests, nor of culture, nor of soul, is indispensable to a nationality. ... It is a psychological phenomenon, having its regular laws of origin, development, and decay. . . . Nationality, we now see, is a state of mind corresponding to a political fact. . . . Nationality . . . can be explained only by psychology. It is — or should be — a section of 'the psychology of crowds.' It springs from the operation of what I propose to call 'the law of contiguous co-operation.' This is the law under which casual atoms are unified by mutual magnetism into a congregation, a corps, a team, a party, each with its peculiar group-spirit. Co-operation even at a dis- tance brings fellow-feeling: contiguity even without co-operation draws together."
To this should be added that nations are not merely psychological entities but also mighty ideals, such as the Church has been, such as were the idols of our forefathers, only less august and much more human. The core of each nation is the type of citizen it repre-
Nations 57
sents. When we say that nations are ideals we do not mean that they are non-existent realms found only in the imagination, but we mean that each nation stands for an ideal type of citizen who exemplifies the vir- tues that all other citizens are striving to attain. Slightly caricatured this comes out in the fact that next to our flags we have our figures of John Bull or Uncle Sam which, in spite of being humorous ex- aggerations, lead no one but a fool into thinking that nations are ridiculous. Nations by becoming more human and quite the reverse of other-worldly have in common with all mortal things attained a slightly humorous side; but they have also not lost their other side which is deep and tragic and sublime, for the real symbol of a nation is the flag and around the flag stands a religion which is patriotism, and a Bible which is history, and martyrs who are the national heroes.
The nations are the first gods come to dwell un- reservedly among men, and we love them more than we do ourselves, for this love is rooted in an age- old habit of worshipping the unseen through a symbol. Unfortunately it is the gods and not a god that has come down to us. A disquieting circumstance is that nationalism is not a monotheism but worship of many gods; and this leads us to think that the stage at which men worship nations may also be a transition stage, a dear one because it is our own, but never- theless a transition stage bound to undergo changes.
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The gods have already clashed. We have had our battle of the nations and we may yet have our twilight of the nations, but meanwhile these nations are unit- ing into a family much after the pleasant analogy of a former family of gods on Mount Olympus. Peace, between nations at least, may not yet be an accom- plished fact but it is coming. Even after the Olym- pian League of Nations, or something similar to it, has been established it may occasionally be necessary to depose a Vulcan and let him drop for nine days into his proper place, but let us hope that these will be family readjustments and not family feuds. We are going about things in the right way when, instead of making our gods more terrible and warlike, we make them more humane and beautiful. In the post- bellum period we shall take away from our gods their sacrifices and their thunderbolts, we shall rob them of their ability to do us harm, but we shall not nec- essarily do away with them altogether. As the chang- ing ideals of groups of men, it will not hurt each nation to be more itself than ever before, for groups, like single persons, may go far in developing an individuality of their own; and the living together in some sort of international unity need no more destroy the essentially human individuality of a na- tion than the circumstance of being united under a single government destroys individuals. Groupings like our own New England poets or the Chicago school of philosophy or the Republican party occur with
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perfect regularity under the same government; simi- larly under universal peace the culture of France, Italy, America, and of all other countries may flourish all the better because the pedestal of nations has been lowered and their stability increased.
The spirit of co-operation is beginning to prevail also among nations. Political dependence no longer necessarily means the utter slavery that it did in bygone ages. More and more certain kinds of de- pendence are becoming an aid rather than a hindrance to self -development. The time for putting a narrow construction on the principle of "Give me Liberty or Give me Death" is past. If this principle had always been strictly applied even in the past, then it were better that all the inhabitants of partitioned Poland had committed suicide, that all the conquered South African Boers had burned themselves on a great fun- eral pyre, and that the vanquished Greeks instead of becoming the slaves and eventual teachers of the Ro- mans should centuries ago have thrown themselves into the sea.
This does not mean that there may not have been times when it was better to fight than to be conquered. Just as there are murderers among individuals so there have been murderers among the nations whose aim was extinction and soul-exterminating slavery and who could be checked only by fighting back; for a murderous and maniacal nation that stops at nothing thereby places itself in a class with deadly microbes,
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storms, famine, and the unmoral elements in nature against whom war is never over. If a portion of mankind descends to the level of the potato bug it can only expect to be stepped upon, for the principle that human life is sacred is a very simple one. It means that all the agencies that threaten human life must be rendered harmless, and if one of these agen- cies itself be human and the absolutely only way of rendering it harmless is to kill it, then there is.no element of choice left in the matter. Normally the principle that human life is sacred acts as a restrain- ing influence preventing murder, not by killing the would-be murderer, but by changing the heart and inclination of the murderer and doing away with savage thoughts by substituting others and more sober ones; therefore, the nation that in the post-bellum period still wants war, places itself outside the pale of humanity and the only thing left is to quarantine that nation, to curb it as disease is curbed, until a cure sets in. If argument and education fail, there re- main economic pressure and starvation, until every nation learns that indeed we must all hang together or we shall all hang separately. That will be the great achievement of modern times, that we have chained our gods, so that even nations can no longer at will break out and commit random destruction. In the age of post-bellum economics it is possible to perfect machinery that will as effectually isolate a nation as prison bars shut in a malefactor; and if this
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can be done the last excuse for war will have dis- appeared. Mankind will have entered upon the post- bellum stage, the guarantee of whose continuance will be the cultivation of the attitude of mind that we have all along been trying to describe.
The embodiment of man's supreme ideal has changed from totems to idols, from idols to invisible realms, from realms to the Church, the Church to kings, kings to nations, and now the end of nations as sovereign powers is near. It will come, it must come, the time when the battle of nations will have to our ear the far-off sound of Greek mythology; and to hasten this day the one thing to do will be to look forward not backward, to fix an eye not on the glories of the past, but on the unbelievable grandeur of the future. What all our gods have been to us we can now be to ourselves. The whole world of the imagination can be made real. As an artist hews his dream in stone so we shall henceforth hew our gods from human hearts, for there lies our future — in the world of human nature, in the unplumbed depths of hearts and heads, in the new and complex emotions caused by the unbelievable visions and in- sights and the great courages to come when the indi- vidual shall live not as a tribesman, Jew or Greek or citizen of Rome but as living, throbbing members of a humanized planet. Now we live on earth by a sort of tolerance, but some day the earth will really be under our feet. Some day our wits will stop wool-
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gathering, our hearts will stop bowing down before strange gods, and our eyes will open to the ethics of the dust. Then we shall return to the path at some turn of which earth will be forced to give up secrets that will make us masters irrevocable of our whole fate. Without being either a socialist or an anar- chist, one may wish to hasten the day when all men will clearly see that wars divide the house of humanity against itself and that the great struggle is not the fight between man and man, but the figiht between man and the blind powers that make him. This is the philosophy of Earthianism, that our real problem is right here below and that the only question is whether the earth will overcome us or whether we will overcome the earth.
CHAPTER VI DEVELOPMENT OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS
The only thing on earth that has been granted the power of putting a value on itself is the human in- dividual. It is gradually beginning to dawn upon us that we are the only beings that have been handed a blank check to be filled out with an estimate of our own worth and then made good, and that we are unique in rightly or wrongly fancying ourselves su- perior to our surroundings and in developing the un- heard of temerity of smiling at the very forces which produced us. It is becoming clear that we are to be the first to receive the right of self-determination^ Earth is slow to let power slip from its grasp, but we are equally slow in realizing that that is exactly what is happening when gradually but surely the secrets of nature are finding an outlet through human conscious- ness.
To be sure, outside of humanity there are other and fairly intelligent creatures that do not hesitate to act as if they owned the world, but they do not realize the significance of their own attitude. Sur- rounding the human race there is a great deal of fear and hunger and procreation, but all much in the same
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way as there is lightning, wind, and gravitation. These are all terrific powers burrowing underground without ever reaching the light of consciousness. The whole of unconscious creation moves in a blind and terrible bondage, and nowhere, except in human in- dividuals, is there a detached and animated being that can look before it leaps and make any effort at all to avert its own impending doom.
Everywhere in nature there is subservience to law, so that living beings act not as individuals but in tremendous groups. Thus far there has been a crude mass production of uniform building material and little else. In this connection the apparent disregard found all through nature for the individual and the exaggerated care for species becomes significant. The present earth is doubtless meant to be a scaffold- ing. The forces of nature have thus far been build- ing only in the rough. Beams have been put up, rafters are there, power sleeps latent in large lines; but never until human individuals appeared was there a hint that the building was to take shape, to be fin- ished off with decorations, and perhaps even to be put to some use. There have been endless repeti- tions and experiments in the kind of species that could best survive but never a hint that nature was anything more than a rough craftsman unable to put on finishing touches or even to decide on the style of architecture desired, until the whole enigma is ap- parently explained by the appearance of self-
Development of Self-Consciousness 65
conscious beings who, when grown to maturity, seem destined to become the detail workers, the finishers, and perhaps eventually the masters of the earth. Blind forces of simple origin cannot themselves com- plete a job which, as indications show, is now being delegated to no other agency than to the individuals of the human species.
But it has taken us geological ages before we reached the stage where we could even take the hint. Not in a day, not in a year, not in aeons, do we get over the firmly implanted notion that we are anything but a part of nature, to be used blindly by great forces, and beaten about against our will eventually to meet a more than probable and early doom to which, like the rest of nature, we had better become resigned as soon as possible. Only during the last four thousand years have there been certain aberrations which indi- cate a ripening consciousness; I call them aberrations because we looked for the development of our king- dom elsewhere than on earth. Only recently, largely through the influence of science, have our eyes begun to open to mundane possibilities; and the passing of wars will open our eyes still further until we begin to wake up to the fact that some of the secrets of nature are being whispered into our ears and that per- haps the far off divine event, heralded so long, is none other than the day when the reins of human destiny will pass from nature's hands into our own. At a certain point in the future, consciousness is bound
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to come of age; and then, inebriate with power, we shall feel earth's centre of gravity, hope, and respon- sibility shift to within our own bosoms.
Viewed as a step toward this event, the long upward climb, representing the growth of consciousness from primitive man to modem time, becomes significant. Our real work as fullgrown men and women still lies before us, but the first long step toward an enlightened individualism is nearly over. We began with canni- balism. Savages attadh so little worth to themselves as individuals that without compunction they hunt and slay and eat each other. In utter disregard for one's neighbour it is hard to go farther back than to the days when each tribe was food for another tribe. Form- erly like animals we preyed upon each other, and from that day to the time when human life will be the most sacred thing on earth is one long steady climb.
Thus far man, like nature, has been careless of the single life. After unmitigated savagery ensue long periods in which the chief function of the male was to be a warrior. There were tribal wars and wars of conquest lasting well into the time when men were savages no more. In the early part of this period prisoners of war were put to death. It was only gradually that the conqueror learned to dispose of his prisoners in a less summary fashion than that prompted by the prodigal impulse of nature.
A variation of the wars of conquest were the wars
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of ambition and rivalry. Within historic times, a number of more or less successful empires strut and fret and have their little day. Not to go back to the Assyrians and Babylonians, there are the hosts of Alexander the Great, of Caesar, and of Charlemagne. The greatest of former empires was Rome, and its habit of using the ever-ready sword for purposes of furthering dominion was copied by the devotees of religion, who thus transplanted war into a new and fertile field. The Church militant, ably seconded by the Mohammedans, has done wonders in keeping the martial spirit alive. It taught us that war and ex- termination could ostensibly be made to serve the highest ideals. From this it is but a step to wars for all sorts of ideals including political ones. In the name of religion and of liberty countless souls have marched to an untimely death. Persecutions, inquisitions, and titanic national struggles have learned to hide behind high motives; but nothing can quite conceal the fact that this entire procedure is an extension of old barbaric customs rooted in man's animosity to man, which in turn are an unconscious working out of the primitive impulse to hold life cheap and to rely on procreation rather than creation. After States were well established they still clung to the policy of small regard for individuals. From the Mosaic code with its numerous capital crimes to Georgian England with its death penalty for stealing is after all not a great step. Restriction of the death
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penalty to really serious crimes is of painfully recent date. Recent also is the passing out of the chivalrous habit of duelling, when for a word, a petty insult or a smile men threw their lives away — puny indi- viduals thus bravely aping the prodigality of nature. How earth's forces would laugh at their well-trained puppets if these forces but knew and had a sense of humour. The reason the duelling habit died hard and still persists, in lynching as an ungentlemanly and in the death penalty as a legal survival of the duel, is that it was rooted in nature's logic if not in our own. We do not easily achieve our mental in- dependence as a race, for the marvel of this attitude of prodigality portrayed in dwindling form from con- queror to duellist is the deep-rooted racial psychology of it all. We persist in following good old Mother Earth who is careful of the type, more careful than we are, but as yet too clumsy to care aught for in- dividuals. At least so it seems to us, but perhaps this view is after all incomplete; for we read earth's prodigality only in the book of nature, in the lower forms of evolution, in the earlier pages of Earthian drama, and we forget that voices come to us also from the inside. It has been our error that the still small voice that has been trying to make itself heard was for centuries referred to strange and extraneous authors, rather than to the well-known terrestrial pow- ers that have rough-hewn this planet. Why cannot Earth's voice now be speaking to us in our individual
Development of Self-Consciousness 69
consciousness, in an effort to make clear to us that the type is as perfect as mass methods can make it, and that the only way to develop it further is through the individual. After all, the type is rough work; it is the John the Baptist of the individual; and now come the details and the depth which mean every- thing.
The whole process of civilization has been one of increasing the worth of the individual. Our first task has been to make the world safe for the race, and in this we were aided by nature's method of mak- ing the race and species stick together as units, so that in mass combats we could hold our own with other species; but now that the physical world is conquered, it is absurd to want to go on and conquer man in the same crude way that we conquered the earth. It is a contradiction in terms for man to conquer man. If we are to slay each other ad in- finitum by the sword, it were better that the gift of self-knowledge had been given to the birds or the bees or some other branch of the animal kingdom who might have used it more intelligently. Upon earth's conquest there should follow the development, not the decimation, of man. After the race is secure our motto should be: Make the world safe for the in- dividual and then Burbank the individual. I say Burbank the individual because the race has reached a point where the quickest way to improve it farther is to improve the individuals. The burden of the
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constantly increasing worth of consciousness is that further development means the enactment of a post- bellum era based on the maxim that the most precious thing on earth is the human individual.
CHAPTER VII SOCIETY VERSUS THE INDIVIDUAL ^
There are undiscovered depths in every human be- ing. No one finds it easy to bring out all that is in him. We talk with a man and the surface of his being is not even ruffled ; it cannot be, for in ordinary conversation it is impossible not to ride lightly over the souls of our fellowmen as ships ride lightly over the sea. Under other and extraordinary circum- stances the same man that we have just spoken to surprises us by his sudden strength, his tenderness, or by some other treasure apparently brought up from the depths of his being. Human nature is so ridh and deep that no one can justly say that he knows even one individual through and through.
Society as at present constituted is the result of a shallow co-operation of individual human natures working together on the principle that each display and expend as little of his real self as possible. It is made up not of men and women but of incomplete
1 By "society" in this chapter I mean the more or less man of straw society that consists of the sum total of our public selves as expressed in the laws and institutions of today. The position in- tended to be brought out is that the society of today is the merest beginning of united effort and that the greater glories of complete co-operation are yet to be revealed.
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and fractional men and women. Imagine an archi- tect building a house out of nothing but odds and ends and irregular pieces of wood, with never a single complete beam or part anywhere. Would it be sur- prising if the structure hung together badly? Thus modern society is not the sum total of true humanity, for humanity is not in it. It has not yet reached that stage. He who looks into society, into public laws, customs, religions, and history to find humanity, looks amiss, for there is not a single complete man or woman in it. Society is not a whole composed of in- dividuals any more than the Panama Canal is the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean ; it is merely the sum total of the few points of contact between individuals who prefer not to touch each other profoundly at all. Sciences like sociology, eugenics, philosophy of his- tory, modern psychology, and a host of others are crazy quilts pieced together from fragments; and any inference drawn from them is as likely to be wrong as not. At most they are gateways to a larger science for which the data will come in the future, for as yet a man's self is in his own soul rather than in the hands of his fellowmen.
When a twelve horsepower steam engine is never worked to more than one-twelfth of its full capacity, some people are sure to begin to think that it is only a one horsepower machine. By their works you shall know them, think these modem savants who see in this more than half slumbering toy engine of humanity a
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clear revelation of man's innermost secrets. Not dreaming of the undeveloped powers of man, they see in the doings of the race up to the present eternal law. History is regarded as the key to the world's progress, and human institutions are all looked upon as sacrosanct, because it is forgotten that we make our laws and institutions only to break them, and that in the eyes of any sort of a prophet a thousand years are but a day. A few millenniums hence most of our present inviolable institutions will have been replaced by better ones. It is folly to worship too rigidly the doings of man up to the present, because it leaves out of account our own transforming and transvaluing capacities. Like the host of living things all around us who do not know what they are doing, we also are only partially aware of our own abilities, so that the present works of society are a concealment rather than a revelation of what man is or can do.
Perhaps the feebleness of our concerted action is also partially responsible for the fact that separate in- dividuals seldom exert themselves to full capacity. Only now and then do we have an age in which great individuals stand out. Ordinarily the ingrained policy of the millions is to ask for royal roads and to dream of advance by wonderfully easy and semi-miraculous agencies that will require little or no exertion from the separate units that after all are the only com- ponents of humanity. It is easy to work for some dim and distant people of the future, far off and readily
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satisfied; it is hard to work for the present generation. It is easy to work for some "ism" that we hope will blossom out in some far-off time, but it is hard to get on with one's neighbour. We love perfect bliss, but seeing that its realization involves more than a modi- cum of effort, we lend ourselves willingly to the theory that bliss comes in the hereafter; or if we believe in a heaven on earth, it is the path of least resistance to hold that the "laws of society" will bring this about so that the individual has no burden. We love to co-operate with the supernatural but not with our fel- lowmen right here and now. In our hearts we are much more afraid of each other than we are of the devil. We are not anthropomorphic enough.
To be anthropomorphic is the doctrine that we must limit our dream of achievement to the truly human but that within these limits there are endless vistas and as yet undreamed of possibilities. We cannot be gods, for we are not gods; we cannot be animals for we are not animals. What we can be is human beings and that is sufficient, for in so doing we shall be avoid- ing on the one hand the Charybdis of trying to be more than we can be, which is destruction; and on the other hand the Scylla of being content with less than we can be which is stagnation — ^between which there is no more difference than between chopping a tree down, or letting it starve for want of water; for both mean death. It is hard to say which at present should be most severely condemned: our efforts to follow im-
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possible ideals that lead to our own destruction or our efforts to get along without any ideals at all which leads us back into the sleep of animalism. The scale of life from plants and animals to man has recently been found to be continuous, and the fact that there is no break between us and the lower reaches of the animal kingdom has made certain of us overemphasize the material side of life; but of the two destructive tendencies inherent in a human race that toward over- animalization is only a little less dangerous than that toward over-spiritualization ; for again and again it is worth pointing out that we live not by bread alone and that our spiritual food is none the less essential be- cause it can occasionally be abused. Our salvation lies in treading the golden via media which leads neither upward toward the incorporeal gods nor down- ward toward the unspiritual animals.
It is necessary to care for material things, but it should be clearly recognized that any race that has gone through a training school of centuries of living by and for ideals can no longer successfully love ma- terial things for their own sake. We love them for the human values that they stand for. The root of the material world is money, but, after all, our animal needs are few; and after that we love money for what it stands for in the souls of others, for the mock ap- proval which it brings, for honour, deference, power, and beauty, none of which are material things. Fame, another goal of much endeavour, is utterly com-
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pounded of spiritual incense carried by the tongues of men; but the thing we want most in life is love, an intensely human commodity that like all impond- erables cannot be bought in the market. Thus we are drifting into the practice of symbolizing everything we touch, and loving not the thing itself but our own view of it. More and more it is the immaterial part of a material world that we become attached to, and the root and secret source of all this immateriality is in the hearts of our fellowmen. That is why these fel- lowmen are becoming more and more a desperate necessity to each other. That is why each generation in an orgy of sacrifice bequeathes its best riches to the next generation, hoping for the love and adoration of those to come. It is almost pathetic the way we raise us up human beings to love us, just as we raise us grain to feed us; each generation endowing, edu- cating, and exhorting its children, in a mighty effort to earn the crumbs of gratitude that will fall from their table when our day is over and theirs will have come. We can no longer live without the impond- erables with which we supply each other. In the heart of humanity the self-devouring material world of plants and animals is being turned into a world where soul feeds on soul, and the deepest life impulse is an insensate desire to enjoy more and more of each other's most intimate humanity. To live as human beings more fully and more abundantly is getting to be our innermost craving, and this implies
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two things : insight enough to see that it is the spiritual and not the material which is the goal of our striving, and after we know this, common sense enough to look for the spiritual not in the clouds but in the hearts of men right here on earth.
The need for ideals and the proper attitude to take toward them cannot be too clearly stated. Ideals are not to be overvalued in the sense that we should throw our lives away for them, but on the other hand they are not to be undervalued in the sense that we could get along without them if we wanted to. We can no longer live without ideals any more than we can live without food. We are developing strange appetites as strong and stronger than the hunger in our stomachs. Many a man with enough to eat has killed himself. At the pinnacle of his ambition Leo Tolstoy wrote as follows:
"Such was the condition I had come to, at a time when all the circumstances of my life were pre-emi- nently happy ones, and when I had not reached my fiftieth year. I had a good, loving, and beloved wife, good children, and a large estate, which, without much trouble on my part, was growing and increasing; I was more than ever respected by my friends and acquaint- ances; I was praised by strangers, and could lay claim to having made my name famous without much self- deception. Moreover, I was not mad or in an un- healthy mental state; on the contrary, I enjoyed a mental and physical strength which I have seldom found in men of my class and pursuits; I could keep up with a peasant in mowing, and could continue
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mental labour for eight or ten hours at a stretch, with- out any evil consequences. And in this state of things it came to this, that I could not live, and as I feared death I was obliged to employ ruses against myself so as not to put an end to my life."
It is possible to object that this was a pathological case, but it is impossible to get rid of a fact by calling it pathological. If to be starving for spiritual food is pathological, then we are all becoming more path- ological as the years and the ages roll by. Without knowing it, the race is undergoing a rebirth. It is rising into a sphere where men breathe not air but love, where men see not things but values, where we do not starve from lack of food but from lack of un- derstanding and sympathy. We are being weaned from living by material things. Our food, the real food that we live by and enjoy will presently be some- thing that only mutual interaction can produce. We are delving deeper into earth's own secret of per- petual motion and undying youth, and in a sense we have already become self -feeding machines with all the paradoxicality that that implies. Presently we shall reach a stage where progress in the right direc- tion will establish us for ever, but where a false move either upward or downward will send us scampering off the earth like many a lesser race before us, thus depriving us for ever of the new riches now for the first time after the lapse of aeons placed within our reach. Our heaven-sent imagination, the source of
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all our spiritual life, like a balloon tied to a slender string, will either soar away from us for good, or we soar with it and learn the art of flying. There is no third course. The tug of the balloon is getting far too strong. Either from now on we decline or a new era of undreamt of growth sets in.
CHAPTER VIII
UTOPIANISM
Neither a cursory review of racial history indicat- ing the growth of self -consciousness, nor a rapid an- alysis of what is meant by society, suffice to bring out the unique worth of individuals in the post-bellum period. The reason for this is that the importance .of creeds, potentates, and such institutions as the State has been drummed into our ears so continuously and persistently that we have lost sight of the new role beginning to be played by the individual. For many hundreds of years enormous pains have been taken to educate us to a clear view of the indispen- sability of Church and State so that we have reached a stage where we react automatically to the majesty of these institutions and, at least in the case of a State, assume without examination that a nation is greater than the individuals composing it. In the past such an attitude may have been necessary; in fact, it is impossible to see how it could have been avoided when throughout all ages powerful minds have made it their business to exalt all manner of States until the entire history of man has become tinged with Utopianism or an exaggerated regard for the importance of political
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States. It need not be doubted that States have been and still are of tremendous importance, but the ques- tion is: are they eternally of the same transcendent value, or do new ages and new circumstances create conditions that perhaps call for a gradual shift of emphasis? Now that the paths between man and man are being straightened, are artificial units such as States still the absolutely highest thing on earth or are they the second highest?
In the past this question has been answered in only one way. Symptomatic of the general temper of hu- manity have been the great Utopia-makers of history who unequivocally exalt the State above all else. It is impossible to pass in review all the men who with the magic of their eloquence have helped to idealize the State, but for purposes of illustration two men, Plato and Hegel, centuries apart and both fashioners of Utopias, will suffice. Plato's "Republic" is a classic among Utopias, and Hegel's ethics likewise cul- minates in an almost orgiastic exaggeration of the social function of some legally constructed State.
For ages the Church and the State have been the two pillars of society, and what the clergy have been to the Church, Utopians have been to the State. Their aim has been to make us fall in love with States. In the case of Plato and Hegel, the one does this by idealizing the outer form of a State, and the other by idealizing its inner character. Plato, with the touch of a dramatist, gives us a ravishing picture
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of what a model State should look like, and Hegel, not one whit less idealistic and impractical than Plato, gives us an exposition of the spiritual groundwork on which he thinks a modem State should rest. Plato's "Republic" is a bare, harmonious structure, in which stark individuals are fitted together like blocks of marble, and the whole is as rigidly severe in outline as a Greek temple. To be sure in Greek temples there is delicate sculpturing and the lines are exquisite, but this has its counterpart in Plato's work where in the various dialogues many a personality stands out with the subtle grace and boldness of close acquaintances suddenly baring their inmost hearts. Hegel's struc- ture on the other hand, with its buttresses and wings and balancing of masses, is more like a Gothic cathe- dral. His State was composed, not of sheer indi- viduals, but of individuals, families, and corpora- tions. Using a straightforward, dichotomous logic, Plato barred from his State all that was subversive or contradictory; whereas Hegel by means of a curiously modern, three-cornered logic managed very well to incorporate contradictions, and when his State was finished it looked a great deal like a State based on the English Constitution, for which it is well known that Hegel had great veneration. By the time Utopias reached Hegel they were complex enough to resemble natural growths. All this divergence need not make us lose sight of the fact that the problem of both of these men was to answer the question: How can I
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make an ordinary, everyday State seem not an ordi- nary, everyday State, but a thing divine?
Both speak of the State with almost religious ven- eration. To Hegel it is "der Gang Gottes in der Welt." All creation has been in endless travail be- fore the State was born, and no deity or heavenly kingdom with its hierarchy of angels overtops the glory of an earthly State, for God himself is the State. It is the highest manifestation of the biggest thing he knows, namely Geist or God, who does not exist as something transcending the State but rather as something which in man is becoming a State, the Deity together with man through a sort of spiritual dialectic working out their own salvation ; so that when all is said and done the politics of Hegel absorbs the whole of his theology. In a similar manner Plato makes all that is divine contribute to the State, the proper functioning of which calls for virtues such as can only have been remembered from a former life. The State for Plato has its rising and its set- ting in two divine eternities. If Hegel tries to supply the State with an immense depth of spiritual ground- work, Plato no less sets his State, like a jewel, in the midst of splendours, flanking it to the left with Pre- Existence and to the right with Immortality. Every- thing that is exalted meets in the human State of Plato which is the home of righteousness, the centre of order, the final end of the rainbow where the greatest sum total of human bliss is found. It is only
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in his Ideal State that Plato, that insatiable seeker after the good, at last finds rest. Other cosmic lov- ers of heroic type may pitch upon Personality or the Uebermensch or the Glory of God as their supreme desire, but Plato and Hegel are among those who pre- pare the way for a worship of the State.
In spite of the intellectual greatness of these two men and others like them, the whole galaxy of build- ers of artificial States is out of date. In a day of personality and character, Utopias fashioned out of manikins and legal fictions lose their ring of truth and jangle out of tune. All States and nations con- structed either on paper or in reality have in them an element of artificiality and incompleteness, bound to render them unfit to be worshipped as patterns in too uncritical a spirit. If we hark back far enough, they are, as we have seen, the counterparts of ancient heathen idols which in the eyes of former worshippers seemed perfect, but which to us now seem but crude idealizations of the average primitive man. Not one of them is as palpitatingly true or real as a single human being.
Of course, for a latter-day Utopian like Hegel it is impossible to over-emphasize a State, because to him an individual exists only in the State, owes every- thing to the State, and without the State is less than nothing. To this once more the only reply is that some sort of a political State is absolutely essential to the life of man, but that the same thing may be said
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of such simple substances as air and water. They too are absolutely essential, for we cannot live without them, yet who lives for air and water? Who idealizes them or gives up his life for them? Utopians are wrong in picking out the State as the one thing in the universe greater than individuals, for such a view rests on a false analysis of the function of ideals in the spiritual life of man. Before looking at man writ large in the State, Plato might better have ex- amined a little more closely the small print in the heart of each individual; and before deciding that the starting-point of ethics is the community, Hegel might better have stopped to look more closely into the na- ture of these human beings out of which so glibly be built up his Juggernaut; for the centre of humanity is within man, in its private rather than its public life, and whosoever builds a universe in which this centre is misplaced, builds nothing but a house of cards.
From what happens when States crumble it is pos- sible to get a glimpse of why externalized Utopias are artificial. The fall of Greece was a prelude to the rapid rise and then still greater fall of the Roman Empire, and when Rome fell men turned not to a new Republic but to Christianity. Christianity had in it such stuff as made Utopias look pale. What Utopia allowed each man to be more himself than ever be- fore? What Utopia had a ruler who treated rich and poor alike and took a personal interest in all his sub-
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jects? Who ever before had heard of a place where the first were last and the last first, where the rich could hardly enter, and the meek inherited the earth? This was not a kingdom but a place where men could feel at home and grow in grace and inner wisdom. Under Christianity men developed rich inner lives consisting of chivalry, honour, personality, and conscience, all of which constituted a genuine step for- ward because they allowed more scope to the in- dividual.
One indication that Hegel is a recession from the lesson taught by Christianity is the fact that he once more tried to do away with personal conscience and to substitute for it the public conscience of a people as expressed in public laws. He tried to save Chris- tianity by pouring what he thought were its spiritual riches into the fine old pagan mould of Plato's Re- public, and the result was a bigger, grander, and even more hopelessly artificial State than ever. Hegel drew the wrong lesson from a Christianity which was never meant to be a kingdom of this earth. Prayers, vigils, battles with conscience, regenerations, and other-worldliness are things which make man not more but less of a social animal. They enable him to live in monasteries, quietly on books, or drive him out to the desert or to Nature. The real fruits of this re- ligion, whose founder refused to be King, are for- giveness, humility, and love of enemies — all of which are aids to the development of inner consciousness.
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but poison to nationalism. It is impossible to graft these fruits upon the dead stalk of Plato's Republic, as Hegel did, and expect them to grow. Their nat- ural soil is the individual, not the State.
The fall of a world empire was followed by de- velopment and assimilation of a world religion which, however, was only one of a number of great move- ments that all went to enrich the inner life of in- dividuals. As a factor of world wide influence, Christianity has had to cede the centre of the stage to the melee of modem industry, science, and art, none the less intensively spiritual because they are secular. Science has come with a greater onrush than any previous movement since the world began. Ever since science has stopped looking in the clouds for the philosopher's stone, it has through its immense practicality become a ministering angel that does more than any other single agency toward making our everyday life agreeable. It has become human- ized and interesting to the multitude. In the last two hundred years we have learned more about our earth, our ancestors, our history, our body, our brain, our subconscious self, and about everything pertain- ing to us, than we did in all the years preceding; and knowledge means first interest and then insight. Like religion, science is getting us all interested in things we never dreamed of before, and the result is that we become more interesting to each other and that our human life is deepened.
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■
Both science and art are to be classed with religion because like religion they are anti-sectional and uni- versal. In this they breathe the modem spirit which is that of co-operation from one end of the earth to the other. Another similarity is that they deepen the inner life of the humblest of us, for beauty and truth are independent of great riches and, like religion, are accessible to all who have but ears to hear and eyes to drink them in. Art is especially fortunate in its infinite capacity for glorifying little things. In this it is more than a match for religion, for in a way the Bible was the first great novel ever written, and the same spiritual struggles that illuminate its pages are now poured forth into our novels, dramas, comedies, and poetry. Why should not the literature of the whole world be the legitimate successor of the start- lingly precocious literature of a single people that for centuries has fed the Occident? The first enlight- enment followed the Hebrew Scriptures; the second came when to these Scriptures were added the liter- atures of Greece and Rome; and the third will come when, no longer wedded to political idols, we begin to assimilate, live by, and enjoy our own literatures which under our eyes have been turning into a power- ful new gospel of humanity. Men have been pouring their hearts into books, statues, and pictures, until limned in art there stands ready for our use the open record of each other's hearts. Especially the modern novel has become more and more the medium through
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which we watch other lives unfold and behold those invisible and yet so intensely human struggles and actions that can be portrayed only by an imagination steeped in sympathy. Our literature is the only work proceeding from the hand of man that fully keeps up with our spiritual development. It is our least ar- tificial creation, and therefore it is significant that our literature has descended from hero worship to char- acter worship. Like sculpture, which has run the gamut from Phidias to Rodin, from immortal statues with impassive faces to ugliness instinct with spiritual beauty, so literature has passed from the unreal to the human, from externals to internals, from plots to character, motives, loves, thoughts, and hates, until the whole groundwork of human values comes to light. Art and science are tending more and more toward an enrichment of our personal life and an increase of insight into the immense value of individuals to each other.
The whole significance of our spiritual labour, as exhibited in art and science, comes to a head in our pathetic attempt to pass them on untarnished to suc- ceeding generations. They are our spiritual riches, the only thing in the world that makes us interesting to each other, and thus in an agony of endeavour we be- queath them to our children, lest we rear us sticks and stones instead of human beings. That is the secret of the gigantic effort made to educate each suc- ceeding generation up to the level of those preceding
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it, for we need that which education does to an in- dividual; namely, develop his inner life to a point where it can understand and mingle with our own. We can no longer be happy with animals or savages; hence our own children must have our own inner world inside of them, so that we may enjoy them and they us. Thus only can we live and live more abundantly as each generation replaces the old one in a world where more and more we shall have to be all in all to each other. And now that many nations are wrecked and another would-be world empire has fallen, the call to march ahead on the road blazed by Christianity and further opened up by modern art and science once more comes clear and strong; and the only alternative to marching forward on this road is to march back into the olden days of fire, pillage, and slaughter, of primitive, insane, ferocious animal- ism of which we have just had such a costly reminder and from which, before the new light of individual self-consciousness dawned upon us, there was no escape.
CHAPTER IX
DEMOCRACY
Cohesion keeps the world intact. In the form of gravitation it operates between the tiniest atoms and the mightiest suns, so that all these entities can form the great universe of which our solar system with its minute earth and its still more minute in- stitutions is but an insignificant part. These forces of cohesion flow also through our own veins and brains when, as human beings, we find that on the one hand we are immeasurably alone and on the other hand irresistibly drawn to each other. As far back as memory goes, the members of the human race have been to some extent instinctively gregarious. Like the whiff's of nebulous matter that cling together and form swirling clouds long before a solid planet is ready to take form, so human beings have always huddled together in clusters of varying shape and size long before the comparatively modem days of world powers and internationalism. Recently such modem inventions as books, tunnels, telephones, rail- ways, liners, ocean fliers, and national newspapers have welded us more closely together than ever before
until the whole human world has become a network
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of individuals totally dependent upon each other for hundreds of things essential to life and happiness. Co-operation has increased both our comforts and our wants, and some day in the not too distant future, as measured by a universe that toils a billion years over a cockle shell, the all-pervading forces of cohesion will twist us human beings into an organization so tight that, like the parts in a Swiss watch, every cog and every member in the human race will be essential.
Elements of this fundamental drift are being im- bedded into our institutions, one of which is democ- racy, a form of government whose fundamental prin- ciple, bound to come to the surface in time, is that the people and every single unit composing it are sacred. Not until the notion that even the humblest of us has his little role to play adumbrated faintly through all the strata of society was the ground ripe for such an institution as democracy, which demands that in the game of life no man be counted out. De- mocracy is the name now given to the theory that every man has an inalienable right to life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, and as many other rights and blessings as are not inconsistent with these funda- mental ones.
First democracies have seen this truth imperfectly. An institution such as slavery played an important part in bringing to a head the fine culture of ancient Greece, and for that matter slavery was not abolished in our own democracy till 1864. As a general rule
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the principle of democracy is merely laid down in broad lines and lived up to more or less roughly until gradually, in the marrow of our bones, we begin to feel what it means that the individual is sacred. The slow but inevitable abolition of slavery is but an instance of how this principle is permeating. Little by little we learn that certain ways of thinking and acting are inconsistent with the program laid down for ourselves, and then we abolish the institution em- bodying these obnoxious practices. A democracy is not necessarily a paradise on earth. All it has thus far managed to be is a form of government of which the cornerstone is solid and eminently capable of sup- porting tier upon tier of great emancipations. Yes- terday we abolished slavery, tomorrow we shall abolish war. Democracy does not solve all prob- lems at a stroke, but it does give every human being a chance to contribute to the solution; and that in itself is an enormous advance. Wisdom no longer dies with the King.
It is one thing to say that each individual is worth something and therefore ought at least to be allowed to live, and quite another thing to say that each in- dividual is worth as much as any other. Making de- mocracy a synonym for indiscriminate equality has done more than any other single error in leading democracies astray; it has led nascent democracies to insist on all sorts of minor rights while they lost sight of the one essential, fundamental right
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of individuals to life. It is due to this error that not only war, but wars for petty issues, are still with us. Democracy does not mean that all men are equal but only that they are equal to a certain clearly defined extent. Just because each man has a vote is no sign that each man is a Daniel Webster. When we give each man the right to live and perhaps also to vote, that merely means that up to a certain level all men are presumed to be equal; it does not mean that some men may not grow far beyond this ordinary level required to breathe and cast a vote. Democracies assume that every human being has enough intelligence to do certain things such as pursue life, liberty, and happiness, or however the constitu- tion of any particular democracy may phrase it, but these democracies would perish unless some indi- viduals did more than that. Certain minimum re- quirements are laid down, and these are followed by certain rights enjoyed by all, because all are sup- posed to have these minimum requirements; but this does not mean that those who have abilities far above this minimum may not be of immensely greater value to their fellowmen. All men have certain funda- mental similarities, but for the rest it is far more true that all men are unequal than that they are equal. No two faces, no two characters, no two abilities are alike. Even in the smallest natural groups of society, such as the family, one member is the father, the other the mother, and the third the
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child, and the function as well as the place that each occupies is strikingly different. The pith of a de- mocracy is not that it denies these differences, but that in the midst of this vast inequality it has found one or two respects in which all men are, and to eternity can be, consistently equal.
By insisting upon this grain of fundamental equal- ity, democracy has checked the wild excesses of the much older doctrine that all are unequal and in no respect alike. Long before democracy with its em- phasis on certain rights for every member of the human family obtained a foothold, the other theory which saw no element of similarity between high-bom and low, pauper and prince, elect and damned held sway, it was openly preached and practiced that cer- tain men have an absolute right over the life and lib- erty of others. There have been eras in which tyrants ruled like gods. But the doctrine does not always take on the severe form of tyranny and despotism. In a milder way a man like Carlyle, by stressing the inequality of man, came to his well-known views on hero-worship and to his theory that history is at bot- tom the history of great men. This view has in it so much of truth that it may as well be admitted with- out more ado that Carlyle was not wrong in his in- sistence on the deep-going inequality of man, but that he erred solely and uniquely in his view that this was inconsistent with democracy. The mistake lies in thinking that a great deal of inequality may not be
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consistent with an even more striking equality. The fact that men are not equal in all respects does not exclude the possibility that under their skins or in a very elemental way they may all be alike. Although no two of us have similar faces, yet we all belong to the class of animals having backbones and a breath that fails us at the end of seventy years; that is: we are all perishable vertebrates though we may not all be hardshell Baptists or Republicans. A more rad- ical exponent of inequality was Nietzsche who held that under all circumstances the herd should rightly be sacrificed to the superman who in turn is enjoined to have no tenderness. The superman is the final, much-to-be-desired goal of all evolution, and one such a child of the dawn is worth millions of slaves.
It is commonly thought that Nietzsche's views are directly opposed to those of that apostolic Christianity which he so violently attacked, and the fundamental virtues of which are supposed to be humility and a naive non-resistance to the evils of a world wrongly regarded as ephemeral. As a matter of fact from the point of view of a theory of society the two are sup- plementary rather than irreconcilable, for both justify the self-sacrifice of individuals, one by instructing the supermen to demand it and the other by instructing the herd not to withhold it; and both therefore violate the cardinal principle of what democracy is coming to; namely, a sacred regard for the life of the in- dividual. Nietzsche preached the deified superman.
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and primitive Christianity taught mortals the proper attitude to assume towards a deity; the result is that unintentionally both doctrines dovetail, producing a combination of terrific force and practicality which several times in history has worked nothing less than miracles of destruction — look at the stupendous havoc wrought by Napoleon and his adoring soldiers. The combination of these two doctrines confirming and acquiescing in bottomless inequality, gives us a po- litical philosophy that is among the things that work, but work too deadly well, and is likely to result in establishing for ever a world in which carnage rules and the few flourish at the expense of the many.
All theories of radical inequality, untempered by democracy, must sooner or later advocate brute force as the final arbiter of human destinies. If men are not even equal to the minimum extent that all are human beings with the right to live, then any part of humanity that can demolish any other part has the right to do so and to hold its winnings; but let us hope that the great war has put a final quietus on this theory that might is right and that brute force is the only ultimate way of deciding human questions; on the other hand an over-readiness to suffer and accept our lot is just as fatal as the theory that a man with giant strength should use it as a giant. Senseless self-sacrifice should never be required. In the past it may have been necessary that many men should die for others, just as a stone age, a bronze age, and
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slavery were necessary to bring us where we are today, although all the practices of these bygone ages are now not only obsolete but harmful. In this de- veloping world of ours, a thing that was good in one age need no longer be so in another age in which the whole complexion of humanity has changed. It may be true that through inordinate self-sacrifice we have learned to deepen our love for each other, just as through slavery we learned useful habits of hard work, but from this it does not follow that supreme self-sacrifices should go on for ever, any more than that slavery should become an eternal institution be- cause in its day and age it brought us a great boon. Greater love hath no man than that he lay down his life for his friend still stands, but in a post-bellum age it is unfair that such proofs should be required or such practices erected into a doctrine.
Somehow we are all beginning to feel that the right way lies somewhere between sentiment and force. There is a middle ground between militarism and pacifism, between too much self-sacrifice and too much self-assertion, toward which we are slowly feel- ing our way. Here the first of all democracies which lived its little day in a less complex time may shed some light. When Greek civilization was at its height Pericles is supposed to have ruled Athens not by force but by persuasion. The Greeks trusted neither to the heart nor to their strong right arm alone, but they
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had faith in their mental powers, in their clear-seeing eyes which could divine a road to walk upon and in their marvellous eloquence which could point out this road to others and make them delight in walking on it also. The Greek theory of persuasion, as an in- strument for exerting rational power over others, oc- cupies a middle ground between brute force and senseless submission, and as such, for articulate hu- man beings able to communicate their own insights to others, it cannot be improved. The art of per- suasion as part of the role played by free discussion in a democracy cannot be overemphasized.
Much of what the Greeks were driving at was em- bodied by the Romans and succeeding peoples in their system of jurisprudence and law-courts, but the whole movement of free discussion has gradually taken a turn and narrowed itself to a method of dealing spe- cifically with criminals and people hardly amenable to persuasion. Thus everywhere force has had to come to the aid of the law, and the real elements of free persuasion have had to work out their own salva- tion elsewhere. In dealing with the undeveloped, the irrational, and the criminal persuasion will always have to be supplemented by force, but in the domain of free men things are moving in the right direction when steps are once more taken to establish interna- tional instruments of persuasion to which men submit freely because they see the right. Signs are not want-
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ing to indicate that the minds of men are once more being opened to argument, and that the old Greek method of ruling each other and wooing prosperity by persuasion may yet come into its own.
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CHAPTER X
TOLERANCE
A beneficent influence of the practice of persuasion by argument has been to bring into the world that most modem of all the great virtues, tolerance, the genesis of which is well described by an English, writer in the following terms:
"Tolerance too is learned in discussion; and as his- tory shows, is only so learned. In all customary so- cieties bigotry is the ruling principle; in rude places to this day any one who says anything new is looked on with suspicion, and is persecuted by opinion if not in- jured by penalty. One of the greatest pains to human nature is the pain of a new idea: it is, as common peo- ple say, so 'upsetting'; it makes you think that after all your favourite notions may be wrong, your firmest beliefs ill-founded; it is certain that till now there was no place allotted in your mind to the new and startling inhabitant, and now that it has conquered an entrance you do not at once see which of your old ideas it will or will not turn out, with which of them it can be reconciled and with which of them it is at essential enmity. Naturally therefore, common men hate a new idea, and are disposed more or less to ill-treat the or- iginal man who brings it. Even nations with long habits of discussion are intolerant enough: in England, 101
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• ;•; ivherjej there -is jtvn the whole probably a freer discus- sion of a greater number of subjects than ever was before in the world, we know how much power bigotry retains. But ... if we know that a nation is capable of enduring continuous discussion, we know that it is capable of practising with equanimity continuous tol-
Tolerance, an enlightened form of liberty, is a com- pound of love and understanding born from the free development of the individual. In the shape of re- ligious tolerance it is woven into the very texture of our own democracy. One of the reasons why men came to America was to enjoy freedom of worship, and to this aim they clung when all of the colonies, finally united, decreed that religion was to be a per- sonal matter and that each man, regardless of what church he was a member, could still be as good a citizen as anybody else. This far-sighted policy has contributed no little toward increasing among us the blessings of liberty.
The question of religious wars and persecutions could be settled in no other way than by making re- ligion the affair of the individual with which the State or the nation was not concerned. The process by which the new freedom was obtained, consisted in taking religion out of public life and finding it a place within the ever growing sphere of private life. Much this same sort of thing has been going on since
1 Walter Bagehot, "Physics and Politics.*'
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time immemorial in the history of civilization, during which we developed from members of a primitive tribe with no personal life at all into members of prosperous States, jealous of government interference in the affairs of our inner, complex, personal lives. One by one, by breaking the shackles of public cus- tom, private rights and liberties were gained at the expense of public tyrannies.
In the same way we shall get rid of wars — by mak- ing private issues out of public ones. In the midst of the Reformation it was hard to see how religious tolerance could ever come about; and in the same way, after the greatest war in history, it is hard to see how wars will ever recede; but there is no doubt that political wars will some day be as unreal to us as ecclesiastical auto-da-fe and burnings at the stake are now. Some day the reasons for which millions have been for centuries asked to lay down their lives will seem a matter of personal choice, making little dif- ference one way or another; for our stature as human beings is capable of broadening out in ways that at the moment we may not suspect. In the light of his- tory and past achievements, it seems not impossible that there may come a day when each will enjoy his own nationality, without rancor, without continual chips upon his shoulders, without those prickly ceremonial fences that make for easily wounded pride; just as today each man enjoys his own pipe, his own religion, his own school of art, and his own
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favourite authors. One grain of international hu- mour may be the catalyst that will change the troubled situation of today into the peaceful calm of tomorrow. Nations represent types of individuals, and the day may come when each will join the type that he likes best and in so doing promote the interest of all.
Making a public issue out of a private one does not necessarily mean making it a dead issue. There are thousands of live private issues among human beings with which the public has little to do. How can it be otherwise when the source of life and growth and all new interests is in the individual? All great issues are hatched in the heart of the individual; there have been prophets with dreams and visions that they dared tell no one; there have been ideals that could at first be communicated only to a few select disciples who then spent centuries of mission work before the dream became a world force. Thus gospels are spread, both big and little ones, and some gospels never sit well upon a multitude. As long as men have strongly diversified interests how can the same spiritual meat satisfy all? There are throughout the universe great powers of differentiation second in strength only to the powers of cohesion, and from them flow the forces of toleration that break up tyrannies and turn us into sharply outlined individuals who need our liberties as we need the air we breathe. The day of tribes with a single totem and a few unwritten laws is over; for there are now on earth millions of highly diff'er-
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entiated individuals, all potential incubators of new ideas and ideals, some of which fit small groups and some of which fit nations but all of which must be developed, for they are among the most precious of our possessions. All over the world next to the old and powerful nations there are little nations spring- ing up, and the tendency of today is toward a tol- erance that allows the small nation as many rights as the big one. The next step in this wave of tol- erance will be to allow greater liberty to all sort of group formations other than the nations, that is: to encourage the free development of art, industry, science, and all the immensely variegated activities of normal human beings.
The first blind gropings of this non-national consciousness have given rise to strange anomalies. Dimly conscious of a desire to be different from the old regime and as yet not hardy enough to be anything but a reversion to remote types, men in some coun- tries are fanning the flames of an aboriginal class consciousness that sets its face like flint against all diff'erentiation. This goes back of mediaeval guilds, back of primitive tyrants, to the kind of bondage in which animals are held by the chains of a class in- stinct which compels each member of a species blindly to repeat the acts of every other member. The at- tempt to iron out all the century-wrought distinctions between man and his neighbour goes back of the ants and the bees to the buffaloes who stupidly grazed in
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herds, a prey to the first white man that came along. Long ago we fought our way up from the animals through the instrumentality of hero-men who dared to be different and defy the edicts of the tribe; and through the innovations invented by these men and gradually adopted by the tribe the spirit in which they worked was kept alive. Thus the tyranny of herds was broken, and whenever a single tyrant usurped the power that formerly was held by a whole tribe that tyrant lost his head. Through the eternal vigilance which is the price of liberty the tyranny that formerly prevailed en masse was gradually attenuated to a few sporadically reappearing demagogues, ty- rants, and oligarchies against whom, since the early lispings of democracies, the sovereign people have^ had to be on guard. How absurd then is the attempt to get rid of a single tyrant or a bureaucracy by reel- ing back into a class tyranny that, by all the laws of civilization, has been dead for whole millenniums.
It is not by breaking up the nations into new classes, with a more deadly hatred fqr each other than ever before, that we are reborn into the kingdom of grownups. A savage class tyranny that levels by main force can, in the nature of the case, no longer be successful, for the day of the dodo is over; and the harmonious co-operation of the highly specialized in- dividuals of today is a problem far too complex to be solved by the crass methods of our antediluvian an- cestry. Certain things have been achieved, such as
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beauty, culture, liberty, tolerance, and these must be retained. The way to peace and growth lies through a greater tolerance of all for all, of the rich for the poor and the poor for the rich, of the weak for the strong and the strong for the weak; for we are all mortals here below, whirling through space on a frag- ile planet, and as long as possible there must be room for us all. The bond of our common mor- tality, of our common and appalling ignorance in the face of cosmic mysteries everywhere surrounding us, ought to make us love and tolerate each other. We, the children of death, fighting for our life on an un- known and possibly hostile planet, have no business to obscure the issue by new civil wars and civil hatreds between groups other than the nations; for it is time that we turn as a race to the task of the race which, as I understand it, is to fathom the secrets of the universe.
CHAPTER XI HARMONY
What the world lacks most is harmony. War is dissonance. It is easy to say that in some respects we are all alike and in others we are all different, but what good does this do unless it is shown how, with such material, harmony can be produced. The notes that go to make up a song are also in one way all alike and in another way all different, yet of what avail is this knowledge to a musician whose only aim is to create from these elements masterpieces of melody. The significant thing about notes is that if you put them together in one way you, get noise and in another way you get harmony. What the world needs is not an analyst to point out that men are both alike and different, but an expert in cosmic composi- tion who will tell us how to combine this mass of men in such a way as to produce harmony instead of a ghastly clanging.
The problem of how to reduce the world to harmony is insoluble unless we have a clear idea of what is meant by harmony. One of the best ways to come to clearness on the kind of harmony that best fits the deepest needs of mortals is to pass in review some of
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the definitions of harmony that have come to men throughout the ages as a result of hard thought based on observation. Clearcut answers to the simple ques- tion of what harmony is are surprisingly few. There have been many rootless fancies and innumerable full descriptions of chimerical realms where all of a sud- den "the morning stars sang together and all the Sons of God shouted for joy," but these are not the answers of sober reflection. The kind of harmony that leads to the control of human ideals is not a narrow or a technical thing. It must be a harmony as broad as the universe, with the deepest laws of Mother Earth behind it, and not too far removed from chemistry and physics. Unless the harmony we seek be funda- mental and in the best sense of that term of the earth earthy, we can never make it prevail; for we are earthlings through and through. If we ever succeed at our cosmic task of learning to control our own destinies it will be, not through blowing this earth away and creating a new one, but merely by reading more deeply the secrets of our nature and the nature around us until the key to complete control drops into our hands.
The people who began to do that are the Greeks. A harmony loving race accustomed to look deep into the heart of things, they tried to translate some of the rhythms of nature into their own lives and we today are still copying their arts and institutions. Their studies are of profound significance to us because in
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genuine insight as well as in artistic achievement we have as yet by no means hopelessly outdistanced the Greeks. Two of the simplest answers some of the earlier Greeks gave to the question of what harmony is were to the effect that it was at bottom either a kind of condensation and rarefaction or a mysterious mix- ing and blending of elements.
To children of a modem age these answers seem crude. They may be crude, just as the original statues of the Greeks were crude, but they are not so false as some of our later and much more elaborate answers are. To the old mystical assertion that all things are at bottom one the scientifically minded Greeks gave an expression so simple and concrete that the meanest day labourer could understand it. All things are one because they are made of a stuff that can condense and stretch — that was their first solution, squarely emphasizing the naturally Protean aspect of things. No wonder, said they, that things appear to be different when in reality they are all beautifully one, for sometimes you see water con- dense as ice and earth and other solid things, the sea casting up pebbles and the rivers their alluvial earth, and at other times water is rarefied into tenuous liquids or even gases such as steam, air, wind, and spirit. Is not our breath moist and does not the body return to the dust from whence it came? Thus at a stroke soul felt its kinship to the clod. A realm em-
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bracing such wide variants as solid rock and human breath was to the mind's eye reduced to harmony be- cause of the simple principle that all things, including ourselves, are made of a stuff that can compact and rarefy itself apparently at will. This simple solution covers greater extremes and cuts deeper than many a modem philosophy. In modern times for long per- iods it has been the fashion to say that if sin had not entered the world all men would have been good and therefore happy. Some of our most widely diffused modern ideals of harmony are based on a sort of idiotic uniformity whereby all men are enjoined to copy a single pattern, the more remote and impossible the pattern the better, as if harmony consisted merely of sameness. The Greeks in their simple solutions at least saw that harmony implies a wide diversity.
Their second solution has the same merit. Hard upon the Milesians, who held that the world was composed of a stuff that could condense and rarefy, came the Pythagoreans who through a study of mus- ical notes stumbled upon an apparently deeper and richer way in which varying elements could be ren- dered harmonious. If the strings of a lyre were of the right length, the notes blended into chords, and the lengths of the proper strings were found to cor- respond to the intervals between well-known numbers. Harmony thus came to be a matter of proportion, a combining of elements according to definite mathe-
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matical laws of proportion — ^not as simple a process as condensation and rarefaction but in its results pro- founder and more far-reaching.
The secret of the process was contained in the word "blending" or "mixing," and in most in- genious ways this new theory was applied to a host of phenomena, just as we today apply new natural laws to whole realms that formerly seemed without order. For instance to these early think- ers health also was a sort of harmony result- ing from the proper mixture of humours in the body. The whole art of medicine consisted in ad- ministering remedies that would restore the balance of these humours that through illness had been dis- turbed. From this to a picture of social health and justice such as that exhibited in Plato's "Republic" or even to the well-known Aristotelian doctrine of virtue as a golden mean between two evils is but a step. The direct descendants of these earlier thinkers, how- ever, were the atomists who promulgated the doctrine that the whole world was at bottom composed of bits of matter all properly blended and mixed to form the universe as we find it. The world to them was a symphony of atoms. These atoms could not be seen by the naked eye, but what of that to a race accus- tomed to seeing hidden harmonies everywhere. In certain circles of the old Greek world the word "atoms" for these bits of matter all formed from the same substance but different in size, shape, and posi-
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tion and all beautifully blended into endlessly vary- ing combination became a word to conjure with. Have we advanced far beyond that? The rise of modern science has not entirely swept away the old atomic theory stated in essentials by Leucippus and Demo- critus. It appears that the Greeks here hit upon a foundation still fit to build upon/
The salient point in these old theories was that the inventors founded their theories of harmony upon the rock of things as they are. Their idea of what har- mony should be was related to the actual world as they saw it and as we still see it today. It allowed for diversity; and whatever the harmony we want may be, it must be consistent with human growth which, as we have seen, implies the liberty of the human in- dividual to live and develop his own personality in a world that also more and more shall be compelled to supply the ever extending, multifarious wants of man. The best modem thinkers accept these points. In general the modem world in its thinking on such fundamental problems as how to achieve harmony tends to emphasize the world within rather than the world without as did the ancient Greeks. Our way of expanding ancient scientific thought has been to add and magnify the human element. This shift of emphasis can best be brought out by considering one or two representative modems such as Leibnitz and
1 In this fragmentary exposition I follow John Burnet whose bril- liant studies of Greek thought are bound to be an inspiration to future students of this subject.
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Bergson both of whom by some stretch of the imagina- tion might be called modem atomists. If two of the ancient solutions of the problem of harmony were "condensation and rarefaction" on the one hand and "mixing and blending" on the other, we might say that modem thinkers would choose such words as "integration" and "creative evolution" as technical terms for the process the whole travailing earth, in- cluding humanity, is going through in arriving at harmony and happiness.
Leibnitz was a physicist who achieved fame by giv- ing us among other things the first fairly adequate definition of force. With this modern notion of force in his head he based himself squarely upon the ancient atomism, breathing new life into this vener- able structure by saying that to be sure the whole world was composed of marvellously interacting atoms but atoms of force not of matter. The atoms com- posing our grand harmonious universe were to him centres of self-originating force which for purposes of distinction he called monads. The modern touch was that he made his atoms not dead but alive. Our own soul, he thought, was one of these monads of which there are many kinds ranging from the soul of minerals to the soul of man. For us who know our own inner complex life so well it is easier to see how a multitude of living, stmggling monads might work out their own salvation into eventual harmony than to accept the more materialistic atomism of the
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Greeks. Dead atoms cannot construct a universe; it takes live atoms with inherent powers of organization. It was in attempting to solve this problem of how out of an acorn grows an oak, out of a germ a man, and out of monads a universe, that Leibnitz was hot on the trail of what in most of his works he seeks to explain; namely, the secret of harmony or growth; and at this point the mathematician in him came to the aid of the physicist. Leibnitz is known in the field of mathematics as the discoverer among other things of the integral calculus. His close study of infinitesi- mal points in mathematics led him to give his monads or "metaphysical" points similar constructive attri- butes. Just as a line is presumably made up out of points not themselves lines, so the world is an in- tegration of monads quite distinct from the separate monads uncombined, and the secret of the process by which the world is thus blended into harmony is con- tained in the word "integration." All growing or progress in harmonization is a process of combining elements in such a way as to produce something as distinct from these elements themselves as a song is different from its notes. A song is, so to speak, not a mere addition but an integration of notes. As the eye of an artist fuses a landscape into a unified im- pression of beauty, so to the mind of Leibnitz the world was a fusion or integration of monads into a unified and artistic whole. His specific advance on older atomists consisted in rejecting such relatively
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imperfect findings as condensation or blending and substituting the keyword integration which he held to be diiferent from mere summation as really contain- ing some inkling of the long sought after secret of harmony.
The human application of all this comes out in considering the further advance of Bergson, a more recent thinker. For Bergson also it is from the fever called living that dead things are best explained; rest is derived from motion, space from time, the simple from the complex; and in all problems it is the living, palpitating consciousness in our hearts of these prob- lems that comes first. Not by the dead atoms of Democritus are mysteries finally solved; a better un- derstanding is obtained by beginning with the atom that each in his heart feels himself to be. "Know thyself," said Solon, and to this modem sages includ- ing Bergson have added the assurance that then we shall also know more about everything else, for the kingdom of knowledge is within us.
Leibnitz tried to give life and meaning to his atoms by explaining how each atom has perception, how it can integrate and organize other atoms, and how in- tegration is never a mere summation or plain addition. It is this quality that Bergson further expatiates upon. For him integration becomes a process not unlike human intuition whereby in a flash fragments are fused into a thing of beauty. Through its perhaps unconscious intuitions our universe achieves its unity.
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In artists and mystics this activity bubbles over. If the whole of creation were conscious it might feel within itself some of the intuitive gropings which an artist feels in creating a masterpiece. This process of universal intuition Bergson calls creative evolution. What is the difference between ten nonsense words placed in a row and ten similar words that make sense and form a sentence? The difference is that the former are only added while the latter fuse in such a way as to convey a thought and have an inner meaning. It is the same in music where the separate notes blend into a unified harmony. It is the same with all art. Beauty that the old Greeks sought is this tremulous unity achieved when the parts interfuse and no longer stand merely side by side. All genuine works of art produce on us an overwhelmingly unified impression most difficult to analyse. It is the same with all great human movements. Ten men who stand side by side as strangers without co-operation have no meaning, whereas ten men unified by a pur- pose and mutually complementary form a unity very similar to that of k great work of art. Human beings may become the vehicle for the universal vital im- pulse that bursts out everywhere working for semi- understood and half -accomplished ends, that has gone one way in producing the birds, another way in in- sects, and another way in the blind alleys formed by species of life now extinct. In us this impulse goes furthest of all which is but one reason the more why
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it is proper to begin with ourselves in trying to solve life's deeper mysteries.
The social side of Bergson's atomism or creative evolution has never been developed but the main out- lines such a development would take are easy to foreshadow. In different guise all great ethical teachers have been trying to inculcate a principle similar to integration and creative evolution when they exhort people to lay aside hatred and to help instead of hinder each other. Christian ethics calls it love, Schopenhauer calls it pity, Buddhists call it the killing off of individual desire. It is true that if all our neighbours were less strangers to us and more like brothers, much disharmony would cease. But it is not enough to love each other blindly; each must feel that his fellowman is a part of himself; each must feel that the gift enriches the giver and that he is getting something for his self-sacrifice. Instead of genuine interpenetration that makes for the enrich- ment of all, there has been a great deal of onesided sacrifice, a throwing away of self on other people. It is as if the ten nonsense words in an heroic endeavour to give meaning to a sentence each tried to surrender his own meaning to the word right next to him, whereas it is only by first of all being ourselves and then at the same time both utilizing and aiding our neighbour that there is anything approaching true in- tegration and harmony.
It will be asked what has all this to do with the
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control of ideals; and the answer is that it is exactly our great ignorance of what harmony really consists of that lies at the bottom of the condition of affairs by which we, at this day and age, allow our ideals to get so completely out of hand that, instead of con- trolling them, they control us. We think ideals are a fine thing — and we are right — but we forget that ideals like notes, unless controlled, produce dis- harmony instead of concord. We do not go deep enough in the solution of our practical problems. The roots of war and other discords lie in hazy no- tions of what we are trying to achieve and of what is good for the soul of humanity. In seeking to avoid war we are feeling our way toward universal har- mony, and it is well to realize that the essence of harmony consists in the close co-operation of dis- similar units. If the elements that co-operate are too similar the result is thinness, stagnation, and death. Symphonies cannot be built up from the endless repe- tition of the same note on identical instruments. If nothing on earth were allowed to be truly different, if all females were males, all air water, or all earth air, where would we be, where would anything be? Thorough differentiation is essential to that fulness of harmony for which we all in our hearts are seek- ing. On the other hand, too great a disparity in com- ponent parts makes for dissolution. It is well to re- member that in all forms of atomism the atom is per- force inviolate. The fundamental doctrine of the
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sacredness of individual life is indispensable in at- taining the goal that we have put before us; for human lives, as we shall presently see, are the atoms of the human universe, the sole source and origin of such harmony as we as a race may ever hope to achieve.
CHAPTER XII
SYMBIOSIS
The problem of inequality among the living and dead things all around us is solved in nature every day. After all, the different parts of the world do hang together and there is a certain kind of harmony revealed in the continued existence of our planet where the strong and the weak live together and whole king- doms interact. Plants feed animals and animals feed plants. "All that is alive must die, and all that is dead must be disintegrated, dissolved, or gasefied ; the elements which are the substratum of life must enter into new cycles of life. . . . One grand phenomenon presides over this vast work, the phenomenon of fer- mentation." ^ Without the plants to feed upon, ani- mals including ourselves could not live, and without the ceaseless work of various bacteria in decompos- ing organic matter plants would be robbed of their sustenance. The plant and the animal world, whipped into working together, are but illustrations of those gigantic processes of give and take which underlie the universe, and which are at bottom a sort of harmony.
1 Pasteur quoted by Dr. H. Byrd in "An Appreciation of Louis Pasteur," Record Company, St. Augustine, Fla., 1910, p. 10.
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To this harmony of the spheres our own planet, keyed up to a pitch in which the centripetal impulse always just slightly exceeds the centrifugal forces, contributes its own wild melody wherein attraction overcomes repulsion and love is always triumphing over hate. All through inorganic nature runs the ethics of the dust, no less complex and romantic than our own. There is a chaos of squirmings, tropisms, and struggles to fly apart, but in the final test the union of component parts is everywhere maintained. The chemist in his laboratory spends a lifetime fa- miliarizing himself with the capricious behaviour of atoms which sometimes agree to co-operate and some- times refuse. Students of crystallization and elec- tricity encounter the same helter skelter of opposing forces which pick and choose their way at random, but in the end manage to work together so that the keynote even of the inorganic is co-operation.
In the world of living things where co-operation reaches a new level, there is a veritable fury of effort to strike off" continually new illustrations of how dif- ferent bits of matter can be fused into unity and made to work together for the common good. If our earth has any specialty, it is that of producing countless liv- ing organisms, all so many experiments in detailed co-operation. The separate organisms may fight each other but within the organism there is peace perhaps of brief duration, for death is always stepping in, but of a profound and blind intensity while life en-
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dures. The whole of the animate world is more of a passion for life than a struggle for life, in which there is trespassing not through hatred but through love, through a primeval and undisciplined love of self. This, however, is becoming weaker as the world goes on; and co-operation coupled with self-abnega- tion increases until the problem is not how to practise self-abnegation but how to keep our own personalities intact — how to keep from becoming blind cogs in a great machine that will hurl us all to death unless we retain intelligent control, and ourselves determine whither the world with its intricate organizing powers shall lead us. In our mortal bodies the eye is dif- ferent from the hand, the digestive from the cir- culatory tract; and yet this masterpiece of creation with its hundreds of component parts different in shape, texture, and function in a few years stops growing, while the impulse of life passes over into our spiritual activities which now also have become almost as complex, almost as diversified as the infinite tissue of our bodies. It almost seems at the present time that we have stopped growing spiritually, and then what is there left but death ; and if we die our planet can only begin all over again a billion year, agonized effort to create another agent with a brain like ours and enough sense to go on developing that brain until, through a race of more than ordinary wisdom, plane- tary self-determination is at last attained.
The crux of earth's problem lies in the mental life
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of human beings. All that has gone before helps a little in the way of illustration and analogy, but no single example of what has preceded human beings is adequate as a guide for a species that stands at the head of both animate and inanimate creation, and which, therefore, must come to a point where the in- dividuals of that species blaze forth their own trail, cleancut, and unafraid. Every parallel based on liv- ing organisms is misleading, for humanity is not an organism. An organism is conscious at some central point, but the human race is conscious in every in- dividual cell and has no central heart or brain. Even if the organization of the race should ever become any- where near as complete as that between the parts of a single human body, we should still be a super-organ- ism, different in nature and structure from any known living animal, and as high above the present animals as these are above the plants ; for there would be levels and depths of consciousness such as it is impossible for us to imagine in our present state of imperfect co-operation.
Meanwhile slightly better analogies occur in the social life of some animals and plants such as lichens and birds and bees. In the lichens two plants by forming an alliance in which one furnishes protec- tion and the other food manage to function practically as one, and succeed in turning themselves into a com- bination that outdoes the single plant in hardiness and perseverance so that the lichen grows where other
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plants would die. Strains of such pioneer co-opera- tion run all through nature; the importance of the role played by countless parasites is only beginning to be understood. Examples of plants and animals, such as flowers and bees, aiding each other in ways that are mutually beneficial are easy to find, for every one knows of the part played by insects in dis- tributing the pollen of flowers; but more striking still is the co-operation between members of the same species in the so-called social insects which in some ways lead a co-operative life more perfect and more harmonious than the life of man.
One thing that a small amount of observation of such animals as the ants, wasps, and bees is sufficient to bring out is that human beings have no monopoly on unselfishness. Ants make ropes of themselves, drop food down from heights, work in relays, com- municate with each other through their antennae, and set out on enterprises in which the whole tribe turns out as one. Their care for the cleanliness of the growing young and their promptness in removing the dead show sanitary instincts, but the most remark- able thing about life in an ant colony is said by ob- servers to be the complete and apparently willing sup- pression of the individual for the good of the colony. Among bees the same thing holds. No one can read Maeterlinck's "Life of the Bee" without being pro- foundly impressed by the ways in which bees obey what he calls the spirit of the hive. In the sacrifice
126 The Control of Ideals
of individuals for the welfare of all the bee colony surpasses all human comprehension of self-abnega- tion. Yet who would want to be a bee or a wasp? After all, their life is in our hands. These animals show that the social instinct can be overdone.
This interchange of function between living agents which operates to the mutual benefit of each party, without going to the extent of depriving the partici- pants of their own life, is what humanity also has been trying its hand at almost since the beginning. Division of labour has turned us all into specialists with special likes, dislikes, abilities, and capacities. Through becoming a saving race with a surplus for each generation we have gradually reached the ro- mantic point where we enjoy the fruits, not only of each other's labour, but also of the labour of untold generations that have gone before. In the present age, for one finished product that I furnish I can buy a hundred others in return. We have perfected a machinery whereby any sacrifice the individual makes can be repaid a hundred fold. This is not sufficiently realized by those who want to simplify things by go- ing back to nature and to a time when all genuine, individual happiness was as fleeting as a yellow sun- beam in the rain.
An adjunct of the industrial world, with its division of labour, is the commercial world which operates on the theory that for the thing I need and like I give you the thing you need and like. Presumably both
Symbiosis 127
parties are satisfied and two wants are met where there were no wants at all or only one before. In this sphere there is theoretically no place for either steal- ing or charity; needs are multiplied and at the same time satisfied by a process of interchange in which each man is a hundred times a benevolent parasite to his neighbour. The ptocess is worth pondering over. It is an attempt to answer the question of how to get something for something you do not want; and the whole transaction rests on one solitary prop and basis; namely, the far-reaching inequality of the separate individuals that compose humanity. If human be- ings were all alike in wants and needs, no intercourse or exchange of values would be possible. It is be- cause each man counts for one and yet is different from others that we can work together and produce any sort of harmony at all.
In the world of today with its billions of inhabitants all highly diversified no one human being can pos- sibly embody in himself all the aspects and desires of which humanity is capable. No one man can possibly be a poet, sculptor, painter, novelist, drama- tist, actor, scientist, aviator, athlete, physician — and the list could be extended to cover pages — all in one; for we have reached the stage where our culture has far outgrown the individual. The atoms that make up the world of humanity must not only divide their labour to supply their common needs, but it pays them to supply the special needs which only certain indi-
128 The Control of Ideals
viduals have developed, for thus the way is opened to an indefinite exchange enriching the inmost life of every individual. The point is that individuals have grown to be so different that what satisfies one no longer satisfies the other.
All this means is that we are living in the age of the specialist, wherein there are unique wants and needs to be supplied which altogether have made us more than ever before dependent on each other and perhaps on people most remote from us. The phy- sician with his microscope is dependent on the lens- grinder, who in turn is dependent on the physicist, who perhaps gets his formula from the mathematician and his glass from the geologist and chemist; and similarly there are thousands of other ramifications of interdependence; the saving grace in each case being that with increased dependence comes an increased willingness to be dependent and to be led by others. Man's trust in man increases as his wants increase; and this gives us an inkling of the secret of co-opera- tion.
The living miracle of modern life is that we are all now part and parcel of a world of experts, the breath of whose life is to trust each other and to rely upon each other's knowledge, judgment, and skilled habits of co-operation. We are glad enough to be led by those who know. Any one is willing to obey an expert who unfailingly can help us. In sickness it is foolish to flout a physician; in legal affairs no one
Symbiosis 129
attempts to get on without consulting a lawyer; simi- larly any man a thousand times a day trusts his life to bai'bers, chauffeurs, engineers and what not, just as he trusts his fortunes to a banker. There are thousands of trained individuals all of whom respect each other's interests because it is in their own in- terest to do so. Men are unequal in knowledge and skill, and it is the part of wisdom and common sense to be willingly led by those who through superior knowledge in any line have earned the right to lead us; for not every realm of life is equally familiar to us; and just as a stranger in a strange city does not refuse a guide, so we perforce accept the guidance of others in realms of life of which we do not know enough. That is the secret of obedience, not force or supine sacrifice, but intelligent consent because of a clear recognition that submission benefits both leader and follower.
In other words the secret of co-operation is mutual usefulness in supplying each other's wants varied as they are both physical, mental, and spiritual. True co-operation is neither compulsory nor sacrificial, but follows from intellectual insight and persuasion. Then let men be unequal ; it will only be an inequality that results from growth. At the same time it must be remembered that our human structure is composed of atoms with certain "inalienable" rights among which are "life" ... let us stop right there. The universe of human atoms is beginning to crumble
130 The Control of Ideals
when it is demanded that a portion of its atoms be violently extinguished. Just as harmony in music is inconsistent with shrillness, so the music of our sphere becomes shrill and inharmonious when diversity is carried to a point where the welfare of certain indi- viduals demands the total sacrifice of others. In the post-bellum period of the race it will be recognized that this is never necessary. Every individual will be compelled to worry along as best he can without de- manding the total sacrifice of others no less possessed of inalienable rights than he. It may be objected that there are really no inalienable rights unless we choose to make them so. The objection is valid. It is we who make them inalienable. It is our only way of doing away with war. War will be abolished by the common consent of a mankind educated into the higher reaches of that simple, "live and let live" sportsmanship that is the hallmark of democracy.
CHAPTER XIII ATOMISM
One reason why democracies are among the most hopeful of human institutions is that they are based on the fundamentally correct principle of atomism In its championship of the people and its determina tion to give all individuals an equal chance, democ racy places itself unequivocably on a scientific basis It lays a foundation that is analogous to the founda tion of the world which, according to the best knowl edge available throughout the ages, is also composed of atoms of some sort, alike enough to work together and yet unlike enough to be different and to make a difference. The individual is the atom of society, the unit which enters into every human relation and problem.
Ethics was first bom when the individual became conscious of himself as a unit separate from his en- vironment. Without a self there is no value. With- out a centre of reference, such as the zero-stripe on a thermometer, there are neither negative nor positive evaluations. Everything to have any value at all must have a value either positive or negative for some- body or something, and the one reference point that is
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132 The Control of Ideals
surging more and more clearly to the front as time goes on is the individual. The individual is the unit of ethics.
Every science has its elemental units. In chem- istry the structural unit is the atom; in society it is the individual. No other unit such as the family or nation in simplicity, compactness, or clear outlines approaches the individual who in modem sociology plays a role comparable to that of the atom in chem- istry. An atom is supposed to be indivisible. So are individuals. To be sure, modem physics is speaking of electrons and electrical charges just as modem psychology speaks of the subconscious and of dissociated personality, but these are distinctions within the unit, not separable parts. An atom is sup- posed to be able to enter into more varied complexes than any other unit. The same may be said of the individual. Moreover the atom is indestructible. By this is meant that the atom is an essential part of any combination into which it enters ; so much so, that if the atom perishes all else perishes with it. It is obvious that this holds also of the individual. So- ciety might worry along without states or without tribes or families but it is inconceivable that it should get along without individuals. These are only the more obvious reasons why it is convenient to riiake the individual the comerstone of ethics; there are other and more fundamental reasons.
One of these is that an essential element of any
Atomism 133
process that makes for ethics is negation, and that the only genuine negator we know of is the individual. When the individual by becoming self-conscious at- tains a certain degree of independence from his en- vironment, he is immediately compelled to fight for that independence; he becomes a destructive and a constructive centre, and it is the destructive side of any process of healthy living that is most frequently over- looked. The first step in ethical development is not acceptance but negation. In order that ethics be possible at all men must first become dissatisfied with things as they are; and there is no dissatisfaction without a desire to destroy or at least to alter the present. Thus there has been, since the beginning of man, at the bottom of ethics something profoundly destructive. We have altered the face of the earth. What has stood in the way of our progress has had to be changed. We begin by being destructive, and when to this destructive tendency there is added a tinge of elemental creative force, such as crops out in nature everywhere and such as is responsible for all the growth and differentiation in the world around us, conditions are ripe for ethical development. What differentiates man from the animals is his abil- ity to negate the things that are, in favour of the things that are to be.
This ethical negation is not to be confused with logical negation or even with the far deeper negation preached by the pessimist. Ethical negation is the
134 The Control of Ideals
trunk and parent stem of logical negation which is of application only in the sphere of verbal judgments, whereas ethical negation is part and parcel of every concrete human effort at amelioration through a de- nial of the past in favour of the future. Furthermore it differs from pessimistic or Buddhistic negation in being a negation only of things connected with the self and never of the self proper; thus eschewing suicide or self-abnegation in any form because the only thing destroyed is that which stands in the way of growth, and never the germ of growth itself. Ethics no more destroys the self than the shedding of a snake's skin destroys the snake. Katabolism no- where need stand in the way of anabolism. Thus the Greeks destroyed barbaric civilization but left their own. If they had been satisfied with the art of bar- barians, they would never have been led to substitute something infinitely more advanced and perfect; for the minute man is completely satisfied with his own handiwork, he is like the beasts that perish because they too are able to accept things as they are.
The individual is the proper unit in ethics because it is the individual alone that is self-conscious. We, personal human beings, are the only things on earth awake enough to know that anything is worth any- thing at all. The living, breathing individual is the only conscious negator and creator, bearer of both memory and imagination, the one intelligent centre and origin of the entire process of ethical metabolism.
Atomism 135
This applies to the concrete individual and not to an abstraction. It has been said that the individual can never be the unit of ethics because strictly speaking the individual does not exist at all. On this view the word "individual" is but a name given to a number of different, largely mental, relations existing to- gether, and it is the state or society that makes the man. This is fallacious. It is the same as if one should say that all there is to sight is colours, and should proceed to illustrate this by saying: "Take away from a man the colour red and the colour blue, and continue to take away colours until none are left, and by so doing you will deprive a man of his sight." By no means. Darkness deprives us of colour, but a man in the dark or a man with his eyes shut is not blind. Similarly abstract from a man all the mul- titudinous activities that fill his waking hours, and you will have a completely idle and blank man, but the potentiality of it all remains ; the power of creat- ing families, making states, entering into a thousand and one relations is still there. Another objection is to the effect that even if society did not produce the individual, it cannot be denied that everybody has a father and a mother, and to that extent at least it is the race which has produced the individual. This, however, is again a mere figure of speech. Indi- viduals are not produced by the race or by society or by any common term at all, but merely by other in- dividuals. It is the individual that produces other
136 The Control of Ideals
individuals, that is the most that can be said. The fact that an individual becomes a member of a family or of a group of any kind, such as a State, does not make him less an individual. Just as a man has ten fingers or a wife or a home so also he has a State. The individual is a, convenient unit just be- cause he is capable of entering into various combina- tions and becoming a member of the most varied groups including humanity in general; but this does not prevent the individual from being in every way prior to his own creations. The State, the family, the nation, and all the products of combined effort since the beginning of co-operation exist only because of individuals and are the products of individuals. All general institutions have only a guarding, conserving, and protective function. As soon as they are re- garded as ends to which to dedicate ourselves they fail in their primary function, and end by becoming stumbling blocks to progress. Not even the race will do as an end in itself, because the word "race" is an abstraction. Living for the race generally mean^ that the present generation lives for some future gen- eration, thus implying that this future generation at least has a right to live for its own sake. If a future generation may do this, why not we? Even to live for the glory of God implies, as divines in the heyday of theology well saw, a deity that is self-sufficient and that really does not need us at all. Nor is it true that society, the State, etc. exist FOR the individual —
Atomism 137
nothing in our human world lives or exists in the first place for anything else — they exist not for but be- cause of the individual, and to exalt the State or the race above the individual is to prize the golden eggs above the goose that lays them. Dreams are not greater than the dreamer.
This does not necessarily mean that man is himself the raison d'etre of everything on earth. Back of value itself, back of the very thing value, lies that which constitutes its value; namely, the individual. Value is a human product, a concomitant of self- consciousness, a quality more frail and full of pathos than we know because it exists only for us. Outside of humanity there is no ethics, any more than for animals without eyes anything is either red or blue. Man is the measurer, not the measure of things. His baubles are worth all the world to him, but when all is said and done he gets them from the storehouse of his own soul, and it is his pleasure both to make them and to break them. Man lives by his ideals, but as they are attained he kills them off and makes him new ones. Ethics is a process of transvaluation, assimilation, and growth in which there are no ever- lasting values and the only eternity is the present. Perhaps the very meaning of death is that life right here and now should be intensified and rendered glor- ious. All putting off of the final end of life into future generations or into the race is at bottom cowardice and self-deception, for the accepted time
138 The Control of Ideals
is the present. Death and our ever changing ideals are the stings by which our life becomes significant and beautiful. The seed lives in the plant, not the plant in the seed. There is a spiritual meaning in the carpe diem philosophy which has never yet been fully fathomed. If all things lived for ever and noth- ing ever perished, there could be no values and no ethics. It is because things cannot last that they are doubly dear to us. Life is a flame that changes as it bums, and never twice does it cast the same shadow on the wall. The flowering of our earth is the life that courses through our veins at this very moment, burning brightly in our own unique and unredupli- catable personalities. Ethics begins with self- consciousness and ends in self-realization.
CHAPTER XIV FUNCTION OF IDEALS
In the picturesque atomism of ancient times it was said that some of the atoms were smooth, some rough, some round, some square, and that some had hooks by which they hooked themselves together into com- binations capable of unlimited development. Human atoms also have hooks; namely, their ideals; and what I have been trying to say all along is that the essential function of these ideals is to fasten us to each other rather than to impossible mirages that pull us up by the roots away from the solid earth into de- struction. The moral has been that our ideals should not be regarded as ladders to heaven or cobwebs to the clouds, but as anchors by which we sink ourselves deeper into the spiritual texture of our fellowmen which is our rightful home.
All of our ideals are at bottom ideal men — that must never be forgotten. All idealistic endeavour consists in taking steps that will make each of us a more perfect human being. If, in concentrating on the steps, we forget the goal in view, we have only our own stupidity to blame. If, instead of working f 6r better men through better political States, we for-
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get the men and work only for the States, disaster alone can result; clashing States become a maelstrom in which millions meet their deaths; and our ideals divide and destroy instead of harmonize humanity. A race grown up enough to recognize the human aim and function of ideals cannot with impunity pervert the normal use of these ideals.
Once upon a time in the days before we had per- fected language as a means of communication with each other, a man and his neighbour stood apart, and there was more than a modicum of excuse for blood and tears through human strife; but now that we have our language and our ideals and know what they are for, to use these hooks, by which alone the isolated atoms of humanity can get together and co-operate, as weapons of offence with which to tear the souls and bodies of brothers asunder is the crowning blun- der of the ages. The hooks, or anticipatory varia- tions as we have elsewhere called them, are meant to enrich the life of the human atom. If these varia- tions are too unlike the human parent stem, they lure us into the evolutionary bypaths of destruction. If the new variation sets brother against brother and hopelessly divides the house of humanity against itself, there is something wrong with the new varia- tion. As pointed out before, the variations must bring us together, not drive us apart. Our ideas and ideals are the tentacles by which we combine, inter- penetrate, and produce marvels of unified effort;
Function of Ideals 141
they are our wireless to each other, the electrical pulls and tugs by which we keep alive and growing. The present age is the age of the all-powerful idea. A man fills sheets of paper with queer marks, the eye of another man falls on these marks, and without stirring a muscle the deepest springs of action, re- solve, and character in these two men may have been touched; a common ideal may have linked these two beings for ever together.
Once the beneficently human quality of ideals is clearly grasped, there follows a general uncrowning of impossible and dangerous ideals, a laying aside of all extravagance in the worship of romanticism, and a sober testing of ideals in the light of everyday pos- sibilities. In these days of fast gathering democracy, it has become an anachronism to do our ideals more than regal honour by placing them on autocratic thrones before which we bow low in self-effacement, ready to annihilate ourselves. Ideals are not meant to lead us into such an exaggeratedly worshipful atti- tude. The time has come to rob them of their heredi- tary splendours. From kings let them become the servants of the people. Thus our highest ideals will once more become a living, helpful part of our de- mocracies instead of the greatest single danger that these democracies have to face. Ideals have merely been abused. They are still among the highest things in life. Who will say that the intellect of man or even the strength of man has always been used in splendidly
142 The Control of Ideals
constructive ways? All these gifts have been abused time and again and so has the imagination, but rightly used its gifts are priceless. Our ideals need only be humanized.
At the same time even after recognizing the essen- tially human quality and function of ideals, there still remains the work of sorting out the impossible ones and putting into use the truly available ones. Some indications of this process have already been given. Ideals first flourish in the imagination of in- dividuals, then they encounter the weeding out process of contact and conflict with ideals from other minds — all this occurring in the realm of language and free discussion. Finally by a majority vote ideals crys- tallize into the law or custom of the land. The danger of embodying them too soon has been pointed out; also the possibilities of unprecedented richness of ideals by enlarging the environment of human minds upon which ideals first impinge. It is a fasci- nating hypothesis this — that in the realm of ideals not only the ideal but also the environment is largely subject to human control. Out of men's heads have come ideas of beauty which are embodied in art; out of men's brains have come ideas of comfort which are embodied in the comforts of civilization; out of the welter of thought have come theories which upon ap- plication have changed the face of the earth. The significant point here is that had ideals not come their application likewise would never have occurred ; and
Function of Ideals 143
a corollary is that the more numerous and searching our ideals, the greater and more far-reaching their eventual application in the world of solid fact and matter which from first to last ought to be our one and only adversary.
Whatever happens ideals must be kept coming be- cause they lead to discoveries which slowly but surely are opening up the secret of earth's rebellion, and changing its antagonistic spirit into one of co-opera- tion. Moreover, old ideals in the course of time lose their utility and must be replaced. Unless we keep on growing (i. e. producing ideals) the body of hu- manity decays and dies. All of our present laws and institutions, admirable though they may be, will not keep us from eventual stagnation and death unless through life and more of it we someday penetrate to the heart of the whole life-and-death process and so discover the secret of happiness — ^happiness, not con- tentment, for we are made of sterner and more strenuous stuff than rocks or mountains. They may last forever but we do not want to last unless we grow; in fact we cannot last unless we grow. We are doomed to develop or to die, and the world does not seem to care much which we do; but one thing we know and that is that the only thing to keep the world of human beings alive and growing is the multitude of young ideals that, budding in the hearts and imagina- tions of men, flower out into new civilizations com- posed of new laws, arts, and sciences or, what is the
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same thing, continual improvements on the old. That ought to be the burden of post-bellum ethics that the source of growth must be protected until such indis- cernible day as not the individual alone but the entire race will have attained its full stature.
Unless the whole of civilization be first and fore- most a method of safeguarding the sanctity of the individual, no matter how we turn, the very ends which we pursue will be defeated. Our civilization is the framework of a larger liberty, the liberty of individuals to enjoy each other, the liberty to love and grow and make wondrous ties, the liberty through miracles in science and art to fathom the depths of each other's spirits, for at bottom man has no other interest than man. We may temporarily deceive our- selves into thinking that we are souls that dwell apart in pursuit of impossible ideals, but to be candid we are only animals with a splendid imagination, at most small incarnate chunks of a whirling world, not yet controlling the physical machinery we grow upon. Meanwhile as human beings we have each other and our ideals.
And it is the ideals that are significant. If we hope to progress much further beyond the unconscious beings that in the past we were, it will be because in our imagination we can shadow forth brightly as in an iridescent glass the things we hope and may not hope to be, the future within our reach and the future for ever impossible. By loving the latter less and the
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former more we shall encourage the processes of growth and perhaps succeed in killing off for ever the dangerous ideals that make us strangers to each other in their demand for sacrifices that leave eternal scars. The supreme danger, worthy of avoiding at all costs, is the possibility that by stopping up the fount of our ideals, we dry up at the same time the source of art, literature, legislation, growth, and life itself.
CHAPTER XV
MORAL COURAGE
Ethics treats of ideals, their origin, nature, pos- sibilities, and control, especially the latter, and this control of our ideals amounts to nothing less than an attempt to lay down the rules for the game of life. More than that — we not only lay down the rules but we invent the game. The scope of the game, rules to be obeyed, and the spirit in which we should play are all parts of ethics. And because we ourselves make the rules is no reason why they should be any the less binding; for, as the player of any game knows, the rules must be obeyed or there is no game and no enjoyment. Also care must be taken that the rules are neither too simple and unprovocative of skill on the one hand, nor unfair or too difficult on the other hand. It is unfair, for instance, to frame the rules in such a manner that some of the players have not even a chance of living and then to try and cultivate a spirit in which those who must inevitably lose will be reconciled to their lot. Every individual should, as far as is humanly possible, have a chance at the game guaranteed, and never be asked to make the supreme sacrifice of giving up his life for others.
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Moral Courage 147
Wars are the one shrieking injustice of modem times. On the other hand we are not mollycoddles who want life to be an everlasting pink tea without any excite- ment. And there is the ruh. How can we provide excitement without loading the dice? How can the game of life be made interesting for all, and yet not so deathly serious that part of the race will always have to give up its life for the rest? It is the old problem of how to get harmony without shrillness that we have just been discussing. It is the problem that runs through nature everywhere of how to get the greatest diversity consistent with nature's grand and fundamental uniformities. It is the question of where to find not the bypaths but the grand highway of life on which it is impossible for us to go astray. For when all is said and done man is bom in chains; we are prisoners; liberty must be achieved. Some- thing ties us down, and our task is to run as far as our rope will permit without, in our gyrations, tying knots in the rope that will shorten it for ever. All the skill, experience, and good sportsmanship that we can muster will be needed.
The interest of the game depends on us. James was distinctly on the right track when as a moral equivalent of war he suggested a more strenous play- ing of the game of life itself. As a substitute for war what can be both more terrifying and satisfactory than the still unfinished war against nature, against the clods that bind us, against the powers that kill us,
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against the horrible unmorality, injustice, and stupid- ity of conditions surrounding human life still less than half unfettered, still immovable within the coils of natural laws more stupid than our own? There is a great outcry against war which kills some of us, but none against nature which kills all of us. Plainly the ringing challenge of today comes to us, not from the clamour of gods of our own making, but from the turmoil of earth with its pestilences, deaths, and cyn- ical sacrifices that, like our own wars, must not go on for ever. All our battles with each other and with our own ignorant superstitions are but a prelude to a far off but infinitely more exciting battle still to be waged by a united humanity against the elements. The time has come for us to get at least a glimmer of our greater task compared with which our present problems are but child's play.
Life's great game is bound to go on, getting more intricate and daring as the ages pass; and as the race grows older and death perhaps sits in a little closer at the play, refusing to be trumped, it is possible that the game may deepen into a tragedy. But what of that? Tragedies can at least be beautiful. The thing to do is to play the game and not make false moves or rules that limit its scope by forcing us into an annihilating interfratemal struggle that leaves death, our real enemy, a sure winner without ever having encountered the full strength of our combined strategy. It must not be, this true calamity, that
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the playing be ended before we really get into the game. The struggle must not be over before it has called out all there is in us of suffering and joy, of endurance, wisdom, and the uncanny insight born from ever-deepening experience.
We must give ourselves a rational opportunity to develop and then if it should turn out that in the end human nature is not of the world, not in the highest sense of the earth earthy, but merely adventitious, then we have always our moral courage to fall back upon. Moral courage is the "never say die" spirit in man. It is the greater patriotism engendered in the whole human race by the brute, unmoral, and stubborn resistance of the powers of nature. It comes to us not because the world is with us, but because it is against us. It is the essence of aeons of human ex- perience, an unearthly compound of patience, shrewd- ness, suffering, and strength, illumined by insight from the spring of a self -consciousness deeper than any we can yet imagine, — the whole a human quality that calculates and calculates to win. All that we have of brain, brawn, nerve, and imagination will be needed merely to sustain the battle and to solve our final problem when it comes. But the solution will be worth it. Therefore,
Schlage die Trommel und fiirchte dich nicht, Und kiisse die Marketenderin ! . . . Trommle die Leute aus dem Schlaf Trommle Reveille mit Jugendkraft,
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Marschiere trommeind immer voran, Das ist die ganze Wissenschaft.
Or if the choice of a German quotation has been un- fortunate:
"Over the mountains
Of the Moon,
Down the Valley of the Shadow,
Ride, boldly ride,"
The shade replied, "If you seek for Eldorado."
INDEX
Age of specialists, 128. Anarchy, 62. Anthropomorphism, 74. Appreciation of Louis Pasteur,
by Dr. H. Byrd, 121. Aristotle, logic, 30; doctrine of
virtue, 112. Art, deepener of inner life, 87;
anti-sectional and universal,
88; Greeks dissatisfied with
barbaric art, 134. Artists, Types of, 9. Atoms, Greek view, 112; theory
of Leibnitz, 114; hooks on,
139.
Bagehot, Walter, quoted, 102. Beauty, Ethics of, 9. Bees, co-operative life, 125. Bergson, Henri, intuition, 116. Berkeley, George, referred to, 30. Bible, first great novel, 88. Buddhists, 118. Burbank, Luther, 69. Burnet, John, acknowledged, 113.
Cannibalism, physical and spir- itual, 32; lowest stage of de- velopment, 66.
Carlyle, Thomas, 40.
Christianity, compared with Uto- pianism, 85; contribution to- ward development of inner life, 86; poison to nationalism, 87; relation to science and art, 87.
Christianity and Nietzsche, 96.
Civilization, precedes abolition of war, 25 ; choice between dif- ferent, 28; marked by in-
creased worth of individual, 69.
Class consciousness, 105, 106.
Cohesion, Function of, 91.
Common sense, genesis, 12; ori- gin of religious tolerance, 25.
Condensation and rarefaction, 114.
Conscience, Danger of, 17.
Co-operation, imperfect at pres- ent, 71; increases comforts and wants, 92; in nature, 122, 125; scope, 128; secret of, 129.
Creative evolution, 114, 117.
Curiosity, root of ideals of truth, 11; fount of common sense and tolerance, 12.
Death, as sting rendering life significant, 138.
Death penalty, 67.
Deity, Views of, 4.
Democracy, antecedents, 55; defi- nition, 92; development, 93; minimum requirements, 94 ; equality and inequality, 94, 95.
Democritus, referred to, 113.
Descartes, Rene, mathematics, 30.
Division of labour, 126.
Duality, in human beings, 40.
Duelling, 68.
Duty, Ideal of, 28.
Earthianism, 62.
Education, 48, 89.
Eloquence, 48.
Enlightenment, Three stages in,
88. Environment of ideals, 45. Equality, meaning, 94; co-exist-
151
152
Inde]
ent with inequality, 95, 96.
Ethical negation, 133.
Ethics, definition, 1, 137, 138, 146; relation to war preven- tion, 23; bases of post-bellum ethics, 25; unit in, 44, 132, 135.
Ethics of the dust, 122.
Evolution, development, 31; or- der of race, ideals, and indi- viduals in, 52.
Fear, basis of ethics of power, 3. Final end of life, 136, 137.
Game of life, 46.
Great Stone Face, 4, 5.
Greeks, theory of elements, 30; solution to question of har- mony, 110; atomism, 113; art, 134.
Growth, stimulated by ideals, 28; periods in life of race, 36; due to production of ideals, 143; protecting source of, 144.
Hegel, G. W., deification of State, 31; maker of Utopias, 81; re- cession from Christianity, 86.
Heine, Heinrich, quoted, 149.
History, Economic interpreta- tion of, 27.
Homeric humour, 22.
Human race, Task of, 107.
Hume, David, referred to, 30.
Humour, International, 104.
Ideals, origin, 2; definition, 2, 39, 40, 42; pictorial quality, 2, 42, 43, 139; classification, 3; tyrannical aspect, 18; priceless value, 19; as spiritual food, 21, 28; clash of, 27; progress from ideal to institution, 29; not worth more than life, 33; de- claring independence from, 33,
38; hierarchy, 34; survival, 39; uncrowning, 141.
Idols, compared to ideals, 15; worship a training in seeing in- visible, 53; nations as idols, 56.
Imagination, source of ethical duality, 1; of civilization, 14; of spiritual life, 78; an experi- mental laboratory, 41 ; strength- ened by religion, 53, 78, 79; gifts abused, 142.
Immortality, Dream of, 8.
Individual, unit of ethics, 44, 132, 135 ; self -determining agent, 63; finisher of nature's work, 65, 69; making world safe for, 69; more important than State, 80, 85; atom of society, 131.
Inequality, part of democracy, 95; relation to brute force, 97; results from growth, 129.
Integration, 114, 115.
Intolerance, 17, 108.
Intuition, 116.
James, William, pragmatism, 31; moral equivalent of war, 147. Judaism, 53. Justice, 11, 12.
Labor, Division of, 126.
Laws, 72.
League of nations, 58.
Leibnitz, G. W., atomism, 114; integration, 115.
Leucippus, referred to, 113.
Liberty, strict construction of "Liberty or Death," 59; poli- tical, 105.
Lichens, 124.
Life, value, 23; not a quiescent adjustment, 35; increasing re- spect for, 66; an inalienable right, 92, 129; game of, 146.
Index
153
Life of the Bee, by Maurice Mae- terlinck, 125. Literature, 89. Locke, John, referred to, 30.
Maeterlinck, Maurice, 125. Man, four ages, 52; as the meas- urer of things, 137. Milesians, referred to. 111. Militarism, 98 Monads, 115. Moral courage, 149.
Nature, battle against, 62, 148; supplemented by conscious- ness, 65; disregard for indi- vidual, 68.
Negation, ethical, logical, meta- physical, 133.
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 96, 97.
Nonresistance, 24.
Novel, Modem, 88, 89.
Old Testament, 53. Other-worldliness, 53-56.
Pacifism, 23, 98.
Pasteur, Louis, quoted, 121.
Patriotism, a religion, 57; the
greater patriotism, 149. Pericles, referred to, 98. Persuasion, Greek theory, 99; as
means of co-operation, 129. Pessimism, 134. Phidias, referred to, 89. Philosophy, definition of, 29. Physics and Politics, by Walter
Bagehot, 102. Plato, other-worldliness in, 30,
53, 54; creator of Utopias, 81-
84; referred to, 85. Poe, E. A., quoted, 150. Power, Ideals of, 3-8. Principle of Nations, by Israel
Zangwill, 56. Pythagoreans, 111.
Quantity, Ethics of, 5, 7.
Reformation, 55.
Religion, deepens inner life, 86;
universality, 88. Renaissance, 54, 55. Republic, by Plato, 81, 82, 87,
112. Rodin, Auguste, referred to, 89.
Sacrifices, 16, 17.
Schopenhauer, Arthur, quoted, 36; referred to, 118.
Science, profoundly imaginative, 13; see also: 87-90.
Self-determination, Planetary, 123.
Self-sacrifice, accepted creed, 37; unjust to require it of others, 97, 98; also: 118, 123.
Slavery, 92.
Social instinct. Excess of, 126.
Socialism, 62.
Society, 71.
Socrates, referred to, 43.
Sophistication, 22, 25.
Specialization, 126.
Speech as battlefield of ideals, 47.
Spiritual, The, Growing impor- tance of, 75; correct valuation, 77.
State, new attitude toward, 81; Hegel and Plato on, 83; arti- ficiality in, 84, 85.
Struggle for existence among ideals, 39.
Sublimity, Ethics of, 7.
Summum bonum, ideals regarded as, 20; relation to paucity of ideals, 50, 51.
Tolstoy, L. N., quoted, 77.
Tragedy, 148.
Truth, Ideals of, 11-14.
154
Index
Value, as measured by size, 5; dependent on a self, 131; cre- ated by individual, 137.
Variation, Principle of, 40.
Virtue, Doctrine of, Aristotle's, 112.
sonal matter, 19; preventable! but not curable, 24; wars ofj conquest and ideals, 27; with murderous nations, 60; roots, 119; abolishment by education, 130; moral equivalent, 147.
War, avoidance painful and per- Zangwill, Israel, quoted, 56.
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