The control of ideals ; a contribution to the study of ethics

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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

, • • '• o <» > »

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

60

Nations 51

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-

Nations 53

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

Nations 55

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.

58 The Control of Ideals

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

Nations 59

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,

60 The Control of Ideals

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

Nations 61

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-

62 The Control of Ideals

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

63

64 The Control of Ideals

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

66 The Control of Ideals

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

Development of Self-Consciousness 67

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

68 The Control of Ideals

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

70 The Control of Ideals

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.

71

72 The Control of Ideals

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

Society Versus the Individual 73

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

74 The Control of Ideals

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-

Society Versus the Individual 75

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-

76 The Control of Ideals

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

Society Versus the Individual 77

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

78 The Control of Ideals

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

Society Versus the Individual 79

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

80

Utopianism 81

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

82 The Control of Ideals

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

Utopianism 83

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

84 The Control of Ideals

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

Utopianism 85

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-

86 The Control of Ideals

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.

Utopianism 87

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.

88 The Control of Ideals

■

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

Utopianism 89

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

90 The Control of Ideals

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

91

92 The Control of Ideals

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

Democracy 93

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

94 The Control of Ideals

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

Democracy 95

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

96 The Control of Ideals

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.

Democracy 97

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

98 The Control of Ideals

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

Democracy 99

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-

100 The Control of Ideals

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.

y > 1 1 >

I II' \

1 ) 1 1 > '

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

102 .• ;;.'ithe Control of Ideals

• ;•; 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.*'

Tolerance 103

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

104 The Control of Ideals

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-

Tolerance 105

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

106 The Control of Ideals

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

Tolerance 107

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

108

Harmony 109

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

110 The Control of Ideals

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-

Harmony 111

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-

112 The Control of Ideals

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-

Harmony 113

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.

114 The Control of Ideals

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

Harmony 115

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

116 The Control of Ideals

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.

Harmony 117

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

118 The Control of Ideals

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

Harmony 119

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

120 The Control of Ideals

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.

121

122 The Control of Ideals

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-

Symbiosis 123

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

124 The Control of Ideals

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

Symbiosis 125

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

131

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-

139

140 The Control of Ideals

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

144 The Control of Ideals

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

Function of Ideals 145

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.

146

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,

148 The Control of Ideals

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

Moral Courage 149

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,

150 The Control of Ideals

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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