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By the Same Author

Short Stories

Thirty Strange Stories
Tales of Space and Time
Twelve Stories and a Dream

Romances

The Time Machine

The Wonderful Visit

The Island of Dr. Moreau

The War of the Worlds

The Invisible Man

The First Man in the Moon

The Sea Lady

When the Sleeper Wakes

In the Days of the Comet

Novels

The Wheels of Chance
Love and Mr. Lewisham
Kipps

Sociological Essays

Anticipations
Mankind in the Making
A Modern Utopia
The Future in America
New Worlds for Old

First and Last Things^

A Confession of Faith and a
Rule of Life

By
H. G. Wells

Author of " New Worlds for Old," " The Time Machine,
" The War of the Worlds," " The Future
in America," etc.

G. P. Putnam's Sons

New York and London

Zbe Iknfcfterbocfter press

1908

H. G. WELLS

ITbc Iftnfclierboclicr |>re0e, Hew |?orft

pi^cnr

CONTENTS.

Introduction .....

BOOK THE FIRST.
metaphysics.
The Necessity for Metaphysics .
The Resumption of Metaphysical Enquiry
The World of Fact
Scepticism of the Instrument
The Classificatory Assumption
Empty Terms
Negative Terms .
Logic Static and Life Kinetic
Planes and Dialects of Thought

Practical Conclusions from these Consid
erations .....

Beliefs ......

Summary ......

PA.GB

13
15
19
22
31
2>3
37
39

44
55
59

Contents

BOOK THE SECOND.

of belief.

My Primary Act of Faith .

On Using the Name of God

Free-Will and Predestination .

A Picture of the World of Men.

The Problem of Motives the Real Problem
of Life .....

A Review of Motives ....

The Synthetic Motive

The Being of Mankind

Individuality an Interlude

The Mystic Element ....

The Synthesis .....

Of Personal Immortality .

A Criticism of Christianity

Of Other Religions ....

65
68

78
81

87
91

96
104
107
109
112

BOOK THE THIRD.
OF general conduct.
Conduct Follows from Belief
What Is Good ....
Socialism .....

125
127
129

Contents

PACK

A Criticism of Certain Forms of Socialism . 133
Hate and Love . , . . . .142

The Preliminary Social Duty . . . 148

Wrong Ways of Living . . . -154

Social Parasitism and Contemporary In-
justices . . . . . -157

The Case of the Wife and Mother . . 162

Associations ...... 167

Of an Organised Brotherhood . . . 173

Concerning New States and New Religions 189
The Idea of the Church .... 194

Of Secession ...... 202

A Dilemma ....... 207

A Comment . . . . . .211

War 213

War AND Competition . . . .217

Modern War ...... 223

Of Abstinences and Disciplines . . . 228

On Forgetting, and the Need of Prayer,

Reading, Discussion and Worship . 234

Democracy and Aristocracy . . . 239

On Debts of Honour ..... 244

Contents

The Idea of Justice

Of Love and Justice .

The Weakness of Immaturity

Possibility of a New Etiquette

Sex

The Institution of Marriage

Conduct in Relation to the Thing that Is

Conduct towards Transgressions

BOOK THE FOURTH.

SOME personal THINGS.

Personal Love and Life

The Nature of Love .

The Will to Love

Love and Death

The Consolation of Failure

The Last Confession .

PACK

261
265

277
280

288
296
298

305

First and Last Things

First and Last Things.

INTRODUCTION.

Recently I set myself to put down what I
believe. I did this with no idea of making a
book, but at the suggestion of a friend and to
interest a number of friends with whom I was
associated. We were all, we found, extremely
uncertain in our outlook upon life, about our
religious feelings and in our ideas of right and
wrong. And yet we reckoned ourselves people
of the educated class and some of us talk and
lecture and write with considerable confidence.
We thought it would be of very great interest to
ourselves and each other if we made some sort
of frank mutual confession. We arranged to
hold a series of meetings in which first one and
then another explained the faith, so far as he
understood it, that was in him. We astonished
ourselves and our hearers by the irregular and

2 First and Last Things

fragmentary nature of the creeds we produced,
clotted at one point, inconsecutive at another,
inconsistent and unconvincing to a quite unex-
pected degree. It would not be difficult to
caricature one of those meetings; the lecturer
floundering about with an air of exquisite illumi-
nation, the audience attentive with an expression
of thwarted edification upon its various brows.
For my own part I grew so interested in planning
my lecture and in joining up point and point,
that my notes soon outran the possibilities of the
hour or so of meeting for which I was preparing
them. The meeting got only a few fragments of
w^hat I had to say, and made what it could of
them. And after that was over I let myself
loose from limits of time and length altogether
and have expanded these memoranda into a
book.

It is as it stands now the frank confession of
what one man of the early Twentieth Century
has found in life and himself, a confession just
as frank as the limitations of his character per-
mit; it is his metaphysics, his religion, his moral
standards, his uncertainties and the expedients
with which he has met them. On every one of
these departments and aspects I write — how
shall I put it? — as an amateur. In every section

Introduction 3

of my subject there are men not only of far
greater intellectual power and energy than I,
but who have devoted their whole lives to the
sustained analysis of this or that among the
questions I discuss, and there is a literature so
enormous in the aggregate that only a specialist
scholar could hope to know it. I have not been
unmindful of these professors and this literature;
I have taken such opportunities as I have found,
to test my propositions by them. But I feel
that such apology as one makes for amateurish-
ness in this field has a lesser quality of self-con-
demnation than if one were dealing with narrower,
more defined and fact-laden matters. There is
more excuse for one here than for the amateur
maker of chemical theories, or the man who
evolves a system of surgery in his leisure. These
things, chemistry, surgery and so forth, we may
take on the reputation of our expert, but our
fundamental beliefs, our rules of conduct, we
must all make for ourselves. We may listen
and read, but the views of others we cannot
take on credit; we must rethink them and ''make
them our own." And we cannot do without
fundamental beliefs, explicit or implicit. The
bulk of men are obliged to be amateur phi-
losophers,— all men indeed who are not special-

4 First and Last Things

ised students of philosophical subjects, — even
if their philosophical enterprise goes no further
than prompt recognition of and submission to
Authority.

And it is not only the claim of the specialist
that I would repudiate. People are too apt to
suppose that in order to discuss morals a man
must have exceptional moral gifts. I would
dispute that naive supposition. I am an in-
genuous enquirer with, I think, some capacity
for religious feeling but neither a prophet nor
a saint. On the whole I should be inclined to
classify myself as a bad man rather than a good;
not indeed as any sort of picturesque scoundrel
or non-moral expert, but as a person frequently
irritable, ungenerous and forgetful, and inter-
mittently and in small but definite ways, bad.
One thing I claim, I have got my beliefs and
theories out of my life and not fitted them to its
circumstances. As often as not I have learnt
good by the method of difference, by the taste of
the alternative. I tell this faith I hold as I hold
it and I sketch out the principles by which I am
generally trying to direct my life at the present
time, because it interests me to do so and I think
it may interest a certain number of similarly
constituted people. I am not teaching. How

Introduction 5

far I succeed or fail in that private and personal
attempt to explain has nothing to do with the
matter of this book. That is another story, a
reserved and private affair. I offer simply in-
tellectual experiences and ideas.

It will be necessary to take up the most ab-
stract of these questions of belief first. It may
be that to many readers the opening sections
may seem the driest and least attractive. But
I would ask them to begin at the beginning and
read straight on, because much that follows this
metaphysical book cannot be appreciated at its
proper value without a grasp of these preliminaries.

Book the First
Metaphysics.

PEOPEUTY OF THE CVTY OF NEW TORt

THE 2fEW YOllE PtJBLIC LliiiLAaY

€ENTBAL BJESEEVl

The Necessity for Metaphysics. — As a pre-
liminary to that experiment in mutual confession
from which this book arose, I found it necessary
to consider and state certain truths about the
nature of knowledge, about the meaning of truth
and the value of words; that is to say I found I
had to begin by being metaphysical. In writing
out these notes now I think it is well that I
should state just how important I think this
metaphysical prelude is.

There is a popular prejudice against meta-
physics as something at once difficult and fruit-
less, as an idle system of enquiries remote from
any human interest. I suppose this odd mis-
conception arose from the vulgar pretensions of
the learned, from their appeal to ancient names
and their quotations in unfamiliar tongues, and
from the easy fall into technicality of men strug-
gling to be explicit where a high degree of ex-
plicitness is impossible. But it needs erudition
and an accumulated and alien literature to make
metaphysics obscure, and some of the most

lo First and Last Things

fruitful and able metaphysical discussion in the
world was conducted by a number of unhampered
men in small Greek cities, who knew no language
but their own and had scarcely a technical term.
The true metaphysician is after all only a person
who says, "Now let us take thought for a mo-
ment before we fall into a discussion of the broad
questions of life, lest we rush hastily into im-
possible and needless conflict. What is the exact
value of these things we are thinking and these
words we are using?" He wants to take thought
about thought. Those other ardent spirits, on
the contrary, want to plunge into action or con-
troversy or belief without taking thought; they
feel that there is not time to examine thought.
"While you think," they say, **the house is
burning." They are the kin of those who rush
and struggle and make panics in theatre fires.

Now it seems to me that most of the troubles
of humanity are really misunderstandings. Men's
compositions and characters are, I think, more
similar than their views, and if they had not
needlessly different modes of expression upon
many broad issues, they would be practically at
one upon a hundred issues where now they
widely differ.

Most of the great controversies of the world,

Metaphysics 1 1

most of the wide religious differences that keep
men apart, arise from this, from differences in
their way of thinking. Men imagine they stand
on the same ground and mean the same thing
by the same words, whereas they stand on
sHghtly different grounds, use different terms
for the same thing and express the same thing
in different words. Logomachies, conflicts about
words, into such death-traps of effort those ardent
spirits run and perish.

This is now almost a commonplace, it has been
said before by numberless people. It has been
said before by numberless people, but it seems
to me it has been realised by very few — and
until it is realised to the fullest extent, we shall
continue to live at intellectual cross purposes
and waste the forces of our species needlessly
and abundantly.

This persuasion is a very important thing in
my mind.

I think that the time has come when the
human mind must take up metaphysical dis-
cussion again — when it must resume those sub-
tle but necessary and unavoidable problems
that it dropped unsolved at the close of the
period of Greek freedom, when it must get to a
common and general understanding upon what

12 First and Last Things

its ideas of truth, good and beauty amount to,
and upon the relation of the Name to the Thing,
and of the relation of one Mind to another Mind
in the matter of resemblance and the matter of
difference — upon all those issues the young science
student is apt to dismiss as Rot, and the young
classical student as Gas, and the austere student
of the science of Economics as Theorising, un-
suitable for his methods of research.

In our achievement of understandings in the
place of these evasions about fundamental things
lies the road, I believe, along which the human
mind can escape, if ever it is to escape, from the
confusion of purposes that distracts it at the
present time.

§2.

The Resumption of Metaphysical Enquiry.
— It seems to me that the Greek mind up to the
disaster of the Macedonian Conquest was elabo-
rately and discursively discussing these questions
of the forms and methods of thought and that
the discussion was abruptly closed and not nat-
urally concluded, summed up hastily as it were,
in the career and lecturings of Aristotle.

Since then the world never effectually reopened
these questions until the modern period. It went
on from Plato and Aristotle just as the art of the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries went on
from Raphael and Michael Angelo. Effectual
criticism was absolutely silent until the Renais-
sance, and then for a time was but a matter of
scattered utterances having only the slightest
collective effect. In the past half century there
has begun a more systematic movement to affect
the general mind, a movement analogous to the
Pre-Raphaelite movement in art — sl Pre-Aristo-
telian movement, a scepticism about things
supposed to be settled for all time, a resumed

14 First and Last Things

enquiry into the fundamental laws of thought, a
harking back to positions of the older philosophers
and particularly to Heraclitus so far as the sur-
viving fragments of his teaching enable us to
understand him, and a new forward movement
from that recovered ground.

§3.

The World of Fact. — Necessarily when one
begins an enquiry into the fundamental nature
of oneself and one's mind and its processes, one
is forced into autobiography. I begin by asking
how the conscious mind with which I am prone
to identify myself, began.

It presents itself to me as a history of a per-
ception of a world of facts opening out from an
accidental centre at which I happened to begin.

I do not attempt to define this word fact.
Fact expresses for me something in its nature
primary and unanalysable. I start from that.
I take as a typical statement of fact that I sit
here at my desk writing with a fountain pen on a
pad of ruled scribbling paper, that the sunlight
falls upon me and throws the shadow of the
window mullion across the page, that Peter, my
cat, sleeps on the window-seat close at hand
and that this agate paper-weight with the silver
top holds my loose memoranda together. Out-
side is a patch of lawn and then a fringe of winter-
bitten iris leaves and then the sea, greatly wrinkled

i6 First and Last Things

and astir under the south-west wind. There is
a boat going out which I think may be Jim Pain's,
but of that I cannot be sure. . . .

These are statements of a certain quahty, a
quaHty that extends through a huge universe
in which I find myself placed.

I try to recall how this world of fact arose in
my mind. It began with a succession of limited
immediate scenes and of certain minutely per-
ceived persons; I recall an underground kitchen
with a drawered table, a window looking up at a
grating, a back-yard in which, growing out by
a dust-bin, was a grape-vine, a red-papered room
with a bookcase over my father's shop, the dusty
aisles and fixtures, the regiments of w^ine-glasses
and tumblers, the rows of hanging mugs and
jugs, the towering edifices of jampots, the tea
and dinner and toilet sets in that emporium, its
brighter side of cricket goods, of pads and balls
and stumps. Out of the window one peeped at
the more exterior world, the High Street in
front, the tailor's garden, the butcher's yard, the
churchyard and Bromley church tower behind;
and one was taken on expeditions to fields and
open places. This limited world w^as peopled with
certain familiar presences, mother and father,
two brothers, the evasive but interesting cat,

Metaphysics 1 7

and by intermittent people of a livelier but more
transient interest, customers and callers.

Such was my opening world of fact, and each
day it enlarged and widened and had more things
added to it. I had soon won my way to speech
and was hearing of facts beyond my visible world
of fact. Presently I was at a Dame's school and
learning to read.

From the centre of that little world as primary,
as the initiatory material, my perception of the
world of fact widened and widened by new sights
and sounds, by reading and hearing descriptions
and histories, by guesses and inferences; my curi-
osity and interest, my appetite for fact, grew by
what it fed upon, I carried on my expansion of
the world of fact until it took me through the
mineral and fossil galleries of the Natural His-
tory Museum, through the geological drawers of
the College of Science, through a year of dissec-
tion and some weeks at the astronomical telescope.
So I built up my conceptions of a real world out
of facts observed and out of inferences of a nature
akin to fact, of a world immense and enduring
receding interminably into space and time. In
that I found myself placed, a creature relatively
infinitesimal, needing and struggling. It was
clear to me, by a hundred considerations, that I

1 8 First and Last Things

in my body upon this planet Earth, was the out-
come of countless generations of conflict and
begetting, the creature of natural selection, the
heir of good and bad engendered in that struggle.
So my world of fact shaped itself. I find it
altogether impossible to question or doubt that
world of fact. Particular facts one may ques-
tion as facts. For instance, I think I see an
unseasonable yellow wallflower from my windows,
but you may dispute that and show it is only a
broken end of iris leaf accidentally lit to yellow.
That is merely a substitution of fact for fact.
One may doubt whether one is perceiving or
remembering or telling facts clearly, but the
persuasion that there are facts, independent of
one's persuasion and obdurate to one's will, re-
mains invincible.

§4.

Scepticism of the Instrument. — ^At first I
took the world of fact as being exactly as I per-
ceived it. I believed my eyes. Seeing was be-
lieving I thought. Still more did I believe my
reasoning. It was only slowly that I began to
suspect that the world of fact could be anything
different from the clear picture it made upon
my mind.

I realised the inadequacy of the senses first.
Into that I will not enter here. Any proper
text-book of physiology or psychology will supply
a number of instances of the habitual deceptions
of sight and touch and hearing. I came upon
these things in my reading, in the laboratory,
with microscope or telescope, lived with them
as constant difficulties. I will only instance one
trifling case of visual deception in order to lead
to my next question. One draws two lines
strictly parallel; so

20 First and Last Things

Oblique to them one draws a series of lines; so

and instantly the parallelism seems to be dis-
turbed. If the second figure is presented to any-
one without sufficient science to understand this
delusion, the impression is created that these lines
converge to the right and diverge to the left.
The vision is deceived in its mental factor and
judges wrongly of the thing seen.

In this case we are able to measure the dis-
tance of the lines, to find how the main lines
looked before the cross ones were drawn, to bring
the deception up against fact of a different sort
and so correct the mistake. If the ignorant
observer were unable to do that, he might re-
main permanently under the impression that the
main lines were out of parallelism. And all the
infirmities of eye and ear, touch and taste are
discovered and checked by the fact that the
erroneous impressions presently strike against
fact and discover an incompatibility with it. If
they did not we should never have discovered
them. If on the other hand they are so incom-

Metaphysics 21

patible with fact as to endanger the lives of the
beings labouring under such infirmities, they
woiild tend to be eliminated from the species.

The presumption to which biological science
brings one is that the senses and mind will
work as well as the survival of the species may
require, but that they will not work so very much
better. There is no ground in matter-of-fact
experience for assuming that there is any more
inevitable certitude about purely intellectual
operations than there is about sensory percep-
tions. The mind of a man may be primarily
only a food-seeking, danger-avoiding, mate-find-
ing instrument, just as the mind of a dog is, just
as the nose of a dog is, or the snout of a pig.

You see the strong preparatory reasons there
are for entertaining the supposition that; —

The senses seem surer than they are.

The thinking mind seems clearer than it is
and is more positive than it ought to be.

The world of fact is not what it appears to be.

§s.

The Classificatory Assumption. — After I
had studied science and particularly biological
science for some years, I became a teacher in a
school for boys. I found it necessary to sup-
plement my untutored conception of teach-
ing method by a more systematic knowledge
of its principles and methods and I took
the courses for the diplomas of Licentiate
and Fellow of the London College of Pre-
ceptors which happened to be convenient for
me. These courses included some of the more
elementary aspects of psychology and logic and
set me thinking and reading further. From
the first, Logic as it was presented to me
impressed me as a system of ideas and
methods remote and secluded from the world
of fact in which I lived and with which I
had to deal. As it came to me in the ordin-
ary text-books, it presented itself as the
science of inference with the syllogism as its
principal instrument. Now I was first struck
by the fact that while my teachers in Logic

Metaphysics 23

seemed to be assuring me I always thought in
this form; —

Mis P
S isM
S isP

the method of my reasoning was almost always
in this form; —

Sj is more or less P.

83 is very similar to Sj.

S, is very probably but not certainly more or less P.

Let us go on that assumption and see how it
works.

That is to say I was constantly reasoning by
analogy and applying verification. So far from
using the syllogistic form confidently, I habitually
distrusted it as anything more than a test of
consistency in statement. But I found the text-
books of logic disposed to ignore my customary
method of reasoning altogether or to recognise
it only where S^ and 83 could be lumped to-
gether under a common name. Then they put it
something after this form as Induction; —

S„ S„ S3, and S, are P.

S,+S, + S3 + S4+ . . . areallS.

All S is P.

I looked into the laws of thought and into the

24 First and Last Things

postulate upon which the syllogistic logic is based,
and it slowly became clear to me that from my
point of view, the point of view of one who seeks
truth and reality, logic assumed a belief in the
objective reality of classification of which my
studies in biology and mineralogy had largely
disabused me. Logic, it seemed to me, had taken
a common innate error of the mind and had em-
phasised it in order to develop a system of reason-
^ing that should be exact in its processes. I turned
my attention to the examination of that. For
in common with the general run of men I had
supposed that logic professed to supply a trust-
worthy science and method for the investigation
and expression of reality.

A mind nourished on anatomical study is of
course permeated with the suggestion of the
vagueness and instability of biological species.
A biological species is quite obviously a great
number of unique individuals which is separable
from other biological species only by the fact
that an enormous number of other linking in-
dividuals are inaccessible in time — are in other
words dead and gone — and each new individual
in that species does, in the distinction of its own
individuality, break away in however infinitesimal
degree from the previous average properties of

Metaphysics 25

the species. There is no property of any species,
even the properties that constitute the specific
definition, that is not a matter of more or less.

If, for example, a species be distinguished by
a single large red spot on the back, you will find
if you go over a great number of specimens that
red spot shrinking here to nothing, expanding
there to a more general redness, weakening to
pink, deepening to russet and brown, shading
into crimson, and so on and so on. And this is
true not only of biological species. It is true of
the mineral specimens constituting a mineral
species, and I remember as a constant refrain
in the lectures of Professor Judd upon rock classi-
fication, the words, "they pass into one another
by insensible gradations." It is true, I hold, of
all things.

You will think perhaps of atoms of the ele-
ments as instances of identically similar things,
but these are things not of experience but of
theory, and there is not a phenomenon in chem-
istry that is not equally well explained on the
supposition that it is merely the immense quan-
tities of atoms necessarily taken in any experiment
that masks by the operation of the law of aver-
ages the fact that each atom also has its unique
quality, its special individual difference.

26 First and Last Things

This ideal of uniqueness in all individuals is
not only true of the classifications of material
science; it is true and still more evidently true
of the species of common thought, it is true of
common terms. Take the word Chair. When
one says chair, one thinks vaguely of an average
chair. But collect individual instances, think of
arm-chairs and reading-chairs and dining-room
chairs, and kitchen chairs, chairs that pass into
benches, chairs that cross the boundary and
become settees, dentists' chairs, thrones, opera
stalls, seats of all sorts, those miraculous fungoid
growths that cumber the floor of the Arts and
Crafts Exhibition, and you will perceive what
a lax bundle in fact is this simple straightforward
term. In co-operation with an intelligent joiner
I would undertake to defeat any definition of
chair or chairishness that you gave me. Chairs
just as much as individual organisms, just as
much as mineral and rock specimens, are unique
things, — if you know them well enough you will
find an individual difference even in a set of
machine-made chairs — and it is only because we
do not possess minds of unlimited capacity,
because our brain has only a limited number of
pigeon-holes for our correspondence with an un-
limited universe of objective uniques, that we

Metaphysics 27

have to delude ourselves into the behef that there
is a chairishness in this species common to and
distinctive of all chairs.

Classification and number, which in truth
ignore the fine differences of objective realities,
have in the past of human thought been imposed
upon things. . . .

Greek thought impresses me as being over-
much obsessed by an objective treatment of
certain necessary preliminary conditions of human
thought — number and definition and class and
abstract form! But these things, number, defini-
tion, class and abstract form, I hold, are merely
unavoidable conditions of mental activity — re-
grettable conditions rather than essential facts.
The forceps of our minds are clumsy forceps and
crush the truth a little in taking hold of it. . . .

Let me give you a rough figure of what I am
trying to convey in this first attack upon the
philosophical validity of general terms. You
have seen the result of those various methods of
black and white reproduction that involve the
use of a rectangular net. You know the sort
of process picture I mean — it used to be em-
ployed very frequently in reproducing photo-
graphs. At a little distance you really seem to
have a faithful reproduction of the original

28 First and Last Things

picture, but when you peer closely you find not
the unique form and masses of the original, but
a multitude of little rectangles, uniform in shape
and size. The more earnestly you go into the
thing, the closelier you look, the more the picture
is lost in reticulations. I submit the world of
reasoned enquiry has a very similar relation to
the world of fact. For the rough purposes of
everyday the net-work picture will do, but the
finer your purpose the less it will serve, and for
an ideally fine purpose, for absolute and general
knowledge that will be as true for a man at a
distance with a telescope as for a man with a
microscope, it will not serve at all.

It is true you can make your net of logical
interpretation finer and finer, you can fine your
classification more and more — up to a certain
limit. But essentially you are working in limits,
and as you come closer, as you look at finer and
subtler things, as you leave the practical purpose
for which the method exists, the element of error
increases. Every species is vague, every term
goes cloudy at its edges, and so in my way of
thinking, relentless logic is only another name
for a stupidity — for a sort of intellectual pig-
headedness. If you push a philosophical or
metaphysical enquiry through a series of valid

Metaphysics 29

syllogisms — never committing any generally recog-
nised fallacy — you nevertheless leave behind you at
each step a certain rubbing and marginal loss of
objective truth and you get deflections that are
difficult to trace, at each phase in the process.
Every species waggles about in its definition,
every tool is a little loose in its handle, every scale
has its individual error. So long as you are
reasoning for practical purposes about finite
things of experience, you can every now and then
check your process and correct your adjustments.
But not when you make what are called philo-
sophical and theological inquiries, when you turn
your implement towards the final absolute truth
of things.

This real vagueness of class terms is equally
true whether we consider those terms used ex-
tensively or intensively, that is to say whether in
relation to all the members of the species or in
relation to an imaginary typical specimen. The
logician begins by declaring that S is either P
or not P. In the world of fact it is the rarest
thing to encounter this absolute alternative; Si
is pink, but S2 is pinker, S3 is scarcely pink at all,
and one is in doubt whether S4 is not properly to
be called scarlet. The finest type specimen you
can find simply has the characteristic quality a

30 First and Last Things

little more rather than a little less. The neat
little circles the logician uses to convey his idea
of P or not P to the student are just pictures of
boundaries in his mind, exaggerations of a natural
mental tendency. They are required for the
purposes of his science, but they are departures
from the nature of fact.

§6.

Empty Terms. — Classes in logic are not only
represented by circles with a hard firm outline,
whereas in fact they have no such definite limits,
but also there is a constant disposition to think
of all names as if they represented positive
classes. With words just as with numbers and
abstract forms there have been definite phases
of human development. There was with regard
to numbers the phase when man could barely
count at all, or counted in perfect good faith and
sanity upon his fingers. Then there was the
phase when he struggled with the development
of number, when he began to elaborate all sorts
of ideas about numbers, until at last he developed
complex superstitions about perfect numbers and
imperfect numbers, about threes and sevens and
the like. The same was the case with abstract
forms and even to-day we are scarcely more
than heads out of the vast subtle muddle of
thinking about spheres and ideally perfect forms
and so on, that was the price of this little neces-
sary step to clear thinking. How large a part

32 First and Last Things

numerical and geometrical magic, numerical and
geometrical philosophy has played in the history
of the mind! And the whole apparatus of lan-
guage and mental communication is beset with
like dangers. The language of the savage is I
suppose purely positive; the thing has a name,
the name has a thing. This indeed is the tradi-
tion of language, and to-day even, we, when we
hear a name are predisposed — and sometimes it
is a very vicious disposition — to imagine forthwith
something answering to the name . We are disposed
as an incurable mental vice, to accumulate intension
in terms. If I say to you Wodget or Crump,
you find yourself passing over the fact that these
are nothings, these are, so to speak, mere blankety
blanks, and trying to think what sort of thing a
Wodget or a Crump may be. You find yourself
led insensibly by subtle associations of sound and
ideas to giving these blank terms attributes.

Now this is true not only of quite empty terms
but of terms that carry a meaning. It is a mental
necessity that we should make classes and use gen-
eral terms, and as soon as we do that we fall into
immediate danger of unjustifiably increasing the
intension of these terms. You will find a large
proportion of human prejudice and misunderstand-
ing arises from this universal proclivity.

§7-

Negative Terms. — ^There is a particular sort
of empty terms that has been and is conspicuously
dangerous to the thinker, the class of negative
terms. The negative term is in plain fact just
nothing; ''Not-A" is the absence of any trace of
the quality that constitutes A, it is the rest of
everything for ever. But there seems to be a
real bias in the mind towards regarding "Not-A"
as a thing mysteriously in the nature of A, as
though **Not-A" and A were species of the same
genus. When one speaks of not-Pink one is apt
to think of green things and yellow things and
to ignore anger or abstract nouns or the sound
of thunder. And logicians, following the normal
bias of the mind do actually present A and Not-A

in this sort of diagram ignoring altogether the
difficult case of the space in which these words

34 First and Last Things

are printed. Obviously the diagram that comes
nearer experienced fact is

Not ® A

with no outer boundary. But the logician finds
it necessary for his processes ^ to present that
outer Not- A as bounded, and to speak of the
total area of A and Not-A as the Universe of
Discourse and the metaphysician and the common-
sense thinker alike fall far too readily into the
belief that this convention of method is an ade-
quate representation of fact.

Let me try and express how in my mind this
matter of negative terms has shaped itself. I
think of something which I may perhaps best
describe as being off the stage or out of court, or
as the Void without Implications, or as Nothing-
ness, or as Outer Darkness. This is a sort of
hypothetical Beyond to the visible world of
human thought, and thither I think all negative
terms reach at last, and merge and become
nothing. Whatever positive class you make,
whatever boundary you draw, straight away from
that boundary begins the corresponding negative

1 Vide e.g. Kayne's Formal Logic re Euler's diagrams and
Immediate Inferences.

Metaphysics 35

class and passes into the illimitable horizon of
nothingness. You talk of pink things, you ig-
nore, as the arbitrary postulates of Logic direct,
the more elusive shades of pink, and draw your
line. Beyond is the not-pink, known and know-
able, and still in the not-pink region one comes
to the Outer Darkness. Not blue, not happy,
not iron, all the not classes meet in that Outer
Darkness. That same Outer Darkness and no-
thingness is infinite space and infinite time and
any being of infinite qualities, and all that region
I rule out of court in my philosophy altogether.
I will neither affirm nor deny if I can help it about
any not things, I will not deal with not things at
all, except by accident and inadvertence. If I
use the word ''infinite" I use it as one often uses
"countless," "the countless hosts of the enemy"
— or * ' Immeasurable ' ' — * * immeasurable cliffs ' ' —
that is to say as the limit of measurement, as a
convenient equivalent to as many times this
cloth yard as you can, and as many again and
so on and so on.

Now a great number of apparently positive
terms are, or have become, practically negative
terms and are under the same ban with me. A
considerable number of terms that have played
a great part in the world of thought, seem to me

36 First and Last Things

to be invalidated by this same defect, to have no
content or an undefined content or an unjusti-
fiable content. For example, that word Omni-
scient, as implying infinite knowledge, impresses
me as being a word with a delusive air of being
solid and full, when it is really hollow with no
content whatever. I am persuaded that knowing
is the relation of a conscious being to something
not itself, that the thing known is defined as a
system of parts and aspects and relationships,
that knowledge is comprehension, and so that
only finite things can know or be known. When
you talk of a being of infinite extension and
infinite duration, omniscient and omnipotent and
Perfect, you seem to me to be talking in nega-
tives of nothing whatever.

§8.

Logic Static and Life Kinetic. — ^There is
another infirmity of the mind to which atten-
tion has been called recently by an able
paper read to the Cambridge Moral Science
Club by my friend Miss Amber Reeves. In
this she has developed a suggestion of Mr.
F. C. S. Schiller's. The current syllogistic
logic rests on the assumption that either A
is B or it is not B. The practical reality,
she contends, is that nothing is permanent;
A is always becoming B more or less or ceas-
ing to be B more or less. But it would seem
the human mind cannot manage with that.
It has to hold a thing still for a moment be-
fore it can think it. It arrests the present
moment for its struggle as Joshua stopped
the sun. It cannot contemplate things con-
tinuously and so it has to resort as it were
to a series of static snapshots. It has to kill
motion in order to study it as a naturalist
kills and pins out a butterfly in order to

study life.

38 First and Last Things

You see the mind is really pigeon-holed and
discontinuous in two respects; in respect to time
and in respect to classification, where one has
a strong persuasion that the world of fact is
unbounded or continuous.

§9-

Planes and Dialects op Thought. — Finally
the Logician, intent upon perfecting the certitudes
of his methods rather than upon expressing the
confusing subtleties of truth, has done little to
help thinking men in the perpetual difficulty that
arises from the fact that the universe can be seen
in many different fashions and expressed by many
different systems of terms, each expression in its
limits true and yet incommensurable with expres-
sion upon a differing system. There is a sort of
stratification in human ideas. I have it very
much in mind that various terms in our reasoning
lie, as it were, at different levels and in different
planes, and that we accomplish a large amount
of error and confusion by reasoning terms together
that do not lie or nearly lie in the same plane.

Let me endeavour to make myself a little less
obscure by a flagrant instance from physical
things. Suppose someone began to talk seriously
of a man seeing an atom through a microscope,
or better perhaps of cutting one in half with a
knife. There are a number of non-analytical

40 First and Last Things

people who would be quite prepared to believe
that an atom could be visible to the eye or cut
in this manner. But anyone at all conversant
with physical conceptions would almost as soon
think of killing the square root of 2 with a rook
rifle as of cutting an atom in half with a knife.
One's conception of an atom is reached through
a process of hypothesis and analysis, and in the
world of atoms there are no knives and no men
to cut. If you have thought with a strong con-
sistent mental movement, then when you have
thought of your atom under the knife blade, your
knife blade has itself become a cloud of swinging
grouped atoms, and your microscope lens a little
universe of oscillatory and vibratory molecules.
If you think of the universe, thinking at the level
of atoms, there is neither knife to cut, scale to
weigh, nor eye to see. The universe at that plane
to which the mind of the molecular physicist descends
has none of the shapes or forms of our common
life whatever. This hand with which I write
is in the universe of molecular physics a cloud of
warring atoms and molecules, combining and
recombining, colliding, rotating, flying hither and
thither in the universal atmosphere of ether.

You see, I hope, what I mean when I say that
the universe of molecular physics is at a different

Metaphysics 41

level from the universe of common experience;
— ^what we call stable and solid is in that world
a freely moving system of interlacing centres of
force, what we call colour and sound is there no
more than this length of vibration or that. We
have reached to a conception of that universe of
molecular physics by a great enterprise of organ-
ised analysis, and our universe of daily experi-
ences stands in relation to that elemental world
as if it were a synthesis of those elemental things.

I would suggest to you that this is only a very
extreme instance of the general state of affairs,
that there may be finer and subtler differences of
level between one term and another, and that
terms may very well be thought of as lying
obliquely and as being twisted through different
levels.

It will perhaps give a clearer idea of what I
am seeking to convey if I suggest a concrete
image for the whole world of a man's thought and
knowledge. Imagine a large clear jelly, in which
at all angles and in all states of simplicity or
contortion his ideas are imbedded. They are all
valid and possible ideas as they lie, none incom-
patible with any. If you imagine the direction
of up or down in this clear jelly being as it were
the direction in which one moves by analysis or

42 First and Last Things

by synthesis, if you go down for example from
matter to atoms and centres of force and up to
men and states and countries — if you will imagine
the ideas lying in that manner — you will get the
beginnings of my intention. But our Instrument,
our process of thinking, like a drawing before
the discovery of perspective, appears to have diffi-
culties with the third dimension, appears capable
only of dealing with or reasoning about ideas by
projecting them upon the same plane. It will
be obvious that a great multitude of things may
very well exist together in a solid jelly, which
would be overlapping and incompatible and
mutually destructive, when projected together
upon one plane. Through the bias in our Instru-
ment to do this, through reasoning between terms
not in the same plane, an enormous amount of
confusion, perplexity and mental deadlocking
occurs.

The old theological deadlock between pre-
destination and free-will serves admirably as an
example of the sort of deadlock I mean. Take
life at the level of common sensation and common
experience and there is no more indisputable fact
than man's freedom of will, unless it is his complete
moral responsibility. But make only the least
penetrating of scientific analyses and you perceive

Metaphysics 43

a world of inevitable consequences, a rigid suc-
cession of cause and effect. Insist upon a fiat
agreement between the two, and there you are!
The Instrument fails.

So far as this particular opposition is concerned,
I shall point out later the reasonableness and con-
venience of regarding the common-sense belief in
free-will as truer for one's personal life than
determinism.

§ lo.

Practical Conclusions from these Con-
siderations.— Now what is the practical otit-
come of all these criticisms of the human mind?
Does it follow that thought is futile and discussion
vain? By no means. Rather these considera-
tions lead us toward mutual understanding.
They clear up the deadlocks that come from the
hard and fast use of terms, they establish mutual
charity as an intellectual necessity. The common
way of speech and thought which the old system
of logic has simply systematised, is too glib and
too presumptuous of certainty. We must needs
use language, but we must use it always with the
thought of its unreal exactness, its actual habitual
deflection from fact in our minds. All proposi-
tions are approximations to an elusive truth, and
we employ them as the mathematician studies
the circle by supposing it to be a polygon of a
very great number of sides.

We must make use of terms and sometimes of
provisional terms. But we must guard against
such terms and the mental danger of excessive

Metaphysics 45

intension they carry with them. The child takes
a stick and says it is a sword and does not forget,
he takes a shadow under the bed and says it is
a bear and he half forgets. The man takes a set
of emotions and says it is a God, and he gets
excited and propagandist and does forget, he is
involved in disputes and confusions with the old
gods of wood and stone, and presently he is
making his God a Great White Throne and fitting
him up with a mystical family.

Essentially we have to train our minds to think
anew, if we are to think beyond the purposes for
which the mind seems to have been evolved. We
have to disabuse ourselves from the superstition
of the binding nature of definitions and the
exactness of logic. We have to cure ourselves
of the natural tricks of common thought and
argument. You know the way of it, how effec-
tive and foolish it is; the quotation of the
exact statement of which every jot and tittle
must be maintained, the challenge to be
consistent, the deadlock between your terms
and mine.

More and more as I grow older and more settled
in my views am I bored by common argument,
bored not because I am ceasing to be interested
in the things argued about, but because I see

46 First and Last Things

more and more clearly the futility of the methods
pursued.

How then are we to think and argue and what
truth may we attain? Is not the method of the
scientific investigator a valid one and is there not
truth to the world of fact in scientific laws? De-
cidedly there is. And the continual revision
and testing against fact that these laws get is
constantly approximating them more and more
nearly to a trustworthy statement of fact. Never-
theless they are never true in that dogmatic
degree in which they seem true to the unphilo-
sophical student of science. Accepting as I do
the validity of nearly all the general propositions
of modern Science, I have constantly to bear in
mind that about them too clings the error of
excessive claims to precision.

The man trained solely in science falls easily
into a superstitious attitude; he is overdone with
classification. He believes in the possibility of
exact knowledge everywhere. What is not exact
he declares is not knowledge. He believes in
specialists and experts in all fields.

I dispute this universal range of possible scien-
tific precision. There is a certain not too clearly
recognised order in the sciences which forms the
gist of my case against this scientific pretension.

Metaphysics 47

There is a gradation in the importance of the
individual instance as one passes from mechanics
and physics and chemistry through the biological
sciences and economics and sociology, a grada-
tion whose correlations and implications have not
yet received adequate recognition, and which
do profoundly affect the method of study and
research in each science.

Let me repeat in slightly altered terms some
of the points raised in the preceding sections. I
have doubted and denied that there are identi-
cally similar objective experiences; I consider all
objective beings as individual and unique. It
is now understood that conceivably only in the
subjective world, and in theory and the imagina-
tion, do we deal with identically similar units,
and with absolutely commensurable quantities.
In the real world it is reasonable to suppose we
deal at most with practically similar units and
practically commensurable quantities. But there
is a strong bias, a sort of labour-saving bias in
the normal human mind to ignore this and not
only to speak but to think of a thousand bricks
or a thousand sheep or a thousand sociologists as
though they were all absolutely true to sample.
If it is brought before a thinker for a moment that
in any special case this is not so, he slips back to

48 First and Last Things

the old attitude as soon as his attention is with-
drawn. This type of error has, for instance,
caught many of the race of chemists and atoms
and ions and so forth of the same species are
tacitly assumed to be similar to one another. Be
it noted that so far as the practical results of
chemistry and physics go, it scarcely matters
which assumption we adopt, the number of units
is so great, the individual difference so drowned
and lost. For purposes of enquiry and discussion
the incorrect one is infinitely more convenient.

But this ceases to be true directly we emerge
from the region of chemistry and physics. In the
biological sciences of the eighteenth century,
common-sense struggled hard to ignore individ-
uality in shells and plants and animals. There
was an attempt to eliminate the more conspicuous
departures as abnormalities, as sports, nature's
weak moments, and it was only with the estab-
lishment of Darwin's great generalisations that
the hard and fast classificatory system broke
down and individuality came to its own. Yet
there had always been a clearly felt difference
between the conclusions of the biological sciences
and those dealing with lifeless substance in the
relative vagueness, the insubordinate looseness
and inaccuracy of the former. The naturalist

Metaphysics 49

accumulated facts and multiplied names, but he
did not go triumphantly from generalisation
to generalisation after the fashion of the chemist
or physicist. It is easy to see therefore how it
came about that the inorganic sciences were re-
garded as the true scientific bed-rock. It was
scarcely suspected that the biological sciences
might perhaps after all be truer than the experi-
mental, in spite of the difference in practical value
in favour of the latter. It was, and is by the
great majority of people to this day, supposed to
be the latter that are invincibly true ; and the for-
mer are regarded as a more complex set of prob-
lems merely, with obliquities and refractions that
presently will be explained away. Comte and
Herbert Spencer certainly seem to me to have
taken that much for granted. Herbert Spencer
no doubt talked of the unknown and unknowable,
but not in this sense as an element of inexactness
running through all things. He thought, it seems
to me, of the unknown as the indefinable be-
yond to an immediate world that might be quite
clearly and definitely known.

There is a growing body of people which is be-
ginning to hold the converse view — that counting,
classification, measurement, the whole fabric of
mathematics, is subjective and untrue to the

50 First and Last Things

world of fact, and that the uniqueness of individu-
als is the objective truth. As the number of units
taken diminishes, the amount of variety and
inexactness of generalisation increases, because
individuality tells more and more. Could you
take men by the thousand billion, you could
generalise about them as you do about atoms,
could you take atoms singly, it may be you would
find them as individual as your aunts and cousins.
That concisely is the minority belief, and my
belief.

Now what is called the scientific method in
the physical sciences rests upon the ignoring of
individualities; and like many mathematical con-
ventions, its great practical convenience is no
proof whatever of its final truth. Let me admit
the enormous value, the wonder of its results in
mechanics, and all the physical sciences, in chem-
istry, even in physiology, — but what is its value
beyond that ? Is this * ' scientific method " of value
in biology ? The great advances made by Darwin
and his school in biology were not made, it must
be remembered, by the scientific method, as it is
generally conceived, at all. His was historical
research. He conducted a research into pre-
documentary history. He collected information
along the lines indicated by certain interrogations,

Metaphysics 51

and the bulk of his work was the digesting and
critical analysis of that. For documents and
monuments he had fossils and anatomical struc-
tures and germinating eggs too innocent to lie.
But on the other hand he had to correspond with
breeders and travellers of various sorts, classes
entirely analogous, from the point of view of evi-
dence, to the writers of history and memoirs. I
question profoundly whether the word "science,"
in current usage anyhow, ever means such patient
disentanglement as Darwin pursued. It means the
attainment of something positive and emphatic
in the way of a conclusion, based on amply re-
peated experiments capable of infinite repetition,
''proved" as they say, **up to the hilt."

It would be of course possible to dispute
whether the word "science" should convey this
quality of certitude, but to most people it certainly
does at the present time. So far as the move-
ments of comets and electric trams go, there is
no doubt practically cock-sure science ; and Comte
and Herbert Spencer seem to me to have believed
that cock-sure could be extended to every con-
ceivable finite thing. The fact that Herbert
Spencer called a certain doctrine Individualism
reflects nothing on the non-individualising quality
of his primary assumptions and of his mental

52 First and Last Things

texture. He believed that individuality (hetero-
geneity) was and is an evolutionary product from
an original homogeneity, begotten by folding
and multiplying and dividing and twisting it, and
still fundamentally it. It seems to me that the
general usage is entirely for the limitation of the
word "science" to knowledge and the search
after knowledge of a high degree of precision.
And not simply the general usage; "Science is
measurement," Science is "organised common-
sense," proud in fact of its essential error, scorn-
ful of any metaphysical analysis of its terms.

Now my contention is that we can arrange
the fields of human thought and interest about
the world of fact in a sort of scale. At one
end the number of units is infinite and the methods
exact, at the other we have the human subjects in
which there is no exactitude. Sociology stands at
the extreme end of the scale from the molecular
sciences. In these latter there is an infinitude of
units; in sociology, as Comte perceived, there is
only one unit. It is true that Herbert Spencer,
in order to get classification somehow, did, as
Professor Durkheim has pointed out, separate
human society into societies and made believe
they competed one with another and died and
reproduced just like animals, and that economists

Metaphysics 53

following List have for the purposes of fiscal con-
troversy discovered economic types; but this is
a transparent device, and one is surprised to
find thoughtful and reputable writers off their
guard against such bad analogy. But indeed it
is impossible to isolate complete communities of
men, or to trace any but rude general resemblances
between group and group. These alleged units
have as much individuality as pieces of cloud;
they come, they go, they fuse and separate.
And we are forced to conclude that not only is
the method of observation, experiment and veri-
fication left far away down the scale, but that
the method of classification under types, which
has served so useful a purpose in the middle group
of subjects, the subjects involving numerous
but a finite number of units, has also to be aban-
doned here. We cannot put Humanity into a
museum or dry it for examination ; our one single
still living specimen is all history, all anthropo-
logy, and the fluctuating world of men. There is no
satisfactory means of dividing it and nothing else
in the real world with which to compare it. We
have only the remotest ideas of its ''life-cycle"
and a few relics of its origin and dreams of its
destiny.

This denial of scientific precision is as true of

54 First and Last Things

all the subjects of general human relations and
attitude, as it is of sociology. And in regard to
all these matters affecting our personal motives,
our self-control and our devotions, it is much
truer.

From this it is an easy step to the statement
that so far as the clear-cut confident sort of
knowledge goes, the sort of knowledge one gets
from a time-table or a text-book of chemistry,
or seeks from a witness in a police court, I am,
in relation to religious and moral questions, an
agnostic. I do not think any general propositions
partaking largely of the nature of fact can be
known about these things. There is nothing
possessing the general validity of fact to be
stated or known.

§11.

Beliefs. — Yet it is of urgent practical neces-
sity that we should have such propositions and
beliefs. All those we conjure out of our mental
apparatus and the world of fact dissolve and
disappear again under scrutiny. It is clear we
must resort to some other method for these
necessities.

Now I make my beliefs as I want them. I do
not attempt to go to fact for them. I make
them thus and not thus exactly as an artist makes
a picture so and not so. I believe that is how
we all make our beliefs, but that many people do
not see this clearly and confuse their beliefs with
perceived fact.

I draw my beliefs exactly as an artist draws
lines to make a picture, to express my impression
of the world and my purpose.

The artist cannot defend his expression as
a scientific man defends his, and upon any
given assumptions demonstrate that they are
true. Any loud fool may stand in the front of a
picture and call it inaccurate, untrustworthy,

56 First and Last Things

unbeautiful. That last, the most vital issue of
all, is the one least assured. Loud fools always
will do that sort of thing. You take quite ig-
norant people before almost any beautiful work
of art and they will laugh at it as absurd. If one
sits on a popular evening in that long room at
South Kensington which contains Raphael's car-
toons, one remarks that perhaps a third of those
who stray through and look at all those fine efforts,
titter. If one searches in the magazines of a little
while ago, one finds in the angry and resentful
reception of the Pre-Raphaelites another instance
of the absolutely indefensible nature of many of
the most beautiful propositions. And as a still
more striking and remarkable case, take the on-
slaught made by Ruskin upon the works of
Whistler. You will remember that a libel action
ensued and that these pictures were gravely
reasoned about by barristers and surveyed by
jurymen to assess their merits. . . .

In the end it is the indefensible truth that lasts •
it lasts because it works and serves. People come
to it and remain and attract other understanding
and enquiring people.

Now when I say I make my beliefs and that I
cannot prove them to you and convince you of
them, that does not mean that I make them

Metaphysics 57

wantonly and regardless of fact, that I throw
them off as a child scribbles on a slate. Mr.
Ruskin, if I remember rightly, accused Whistler
of throwing a pot of paint in the face of the public,
that was the essence of his libel. The artistic
method in this field of beliefs, as in the field of
visual renderings, is one of great freedom and
initiative and great poverty of test, that is all,
but of no wantonness; the conditions of rightness
are none the less imperative because they are
mysterious and indefinable. I adopt certain
beliefs because I feel the need for them, because
I feel an often quite unanalysable rightness in
them; because the alternative of a chaotic life
distresses me, because they are right. My belief
in them rests upon the fact that they work for
me and satisfy a desire for harmony and beauty.
They are arbitrary assumptions if you will, that
I see fit to impose upon my universe. But
though they are arbitrary, they are not
necessarily individual. Just so far as we all
have a common likeness, just so far can we
be brought under the same imperatives to
think and believe.

And though they are arbitrary, each day they
stand wear and tear and each new person they
satisfy, is another day and another voice towards

58 First and Last Things

showing they do correspond to something that is
so far fact and real.

This is Pragmatism as I conceive it, the aban-
donment of infinite assumptions, the extension of
the experimental spirit to all human interests.

§ 12.

Summary. — In concluding this First Book let
me give a summary of the principal points of
what has gone before.

I figure the mind of man as an imperfect being
obtaining knowledge by imperfect eyesight, im-
perfect hearing and so forth, who must needs walk
manfully and patiently, exercising will and mak-
ing choices and determining things between the
mysteries of external and internal fact.

Essentially man's mind moves within limits
depending upon his individual character and
experience. These limits constitute his circle of
thought, and they differ for everyone.

That briefly is what I consider to be the case
with my own mind, and I believe it is the case
with yours.

Most minds, it seems to me, are similar, but
none are absolutely alike in character or in
contents.

We are all biassed to ignore our mental im-
perfections and to talk and act as though in
our minds we had exact instruments, something

6o First and Last Things

wherewith to scale the heavens with assurance,
and to believe as if, except for perversity, all our
minds work exactly alike.

Man, thinking man, suffers from intellectual
over-confidence and a vain belief in the universal
validity of reasoning.

We all need training, training in the balanced
attitude.

Of everything we need to say this is true, hut it
is not quite true.

Of everything we need to say, this is true in
relation to things in or near its plane but not
true of other things.

Of everything we have to remember, this may
be truer for us than for other people.

In disputation particularly we have to re-
member this and most with our antagonist,
that the spirit of an utterance may be better
than the phrase.

We have to discourage the cheap tricks of
controversy, the retort, the search for incon-
sistency.

We have to realise that these things are as
foolish and ill-bred and anti-social as shouting
in conversation or making puns, and we have
to work out habits of thought purged from
the sin of assurance. We have to do this for

Metaphysics 6i

our own good quite as much as for the sake of
intercourse.

All the great and important beliefs by which
life is guided and determined are less of the nature
of fact than of artistic expression.

Book the Second
Of Belief.

§1.

My Primary Act of Faith. — And now having
stated my conception of the true relationship
of our thoughts and words to facts, having
distinguished between the more accurate and
frequently verified propositions of science and
the more arbitrary and infrequently verified
propositions of belief and made clear the spon-
taneous and artistic quality that inheres in all
our moral and religious generalisations, I may
hope to go on to my confession of faith with
less misunderstanding.

Now my most comprehensive belief about the
external and the internal and myself is that they
make one universe in which I and every part are
ultimately important. That is quite an arbi-
trary act of my mind. It is quite possible to
maintain that everything is a chaotic assembly,
that any part might be destroyed without affecting
any other part. I do not choose to argue against
that. If you choose to say that, I am no more
disposed to argue with you than if you choose to
wear a mitre in Fleet Street or drink a bottle of

66 First and Last Things

ink, or declare the figure of Ally Sloper more dig-
nified and beautiful than the head of Jove. There
is no Q.E.D. that you cannot do so. You can.
You will not like to go on with it, I think,
and it will not answer, but that is a different
matter.

I dismiss the idea that life is chaotic because
it leaves my life ineffectual, and I cannot contem-
plate an ineffectual life patiently. I am by my
nature impelled to refuse that. I assert that it
is not so. I assert therefore that I am important
in a scheme, that we all are important in that
scheme, that the wheel-smashed frog in the road
and the fly drowning in the milk are important
and correlated with me. What the scheme as a
whole is I do not know; with my limited mind I
cannot know. There I become a Mystic. I use
the word scheme because it is the be^ word
available, but I strain it in using it. I do not
wish to imply a schemer, but only order and co-
ordination as distinguished from haphazard. "All
this is important, all this is profoundly signifi-
cant." I say it of the universe, as a child that
has not learnt to read might say it of a parchment
agreement. I can't read the universe, but I can
believe that this is so.

And this unfounded and arbitrary declara-

Of Belief 67

tion of the ultimate Tightness and significance of
things I call the Act of Faith. It is my funda-
mental religious confession. It is a voluntary
and deliberate determination to believe, it is a
choice made.

§2.

On Using the Name of God. — You may say
if you will that this scheme I talk about, this
something that gives Importance and correlation
and significance, is what is meant by God. You
may embark upon a logical wrangle here with me
if you have failed to master what I have hitherto
said about the meaning of words. If a Scheme,
you will say, then there must be a Schemer.

But I repeat, I am using scheme and importance
and significance here only in a spirit of analogy
because I can find no better words, and I will not
allow myself to be entangled by an insistence
upon their implications.

Yet let me confess I am greatly attracted by
such fine phrases as the Will of God, the Hand of
God, the Great Commander. These do most
wonderfully express aspects of this belief I choose
to hold. I think if there had been no gods before,
I would call this God. But I feel that there
is a great danger in doing this sort of thing
unguardedly. Many people would be glad for
rather trivial and unworthy reasons that I should

Of Belief 69

confess a faith in God and few would take offence.
But the run of people even nowadays mean some-
thing more and something different when they
say ''God." They intend a personality exterior
to them and limited, and they will instantly con-
clude I mean the same thing. To permit that
misconception is, I feel, the first step on the
slippery slope of meretricious complaisance, is to
become in some small measure a successor of
those who cried, "Great is Diana of the Ephe-
sians." Occasionally we may best serve the God
of Truth by denying him.

Yet at times I admit the sense of personality
in the universe is very strong. If I am confessing,
I do not see why I should not confess up to the
hilt. At times in the silence of the night and in
rare lonely moments, I come upon a sort of com-
munion of myself and something great that is not
myself. It is perhaps poverty of mind and
language obliges me to say then this universal
scheme takes on the effect of a sympathetic
person — and my communion a quality of
fearless worship. These moments happen and
they are the supreme fact in my religious life
to me, they are the crown of my religious
experiences.

None the less, I do not usually speak of God

70 First and Last Things

even in regard to these moments, and where I do
use that word it must be understood that I use
it as a personification of something entirely
different in nature from the personality of a
human being.

§3-

Free-Will and Predestination. — And now-
let me return to a point raised in the first part in
§ 9. Is the whole of this scheme of things settled
and done? The whole trend of Science is to that
belief. On the scientific plane one is a fatalist,
the universe a system of inevitable consequences.
But as I show in that section referred to, it is quite
possible to accept as true in their several planes
both Predestination and Free-Will.^ If you ask
me, I think I should say I incline to believe in
predestination and do quite completely believe
in free-will. The important belief is free-will.

But does the whole universe of fact, the external
world about me, the mysterious internal world
from which my motives rise, form one rigid and
fated system as Determinists teach? Do I be-
lieve that had one a mind ideally clear and power-
ful, the whole universe would seem orderly and
absolutely predestined? I incline to that belief.

» I use Free-Will in the sense of self-determinism and not
as it is defined by Professor William James, and Predestina-
tion as equivalent to the conception of a universe rigid in
time and space.

72 First and Last Things

I do not harshly believe it, but I admit its large
plausibility — that is all. I see no value whatever
in jumping to a decision. One or two Pragma-
tists, so far as I can understand them, do not hold
this view of Predestination at all. But as a pro-
visional assumption it underlies most scientific
work.

I glance at this question rather to express a
detachment than a view.

From me as a person this theory of predestina-
tion has no practical value. At the utmost it is
an interesting theory like the theory that there
is a fourth dimension. There may be a fourth
dimension of space, but one gets along quite
well by assuming there are just three. It may
be knowable the next time I come to cross-roads
which I shall take. Possibly that knowledge
actually exists somewhere. There are those who
will tell you they can get intimations in the matter
from packs of cards or the palms of my hands, or
see by peering into crystals. Of such beliefs I
am entirely free. The fact is I believe that neither
I know nor anybody else who is practically con-
cerned knows which I shall take. I hesitate, I
choose just as though the thing was unknowable.
For me and my conduct there is that much wide
practical margin of freedom.

Of Belief 73

I am free and freely and responsibly making
the future — so far as I am concerned. You others
are equally free. On that theory I find my life
will work, and on a theory of mechanical pre-
destination nothing works.

I take the former theory therefore for my every-
day purposes, and as a matter of fact so does
everybody else. I regard myself as a free respon-
sible person among free responsible persons.

§4.

A Picture of the World of Men. — Now I
have already given a first picture of the world
of fact as it shaped itself upon my mind. Let
me now give a second picture of this world in
which I find myself, a picture in a rather different
key and at a different level, in which I turn to
a new set of aspects and bring into the foreground
the other minds which are with me in the midst
of this great spectacle.

What ami?

Here is a question to which in all ages men
have sought to give a clear unambiguous answer,
and to which a clear unambiguous answer is mani-
festly unfitted. Am I my body? Yes or no? It
seems to me that I can externalise and think of
as "not myself" nearly everything that pertains
to my body; hands and feet, and even the most
secret and central of those living and hidden
parts, the pulsing arteries, the throbbing nerves,
the ganglionic centres, that no eye, save for the
surgeon's knife, has ever seen or ever will see

until they coagulate in decay. So far I am not

Of Belief 75

my body, and then as clearly, since I suffer
through it, see the whole world through it and
am always to be called upon where it is, I am it.
Am I a mind mysteriously linked to this thing
of matter and endeavour? So I can present
myself. I seem to be a consciousness, vague and
insecure, placed between two worlds. One of
these worlds seems clearly *'not me," the other
is more closely identified with me and yet is still
imperfectly me. The first I call the exterior
world and it presents itself to me as existing in
Time and Space. In a certain way I seem able
to interfere with it and control it. The second
is the interior world, having no forms in space
and only a vague evasive reference to time, from
which motives arise and storms of emotion, which
acts and reacts constantly and in untraceable
ways with my conscious mind. And that con-
sciousness itself hangs and drifts about the region
where the inner world and the outer world meet,
much as a patch of limelight drifts about the
stage, illuminating, affecting, following no mani-
fest law except that usually it centres upon the
hero, my Ego.

It seems to me that to put the thing much
more precisely than this is to depart from the
reality of the matter.

76 First and Last Things

But so departing a little, let me borrow a
phrase from Herbart and identify myself more
particularly with my mental self. It seems to
me that I may speak of myself as a circle of
thought and experience hung between these two
imperfectly understood worlds of the internal
and the external and passing imperceptibly into
the former. The external world impresses me as
being, as a practical fact, common to me and
many other creatures similar to myself; the in-
ternal I find similar but not identical with theirs.
It is mine. It seems to me at times no more
than something cut off from that external world
and put into a sort of pit or cave, much as all the
inner mystery of my body, those living, writhing,
warm and thrilling organs are isolated, hidden
from all eyes and interference so long as I remain
alive. And I myself, the essential me, am the
light and watcher in the mouth of the cave.

So I think of myself, and so I think of all other
human beings, as circles of thought and ex-
perience, each a little different from the others.
Each human being I see as essentially a circle of
thought between an internal and an external
world.

I figure these circles of thought as more or
less imperfectly focussed pictures, all a little askew

Of Belief 77

and vague as to margins and distances. In the
internal world arise motives and they pass out-
ward through the circle of thought and are modi-
fied and directed by it into external acts. And
through speech, example and a hundred various
acts one such circle, one human mind, lights and
enlarges and plays upon another. Th3-t is the
image under which the interrelation of minds
presents itself to me.

§5-

The Problem of Motives the Real Problem
OF Life. — Now each self among us for all its
fluctuations and vagueness of boundary, is, as I
have already pointed out, invincibly persuaded
of Free- Will. That is to say it has a persuasion
of responsible control over the impulses that teem
from the internal world and tend to express them-
selves in act. The problem of that control and
its solution is the reality of life. "What am I to
do?" is the perpetual question of our existence.
Our metaphysics, our beliefs are all sought as
subsidiary to that and have no significance with-
out it.

I confess I find myself a confusion of motives
beside which my confusion of perceptions pales
into insignificance.

There are many various motives and mo-
tives very variously estimated — some are
called gross, some sublime, some — such as
pride — wicked. I do not readily accept these
classifications.

Many people seem to make a selection among
78

Of Belief 79

their motives without much enquiry, taking
those classifications as just; they seek to lead
what they call pure lives and useful lives and
to set aside whole sets of motives which do
not accord with this determination. Some
exclude the seeking of pleasure as a permissible
motive, some the love of beauty, some insist
upon one's "being oneself" and prohibit or
limit responses to exterior opinions. Most of
such selections strike me as wanton and hasty.
I decline to dismiss any of my motives at all
in that wholesale way. Just as I believe I am
important in the scheme of things, so I believe
are all my motives. Turning one's back on any
set of them seems to me to savour of the head-
long actions of stupidity. To suppress a pas-
sion or a curiosity for the sake of suppressing
a passion is to my mind just the burial of a
talent that has been entrusted to one's care.
One has, I feel, to take all these things as
weapons and instruments, material in the ser-
vice of the scheme; one has to take them in
the end gravely and do right among them un-
biassed in favour of any set. To take some
poor appetite and fling it out is to my mind
a cheap and unsatisfactory way of simplifying
one's moral problems. One has to take these

So First and Last Things

things in oneself, I feel — even if one knows them
to be dangerous things, even if one is sure they
have an evil side.

Let me however in order to express my attitude
better make a rough grouping of the motives I
find in myself and the people about me.

§6.

A Review of Motives. — I cannot divide them
into clearly defined classes, but I may perhaps
begin with those that bring one into the widest
sympathy with living things and go on to those
one shares only with highly intelligent and com-
plex human beings.

There come first the desires one shares with those
more limited souls the beasts, just as much as one
does with one's fellow-man. These are the bodily
appetites and the crude emotions of fear and
resentment. These first clamour for attention
and must be assuaged or controlled before the
other sets come into play.

Now in this matter of physical appetites I do
not know whether to describe myself as a sensualist
or an ascetic. If an ascetic is one who suppresses
to a minimum all deference to these impulses,
then certainly I am not an ascetic; if a sensualist
is one who gives himself to heedless gratification,
then certainly I am not a sensualist. But I find
myself balanced in an intermediate position by
something that I will speak of as the sense of

6 8i

82 First and Last Things

Beauty. This sense of Beauty is something in
me which demands not simply gratification but
the best and keenest of a sense or continuance of
sense impressions and which refuses coarse quan-
titive assuagements. It ranges all over the senses
and just as I refuse to wholly cut off any of my
motives, so do I refuse to limit its use to the plane
of the eye or the ear.

It seems to me entirely just to speak of beauty
in matters of scent and taste, to talk not only of
beautiful skies and beautiful sounds but of beauti-
ful beer and beautiful cheese! The balance as
between asceticism and sensuality comes in, it
seems to me, if we remember that to drink well
one must not have drunken for some time, that
to see well one's eye must be clear, that to make
love well one must be fit and gracious and sweet
and disciplined from top to toe, that the finest
sense of all — the joyous sense of bodily well-being
— comes only with exercises and restraints and
fine living. There I think lies the way of my dis-
position. I do not want to live in the sensual sty,
but also I do not want to scratch in the tub of
Diogenes.

But I diverge a little in these comments from
my present business of classifying motives.

I perceive hypertrophied in myself and many

Of Belief 83

sympathetic human beings, a passion that many
animals certainly possess, the beautiful and fear-
less cousin of fear, Curiosity, that seeks keenly for
knowing and feeling. Apart from appetites and
bodily desires and blind impulses, I want most
urgently to know and feel for the sake of knowing
and feeling. I want to go round corners and see
what is there, to cross mountain ranges, to open
boxes and parcels. Young animals at least have
that disposition too. For me it is something that
mingles with all my desires. Much more to me
than the desire to live is the desire to taste life.
I am not happy until I have done and felt things.
I want to get as near as I can to the thrill of a
dog going into a fight or the delight of a bird in
the air. And not simply in the heroic field of
war and the air do I want to understand. I want
to know something of the jolly wholesome satis-
faction that a hungry pig must find in its wash.
I want to get the fine quintessence of that.

I do not think that in this I confess to any un-
usual temperament. I think that the more closely
mentally animated people scrutinise their motives
the less is the importance they will attach to mere
physical and brute urgencies and the more to
curiosity.

Next after Curiosity come those desires and

84 First and Last Things

motives that one shares perhaps with some social
beasts, but far more so as a conscious thing with
men alone. These desires and motives all centre
on a clearly apprehended "self" in relation to
* 'others," they are the essentially egotistical
group. They are self-assertion in all its forms.
I have dealt with motives toward gratification
and motives toward experience, this set of motives
is for the sake of oneself. Since they are the most
acutely conscious motives in unthinking men,
there is a tendency on the part of unthinking
philosophers to speak of them as though vanity,
self-seeking, self-interest, were the only motives.
But one has but to reflect on what has gone before
to realise that this is not so. One finds these
**self" motives vary with the mental power and
training of the individual ; here they are fragmen-
tary and discursive, there drawn tight together
into a coherent scheme. Where they are weak
they mingle with the animal motives and curiosity
like travellers in a busy market-place, but where
the sense of self is strong they become rulers and
regulators, self-seeking becomes deliberate and
sustained in the case of the human being, vanity
passes into pride.

Here again that something in the mind so difficult
to define, so easy for all who understand to under-

Of Belief 85

stand, that something which insists upon a best
and keenest, the desire for beauty, comes into the
play of motives. Pride demands a beautiful self
and would discipline all other passions to its
service. It also demands recognition for that
beautiful self. Now pride, I know, is denounced
by many as the essential quality of sin. We are
taught that "self-abnegation" is the substance
of virtue and self-forgetfulness the inseparable
quality of right conduct. But indeed I cannot so
dismiss egotism and that Pride which was the
first form in which the desire to rule oneself as a
whole came to me. Through pride one shapes
oneself towards a best, though at first it may be
an ill-conceived best. Pride is not always arro-
gance and aggression. There is that pride that
does not ape but learn humility.

And with the human imagination all these
elementary instincts, of the flesh, of curiosity, of
self-assertion, become only the basal substance of
a huge elaborate edifice of secondary motive and
intention. We live in a great flood of example
and suggestion, our curiosity and our social quality
impel us to a thousand imitations, to dramatic
attitudes and subtly obscure ends. Our pride
turns this way and that as we respond to new
notes in the world about us. We are arenas for

^6 First and Last Things

a conflict between suggestions flung in from all
sources, from the most diverse and essentially
incompatible sources. We live long hours and
days in a kind of dream, negligent of self-interest,
our elementary passions in abeyance, among these
derivative things.

§7-

The Synthetic Motive. — Such it seems to me
are the chief masses of the complex of motive in
us, the group of sense, the group of pride, curi-
osity and the imitative and suggested motives,
making up the system of impulses which is our
will. Such has been the common outfit of mo-
tives in every age, and in every age its melee has
been found insufficient in itself. It is a hetero-
geneous system, it does not form in any sense a
completed or balanced system, its constituents
are variable and compete among themselves.
They are not so much arranged about one another
as superposed and higgledy-piggledy. The senses
war with pride and one another, the motives sug-
gested to us fall into conflict with this element or
that of our intimate and habitual selves. We find
all our instincts are snares to excess. Excesses
of indulgence lead to excesses of abstinence, and
even the sense of beauty may be clouded and be-
tray. So to us all, even for the most balanced of
us, come disappointments, regrets, gaps; and for
most of us who are ill-balanced, miseries and

88 First and Last Things

despairs. Nearly all of us want something to hold
us together — something to dominate this swarming
confusion and save us from the black misery of
wounded and exploded pride, of thwarted desire,
of futile conclusions. We want more oneness,
some steadying thing that will afford an escape
from fluctuations.

Different people, of differing temperament and
tradition have sought oneness, this steadying and
universalising thing, in various manners. Some
have attained it in this manner and some in that.
Scarcely a religious system has existed that has
not worked effectively and proved true for some-
one. To me it seems that the need is synthetic,
that some synthetic idea and belief is needed to
harmonise one's life, to give a law by which
motive may be tried against motive and an
effectual peace of mind achieved. I want an
active peace and not a quiescence, and I do not
want to suppress and expel any motive at all.
But to many people the effort takes the form of
attempts to cut off some part of oneself as it were,
to repudiate altogether some straining or dis-
tressing or disappointing factor in the scheme of
motives, and find a tranquillising refuge in the
residuum. So we have men and women aban-
doning their share in economic development.

Of Belief 89

crushing the impulses and evading the complica-
tions that arise out of sex and flying to devotions
and simple duties in nunneries and monasteries;
we have people cutting their lives down to a
vegetarian dietary and scientific research, resort-
ing to excesses of self-discipline, giving themselves
up wholly to some "art" and making everything
else subordinate to that, or, going in another di-
rection, abandoning pride and love in favour of
an acquired appetite for drugs or drink.

Now it seems to me that this desire to get the
confused complex of life simplified is essentially
what has been called the religious motive and
that the manner in which a man achieves that
simplification, if he does achieve it, and imposes
an order upon his life is his religion. I find in the
scheme of conversion and salvation as it is pre-
sented by many Christian sects, a very exact
statement of the mental processes I am trying to
express. In these systems this discontent with
the complexity of life upon which religion is based,
is called the conviction of sin, and it is the first
phase in the process of conversion — of finding sal-
vation. It leads through distress and confusion
to illumination, to the act of faith and peace.

And after peace comes the beginning of right
conduct. If you believe and you are saved, you

Qo First and Last Things

will want to behave well, you will do your utmost
to behave well and to understand what is behaving
well, and you will feel neither shame nor disap-
pointment when after all you fail. You will say
then, "so it is failure I had to achieve." And
you will not feel bitterly because you seem unsuc-
cessful beside others or because you are misunder-
stood or unjustly treated, you will not bear malice
nor cherish anger nor seek revenge, you will never
turn towards suicide as a relief from intolerable
things; indeed there will be no intolerable things.
You will have peace within you.

But if you do not truly believe and are not
saved, you will know it because you will still
suffer the conflict of motives, and in regrets, con-
fusions, remorses and discontents, you will suffer
the penalties of the unbeliever and the lost. You
will know certainly your own salvation.

§8.

The Being of Mankind. — I will boldly adopt
the technicalities of the sects. I will speak as a
person with experience and declare that I have
been through the distresses of despair and the
conviction of sin and that I have found salvation.

/ believe.

I believe in the scheme, in the Project of all
things, in the significance of myself and all life,
and that my defects and uglinesses and failures,
just as much as my powers and successes are
things that are necessary and important and con-
tributory in that scheme, that scheme which
passes my understanding — and that no thwarting
of my conception, not even the cruelty of nature,
now defeats or can defeat my faith, however much
it perplexes my mind.

And though I say that scheme passes my under-
standing, nevertheless I hope you will see no in-
consistency when I say that necessarily it has an
aspect towards me that I find imperative.

It has an aspect that I can perceive, however

dimly and fluctuatingly.

92 First and Last Things

I take it that to perceive this aspect to the
utmost of my mental power and to shape my
acts according to that perception is my function
in the scheme, that if I hold steadfastly to that
conception, I am — saved. I find in that idea of
perceiving the scheme as a whole towards me and
in this attempt to perceive, that something to
which all my other emotions and passions may
contribute by gathering and contributing ex-
perience, and through which the synthesis of my
life becomes possible.

Let me try to convey to you what it is I per-
ceive, what aspect this scheme seems to bear on
the whole towards me.

The essential fact in man's history to my sense
is the slow unfolding of a sense of community
with his kind, of the possibilities of co-operations
leading to scarce-dreamt-of collective powers, of
a synthesis of the species, of the development of
a common general idea, a common general pur-
pose out of a present confusion. In that awaken-
ing of the species, one's own personal being lives
and moves — a part of it and contributing to it.
One's individual existence is not so entirely cut off
as it seems at first ; one's entirely separate individu^
ality is another, a profounder, among the subtle
inherent delusions of the human mind. Between

Of Belief 93

you and me as we set our minds together, and
between us and the rest of mankind, there is
something, something real, something that rises
through us and is neither you nor me, that com-
prehends us, that is thinking here and using me
and you to play against each other in that thinking
just as my finger and thumb play against each
other as I hold this pen with which I write.

Let me put it to you that this is no sentimental
or mystical statement. It is hard fact as any
hard fact we know. We, you and I, are not only
parts in a thought process, but parts of one flow
of blood and life. Let me put that in a way that
may be new to some of you. Let me remind you
of what is sometimes told as a jest, the fact that
the number of one's ancestors increases as we
look back in time. Disregarding the chances of
intermarriage, each one of us had two parents,
four grandparents, eight great-grandparents, and
so on backward until very soon, in less than fifty
generations, we should find that but for the
qualification introduced, we should have all the
earth's inhabitants of that time as our progenitors.
For a hundred generations it must hold abso-
lutely true, that everyone of that time who has
issue living now is ancestral to all of us. That
brings the thing quite within the historical period.

94 First and Last Things

There is not a western European palaeolithic or
neolithic relic that is not a family relic for every
soul alive. The blood in our veins has handled it.

And there is something more. We are all
going to mingle our blood again. We cannot
keep ourselves apart ; the worst enemies will some
day come to the Peace of Verona. All the Mon-
tagues and Capulets are doomed to intermarry.
A time will come in less than fifty generations
when all the population of the world will have
my blood, and I and my worst enemy will not
be able to say which child is his or mine.

But you may retort — perhaps you may die
childless. Then all the sooner the whole species
will get the little legacy of my personal achieve-
ment, whatever it may be.

You see that from this point of view — which is
for me the vividly true and dominating point of
view — our individualities, our nations and states
and races are but bubbles and clusters of foam
upon the great stream of the blood of the species,
incidental experiments in the growing knowledge
and consciousness of the race.

I think this real solidarity of humanity is a fact
that is only being slowly apprehended, that it is
an idea that we who have come to realise it have
to assist in thinking into the collective mind. I

Of Belief 95

believe the species is still as a whole unawakened,
still sunken in the delusion of the permanent
separateness of the individual and of races and
nations, that so it turns upon itself and frets
against itself and fails to see the stupendous
possibilities of deliberate self-development that
lie open to it now.

I see myself in life as part of a great physical
being that strains and I believe grows towards
Beauty, and of a great mental being that strains
and I believe grows towards knowledge and power.
In this persuasion that I am a gatherer of ex-
perience, a mere tentacle that arranged thought
beside thought for this Being of the Species, this
Being that grows beautiful and powerful, in this
persuasion I find the ruling idea of which I stand
in need, the ruling idea that reconciles and ad-
judicates among my warring motives. In it I
find both concentration of myself and escape
from myself, in a word, I find Salvation.

§9-

Individuality an Interlude — I would like
in a parenthetical section to expand and render
a little more concrete this idea of the species as
one divaricating flow of blood by an appeal to its
arithmetical aspect. I do not know if it has ever
occurred to the reader to compute the number of
his living ancestors at some definite remote date,
at, let us say the year one of the Christian era.
Everyone has two parents and four grandparents,
most people have eight great-grandparents, and
if we ignore the possibility of intermarriage we
shall go on to a fresh power of two with every
generation, thus: —

Number of generations.

3
4
5

Number

of ancestors.
8

128

30
40

1,024

126,976

15,745,024

1,956,282,976

I do not know whether the average age of the

parent at the birth of a child under modern con-

Of Belief 97

ditions can be determined from existing figures.
There is, I should think, a strong presumption
that it has been a rising age. There may have
been a time in the past when most women were
mothers in their early teens and bore most or
all of their children before thirty, and when men
had done the greater part of their procreation
before thirty-five; this is still the case in many
tropical climates and I do not think that I favour
my own case unduly by assuming that the average
parent must be about, or even less than, five and
twenty. This gives four generations to a century.
At that rate and disregarding intermarriage of
relations the ancestors living a thousand years
ago needed to account for a living person would
be double the estimated present population of
the world. But it is obvious that if a person
sprang from a marriage of first cousins, the eight
ancestors of the third generation are cut down
to six; if of cousins at the next stage, to fourteen
in the fourth. And every time that a common
pair of ancestors appears in any generation, the
number of ancestors in that generation must be
reduced by two from our original figures, or if it
is only one common ancestor, by one, and that
as we go back that reduction will have to be
doubled, quadrupled and so on. I daresay that

98 First and Last Things

by the time anyone gets to the 8916 names of
his EHzabethan ancestors he will find quite a
large number repeated over and over again in
the list and that he is cut down to perhaps two or
three thousand separate persons. But this does
not effectually invalidate my assumption that
if we go back only to the closing years of the
Roman Republic, we go back to an age in which
nearly every person within the confines of what
was then the Roman Empire who left living
offspring must have been ancestral to every
person living within that area to-day. No
doubt they were so in very variable measure.
There must be for everyone some few individu-
als in that period who have so to speak inter-
married with themselves again and again and
again down the genealogical series, and others
who are represented just by one touch of their
blood. The blood of the Jews, for example, has
turned in upon itself again and again, but for
all we know one Italian proselyte in the first year
of the Christian era may have made by this time
every Jew alive a descendant of some unrecorded
bastard of Julius Caesar. The exclusive breeding
of the Jews is in fact the most effectual guar-
antee that whatever does get into the charmed
circle through either proselytism, the violence of

Of Belief 99

enemies, or feminine unchastity, must ultimately
pervade it universally.

It may be argued that as a matter of fact
humanity has until recently been segregated in
pools, that in the great civilisation of China for
example, humanity has pursued its own inter-
lacing system of inheritances without admixture
from other streams of blood. But such considera-
tions only defer the conclusion ; they do not stave
it off indefinitely. It needs only that one philo-
progenitive Chinaman should have wandered into
those regions that are now Russia, about the time
of Pericles, to link east and west in that matter;
one Tartar chieftain in the Steppes may have
given a daughter to a Roman soldier and sent
his grandsons east and west to interlace the
branches of every family tree in the world. If
any race stands apart it is such an isolated
group as that of the now extinct Tasmanian
primitives or the Australian black. But even
here, in the remote dawn of navigation, may
have come shipwrecked Malays, or some half-
breed woman kidnapped by wandering Phoe-
nicians have carried this link of blood back
to the western world. The more one lets
one's imagination play upon the incalculable
drift and soak of population, the more one

loo First and Last Things

realises the true value of that spreading relation
with the past.

But now let us turn in the other direction, the
direction of the future, because there it is that
this series of considerations becomes most edi-
fying. It is the commonest trick to think of
one's descendants as though they were one's own.
We are told that one of the dearest human motives
is the desire to found a family, but think how
much of a family one founds at the best. One's
son is after all only half one's blood ; one's grand-
son only one quarter, and so one goes on until it
may be that in ten brief generations one's heir
and namesake has but tAj th of one's inherited
self. Those other thousand odd unpredictable
people thrust in and mingle with one's pride. The
trend of all things nowadays is to render such
admixture far more probable and facile in the
future than in the past, the ever increasing ease
of communication, the great and increasing drift
of population, the establishment of a common
standard of civilisation.

It is a pleasant fancy to imagine some ambitious
hoarder of wealth, some egotistical founder of
name and family returning to find his descendants
— his descendants — after the lapse of a few brief
generations. His heir and namesake may have

Of Belief loi

not a thousandth part of his heredity, while under
some other name, lost to all the tradition and
glory of him, enfeebled and degenerate through
much intermarriage, may be a multitude of
people who have as much as a fiftieth or even
more of his quality. They may even be in servi-
tude and dependence to the really alien person
who is head of the family. Our founder will go
through the spreading record of offspring and
find it mixed with that of the people he most hated
and despised. The antagonists he wronged and
overcame will have crept into his line and recap-
tured all they lost ; have played the cuckoo in his
blood and acquisitions and turned out his diluted
strain to perish.

And while I am being thus biological let me
point out another queer aspect in which our ego-
tism is overridden by physical facts. Men and
women are apt to think of their children as being
their very own, blood of their blood and bone of
their bone. But indeed one of the most striking
facts in this matter is the frequent want of resem-
blance between parents and children. It is one
of the commonest things in the world for a child
to resemble an aunt or an uncle, or to revive a
trait of some grandparent that has seemed entirely
lost in the intervening generation. The Men-

I02 First and Last Things

delians have given much attention to facts of this
nature and though their general method of ex-
position seems to me to be altogether too exact
and precise, it cannot be denied that it is often
vividly illuminating. It is so in this connexion.
They distinguish between "dominant" and ** reces-
sive" qualities and they establish cases in which
parents with all the dominant characteristics
produce offspring of recessive type. Recessive
qualities are constantly being masked by dominant
ones and emerging again in the next generation.
It is not the individual that reproduces himself,
it is the species that reproduces through the
individual and often in spite of his characteristics.

The race flows through us, the race is the drama
and we are the incidents. This is not any sort of
poetical statement; it is statement of fact. In
so far as we are individuals, so far as we seek to
follow merely individual ends, we are accidental,
disconnected, without significance, the sport of
chance. In so far as we realise ourselves as
experiments of the species for the species, just
in so far do we escape from the accidental and
the chaotic. We are episodes in an experience
greater than ourselves.

Now none of this, if you read me aright, makes
for the suppression of one's individual difference,

Of Belief 103

but it does make for its correlation. We have
to get everything we can out of ourselves for this
very reason that we do not stand alone ; we signify
as parts of a universal and immortal development.
Our separate selves are our charges, the talents
of which much has to be made. It is because
we are episodical in the great synthesis of life
that we have to make the utmost of our individual
lives and traits and possibilities.

§ lo.

The Mystic Element. — What stupendous con-
structive mental and physical possibilities are
there to which I feel I am contributing, you may
ask, when I feel that I contribute to this greater
Being, and at once I confess I become vague and
mystical. I do not wish to pass glibly over this
point. I call your attention to the fact that here
I am mystical and arbitrary. I am what I am,
an individual in this present phase. I can see
nothing of these possibilities except that they will
be in the nature of those indefinable and over-
powering gleams of promise in our world that
we call Beauty. Elsewhere (in my Food of the
Gods) I have tried to render my sense of our
human possibility by monstrous images; I have
written of those who will ''stand on this earth as
on a footstool and reach out their hands among
the stars." But that is mere rhetoric at best, a
straining image of unimaginable things. Things
move to Power and Beauty ; I say that much and
I have said all that I can say.

But what is Beauty, you ask, and what will
104

Of Belief 105

Power do? And here I reach my utmost point
in the direction of what you are free to call the
rhapsodical and the incomprehensible. I will not
even attempt to define Beauty. I will not because
I cannot. To me it is a final, quite indefinable
thing. Either you understand it or you do not.
Every true artist and many who are not artists
know — they know there is something that shows
suddenly — it may be in music, it may be in paint-
ing, it may be in the sunlight on a glacier or
shadow cast by a furnace or the scent of a flower ;
it may be in the person or act of some fellow-
creature, but it is right, it is commanding, it is,
to use theological language, the revelation of God.
To the mystery of Power and Beauty, out of
the earth that mothered us, we move. I do
not attempt to define Beauty nor even to dis-
tinguish it from Power. I do not think indeed
that one can effectually distinguish these aspects
of life. I do not know how far Beauty may not
be simply fulness and clearness of sensation, a
momentary unveiling of things hitherto seen but
not dully and darkly. As I have already said
there may be beauty in the feeling of beer in the
throat, in the taste of cheese in the mouth, there
may be beauty in the scent of earth, in the warmth
of a body, in the sensation of waking from sleep.

io6 First and Last Things

I use the word Beauty therefore in its widest
possible sense, ranging far beyond the special
beauties that art discovers and develops. Per-
haps as we pass from death to life all things become
beautiful. The utmost I can do in conveying
what I mean by Beauty is to tell of things that
I have perceived to be beautiful as beautifully as
I can tell of them. It may be, as I suggest else-
where, Beauty is a thing synthetic and not simple ;
it is a common effect produced by a great medley
of causes, a larger aspect of harmony.

But the question of what Beauty is does not
very greatly concern me, since I have known it
when I met it and almost every day in life I seem
to apprehend it more and to find it more sufficient
and satisfying. It is light, I fall back upon that
image, it is all things that light can be, beacon,
elucidation, pleasure, comfort and consolation,
promise, warning, the vision of reality.

II.

The Synthesis. — It seems to me that the
whole living creation may be regarded as walking
in its sleep, as walking in the sleep of in-
stinct and individualised illusion, and that now
out of it all rises man, beginning to perceive
his larger self, his universal brotherhood and
a collective synthetic purpose to realise power
and beauty. . . .

I write this down. It is the form of
my belief and that unanalysable something
called Beauty is the light that falls upon
that form.

It is only by such images, it is only by the use

of what are practically Parables, that I can in

any way express these things in my mind. These

two things, I say, are the two aspects of my belief ;

one is the form and the other the light. The

former places me as it were in a scheme, the latter

illuminates and inspires me. I am a member in

that great Being and my function is, I take it,

to develop my capacity for Beauty and convey

the perception of it to my fellows, to gather and

store experience and increase the racial conscious-

107

io8 First and Last Things

ness. I hazard no whys nor wherefores. That is
how I see things; that is how the universe in re-
sponse to my demand for a synthesising aspect,
presents itself to me.

§ 12.

Of Personal Immortality. — ^These are my
beliefs. They begin with arbitrary assumptions ;
they end in a mystery. So do all beliefs that are
not grossly utilitarian and material, promising
houris and deathless appetite or endless hunting
or a cosmic mortgage. The Peace of God passe th
understanding, the Kingdom of Heaven within
us and without can be presented only by parables.
But the unapproachable distance and vagueness
of these things make them none the less necessary,
just as a cloud upon a mountain or sunlight re-
motely seen upon the sea are as real as, and to
many people far more necessary than, pork chops.
The driven swine may root and take no heed, but
man the dreamer drives. And because these
things are vague and impalpable and wilfully
attained, it is none the less important that they
shoiild be rendered with all the truth of one's
being. To be atmospherically vague is one thing,
to be haphazard, wanton and untruthful, quite
another.

But here I may give a specific answer to a
109

no First and Last Things

question that many find profoundly important
though indeed it is already implicitly answered in
what has gone before.

I do not believe I have any personal immor-
tality. I am part of an immortality perhaps;
but that is different. I am not the continuing
thing. I personally am experimental, incidental.
I feel I have to do something, a number of things
no one else could do and then I am finished and
finished altogether. Then my substance returns
to the common lot. I am a temporary enclosure
for a temporary purpose; that served, and my
skull and teeth, my idiosyncrasy and desire, will
disperse, I believe, like the timbers of a booth
after a fair.

Let me shift my ground a little and ask you to
consider what is involved in the alternative.

My idea of the unknown scheme is of something
so wide and deep that I cannot conceive it en-
cumbered by my egotism perpetually. I shall
serve my purpose and pass under the wheel and
end. That distresses me not at all. Immortality
would distress and perplex me. If I may put this
in a mixture of theological and social language,
I cannot respect, I cannot believe in a God who is
always going about with me.

But this is after all what I feel is true and what

Of Belief m

I choose to believe. It is not a matter of fact.
So far as that goes there is no evidence that I am
immortal and none that I am not.

I may be altogether wrong in my beliefs ; I may
be misled by the appearances of things. I believe
in the great and growing Being of the Species
from which I rise, to which I return, and which,
it may be, will ultimately even transcend the
limitation of the Species and grow into the Con-
scious Being, the eternally conscious Being of all
things. Believing that I cannot also believe
that my peculiar little thread will not undergo
synthesis and vanish as a separate thing.

And what after all is my distinctive something,
certain capacities, certain incapacities, an uncer-
tain memory, a hesitating presence? It matters
no doubt in its place and time, as all things matter
in their place and time, but where in it all is the
eternally indispensable? The great things of my
life, love, faith, the intimation of beauty, the
things most savouring of immortality, are the
things most general, the things most shared, and
least distinctively me.

§ 13-

A Criticism of Christianity. — And here per-
haps, before I go on to the question of Conduct,
is the place to define a relationship to that system
of faith and religious observance out of which I
and most of my readers have come. How do these
beliefs on which I base my rule of conduct stand
to Christianity?

They do not stand in any attitude of antagonism.
A religious system so many-faced and so enduring
as Christianity must necessarily be saturated
with truth even if it be not wholly true. To as-
sume as the Atheist and Deist seem to do, that
Christianity is a sort of disease that came upon
civilisation, an unprofitable and wasting disease,
is to deny that conception of a progressive scheme
and rightness which we have taken as our basis of
belief. As I have already confessed, the Scheme
of Salvation, the idea of a process of sorrow and
atonement presents itself to me as adequately
true. So far I do not think the new faith breaks
with the old. But it follows as a natural con-
sequence of our metaphysical preliminaries that

112

Of Belief 113

I should find the Christian theology Aristotelian,
over-defined and excessively personified. The
painted figure of that bearded ancient upon the
Sistine Chapel or William Blake's wild-haired,
wild-eyed Trinity, convey no nearer sense of God
to me than some pearl-eyed carven monster from
the worship of the South Sea Islands. And the
whole story Milton has rehearsed, the whole fable
of the offended creator and the sacrificial son,
it cannot span the circle of my ideas, it is a little
thing and none the less little because it is inti-
mate, flesh of my flesh and spirit of my spirit,
like the drawings of my little boy. I put it aside
as I would put aside the gay figure of a costumed
officiating priest. The passage of time has made
his canonicals too strange, too unlike the world of
common thought and costume. These things
helped, but now they hinder and disturb. I
cannot bring myself back to them. . . .

But the psychological experience and the
theology of Christianity are only a ground-work
for its essential feature, which is the conception
of a relationship of the individual believer to a
mystical being at once human and divine, the
Risen Christ. This being presents itself to the
modern consciousness as a familiar and beautiful
figure, associated with a series of sayings and

114 First and Last Things

incidents that coalesce with a very distinct and
rounded-off and complete effect of personality.
After we have cleared off all the definitions of
theology, He remains, mystically suffering for
humanity, mystically asserting that love in pain
and sacrifice in service are the necessary substance
of Salvation. Whether he actually existed as a
finite individual person in the opening of the
Christian era seems to me a question entirely
beside the mark. The evidence at this distance
is of imperceptible force, for or against. The
Christ we know is quite evidently something
different from any finite person, a figure, a con-
ception, a synthesis of emotions, experiences and
inspirations, sustained by and sustaining millions
of human souls.

Now it seems to be the common teaching of
almost all Christians, that Salvation, that is to
say the consolidation and amplification of one's
motives through the conception of a general
scheme or purpose, is to be attained through the
personality of Christ. Christ is made cardinal
to the act of Faith. The act of Faith, they assert,
is not simply as I hold it to be, belief, but belief
in Him.

We are dealing here, be it remembered, with
beliefs deliberately undertaken and not with

Of Belief 115

questions of fact. The only matters of fact
material here are facts of experience. If in your
experience Salvation is attainable through Christ,
then certainly Christianity is true for you. And
if a Christian asserts that my belief is a false light
and that presently I shall "come to Christ," I
cannot disprove his assertion, I can but disbelieve
it. I hesitate even to make the obvious retort.

I hope I shall offend no susceptibilities when I
assert that this great and very definite personality
in the hearts and imaginations of mankind does
not and never has attracted me. It is a fact I
record about myself without aggression or regret.
I do not find myself able to associate Him in any
way with the emotion of Salvation.

I admit the splendid imaginative appeal in the
idea of a divine-human friend and mediator. If
it were possible to have access by prayer, by
meditation, by urgent outcries of the soul, to
such a being whose feet were in the darknesses,
who stooped down from the light, who at once was
great and little, limitless in power and virtue and
one's very brother; if it were possible by sheer will
in believing to make such a helper and to make
one's way to him, who would refuse such help?
But I do not find such a being in Christ. I do
not find, I cannot imagine, such a being. I wish

ii6 First and Last Things

I could. To me the Christian Christ seems not
so much a humanised God as an incomprehensibly
sinless Being neither God nor man. His sinless-
ness wears his incarnation like a fancy dress,
all his white self unchanged. He had no petty
weaknesses.

Now the essential trouble of my life is its petty
weaknesses. If I am to have that love, that
sense of understanding fellowship, which is, I
conceive, the peculiar magic and merit of this
idea of a personal Saviour, then I need someone
quite other than this image of virtue, this terrible
and incomprehensible Galilean with his crown of
thorns, his blood-stained hands and feet. I
cannot love him any more than I can love a man
upon the rack. Even in the face of torments I
do not think I should feel a need for him. I had
rather then a hundred times have Botticelli's
armed angel in his Tobit at Florence. (I hope
I do not seem to want to shock in writing these
things, but indeed my only aim is to lay my
feelings bare.) I know what love for an idealised
person can be. It happens that in my younger
days I found a character in the history of litera-
ture that had a singular and extraordinary charm
for me, of whom the thought was tender and
comforting, who indeed helped me through

Of Belief 117

shames and humiliations as though he held my
hand. This person was Oliver Goldsmith. His
blunders and troubles, his vices and vanities,
seized and still hold my imagination. The
slights of Bos well, the contempt of Gibbon and
all his company save Johnson, the exquisite
fineness of spirit in his Vicar of Wakefield, and
that green suit of his and the doctor's cane and
the love despised, these things together make him
a congenial saint and hero for me, so that I
thought of him as others pray. When I think
of that youthful feeling for Goldsmith, I know
what I need in a personal Saviour, as a troglodyte
who has seen a candle can imagine the sun. But
the Christian Christ in none of his three charac-
teristic phases, neither as the magic babe (from
whom I am cut off by the wanton and indecent
purity of the Immaculate Conception) nor as the
white-robed, spotless miracle worker, nor as the
fierce unreal torment of the cross, comes close
to my soul. I do not understand the Agony in
the Garden; to me it is like a scene from a play
in an unknown tongue. The last cry of despair
is the one human touch discordant with all the
rest of the story. One cry of despair does not
suffice. The Christian's Christ is too fine for
me, not incarnate enough, not flesh enough, not

ii8 First and Last Things

earth enough nor failure enough. He was never
foolish and hot-eared and inarticulate, never vain,
he never forgot things nor tangled his miracles.
I could love him I think more easily if the dead
had not risen and if he had lain in peace in his
sepulchre instead of coming back more enhaloed
and whiter than ever, as a postscript to his own
tragedy.

When I think of the Resurrection I am always
reminded of the ''happy endings" that editors
and actor managers are accustomed to impose
upon essentially tragic novels and plays. . . .

You see how I stand in this matter, puzzled
and confused by the Christian presentation of
Christ. I know there are many will answer —
as I suppose my friend the Rev. R. J. Campbell
would answer — that what confuses me is the
overlaying of the personality of Jesus by stories
and superstitions and conflicting symbols; he will
in effect ask me to disentangle the Christ I need
from the accumulated material, choosing and
rejecting. Perhaps one may do that. He does,
I know, so present him as a man inspired and
strenuously, inadequately and erringly presenting
a dream of human brotherhood and the immediate
Kingdom of Heaven on earth and so blundering
to his failure and death. But that will be a

Of Belief 119

recovered and restored person he would give me,
and not the Christ the Christians worship and
declare they love, in whom they find their
salvation.

When I write "declare they love" I throw
doubt intentionally upon the universal love of
Christians for their Saviour. I have watched
men and nations in this matter. I am struck by
the fact that so many Christians fall back upon
more humanised figures, upon the tender figure
of Mary, upon patron saints and such more erring
creatures, for the effect of mediation and sym-
pathy they need. . . .

You see it comes to this, that I think Christ-
ianity has been true and is for countless people
practically true, but that it is not true now for
me and that for most people it is true only with
modifications. Every believing Christian is, I am
sure, my spiritual brother, but if systematically
I called myself a Christian I feel that to most men
I should imply too much and so tell a lie.

§ 14-

Of Other Religions. — In the same manner,
in varying degree, I hold all religions to be in a
measure true. Least comprehensible to me are
the Indian formulae because they seem to stand
not on common experience but on those intel-
lectual assumptions my metaphysical analysis
destroys. Transmigration of souls without a con-
tinuing memory is to my mind utter foolishness,
the imagining of a race of children. The ag-
gression, discipline and submission of Mahometan-
ism is, I think, an intellectually limited but fine
and honourable religion — for men. Its spirit if
not its formulae is abundantly present in our
modern world. Mr. Rudyard Kipling, for example
manifestly preaches a Mahometan God, a modern-
ised God with a taste for engineering. I have no
doubt that in devotion to a virile, almost national
Deity and to the service of His Empire of stern
Law and Order, efficiently upheld, men have
found and will find Salvation.

All these religions are true for me as Canterbury
Cathedral is a true thing and as a Swiss chalet is

Of Belief 121

a true thing. There they are and they have
served a purpose, they have worked. Men and
women have Hved in and by them. Men and
women still do. Only they are not true for me
to live in them. I have, I believe, to live in a
new edifice of my own discovery. They do not
work for me.

These schemes are true, and also these schemes
are false! in the sense that new things, new
phrasings, have to replace them.

§15-

Such are the essential beliefs by which I express
myself. But now comes the practical outcome
of these things, and that is to discuss and show
how upon this metaphysical basis and these be-
liefs, and in obedience to the ruling motive that
arises with them, I frame principles of conduct.

122

Book the Third.
Of General Conduct.

123

§1.

Conduct Follows from Belief. — I hold that
the broad direction of Conduct follows necessa-
rily from Belief. The Believer does not require
rewards and punishments to direct him to the
Right. Motive and idea are not so separable.
To Believe truly is to want to do Right. To get
Salvation is to be unified by a comprehending
idea of a purpose and by a ruling motive.

The Believer wants to do right, he naturally
and necessarily seeks to do right. If he fails to
do right, if he finds he has done wrong instead of
right, he is not greatly distressed or terrified, he
naturally and cheerfully does his best to correct
his error. He can be damned only by the fading
and loss of his belief. And naturally he recurs
to and refreshes his belief.

I write in phrases that the evangelical Christ-
ianity of my childhood made familiar to me, be-
cause they are the most expressive phrases I have
ever met for the psychological facts with which
I am dealing.

But faith, though it banishes fear and despair
125

126 First and Last Things

and brings with it a real prevailing desire to know
and do the Good does not in itself determine what
is the Good or supply any simple guide to the
choice between alternatives. If it did, there
would be nothing more to be said, a book upon
Conduct would be unnecessary.

§2-

What is Good? — It seems to me one of the
heedless errors of those who deal in philosophy,
to suppose all things that have simple names or
unified effects are in their nature simple and may
be discovered and isolated as a sort of essence by
analysis. It is natural to suppose — and I think
it is also quite wrong to suppose — that such things
as Good and Beauty can be abstracted from good
and beautiful things and considered alone. But
pure Good and pure Beauty are to me empty
terms. It seems to me that these are in their
nature synthetic things, that they arise out of the
coming together of contributory things and con-
ditions, and vanish at their dispersal; they are
synthetic just as more obviously Harmony is
synthetic. It is consequently not possible to
give a definition of Good, just as it is not possible
to give a definition of that other something which
is so closely akin to it, Beauty. Nor is it to be
maintained that what is Good for one is Good
for another. But what is Good of one's general

relations and what is right in action must be

127

128 First and Last Things

determined by the nature of one's Beliefs about
the purpose in things. I have set down my broad
impression of that purpose in respect to me, as
the awakening and development of the conscious-
ness and will of our species, and I have confessed
my belief that in subordinating myself and all
my motives to that idea lies my Salvation. It
follows from that, that the good life is the life
that most richly gathers and winnows and pre-
pares experience and renders it available for the
race, that contributes most effectively to the
collective growth.

This is in general terms my idea of Good. So
soon as one passes from general terms to the
question of individual good, one encounters in-
dividuality; for everyone in the differing quality
and measure of their personality and powers and
possibilities, good and right must be different. We
are all engaged, each contributing from his or her
own standpoint, in the collective synthesis ; what-
ever one can best do, one must do that, in what-
ever manner one can best help the synthesis, one
must exert oneself; the setting apart of oneself,
secrecy, the service of secret and personal ends,
is the waste of life and the essential quality of Sin.

That is the general expression for right living
as I conceive it.

§3.

Socialism. — In the study of what is Good, it
is very convenient to make a rough division of our
subject into general and particular. There are
first the interests and problems that affect us all
collectively, in which we have a common concern
and from which no one may legitimately seek
exemption; of these interests and problems we
may fairly say every man should do so and so
or so and so, or the law should be so and so, or so
and so; and secondly there are those other pro-
blems in which individual difference and the inter-
play of one or two individualities is predominant.
This is of course no hard and fast classification,
but it gives a method of approach. We can
begin with the generalised person in ourselves
and end with individuality.

In the world of ideas about me, I have found
going on a great social and political movement
that correlates itself with my conception of a great
synthesis of human purpose as the aspect towards
us of the universal scheme. This movement is
Socialism. Socialism is to me no clear-cut system

9 129

130 First and Last Things

of theories and dogmas; it is one of those solid
and extensive and synthetic ideas that are better
indicated by a number of different formulae than
by one, just as one only realises a statue by
walking round it and seeing it from a number
of points of view. I do not think it is to be
completely expressed by any one system of
formulae or by any one man. Its common
quality from nearly every point of view is the
subordination of the will of the self-seeking indi-
vidual to the idea of a racial well-being embodied
in an organised state, organised for every end
that can be obtained collectively. Upon that I
seize; that is the value of Socialism for me.

Socialism for me is a common step we are all
taking in the great synthesis of human purpose.
It is the organisation, in regard to a great mass
of common and fundamental interests, that have
hitherto been dispersedly served, of a collective
purpose.

I see humanity scattered over the world, dis-
persed, conflicting, unawakened. ... I see
human life as avoidable waste and curable con-
fusion. I see peasants living in wretched huts
knee-deep in manure, mere parasites on their
own pigs and cows; I see shy hunters wandering
in primeval forests ; I see the grimy millions who

Of General Conduct 131

slave for industrial production; I see some who
are extravagant and yet contemptible creatures
of luxury, and some leading lives of shame and
indignity, tens of thousands of wealthy people
wasting lives in vulgar and unsatisfying triviali-
ties, hundreds of thousands meanly chaffering
themselves, rich or poor, in the wasteful byways
of trade; I see gamblers, fools, brutes, toilers,
martyrs. Their disorder of effort, the spectacle
of futility fills me with a passionate desire to end
waste, to create order, to develop understanding.
. . . All these people reflect and are part of
the waste and discontent of my life, and this co-
ordinating of the species in a common general end,
and the effort of my personal salvation are the
social and the individual aspect of essentially
the same desire. . . .

And yet dispersed as all these people are, they
are yet far more closely drawn together to common
ends and a common effort than the filthy savages
who ate food rotten and uncooked in the age of
unpolished stone. They live in the mere opening
phase of a synthesis of effort the end of which sur-
passes our imagination. Such intercourse and
community as they have is only a dawn. We look
towards the day, the day of the organised civilised
world state. The first clear intimation of that

132 First and Last Things

conscious synthesis of human thought to which I
look, the first edge of the dayspring has arisen —
as Socialism, as I conceive of Socialism. Socialism
is to me no more and no less than the awakening
of a collective consciousness in humanity, a collec-
tive will and a collective mind out of which finer
individualities may arise forever in a perpetual
series of fresh endeavours and fresh achievements
for the race.

§4.

A Criticism of Certain Forms of Socialism. —
It is necessary to point out that a Socialism arising
in this way out of the conception of a synthesis
of the will and thought of the species will neces-
sarily differ from conceptions of Socialism arrived
at in other and different ways. It is based on a
self-discontent and self-abnegation and not on
self-satisfaction, and it will be a scheme of per-
sistent thought and construction, essentially, and
it will support this or that method of law-making,
or this or that method of economic exploitation
or this or that matter of social grouping, only
incidentally and in relation to that.

Such a conception of Socialism is very remote
in spirit, however it may agree in method, from
that philanthropic administrative socialism one
finds among the British ruling and administrative
class. That seems to me to be based on a pity
which is largely unjustifiable and a pride that is
altogether unintelligent. The pity is for the ob-
vious wants and distresses of poverty, the pride
appears in the arrogant and aggressive conception

133

134 First and Last Things

of raising one's fellows. I have no strong feeling
for the horrors and discomforts of poverty as such ;
sensibilities can be hardened to endure the life
led by the Romans in Dartmoor jail a hundred
years ago,i or softened to detect the crumpled
roseleaf; what disgusts me is the stupidity and
warring purposes of which poverty is the outcome.
When it comes to this idea of raising human
beings, I must confess the only person I feel con-
cerned about raising is H. G. Wells, and that
even in his case my energies might be better
employed. After all, presently he must die and
the world will have done with him. His output
for the species is more important than his moral
elevation.

Moreover all this talk of raising implies a classi-
fication I doubt. I find it hard to fix any stand-
ards that will determine who is above me and
who below. Most people are different from me
I perceive, but which among them is better, which
worse? I have a certain power of communicating
with other minds, but what experiences I com-
municate seem often far thinner and poorer stuff
than those which others less expressive than I
half fail to communicate and half display to me.

1 See The Story of Dartmoor Prison, by Basil Thomson.
Heinemann, 1907.

Of General Conduct 135

My "inferiors," judged by tlie common social
standards seem indeed intellectually more limited
than I and with a narrower outlook, they are
often dirtier and more driven, more under the
stress of hunger and animal appetites ; but on the
other hand have they not more vigorous sensa-
tions than I, and through sheer coarsening and
hardening of fibre, the power to do more toilsome
things and sustain intenser sensations than I
could endure? When I sit upon the bench, a
respectable magistrate, and commit some bat-
tered reprobate for trial for this lurid offence or
that, or send him or her to prison for drunkenness
or such-like indecorum, the doubt drifts into my
mind which of us after all is indeed getting near-
est to the keen edge of life. Are I and my re-
spectable colleagues much more than successful
evasions of that? Perhaps these people in the dark
know more of the essential strains and stresses
of nature, being more intimate with pain. At
any rate I do not think I am justified in saying
certainly that they do not know. . . .

No, I do not want to raise people, using my
own position as a standard, I do not want to be
one of a gang of consciously superior people, I do
not want arrogantly to change the quality of other
lives. I do not want to interfere with other lives.

136 First and Last Things

except incidentally — incidentally, in this way that I
do want to get to an understanding with them, I
do want to share and feel with them in our com-
merce with the collective mind. I suppose I do
not stretch language very much when I say I
want to get rid of stresses and obstacles between
our minds and personalities and to establish a
relation that is understanding and sympathy.

I want to make more generally possible a rela-
tionship of communication and interchange that
for want of a less battered and ambiguous word, I
must needs call love.

And if I disavow the Socialism of condescension,
so also do I disavow the Socialism of revolt.
There is a form of socialism based upon the eco-
nomic generalisations of Marx, an economic fatal-
istic Socialism that I hold to be rather wrong in its
vision of facts, rather more distinctly wrong in
its theory, and altogether WTong and hopeless in
its spirit. It preaches as inevitable a concentra-
tion of property in the hands of a limited number
of property owners and the expropriation of the
great proletarian mass of mankind, a concentration
which is after all no more than a tendency condi-
tional on changing and changeable conventions
about property, and it finds its hope of a better
future in the outcome of a class conflict between

Of General Conduct 137

the expropriated Many and the expropriating Few.
Both sides are to be equally swayed by self-
interest, but the toilers are to be gregarious and
mutually loyal in their self-interest — Heaven
knows why, except that otherwise the Marxist
dream will not work. The experience of con-
temporary events seems to show at least an equal
power of combination for material ends among
owners and employers as among workers.
- Now this class-war idea is one diametrically
opposed to that religious-spirited Socialism which
supplied the form of my general activities.

The class-war idea would exacerbate the an-
tagonism of the interests of the Many individuals
against the Few individuals, and I would oppose
the conception of the Whole to the self-seeking
of the Individual. The spirit and constructive
intention of the Many to-day are no better than
those of the Few ; poor and rich alike are over-
individualised, self-seeking and non-creative; to
organise the confused jostling competitions, over-
reachings, envies and hatreds of to-day into two
great class-hatreds and antagonisms will advance
the reign of love at most only a very little, only
so far as it will simplify and make plain certain
issues. It may very possibly not advance the
reign of love at all, but rather shatter the order

138 First and Last Things

we have. Socialism, as I conceive it, and as I
have presented it in my book. New Worlds for
Old, seeks to change economic arrangements only
by the way, as an aspect and outcome of a great
change, a change in the spirit and method of
human intercourse.

I know that here I go beyond the limits many
Socialists in the past, and some who are still
contemporary, have set for themselves. Much
Socialism to-day seems to think of itself as fighting
a battle against poverty and its concomitants
alone. Now poverty is only a symptom of a
profounder evil and is never to be cured by itself.
It is one aspect of divided and dispersed purposes.
If Socialism is only a conflict with poverty,
Socialism is nothing. But I hold that Socialism
is and must be a battle against human stupidity
and egotism and disorder, a battle fought all
through the forests and jungles of the soul of man.
As we get intellectual and moral light and the
realisation of brotherhood, so social and economic
organisation will develop. But the Socialist may
attack poverty for ever, disregarding the intel-
lectual and moral factors that necessitate it, and
he will remain until the end a purely economic
doctrinaire crying in the wilderness in vain.

And if I antagonise myself in this way to the

Of General Conduct 139

philanthropic Socialism of the kindly prosperous
people on the one hand and to the fierce class
hatred Socialism of the other, still more am I
opposed to that furtive Socialism of the specialist
which one meets most typically in the Fabian
Society. It arises very naturally out of what I
may perhaps call specialist fatigue and impatience.
It is very easy for writers like myself to deal in
the broad generalities of Socialism and urge their
adoption as general principles; it is altogether
another affair with a man who sets himself to
w^ork out the riddle of the complications of
actuality in order to modify them in the direction
of Socialism. He finds himself in a jungle of
difficulties that demand his intellectual power to
the utmost. He emerges at last with conclusions,
and they are rarely the obvious conclusions, as
to what needs to be done. Even the people of
his own side he finds do not see as he sees; they
are, he perceives, crude and ignorant. Now I
hold that his duty is to explain his discoveries
and intentions until they see as he sees. But the
specialist temperament is often not a generalis-
ing and expository temperament. Specialists are
apt to measure minds by their specialty and
underrate the average intelligence. The specialist
is appalled by the real task before him and he sets

140 First and Last Things

himself by tricks and misrepresentations, by be-
nevolent scoundrelism in fact, to effect changes
he desires. Too often he fails even in that.
Where he might have found fellowship he arouses
suspicion. And even if a thing is done in this
way, its essential merit is lost. For it is better,
I hold, for a man to die of his diseases than to be
cured unwittingly. That is to cheat him of life,
and to cheat life of the contribution his conscious-
ness might have given it.

The Socialism of my belief rests on a prof ounder
faith and a broader proposition. It looks over
and beyond the warring purposes of to-day as a
general may look over and beyond a crowd of
sullen, excited and confused recruits, to the day
when they will be disciplined, exercised, trained,
willing and convergent on a common end. It
holds persistently to the idea of men increasingly
working in agreement, doing things that are sane
to do, on a basis of mutual helpfulness, temperance
and toleration. It sees the great masses of hu-
manity rising out of base and immediate anxieties,
out of dwarfing pressures and cramped surround-
ings, to understanding and participation and fine
effort. It sees the resources of the earth hus-
banded and harvested, economised and used with
scientific skill for the maximum of result. It

Of General Conduct 141

sees towns and cities finely built, a race of beings
finely bred and taught and trained, open ways
and peace and freedom from end to end of the
earth. It sees beauty increasing in humanity,
about humanity and through humanity. Through
this great body of mankind goes evermore an in-
creasing understanding, an intensifying brother-
hood. As Christians have dreamt of the New
Jerusalem so does Socialism, growing ever more
temperate, patient, forgiving and resolute, set
its face to the World City of Mankind.

§4.

Hate and Love. — Before I go on to point out
the broad principles of action that flow from this
wide conception of Socialism, I may perhaps give
a section to elucidating that opposition of hate
and love I made when I dealt with the class war.
I have already used the word love several times;
it is an ambiguous word and it may be well to
spend a few words in making clear the sense in
which it is used here. I use it in a very broad
sense to convey all that complex of motives, im-
pulses, sentiments, that incline us to find our
happiness and satisfactions in the happiness and
sympathy of others. Essentially it is a synthetic
force in human affairs, the merger tendency, a
linking force, an expression in personal will and
feeling of the common element and interest. It
insists upon resemblances and shares and sym-
pathies. And hate, I take it, is the emotional
aspect of antagonism, it is the expression in per-
sonal will and feeling of the individual's sepa-
ration from others. It is the competing and

destructive tendency. So long as we are individu-

142

Of General Conduct 1 43

als and members of a species, we must needs both
hate and love. But because I believe, as I have
already confessed, that the oneness of the species
is a greater fact than individuality, and that we
individuals are temporary separations from a
collective purpose, and since hate eliminates itself
by eliminating its objects, whilst love multiplies
itself by multiplying its objects, so love must be
a thing more comprehensive and enduring than
hate.

Moreover hate must be in its nature a good
thing. We individuals exist as such, I believe,
for the Purpose in things, and our separations
and antagonisms serve that Purpose. We play
against each other like hammer and anvil. But
the synthesis of a collective will in humanity
which is I believe our human and terrestrial share
in that Purpose, is an idea that carries with it a
conception of a secular alteration in the scope
and method of both love and hate. Both widen
and change with man's widening and developing
apprehension of the Purpose he serves. The
savage man loves in gusts a fellow-creature or so
about him, and fears and hates all other people.
Every expansion of his scope and ideas widens
either circle. The common man of our civilised
world loves not only many of his friends and

144 First and Last Things

associates systematically and enduringly, but
dimly he loves also his city and his country, his
creed and his race; he loves it may be less in-
tensely but over a far wider field and much more
steadily. But he hates also more widely if less
passionately and vehemently than a savage, and
since love makes rather harmony and peace and
hate rather conflict and events, one may easily
be led to suppose that hate is the ruling motive in
human affairs. Men band themselves together
in leagues and loyalties, in cults and organisations
and nationalities, and it is often hard to say
whether the bond is one of love for the association
or hatred of those to whom the association is
antagonised. The two things pass insensibly
into one another. London people have recently
seen an edifying instance of the transition, in the
Brown Dog statue riots. A number of people
drawn together by their common pity for animal
suffering, by love indeed of the most disinterested
sort, had so forgotten their initial spirit as to
erect a monument with an inscription at once
recklessly untruthful, spiteful in spirit and par-
ticularly vexatious to one great medical school of
London. They have provoked riots and pla-
carded London with taunts and irritating mis-
representation of the spirit of medical research,

Of General Conduct 145

and they have infected a whole fresh generation
of London students with a bitter partisan con-
tempt for the humanitarian effort that has so
lamentably misconducted itself. Both sides vow
they will never give in, and the anti-vivisectionists
are busy manufacturing small china copies of the
Brown Dog figure, inscription and all, for purposes
of domestic irritation. Here hate, the evil ugly
brother of effort, has manifestly slain love the
initiator and taken the affair in hand. That is a
little model of human conflicts. So soon as we
become militant and play against one another,
comes this danger of strain and this possible
reversal of motive. The fight begins. Into a pit
of heat and hate fall right and wrong together.
Now it seems to me that a religious faith such
as I have set forth in the second Book, and a clear
sense of our community of blood with all man-
kind, must necessarily affect both our loving and
our hatred. It will certainly not abolish hate,
but it will subordinate it altogether to love. We
are individuals, so the Purpose presents itself to
me, in order that we may hate the things that
have to go, ugliness, baseness, insufficiency, un-
reality, that we may love and experiment and
strive for the things that collectively we seek —
power and beauty. Before our conversion we

146 First and Last Things

did this darkly and with our hate spreading to
persons and parties from the things for which
they stood. But the believer will hate lovingly
and without fear. We are of one blood and sub-
stance with our antagonists, even with those that
we desire keenly may die and leave no issue in
flesh or persuasion. They all touch us and are
part of one necessary experience. They are all
necessary to the synthesis, even if they are neces-
sary only as the potato-peel in the dust-bin is
necessary to my dinner.

So it is I disavow and deplore the whole spirit
of class-war Socialism with its doctrine of hate,
its envious assault upon the leisure and freedom
of the wealthy. Without leisure and freedom
and the experience of life they gave, the ideas
of Socialism could never have been born. The
true mission of Socialism is against darkness,
vanity and cowardice; that darkness which
hides from the property owner the intense
beauty, the potentialities of interest, the splen-
did possibilities of life ; that vanity and coward-
ice that makes him clutch his precious holdings
and fear and hate the shadow^ of change. It
has to teach the collective organisation of
society; and to that the class-consciousness
and intense class-prejudices of the worker need

Of General Conduct 147

to bow quite as much as those of the property
owner.

But when I say that SociaHsm's mission is to
teach, I do not mean that its mission is a merely
verbal and mental one ; it must use all instruments
and teach by example as well as precept. So-
cialism by becoming charitable and merciful will
not cease to be militant. Socialism must, lovingly
but resolutely, use law, use force, to dispossess
the owners of socially disadvantageous wealth,
as one coerces a lunatic brother or takes a wrong-
fully acquired toy from a spoilt and obstinate
child. It must intervene between all who would
keep their children from instruction in the busi-
ness of citizenship and the lessons of fraternity.
It must build and guard what it builds with laws
and with that sword which is behind all laws.
Non-resistance is for the non-constructive man,
for the hermit in the cave and the naked saint
in the dust; the builder and maker with the first
stroke of his foundation spade uses force and
opens war against the anti-builder.

§5-

The Preliminary Social Duty. — The belief
I have that contributing to the development of
the collective being of man is the individual's
general meaning and duty, and the formulae of
the Socialism which embodies this belief so far
as our common activities go, give a general frame-
work and direction how a man or woman should
live. (I do throughout all this book mean man
or woman equally when I write of "man," unless
it is manifestly inapplicable.)

And first in this present time he must see to

it that he does live, that is to say he must get

food, clothing, covering, an adequate leisure for

the finer aspects of living. Socialism plans an

organised civilisation in which these things will

be a collective solicitude, and the gaining of

a subsistence an easy preliminary to the fine

drama of existence, but in the world as we have

it we are forced to engage much of our energy in

scrambling for these preliminary necessities. Our

problems of conduct lie in the world as it is and

not in the world as we want it to be. First then

148

Of General Conduct 149

a man must get a living, a fair, civilised living for
himself. It is a fundamental duty. It must be a
fair living, not pinched nor mean nor strained. A
man can do nothing higher, he can be of no service
to any cause until he himself is fed and clothed
and equipped and free. He must earn this living
or equip himself to earn it in some way not socially
disadvantageous, he must contrive as far as
possible that the work he does shall be construc-
tive and contributory to the general well-being.

And these primary necessities of food, clothing
and freedom being secured, one comes to the
general disposition of one's surplus energy. With
regard to that I think that a very simple proposi-
tion follows from the broad beliefs I have chosen
to adopt. The general duty of a man, his exis-
tence being secured, is to educate and chiefly to
educate and develop himself. It is his duty to
live, to make all he can out of himself and life,
to get full of experience, to make himself fine and
perceiving and expressive, to render his experience
and perceptions honestly and helpfully to others.
And in particular he has to educate himself and
others with himself in Socialism. He has to make
and keep this idea of synthetic human effort and
of conscious constructive effort clear first to him-
self and then clear in the general mind. For it is

150 First and Last Things

an idea that comes and goes. We are all of us
continually lapsing from it towards Individual
isolation again. He needs, we all need, constant
refreshment in this belief if it is to remain a pre-
dominant living fact in our lives.

And that duty of education, of building up the
collective idea and organisation of humanity, falls
into various divisions depending in their impor-
tance upon individual quality. For all there is
one personal work that none may evade, and
that is thinking hard, criticising strenuously and
understanding as clearly as one can religion,
socialism and the general principle of one's acts.
The intellectual factor is of primary importance
in my religion. I can see no more reason why
Salvation should come to the intellectually in-
capable than to the morally incapable. For
simple souls thinking in simple processes, Sal-
vation perhaps comes easily, but there is none
for the intellectual coward, for the mental sloven
and sluggard, for the stupid and obdurate mind.
The Believer will think hard and continue to grow
and learn, to read and seek discussion as his
needs determine.

Correlated with one's own intellectual activity,
part of it and growing out of it for almost every-
one, is intellectual work with and upon others.

Of General Conduct 151

By teaching we learn. Not to communicate one's
thoughts to others, to keep one's thoughts to
oneself as people say, is either cowardice or pride.
It is a form of sin. It is a duty to talk, teach,
explain, write, lecture, read and listen. Every
truly religious man, every good Socialist, is a
propagandist. Those who cannot write or dis-
cuss can talk, those who cannot argue can induce
people to listen to others and read. We have a
belief and an idea that we want to spread, each
to the utmost of his means and measure, through-
out all the world. We have a thought that we
want to make humanity's thought. And it is a
duty too that one should within the compass
of one's ability, make teaching, writing and
lecturing possible where it has not existed before.
This can be done in a hundred ways, by founding
and enlarging schools and universities and chairs,
for example; by making print and reading and
all the material of thought cheap and abundant;
by organising discussion and societies for enquiry.
And talk and thought and study are but the
more generalised aspects of duty. The Believer
may find his own special aptitude lies rather
among concrete things, in experimenting and pro-
moting experiments in collective action. Things
teach as well as words, and some of us are most

152 First and Last Things

expressive by concrete methods. The Believer
will work himself and help forward others to his
utmost in all these developments of material
civilisation, in organised sanitation for example,
all those developments that force collective acts
upon communities and collective realisations into
the minds of men. And the whole field of scien-
tific research is a field of duty calling to everyone
who can enter it, to add to the permanent store
of knowledge and new resources for the race.

The Mind of that Civilised State we seek to
make by giving ourselves into its making is evi-
dently the central work before us. But while
the writer, the publisher and printer, the book-
seller and librarian and teacher and preacher, the
investigator and experimenter, the reader and
everyone who thinks, will be contributing them-
selves to this great organised mind and intention
in the world, many sorts of specialised men will
be more immediately concerned with parallel
and more concrete aspects of the human syn-
thesis. The medical worker and the medical
investigator for example, will be building up the
body of a new generation, the Body of the Civilised
State; and he will be doing all he can not simply
as an individual, but as a citizen, to organise his
services of cure and prevention, of hygiene and

Of General Conduct 153

selection. A great and growing multitude of
men will be working out the apparatus of the
civilised state; the organisers of transit and
housing, the engineers in their incessantly in-
creasing variety, the miners and geologists es-
timating the world's resources in metals and
minerals, the mechanical inventors perpetually
economising force. The scientific agriculturist
again will be studying the food supply of the world
as a whole, and how it may be increased and dis-
tributed and economised. And to the student of
law comes the task of rephrasing his intricate and
often quite beautiful science in relation to modern
conceptions. All these and a hundred other
aspects are integral to the wide project of Con-
structive Socialism as it shapes itself in my faith.

§6.

Wrong Ways of Living. — When we lay down
the proposition that it is one's duty to get one's
living in some way not socially disadvantageous,
and as far as possible by work that is contributory
to the general well-being and development, when
we state that one's surplus energies, after one's
living is gained, must be devoted to experience,
self -development and constructive work, it is
clear we condemn by implication many modes of
life that are followed to-day.

For example it is manifest we condemn living
in idleness or on non-productive sport, on the
income derived from private property, and all
sorts of ways of earning a living that cannot be
shown to conduce to the constructive process.
We condemn trading that is merely speculative,
and in fact all trading and manufacture that is
not a positive social service; we condemn living
by gambling or by playing games for either stakes
or pay. Much more do we condemn dishonest
or fraudulent trading and every act of advertise-
ment that is not punctiliously truthful. We

154

Of General Conduct 155

must condemn too the taking of any income from
the community that is neither earned nor con-
ceded in the collective interest. But to this
last point and to certain issues arising out of
it, I will return in the section next following
this one.

And it follows evidently from our general
propositions that every form of prostitution is
a double sin, against one's individuality and
against the species which we serve by the de-
velopment of that individuality's preferences
and idiosyncrasies.

And by prostitution I mean not simply the act
of a woman who sells for money and against her
thoughts and preferences, her smiles and endear-
ments and the secret beauty and pleasure of her
body, but the act of anyone who, to gain a living,
suppresses himself, does things in a manner alien
to himself and subserves aims and purposes with
which he disagrees. The journalist who writes
against his personal convictions, the solicitor who
knowingly assists the schemes of rogues, the
barrister who pits himself against what he per-
ceives is justice and the right, the artist who does
unbeautiful things or less beautiful things than
he might, simply to please base employers, the
craftsman who makes instruments for foolish

156 First and Last Things

uses or bad uses, the dealer who sells and pushes
an article because it fits the customer's folly; all
these are prostitutes of mind and soul if not of
body, with no right to lift an eyebrow at the
painted disasters of the streets.

§7-

Social Parasitism and Contemporary In-
justices.— ^These broad principles about one's
way of living are very simple; our minds move
freely among them. But the real interest is with
the individual case, and the individual case is
almost always complicated by the fact that the
existing social and economic system is based upon
conditions that the growing collective intelligence
condemns as unjust and undesirable, and that
the constructive spirit in men now seeks to super-
sede. We have to live in a provisional State
while we dream of and work for a better one.

The ideal life for the ordinary man in a civilised,
that is to say a Socialist, State would be in public
employment or in private enterprise aiming at
public recognition. But in our present world
only a small minority can have that direct and
honourable relation of public service in the work
they do; most of the important business of the
community is done upon the older and more tor-
tuous private ownership system, and the great

mass of men in socially useful employment find

157

158 First and Last Things

themselves working only indirectly for the com-
munity and directly for the profit of a private
owner, or they themselves are private owners.
Every man who has any money put by in the bank
or any money invested, is a private owner, and
in so far as he draws interest or profit from this
investment he is a social parasite. It is in prac-
tice almost impossible to divest oneself of that
parasitic quality, however straightforward the gen-
eral principle may be.

It is practically impossible for two equally valid
sets of reasons. The first is that under existing
conditions, saving and investment constitute the
only way to rest and security in old age, to leisure,
study and intellectual independence, to the safe
upbringing of a family and the happiness of one's
weaker dependents. These are things that should
not be left for the individual to provide; in the
civilised state, the state itself will insure every
citizen against these anxieties that now make the
study of the City Article almost a duty. To
abandon saving and investment to-day, and to
do so is of course to abandon all insurance, is
to become a driven and uncertain worker, to risk
one's personal freedom and culture and the up-
bringing and efficiency of one's children. It is
to lower the standard of one's personal civilisa-

Of General Conduct 159

tion, to think with less deliberation and less
detachment, to fall away from that work of ac-
cumulating fine habits and beautiful and pleasant
ways of living contributory to the coming State.
And in the second place there is not only no return
for such a sacrifice in anything won for Socialism,
but for fine-thinking and living people to give up
property is merely to let it pass into the hands
of more egoistic possessors. Since at present
things must be privately owned, it is better that
they should be owned by people consciously
working for social development and willing to
use them to that end.

We have to live in the present system and
under the conditions of the present system, while
we work with all our power to change that system
for one more completely organised.

The case of Cadburys, the cocoa and choco-
late makers, and the practical slavery under the
Portuguese of the East African negroes who grow
the raw material for Messrs. Cadbury, is an il-
luminating one in this connection. The Cad-
burys, like the Rown trees, are well known as an
energetic and public-spirited family, the social
and industrial experiments at Bourne ville and the
general social and political activities are broad
and constructive in the best sense. But they

i6o First and Last Things

find themselves in the pecuHar dilemma that they
must either abandon an important and profitable
portion of their great manufacture or continue to
buy produce grown under cruel and even horrible
conditions. Their retirement from this branch
of the cocoa and chocolate trade concerned would
under these circumstances mean no diminution
of the manufacture or of the horrors of this par-
ticular slavery; it would mean merely that less
humanitarian manufacturers would step in to
take up the abandoned trade. The self-righteous
individualist would have no doubts about the
question; he would keep his hands clean anyhow,
retrench his social work, abandon the types of
cocoa involved, and pass by on the other side.
But indeed I do not believe we came into the mire
of life simply to hold our hands up out of it.
Messrs. Cadbury follow a better line; they keep
their business going and exert themselves in
every way to let light into the secrets of Portu-
guese East Africa and to organise a better control
of these labour cruelties. That I think is alto-
gether the right course in this difficulty.

We cannot keep our hands clean in this world
as it is. There is no excuse indeed for a life of
fraud or any other positive fruitless wrongdoing
or for a purely parasitic non-productive life, yet

Of General Conduct i6i

all but the fortunate few who are properly paid
and recognised state servants, must in financial
and business matters do their best amidst and
through institutions tainted with injustice and
flawed with unrealities. All Socialists everywhere
are like expeditionary soldiers far ahead of the
main advance. The organised State that should
own and administer their possessions for the
general good has not arrived to take them over;
and in the meanwhile they must act like its
anticipatory agents according to their lights and
make things ready for its coming.

The Believer then who is not in the public
service, whose life lies among the operations of
private enterprise must work always on the sup-
position that the property he administers, the
business in which he works, the profession he
follows, is destined to be taken over and organ-
ised collectively for the commonweal and must be
made ready for the taking over, that the private
outlook he secures by investment, the provision
he makes for his friends and children, are tem-
porary, wasteful, unavoidable devices to be pre-
sently merged in and superseded by the broad
and scientific previsions of the co-operative State.

§8.

The Case of the Wife and Mother. — These
principles give a rule also for the problem that
faces the great majority of thinking wives and
mothers to-day. The most urgent and necessary
social work falls upon them ; they bear, and largely
educate and order the homes of the next genera-
tion, and they have no direct recognition from
the community for either of these supreme func-
tions. They are supposed to perform them not
for God or the world, but to please and satisfy a
particular man. Our laws, our social conventions,
our economic methods, so hem a woman about
that however fitted for and desirous of maternity
she may be, she can only effectually do that duty
in a dependent relation to her husband. Nearly
always he is the paymaster and if his payments
are grudging or irregular, she has little remedy
short of a breach and the rupture of the home.
Her duty is conceived of as first to him and only
secondarily to her children and the State. Many
wives become under these circumstances mere

prostitutes to their husbands, often evading the

162

Of General Conduct 163

bearing of children with their consent and even
at their request, and " loving for a living." That
is a natural outcome of the proprietary theory of
the family out of which our civilisation emerges.
But our modern ideas trend more and more to
regard a woman's primary duty to be her duty
to the children and to the world to which she gives
them. She is to be a citizen side by side with her
husband ; no longer is he to intervene between her
and the community. As a matter of contem-
porary fact he can do so and does do so habitually,
and most women have to square their ideas of
life to that possibility.

Before any woman who is clear-headed enough
to perceive that this great business of motherhood
is one of supreme public importance, there are a
number of alternatives at the present time. She
may, like Grant Allen's heroine in The Woman
Who Did, declare an exaggerated and impossible
independence, refuse the fetters of marriage and
bear children to a lover. This in the present state
of public opinion in almost every existing social
atmosphere would be a purely anarchistic course.
It would mean a fatherless home, and since the
woman will have to play the double part of
income-earner and mother, an impoverished and
struggling home. It would mean also an unsocial

i64 First and Last Things

because ostracised home. In most cases, and
even assuming it to be right in idea it would still
be on all fours with that immediate abandonment
of private property we have already discussed, a
sort of suicide that helps the world nothing.

Or she may "strike," refuse marriage and pur-
sue a solitary and childless career, engaging her
surplus energies in constructive work. But that
also is suicide; it is to miss the keenest experi-
ences, the finest realities life has to offer.

Or she may meet a man whom she can trust
to keep a treaty with her and supplement the
common interpretations and legal insufficiencies
of the marriage bond, who will respect her always
as a free and independent person, will abstain
absolutely from authoritative methods and will
either share and trust his income and property
with her in a frank communism, or give her a
sufficient and private income for her personal use.
It is only fair under existing economic conditions
that at marriage a husband should insure his
life in his wife's interest, and I do not think it
would be impossible to bring our legal marriage
contract into accordance with modem ideas in
that matter. Certainly it should be legally im-
perative that at the birth of each child a new
policy upon its father's life, as the income-getter,

Of General Conduct 165

should begin. The latter provision at least should
be a normal condition of marriage and one that a
wife should have power to enforce when payments
fall away. With such safeguards and under
such conditions marriage ceases to be a haphazard
dependence for a woman, and she may live, teach-
ing and rearing and free, almost as though the
co-operative commonwealth had come.

But in many cases, since great numbers of
women marry so young and so ignorantly that
their thinking about realities begins only after
marriage, a woman will find herself already mar-
ried to a man and married before she realised the
significance of these things. She may be already
the mother of children. Her husband's ideas
may not be her ideas. He may dominate, he
may prohibit, he may intervene, he may default.
He may, if he sees fit, burden the family income
with the charges of his illegitimate ofTspring.

We live in the world as it is and not in the
world as it should be. That sentence becomes
the refrain of this discussion.

The normal modern married woman has to
make the best of a bad position, to do her best
under the old conditions, to live as though she
was under the new conditions, to make good
citizens, to give her spare energies as far as she

i66 First and Last Things

can, to bringing about a better state of affairs.
Like the private property owner and the official
in a privately owned business, her best method of
conduct is to consider herself an unrecognised
public official, irregularly commanded and im-
properly paid. There is no good in flagrant
rebellion. She has to study her particular cir-
cumstances and make what good she can out of
them, keeping her face towards the coming time.
I cannot better the image I have already used
for the thinking and believing modern-minded
people of to-day as an advance guard cut off
from proper supplies, ill furnished so that make-
shift prevails, and rather demoralised. We have
to be wise as well as loyal; discretion itself is
loyalty to the coming State.

§9-

Associations. — In the previous sections I have
dealt with the single individual's duty in relation
to the general community and to law and gener-
ally received institutions. But there is a new
set of questions now to be considered. Let us
take up the modifications that arise when it is
not one isolated individual but a group of in-
dividuals who find themselves in disagreement
with contemporary rule or usage and disposed to
find a rightness in things not established or not
conceded. They too, live in the world as it is
and not in the world as it ought to be, but their
association opens up quite new possibilities of
anticipating coming developments of living and
of protecting and guaranteeing one another from
what for a single unprotected individual would
be the inevitable consequences of a particular
line of conduct, conduct which happened to be
unorthodox or only, in the face of existing con-
ditions, unwise.

For example, a friend of mine who had read a

copy of the preceding section wrote as follows:

167

1 68 First and Last Things

* * I can see no reason why even to-day a number
of persons avowedly united in the same 'Belief
and recognising each other as the self -constituted
social vanguard should not form a recognised
spiritual community centring round some kind
of 'religious' edifice and ritual, and agree to
register and consecrate the union of any couples
of the members according to a contract which the
whole community should have voted acceptable.
The community would be the guardian of money
deposited or paid in gradually as insurance for
the children. And the fact of the whole business
being regular, open and connected with a common
intellectual and moral ritual and common name,
such for example as your name of 'The Samurai'
would secure the respect of outsiders so that
eventually these new marriage arrangements
would modify the old ones. People would ask
'Were you married before the registrar?' and the
answer would be, 'No, we are Samurai and were
united before the Elders.' In Catholic countries
those who use only the civil marriage are con-
sidered outcasts by the religiously minded, which
shows that recognition by the State is not as
potent as recognition by the community to which
one belongs. The religious marriage is considered
the only binding one by Catholics, and the civil

Of General Conduct 169

ceremony is respected merely because the State
has brute force behind it."

There is in this passage one particularly valu-
able idea, the idea of an association of people to
guarantee the welfare of their children in common.
I will follow that a little, though it takes me
away from my main line of thought. It seems
to me that such an association might be found in
many cases a practicable way of easing the con-
flict that so many men and women experience,
between their individual public service and their
duty to their own families. Many people of
exceptional gifts, whose gifts are not necessarily
remunerative, are forced by these personal con-
siderations to direct them more or less askew, to
divert them from their best application to some
inferior but money-making use, and many more
are given the disagreeable alternative of evading
parentage or losing the freedom of mind needed
for socially beneficial work. This is particularly
the case with many scientific investigators, many
sociological and philosophical workers, many
artists, teachers and the like. Even when such
people are fairly prosperous personally they do
not care to incur the obligation to keep prosperous
at any cost to their work that a family involves. It
gives great ease of mind to any sort of artistic

lyo First and Last Things

or intellectual worker to feel free to become poor.
I do not see why a group of such people should not
attempt a merger of their family anxieties and
family adventures, insure all its members, and
while each retains a sufficient personal inde-
pendence for freedom of word and movement,
pool their family solicitudes and resources, or-
ganise a collective school and a common main-
tenance fund for all the children born of members
of the association. I do not see why they should
not in fact develop a permanent Trust to main-
tain, educate and send out all their children into
the world, a Trust to which their childless friends
and associates could contribute by gift and bequest
and to which the irregular good fortune that is
not uncommon in the careers of these exceptional
types could be devoted. I do not mean any
sort of Charity but an enlarged family basis.

Such an idea passes very readily into the form
of a Eugenic association. It would be quite
possible and very interesting for prosperous
people interested in Eugenics to create a Trust
for the offspring of a selected band of beneficia-
ries, and with increasing resources to admit new
members and so build up within the present so-
cial system a special strain of chosen people. So
far people with Eugenic ideas and people with

Of General Conduct 171

conceptions of associated and consolidated families
have been too various and too dispersed for such
associations to be practicable, but as such views
of life become more common, the chance of a
number of sufficiently homogeneous and con-
genial people working out the method of such a
grouping increases steadily.

Moreover I can imagine no reason to prevent
any women who are in agreement with the moral
standards of The Woman Who Did (standards
I will not discuss at this present point but defer
for a later section) combining for mutual pro-
tection and social support and the welfare of
such children as they may bear. Then certainly,
to the extent that this succeeds, the objections
that arise from the evil effects upon the children
of social isolation disappear. This isolation would
be at worst a group isolation and there can
be no doubt that my friend is right in pointing
out that there is much more social toleration
for an act committed under the sanction of a
group than for an isolated act that may be
merely impulsive misbehaviour masquerading as
high principle.

It seems to me remarkable that, to the best of
my knowledge, so obvious a form of combination
has never yet been put in practice. It is remark-

172 First and Last Things

able but not inexplicable. The first people to
develop novel ideas, more partictilarly of this
type, are usually people in isolated circumstances
and temperamentally incapable of disciplined co-
operation.

§ lo.

Of an Organised Brotherhood. — ^The idea
of organising the progressive elements in the
social chaos into a regulated developing force is
one that has had a great attraction for me. I
have written upon it elsewhere, and I make no
apology for returning to it here and examining
it in the light of various afterthoughts and with
fresh suggestions.

I first broached the idea in a book called An-
ticipations, wherein I described a possible devel-
opment of thought and concerted action which
I called New Republicanism, and afterwards I
redrew the thing rather more elaborately in my
Modern Utopia. I had been struck by the
apparently chaotic and wasteful character of
most contemporary reform movements, and it
seemed reasonable to suppose that those who
aimed at organising society and replacing chaos
and waste by wise arrangements might very well
begin by producing a more effective organisation
for their own efforts. These complexities of
good intention made me impatient, and I sought

industriously in my mind for a short cut through

173

174 First and Last Things

them. In doing so I think I overlooked alto-
gether too much how heterogeneous all pro-
gressive thought and progressive people must
necessarily be.

In my Modern Utopia I turned this idea of an
organised brotherhood about very thoroughly 5
I looked at it from this point and that; I let it
loose as it were and gave it its fullest development
and so produced a sort of secular Order of govern-
ing men and women. In a spirit entirely jour-
nalistic I called this the Order of the Samuraiy
for at the time I wrote there was much interest
in Bushido because of the capacity for hardship
and self-sacrifice this chivalrous culture appears
to have developed in the Japanese. These
Samurai of mine were a sort of voluntary nobility
who supplied the administrative and organising
forces that held my Utopian world together.
They were the "New Republicans" of my Anti-
cipations and Mankind in the Making, much
developed and supposed triumphant and ruling
the world.

I sought of course to set out these ideas as
attractively as possible in my books, and they
have as a matter of fact proved very attractive
to a certain number of people. Quite a number
have wanted to go on with them. Several little

Of General Conduct 1 75

organisations of Utopians and Samurai and the
like have sprung up and informed me of them-
selves, and some survive; and young men do still
at times drop into my world ''personally or by
letter" declaring themselves New Republicans.

All this has been very helpful and at times a
little embarrassing to me. It has given me an
opportunity of seeing the ideals I flung into the
distance beyond Sirius and among the mountain
snows, coming home partially incarnate in girls
and young men. It has made me look into in-
dividualised human aspirations, human impa-
tience, human vanity and a certain human need
of fellowship, at close quarters. It has illuminated
subtle and fine traits ; it has displayed nobilities,
and it has brought out aspects of human absurdity
to which only the pencil of Mr. George Morrow
could do adequate justice. The thing I have
had to explain most generally is that my New
Republicans and Samurai are but figures of
suggestion, figures to think over and use in plan-
ning disciplines but by no means copies to follow.
I have had to go over again, as though it had
never been raised before in any previous writings,
the difference between the spirit and the letter.

These responses have on the whole confirmed
my main idea that there is a real need, a need that

176 First and Last Things

many people, and especially adolescent people,
feel very strongly, for some sort of constructive
brotherhood of a closer type than mere political
association, to co-ordinate and partly guide their
loose chaotic efforts to get hold of life — but they
have also convinced me that no wide and com-
prehensive organisation can supply that want.

My New Republicans were presented as in many
respects harsh and overbearing people, *'a sort
of outspoken secret society" for the organisation
of the world. They were not so much an ideal
order as the Samurai of the later book, being
rather deduced as a possible outcome of certain
forces and tendencies in contemporary life (a. d.
1900) than, as literary people say, "created."
They were to be drawn from among engineers,
doctors, scientific business organisers and the like,
and I found that it is to energetic young men of
the more responsible classes that this particular
ideal appeals. Their organisation was quite in-
formal, a common purpose held them together.

Most of the people who have written to me to
call themselves New Republicans are I find also
Imperialists and Tariff Reformers, and I suppose
that among the prominent political figures of
to-day the nearest approach to my New Repub-
licans is Lord Milner and the Socialist-Unionists

Of General Conduct 177

of his group. It is a type harshly constructive,
incHned to an unscrupulous pose and slipping
readily into a Kiplingesque brutality.

The Samurai on the other hand were more pic-
turesque figures, with a much more elaborated
organisation.

I may perhaps recapitulate the points about
that Order here.

In the Modern Utopia the visitor from earth
remarks :

'* These Samurai form the real body of the State.
All this time that I have spent going to and fro in
this planet, it has been growing upon me that this
order of men and women, wearing such a uniform
as you wear, and with faces strengthened by dis-
cipline and touched with devotion, is the Utopian
reality; that but for them, the whole fabric of these
fair appearances would crumble and tarnish, shrink
and shrivel, until at last, back I should be amidst
the grime and disorders of the life of earth. Tell me
about these samurai, who remind me of Plato's
guardians, who look like Knight Templars, who
bear a name that recalls the swordsmen of Japan.
What are they? Are they an hereditary caste, a
specially educated order, an elected class? For, cer-
tainly, this world turns upon them as a door upon
its hinges."

His informant explains:

"Practically the whole of the responsible rule of the

178 First and Last Things

world is in their hands; all our head teachers and
disciplinary heads of colleges, our judges, barristers,
employers of labour beyond a certain limit, prac-
tising medical men, legislators, must be samurai,
and all the executive committees and so forth, that
play so large a part in our affairs, are drawn by
lot exclusively from them. The order is not hered-
itary— we know just enough of biology and the un-
certainties of inheritance to know how silly that
would be — and it does not require an early conse-
cration or novitiate or ceremonies and initiations
of that sort. The samurai are, in fact, volunteers.
Any intelligent adult in a reasonably healthy and
efficient state may, at any age after five and twenty,
become one of the samurai and take a hand in the
universal control."

'' Provided he follows the Rule."
"Precisely — provided he follows the Rule."
"I have heard the phrase, 'voluntary nobility.' "
" That was the idea of our Founders. They made
a noble and privileged order — open to the whole
world. No one could complain of an unjust ex-
clusion, for the only thing that could exclude from
the order was unwillingness or inability to follow
the Rule."

"The Rule aims to exclude the dull and base alto-
gether, to discipline the impulses and emotions, to
develop a moral habit and sustain a man in periods
of stress, fatigue and temptation, to produce the
maximum co-operation of all men of good-intent,
and in fact to keep all the samurai in a state of moral
and bodily health and efficiency. It does as much
of this as well as it can, but of course like all general
propositions, it does not do it in any case with ab-

Of General Conduct 179

solute precision. At first in the militant days, it was
a trifle hard and uncompromising; it had rather too
strong an appeal to the moral prig and the harshly
righteous man, but it has undergone, and still under-
goes, revision and expansion, and every year it
becomes a little better adapted to the need of a
general rule of life that all men may try to follow.
We have now a whole literature with many very
fine things in it, written about the Rule.

"The Rule consists of three parts: there is the list
of things that qualify, the list of things that must
not be done, and the list of things that must be done.
Qualification exacts a little exertion as evidence of
good faith and it is designed to weed out the duller
dull and many of the base."

He goes on to tell of certain intellectual qualifi-
cations and disciplines.

" Next to the intellectual qualification comes the
physical, the man must be in sound health, free from
certain foul, avoidable and demoralising diseases,
and in good training. We reject men who are fat,
or thin, or flabby, or whose nerves are shaky — we
refer them back to training. And finally the man
or woman must be fully adult."

"Twenty-one? But you said twenty-five!"
"The age has varied. At first it was twenty-five
or over; then the minimum became twenty-five
for men and twenty- one for women. Now there
is a feeling that it ought to be raised. We don't want
to take advantage of mere boy and girl emotions —
men of my way of thinking, at any rate, don't — we
want to get our samurai with experiences, with a

1 80 First and Last Things

settled mature conviction. Our hygiene and regimen
are rapidly pushing back old age and death, and
keeping men hale and hearty to eighty and more.
There 's no need to hurry the young. Let them have
a chance of wine, love and song; let them feel the
bite of full-blooded desire, and know what devils
they have to reckon with. . . .

" We forbid a good deal. Many small pleasures
do no great harm, but we think it well to forbid them
none the less, so that we can weed out the self-
indulgent. We think that a constant resistance to
little seductions is good for a man's quality. At
any rate, it shows that a man is prepared to pay
something for his honour and privileges. We pre-
scribe a regimen of food, forbid tobacco, wine, or any
alcoholic drink, all narcotic drugs. . . .

"Originally the samurai were forbidden usury,
that is to say the lending of money at fixed rates
of interest. They are still under that interdiction,
but since our commercial code practically prevents
usury altogether, and our law will not recognise con-
tracts for interest upon private accommodation
loans to unprosperous borrowers" (he is speaking
of Utopia), "it is now scarcely necessary. The idea
of a man growing richer by mere inaction and at the
expense of an impoverished debtor is profoundly
distasteful to Utopian ideas, and our State insists
pretty effectually now upon the participation of the
lender in the borrower's risks. This, however, is
only one part of a series of limitations of the same
character. It is felt that to buy simply in order to
sell again brings out many unsocial human qualities;
it makes a man seek to enhance profits and falsify
values, and so the samurai are forbidden to buy or

of General Conduct i8i

sell on their own account or for any employer save
the State, unless by some process of manufacture
they change the nature of the commodity (a mere
change in bulk or packing does not suffice) and they
are forbidden salesmanship and all its arts. Nor
may the samurai do personal services, except in the
matter of medicine or surgery; they may not be
barbers, for example, nor inn waiters nor boot
cleaners. But nowadays we have scarcely any
barbers or boot cleaners; men do these things for
themselves. Nor may a man under the Rule be
any man's servant; pledged to do whatever he is told.
He may neither be a servant nor keep one; he must
shave and dress and serve himself, carry his own
food from the helper's place, redd his sleeping room
and leave it clean. ..."

Finally came the things they had to do. Their
Rule contained

*'many precise directions regarding his health and
rules that would aim at once at health and that
constant exercise of will that makes life good. Save
in specified exceptional circumstances, the samurai
must bathe in cold water and the men must shave
every day; they have the precisest directions in such
matters; the body must be in health, the skin and
nerves and muscles in perfect tone or the samurai
must go to the doctors of the order and give im-
plicit obedience to the regimen prescribed. They
must sleep alone at least four nights in five ; and they
must eat with and talk to anyone in their fellowship
who cares for their conversation for an hour at least,
at the nearest club-house of the samurai once on

1 82 First and Last Things

three chosen days in every week. Moreover they
must read aloud from the Book of the Samurai for
at least five minutes every day. Every month they
must buy and read faithfully through at least one
book that has been published during the past five
years, and the only intervention with private choice
in that matter is the prescription of a certain minimum
of length for the monthly book or books. But the
full rule in these minor compulsory matters is vo-
luminous and detailed, and it abounds with alter-
natives. Its aim is rather to keep before the samurai
by a number of sample duties, as it were, the need
of and some of the chief methods towards health
of body and mind rather than to provide a com-
prehensive rule, and to ensure the maintenance
of a community of feeling and interests among
the samurai through habit, intercourse and a living
contemporary literature. These minor obligations
do not earmark more than an hour in the day, yet
they serve to break down isolations of sympathy,
all sorts of physical and intellectual sluggishness and
the development of unsocial preoccupations of many
sorts. . . .

"So far as the samurai have a purpose in common
in maintaining the State and the order and discipline
of the world, so far, by their discipline and denial,
by their public work and effort, they worship God
together. But the ultimate fount of motives lies
in the individual life, it lies in silent and deliberate
reflections, and at this, the most striking of all the
rules of the samurai aims. For seven consecutive
days in the year, at least, each man or woman under
the Rule must go right out of all the life of men into
some wild and solitary place, must speak to no man

Of General Conduct 183

or woman and have no sort of intercourse with man-
kind. They must go bookless and weaponless,
without pen or paper or money. Provision must be
taken for the period of the journey, a rug or sleeping-
sack — for they must sleep under the open sky— but
no means of making a fire. They may study maps
before to guide them, showing any difficulties and
dangers in the journey, but they may not carry such
helps. They must not go by beaten ways or wherever
there are inhabited houses, but into the bare, quiet
places of the globe — the regions set apart for
them.

"This discipline was invented to secure a certain
stoutness of heart and body in the samurai. Other-
wise the order might have lain open to too many tim-
orous, merely abstemious men and women. Many
things had been suggested, sword-play and tests
that verged on torture, climbing in giddy places
and the like, before this was chosen. Partly, it is
to ensure good training and sturdiness of body and
mind, but partly also, it is to draw the minds of the
Samurai for a space from the insistent details of
life, from the intricate arguments and the fretting
effort to work, from personal quarrels and personal
affections and the things of the heated room. Out
they must go, clean out of the world. ..."

These passages will at least serve to present
the samurai idea and the idea of common Rule
of conduct it embodied.

In the Modern Utopia I discuss also a lesser
Rule and the modification of the Rule for women

i84 First and Last Things

and the relation to the order of what I call the
poietic types, those types whose business in life
seems to be rather to experience and express
than to act and effectually do. For those things
I must refer the reader to the book itself. To-
gether with a sentence I have put in italics above,
they serve to show that even when I was devising
those samurai, I was not unmindful of the defects
that are essential to such a scheme.

This dream of the samurai proved attractive
to a much more various group of readers than
the New Republican suggestion, and there have
been actual attempts to realise the way of life
proposed. In most of these cases there was mani-
fest a disposition greatly to overaccentuate organ-
isation, to make too much of the disciplinary side
of the Rule and to forget the entire subordination
of such things to active thought and constructive
effort. They are valuable and indeed only justi-
fiable as a means to an end. These attempts of
a number of people of very miscellaneous origins
and social traditions to come together and work
like one machine made the essential wastefulness
of any terrestrial realisation of my samurai very
clear. The only reason for such an Order is the
economy and development of force, and under
existing conditions disciplines would consume

Of General Conduct 185

more force than they would engender. The
Order so far from being a power would be an
isolation. Manifestly the elements of organisa-
tion and uniformity were overdone in my Utopia ;
in this matter I was nearer the truth in the case
of my New Republicans. These, in contrast
with the samurai, had no formal general organisa-
tion, they worked for a common end because
their minds and the suggestion of their circum-
stances pointed them to a common end. Nothing
was enforced upon them in the way of observance
or discipline. They were not shepherded and
trained together, they came together. It was
assumed that if they wanted strongly they would
see to it that they lived in the manner most
conducive to their end just as in all this book I
am taking it for granted that to believe truly is
to want to do right. It was not even required of
them that they should sedulously propagate their
constructive idea.

Apart from the illumination of my ideas by
these experiments and proposals, my Samurai idea
has also had a quite unmerited amount of subtle
and able criticism from people who found it at
once interesting and antipathetic. My friends
Vernon Lee and G. K. Chesterton, for example,
have criticised it, and I think very justly, on the

1 86 First and Last Things

ground that the invincible tortuousness of human
pride and class-feeHng would inevitably vitiate
its working. All its disciplines would tend to
give its members a sense of distinctness, would
tend to syndicate power and rob it of any inti-
macy and sympathy with those outside the
Order. . . .

It seems to me now that anyone who shares the
faith I have been developing in this book will see
the value of these comments and recognise that
this dream is a dream; the samtirai are just one
more picture of the Perfect Knight, an ideal of
clean, resolute and balanced living. They may
be valuable as an ideal of attitude but not as an
ideal of organisation. They are never to be put,
as people say, upon a business footing and made
available as a refuge from the individual problem.

To modernise the parable, the Believer must
not only not bury his talent but he must not bank
it with an organisation. Each Believer must
decide for himself how far he wants to be kinetic
or efficient, how far he needs a stringent rule of
conduct, how far he is poietic and may loiter and
adventure among the coarse and dangerous things
of life. There is no reason why one should not,
and there is every reason why one should, discuss
one's personal needs and habits and disciplines

Of General Conduct 187

and elaborate one's way of life with those about
one, and form perhaps with those of like training
and congenial temperament, small groups for
mutual support. That sort of association I have
already discussed in the previous section. With
adolescent people in particular such societies are
in many cases an almost instinctive necessity.
There is no reason moreover why everyone who
is lonely shoiild not seek out congenial minds and
contrive a grouping with them. All mutual
lovers for example are Orders of a limited mem-
bership, many married couples and endless cliques
and sets are that. Such small and natural asso-
ciations are indeed force-giving Orders because
they are brought together by a common innate
disposition out of a possibility of mutual assis-
tance and inspiration; they observe a Rule that
springs up and not a Rule imposed. The more
of such groups and Orders we have the better. I
do not see why having formed themselves they
should not dispose and organise themselves. I
believe there is a phase somewhere between fifteen
and thirty, in the life of nearly everybody when
such a group is sought, is needed and would be
helpful in self -development and self -disco very.
In leagues and societies for specific ends too, we
must all participate. But the order of the

1 88 First and Last Things

samurai as a great progressive force controlling
a multitude of lives right down to their intimate
details and through all the phases of personal
development is a thing unrealisable. To seek
to realise it is impatience. True brotherhood is
universal brotherhood. The way to that is long
and toilsome, but it is a way that permits of no
such energetic short cuts as this militant order
of my dream would achieve.

§11.

Concerning New Starts and New Religions.
— When one is discussing this possible formation
of cults and brotherhoods, it may be well to con-
sider a few of the conditions that rule such human
re-groupings. We live in the world as it is and
not in the world as we want it to be, that is the
practical rule by which we steer, and in directing
our lives we must constantly consider the forces
and practicabilities of the social medium in which
we move.

In contemporary life the existing ties are so

various and so imperative that the detachment

necessary as a preliminary condition to such new

groupings is rarely found. This is not a period

in which large numbers of people break away

early and completely from old connexions. Things

change less catastrophically than once they did.

More particularly is there less driving out into

the wilderness. There is less heresy hunting;

persecution is frequently reluctant and can be

evaded by slight concessions. The world as a

whole is less harsh and emphatic than it was.

189

iQo First and Last Things

Customs and customary attitudes change now-
adays not so much by open, defiant and revolu-
tionary breaches as by the attrition of partial
negligencies and new glosses. Innovating people
do conform to current usage, albeit they conform
unwillingly and imperfectly. There is a constant
breaking down and building up of usage, and as
a consequence a lessened need of wholesale sub-
stitutions. Human methods have become vivi-
parous ; the New nowadays lives for a time in the
form of the Old. The friend I quote in § 9 writes
of a possible sect with a ''religious edifice" and
ritual of its own, a new religious edifice and a
new ritual. In practice I doubt whether "real"
people, people who matter, people who are get-
ting things done and who have already developed
complex associations, can afTord the intensive
readjustment implied in such a new grouping.
It would mean too much loss of time, too much
loss of energy and attention, too much sacrifice
of existing co-operations.

New cults, new religions, new organisations of
all sorts, insisting upon their novelty and differ-
ence, are most prolific and most successful wher-
ever there is an abundant supply of dissociated
people, where movement is in excess of delibera-
tion and creeds and formulae unyielding and

Of General Conduct 191

unadaptable because they are unthinking. In
England, for example, in the last century where
social conditions have been comparatively stable,
discussion good and abundant and internal mi-
gration small, there have been far fewer such
developments than in the United States of Amer-
ica. In England toleration has become an insti-
tution, and where Tory and Socialist, Bishop
and Infidel can all meet at the same dinner table
and spend an agreeable week-end together, there
is no need for defensive segregations. In such
an atmosphere opinion and usage change and
change continually but not dramatically as the
results of separations and pitched battles but
continuously and fluently as the outcome of in-
numerable personal reactions. America on the
other hand because of its material preoccupations,
because of the dispersal of its thinking classes over
great areas, because of the cruder understand-
ing of its more heterogeneous population (which
constantly renders hard and explicit statement
necessary), means its creeds much more literally
and is at once more experimental and less com-
promising and tolerant. It is there if anywhere
that new Brotherhoods and new creeds will con-
tinue to appear. But even in America I think
the trend of things is away from separations and

192 First and Last Things

segregations and new starts, and towards more com-
prehensive and graduated methods of development.
New ReHgions, I think, appear and are possible
and necessary in phases of social disorganisation,
in phases when considerable numbers of people
are detached from old systems of direction and
unsettled and distressed. So at any rate it was
Christianity appeared, in a strained and disturbed
community, in the clash of Roman and Oriental
thought, and for a long time it was confined to
the drifting population of seaports and great
cities and to wealthy virgins and widows, reaching
the most settled and most adjusted class, the
pagani last of all and in its most adaptable forms.
It was the greatest new beginning in the world's
history, and the wealth of political and literary
and social and artistic traditions it abandoned
had subsequently to be revived and assimilated
to it, fragment by fragment from the past it had
submerged. Now I do not see that the world
to-day presents any fair parallelism to that sere
age of stresses in whose recasting Christianity
played the part of a flux. Ours is on the whole
an organising and synthetic rather than a dis-
integrating phase throughout the world. Old
institutions are neither hard nor obstinate to-day,
and the immense and various constructive forces

Of General Conduct 193

at work are saturated now with the conception of
evolution, of secular progressive development,
as opposed to the revolutionary idea. Only a
very vast and terrible war explosion can, I think,
change this state of affairs.

This conveys in general terms, at least, my
interpretation of the present time, and it is in
accordance with this view that the world is moving
forward as a whole and with much dispersed and
discrepant Tightness, that I do not want to go
apart from the world as a whole into any smaller
community with all the implication of an exclu-
sive possession of right which such a going apart
involves. Put to the test of my own Samurai for
example, by a particularly urgent and enthusiastic
disciple, I found I did not in the least want to be
one of that organisation, that it only expressed
one side of a much more complex self than its
disciplines permitted. And still less do I want
to hamper the play of my thoughts and motives
by going apart into the particularism of a New
Religion. Such refuges are well enough when the
times threaten to overwhelm one. The point about
the present age, so far as I am able to judge the
world, is that it does not threaten to overwhelm,
that at the worst, by my standards, it maintains its
way of thinking instead of assimilating mine.
13

12.

The Idea of the Church. — Now all this leads
very directly to a discussion of the relations of
a person of my way of thinking to the Church
and religious institutions generally. I have al-
ready discussed my relation to commonly ac-
cepted beliefs, but the question of institutions is,
it seems to me, a different one altogether. Not
to realise that, to confuse a church with its
creed, is to prepare the ground for a mass of
disastrous and life-wasting errors.

Now my rules of conduct are based on the
supposition that moral decisions are to be deter-
mined by the belief that the individual life guided
by its perception of beauty is incidental, experi-
mental and contributory to the undying life of
the blood and race. I have decided for myself
that the general business of life is the develop-
ment of a collective consciousness and will and
purpose out of a chaos of individual conscious-
nesses and wills and purposes, and that the way
to that is through the development of the So-
cialist State, through the socialisation of existing

194

Of General Conduct 195

State organisations and their merger or pacific
association in a world state. But so far I have
not taken up the collateral aspect of the synthesis
of human consciousness, the development of
collective feeling and willing and expression in
the form, among others, of religious institutions.
Religious institutions are things to be legiti-
mately distinguished from the creeds and cos-
mogonies with which one finds them associated.
Customs are far more enduring things than ideas,
witness the misletoe at Christmas or the old lady
turning her money in her pocket at the sight of
the new moon. And the exact origin of a religious
institution is of much less significance to us than
its present effect. The theory of a religion may
propose the attainment of Nirvana or the propitia-
tion of an irascible Deity or a dozen other things
as its end and aim, the practical fact is that it
draws together great multitudes of diverse in-
dividualised people in a common solemnity and
self-subordination however vague, and is so far
like the State, and in a manner far more intimate
and emotional and fundamental than the State,
a synthetic power. And in particular, the idea
of the Catholic Church is charged with synthetic
suggestion; it is in many ways an idea broader
and finer than the constructive idea of any existing

196 First and Last Things

state. And just as the Beliefs I have adopted lead
me to regard myself as in and of the existing state,
such as it is, and working for its rectification
and development, so I think there is a reasonable
case for considering oneself in and of the Catholic
Church and bound to work for its rectification
and development. And this in spite of the fact
that one may not feel justified in calling oneself
a Christian in any sense of the term.

It may be m^aintained very plausibly that the
Catholic Church is something greater than Christ-
ianity, however much the Christians may have
contributed to its making. From the historical
point of view it is a religious and social method
that developed with the later development of the
world empire of Rome and as the expression of
its moral and spiritual side. Its head was and
so far as its main body is concerned still is, the
pontifex maximus of the Roman w^orld empire, an
official who was performing sacrifices centuries
before Christ was born. It is easy to assert that
the Empire was converted to Christianity and
submitted to its terrestrial leader, the bishop of
Rome; it is quite equally plausible to say that
the religious organisation of the Empire adopted
Christianity and so made Rome, which had hith-
erto had no priority over Jerusalem or Antioch m

Of General Conduct 197

the Christian Church the headquarters of the
adopted cult. And if the Christian movement
could take over and assimilate the prestige, the
world predominance and sacrificial conception of
the pontifex maximus and go on with that as part
at any rate of the basis of a universal church, it
is manifest that now in the fulness of time, this
great organisation, after its accumulation of
Christian tradition, may conceivably go on still
further to alter and broaden its teaching and
observances and formulae.

»In a sense no doubt all we moderns are bound
to consider ourselves children of the Catholic
Church, albeit critical and innovating children
with a tendency rather to hark back to our Greek
grandparents; we cannot detach ourselves abso-
lutely from the church without at the same time
detaching ourselves from the main process of
spiritual synthesis that has made us what we are.
And there is a strong case for supposing that not
only is this reasonable for us who live in the
tradition of Western Europe, but that we are
legitimately entitled to call upon extra-European
peoples to join with us in that attitude of filiation
to the Catholic Church since, outside it, there is no
organisation whatever aiming at a religious catho-
licity and professing or attempting to formulate

igS First and Last Things

a collective religious consciousness in the world.
So far as they come to a conception of a human
synthesis they come to it by coming into our
tradition.

I write here of the Catholic Church as an idea.
To come from that idea to the world of present
realities is to come to a tangle of difficulties. Is
the Catholic Church merely the Roman commun-
ion or does it include the Greek and Protestant
Churches? Some of these bodies are declaredly
dissentient, some claim to be integral portions
of the Catholic Church which have protested
against and abandoned certain errors of the
central organisation. I admit it becomes a very
confusing riddle in such a country as England to
determine which is the Catholic Church; whether
it is the body which possesses and administers
Canterbury Cathedral and Westminster Abbey,
or the bodies claiming to represent purer and
finer or more authentic and authoritative forms
of Catholic teaching which have erected that new
Byzantine-looking cathedral in Westminster, or
Whitefield's Tabernacle in the Tottenham Court
Road, or a hundred or so other organised and inde-
pendent bodies. It is still more perplexing to settle
upon the Catholic Church in America among an
immense confusion of sectarian fragments.

Of General Conduct 199

Many people, I know, take refuge from the
struggle with this tangle of controversies by re-
fusing to recognise any institutions whatever as
representing the Church. They assume a mystical
Church made up of all true believers, of all men
and women of good intent, whatever their formulae
or connexion. Wherever there is worship, there,
they say, is a fragment of the Church. All and
none of these bodies are the true Church.

This is profoundly true no doubt. It gives
something like a working assumption for the needs
of the present time. People can get along upon,
that. But it does not exhaust the question. We
seek a real and understanding synthesis. We
want a real collectivism, not a poetical idea; a
means whereby men and women of all sorts, all
kinds of humanity, may pray together, sing to-
gether, stand side by side, feel the same wave of
emotion, develop a collective being. No doubt
right-spirited men are praying now at a thousand
discrepant altars. But for the most part those
who pray imagine those others who do not pray
beside them are in error, they do not know their
common brotherhood and salvation. Their bro-
therhood is marked by unanalysable differences;
theirs is a dispersed collectivism; their churches
are only a little more extensive than their

200 First and Last Things

individualities and intenser in the^'r collective
separations.

The true Church towards which my own
thoughts tend will be the conscious illuminated
expression of Catholic brotherhood. It must, I
think, develop out of the existing medley of
Church fragments and out of all that is worthy
in our poetry and literature, just as the world-
wide Socialist State at which I aim must develop
out of such state and casual economic organisa-
tions and constructive movements as exist to-
day. There is no ** beginning again" in these
things. In neither case will going apart out of
existing organisations secure our ends. Out of
what is, we have to develop what has to be. To
work for the Reformation of the Catholic Church
is an integral part of the duty of a believer.

It is curious how misleading a word can be.
We speak of a certain phase in the history of
Christianity as the Reformation, and that word
effectually conceals from most people the simple
indisputable fact that there has been no Reforma-
tion. There was an attempt at a Reformation
in the Catholic Church, and through a variety
of causes it failed. It detached great masses
from the Catholic Church and left that organisa-
tion impoverished intellectually and spiritually,

Of General Conduct 201

but it achieved no reconstruction at all. It
achieved no reconstruction because the movement
as a whole lacked an adequate grasp of one funda-
mentally necessary idea, the idea of Catholicity.
It fell into particularism and failed. It set up a
vast process of fragmentation among Christian
associations. It drove huge fissures through the
once common platform. In innumerable cases
they were fissures of organisation and prejudice
rather than real differences in belief and mental
habit. Sometimes it was manifestly conflicting
material interests that made the split. People
are now divided by forgotten points of difference,
by sides taken by their predecessors in the dis-
putes of the sixteenth century, by mere sectarian
names and the walls of separate meeting places.
In the present time as a result of the dissenting
method, there are multitudes of believing men
scattered quite solitarily through the world.

The Reformation, the Reconstruction of the
Catholic Church lies still before us. It is a neces-
sary work. It is a work strictly parallel to the
reformation and expansion of the organised State.
Together these processes constitute the general
duty before mankind.

§ 13-

Of Secession. — ^The whole trend of my thought
in matters of conduct is against whatever ac-
centuates one's individual separation from the
collective consciousness. It follows naturally
from my fundamental creed that avoidable
silences and secrecy are sins, just as abstinences
are in themselves sins rather than virtues. And
so I think that to leave any organisation or human
association except for a wider and larger associa-
tion, to detach oneself in order to go alone, or to
go apart narrowly with just a few, is fragmenta-
tion and sin. Even if one disagrees with the pro-
fessions or formulae or usages of an association,
one should be sure that the disagreement is suffi-
ciently profound to justify one's secession, and
in any case of doubt, one should remain.

No profession of faith, no formula, no usage
can be perfect. It is only required that it should
be possible. More particularly does this apply
to churches and religious organisations. There
never was a creed nor a religious declaration but
admitted of a wide variety of interpretations and

Of General Conduct 203

implied both more and less than it expressed.
The pedantically conscientious man, in his search
for an unblemished religious brotherhood, tends
always to a solitude of universal dissent.

In the religious, as in the economic, sphere one
must not look for perfect conditions. Setting up
for oneself in a new sect is like founding Utopian
settlements in Paraguay, an evasion of the essential
question; our real business is to take what we
have, live in and by it, use it and do our best to
better such faults as are manifest to us, in the
direction of a wider and nobler organisation. If
you do not agree with the church in which you
find yourself, your best course is to become a re-
former in that church, to declare it a detached
forgetful part of the greater church that ought
to be, just as your State is a detached unawakened
part of the World State. You take it as what it
is and try and broaden it towards reunion. It
is only when secession is absolutely unavoidable
that it is right to secede.

This is particularly true of state churches such
as is the Church of England. These are bodies
constituted by the national law and amenable
to the collective will. I do not think a man should
consider himself excluded from them because
they have Articles of Religion to which he cannot

204 First and Last Things

subscribe and Creeds he will not say. A National
State Church has no right to be thus limited and
exclusive. Rather then let any man, just to the
very limit that is possible for his intellectual or
moral temperament, remain in his Church to
redress the balance and do his utmost to change
and broaden it.

But perhaps the church will not endure a broad-
minded man in its body, speaking and reforming,
and will expel him?

Be expelled — well and good! That is alto-
gether different. Let them expel you, struggling
valiantly, and resolved to return so soon as they
release you to hammer at the door. But with-
drawing— sulking — going off in a serene huff to
live by yourself spiritually and materially in your
own way — that is voluntary damnation, the de-
nial of the Brotherhood of Man. Be a rebel or
a revolutionary to your heart's content, but a
mere seceder never.

For otherwise it is manifest that we shall have
to pay for each step of moral and intellectual
progress with a fresh start, with a conflict between
the new organisation and the old from which it
sprang, a perpetually recurring parricide. There
will be a series of religious institutions in develop-
ing order, each containing the remnant too dull or

Of General Conduct 205

too hypocritical to secede at the time of stress
that began the new body. Something of the
sort has indeed happened to both the Catholic
and English protest ant churches. We have the
intellectual and moral guidance of the people
falling more and more into the hands of an in-
formal Church of morally impassioned leaders,
writers, speakers and the like, while the beautiful
cathedrals in which their predecessors sheltered,
fall more and more into the hands of an unin-
spiring, retrogressive but conforming clergy.

Now this was all very well for the Individualist
Liberal of the Early Victorian period, but In-
dividualist Liberalism was a more destructive
phase in the process of renewing the old Catholic
order, a clearing of the site. We Socialists want
a Church through which we can feel and think
collectively, as much as we want a State that we
can serve and be served by. Whether as members
or external critics we have to do our best to get
rid of obsolete doctrinal and ceremonial barriers,
so that the churches may merge again in a uni-
versal Church, and that Church comprehend again
the whole growing and amplifying spiritual life
of the race.

I do not know if I make my meaning perfectly
clear here. By conformity I do not mean silent

2o6 First and Last Things

conformity. It is a man's primary duty to con-
vey his individual difference to the minds of his
fellow-men. It is because I want that difference
to tell to the utmost that I suggest he should not
leave the assembly. But in particular instances
he may find it more striking and significant to
stand out and speak as a man detached from the
general persuasion, just as obstructed and em-
barrassed ministers of State can best serve their
country at times by resigning ofifice and appealing
to the public judgment by this striking and sig-
nificant act.

§ 14.

A Dilemma. — We are led by this discussion of
secession straight between the horns of a moral
dilemma. We have come to two conclusions;
to secede is a grave sin, but to lie is also a grave
sin.

But often the practical alternative is between
futile secession or implicit or actual falsehood.
It has been the instinct of the aggressive contro-
versialist in all ages to seize upon collective or-
ganisations and fence them about with oaths and
declarations of such a nature as to bar out anyone
not of his own way of thinking. In a democracy,
for example, to take an extreme caricature of our
case, a triumphant majority in power, before
allowing anyone to vote, might impose an oath
whereby the leader of the minority and all his
aims were specifically renounced. And if no
country goes so far as that, nearly all cotin tries
and all churches make some such restrictions upon
opinion. The United States, that land of freedoms
abandoned and seceding, imposes upon everyone

who crosses the Atlantic to its shores, a childish

207

2o8 First and Last Things

ineffectual declaration against anarchy and poly-
gamy. None of these tests exclude the unhesitat-
ing liar, but they do bar out many proud and
honest-minded people. They "fix" and kill
things that should be living and fluid; they are
offences against the mind of the race. How is a
man then to behave towards these test oaths and
affirmations, towards repeating Creeds, signing
assent to Articles of Religion and the like? Do
not these unavoidable barriers to public service,
religious work and the like, stand on a special
footing?

Personally I think they do.

I think that in most cases personal isolation
and disuse is the greater evil. I think if there is
no other way to constructive service except
through test oaths and declarations, one must
take them. This is a particular case that stands
apart from all other cases. The man who preaches
a sermon and pretends therein to any belief he
does not truly hold is an abominable scoundrel,
but I do not think he need trouble his soul very
greatly about the barrier he stepped over to get
into the pulpit, if he felt the call to preach, so long
as the preaching be honest. A Republican who
takes the oath of allegiance to the King and wears
his uniform is in a similar case. These things

Of General Conduct 209

stand apart; they are so formal as to be scarcely
more reprehensible than the falsehood of calling
a correspondent **Dear" or asking a tiresome
intruder to whom one is being kind and civil for
the pleasure of his company to lunch or dinner.
We ought to do what we can to abolish these
absurd barriers and petty falsehoods, but we
ought not to commit a social suicide against
them.

That is how I think and feel in this matter, but
if a man sees the matter more gravely, if his con-
science tells him relentlessly and uncompro-
misingly, "this is a lie," then it is a lie and he
must not be guilty of it. But then I think it ill
becomes him to be silently excluded. His work
is to clamour against the existence of the barrier
that wastes him.

I do not see that lying itself is a fundamental
sin. In the first place some lying, that is to say
some unavoidable inaccuracy of statement is
necessary to nearly everything we do, and the
truest statement becomes false if we forget or
alter the angle at which it is made, the direction
in which it points. In the next the really funda-
mental and most generalised sin is self-isolation.
Lying is a sin only because self-isolation is a sin,
because it is an effectual way of cutting oneself

2IO First and Last Things

off from human co-operation. That is why there
is no sin in telHng a fairy tale to a child. But
telling the truth when it will be misunderstood is
no whit better than lying, and silences are often
blacker than any lies. I class secrets with lies
and cannot comprehend the moral standards
that exonerate secrecy in human affairs.

To all these things one must bring a personal
conscience and be prepared to examine particular
cases. The excuses I have made, for example,
for a very broad churchman to stay in the Church
might very well be twisted into an excuse for
professing faith in something one did not to
the slightest extent believe in order to enter and
betray some organisation to which one was vio-
lently hostile. I admit that there may be every
gradation between these two things. The in-
dividual must examine his special case and weigh
the element of treachery against the possibility
of co-operation. I do not see how there can be
a general rule. I have already shown why in
my own case I hesitate to profess a belief in God
because I think the misleading element in that
profession would outweigh the advantage of sym-
pathy and confidence gained.

§15-

A Comment. — The preceding section has been
criticised by a friend who writes:

"In religious matters apparent assent produces
false unanimity. There is no convention about
these things; if there were they would not exist.
On the contrary, the only way to get perfunctory
tests and so forth abrogated, is for a sufficient
number of people to refuse to take them. It is
in this case as in every other; secession is the be-
ginning of a new integration. The living elements
leave the dead or dying form and gradually create
in virtue of their own combinations a new form
more suited to present things. There is a forma-
tive, a creative power in sincerity, and also in
segregation itself. And the new form, the new
species produced by variation and segregation
will measure itself and its qualities with the old
one. The old one will either go to the wall,
accept the new one and be renewed by it, or the
new one will itself be pushed out of existence if
the old one has more vitality and is better adapted
to the circumstances. This process of variation,

311

2 12 First and Last Things

competition and selection, also of intermarriage
between equally vital and equally adapted varie-
ties, is after all the process by which not only
races exist but all human thoughts."

So my friend, who I think is altogether too
strongly swayed by biological analogies. But I
am thinking not of the assertion of opinions pri-
marily but of co-operation with an organisation
within which, save for the matter of the test, one
may agree. Secession may not involve the de-
velopment of a new and better moral organisation ;
it may simply mean the suicide of one's public
aspect. There may be no room or no need of a
rival organisation. To secede from state employ-
ment for example is not to create the beginnings
of a new state however many — short of a revolu-
tion— may secede with you. It is to become a
disconnected private person and throw up one's
social side.

§i6

War. — I do not think a discussion of a man's
social relations can be considered at all complete
or satisfactory until we have gone into the ques-
tion of military service. To-day, in an increasing
number of countries, military service is an essen-
tial part of citizenship and the prospect of war
lies like a great shadow across the whole bright
complex prospect of human affairs. What should
be the attitude of a right-living man towards
his state at war and to warlike preparations?

In no other connexion are the confusions

and uncertainty of the contemporary mind

more manifest. It is an odd contradiction that

in Great Britain and Western Europe generally,

just those parties that stand most distinctly

for personal devotion to the State in economic

matters, the Socialist and Socialistic parties,

are most opposed to the idea of military service,

and just those parties that defend individual

self-seeking and social disloyalty in the sphere

of property, are most urgent for conscription.

No doubt some of this uncertainty is due to the
213

2 14 First and Last Things

mixing in of private interests with public pro-
fessions, but much more is it, I think, the result
of mere muddle-headedness and an insufficient
grasp of the implications of the propositions
under discussion. The ordinary political So-
cialist desires, as I desire, and as I suppose every
sane man desires as an ultimate ideal, universal
peace, the merger of national partitions in loy-
alty to the World State. But he does not re-
cognise that the way to reach that goal is not
necessarily by minimising and specialising war
and war responsibility at the present time.
There he falls short of his own constructive
conceptions and lapses into the secessionist
methods of the earlier Radicals. We have here
another case strictly parallel to several we have
already considered. War is a collective con-
cern; to turn one's back upon it, to refuse to
consider it as a possibility, is to leave it entirel}^
to those who are least prepared to deal with it
in a broad spirit.

In many ways war is the most socialistic of
all forces. In many ways military organisation
is the most peaceful of activities. When the
contemporary man steps from the street of clam-
orous insincere advertisement, push, adultera-
tion, underselling and intermittent employment,

Of General Conduct 215

into the barrack-yard, he steps on to a higher
social plane, into an atmosphere of service and
co-operation and of infinitely more honourable
emtilations. Here at least men are not flung
out of employment to degenerate because there
is no immediate work for them to do. They
are fed and drilled and trained for better ser-
vices. Here at least a man is supposed to win
promotion by self-forgetfulness and not by self-
seeking. And beside the feeble and irregular
endowment of research by commercialism, its
little short-sighted snatches at profit by inno-
vation and scientific economy, see how remark-
able is the steady and rapid development of
method and appliances in naval and military
affairs! Nothing is more striking than to com-
pare the progress of civil conveniences which
has been left almost entirely to the trader, to
the progress in military apparatus during the
last few decades. The house appliances of to-
day for example, are little better than they
were fifty years ago. A house of to-day is still
almost as ill- ventilated, badly heated by waste-
ful fires, clumsily arranged and furnished as
the house of 1858. Houses a couple of hundred
years old are still satisfactory places of residence,
so little have our standards risen. But the rifle

2i6 First and Last Things

or battleship of fifty years ago was beyond all
comparison inferior to those we possess; in
power, in speed, in convenience alike. No one
has a use now for such superannuated things.

§ 17

War and Competition. — What is the mean-
ing of war in life?

War is manifestly not a thing in itself, it is
something correlated with the whole fabric of
human life. That violence and killing which
between animals of the same species is private
and individual becomes socialised in war. It
is a co-operation for killing that carries with
it also a co-operation for saving and a great
development of mutual help and development
within the war-making group.

War, it seems to me, is really the elimination
of violent competition as between man and
man, an excretion of violence from the develop-
ing social group. Through war and military
organisation, and through war and military
organisation only, has it become possible to
conceive of peace.

This violence was a necessary phase in human
and indeed in all animal development. Among
low types of men and animals it seems an in-
evitable condition of the vigour of the species

217

2i8 First and Last Things

and the beauty of life. The more vital and
various individual must lead and prevail, leave
progeny and make the major contribution to
the synthesis of the race; the weaker individual
must take a subservient place and leave no
offspring. That means in practice that the
former must directly or indirectly kill the latter
until some mitigated but equally effectual sub-
stitute for that killing is invented. That duel
disappears from life, the fight of the beasts for
food and the fight of the bulls for the cows, only
by virtue of its replacement by new forms of
competition. With the development of prim-
itive war we have such a replacement. The
competition becomes a competition to serve
and rule in the group, the stronger take the
leadership and the larger share of life, and the
weaker co-operate in subordination, they waive
and compromise the conflict and use their con-
joint strength against a common rival.

Competition is a necessary condition of pro-
gressive life. I do not know if so far I have
made that belief sufficiently clear in these con-
fessions. Perhaps in my anxiety to convey
my idea of a human synthesis I have not suffi-
ciently insisted upon the part played by com-
petition in that synthesis. But the implications

Of General Conduct 219

of the view I have set forth are fairly plain.
Every individual, I have stated, is an experi-
ment for the sy.ithesis of the species, and upon
that idea my system of conduct so far as it is
a system is built. Manifestly the individual's
function is either self-development, service and
reproduction or failure and an end.

With moral and intellectual development the
desire to serve and participate in a collective
purpose arises to control the blind and pas-
sionate impulse to survival and reproduction
that the struggle of life has given us, but it does
not abolish the fact of selection, of competition.
I contemplate no end of competition. But for
competition that is passionate, egoistic and
limitless, cruel, clumsy and wasteful, I desire
to see competition that is controlled and fair-
minded and devoted, men and women doing
their utmost with themselves and making their
utmost contribution to the specific accumu-
lation, but in the end content to abide by a
verdict.

The whole development of civilisation, it
seems to me, consists in the development of
adequate tests of survival and of an intellectual
and moral atmosphere about those tests so that
they shall be neither cruel nor wasteful. If

220 First and Last Things

the test is not to be "are you s:rong enough to
kill everyone you do not like?" that will only be
because it will ask still more comprehensively
and with regard to a multitude of qualities other
than brute-killing power, "are you adding worth-
ily to the synthesis by existence and survival?'*

I am very clear in my mind on this perpetual
need of competition. I admit that upon that
turns the practicability of all the great series of
organising schemes that are called Socialism.
The Socialist scheme must show a system in
which predominance and reproduction are cor-
related with the quantity and amount of an
individual's social contribution, and so far I
acknowledge it is only in the most general terms
that this can be claimed as done. We Socialists
have to work out all these questions far more
thoroughly than we have done hitherto. We
owe that to our movement and the world.

It is no adequate answer to our antagonists
to say, indeed it is a mere tu quoque to say, that
the existing system does not present such a
correlation, that it puts a premium on secretive-
ness and self-seeking and a discount on many
most necessary forms of social service. That
is a mere temporary argument for a delay in
judgment.

Of General Conduct 221

The whole history of humanity seems to me
to present a spectacle of this organising special-
isation of competition, this replacement of the
indiscriminate and collectively blind struggle for
life by an organised and collectively intelligent
development of life. We see a secular replace-
ment of brute conflict by the law, a secular
replacement of indiscriminate brute lust by mar-
riage and sexual taboos, and now with the develop-
ment of Socialistic ideas and methods, the steady
replacement of blind industrial competition by
public economic organisation. As moreover there
is going on a great educational process bringing
a greater and greater proportion of the minds of
the community into relations of understanding
and interchange.

Just as this process of organisation proceeds,
the violent and chaotic conflict of individuals
and presently of groups of individuals disappears ;
personal violence, private war, cutthroat com-
petition, local war, each in turn is replaced by
a more efficient and more economical method
of survival, a method of survival giving con-
stantly and selecting always more accurately
a finer type of survivor.

I might compare the social synthesis to crys-
tals growing out of a fluid matrix. It is where

222 First and Last Things

the growing order of the crystals has as yet not
spread that the old resource to destruction and
violent personal or associated acts remains.

But this metaphor of crystals is a very in-
adequate one. Because crystals have no will in
themselves ; nor do crystals, having failed to grow
in some particular form, presently modify that
form more or less and try again. I see the or-
ganising of forces, not simply law and police
which are indeed mere paid mercenaries from
the region of violence, but legislation and litera-
ture, teaching and tradition, organised religion,
getting themselves and the social structure
together, year after year and age after age,
halting, failing, breaking up in order to try again.
And it seems to me that the amount of lawless-
ness and crime, the amount of waste and futility,
the amount of war and war possibility and war
danger in the world are just the measure of the
present inadequacy of the world's system of
collective organisations to the Purpose before
them.

§ i8.

Modern War. — In our contemporary world,

in our particular phase, military and naval or-
ganisation loom up, colossal and unprecedented
facts. They have the effect of an overhanging
disaster that grows every year more tremendous,
every year in more sinister contrast with the in-
creasing securities and tolerations of the every-
day life. It is impossible to imagine now what
a great war in Europe would be like ; the change
in material and method has been so profound
since the last cycle of wars ended with the down-
fall of the Third Napoleon. But there can be
little or no doubt that it would involve a de-
struction of property and industrial and social
disorganisation of the most monstrous dimen-
sions. No man, I think, can mark the limits
of the destruction of a great European conflict
were it to occur at the present time, and the
near advent of practicable flying machines opens
a whole new world of frightful possibilities.

For my own part I can imagine that a col-
lision between such powers as Great Britain,

223

22 4 First and Last Things

Germany or America, might very well involve
nearly every other power in the world, might
shatter the whole fabric of credit upon which
our present system of economics rests and put
back the orderly progress of social construction
for a vast interval of time. One figures great
towns red with destruction while giant airships
darken the sky, one pictures the crash of mighty
ironclads, the bursting of tremendous shells fired
from beyond the range of sight into unprotected
cities. One thinks of congested w^ays swarming
with desperate fighters, of torrents of fugitives
and battles gone out of the control of their gen-
erals into unappeasable slaughter. There is a
vision of interrupted communications, of wrecked
food trains and sunken food ships, of vast masses
of people thrown out of employment and darkly
tumultuous in the streets, of famine and famine-
driven rioters. What modern population will
stand a famine? For the first time in the his-
tory of warfare the rear of the victor, the rear
of the fighting line becomes insecure, assailable
by flying machines and subject to unprecedented,
and unimaginable panics. No man can tell
what savagery of desperation these new condi-
tions may not release in the soul of man. A
conspiracy of adverse chances, I say, might

Of General Conduct 225

contrive so great a cataclysm. There is no effect-
ual guarantee that it could not occur.

But in spite of that, I believe that on the whole
there is far more good than evil in the enormous
military growths that have occurred in the last
half century. I cannot estimate how far the
alternative to war is lethargy. It is through
military urgencies alone that many men can
be brought to consent to the collective endow-
ment of research, to public education and to
a thousand interferences with their private self-
seeking. Just as the pestilence of cholera was
necessary before men could be brought to con-
sent to public sanitation, so perhaps the dread
of foreign violence is an unavoidable spur in
an age of chaotic industrial production in order
that men may be brought to subserve the growth
of a State whose purpose might otherwise be too
high for them to understand. Men must be
forced to care for fleets and armies until they
have learnt to value cities and self-development
and a beautiful social life.

The real danger of modern war lies not in the
disciplined power of the fighting-machine but
in the imdisciplined forces in the collective mind
that may set that machine in motion. It is
not that our guns and ships are marvellously

2 26 First and Last Things

good, but that our press and political organisa-
tions are haphazard growths entirely inferior
to them. If this present phase of civilisation
should end in a debacle, if present humanity
finds itself beginning again at a lower level of
organisation, it will not be because we have
developed these enormous powers of destruction
but because we have failed to develop adequate
powers of control for them and collective de-
termination. This panoply of war waits as the
test of our progress towards the realisation of
that collective mind which I hold must ulti-
mately direct the evolution of our specific being.
It is here to measure our incoherence and error,
and in the measure of those defects to refer us
back to our studies.

Just as we understand does war become
needless.

But I do not think that war and military
organisation will so much disappear as change
its nature as the years advance. I think that
the phase of universal military service we seem
to be approaching is one through which the mass
of mankind may have to pass, learning some-
thing that can be learnt in no other way, that
the uniforms and flags, the conceptions of order
and discipline, the tradition of service and de-

Of General Conduct 227

votion, of physical fitness, unstinted exertion
and universal responsibility, will remain a per-
manent acquisition, though the last ammunition
has been used ages since in the pyrotechnic
display that welcomed the coming of the ultimate
Peace,

§ 19.

Of Abstinences and Disciplines. — From
these large issues of conduct let me come now
to more intimate things, to one's self-control,
the regulation of one's personal life. And first
about abstinences and disciplines.

I have already confessed (Book II, § 6) that
my nature is one that dislikes abstinences and
is wearied by and wary of excess.

I do not feel that it is right to suppress alto-
gether any part of one's being. In itself ab-
stinence seems to me a refusal to experience,
and that, upon the lines of thought I follow, is
to say that abstinence for its own sake is evil.
But for an end all abstinences are permissible,
and if the kinetic type of believer finds both
his individual and his associated efficiency en-
hanced by a systematic discipline, if he is con-
vinced that he must specialise because of the
discursiveness of his motives, because there is
something he wants to do or be so good that
the rest of them may very well be suppressed

for its sake, then he must suppress. But the

228

Of General Conduct 229

virtue is in what he gets done and not what he
does not do. Reasonable fear is a sound reason
for abstinence, as when a man has a passion
like a lightly sleeping maniac that the slightest
indulgence will arouse. Then he must needs
adopt heroic abstinence, and even more so must
he take to preventive restraint if he sees any
motive becoming unruly and urgent and trouble-
some. Fear is a sound reason for abstinence
and so is love. Many who have sensitive imag-
inations nowadays very properly abstain from
meat because of butchery. And it is often need-
ful, out of love and brotherhood, to abstain from
things harmless to oneself because they are
inconveniently alluring to others linked to us.
The moderate drinker who sits at table sipping
his wine in the sight of one he knows to be a
potential dipsomaniac is at the best but an
unloving fool.

But mere abstinence and the doing of barren
toilsome unrewarding things for the sake of the
toil, is a perversion of one's impulses. There
is neither honour nor virtue nor good in that.

I do not believe in negative virtues. I think
the ideas of them arise out of the system of
metaphysical errors I have roughly analysed
in my first book, out of the inherent tendency

230 First and Last Things

of the mind to make the relative absolute and
to convert quantitative into qualitative dif-
ferences. Our minds fall very readily under the
spell of such unmitigated words as Purity and
Chastity. Only death beyond decay, absolute
non-existence, can be Pure and Chaste. Life
is impurity, fact is impure. Everything has
traces of alien matter ; our very health is depend-
ent upon parasitic bacteria, the purest blood in
the world has a tainted ancestor, and not a saint
but has evil thoughts. It was blindness to that
which set men stoning the woman taken in
adultery. They forgot what they were made
of. This stupidity, this unreasonable idealism
of the common mind, fills life to-day with cruelties
and exclusions, with partial suicides and secret
shames. But we are born impure, we die impure ;
it is a fable that spotless white lilies sprang from
any saint's decay, and the chastity of monk or
nun is but introverted impurity. We have to
take life valiantly on these conditions and make
such honour and beauty and sympathy out of
our confusions, gather such constructive experi-
ence, as we may.

There is a mass of real superstition upon these
points, a belief in a magic purity, in magic per-
sonalities who can say: —

Of General Conduct 231

" My strength is as the strength of ten
Because my heart is pure," —

and in wonderful clairvoyant innocents like the
young man in Mr. Kipling's Finest Story in the
World.

There is a lurking disposition to believe, even
among those who lead the normal type of life,
that the abstinent and chastely celibate are
exceptionally healthy, energetic, immune. The
wildest claims are made. But indeed it is true
for all who can see the facts of life simply and
plainly, that man is an omnivorous, versatile,
various creature and can draw his strength from
a hundred varieties of nourishment. He has
physiological idiosyncracies too that are indif-
ferent to biological classifications and moral
generalities. It is not true that his absorbent
vessels begin their task as children begin the
guessing game, by asking, *'Is it animal, veg-
etable or mineral?" He responds to stimulation
and recuperates after the exhaustion of his re-
sponse, and his being is singularly careless
whether the stimulation comes as a drug or
stimulant, or as anger or music or noble appeals.

Most people speak of drugs in the spirit of
that admirable firm of soap-boilers which assures
its customers that the soap they make **con-

232 First and Last Things

tains no chemicals." Drugs are supposed to
be a mystic diabolical class of substance, remote
from and contrasting in their nature with all
other things. So they banish a tonic from the
house and stuff their children with manufactured
cereals and chocolate creams. The drunken
helot of this system of absurdities is the Christian
Scientist who denies healing only to those who
have studied pathology, and declares that any-
thing whatever put into a bottle and labelled
with directions for its use by a doctor is thereby
damnable and damned. But indeed all drugs
and all the things of life have their uses and
dangers, and there is no wholesale truth to ex-
cuse us a particular wisdom and watchfulness
in these matters. Unless w^e except smoking
as an unclean and needless artificiality, all these
matters of eating and drinking and habit are
matters of more or less. It seems to me foolish
to make anything that is stimulating and pleas-
urable into a habit, for that is slowly and surely
to lose a stimulus and pleasure and create a
need that it may became painful to check or
control. The moral rule of my standards is
irregularity. If I were a father confessor I should
begin my catalogue of sins by asking, ** Are you
a man of regular life?" And I would charge

Of General Conduct 233

my penitent to go away forthwith and commit
some practicable saving irregularity; to fast or
get drunk or climb a mountain or sup on pork
and beans or give up smoking or spend a month
with publicans and sinners. Right conduct for
the common unspecialised man lies delicately
adjusted between defect and excess as a watch
is adjusted and adjustable between fast and
slow. We none of us altogether and always
keep the balance or are altogether safe from
losing it. We swing, balancing and adjusting,
along our path. Life is that and abstinence is
for the most part a mere evasion of life.

§ 20.

On Forgetting, and the Need of Prayer,
Reading, Discussion and Worship. — One as-
pect of life I had very much in mind when I
planned those Samurai disciplines of mine. It
was forgetting.

We forget.

Even after we have found Salvation, we have
to keep hold of Salvation; believing, we must
continue to believe. We cannot always be at
a high level of noble emotion. We have clam-
bered on the ship of Faith and found our place
and work aboard, and even while we are busied
upon it, behold we are back and drowning in
the sea of chaotic things.

Every religious body, every religious teacher,
has appreciated this difficulty and the need
there is of reminders and renewals. Faith needs
restatement and revival as the body needs food.
And since the Believer is to seek much experi-
ence and be a judge of less or more in many
things, it is particularly necessary that he should

keep hold upon a living Faith.

234

Of General Conduct 235

How may he best do this ?

I think we may state it as a general duty
that he must do whatever he can to keep his
faith constantly alive. But beyond that what
a man must do depends almost entirely upon
his own intellectual character. Many people
of a regular type of mind can refresh themselves
by some recurrent duty, by repeating a daily
prayer, by daily reading or re-reading some
devotional book. With others constant repe-
tition leads to a mental and spiritual deaden-
ing, until beautiful phrases become unmeaning,
eloquent statements inane and ridiculous, —
matter for parody. All who can, I think, should
pray and should read and re-read what they have
found spiritually helpful, and if they know of
others of kindred dispositions and can organise
these exercises, they should do so. Collective
worship again is a necessity for many Believers.
For many, the public religious services of this
or that form of Christianity supply an at-
mosphere rich in the essential quality of religion
and abounding in phrases about the religious
life, rich and mellow from the use of centuries
and almost immediately applicable. It seems
to me that if one can do so, one should par-
ticipate in such public worship and habituate

236 First and Last Things

oneself to read back into it that collective pur-
pose and conscience it once embodied.

With others again, Faith can be most ani-
mated by writing, by confession, by discussion,
by talk with friends or antagonists.

One or other or all of these things the Believer
must do, for the mind is a living and moving
process, and the thing that lies inert in it is
presently covered up by new interests and lost.
If you make a sort of King Log of your faith,
presently something else will be sitting upon
it, pride or self-interest, or some rebel craving,
King de facto of your soul, directing it back to
anarchy.

For many types that however is exactly what
happens with public worship. They do get a
King Log in Ceremony. And if you deliberately
overcome and suppress your perception of and
repugnance to the perfunctoriness of religion in
nine tenths of the worshippers about you, you
may be destroying at the same time your own
intellectual and moral sensitiveness. But I am
not suggesting that you should force yourself
to take part in public worship against your
perceptions, but only that if it helps you to
worship you should not hesitate to do so.

We deal here with a real need that is not to

Of General Conduct 237

be fettered by any general prescription. I have
one Cambridge friend who finds nothing so up-
Hfting in the world as the atmosphere of the
afternoon service in the choir of King's College
Chapel, and another, a very great and distinguished
and theologically sceptical woman, who ac-
customed herself for some time to hear from
a distant corner the evening service in St. Paul's
Cathedral and who would go great distances to
do that.

Many people find an exaltation and broad-
ening of the mind in mountain scenery and the
starry heavens and the wide arc of the sea, and
as I have already said, it was part of the dis-
ciplines of these Samurai of mine that yearly
they should go apart for at least a week of sol-
itary wandering and meditation in lonely and
desolate places. Music again is a frequent means
of release from the narrow life as it closes about
us. One man I know makes an anthology into
which he copies to re-read any passage that
stirs and revives in him the sense of broad issues.
Others again seem able to refresh their nobility
of outlook in the atmosphere of an intense per-
sonal love.

Some of us seem to forget almost as if it were
an essential part of ourselves. Such a man as

238 First and Last Things

myself, irritable, easily fatigued and bored,
versatile, sensuous, curious and a little greedy
for experience, is perpetually losing touch with
his faith, so that indeed I sometimes turn over
these pages that I have written and come upon
my declarations and confessions with a sense of
alien surprise.

It may be, I say, that for some of us forget-
ting is the normal process, that one has to
believe and forget and blunder and learn some-
thing and regret and suffer and so come again
to belief much as we have to eat and grow hun-
gry and eat again. What these others can get
in their temples we, after our own manner, must
distil through sleepless and lonely nights, from
unavoidable humiliations, from the smarting of
bruised shins.

21.

Democracy and Aristocracy. — And now
having dealt with the general form of a man's
duty and with his duty to himself, let me come
to his attitude to his individual fellow-men.

The broad principles determining that atti-
tude are involved in things already written in
this book. The belief in a collective being gather-
ing experience and developing will, to which
every life is subordinated, renders the cruder
conception of aristocracy, the idea of a select
life going on amidst a majority of trivial and
contemptible persons who ''do not exist," un-
tenable. It abolishes contempt. Indeed to
believe at all in a comprehensive purpose in
things is to abandon that attitude and all the
habits and acts that imply it. But a belief in
universal significance does not altogether pre-
clude a belief in an aristocratic method of prog-
ress, in the idea of the subordination of a number
of individuals to others who can utilise their
lives and help and contributory achievements
in the general purpose. To a certain extent

239

240 First and Last Things

indeed, this last conception is almost inevitable.
We must needs so think of ourselves in relation
to plants and animals, and I see no reason why
we should not think so of our relations to other
men. There are clearly great differences in the
capacity and range of experience of man and
man and in their power of using and rendering
their experiences for the racial synthesis. Vig-
orous persons do look naturally for help and
service to persons of less initiative, and we all
are more or less capable of admiration and hero-
worship and pleased to help and give ourselves
to those we feel to be finer or better or completer
or more forceful and leaderly than ourselves.
This is natural and inevitable aristocracy.

For that reason it is not to be organised. We
organise things that are not inevitable, but
this is clearly a complex matter of accident and
personalities for which there can be no general
rule. All organised aristocracy is manifestly
begotten by that fallacy of classification my
Metaphysical book set itself to expose. Its
effect is, and has been in all cases, to mask natural
aristocracy, to draw the lines by wholesale and
wrong, to bolster up weak and ineffectual per-
sons in false positions and to fetter or hamper
strong and vigorous people. The false aristo

Of General Conduct 241

crat is a figure of pride and claims, a consumer
followed by dupes. He is proudly secretive, pre-
tending to aims beyond the common under-
standing. The true aristocrat is known rather
than knows; he makes and serves. He exacts
no deference. He is urgent to make others
share what he knows and wants and achieves.
He does not think of others as his but as the
End*s.

There is a base democracy just as there is a
base aristocracy, the swaggering, aggressive dis-
position of the vulgar soul that admits neither
of superiors nor leaders. Its true name is in-
subordination. It resents rules and refinements,
delicacies, differences and organisation. It dreams
that its leaders are its delegates. It takes refuge
from all superiority, all special knowledge, in
a phantom ideal, the People, the sublime and
wonderful People. "You can fool some of the
people all the time and all the people some of
the time, but you can't fool all the people all
the time," expresses I think quite the quintes-
sence of this mystical faith, this faith in which
men take refuge from the demand for order,
discipline and conscious light. In England it
has never been of any great account, but in
America, the vulgar individualist's self-protective

242 First and Last Things

exaltation of an idealised Common Man has
worked and is working infinite mischief.

In politics the crude democratic faith leads
directly to the submission of every question,
however subtle and special its issues may be
to a popular vote. The community is regarded
as a consultative committee of profoundly wise,
alert and well-informed Comman Men. Since
the common man is, as Gustave le Bon has
pointed out, a gregarious animal, collectively
rather like a sheep, emotional, hasty and shallow,
the practical outcome of political democracy
in all large communities under modern con-
ditions is to put power into the hands of rich
newspaper proprietors, advertising producers and
the energetic wealthy generally who are best
able to flood the collective mind freely with the
suggestions on which it acts.

But democracy has acquired a finer meaning
than its first crude intentions — there never was
a theory started yet in the human mind that
did not beget a finer offspring than itself — and
the secondary meaning brings it at last into
entire accordance with the finer conception of
aristocracy. The test of this quintessential
democracy is neither a passionate insistence
upon voting and the majority rule, nor an

Of General Conduct 243

arrogant bearing towards those who are one's
betters in this aspect or that, but fellowship.
The true democrat and the true aristocrat meet
and are one in feeling themselves parts of one
synthesis under one Purpose and one Scheme.
Both realise that self -concealment is the last
evil, both make frankness and veracity the basis
of their intercourse. The general rightness of
living for you and others and for others and you
is to understand them to the best of your ability
and to make them all, to the utmost limits of
your capacity of expression and their under-
standing and sympathy, participators in your
act and thought.

§ 22.

On Debts of Honour. — My ethical dispo-
sition is all against punctilio and I set no greater
value on unblemished honour than I do on purity.
I never yet met a man who talked proudly of
his honour who did not end by cheating me,
not a code of honour that did not impress me
as something of a conspiracy against the com-
mon welfare and purpose in life. There is honour
among thieves, and I think it might well end
there as an obligation in conduct. The soldier
who risks a life he owes to his army in a duel
upon some silly matter of personal pride is no
better to me than the clerk who gambles with
the money in his master's till. When I was a
boy I once paid a debt of honour, and it is one
of the things I am most ashamed of. I had
played cards into debt and I still remember
burningly how I went flushed and shrill-voiced
to my mother and got the money she could so
ill afford to give me. I would not pay such a
debt of honour now. If I were to wake up one

morning owing big sums that I had staked

244

Of General Conduct 245

over-night I would set to work at once by
every means in my power to evade and repudi-
ate that obhgation. Such money as I have I
owe under our present system to wife and
sons and my work and the world, and I see
no valid reason why I should hand it over
to Smith because he and I have played the
fool and rascal and gambled. Better by far
to accept that fact and be published fool and
rascal.

I have never been able to understand the
sentimental spectacle of sons toiling dreadfully
and wasting themselves upon mere money-
making to save the secret of a father's pecu-
lations and the ** honour of the family," or men
conspiring to weave a wide and mischievous
net of lies to save the "honour" of a woman.
In the conventional drama the preservation of the
honour of a woman seems an adequate excuse
for nearly any offence short of murder; the
preservation that is to say of the appearance
of something that is already gone. Here it is
that I do definitely part company with the false
aristocrat who is by nature and intent a humbug
and fabricator of sham attitudes, and ally my-
self with democracy. Fact, valiantly faced, is
of more value than any reputation. The false

246 First and Last Things

aristocrat is robed to the chin and unwashed
beneath, the true goes stark as Apollo. The
false is ridiculous with undignified insistence
upon his dignity- the true says like God, **I
am that I am."

§ 23.

The Idea of Justice. — One word has so far
played a very little part in this book, and that
is the word Justice.

Those who have read the opening book on
Metaphysics will perhaps see that this is a nec-
essary corollary of the system of thought de-
veloped therein. In my philosophy, with its
insistence upon uniqueness and marginal differ-
ences and the provisional nature of numbers
and classes, there is little scope for that blind-
folded lady with the balances, seeking always
exact equivalents. Nowhere in my system of
thought is there work for the idea of Rights
and the conception of conscientious litigious-
spirited people exactly observing nicely defined
relationships.

You will note, for example, that I base my
Socialism on the idea of a collective develop-
ment and not on the ** right" of every man to
his own labour, or his "right" to work, or his
** right" to subsistence. All these ideas of

** rights" and of a social ''contract" however

247

248 First and Last Things

implicit are merely conventional ways of look-
ing at things, conventions that have arisen in
the mercantile phase of human development.

Laws and rights, like common terms in speech,
are provisional things, conveniences for taking
hold of a number of cases that would otherwise
be unmanageable. The appeal to Justice is a
necessarily inadequate attempt to de-individ-
ualise a case, to eliminate the self's biassed at-
titude. I have declared that it is my wilful
belief that everything that exists is significant
and necessary. The idea of Justice seems to
me a defective, quantitative application of the
spirit of that belief to men and women. In
every case you try and discover and act upon
a plausible equity that must necessarily be based
on arbitary assumptions.

There is no equity in the universe, in the
various spectacle outside our minds; and the
most terrible nightmare the human imagination
has ever engendered is a Just God, measuring
with himself as the Standard against finite men.
Ultimately there is no adequacy, we are all
weighed in the balance and found wanting.

So, as the recognition of this has grown, Jus-
tice has been tempered with Mercy, which indeed
is no more than an attempt to equalise things

Of General Conduct 249

by making the factors of the very defect that
is condemned, its condonation. The modern
mind fluctuates uncertainly somewhere between
extremes, now harsh and now ineffectual.

To me there seems no validity in these quasi-
absolute standards.

A man seeks and obeys standards of equity
simply to economise his moral effort, not be-
cause there is anything true or sublime about
Justice, but because he knows he is too egoistic
and weak-minded and obsessed to do any perfect
thing at all, because he cannot trust himself
with his own transitory emotions unless he
train himself beforehand to observe a prede-
termined rule. There is scarcely an eventuality
in life that without the help of these general-
isations would not exceed the average man's
intellectual power and moral energy, just as
there is scarcely an idea or an emotion that can
be conveyed without the use of faulty and de-
fective common names. Justice and Mercy are
indeed not ultimately different in their nature
from such other conventions as the rules of a
game, the rules of etiquette, forms of address,
cab tariffs and standards of all sorts. They
are mere organisations of relationship either to
economise thought or else to facilitate mutual

250 First and Last Things

understanding and codify common action. Mod-
esty and self-submission, love and service are, in
the system of my beliefs, far more fundamental
Tightnesses and duties.

We are not mercantile and litigious units
such as making Justice our social basis would
imply, we are not select responsible right persons
mixed with and tending weak irresponsible
wrong persons such as the notion of Mercy sug-
gests, we are parts of one being and body, each
unique yet sharing a common nature and a
variety of imperfections and working together
(albeit more or less darkly and ignorantly) for
a common end.

We are strong and weak together and in one
brotherhood. The weak have no essential rights
against the strong, nor the strong against the
weak. The world does not exist for our weak-
nesses but our strength. And the real justifi-
cation of democracy lies in the fact that none of
us are altogether strong nor altogether weak;
for everyone there is an aspect wherein he is
seen to be weak; for everyone there is a strength
though it may be only a little peculiar strength
or an undeveloped potentiality. The uncon-
verted man uses his strength egotistically, em-
phasises himself harshly against the man who

Of General Conduct 251

is weak where he is strong, and hates and con-
ceals his own weakness. The Believer, in the
measure of his belief, respects and seeks to under-
stand the different strength of others and to use
his own distinctive power with and not against
his fellow men, in the common service of that
synthesis to which each one of them is ultimately
as necessary as he.

§24.

Of Love and Justice. — Now here the friend
who has read the first draft of this book falls
into something like a dispute with me. She
does not, I think, like this dismissal of Justice
from a primary place in my scheme of conduct.

''Justice," she asserts, "is an instinctive crav-
ing very nearly akin to the physical craving for
equilibrium. Its social importance corresponds.
It seeks to keep the individual's claims in such
a position as to conflict as little as possible with
those of others. Justice is the root instinct of
all social feeling, of all feeling which does not
take account of whether we like or dislike indi-
viduals, it is the feeling of an orderly position
of our Ego towards others, merely considered as
others and of all the Egos merely as Egos towards
each other. Love cannot be felt towards others
as others. Love is the expression of individual
suitability and preference, its positive existence
in some cases implies its absolute negation in
others. Hence Love can never be the essential

and root of social feeling, and hence the necessity

252

Of General Conduct 253

for the instinct of abstract justice which takes
no account of preferences or aversions. And
here I may say that all application of the word
love to unknown, distant creatures, to mere
otherSf is a perversion and a wasting of the word
love, which taking its origin in sexual and parental
preference, always implies a preference of one
object to the other. To love everybody is simply
not to love at all. And it is just because of the
passionate preference instinctively felt for some in-
dividuals, that mankind requires the self -regarding
and self-respecting passion of justice."

Now this is not altogether contradictory of
what I hold. I disagree that because love neces-
sarily expresses itself in preference, selecting this
rather than that, that it follows necessarily that
its absolute negation is implied in the non-selected
cases. A man may go into the world as a child
goes into a garden and gathers its hands full of
the flowers that please it best and then desists,
but only because its hands are full and not because
it is at an end of the flowers that it can find delight
in. So the man finds at last his memory and
apprehensions glutted. It is not that he could
not love those others. And I dispute the pro-
position that to love everybody is not to love at
all. To love two people is surely to love more

254 First and Last Things

than to love just one person, and so by way of
three and four to a very large number. But if
it is put that love must be a preference because of
the mental limitations that forbid us to apprehend
and understand more than a few of the multitudin-
ous lovables of life, then I agree. For all the
individuals and things and cases for which we
have inadequate time and energy, we need a
wholesale method- justice. That is exactly what
I have said in the previous section.

§ 25.

The Weakness of Immaturity. — One is apt
to write and talk of strong and weak as though
some were always strong, some always weak.
But that is quite a misleading version of life.
Apart from the fact that everyone is fiuctuatingly
strong and fiuctuatingly weak, and weak and
strong according to the quality we judge them
by, we have to remember that we are all develop-
ing and learning and changing, gaining strength
and at last losing it, from the cradle to the grave.
We are all, to borrow the old scholastic term,
pupil -teachers of Life; the term is none the less
appropriate because the pupil-teacher taught
badly and learnt under difficulties.

It may seem to be a crowning feat of platitude

to write that "we have to remember" this, but

it is overlooked in a whole mass of legal, social

and economic literature. Those extraordinary

imaginary cases as between a man A and a man

B who start level on a desert island or elsewhere,

and work or do not work, or save or do not save,

become the basis of immense schemes of just
255

256 First and Last Things

arrangement which soar up confidently and
serenely regardless of the fact that never did
anything like that equal start occur; that from
the beginning there were family groups and old
heads and young heads, help, guidance and sacri-
fice, and those who had learnt and those who had
still to learn, jumbled together in confused trans-
actions. Deals, tradings and so forth are entirely
secondary aspects of these primaries, and the
attempt to get an idea of abstract relationship
by beginning upon a secondary issue is the fatal
pervading fallacy in all these regions of thought.
At the present moment the average age of the
world is I suppose about 21 or 22, the normal
death somewhere about 44 or 45, that is to say
nearly half the world is "under age," green, in-
experienced, demanding help, easily misled and
put in the wrong and betrayed. Yet the younger
moiety, if we do indeed assume life's object is a
collective synthesis, is more important than the
older, and every older person bound to be some-
thing of a guardian to the younger. It follows
directly from the fundamental beliefs I have as-
sumed that we are missing the most important
aspects of life if we are not directly or indirectly
serving the young, helping them individually or
collectively. Just in the measure that one's living

Of General Conduct 257

falls away from that, do we fall away from life
into a mere futility of existence, and approach
the state, the extraordinary and wonderful middle
state of (for example) those extinct and entirely
damned old gentlemen one sees and hears eating
and sleeping in every comfortable London club.
That constructive synthetic purpose which I
have made the ruling idea in my scheme of con-
duct may be indeed completely restated in an-
other form, a form I adopted for a book I wrote
some years ago called Mankind in the Making.
In this I pointed out that ''Life is a tissue of
births,"

and if the whole of life is an evolving succession of
births then not only must a man in his individual
capacity (physically as parent, doctor, food dealer,
food carrier, home builder, protector, or mentally
as teacher, news dealer, author, preacher) contribute
to births and growths and the fine future of mankind,
but the collective aspects of man, his social and
political organisations must also be, in the essence,
organisations that more or less profitably and more
or less intentionally, set themselves towards this end.
They are finally concerned with the birth and with
the sound development towards still better births,
of human lives, just as every implement in the tool-
shed of a seedsman's nursery, even the hoe and the
roller, is concerned finally with the seeding and with
the sound development towards still better seeding
of plants. The private and personal motive of the

258 First and Last Things

seedsman in procuring and using these tools may
be avarice, ambition, a religious belief in the saving
efficacy of nursery keeping or a simple passion for
bettering flowers, that does not affect the definite
final purpose of his outfit of tools.

And just as we might judge completely and criti-
cise and improve that outfit from an attentive study
of the welfare of plants and with an entire disregard
of his remoter motives, so we may judge all collective
human enterprises from the standpoint of an atten-
tive study of human births and development. Any
collective human enterprise, institution, movement,
party or state, is to be judged as a whole and com-
pletely, as it conduces more or less to wholesome and
hopeful births, and according to the qualitative and
quantitative advance due to its influence made by each
generation of citizens born under its influence towards
a higher and ampler standard of life.

And individual conduct, quite as much as
collective affairs, comes under the same test.
We are guides and school builders, helpers and
influences every hour of our lives, and by that
standard we can and must judge all our ways of
living.

2 6.

Possibility of a New Etiquette. — ^These two
ideas, firstly the pupil-teacher parental idea and
secondly the democratic idea (that of an equal
ultimate significance), the second correcting any
tendency in the first to pedagogic arrogance and
tactful concealments, do I think give, when taken
together, the general attitude a right-living man
will take to his individual fellow creature. They
play against each other, providing elements of
contradiction and determining a balanced course.
It seems to me to follow necessarily from my
fundamental beliefs that the Believer will tend
to be and want to be and seek to be friendly to,
and interested in, all sorts of people, and truth-
ful and helpful and hating concealment. To be
that with any approach to perfection demands an
intricate and difficult effort, introspection to the
hilt of one's power, a saving natural gift; one
has to avoid pedantry, aggression, brutality, ami-
able tiresomeness — there are pitfalls on every
side. The more one thinks about other people
the more interesting and pleasing they are; I am

259

26o First and Last Things

all for kindly gossip and knowing things about
them, and all against the silly and limiting hard-
ness of soul that will not look into one's fellows
nor go out to them. The use and justification of
most literature, of fiction, verse, histor>% biog-
raphy, is that it lets us into understandings and
the suggestion of human possibilities. The gen-
eral purpose of intercourse is to get as close as one
can to the realities of the people one meets and
to give oneself to them just so far as possible.

From that I think there arises naturally a
newer etiquette that would set aside many of the
rigidities of procedure that keep people apart
to-day. There is a fading prejudice against
asking personal questions, against talking about
oneself or one's immediate personal interests,
against discussing religion and politics and any
such keenly felt matter. No doubt it is necessary
at times to protect oneself against clumsy and
stupid familiarities, against noisy and inattentive
egotists, against intriguers and liars but only in
the last resort do such breaches of patience seem
justifiable to me; for the most part our traditions
of speech and intercourse altogether overdo sep-
arations, the preservation of distances and pro-
tective devices in general.

§ 27-

Sex. — So far I have ignored the immense im-
portance of Sex in our lives and for the most part
kept the discussion so generalised as to apply
impartially to women and men. But now I have
reached a point when this great boimdary line
between two halves of the world and the intense
and intimate personal problems that play across
it must be faced.

For not only must we bend our general activi-
ties and our intellectual life to the conception of
a human synthesis, but out of our bodies and
emotional possibilities we have to make the new
world bodily and emotionally. To the test of
that we have to bring all sorts of questions that
agitate us to-day, the social and political equality
and personal freedom of women, the differing
code of honour for the sexes, the controls and
limitations to set upon love and desire. If, for
example, it is for the good of the species that a
whole half of its individuals should be specialised
and subordinated to the physical sexual life, as

in certain phases of human development Vs^omen

261

262 First and Last Things

have tended to be, then certainly we must do
nothing to prevent that. We have set aside the
conception of Justice as in any sense a counter-
vailing idea to that of the synthetic process.

And it is well to remember that for the whole
of sexual conduct there is quite conceivably no
general simple rule. It is quite possible that, as
Metchnikoff maintains in his extraordinarily illu-
minating Nature of Man, we are dealing with an
irresolvable tangle of disharmonies. We have
passions that do not insist upon their physiologi-
cal end, desires that may be prematurely vivid in
childhood, a fantastic curiosity, old needs of the
ape but thinly overlaid by the acquisitions of the
man, emotions that jar with physical impulses,
inexplicable pains and diseases. And not only
have we to remember that we are dealing with
disharmonies that may at the very best be only
patched together, but we are dealing with matters
in which the element of idiosyncrasy is essential,
insisting upon an incalculable flexibility in any
rule we make, unless we are to take types and
indeed whole classes of personality and write
them down as absolutely bad and fit only for«
suppression and restraint. And on the mental
side we are further perplexed by the extraordinary
suggestibility of human beings. In sexual matters

Of General Conduct 263

there seems to me — and I think I share a general
ignorance here — to be no directing instinct at all,
but only an instinct to do something generally
sexual; there are almost equally powerful desires
to do right and not to act under compulsion.
The specific forms of conduct imposed upon these
instincts and desires depend upon a vast con-
fusion of suggestions, institutions, conventions,
ways of putting things. We are dealing therefore
with problems ineradicably complex, varying
endlessly in their instances, and changing as we
deal with them. I am inclined to think that the
only really profitable discussion of sexual matters
is in terms of individuality, through the novel,
the lyric, the play, autobiography or biography
of the frankest sort. But such generalisations as
I can make I will.

To me it seems manifest that sexual matters
may be discussed generally in at least three
permissible and valid ways, of which the con-
sideration of the world as a system of births and
education is only the dominant chief. There is
next the question of the physical health and
beauty of the community and how far sexual rules
and customs affect that, and thirdly the question
of the mental and moral atmosphere in which
sexual conventions and laws must necessarily be

264 First and Last Things

an important factor. It is alleged that probably
in the case of men and certainly in the case of
women, some sexual intercourse is a necessary
phase in existence; that without it there is an
incompleteness, a failure in the life cycle, a real
wilting and failure of energy and vitality and
the development of morbid states. And for most
of us half the friendships and intimacies from
which we derive the daily interest and sustaining
force in our lives, draw mysterious elements from
sexual attraction and depend and hesitate upon
our conception of the liberties and limits we must
give to that force.

§ 28.

The Institution of Marriage. — The indi-
vidual attitudes of men to women and of women
to men are necessarily determined to a large ex-
tent by certain general ideas of relationship, by
institutions and conventions. One of the most
important and debatable of these is whether we
are to consider and treat women as citizens and
fellows, or as beings differing mentally from men
and grouped in positions of at least material
dependence to individual men. Our decision in
that direction will affect all our conduct from the
larger matters down to the smallest points of
deportment; it will affect even our manner of
address and determine whether when we who are
men speak to a woman we shall be as frank and
unaffected as with a man or touched with a faint
suggestion of the reserves of a cat which does not
wish to be suspected of wanting to steal the milk.

Now as far as that goes it follows almost ne-
cessarily from my views upon aristocracy and
democracy that I declare for the conventional

equality of women, that is to say for the deter-

265

266 First and Last Things

mination to make neither sex nor any sexual
characteristic a standard of superiority or in-
feriority, for the view that a woman is a person
as important and necessary, as much to be con-
sulted, and entitled to as much freedom of action
as a man. I admit that this decision is a choice
into which temperament enters, that I cannot
produce compelling reason why anyone else
should adopt my view. I can produce considera-
tions in support of my view, that is all. But
they are so implicit in all that has gone before
that I will not trouble to detail them here.

The conception of equality and fellowship
between men and women is an idea at least as
old as Plato and one that has recurred wherever
civilisation has reached a phase in which men
and women were sufBciently released from mili-
tant and economic urgency to talk and read and
think. But it has never yet been, at least in the
historical period and in any but isolated social
groups, a working structural idea. The working
structural idea is the Patriarchal Family, in
which the woman is inferior and submits herself
and is subordinated to the man, the head of the
family.

We live in a constantly changing development
and modification of that tradition. It is well

Of General Conduct 267

to bring that factor of constant change into mind
at the outset of this discussion and to keep it
there. To forget it, and it is commonly forgotten,
is to falsify every issue. Marriage and the Family
are perennially fluctuating institutions, and prob-
ably scarcely anything in modern life has changed
and is changing so much; they are in their legal
constitution or their moral and emotional quality,
profoundly different things from what they were
a hundred years ago. A woman who marries
nowadays marries, if one may put it quantita-
tively, far less than she did even half a century
ago; the married woman's property act, for
example, has revolutionised the economic rela-
tionship, her husband has lost his right to assault
her and he cannot even compel her to cohabit
with him if she refuses to do so. Legal separa-
tions and divorces have come to modify the quality
and logical consequences of the bond. The rights
of parent over the child have been even more
completely qualified. The State has come in as
protector and educator of the children, taking over
personal powers and responsibilities that have
been essential to the family institution ever since
the dawn of history. It inserts itself more and
more between child and parent. It invades what
were once the most sacred intimacies, and the

268 First and Last Things

Salvation Army is now promoting legislation to
invade those overcrowded homes in which chil-
dren (it is estimated to the number of thirty or
forty thousand) are living as I write, vassals of
the sacred bond of the family, daily witnesses of
their mother's prostitution or in constant danger
of incestuous attack from drunken fathers and
brothers. And finally as another indication of
profound differences, births were almost univer-
sally accidental a hundred years ago; they are
now in an increasing number of families controlled
and deliberate acts of will. In every one of their
relations do Marriage and the Family change and
continue to change.

But the inherent defectiveness of the human
mind which my metaphysical book sets itself to
analyse, does lead it constantly to speak of
Marriage and the Family as things as fixed and
unalterable as, let us say the characteristics of
oxygen. One is asked, do you believe in Marriage
and the Family ? as if it was a case of either having
or not having some definite thing. Socialists are
accused of being ''against the Family," as if it
were not the case that Socialists, Individualists,
high Anglicans and Roman Catholics are all
against Marriage and the Family as these institu-
tions exist at the present time. But once we

Of General Conduct 269

have realised the absurdity of this absolute treat-
ment, then it should become clear that with it
goes most of the fabric of right and wrong, and
nearly all those arbitrary standards by which we
classify people into moral and immoral. Those
last words are used when as a matter of fact we
mean either conforming or failing to conform to
changing laws and developing institutional cus-
toms we may or may not consider right or wrong.
Their use imparts a flavour of essential wrong-
doing and obliquity into acts and relations that
may be in many cases no more than social in-
discipline, which may be even conceivably a
courageous act of defiance to an obsolescent limi-
tation. Such, until a little while ago, was a
man's cohabitation with his deceased wife's
sister. This, which was scandalous yesterday, is
now a legally honourable relationship, albeit I
believe still regarded by the high Anglican an
incestuous wickedness.

Now I will not deal here with the institutional
changes that are involved in that general scheme
of progress called Socialism. I have discussed
the relation of Socialism to Marriage and the
Family quite fully in my New Worlds for Old ^
and to that I must refer the reader. Therein he

» New Worlds for Old (A. Constable & Co., 1908).

270 First and Last Things

will see how the economic freedom and independ-
ent citizenship of women and indeed also the wel-
fare of the whole next generation hang on the
idea of endowing motherhood, and he will find
too how much of the nature of the marriage con-
tract is outside the scope of Socialist proposals
altogether.

Apart from the broad proposals of Socialism,
as a matter of personal conviction quite out-
side the scope of Socialism altogether, I am
persuaded of the need of much greater facili-
ties of divorce than exist at present, divorce,
on the score of mutual consent, of faithless-
ness, of simple cruelty, of insanity, habitual
vice or the prolonged imprisonment of either
party. And this being so I find it impossible to
condemn on any ground except that it is ''break-
ing ranks" and making a confusion, those who by
anticipating such wide facilities as I propose have
sinned by existing standards. How far and in
what manner such breaking of ranks is to be
condoned I will presently discuss. But it is clear
it is an offence of a different nature from actions
one believed to be in themselves and apart from
the law, reprehensible things.

But my scepticisms about the current legal
institutions and customary code are not ex-

Of General Conduct 271

hausted by these modifications I have suggested.
I believe firmly in some sort of marriage, that is
to say an open declaration of the existence of
sexual relations between man and woman, be-
cause I am averse to all unnecessary secrecies and
because the existence of these peculiarly intimate
relationships affects everybody about the persons
concerned. It is ridiculous to say as some do that
sexual relations between two people affect no one
but themselves unless a child is born. They do,
because they tend to break down barriers and
set-up a peculiar emotional partnership. It is a
partnership that kept secret may work as anti-
socially as a secret business partnership or a se-
cret preferential railway tariff. And I believe too
in the general social desirability of the family
group, the normal group of fathers and mother and
children and in the extreme efficacy in the normal
human being of the blood link and pride link
between parent and child in securing loving care
and upbringing for the child. But this clear
adhesion to Marriage and to the Family grouping
about mother and father does not close the door
to a large series of exceptional cases which our
existing institutions and customs ignore or crush.
For example, monogamy in general seems to
me to be clearly indicated (as doctors say) by the

2 72 First and Last Things

fact that there are not several women in the
world for every man, but quite as clearly does it
seem necessary to recognise that the fact that
there are (or were in 1901) 21,436,107 women to
20,172,984 men in our British community seems
to condemn our present rigorous insistence upon
monogamy, unless feminine celibacy has its own
delights. But, as I have said, it is now largely
believed that the sexual life of a woman is more
important to her than his sexual life to a man
and less easily ignored.

It is true also on the former side that for the
great majority of people one knows personally,
any sort of household but a monogamous one
conjures up painful and unpleasant visions. The
ordinary civilised woman and the ordinary civil-
ised man are alike obsessed with the idea of
meeting and possessing one peculiar intimate
person, one special exclusive lover who is their
very own, and a third person of either sex cannot
be associated with that couple without an in-
tolerable sense of privacy and confidence and
possession destroyed. It is difficult to imagine a
second wife in a home, who would not be and feel
herself to be a rather excluded and inferior per-
son. But that does not abolish the possibility that
there are exceptional people somewhere capable

Of General Conduct 273

of, to coin a phrase, triangular mutuality, and I
do not see why we should either forbid or treat
with bitterness or hostility a grouping we may
consider so inadvisable or so unworkable as never
to be adopted, if three people of their own free
will desire it.

The peculiar defects of the human mind when
they approach these questions of sex are rein-
forced by passions peculiar to the topic, and it is
perhaps advisable to point out that to discuss these
possibilities is not the same thing as to urge the
married reader to take unto himself or herself a
second partner or a series of additional partners.
We are trained from the nursery to become
secretive, muddle-headed and vehemently con-
clusive upon sexual matters, until at last the
editors of magazines blush at the very phrase and
long to put a petticoat over the page that bears it.
Yet our rebellious natures insist on being in-
terested by it. It seems to me that to judge
these large questions from the personal point of
view, to insist upon the whole world without
exception living exactly in the manner that
suits oneself or accords with one's emotional
imagination and the forms of delicacy in which
one has been trained, is not the proper way to

deal with them. I want as a sane social organiser
18

274 First and Last Things

to get just as many contented and law-abiding
citizens as possible ; I do not want to force people
who would otherwise be useful citizens into rebel-
lion, concealments and the dark and furtive ways
of vice, because they may not love and marry as
their temperaments command, and so I want to
make the meshes of the law as wide as possible.
But the common man will not understand this
yet, and seeks to make the meshes just as small
as his own private case demands.

Then marriage, to resume my main discussion,
does not necessarily mean cohabitation. All
women who desire children do not want to be
entrusted with their upbringing. Some women
are sexual and philoprogenitive without being
sedulously maternal, and some are maternal
without much or any sexual passion. There are
men and women in the world now, great allies,
fond and passionate lovers who do not live nor
want to live constantly together. It is at least
conceivable that there are women who, while
desiring offspring, do not want to abandon great
careers for the work of maternity, women again
who would be happiest managing and rearing
children in manless households that they might
even share with other women friends, and men
to correspond with those who do not wish to live

Of General Conduct 275

in a household with wife and children. I submit,
these temperaments exist and have a right to exist
in their own way. But one must recognise the
possibility of these departures from the normal
type of household opens up other possibilities.
The polygamy that is degrading or absurd under
one roof assumes a different appearance when one
considers it from the point of view of people whose
habit of life does not centre upon an isolated home.
All the relations I have glanced at above do
as a matter of fact exist to-day, but shamefully
and shabbily, tainted with what seems to me an
unmerited and unnecessary ignominy. The pun-
ishment for bigamy seems to me insane in its
severity, contrasted as it is with our leniency to
the common seducer. Better ruin a score of
women, says the law, than marry two. I do not
see why in these matters there should not be
much ampler freedom than there is, and this
being so I can hardly be expected to condemn
with any moral fervour or exclude from my so-
ciety those who have seen fit to behave by what
I believe may be the standards of a.d. 2000
instead of by the standards of 1850. These are
offences, so far as they are offences, on an alto-
gether different footing from murder, or exacting
usury, or the sweating of children, or cruelty, or

276 First and Last Things

transmitting diseases, or unveracity, or commercial
or intellectual or physical prostitution, or any
such essentially grave anti-social deeds. We must
distinguish between sins and mere errors of
judgment and differences of taste from ourselves.
To draw up harsh laws, to practise exclusions
against everyone who does not see fit to duplicate
one's own blameless home life, is to waste a
number of courageous and exceptional persons
in every generation, to drive many of them into
a forced alliance with real crime and embittered
rebellion against custom and the law.

§ 29-

Conduct in Relation to the Thing that Is.
— But the reader must keep clear in his mind the
distinction between conduct that is right or per-
missible in itself and conduct that becomes either
inadvisable or mischievous and wrong because of
the circumstances about it. There is no harm
under ordinary conditions in asking a boy with a
pleasant voice to sing a song in the night, but
the case is altered altogether if you have reason
to suppose that a Red Indian is lying in wait a
hundred yards off, holding a loaded rifle and ready
to fire at the voice. It is a valid objection to many
actions that I do not think objectionable in them-
selves, that to do them will discharge a loaded
prejudice into the heart of my friend — or even
into my own. I belong to the world and my
work, and I must not lightly throw my time, my
power, my influence away. For a splendid thing
any risk or any defiance may be justifiable, but
is it a sufficiently splendid thing? So far as he
possibly can a man must conform to common

prejudices, prevalent customs and all laws, —

277

27S First and Last Things

whatever his estimate of them may be. But he
must at the same time do his utmost to change
what he thinks to be wrong.

And I think that conformity must be honest
conformity. There is no more anti-social act
than secret breaches, and only some very urgent
and exceptional occasion justifies even the un-
veracity of silence about the thing done. If your
personal convictions bring you to a breach, let it
be an open breach, let there be no misrepresenta-
tion of attitudes, no organised fabric of lies, no
deception of honourable friends. Of course an
open breach need not be an ostentatious breach-
to do what is right to yourself without fraud or
concealment is one thing, to make a challenge and
aggression quite another. Your friends may
understand and sympathise and condone, but
it does not lie upon you to force them to identify
themselves with your act and situation. But
better too much openness than too little. Squalid
intrigue was the shadow of the old intolerably
narrow order ; it is a shadow we want to illuminate
out of existence. Secrets will be contraband
in the new time.

And if it chances to you to feel called upon to
make a breach w4th the institution or custom or
prejudice that is, remember that doing so is your

Of General Conduct 279

own affair. You are going to take risks and
specialise as an experiment. You must not expect
other people about you to share the consequences
of your dash forward. You must not drag in
confidants and secondaries. You must fight your
little battle in front on your own responsibility,
unsupported — and take the consequences without
repining.

§ 30-

Conduct towards Transgressions. — So far
as breaches of the prohibitions and laws of mar-
riage go, to me it seems they are to be tolerated
by us in others just in the measure that, within
the limits set by discretion, they are frank and
truthful and animated by spontaneous passion
and pervaded by the quality of beauty. I hate
the vulgar sexual intriguer, man or woman, and
the smart and shallow atmosphere of unloving
lust and vanity about the type, as I hate few
kinds of human life ; I would as lief have a polecat
in my home, and this sort of person and every
sort of prostitute except the victim of utter neces-
sity I despise, even though marriage be the fee.
But honest lovers should be, I think, a charge
and pleasure for us. We must judge each pair
as we can.

One thing renders a sexual relationship in-
curably offensive to others and altogether wrong,
and that is cruelty.

But who can define cruelty? How far is the

leaving of a third person to count as cruelty?

280

Of General Conduct 281

There again I hesitate to judge. To love and not
be loved is a fate for which it seems no one can be
blamed; to lose love and to change one's loving
belongs to a subtle interplay beyond analysis or
control, but to be deceived or mocked or deliber-
ately robbed of love, that at any rate is an abom-
inable wrong.

In all these matters I perceive a general rule is
in itself a possible instrument of cruelty. I set
down what I can in the way of general principles,
but it all leaves off far short of the point of ap-
plication. In every case among those we know
I think we modems must judge for ourselves.
Where there is doubt, there I hold must be
Charity. And with regard to strangers mani-
festly our duty is to avoid inquisitorial and
uncharitable acts.

This is as true of financial and economic mis-
conduct as of sexual misconduct, of ways of
living that are socially harmful and of political
faith. We are dealing with people in a mal-
adjusted system to whom absolute right living is
practically impossible, because there are no ab-
solutely right institutions and no simple choice of
good or evil, and we have to balance merits and
defects in every case.

Some people are manifestly and essentially

282 First and Last Things

base and self-seeking and regardless of the happi-
ness and welfare of their fellows, some in business
affairs and politics as others in love. Some
wrong-doers again are evidently so through
heedlessness, through weakness, timidity or haste.
We have to judge and deal with each sort upon
no clear issue but upon impressions they have
given us of their spirit and purpose. We owe
it to them and ourselves not to judge too rashly
or too harshly, but for all that we are obliged to
judge and take sides, to avoid the malignant and
exclude them from further opportunity, to help
and champion the cheated and the betrayed, to
forgive and aid the repentant blunderer and by
mercy to save the lesser sinner from desperate
alliance with the greater. That is the broad rule
and it is as much as we have to go upon until the
individual case comes before us.

Book the Fourth.

Some Personal Things.

283

§1.

Personal Love and Life. — It has been most
convenient to discuss all that might be generalised
about conduct first, to put in the common back-
ground the vistas and atmosphere of the scene.
But a man's relations are of two orders, and these
questions of rule and principle are over and about
and round more vivid and immediate interests.
A man is not simply a relationship between his
individual self and the race, society, the world
and God's Purpose. Close about him are per-
sons, friends and enemies and lovers and beloved
and beautiful people. He desires them, lusts
after them, craves their affection, needs their
presence, abhors them, hates and desires to
limit and suppress them. This is for most of us
the flesh and blood of life. We go through the
noble scene of the world neither alone nor alone
with God, nor serving an undistinguishable mul-
titude, but in a company of individualised people.

Here is a system of motives and passions, im-
perious and powerful, which follows no broad

general rule and in which each man must needs

285

286 First and Last Things

be a light unto himself upon innumerable issues.
I am satisfied that these personal urgencies are
neither to be suppressed nor crudely or ruthlessly
subordinated to the general issues. Religious
and moral teachers are apt to make this part of
life either too detached or too insignificant. They
teach it either as if it did not matter or as if it
ought not to matter. Indeed our individual
friends and enemies stand between us and hide or
interpret for us all the larger things. Few of us
can even worship alone. We must feel others,
and those not strangers, kneeling beside us.

I have already spoken under the heading of
Beliefs of the part that the idea of a Mediator
has played and can play in the religious life. I
have pointed out how the imagination of men
has sought and found in certain personalities,
historical or fictitious, a bridge between the
blood-warm private life and the intolerable
spaciousness of right and wrong. The world is
full of such figures and their images, Christ and
Mary and the Saints and all the lesser, dearer gods
of heathendom. These things and the human
passion for living leaders and heroes and leagues
and brotherhoods all confess the mediatory role,
the mediatory possibilities of personal love be-
tween the individual and the great synthesis of

Some Personal Things 287

which he is a part and agent. The great synthesis
may become incarnate in personal love, and
personal love lead us directly to universal service.
I write may, and temper that sentence to the
quality of a possibility alone. This is only true
for those who believe, for those who have faith,
whose lives have been unified, who have found
Salvation. For those whose lives are chaotic,
personal loves must also be chaotic; this or that
passion, malice, a jesting humour, some physical
lust, gratified vanity, egotistical pride, will rule
and limit the relationship and colour its ultimate
futility. But the Believer uses personal love
and sustains himself by personal love. It is his
provender, the meat and drink of his campaign.

§2.

The Nature of Love. — It is well perhaps to
look a little into the factors that make up love.

Love does not seem to me to be a simple ele-
mental thing. It is, as I have already said, one
of the vicious tendencies of the human mind to
think that whatever can be given a simple name
can be abstracted as a single something in a state
of quintessential purity. I have pointed out that
this is not true of Harmony nor Beauty, and that
these are synthetic things. You bring together
this which is not beautiful and that which is not
beautiful, and behold! Beauty! So also love is,
I think, a synthetic thing. One observes this
and that, one is interested and stirred; suddenly
the metal fuses, the dry bones live ! One loves.

Almost every interest in one's being may be a

factor in the love synthesis. But apart from

the overflowing of the parental instinct that makes

all that is fme and delicate and yoimg dear to us

and to be cherished, there are two main factors

that bring us into love with our fellows. There is

first the emotional elements in our nature that

288

Some Personal Things 289

arise out of the tribal necessity, out of a fellow-
ship in battle and hunting, drinking and feasting,
out of the needs and excitements and delights
of those occupations; and there is next the in-
tenser narrower desirings and gratitudes, satis-
factions and expectations that come from sexual
intercourse. Now both these factors originate
in physical needs and consummate in material
acts, and it is well to remember that this great
growth of love in life roots there, and, it may be,
dies when its roots are altogether cut away.

At its lowest, love is the mere sharing of, or
rather the desire to share, pleasure and excite-
ment, the excitements of conflict or lust or what
not. I think that the desire to partake, the
desire to merge one's individual identity with
another's, remains a necessary element in all
personal loves. It is a way out of ourselves, a
breaking down of our individual separation, just as
hate is an intensification of that. Personal love
is the narrow and intense form of that breaking
down, just as what I call Salvation is its widest,
most extensive form. We cast aside our reserves,
our secrecies, our defences; we open ourselves;
touches that would be intolerable from common
people become a mystery of delight; acts of self-
abasement and self-sacrifice are charged with

290 First and Last Things

symbolical pleasure. We cannot tell which of us
is me, which you. Our imprisoned egoism looks
out through this window, forgets its wall and is
for those brief moments released and imi versa!.

For most of us the strain of primordial sexual
emotion in our love is very strong. Many men
can love only women, many women only men,
and some can scarcely love at all without bodily
desire. But the love of fellowship is a strong one
also, and for many, love is most possible and
easy when the thought of physical love-making
has been banished. Then the lovers will pursue
other interests together, will work together or
journey together. So we have the warm fellow-
ships of men for men and women for women.
But even then it may happen that men friends
together will talk of women, and women friends
of men. Nevertheless we have also the strong
and altogether sexless glow of those who have
fought well together, or drunk or jested together
or hunted a common quarry.

Now it seems to me that the Believer must also
be a Lover, that he will love as much as he can
and as many people as he can, and in many moods
and ways. As I have said already, many of those
who have taught religion and morality in the past
have been neglectful or unduly jealous of the

Some Personal Things 291

in tenser personal loves. They have been, to put
it by a figure, urgent upon the road to the ocean.
To that they would lead us, though we come to
it shivering, fearful and unprepared, and they
grudge it that we should strip and plunge into
the wayside stream. But all streams, all rivers,
come from this ocean in the beginning, lead back
to it in the end.

It is the essential fact of love as I conceive it,
that it breaks down the boundaries of self. That
love is most perfect which does most completely
merge its lovers. But no love is altogether per-
fect, and for most men and women love is no more
than a partial and temporary lowering of the
barriers that keep them apart. With many, the
attraction of love seems always to fall short of
what I hold to be its end ; it draws people together
in the most momentary of self -forget fulness, and
for the rest seems rather to enhance their ego-
tisms and their difference. They are secret from
one another even in their embraces. There is a
sort of love that is egotistical lust almost regard-
less of its partner, a sort of love that is mere flesh-
less pride and vanity at a white heat. There is
the love-making that springs from sheer bore-
dom, like a man reading a story-book to fill an
hour. These inferior loves seek to accomplish an

292 First and Last Things

agreeable act, or they seek the pursuit or glory
of a living possession, they aim at gratification or
excitement or conquest. True love seeks to be
mutual and easy-minded, free of doubts, but
these egotistical mockeries of love have always
resentment in them and hatred in them and a
watchful distrust. Jealousy is the measure of
self-love in love.

True love is a synthetic thing, an outcome of
life, it is not a universal thing. It is, I hold, the
individualised correlative of Salvation; like that
it is a synthetic consequence of conflicts and con-
fusions. Many people do not desire or need Sal-
vation, they cannot understand it, much less can
they achieve it; for them chaotic life suffices.
So too, very many never, save for some rare mo-
ment of illumination, desire or feel love. Its
happy abandonment, its careless self-giving, these
things are mere foolishness to them. But much
has been said and sung of faith and love alike,
and in their confused greed these things also they
desire and parody. So they act worship, they
make a fine fuss of their devotions. And also
they must have a few half-furtive, half-flaunting
fallen love-triumphs prowling the secret back-
streets of their lives, they know not why.

(In setting this down be it remembered I am

Some Personal Things 293

doing my best to tell what is in me because I am
trying to put my whole view of life before the
reader without any vital omissions. These are
difficult matters to explain because they have no
clear outlines; one lets in a hard light suddenly
upon things that have lurked in warm intimate
shadows, dim inner things engendering motives.
I am not only telling quasi-secret things but explor-
ing them for myself. They are none the less real
and important because they are elusive.)

True love I think is not simply felt but known.
Just as Salvation as I conceive it demands a fine
intelligence and mental activity, so love calls to
brain and body alike and all one's powers, there
is always elaborate thinking and dreaming in
love. Love will stir imaginations that have never
stirred before.

Love may be and is for the most part one-sided.
It is the going out from oneself that is love and
not the accident of its return. It is the expedi-
tion whether it fail or succeed.

But an expedition starves that comes to no
port. Love seeks mutuality and grows by the
sense and hope of responses, or we should love
beautiful inanimate things more than we do.
Failing a full return, it makes the most of an
inadequate return. Failing a sustained return

294 First and Last Things

it welcomes a temporary coincidence. But it seeks
a full return always, and the fulness of life has
come only to those who, loving, have met the
lover.

I am trying to be as explicit as possible in thus
writing about Love. But the substance in which
one works here is emotion that evades definition;
poetic flashes and figures of speech are truer than
prosaic statements. Body, and the most sub-
limated ecstasy pass into one another, exchange
themselves, and elude every net of words we
cast.

I have put out two ideas of unification and
self-devotion, extremes upon a scale one from
another; one of these ideas is that devotion to the
Purpose in things I have called Salvation; the
other that devotion to some other most fitting
and satisfying individual which is passionate
love, the former extensive as the universe, the
latter the intensest thing in life. These it seems
to me are the boundary and the living capital of
the empire of life we rule.

All empires need a comprehending boundary,
but many have not one capital but many chief
cities, and all have cities and towns and villages
beyond the capital. It is an impoverished capital
that has no dependent towns, and it is a poor love

Some Personal Things 295

that will not overflow in affection and eager kindly
curiosity and sympathy and the search for fresh
mutuality. To love is to go loving radiantly
through the world. To love and be loved is to
be fearless of experience and rich in the power to
give.

§3-

The Will to Love. — Love is a thing to a large
extent in its beginnings voluntary and controlla-
ble, and at last quite involuntary. It is so hedged
about by obligations and consequences, real and
artificial, that for the most part I think people
are overmuch afraid of it. And also the tradition
of sentiment that suggests its forms and guides
it in the world about us, is far too strongly ex-
clusive. It is not so much when love is glowing
as when it is becoming habitual that it is jealous
for itself and others. Lovers a little exhausting
their mutual interest find a fillip in an alliance
against the world. They bury their talent of
understanding and sympathy to return it duly
in a clean napkin. They narrow their interest
in Hfe lest the other lover should misunderstand
their amplitude as disloyalty.

Our institutions and social customs seem all to
assume a definiteness of preference, a singleness
and a limitation of love, which is not psychologi-
cally justifiable. People do not, I think, fall

naturally into agreement with these assumptions;

296

Some Personal Things 297

they train themselves to agreement. They take
refuge from experiences that seem to carry with
them the risk at least of perplexing situations, in
a theory of barred possibilities and locked doors.
How far this shy and cultivated irresponsive
lovelessness towards the world at large may not
carry with it the possibility of compensating in-
tensities, I do not know. Quite equally probable
is a starvation of one's emotional nature.

The same reasons that make me decide against
mere wanton abstinences make me hostile to the
common convention of emotional indifference to
most of the charming and interesting people one
encounters. In pleasing and being pleased, in
the mutual interest, the mutual opening out of
people to one another, is the key of the door to
all sweet and mellow living.

§ 4.

Love and Death. — For him who has faith,
death, so far as it is his own death, ceases to pos-
sess any quality of terror. The experiment will
be over, the rinsed beaker returned to its shelf,
the crystals gone dissolving down the wastepipe
and the duster sweeps the bench. But the deaths
of those we love are harder to imderstand, or bear.

It happens that of those very intimate with
me I have lost only one, and that came slowly and
elaborately, a long gradual separation wrought
by the accumulation of years and mental decay,
but many close friends and many whom I have
counted upon for sympathy and fellowship have
passed out of my world. I miss such a one as
Bob Stevenson, that luminous, extravagant talker,
that eager fantastic mind. I miss him whenever
I write. It is less pleasure now to write a story
since he will never read it, much less give a word
of praise for it. And I miss York Powell's
friendly laughter and Henley's exuberant wel-
come. They made a warmth that has gone,

those men. I can understand why I, with my

298

Some Personal Things 299

fumbling lucidities and explanations, have to
finish up presently and go, expressing as I do
the mood of a type and of a time, but not those
radiant presences.

And the gap these men have left, these
men with whom after all I only sat now and
again, or wrote to in a cheerful mood or got
a letter from at odd times, gives me some
measure of the thing that happens, that may
happen, when the mind that is always near
one's thoughts, the person who moves to one's
movement and lights nearly all the common
flow of events about one with the reminder
of fellowship and meaning — ceases.

Faith which feeds on personal love must at
last prevail over it. If Faith has any virtue it
must have it here when we find ourselves bereft
and isolated, facing a world from which the light
has fied, leaving it bleak and strange. We live
for experience and the race ; these individual inter-
ludes are just helps to that; the warm inn in
which we lovers met and refreshed was but a
halt on a journey. When we have loved to the
intensest point we have done our best with each
other. To keep to that image of the inn, we must
not sit overlong at our wine beside the fire. We
must go on to new experiences and new adven-

300 First and Last Things

tures. Death comes to part us and turn us out
and set us on the road again.

But the dead stay where we leave them.

I suppose that is the real good in death that
they do stay; that it makes them immortal for
us. Living they were mortal. But now they
can never spoil themselves or be spoilt by change
again. They have finished — for us indeed just
as much as themselves. There they sit for ever,
rounded off and bright and done. Beside these
clear and certain memories I have of my dead,
my impressions of the living are vague provisional
things.

And since they are gone out of the world and
become immortal memories in me, I feel no need
to think of them as in some disembodied and
incomprehensible elsewhere, changed and yet not
done. I want actual immortality for those I love
as little as I desire it for myself.

Indeed I dislike the idea that those I have
loved are immortal in any real sense; it conjures
up dim uncomfortable drifting phantoms that
have no kindred with the flesh and blood I knew.
I would as soon think of them trailing after the
tides up and down the Channel outside my win-
dow. Bob Stevenson for me is a presence utterly
concrete, slouching, eager, quick-eyed, intimate

Some Personal Things 301

and profound, carelessly dressed (at Sandgate he
commonly wore a little felt hat that belonged to
his son) and himself, himself, indissoluble matter
and spirit, down to the heels of his boots. I
cannot conceive of his as any but a concrete im-
mortality. If he lives, he lives as I knew him and
clothed as I knew him and with his unalterable
voice, in a heaven of daedal flowers or a hell of
ineffectual flame, he lives, dreaming and talking
and explaining, explaining it all very earnestly
and preposterously, so I picture him, into the ear
of the amused, incredulous principal person in
the place.

I have a real hatred for those dreary fools and
knaves who would have me suppose that Henley,
that crippled Titan, may conceivably be tapping
at the underside of a mahogany table or scratching
stifled incoherence into a locked slate! Henley
tapping! — for the professional purposes of Sludge!
If he found himself among the circumstances of
a spiritualist seance, he would, I know, instantly
smash the table with that big fist of his. And as
the splinters flew surely York Powell out of the
dead past from which he shines on me, would
laugh that hearty laugh of his back into the world
again.

Henley is nowhere now except that, red-faced

302 First and Last Things

and jolly like an October sunset, "October mild
and boon'* he leans over a gate at Worthing
after a long day of picnicking at Clanktonbuiy
Ring, or sits at his Woking table praising and
quoting The Admirable Bashville, or blue-shirtcd
and wearing the hat that Nicholson has painted,
is thrust and lugged laughing and talking aside
in his bath-chair along the Worthing esplan-
ade. . . .

And Bob Stevenson walks for ever about a
garden in Chiswick, talking in the dusk. . . .

§ 5-

The Consolation of Failure. — ^That parable
of the talents I have made such free use of in this
book has one significant defect. It gives but
two cases, and three are possible. There was
first the man who buried his talent, and of his
condemnation we are assured. But those others
all took their talents and used them courageously
and came back with gain. Was that gain inevi-
table? Does courage always ensure us victory?
Because if that is so we can all be heroes, and
valour is the better part of discretion. Alas! the
faith in such magic dies. What of the possible
case of the man who took his two or three talents
and invested them as best he could and was de-
ceived or heedless and lost them, interest and
principal together?

There is something harder to face than death,
and that is the realisation of failure and mis-
directed effort and wrong-doing.

Faith is no Open Sesame to right-doing, much

less is it the secret of success. The service of

God on earth is no processional triumph. What

303

304 First and Last Things

if one does wrong so extremely as to condemn
one's life, to make oneself part of the refuse and
not of the building? Or what if one is misjudged,
or it may be too pitilessly judged, and one's co-
operation despised and the help one brought
becomes a source of weakness? Or suppose that
the fine scheme one made lies shattered or wrecked
by one's own act, or through some hidden blemish
one's offering is rejected and flung back and one
is thrust out?

So in the end it may be you or I will find we
have been anvil and not hammer in the Purpose
of God.

Then indeed will come the time for Faith, for
the last work of Faith, to say still steadfastly,
disgraced or dying, defeated or discredited, that
all is well.

"This and not that was my appointed work,
and this I had to be."

§6.

The Last Confession. — So these broken con-
fessions and statements of mood and attitude
come to an end.

But at this end, since I have, I perceive, run a
Httle into a pietistic strain, I must repeat again
how provisional and personal I know all these
things to be. I began by disavowing ultimates.
My beliefs, my dogmas, my rules, they are made
for my campaigning needs, like the knapsack
and water-bottle of a Cockney soldier invading
some stupendous mountain gorge. About him
are fastnesses and splendours, torrents and cata-
racts, glaciers and untrodden snows. He comes
tramping on heel- worn boots and ragged socks.
Beauties and blue mysteries shine upon him and
appeal to him, the enigma of beauty smiling the
faint strange smile of Leonardo's Monna Lisa.
He sees a light on the grass like music; and the
blossom on the trees against the sky brings him
near weeping. Such things come to him, give
themselves to him. I do not know why he should
not in response fling his shabby gear aside and

20 305

3o6 First and Last Things

behave like a god; I only know that he does not
do so. His grunt of appreciation is absurd, his
speech goes like a crippled thing — and withal,
and partly by virtue of the knapsack and water-
bottle, he is conqueror of the valley. The valley
is his for the taking.

There is a duality in life that I cannot express
except by such images as this, a duality so that
we are at once absurd and full of sublimity, and
most absurd when we are most anxious to render
the real splendours that pervade us. This du-
plicity in life seems to me at times ineradicable,
at times like the confusing of something essen-
tially simple, like the reduplication of something
seen through a doubly refracting medium. You
think then that you have only to turn the crystal
of Iceland spar about in order to have the whole
thing plain. But you never get it plain. I have
been doing my halting utmost to get down sin-
cerely and simply my vision of life and duty. I
have permitted myself no defensive restraints;
I have shamelessly written my starkest, and it is
plain to me that a smile that is not mine plays
over my most urgent passages. There is a
rebellious rippling of the grotesque under our
utmost tragedy and gravity. One's martialled
phrases grimace as one turns and wink at the

Some Personal Things 307

reader. None the less they signify. Do you
note how in this that I have written, such a word
as Behever will begin to wear a capital letter and
give itself solemn ridiculous airs? It does not
matter. It carries its message for all that neces-
sary superficial absurdity.

Thought has made me shameless. It does
not matter at last at all if one is a little harsh or
indelicate or ridiculous if that also is in the
mystery of things.

Behind everything I perceive the smile that
makes all effort and discipline temporary, all the
stress and pain of life endurable. In the last
resort I do not care whether I am seated on a
throne or drunk or dying in a kitchen. I follow
my leading. In the ultimate I know, though I
cannot prove my knowledge in any way what-
ever, that everything is right and all things mine.

THE END.

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