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CIVILISATION: ITS
CAUSE AND CURE

Digitized by the Internet Archive
in 2007 with funding from
Microsoft Corporation

http://www.archive.org/details/civilisationitscOOcarpuoft

CIVILISATION : ITS
CAUSE AND CURE

AND OTHER ESSAYS

(NEWLY-ENLARGED AND COMPLETE EDITION)

BY

EDWARD CARPENTER

AUTHOR OF ‘“‘ TOWARDS DEMOCRACY,”
“MY DAYS AND DREAMS,” ETC.

LONDON: GEORGE ALLEN & UNWIN LTD.
RUSKIN HOUSE, 40 MUSEUM STREET, W.C.1

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317493.

First Edition, ¥une 1889; Second Edition, December 1890

Third Edition, November 1893; Fourth Edition, Fuly 1895 ;
Fifth Edition, September 1897 ; Sixth Edition, October 1900;
Seventh Edition, ¥uly 1902; Eighth Edition, March 1903 ;
Ninth Edition, fanuary 1906 ; Tenth Edition, fanuary 1908 ;
Eleventh Edition, October 1910; Twelfth Edition, Dec, 1912 ;
Thirteenth Edition, Aug. 1914; Fourteenth Edition, f¥une1916 ;
Fifteenth Edition, Sept. 1917; Complete Edition, fan. 1921

7

(All rights reserved)

PREFACE TO COMPLETE EDITION
(1920)

N looking over this volume, first published
| in 1889, with a view to a final Edition,

I am glad to note that after all there is not
much in it requiring alteration. Considering that
the original issue took place more than 30 years
ago, I had thought that the great changes in
scientific and philosophic thought which have
taken place during that period would probably
have rendered “ out of date” a good deal of the
book.

As a matter of fact, the first paper—that on
Civilisation—was given as a lecture before the
Fabian Society, in 1888; and I shall not easily
forget the furious attacks which were made upon
it on that occasion. The book—published as
a whole in 1889—came in for a very similar re-
ception from the press-critics. They slated it
to the top of their bent—except in those not
unfrequent cases when they ignored it as almost
beneath notice. The whole trend of the thought
of the time was against its conclusions ; and it
is perhaps worth while to recall these facts in

7

Civilisation : Its Cause and Cure

order to measure how far we have travelled in
these 30 years. For to-day (I think we may
say) these conclusions are generally admitted as
correct ; and the views which seemed so hazarded
and precarious at the earlier date are now fairly
accepted and established.

The word Civilisation has undoubtedly during
this period suffered an ominous change of color.
It is no longer an easy term denoting all that is
ideal and delightful in social life, but on the con-
trary, carries with it a sense of doubt and of cri-
ticism, as of something that is by no means accepted
yet, but is rather on its trial—if not actually con-
demned !

I am sorry to note, however, that the suggestion
made more than once in the course of my book—
namely that the term (Civilisation) should properly
be given an historical instead of ideal value, as
applicable to a certain period only in the history
of each people, has not yet been generally taken
up. Yet a paper by some more competent person
than myself on the definite marks and signs of
the civilisation-period in MHistory—their first
appearance in the course of human progress and
evolution, and their probable disappearance again
at a later stage—would be greatly interesting and
instructive.

My little essay on this subject was written at
the time of its composition with a good deal of
imaginative é/an ; and is of course open to criticism
on that side, as being mainly enthusiastic in char-
acter and only slenderly supported by exact daza,

8

Preface

proofs, historical illustrations, analogies, and so
- forth. But to largely alter or amend the essay
without seriously crippling it would be impossible ;
and though the form may be hurried or inade-
quate, yet as far as the actual contents and con-

- clusions are concerned I still adhere to them

absolutely, and believe that time will show them
to be fully justified.

With regard to my views on Modern Science
the last quarter of a century has curiously corro-
borated them. For while on the one hand—as
-expected—the progress in actual discovery and
application of observed facts has been enormous,
the theories on the other hand about all these things
have receded more and more into the background,
and have passed almost out of sight. While
knowing, for instance, infinitely more about elec-
trical actions and adaptations than we did, we
seem to be if anything further off than ever from
_ any valid theory of what Electricity zs. The same
with regard to Heat and Light, to Astronomical,
Biological and Geological “ laws,’ and so forth.
On such matters Modern Science is on the verge
of confessing itself bankrupt, but not wishing
to do that, it keeps a discreet silence.

The Atom, which I ventured (to the disgust of
my scientific friends) to make fun of 30 years
ago, has now exploded of itself as thoroughly as
a German “ coal-box’’; and the fixed Chemical
Elements of older days have of late dissolved
into protean vapours and emanations, ions and
electrons, impossible to follow through their end-

9

Civilisation: Its Cause and Cure

less transformations. As to the numerous “ Laws
of Nature” which in the nineteenth century
we were just about to establish for all eternity,
-it is only with the greatest difficulty that any of
these can now be discovered—most of them
having got secreted away into the darkness of
ancient text-books: where they lead forlorn and
sightless existences, like the fish in the caves of
Kentucky.

Here again—in my chapters on Science—
though some expressions remain which are now
out of date, I have thought it best to leave them
as originally written: the meanings and general
conclusions being still valid and as they were.
It will be seen that the general drift of these chapters
is to point the moral that the true field of science
is to be found in Life, and that the best way to
know things is to experience their meaning and
to identify oneself with them through Action.
From a study on these principles will ultimately
emerge a Science truly humane and creative,
masterful, and capable of building a true home for
men—instead of the feverish, spectral and self-
deluding thing which has usurped the name up
to now.

Something the same will happen with the con-
ception of Morality. The abstract codes on this
subject, which have wrought so much havoc by
their fatal intrusion on the field of human Life,
are rapidly fading away. These ghosts, like the
ghosts of Nature’s “ Laws,” are receiving their
quietus. And the general outline which was sug-

10

Preface

gested in “ The Defence of Criminals”’ has now
been traced more positively in the chapter on
“The New Morality’ inserted at the end of
the present volume. Morality has at last to become:
truly human, and the real expression of our organic
need. Man has to be liberated from the cramps
and suppressions and fixations which have hitherto
paralysed him in the moral field. He has to
emerge from the swathing bands of his pupal stage
into the free air of heaven, and to become in
the highest sense self-determining and creative.

Thus three things, (1) the realisation of a new
order of Society, in closest touch with Nature,
and in which the diseases of class-domination and
Parasitism will have finally ceased ; (2) the realisa-
tion of a Science which will no longer be a mere
thing of the brain, but a part of Actual Life ;
and (3) the realisation of a Morality which will
signalise and express the vital and organic unity
of man with his fellows—these three things will
become the heralds of a new era of humanity—
an era which will possibly prefer wot to call itself
by the name of Civilisation.

In order to corroborate and confirm the first
paper in the book an Appendix has now been
added containing notes and dasa on the life and
customs of many “ uncivilised”’ peoples; for
much of which Appendix I am indebted to the
assistance of my widely-read and_ resourceful
friend, E. Bertram Lloyd.

E. Cc
December, 1920.

Il

LO ON =

CONTENTS

PREFACE TO COMPLETE EDITION . : 4
CiviLisaTION : Irs CausE AND CURE <4 ;
Mopern Science: A Criricism . ; ;
THE SCIENCE OF THE FuTuRE: A FORECAST ;

DEFENCE OF CRIMINALS: A CRITICISM OF MORALITY

EXFOLIATION : LAMARCK versus DARWIN. ;
CusTom . : ; ‘ ‘ :
A RaTIoNAL AND HUMANE SCIENCE ; ;
THe New Moratiry . ‘ : ;

APPENDIX—BEING NoTEs ON SOME OF THE
CHARACTERISTICS AND CUSTOMS OF PRE-
CIVILISED PEOPLES . 7 . ‘

13

PAGE

120

143
181

206

219
243

265

{
m4

—

CIVILISATION :
ITS CAUSE AND CURE

The friendly and flowing savage, who is he? Is he waiting
for civilisation, or is he past it, and mastering it ?—-WHITMAN.

. E find ourselves to-day in the midst of a
\ : somewhat peculiar state of society, which
we call Civilisation, but which even to

the most optimistic among us does not seem al-
together desirable. Some of us, indeed, are
inclined to think that it is a kind of disease which
the various races of man have to pass through—
as children pass through measles or whooping
cough ; but if it is a disease, there is this serious
consideration to be made, that while History tells
us of many nations that have been attacked by it,
of many that have succumbed to it, and of some
that are still in the throes of it, we know of no
single case in which a nation has fairly recovered
from and passed through it to a more normal
and healthy condition. In other words the
development of human society has never yet
(that we know of) passed beyond a certain definite

15

Civilisation: Its Cause and Cure

and apparently final stage in the process we call
Civilisation ; at that stage it has always succumbed
or been arrested.

Of course it may at first sound extravagant
to use the word disease in connection with Civilisa-
tion at all, but a little thought should show that
the association is not ill-grounded. To take the
matter on its physical side first, I find that in
Mullhall’s Dictionary of Statistics (1884) the number
of accredited doctors and surgeons in the United
Kingdom is put at over 23,000. If the extent
of the national sickness is such that we require
23,000 medical men to attend to us, it must surely
be rather serious! And ¢hey do not cure us.
Wherever we look to-day, in mansion or in slum,
we see the features and hear the complaints of
ill-health ; the difficulty is really to find a healthy
person. The state of the modern civilised man in
this respect—our coughs, colds, mufflers, dread of
a waft of chill air, &&c.—is anything but creditable,
and it seems to be the fact that, notwithstanding
all our libraries of medical science, our know-
ledges, arts, and appliances of life, we are actually
less capable of taking care of ourselves than the
animals are. Indeed, talking of animals, we are
—as Shelley I think points out—fast depraving
the domestic breeds. The cow, the horse, the sheep,
and even the confiding pussy-cat, are becoming
ever more and more subject to disease, and are
liable to ills which in their wilder state they knew
not of. And finally the savage races of the earth
do not escape the baneful influence. Wherever

16

Civilisation : Its Cause and Cure

Civilisation touches them, they die like flies from
the small-pox, drink, and worse evils it brings along
with it, and often its mere contact is sufficient to
destroy whole races.

But the word Disease is applicable to our social
as well as to our physical condition. For as in
the body disease arises from the loss of the physical
unity which constitutes Health, and so takes the
form of warfare or discord between the various
parts, or of the abnormal development of individual
organs, or the consumption of the system by pre-
datory germs and growths ; so in our modern
life we find the unity gone which constitutes
true society, and in its place warfare of classes
and individuals, abnormal development of some
to the detriment of others, and consumption of
the organism by masses of social parasites. If
the word disease is applicable anywhere, I should
say it is—both in its direct and its derived sense—
to the civilised societies of to-day.

Again, mentally, is not our condition most
unsatisfactory? Iam not alluding to the number
and importance of the lunatic asylums which
cover our land, nor to the fact that maladies of
the brain and nervous system are now so common;
but to the strange sense of mental unrest which
marks our populations, and which amply justifies
Ruskin’s cutting epigram: that our two objects
in life are, “‘ Whatever we have—to get more ;
and wherever we are—to go somewhere else.”
This sense of unrest, of disease, penetrates down
even into the deepest regions of man’s being—into

17 B

Civilisation : Its Cause and Cure

his moral nature—disclosing itself there, as it
has done in all nations notably at the time of their
full civilisation, as the sense of Sin.t All down
the Christian centuries we find this strange sense
of inward strife and discord developed, in marked
contrast to the naive insouciance of the pagan
and primitive world ; and, what is strangest, we
even find people glorying in this consciousness
—which, while it may be the harbinger of better
things to come, is and can be in itself only the
evidence of loss of unity, and therefore of ill-health,
in the very centre of human life.

Of course we are aware with regard to Civilisa-
tion that the word is sometimes used in a kind of
ideal sense, as to indicate a state of future culture
. towards which we are tending—the implied assump-
tion being that a sufficiently long course of top
hats and telephones will in the end bring us to
this ideal condition ; while any little drawbacks
in the process, such as we have just pointed out,
are explained as being merely accidental and
temporary. Men sometimes speak of civilising
and ennobling influences as if the two terms were
interchangeable, and of course if they like to use
the word Civilisation in this sense they have a
right to; but whether the actual tendencies of
modern life taken in the mass ave ennobling (ex-
cept in a quite indirect way hereafter to be dwelt
upon) is, to say the least, a doubtful question.

t It is interesting to note that the “sense of Sin” seems now

(1920) to have nearly passed away. And this fact probably
indicates a considerable impending change in our Social] Order.
18

Civilisation : Its Cause and Cure

Any one who would get an idea of the glorious
being that is as a matter of fact being turned out
by the present process should read Mr. Kay
Robinson’s article in the Nineteenth Century for
May, 1883, in which he prophesies (quite solemnly
and in the name of science) that the human being
of the future will be a toothless, bald, toeless crea-
ture with flaccid muscles and limbs almost in-
capable of locomotion !

Perhaps it is safer on the whole not to use the
word Civilisation in such ideal sense, but to limit
its use (as is done to-day by all writers on primitive
society) to a definite historical stage through which
the various nations pass, and in which we actually
find ourselves at the present time. Though there
is of course a difficulty in marking the commence-
ment of any period of historical evolution very
definitely, yet all students of this subject agree
that the growth of property and the ideas and
institutions flowing from it did at a certain point
bring about such a change in the structure of
human society that the new stage might fairly be .
distinguished from the earlier stages of Savagery —
and Barbarism by a separate term. The growth
of Wealth, it is shown, and with it the conception
of Private Property, brought on certain very definite
new forms of social life ; it destroyed the ancient
system of society based upon the gems, that 1s,
a society of equals founded upon blood-relationship,
and introduced a society of classes founded upon
differences of material possession ; it destroyed
the ancient system of mother-right and inheritance

19

Civilisation : Its Cause and Cure

through the female line, and turned the woman
into the property of the man; it brought with
it private ownership of land, and so created a class
of landless aliens, and a whole system of rent,
mortgage, interest, etc. ; it introduced slavery,
| serfdom and wage-labour, which are only various
forms of the dominance of one class over another ;
and to rivet these authorities it created the State
and the policeman. Every race that we know,
that has become what we call civilised, has passed
through these changes ; and though the details
may vary and have varied a little, the main order
of change has been practically the same in all cases.
We are justified therefore in calling Civilisation
a historical stage, whose commencement dates
roughly from the division of society into classes
founded on property and the adoption of class-
government. Lewis Morgan in his Ancient Society
adds the invention of writing and the consequent
adoption of written History and written Law ;
Engels in his Ursprung der Familie, des Privat-
eigenthums und des Staats points out the im-
portance of the appearance of the Merchant,
even in his most primitive form, as a mark
of the civilisation-period ; while the French
writers of the last century made a good point in
inventing the term zations policées (policemanised
nations) as a substitute for civilised nations ; for
perhaps there is no better or more universal
mark of the period we are considering, and of its
social degradation, than the appearance of the
crawling phenomenon in question. [Imagine the
2.0

7 2. (Ae TE,

Civilisation: Its Cause and Cure

rage of any decent North American Indians if
they had been told they required policemen to
keep them in order !]

If we take this historical definition of Civilisation,
we shall see that our English Civilisation began
hardly more than a thousand years ago, and even
so the remains of the more primitive society lasted
long after that. In the case of Rome—if we
reckon from the later times of the early kings
down to the fall of Rome—we have again about a
thousand years. The Jewish civilisation from David
and Solomon downwards lasted—with breaks—
somewhat over a thousand years; the Greek
civilisation less ; the series of Egyptian civilisa-
tions which we can now distinguish lasted alto-
gether very much longer ; but the important points
to see are, first, that the process has been quite
similar in character in these various (and numerous
other) cases,! quite as similar in fact as the course
of the same disease in various persons; and
secondly that in no case, as said before, has anys
nation come through and passed beyond this stage ;
but that in most cases it has succumbed soon after
the main symptoms had been developed.

But it will be said, It may be true that Civilisa-
tion regarded as a stage of human history presents
some features of disease ; but is there any reason
for supposing that disease in some form or other
was any less present in the previous stage—that of
Barbarism ? To which I reply, I think there is

t For proof I must refer the reader to Engels, or to his own
studies of history.
21

Civilisation: Its Cause and Cure
good reason. Without committing ourselves to

the unlikely theory that the “ noble savage” was
an ideal human being physically or in any other
respect, and while certain that in many points he
was decidedly inferior to the civilised man, I think
we must allow him the superiority in some directions ;
and one of these was his comparative freedom from
disease. Lewis Morgan, who grew up among
the Iroquois Indians, and who probably knew
the North American natives as well as any white
man has ever done, says (in his Ancient Society,
p- 45), ‘‘ Barbarism ends with the production of
grand Barbarians.” And though there are no
native races on the earth to-day who are actually
in the latest and most advanced stage of Barbarism ; '
yet, if we take the most advanced tribes that we
know of—such as the said Iroquois Indians of
twenty or thirty years ago, some of the Kafhir
tribes round Lake Nyassa in Africa, now (and
possibly for a few years more) comparatively
untouched by civilisation, or the tribes along the
river Uaupes, thirty or forty years back, of Wallace’s
Travels on the Amazon—all tribes in what Morgan
would call the middle stage of Barbarism—we
undoubtedly in each case discover a fine and (which
is our point here) healthy people. Captain Cook
in his first Voyage says of the natives of Otaheite,
‘“ We saw no critical disease during our stay upon
the island, and but few instances of sickness, which
were accidental fits of the colic ;”’ and, later on,

2 Say like the Homeric Greeks, or the Spartans of the Lycurgus
period.

2.2

Se ee

Civilisation: Its Cause and Cure

of the New Zealanders, “‘ They enjoy perfect
and uninterrupted health. In all our visits to
their towns, where young and old, men and women,
crowded about us. ... we never saw a single person
who appeared to have any bodily complaint, nor
among the numbers we have seen naked did we
once perceive the slightest eruption upon the
skin, or any marks that an eruption had left behind.”
These are pretty strong words. Of course diseases
exist among such peoples, even where they have
never been in contact with civilisation, but I think
we may say that among the higher types of savages
they are rarer, and nothing like so various and
so prevalent as they are in our modern life ; while
the power of recovery from wounds (which are of
course the most frequent form of disablement)
is generally admitted to be something astonishing.
Speaking of the Kaffirs, J. G. Wood says, ‘* Their
state of health enables them to survive injuries
which would be almost instantly fatal to any
civilised European.” Mr. Frank Oates in his
Diary * mentions the case of a man who was con-
demned to death by the king. He was hacked
down with axes, and left for dead. ‘“‘ What
must have been intended for the coup de grace
was a cut in the back of the head, which had
chipped a large piece out of the skull, and must
have been meant to cut the spinal cord where it
joins the brain. It had, however, been made a
little higher than this, but had left such a wound
as I should have thought that no one could have

t Matabele Land and the Victoria Falls, p. 209.
23

Civilisation : Its Cause and Cure

survived ... when I held the lanthorn to investigate
the wound I started back in amazement to see a
hole at the base of the skull, perhaps two inches
long and an inch and a half wide, and I will not
venture to say how deep, but the depth too must
have been an affair of inches. Of course this
hole penetrated into the substance of the brain,
and probably for some distance. I dare say a
mouse could have sat in it.” Yet the man was
not so much disconcerted. Like Old King Cole,
‘““He asked for a pipe and a drink of brandy,”
and ultimately made a perfect recovery! Of
course it might be said that such a story only
proves the lowness of organisation of the brains
of savages ; but to the Kaffhirs at any rate this would
not apply ; they are a quick-witted race, with
large brains, and exceedingly acute in argument,
as Colenso found to his cost. Another point
which indicates superabundant health is the
amazing animal spirits of these native races !
The shouting, singing, dancing kept up nights
long among the Kaffirs are exhausting merely
to witness, while the graver North American
Indian exhibits a corresponding power of life in
his eagerness for battle or his stoic resistance of
ain.?

Similarly when we come to consider the social

t A similar physical health and power of life are also developed
among Europeans who have lived for long periods in more native
conditions. It is not to our racé, which is probably superior to
any in capacity, but to the state in which we live that we must
ascribe our defect in this particular matter.

24

ee eS

Civilisation: Its Cause and Cure

life of the wilder races—however rudimentary
and undeveloped it may be—the almost universal
testimony of students and travelers is that within
its limits it is more harmonious and compact than
that of the civilised nations. The members of
the tribe are not organically at warfare with each
other ; society is not divided into classes which
prey upon each other ; nor is it consumed by para-
sites. There is more true social unity, less of
disease. ‘Though the customs of each tribe are
rigid, absurd, and often frightfully cruel, and
though all outsiders are liable to be regarded as
enemies, yet within those limits the members live
peacefully together—their pursuits, their work,
are undertaken in common, thieving and violence
are rare, social feeling and community of interest
are strong. “In their own bands Indians are
erfectly honest. In all my intercourse with them
have heard of not over half-a-dozen cases of such
theft. But this wonderfully exceptional honesty
extends no further than to the members of his
immediate band. To all outside of it, the Indian
is not only one of the most arrant thieves in the
world, but this quality or faculty is held in the
highest estimation.”” (Dodge, p. 64.) Ifa man
set out on a journey (this among the Kaffrs)
“he need not trouble himself about provisions,
for he is sure to fall in with some hut, or per-
haps a village, and is equally sure of obtain-
ing both food and shelter.”2 “I have lived,”
| t See Col. Dodge’s Our Wild Indians.
% Wood’s Natural History of Man.

25

Civilisation : Its Cause and Cure

says A. R. Wallace in his Malay Archipelago
vol. ii. p. 460), “‘ with communities in South
America and the East, who have no laws or law
courts, but the public opinion of the village...
yet each man scrupulously respects the rights of
his fellows, and any infraction of those rights
rarely takes place. In such a community all are
nearly equal. There are none of those wide dis-
tinctions of education and ignorance, wealth and
poverty, master and servant, which are the pro-
duct of our civilisation.” Indeed this community
of life in the early societies, this absence of division
into classes, and of the contrast between rich
and poor, is now admitted on all sides as a marked
feature of difference between the conditions of
the primitive and of civilised man.!

Lastly, with regard to the mental condition of
the Barbarian, probably no one will be found to
dispute the contention that he is more easy-minded
and that his consciousness of Sin is less developed
than in his civilised brother. Our unrest is the
penalty we pay for our wider life. The missionary
retires routed from the savage in whom he can
awake no sense of his supreme wickedness. An
American lady had a servant, a negro-woman,
who on one occasion asked leave of absence for
the next morning, saying she wished to attend the
Holy Communion? “I have no objection,” said
the mistress, “to grant you leave; but do you
think you ought to attend Communion? You
know you have never said you were sorry about

t See Appendix.
26

Civilisation : Its Cause and Cure

that goose you stole last week.”” ‘“‘ Lor’ missus,”
replied the woman, “do ye think I’d let an old
goose stand betwixt me and my Blessed Lord
and Master?” But joking apart, and however
necessary for man’s ultimate evolution may be
the temporary development of this consciousness
of Sin, we cannot help seeing that the condition
of the mind in which it is absent is the most dis-
tinctively healthy; nor can it be concealed that
some of the greatest works of Art have been pro-
duced by people like the earlier Greeks, in whom
it was absent ; and could not possibly have been
produced where it was strongly developed.
Though, as already said, the latest stage of Bar-
barism, #.¢., that just preceding Civilisation, is
unrepresented on the earth to-day, yet we have
in the Homeric and other dawn-literature of the
various nations indirect records of this stage; and
these records assure us of a condition of man very
similar to, though somewhat more developed than,
the condition of the existing races I have mentioned
above. Besides this, we have in the numerous
traditions of the Golden Age,t legends of the
Fall, etc., a curious fact which suggests to us that
a great number of races in advancing towards
Civilisation were conscious at some point or other
of having lost a primitive condition of ease and
contentment, and that they embodied this conscious-
ness, with poetical adornment and licence, in
imaginative legends of the earlier Paradise. Some
people indeed, seeing the universality of these

t See Note at end of this chapter.
27

Civilisation : Its Cause and Cure

stories, and the remarkable fragments of wisdom
embedded in them and other extremely ancient
myths and writings, have supposed that there
really was a general pre-historic Eden-garden or
Atlantis ; but the necessities of the case hardly
seem to compel this supposition. That each
human soul, however, bears within itself some kind
of reminiscence of a more harmonious and perfect
state of being, which it has at some time experienced,
seems to me a conclusion difficult to avoid ; and
this by itself might give rise to manifold traditions
and myths.

I]

However all this may be, the question immedi-
ately before us—having established the more
healthy, though more limited, condition of the
pre-civilisation peoples—is, why this lapse or
fall? What is the meaning of this manifold
and intensified manifestation of Disease—physical,
social, intellectual, and moral? what is its place
and part in the great whole of human evolution ?

And this involves us in a digression, which
must occupy a few pages, on the nature of Health.

When we come to analyse the conception of
Disease, physical or mental, in society or in the
individual, it evidently means, as already hinted
once or twice, /oss of unity. Health, therefore,
should mean unity, and it is curious that the
history of the word entirely corroborates this idea.
As is well known, the words health, whole, holy,

28

i ee oe

Civilisation: Its Cause and Cure

are from the same stock ; and they indicate to us the
fact that far back in the past those who created this
group of words had a conception of the meaning
of Health very different from ours, and which
they embodied unconsciously in the word itself
and its strange relatives.

These are, for instance, and among others:
heal, hallow, hale, holy, whole, wholesome ;
German heilig, Heiland (the Saviour); Latin
salus (as in salutation, salvation) ; Greek kalos ;
also compare hail! a salutation, and, less certainly
connected, the root 4a/, to breathe, as in inhale,
exhale—French haleine—lItalian and French alma
and ame (the soul) ; compare the Latin spiritus,
spirit or breath, and Sanskrit 4tman, breath or
soul.

Wholeness, holiness... “if thine eye be single,
thy whole body shall be full of light.” ... “ thy
faith hath made thee whole.”

The idea seems to be a positive one—a condition
of the body in which it is an entirety, a unity—
a central force maintaining that condition ; and
disease being the break-up—or break-down—
of that entirety into multiplicity.

The peculiarity about our modern conception
of Health is that it seems to be a purely negative
one. So impressed are we by the myriad presence
of Disease—so numerous its dangers, so sudden
and unforetellable its attacks—that we have come
to look upon health as the mere absence of the
same. As a solitary spy picks his way through a
hostile camp at night, sees the enemy sitting round

29

Civilisation : Its Cause and Cure

his fires, and trembles at the crackling of a twig
beneath his feet—so the traveller through this
world, comforter in one hand and physic-bottle
in the other, must pick his way, fearful lest at
any time he disturb the sleeping legions of death—
thrice blessed if by any means, steering now to
the right and now to the left, and thinking only
of his personal safety, he pass by without discovery
to the other side.

Health with us is a negative thing. It is a
neutralisation of opposing dangers. It is to be
neither rheumatic nor gouty, consumptive nor
bilious, to be untroubled by head-ache, back-ache,
heart-ache, or any of the “thousand natural shocks
that flesh is heir to.’ These are the realities.
Health is the mere negation of them.

The modern notion, and which has evidently
in a very subtle way penetrated the whole thought
of to-day, is that the essential fact of life is the
existence of innumerable external forces, which,
by a very delicate balance and difficult to maintain,
concur to produce Man—who in consequence may
at any moment be destroyed again by the non-
concurrence of those forces. The older notion
apparently is that the essential fact of life 7s Man
himself ; and that the external forces, so-called,
are in some way subsidiary to this fact—that they
may aid his expression or manifestation, or that
they may hinder it, but that they can neither create
nor annihilate the Man. Probably both ways of
looking at the subject are important ; there is a
man that can be destroyed, and there is a man that

30

Civilisation : Its Cause and Cure

cannot be destroyed. The old words, soul and
body, indicate this contrast ; but like all words they
are subject to the defect that they are an attempt
to draw a line where no line can ultimately be
drawn ; they mark a contrast where, in fact, there
is only continuity—for between the little mortal
man who dwells here and now, and the divine and
universal Man who also forms a part of our conscious-
ness, is there not a perfect gradation of being,
and where (if anywhere) is there a gulf fixed?
Together they form a unit, and each is necessary
to the other : the first cannot do without the second,
and the second cannot get along at all without the
first. To use the words of Angelus Silesius |
(quoted by Schopenhauer), ‘‘ Ich weiss dass ohne ”
mich Gott nicht ein Nu kann leben.” |

According then to the elder conception, and
perhaps according to an elder experience, man,
to be really healthy, must be a unit, an entirety—
his more external and momentary self standing in
some kind of filial relation to his more universal
and incorruptible part—so that not only the remotest
and outermost regions of the body, and all the
assimilative, secretive, and other processes belonging
thereto, but even the thoughts and passions of the
mind itself, stand in direct and clear relationship
to it, the final and absolute transparency of the
mortal creature. And thus this divinity in each
creature, being that which constitutes it and causes
it to cohere together, was conceived of as that crea-
ture’s saviour, healer—healer of wounds of body
and wounds of heart—the Man within the man,

3!

Civilisation: Its Cause and Cure

whom it was not only possible to know, but whom
to know and be united with was the alone salva-
tion. This, I take it, was the law of health—and
of holiness—as accepted at some elder time of
human history, and by us seen as thro’ a glass
darkly.

And the condition of disease, and of sin, under
the same view, was the reverse of this. Enfeeble-
ment, obscuration, duplicity—the central radiation
blocked ; lesser and insubordinate centres establish-
ing and asserting themselves as against it ; division,
discord, possession by devils.

Thus in the body, the establishment of an in-—
subordinate centre—a boil, a tumor, the introduc-
tion and spread of a germ with innumerable pro-
geny throughout the system, the enlargement
out of all reason of an existing organ—means
disease. In the mind, disease begins when any
passion asserts itself as an independent centre of
thought and action. The condition of health
in the mind is loyalty to the divine Man within it.
But if loyalty to money become an independent
centre of life, or greed of knowledge, or of fame,
or of drink ; jealousy, lust, the love of approbation ;
or mere following after any so-called virtue for
itself—purity, humility, consistency, or what not—
these may grow to seriously endanger the other.
They are, or should be, subordinates ; and though

t No words or theory even of morality can express or formulate
this—no enthronement of amy virtue can take its place; for all
virtue enthroned before our humanity becomes vice, and worse
than vice.

32

Civilisation: Its Cause and Cure

over a long period their insubordination may be
a necessary condition of human progress, yet during
all such time they are at war with each other and
with the central Will; the man is torn and tor-
mented, and is not happy.

And when I speak thus separately of the mind
and body, it must be remembered, as already
said, that there is no strict line between them ;
but probably every affection or passion of the
mind has its correlative in the condition of the
body—though this latter may or may not be
easily observable. Gluttony zs a fever of the
digestive apparatus. What is a taint in the mind
is also a taint in the body. The stomach has
started the original idea of becoming itself the
centre of the human system. The sexual organs
may start a similar idea. Here are distinct threats,
menaces made against the central authority—against
the Man himself. For the man must rule or
disappear ; it is impossible to imagine a man
presided over by a Stomach—a walking Stomach,
using hands, feet, and all other members merely
to carry it from place to place, and serve its assimila-
tive mania. We call such a one an Hog. [And
thus in the theory of Evolution we see the place
of the hog, and all other animals, as fore-runners
or off-shoots of special faculties in Man, and why
the true man, and rightly, has authority over all
animals, and can alone give them their place in
creation. |

So of the Brain, or any other organ ; for the
Man is no organ, resides in no organ, but is the

33 c

Civilisation: Its Cause and Cure

central life ruling and radiating among all organs,
and assigning them their arts to play.

Disease then, in body or mind, is from this
point of view the break-up of its unity, its entirety,
into multiplicity. It is the abeyance of a central
power, and the growth of insubordinate centres—
life in each creature being conceived of as a con-
tinual exercise of energy or conquest, by which
external or antagonistic forces (and organisms)
are brought into subjection and compelled into
the service of the creature, or are thrown off as
harmful to it. Thus, by way of illustration, we
find that plants or animals, when in good health,
have a remarkable power of throwing off the attacks
of any parasites which incline to infest them ;
while those that are weakly are very soon eaten
up by the same. A rose-tree, for instance, brought
indoors, will soon fall a prey to the aphis—though
when hardened out of doors the pest makes next
to no impression on it. In dry seasons when the
young turnip plants in the fields are weakly from
want of water the entire crop is sometimes destroyed
by the turnip fly, which then multiplies enormously ;
but if a shower or two of rain come before much
damage is done the plant will then grow vigorously,
its tissues become more robust and resist the attacks
of the fly, which in its turn dies. Late investiga-
tions seem to show that one of the functions of the
white corpuscles in the blood is to devour disease-
germs and bacteria present in the circulation—thus
absorbing these organisms into subjection to the
central life of the body—and that with this object

34

Civilisation : Its Cause and Cure

they congregate in numbers toward any part of
the body which is wounded or diseased. Or
to take an example from society, it is clear enough
that if our social life were really vivid and healthy,
such parasitic products as the idle shareholder
and the policeman above-mentioned would simply
be impossible. he material on which they prey
would not exist, and they would either perish
or be transmuted into useful forms. It seems
obvious in fact that life in any organism can only
be maintained by some such processes as these—
by which parasitic or infesting organisms are either
thrown off or absorbed into subjection. To define
the nature of the power which thus works towards
and creates the distinctive unity of each organism
may be difficult, is probably at present impossible,
but that some such power exists we can hardly

refuse to admit. Probably it is more a subject \

of the growth of our consciousness, than an_ object
of external scientific investigation.

In this view, Death is simply the loosening
and termination of the action of this power—over
certain regions of the organism; a process by
which, when these superficial parts become hardened
and osseous, as in old age, or irreparably damaged,
as in cases of accident, the inward being sloughs
them off, and passes into other spheres. In the
case of man there may be noble and there may be
ignoble death, as there may be noble and ignoble
life. ‘The inward self, unable to maintain authority
over the forces committed to its charge, declining
from its high prerogative, swarmed over by parasites,

35

Civilisation : Its Cause and Cure

and fallen partially into the clutch of obscene
foes, may at last with shame and torment be driven
forth from the temple in which it ought to have
been supreme. Or, having fulfilled a holy and
wholesome time, having radiated divine life and
love through all the channels of body and mind,
and as a perfect workman uses his tools, so having
with perfect mastery and nonchalance used all the
materials committed to it, it may quietly and
peacefully lay these down, and unchanged (absolutely
unchanged to all but material eyes) pass on to other
spheres appointed.

And now a few words on the medical aspect
of the subject. If we accept any theory (even
remotely similar to that just indicated) to the effect
that Health is a positive thing, and not a mere
negation of disease, it becomes pretty clear that
no mere investigation of the latter will enable us
to find out what the former is, or bring us nearer
to it. You might as well try to create the ebb
and flow of the tides by an organised system of
mops.

Turn your back upon the Sun and go forth into
the wildernesses of space till you come to those
limits where the rays of light, faint with distance,
fall dim upon the confines of eternal darkness—
and phantoms and shadows in the half-light are
the product of the wavering conflict betwixt day
and night—investigate these shadows, describe
them, classify them, record the changes which
take place in them, erect in vast libraries these
records into a monument of human industry and

36

Civilisation : Its Cause and Cure

research ; so shall you be at the end as near to a
knowledge and understanding of the sun itself—
which all this time you have left behind you, and
on which you have turned your back—as the
investigators of disease are to a knowledge and
understanding of what health is. The solar rays
illumine the outer world and give to it its unity
and entirety ; soin the inner world of each individual
possibly is there another Sun, which illumines
and gives unity to the man, and whose warmth
and light would permeate his system. Wait
upon the shining forth of this inward sun, give
free access and welcome to its rays of love, and
free passage for them into the common world
around you, and it may be you will get to know
more about health than all the books of medicine
contain, or can tell you.

Or to take the former simile: it is the central
force of the Moon which acting on the great ocean
makes all its waters one, and causes them to rise
and fall in timely consent. But take your moon
away ; hey ! now the tide is flowing too far down
this estuary! Station your thousands with mops,
but it breaks through in channel and runlet!
Block it here, but it overflows in a neighboring
bay ! Appoint an army of swabs there, but to
what end? The infinitest care along the fringe
of this great sea can never do, with all imaginable
dirt and confusion, what the central power does
easily, and with unerring grace and providence.

And so of the great (the vast and wonderful)
ocean which ebbs and flows within a man—take

37

Civilisation: Its Cause and Cure

away the central guide—and not 20,000 doctors,
each with 20,000 books to consult and 20,000
phials of different contents to administer, could
meet the myriad cases of disease which would
ensue, or bolster up into “‘ wholeness” the being
from whom the single radiant unity had departed.
Probably there has never been an age, nor any
country (except Yankee-land ?) in which disease
has been so generally prevalent as in England
to-day ; and certainly there has never (with the
same exception) been an age or country in which
doctors have so swarmed, or in which medical
science has been so powerful, in apparatus, in
learning, in authority, and in actual organisation
and number of adherents. How reconcile this con-
tradiction—if indeed a contradiction it be?
But the fact is that medical science does not
contradict disease—any more than laws abolish
crime. Medical science—and doubtless for very
good reasons—makes a fetish of disease, and
dances around it. It is (as a rule) only seen where
disease is ; it writes enormous tomes on disease ;
it induces disease in animals (and even men) for
the purpose of studying it ; it knows, to a marvelous
extent, the symptoms of disease, its nature, its
causes, its goings out and its comings in; its
eyes are perpetually fixed on disease, till disease
(for it) becomes the main fact of the world and the
main object of its worship. Even what is so grace-
fully called Hygiene does not get beyond this
negative attitude. And the world still waits for
its Healer, who shall tell us—diseased and suffering

38

= SO

ag,

Civilisation : Its Cause and Cure

as we are—what health is, where it is to be found,
whence it flows; and who having touched this
wonderful power within himself shall not rest
till he has proclaimed and imparted it to men.

No, medical science does not, in the main,
contradict disease. The same cause (infidelity
and decay of the central life in men) which creates
disease and makes men liable to it, creates students
anda science of the subject. The Moon? having
gone from over the waters, the good people rush
forth with their mops ; and the untimely inunda-
tions, and the mops and the mess and the pother,
are all due to the same cause.

As to the lodgment of disease, it is clear that this
would take place easily in a disorganised system—
just as a seditious adventurer would easily effect
a landing, and would find insubordinate materials
ready at hand for his use, in a land where the central
government was weak. And as to the treatment
of a disease so introduced there are obviously two
methods : one is to reinforce the central power
till it is sufficiently strong of itself to eject the
insubordinate elements and restore order; the
other is to attack the malady from outside and if
possible destroy it—(as by doses and decoctions)
—independently of the inner vitality, and leaving
that as it was before. The first method would
seem the best, most durable and effective ; but
it is difficult and slow. It consists in the adoption

t It is curious that this word seems to have the same root as
the word Man, the original idea apparently being Order, of
Measure,

39

Civilisation : Its Cause and Cure

of a healthy life, bodily and mental, and will be
spoken oflateron. Thesecond may be characterised
as the medical method, and is valuable, or rather
I should be inclined to say, wi// be valuable, when
it has found its place, which is to be subsidiary
to the first. It is too often, however, regarded as
superior in importance, and in this way, though
easy of application, has come perhaps to be productive
of more harm than good. The disease may be
broken down for the time being, but, the roots
of it not being destroyed, it soon springs up again
in the same or a new form, and the patient is a
badly off as ever. :
The great positive force of Health, and the
power which it has to expe/ disease from its neigh-
borhood is a thing realised, I believe, by few persons.
But it as been realised on earth, and will be realised
again when the more squalid elements of our
present-day civilisation have passed away.

IT]

Tue result then of our digression is to show that
“ Health—in body or mind—means unity, integra-
tion as opposed to disintegration. In the animals
we find this physical unity existing to a remarkable
degree. An almost unerring instinct and selective
power rules their actions and organisation. Thus
a cat before it has fallen (say before it has become
a very wheezy fireside pussy !) is in a sense perfect.
The wonderful consent of its limbs as it runs or

40

A its >

Civilisation : Its Cause and Cure

leaps, the adaptation of its muscles, the exactness
and inevitableness of its instincts, physical and
affectional ; its senses of sight and smell, its clean-
liness, nicety as to food, motherly tact, the expression
of its whole body when enraged, or when watching
for prey—all these things are so to speak absolute
and instantaneous—and fill one with admiration.
The creature is “whole” or in one piece: there
is no mentionable conflict or division within it.
Similarly with the other animals, and even with
the early man himself. And so it would appear
returning to our subject—that, if we accept the
doctrine of Evolution, there is a progression of
animated beings—which, though not perfect, possess
in the main the attribute of Health—from the
lowest forms up to a healthy and instinctive though
certainly limited man. During all this stage the
central law is in the ascendant, and the physical
frame of each creature is the fairly clean vehicle
of its expression—varying of course in complexity
and degree according to the point of unfoldment
which has been reached. And when thus in the
long process of development the inner Man (which
has lain hidden or dormant within the animal)
at last appeats, and the creature consequently takes
on the outer frame and faculties of the human
being, which are only as they are because of the

t And with regard to disease, though it is not maintained that
among the animals there is anything like immunity from it—
since diseases of a more or less parasitic character are common
in all tribes of plants and animals—still they seem to be rarer,
and the organic instinct of health greater, than in the civilised man.

41

Civilisation : Its Cause and Cure

inner man which they represent; when it has
passed through stage after stage of animal life,
throwing out tentative types and likenesses of
what is to come, and going through innumerable
preliminary exercises in special forms and faculties,
till at last it begins to be able to wear the full
: majesty of manhood itself—shex it would seem
that that long process of development is drawing
to a close, and that the goal of creation must be
within measurable distance.

But then, at that very moment, and when the
goal is, so to speak, in sight, occurs this failure
of “‘wholeness”’ of which we have spoken, this
partial break-up of the unity of human nature—
and man, instead of going forward any longer in
the same line as before, to all appearance fal/s.

What is the meaning of this loss of unity?
What is the cause and purpose of this fall and
centuries-long exile from the earlier Paradise?

There can be but oneanswer. Itis self-knowledge
—(which involves in a sense the abandonment of
self). Man has to become conscious of his destiny
—to lay hold of and realise his own freedom and
blessedness—to transfer his consciousness from
the outer and mortal part of him to the inner and
undying.

The cat cannot do this. Though perfect in
its degree, its interior unfoldment is yet incomplete.
The human soul within it has not yet come forward
and declared itself ; some sheathing leaves have
yet to open before the divine flower-bud can be
clearly seen, And when at last (speaking as a

42

ee ee

Civilisation: Its Cause and Cure

fool) the cat becomes a man—when the human
soul within the creature has climbed itself forward
and found expression, transforming the outer
frame in the process into that of humanity—
(which is the meaning I suppose of the evolution
theory)—then the creature, though perfect and
radiant in the form of Man, still lacks one thing.
It lacks the knowledge of itself ; it lacks its own
identity, and the realisation of the manhood to
which as a fact it has attained.

In the animals consciousness has never returned
upon itself. It radiates easily outwards; and
the creature obeys without let or hesitation, and
with little if any se/f-consciousness, the law of its
being. And when man first appears on the earth,
and even up to the threshold of what we call
civilisation, there is much to show that he should
in this respect still be classed with the animals.
Though vastly superior to them in attainments,
phsyical and mental, in power over nature, capacity
of progress, and adaptability, he still in these earlier
stages was like an animal in the unconscious
instinctive nature of his action ; and on the other
hand, though his moral and intellectual structures
were far less complete than those of the modern
man—as was a necessary result of the absence of
self-knowledge—he actually lived more in harmony
with himself and with nature,! than does his

t As to the unity of these wild races with Nature, that is a
matter seemingly beyond dispute ; their keenness of sense, sensitive-
ness to atmospheric changes, knowledge of properties of plants and
habits of animals, etc., have been the subject of frequent remark ;

43

iy}

3

Civilisation : Its Cause and Cure

descendant ; his impulses, both physical and social,
were clearer and more unhesitating ; and his un-
consciousness of inner discord and sin a great
contrast to our modern condition of everlasting
strife and perplexity.

If then to this stage belongs some degree of
human perfection and felicity, yet there remains

a much vaster height to be scaled. The human

soul which has wandered darkling for so many
thousand of years, from its tiny spark-like germ
in some low form of life to its full splendor and
dignity in man, has yet to come to the knowledge
of its wonderful heritage, has yet to become finally
individualised and free, to know itself immortal,
to resume and interpret all its past lives, and to
enter in triumph into the kingdom which it has
won.

It has in fact to face the frightful struggle of
self-consciousness, or the disentanglement of the
but beyond this, their strong /ee/ing of union with the universal

spirit, probably only dimly self conscious, but expressing itself
very markedly and clearly in their customs, is most strange and

pregnant of meaning. The dances of the Andaman Islanders —

on the sands at night, the wild festival of the new moon among
the Fans and other African tribes, the processions through the
forests, the chants and dull thudding of drums, the torture-dances
of the young Red Indian bravos in the burning heat of the sun ; the
Dionysiac festivals among the early Greeks; and indeed the
sacrificial nature-rites and carnivals and extraordinary powers of
second-sight found among all primitive peoples; all these things
indicate clearly a faculty which, though it had hardly become
self-conscious enough to be what we call religion, was yet in truth

the foundation element of religion, and the germ of some human”

powers which wait yet to be developed.

44,

er

Le ES

Civilisation : Its Cause and Cure

true self from the fleeting and perishable self. «
The animals and man, unfallen, are healthy and
free from care, but unaware of what they are ;
to attain self-knowledge man must fall ; he must
become less than his true self; he must endure
imperfection ; division and strife must enter his
nature. To realise the perfect Life, to know what,
how wonderful it is—to understand that all blessed-
ness and freedom consists in its possession—he
must for the moment suffer divorce from it ;
the unity, the repose of his nature must be broken
up, crime, disease and unrest must enter in, and
by contrast he must attain to knowledge.

Curious that at the very dawn of the Greek
and with it the European civilisation we have
the mystic words “ Know Thyself” inscribed
on the temple of the Delphic Apollo ; and that
first among the legends of the Semitic race stands
that of Adam and Eve eating of the tree of the
Knowledge of good and evil! To the animal
there is no such knowledge, to the early man there
was no such knowledge, and to the perfected man
of the future there will be no such knowledge.
It is a temporary perversion, indicating the disunion
of the present-day man—the disunion of the outer
self from the inner—the horrible dual self-con-
sciousness—which is the means ultimately of a
more perfect and conscious union than could ever
have been realised without it—the death that is
swallowed up in victory. ‘‘ For the first man is
of the earth, earthy ; but the second man is the
Lord from heaven.”

45

Civilisation : Its Cause and Cure

In order then, at this point in his Evolution,
to advance any farther, Man must first fall ; in
order to know, he must lose. In order to realise —
what Health is, how splendid and glorious a
possession, he must go through all the long negative
experience of Disease ; in order to know the perfect
social life, to understand what power and happiness
to mankind are involved in their true relation to
each other, he must learn the misery and suffering
which come from mere individualism and greed ;
and in order to find his true Manhood, to discover
_ what a wonderful power it is, he must first lose it—he
must become a prey and a slave to his own passions
and desires—whirled away like Phaethon by the
horses which he cannot control.

This moment of divorce, then, this parenthesis
in human progress, covers the ground of all History ;
and the whole of Civilisation, and all crime and
disease, are only the materials of its immense purpose
—themselves destined to pass away as they arose,
but to leave their fruits eternal.

Accordingly we find that it has been the work
of Civilisation—founded as we have seen on
Property—in every way to disintegrate and corrupt
man—literally to corrupt—to break up the unity
of his nature. It begins with the abandonment
of the primitive life and the growth of the sense
of shame (as in the myth of Adam and Eve).
From this follows the disownment of the sacredness
of sex. Sexual acts cease to be a part of religious
worship ; love and desire—the inner and the
outer love—hitherto undifferentiated, now become —

46

Civilisation : Its Cause and Cure

two separate things. (This no doubt a necessary
stage in order for the development of the conscious-
ness of love, but in itself only painful and abnormal.)
It culminates and comes to an end, as to-day,
in a complete divorce between the spiritual reality
and the bodily fulfilment—in a vast system of
commercial love, bought and sold, in the brothel
and in the palace. It begins with the forsaking
of the hardy nature-life, and it ends with a society
broken down and prostrate, hardly recognisable
as human, amid every form of luxury, poverty and
disease. He who had been the free child of
Nature denies his sonship ; he disowns the very
breasts that suckled him. He deliberately turns
his back upon the light of the sun, and hides him-
self away in boxes with breathing holes (which
he calls houses), living ever more and more in dark-
ness and asphyxia, and only coming forth perhaps
once a day to blink at the bright god, or to run
back again at the first breath of the free wind for
fear of catching cold! He muffles himself in
the cast-off furs of the beasts, every century swathing
himself in more and more layers, more and more
fearfully and wonderfully fashioned, till he ceases
to be recognisable as the Man that was once the
crown of the animals, and presents a more ludicrous
spectacle than the monkey that sits on his own
barrel organ. He ceases to a great extent to use
his muscles, his feet become partially degenerate,
his teeth wholly, his digestion so enervated that
he has to cook his food and make pulps of all his
victuals, and his whole system so obviously on

47

Civilisation : Its Cause and Cure

the decline that at last in the end of time a Kay
Robinson arises and prophesies as aforesaid, that
he will before long become wholly toothless, bald
and toeless.

And so with this denial of Nature comes every
form of disease; first delicatesse, daintiness,
luxury ; then unbalance, enervation, huge suscepti-
bility to pain. With the shutting of himself
away from the all-healing Power, man inevitably
weakens his whole manhood ; the central bond
is loosened, and he falls a prey to his own organs.
He who before was unaware of the existence of
these latter, now becomes only too conscious of
them (and this—is it not the very object of the
process ?) ; the stomach, the liver and the spleen
start out into painful distinctness before him,
the heart loses its equable beat, the lungs their
continuity with the universal air, and the brain
becomes hot and fevered; each organ in turn
asserts itself abnormally and becomes a seat of
disorder, every corner and cranny of the body
becomes the scene and symbol of disease, and
Man gazes aghast at his own kingdom—whose
extent he had never suspected before—now all
ablaze in wild revolt against him. And then—all
going with this period of his development—sweep
vast epidemic trains over the face of the earth,
plagues and fevers and lunacies and world-wide
festering sores, followed by armies, ever growing,
of doctors—they too with their retinues of books
and bottles, vaccinations and vivisections, and
grinning death’s-heads in the rear—a mad crew,

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Civilisation: Its Cause and Cure

knowing not what they do, yet all unconsciously,
doubtless, fulfilling the great age-long destiny of
humanity.

In all this the influence of Property is apparent
enough. It is evident that the growth of property
through the increase of man’s powers of production

reacts on the man in three ways: to draw him away |

namely, (1) from Nature, (2) from his true Self, |

(3) from his Fellows. In the first place it draws
him away from Nature. That is, that as man’s
power over materials increases he creates for
himself a sphere and an environment of his own,
in some sense apart and different from the great
elemental world of the winds and the waves, the
woods and the mountains, in which he has hitherto
lived. He creates what we call the artificial life, of
houses and cities, and, shutting himself up in these,
shuts Nature out. As a growing boy at a certain
point, and partly in order to assert his independence,
wrests himself away from the tender care of his
mother, and even displays—just for the time being
—a spirit of opposition to her, so the growing
Man finding out his own powers uses them—for
the time—even to do despite to Nature, and to
create himself a world in which she shall have no
part. In the second place the growth of property
draws man away from his true Self. This is clear
enough. As his power over materials and his
possessions increases, man finds the means of
gratifying his senses at will. Instead of being
guided any longer by that continent and “ whole ”

49 D

Civilisation: Its Cause and Cure

instinct which characterises the animals, his chief
motive is now to use his powers to gratify this or
that sense or desire. These become abnormally
magnified, and the man soon places his main
good in their satisfaction ; and abandons his true
Self for his organs, the whole for the parts. Property —
draws the man outwards, stimulating the external
part of his being, and for a time mastering him,
overpowers the central Will, and brings about
his disintegration and corruption. Lastly, Property
by thus stimulating the external and selfish nature
in Man, draws him away from his Fellows. In
the anxiety to possess things for himself, in order
to gratify his own bumps, he is necessarily brought
into conflict with his neighbor and comes to
regard him as an enemy. For the true Self of man
consists in his organic relation with the whole
body of his fellows ; and when the man abandons
his true Self he abandons also his true relation to
his fellows. ‘The mass-Man must rule in each
unit-man, else the unit-man will drop off and die.
but when the outer man tries to separate himself
from the inner, the unit-man from the mass-Man,
then the reign of individuality begins—a false.
and impossible individuality of course, but the
only means of coming to the consciousness of the
true individuality. With the advent of a Civilisa-
tion then founded on Property the unity of the
old tribal society is broken up. The ties of blood
relationship which were the foundation of the
gentile system and the guarantees of the old fraternity
and equality become dissolved in favor of powers
50

Civilisation: Its Cause and Cure

and authorities founded on mere possession. The
growth of Wealth disintegrates the ancient Society ;
the temptations of power, of possession, etc.,
which accompany it, wrench the individual from
his moorings; personal greed rules; “each
man for himself’’ becomes the universal motto ;
the hand of every man is raised against his brother,
and at last society itself becomes an organisation
by which the rich fatten upon the vitals of the poor,
the strong upon the murder of the weak. [It
is interesting in this connection to find that Lewis
Morgan makes the invention of a written alphabet
and the growth of the conception of private property
the main characteristics of the civilisation-period
as distinguished from the periods of savagery
and barbarism which preceded it ; for the invention
of writing marks perhaps better than anything else
could do the period when Man becomes se/f-
conscious—when he records his own doings and
‘thoughts, and so commences History proper;
and the growth of private property marks the
period when he begins to sunder himself from his
fellows, when therefore the conception of sin (or
separation) first enters in, and with it all the long
period of moral perplexity, and the denial of that
community of life between himself and his fellows
which is really of the essence of man’s being.]
And then arises the institution of Government.
Hitherto this had not existed except in a quite
rudimentary form. The early communities troubled
themselves little about individual ownership, and
what government they had was for the most part
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Civilisation : Its Cause and Cure

essentially democratic—as being merely a choice
of leaders among blood-relations and social equals.
But when the delusion that man can exist for himself
alone—his outer and, as it were, accidental self
apart from the great inner and cosmical self by
which he is one with his fellows—when this delusion
takes possession of him, it is not long before it
finds expression in some system of private property.
The old community of life and enjoyment passes
away, and each man tries to grab the utmost he
can, and to retire into his own lair for its consump-
tion. Private accumulations arise; the natural
flow of the bounties of life is dammed back, and
artificial barriers of Law have to be constructed
in order to preserve the unequal levels. Outrage
and Fraud follow in the wake of the desire of
possession ; force has to be used by the possessors
in order to maintain the law-barriers against the
non-possessors ; classes are formed; and finally
the formal Government arises, mainly as the ex-
pression of such force; and preserves itself, as
best it can, until such time as the inequalities which
it upholds become too glaring, and the pent social.
waters gathering head burst through once more
and regain their natural levels.

Thus Morgan in his “ Ancient Society ” points
out over and over again that the civilised state
rests upon territorial and property marks and
qualifications, and not upon a personal basis as
did the ancient gevs, or the tribe; and that the
civilised government correspondingly takes on
quite a different character and function from the

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Civilisation : Its Cause and Cure

simple organisation of the gens. He says (p. 124),
“Monarchy is incompatible with gentilism.’’ Also
with regard to the chain of Property to Civilisa-
tion and Government he makes the following
pregnant remarks (p. 505): “It is impossible to
over-estimate the influence of property in the
civilisation of mankind. It was the power that
brought the Aryan and Semitic nations out of bar-
barism into civilisation. The growth of the idea of
property in the human mind commenced in feeble-
ness and ended in becoming its master passion.
Governments and Laws are instituted with primary
reference to its creation, protection and enjoyment.
It introduced human slavery as an instrument in
its production ; and after the experience of several
thousand years it caused the abolition of slavery
upon the discovery that a freeman was a better
property-making machine.”’ And in another pasage
on the same subject, “‘ The dissolution of society
bids fair to become the termination of a career
of which property is the end and aim ;_ because
such a career contains the elements of self-destruc-
tion. Democracy is the next higher plane. It
will be a revival in a higher form of the liberty,
equality and fraternity of the ancient gentes.”
The institution of Government is in fact the
evidence in social life that man has lost his inner
and central control, and therefore must resort to
an outward one. Losing touch with the inward
Man—who is his true guide—he declines upon
an external law, which must always be false. If
each man remained in organic adhesion to the

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Civilisasion : Its Cause and Cure

general body of his fellows, no serious dis-harmony
could occur ; but it is when this vital unity of the
body politic becomes weak that it has to be pre-
served by artificial means, and thus it is that with
the decay of the primitive and instinctive social
life there springs up a form of government
which is no longer the democratic expression of
the life of the whole people ; but a kind of outside
authority and compulsion thrust upon them by
a ruling class or caste.

Perhaps the sincerest, and often though not
always the earliest, form of Government is Monarchy.
The sentiment of human unity having been already
partly but not quite lost, the people choose—in
order to hold society together—a man to rule
over them who has this sentiment in a high degree.
He represents the true Man and therefore the
people. This is often a time of extensive warfare
and the formation of nations. And it is interesting
in this connection to note that the quite early
“Kings” or leaders of each nation just prior to
the civilisation period were generally associated
with the highest religious functions, as in the
case of the Roman rex, the Greek dasileus, the
early Egyptian Kings, Moses among the Israelites,
and Druid leaders of the Britons, and so on.

Later, and as the central authority gets more
and more shadowy in each man, and the external
attraction of Property greater, so it does in Society.
The temporal and spiritual powers part company.
The king—who at first represented the Divine
Spirit or soul of society, recedes into the back-

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Civilisation : Its Cause and Cure

ground, and his nobles of high degree (who may
be compared to the nobler, more generous, qualities
of the mind) begin to take his place. This is the
Aristocracy and the Feudal Age—the Timocracy
of Plato; and is marked by the appearance of
large private tenures of land, and the growth of
slavery and serfdom—the slavery thus outwardly
appearing in society being the symbol of the inward
enslavement of the man.

Then comes the Commercial Age—the Oligarchy
or Plutocracy of Plato. Honour quite gives place
to material wealth ; the rulers rule not by personal
or hereditary, but by property qualifications. Parlia-
ments and Constitutions and general Palaver
are the order of the day. Wage-slavery, usury,
mortgages, and other abominations, indicate the
advance of the mortal process. In the individual
man gain is the end of existence ; industry and
scientific cunning are his topmost virtues.

Last of all the break-up is complete. The
individual loses all memory and tradition of his
heavenly guide and counterpart ; his nobler passions
fail for want of a leader to whom to dedicate them-
selves ; his industry and his intellect serve but
to minister to his little swarming desires. This
is the era of anarchy—the democracy of Carlyle ;
the rule of the rabble, and mob-law; caucuses
and cackle, competition and universal greed,
breaking out in cancerous tyrannies and pluto-
cracies—a mere chaos and confusion of society.
For just as we saw in the human body, when the
inner and positive force of Health has departed

55

Civilisation : Its Cause and Cure

from it, that it falls a prey to parasites which
overspread and devour it; so, when the central
inspiration departs out of social life, does it writhe
with the mere maggots of individual greed, and
at length fall under the dominion of the most
monstrous egotist who has been bred from its
corruption.

Thus we have briefly sketched the progress of
the symptoms of the “ disease,” which, as said
before, runs much (though not quite) the same
course in the various nations which it attacks.
And if this last stage were really the end of all,
and the true Democracy, there were indeed little
left to hope for. No words of Carlyle could blast
that black enough. But this is no true Democracy.
Here in this “‘ each for himself” is no rule of the
Demos in every man, nor anything resembling
it. Here is no solidarity such as existed in the
ancient tribes and primeval society, but only dis-
integration and a dust-heap. The true Demo-
cracy has yet to come. Here in this present
stage is only the final denial of all outward and
class government, in preparation for the restora-
tion of the inner and true authority. Here in
this stage the task of civilisation comes to an end ;
the purport and object of all these centuries is
fulfilled ; the bitter experience that mankind had
to pass through is completed ; and out of this
Death and all the torture and unrest which accom-
panies it, comes at last the Resurrection. Man
has sounded the depths of alienation from his own
divine spirit, he has drunk the dregs of the cup of

56

J

Civilisation : Its Cause and Cure

suffering, he has literally descended into Hell ;
henceforth he turns, both in the individual and in
society, and mounts deliberately and consciously
back again towards the unity which he has lost.?

And the false democracy parts aside for the dis-
closure of the true Democracy which has been
formed beneath it—which is not an external govern-
ment at all, but an inward rule—the rule of the
mass-Man in each unit-man. For no outward
government can be anything but a make-shift—
a temporary hard chrysalis-sheath to hold the grub
together while the new life is forming inside—a
device of the civilisation-period. Farther than
this it cannot go, since no true life can rely upon

t There is another point worth noting as characteristic of the
civilisation-period. ‘This is the abnormal development of the
abstract intellect in comparison with the physical senses on the one
hand, and the moral sense on the other. Such a result might be
expected, seeing that abstraction from reality is naturally the great
engine of that false individuality or apartness, which it is the object
of Civilisation to produce. As it is, during this period man builds
himself an intellectual world apart from the great actual universe
around him; the “ ghosts of things” are studied in books; the
student lives indoors, he cannot face the open air—his theories
“ may prove very well in lecture-rooms, yet not prove at all under
the spacious clouds, and along the landscape and flowing currents ” ;
children are “ educated” afar from actual life; huge phantom-
temples of philosophy and science are reared upon the most slender
foundations; and in these he lives defended from actual fact.
For as a drop of water, when it comes in contact with red-hot
iron, wraps itself in a cloud of vapor and is saved from destruction,
so the little mind of man, lest it should touch the burning truth
of Nature and God and be consumed, evolves at each point of
contact a veil of insubstantial thought which allows it for a time
to exist apart, and becomes the nurse of its self-consciousness.

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Civilisation: Its Cause and Cure

an external aS em and, when the true life of
society comes, all its forms will be fluid and spon-
taneous and voluntary.

IV

AND now, by way of a glimpse into the future
—after this long digression what is the route that
man will take?

This is a subject that I hardly dare tackle.
“The morning wind ever blows,” says Thoreau,
“the poem of creation is uninterrupted—but
few are the ears that hear it.’”” And how can we,
gulfed as we are in this present whirlpool, conceive
rightly the glory which awaits us? No limits
that our present knowledge puts need alarm us ;
the impossibilities will yield very easily when the
time comes ; and the anatomical difficulty as to
how and where the wings are to grow will vanish
when they are felt sprouting !

It can hardly be doubted that the tendency will
be—indeed is already showing itself—towards a
return to nature and community of human life.
This is the way back to the lost Eden, or rather
forward to the new Eden, of which the old was
only a figure. Man has to undo the wrappings
and the mummydom of centuries, by which he
has shut himself from the light of the sun and
lain in seeming death, preparing silently his glorious
resurrection—for all the world like the funny old
chrysalis that he is. He has to emerge from houses |

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Civilisation : Its Cause and Cure

and all his other hiding places wherein so long ago
ashamed (as at the voice of God in the garden)
he concealed himself—and Nature must once
more become his home, as it is the home of the
animals and the angels.

As it is written in the old magical formula :
“Man clothes himself to descend, unclothes
himself to ascend.’’ Over his spiritual or wind-
like body he puts on a material or earthy body ;
over his earth-body he puts on the skins of animals
and other garments ; then he hides this body in
a house behind curtains and stone walls—which
become to it as secondary skins and prolongations
of itself. So that between the man and his true
life there grows a dense and impenetrable hedge ;
and, what with the cares and anxieties connected
with his earth-body and all its skins, he soon loses
the knowledge that he is a Man at all; his true
self slumbers in a deep and agelong swoon.

But the instinct of all who desire to deliver the
divine imago within them, is, in something more
than the literal sense, towards unclothing. And
the process of evolution or exfoliation itself is
nothing but a continual unclothing of Nature, by
which the perfect human Form which is at the
root of it comes nearer and nearer to its mani-
festation.

Thus, in order to restore the Health which he has
lost, man has in the future to tend in this direction.
Life indoors and in houses has to become a fraction
only, instead of the principal part of existence as
itisnow. Garments similarly have to be simplified,

59

.

Civilisation: Its Cause and Cure

How far this process may go it is not necessary
now to enquire. It is sufficiently obvious that our
domestic life and clothing may be at once greatly
reduced in complexity, and with the greatest ad-
vantage—made subsidiary instead of being erected
into the fetishes which they are. And everyone may
feel assured that each gain in this direction is a
gain in true life—whether it be the head that
goes uncovered to the air of heaven, or the feet
that press bare the magnetic earth, or the elementary
raiment that allows through its meshes the light
itself to reach the vital organs. The life of the
open air, familiarity with the winds and waves, clean
and pure food, the companionship of the animals
—the very wrestling with the great Mother for
his food—all these things will tend to restore that
relationship which man has so long disowned ;
and the consequent instreaming of energy into
his system will carry him to perfections of health
and radiance of being at present unsuspected.
Of course, it will be said that many of these things

are difficult to realise in our country, that an indoor |

life, with all its concomitants, is forced upon us
by theclimate. But if this is to some small—though
very small—extent true, it forms no reason why
we should not still take advantage of every oppor-
tunity to push in the direction indicated. It must
be remembered, too, that our climate is greatly
of our own creation. If the atmosphere of many
of our great towns and of the lands for miles in
their neighbourhood is devitalised and deadly—
so that in cold weather it grants to the poor mortal
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—— Oe

Civilisation: Its Cause and Cure

no compensating power of resistance, but compels
him at peril of his life to swathe himself in great-
coats and mufflers—the blame is none but ours.
It is we who have covered the lands with a pall
of smoke, and are walking to our own funerals
under it.

That this climate, however, at its best may not
be suited to the highest developments of human
life is quite possible. Because Britain has been
the scene of some of the greatest episodes of Civilisa-
tion, it does not follow that she will keep the lead
in the period that is to follow ; and the Higher
Communities of the future will perhaps take their
rise in warmer lands, where life is richer and fuller,
more spontaneous and more generous, than it
can be here.

Another point in this connection is the food
question. For the restoration of the central vigour
when lost or degenerate, a diet consisting mainly
of fruits and grains is most adapted. Animal food
often gives for the time being a lot of nervous
energy—and may be useful for special purposes ;
but the energy is of a spasmodic feverish kind ;
the food has a tendency to inflame the subsidiary
centres, and so to diminish the central control.
Those who live mainly on animal food are specially
liable to disease—and not only physically ; for
their minds also fall more easily a prey to desires
and sorrows. In times therefore of grief or
mental trouble of any kind, as well as in times of
bodily sickness, immediate recourse should be
had to the more elementary diet, The body

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Civilisation : Its Cause and Cure

under this diet endures work with less fatigue,
is less susceptible to pain, and to cold ; and heals
its wounds with extraordinary celerity ; ; all of
which facts point in the same direction. It may
be noted, too, that foods of the seed kind—by
which I mean all manner of fruits, nuts, tubers,
grains, eggs, etc. (and I may include milk in its
various forms of butter, cheese, curds, and so
forth), not only contain by their nature the elements
of life in their most condensed forms, but have
the additional advantage that they can be appro-
priated without injury to any living creature—for
even the cabbage may inaudibly scream when torn
up by the roots and boiled, but the strawberry
plant asks us to take of its fruit, and paints it red
expressly that we may see and devour it! Both
of which considerations must convince us that
this kind of food is most fitted to develop the kernel
of man’s life.

Which all means cleanness. The unity of our
nature being restored, the instinct of bodily clean-
ness, doth within and without, which is such a
marked characteristic of the animals, will again
characterise mankind—only now instead of a
blind instinct it will be a conscious, joyous one 3
dirt being only disorder and obstruction. And
thus the whole human being, mind and body,
becoming clean and radiant from its inmost centre
to its farthest circumference—“ transfigured ”’—
the distinction between the words spiritual and
material disappears. In the words of Whitman,

“objects gross and the unseen soul are one.”

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Civilisation : Its Cause and Cure

But this return to Nature, and identification in
some sort with the great cosmos, does not involve
a denial or depreciation of human life and interests,
It is not uncommonly supposed that there is some
kind of antagonism between Man and Nature,
and that to recommend a life closer to the latter
means mere asceticism and eremitism ; and un-
fortunately this antagonism does exist to-day,
though it certainly will not exist for ever. To-day
it is unfortunately perfectly true that Man is the
only animal who, instead of adorning and beautifying,
makes Nature hideous by his presence. The fox
and the squirrel may make their homes in the
wood and add to its beauty in so doing; but
when Alderman Smith plants his villa there, the
gods pack up their trunks and depart ; they can
bear it no longer. The Bushmen can hide them-
selves and become indistinguishable on a slope
of bare rock ; they twine their naked little yellow
bodies together, and look like a heap of dead
sticks ; but when the chimney-pot hat and frock-
coat appear, the birds fly screaming from the trees.
This was the great glory of the Greeks that they
accepted and perfected Nature ; as the Parthenon
sprang out of the limestone terraces of the Acropolis,
carrying the natural lines of the rock by gradations
scarce perceptible into the finished and human
beauty of frieze and pediment, and as, above, it
was open for the blue air of heaven to descend into
it for a habitation; so throughout in all their
best work and life did they stand in this close
relation to the earth and the sky and to all instinctive

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Civilisation : Its Cause and Cure

and elemental things, admitting no gulf between
themselves and them, but only perfecting their
expressiveness and beauty. And some day we
shall again understand this which, in the very
sunrise of true Art, the Greeks so well understood.
Possibly some day we shall again build our houses
or dwelling places so simple and elemental in
character that they will fit in the nooks of the
hills or along the banks of the streams or by the
edges of the woods without disturbing the harmony
of the landscape or the songs of the birds. Then
the great temples, beautiful on every height, or
by the shores of the rivers and the lakes, will be
the storehouses of all precious and lovely things.
There men, women and children will come to share
in the great and wonderful common life, the gardens
around will be sacred to the unharmed and welcome
animals ; there all store and all facilities of books
and music and art for every one, there a meeting
place for social life and intercourse, there dances
and games and feasts. Every village, every little

© settlement, will have such hall or halls. No need

for private accumulations. Gladly will each man,
and more gladly still each woman, take his or her
treasures, except what are immediately or necessarily
in use, to the common centre, where their value
will be increased a hundred and a thousand fold
by the greater number of those who can enjoy
them, and where far more perfectly and with
far less toil they can be tended than if scattered
abroad in private hands. At one stroke half the
labour and all the anxiety of domestic caretaking
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Civilisation : Its Cause and Cure

will be annihilated. The private dwelling places,
no longer costly and labyrinthine in proportion
to the value and number of the treasures they
contain, will need no longer to have doors and
windows jealously closed against fellow men or
mother nature. The sun and air will have access
to them, the indwellers will have unfettered egress.
Neither man nor woman will be tied in slavery to
the lodge which they inhabit ; and in becoming
once more a part of nature, the human habitation
will at length cease to be what it is now for at
least half the human race—a prison.

Men often ask about the new Architecture—
what, and of what sort, it is going to be. But
to such a question there can be no answer till a
new understanding of life has entered into people’s
minds, and then the answer will be clear enough.
For as the Greek Temples and the Gothic Cathedrals
were built by people who themselves lived but
frugally as we should think, and were ready to
dedicate their best work and chief treasure to the
gods and the common life; and as to-day when
we must needs have for ourselves spacious and
luxurious villas, we seem to be unable to design
a decent church or public building ; so it will
not be till we once more find our main interest and
life in the life of the community and the gods that
a new spirit will inspire our architecture. Then
when our Temples and Common Halls are not
designed to glorify an individual architect or patron,
but are built for the use of free men and women,
to front the sky and the sea and the sun, to spring

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Civilisation : Its Cause and Cure

out of the earth, companionable with the trees
and the rocks, not alien in spirit from the sunlit globe
itself or the depth of the starry night—then I
say their form and structure will quickly determine
themselves, and men will have no difficulty in
making them beautiful. And similarly with the
homes or dwelling places of the people. Various
as these may be for the various wants of men, whether
for a single individual or for a family, or for groups
of individuals or families, whether to the last degree
simple, or whether more or less ornate and complex,
still the new conception, the new needs of life,
will necessarily dominate them and give them form
by a law unfolding from within.

In such new human life then—its fields, its farms,
its workshops, its cities—always the work of man
perfecting and beautifying the lands, aiding the
efforts of the sun and soil, giving voice to the
desire of the mute earth—in such new communal
life near to nature, so far from any asceticism or
inhospitality, we are fain to see far more humanity
and sociability than ever before: an infinite
helpfulness and sympathy, as between the children
of a common mother. Mutual help and com-
bination will then have become spontaneous and
instinctive : each man contributing to the service
of his neighbor as inevitably and naturally as
the right hand goes to help the left in the human
body—and for precisely the same reason. Every
man—think of it !—will do the work which he
likes, which he desires to do, which is obviously
before him to do, and which he knows will be useful,

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Civilisation: Its Cause and Cure

without thought of wages or reward ; and the reward
will come to him as inevitably and naturally as in
the human body the blood flows to the member
which is exerting itself. All the endless burden
of the adjustments of labour and wages, of the war
of duty and distaste, of want and weariness, will
be thrown aside—all the huge waste of work
done against the grain will be avoided ; out of
the endless variety of human nature will spring a
perfectly natural and infinite variety of occupations,
all mutually contributive ; Society at last will be
free and the human being after long ages will
have attained to deliverance.

This is the Communism which Civilisation has
always hated, asit hated Christ. Yetitis inevitable ;
for the cosmical man, the instinctive elemental
man accepting and crowning nature, necessarily
fulfils the universal law of nature. As to External
Government and Law, they will disappear ; for
they are only the travesties and transitory substitutes
of Inward Government and Order. Society in its
final state is neither a Monarchy, nor an Aristocracy
nor a Democracy, nor an Anarchy, and yet in another
sense it is all of these. It is an Anarchy because
there is no outward rule, but only an inward and
invisible spirit of life ; it is a Democracy because
it is the rule of the Mass-man, or Demos, in each
unit man ; it is an Aristocracy because there are
degrees and ranks of such inward power in all
men ; and it is a Monarchy because all these ranks
and powers merge in a perfect unity and central
control at last. And so it appears that the outer

67

Civilisation: Its Cause and Cure

forms of government which belong to the Civilisa-
tion-period are only the expression in separate
external symbols of the facts of the true inner life
of society.

And just as thus the various external forms of
government during the Civilisation-period find
their justification and interpretation in the ensuing
period, so will it be with the mechanical and other
products of the present time ; they will be taken
up, and find their proper place and use in the time
to come. They will not be refused; but they
will have to be brought into subjection. Our
locomotives, machinery, telegraphic and_ postal
systems ; our houses, furniture, clothes, books,
our fearful and wonderful cookery, strong drinks,
teas, tobaccos ; our medical and surgical appliances ;
high-faluting sciences and philosophies, and all
other engines hitherto of human bewilderment,
have simply to be reduced to abject subjection to
the real man. All these appliances, and a thousand
others such as we hardly dream of, will come in
to perfect his power and increase his freedom ;
but they will not be the objects of a mere fetish-wor-
ship as now. Man will use them, instead of their
using him. His real life will lie in a region far
beyond them. But in thus for a moment denying
and “‘mastering’’ the products of Civilisation,

will he for the first time discover their true
value, and reap from them an enjoyment unknown
before. V

The same sith the moral powers. As said
before, the knowledge of good and evil at a certain

68

Civilisation: Its Cause and Cure

point passes away, or becomes absorbed into a
higher knowledge. The perception of Sin goes
with a certain weakness in the man. As long as
there is conflict and division within him, so long
does he seem to perceive conflicting and opposing
principles in the world without. As long as
the objects of the outer world excite emotions in
him which pass beyond his control, so long do those
objects stand as the signals of evil—of disorder and
sin. Not that the objects are bad in themselves,
or even the emotions which they excite, but that
all through this period these things serve to the
man as indications of Ais weakness. But when
the central power is restored in man and all things
are reduced to his service, it is impossible for him
to see badness in anything. The bodily is no
longer antagonistic to the spiritual love, but is
absorbed into it. All his passions take their places
perfectly naturally, and become, when the occasions
arise, the vehicles of his expression. Vices under
existing conditions are vices simply because of
the inordinate and disturbing influence they exer-
cise, but will cease again to be vices when the man
regains his propercommand. Thus Socrates having
a clean soul in a clean body could drink his boon
companions under the table and then go out
himself to take the morning air—what was a blemish
and defect in them being simply an added power
of enjoyment to himself !

The point of difference throughout (being the
transference of the centre of gravity of life and con-
sciousness from the partial to the universal man) is

69

Civilisation: Its Cause and Cure

symbolised by the gradual resumption of more uni-
“ versal conditions. That is to say that during the
civilisation-period, the body being systematically
wrapped in clothes, the head alone represents man—
the little finnikin, intellectual, self-conscious man in
contra-distinction to the cosmical man represented
by the entirety of the bodily organs. The body
has to be delivered from its swathings in order
that the cosmical consciousness may once more
reside in the human breast. We have to become
“all face ’’ again—as the savage said of himself.
Where the cosmic self is, there is no more self-
consciousness. The body and what is ordinarily
called the self are felt to be only parts of the true
self, and the ordinary distinctions of inner and
outer, egotism and altruism, etc., lose a good deal
of their value. Thought no longer returns upon
the local self as the chief object of regard, but con-
sciousness is continually radiant from it, filling
the body and overflowing upon external Nature.
Thus the Sun in the physical world is the allegory of
the true self. The worshiper must adore the
Sun, he must saturate himself with sunlight,
and take the physical Sun into himself. Those
who live by fire and candle-light are filled with
phantoms ; their thoughts are Will-o’-th’-wisp-
like images of themselves, and they are tormented
by a horrible self-consciousness.
And when the Civilisation-period has passed
away, the old Nature-religion—perhaps greatly

t See Alonso di Ovalle’s Account of the Kingdom of Chile in
Churchill’s Collection of Voyages and Travels, 1724.

7°

ae earee,

—

Civilisation : Its Cause and Cure

grown—will come back. ‘This immense stream
of religious life which, beginning far beyond the
horizon of earliest history, has been deflected into
various metaphysical and other channels—of
Judaism, Christianity, Buddhism, and the like
—during the historical period, will once more
gather itself together to float on its bosom all the
arks and sacred vessels of human progress. Man
will once more fee/ his unity with his fellows, he
will feel his unity with the animals, with the moun-
tains and the streams, with the earth itself and the
slow lapse of the constellations, not as an abstract
dogma of Science or Theology, but as a living and
ever-present fact. Ages back this has been under-
stood better than now. Our Christian ceremonial
is saturated with sexual and astronomical symbols ;
and long before Christianity existed, the sexual
and astronomical were the main forms of religion.
That is to say, men instinctively felt and wor-
shiped the great life coming to them through
Sex, the great life coming to them from the deeps
of Heaven. They deified both. They placed
their gods—their own human forms—in sex,
they placed them in the sky. And not only so,

but wherever they felt this kindred human life—

in the animals, in the ibis, the bull, the lamb,
the snake, the crocodile ; in the trees and flowers,
the oak, the ash, the laurel, the hyacinth ; in the
streams and water-falls, on the mountain-sides or
in the depths of the sea—they placed them. The
whole universe was full of a life which, though
not always friendly, was human and kindred to

71

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Civilisation: Its Cause and Cure

their own, fe/t by them, not reasoned about, but
simply perceived. ‘To the early man the notion
of his having a separate individuality could only
with difficulty occur; hence he troubled himself
not with the suicidal questionings concerning the
whence and whither which now vex the modern
mind.t For what causes these questions to be
asked is simply the wretched feeling of isolation,
actual or prospective, which man necessarily has
when he contemplates himself as a separate atom
in this immense universe—the gulf which lies
below seemingly ready to swallow him, and the
anxiety to find some mode of escape. But when
he feels once more that he, that he himself, is
absolutely indivisibly and indestructibly a part
of this great whole—why then there is no gulf
into which he can possibly fall ; when he is sen-
sible of the fact, why then the how of its realisation,
though losing none of its interest, becomes a matter
for whose solution he can wait and work in faith
and contentment of mind. The Sun or Sol,
visible image of his very Soul, closest and most
vital to him of all mortal things, occupying the
illimitable heaven, feeding all with its life; the
Moon, emblem and nurse of his own reflective
thought, the conscious Man, measurer of Time,
mirror of the Sun ; the planetary passions wander-
ing to and fro, yet within bounds; the starry
destinies ; the changes of the earth, and the seasons ;
the upward growth and unfoldment of all organic
life ; the emergence of the perfect Man, towards
t See Notes at end of this chapter.

72

— ) oe

Civilisation : Its Cause and Cure

whose birth all creation groans and travails—all
these things will return to become realities, and
to be the frame or setting of his supra-mundane
life. ‘The meaning of the old religions will come
back to him. On the high tops once more gathering
he will celebrate with naked dances the glory of
the human form and the great processions of the stars,
or greet the bright horn of the young moon which
now after a hundred centuries comes back laden
with such wondrous associations—all the yearnings
and the dreams and the wonderment of the genera-
tions of mankind—the worship of Astarte and of
Diana, of Isis or the Virgin Mary ; once more in
sacred groves will he reunite the passion and the
delight of human love with his deepest feelings of
the sanctity and beauty of Nature ; or in the open,
standing uncovered to the Sun, will adore the
emblem of the everlasting splendour which shines
within. The same sense of vital perfection and
exaltation which can be traced in the early and
pre-civilisation peoples—only a thousand times
intensified, defined, illustrated and purified—will
return to irradiate the redeemed and delivered

Man.

In suggesting thus the part which Civilisation
has played in history, I am aware that the word
itself is difficult to define—is at best only one of
those phantom-generalisations which the mind is
forced to employ ; also that the account I have
given of it is sadly imperfect, leaning perhaps too

73

Civilisation : Its Cause and Cure

much to the merely negative and destructive
aspect of this thousand-year long lapse of human
evolution. I would also remind the reader that
though it is perfectly true that under the dissolv- _
ing influence of civilisation empire after empire
has gone under and disappeared, and the current
of human progress time after time has only been
restored again by a fresh influx of savagery, yet
its corruptive tendency has never had a quite
unlimited fling ; but that all down the ages of its
dominance over the earth we can trace the tradi-
tion of a healing and redeeming power at work
in the human breast and an anticipation of the
second advent of the son of man. Certain institu-
tions, too, such as Art and the Family (though it
seems not unlikely that both of these will greatly
change when the special conditions of their present
existence have disappeared), have served to keep
the sacred flame alive ; the latter preserving in
island-miniatures, as it were, the ancient com-
munal humanity when the seas of individualism
and greed covered the general face of the earth ;
the former keeping up, so to speak, a navel-cord
of contact with Nature, and a means of utterance
of primal emotions else unsatisfiable in the world
around.

And if it seem extravagant to suppose that Society
will ever emerge from the chaotic condition of
strife and perplexity in which we find it all down
the lapse of historical time, or to hope that the
civilisation-process which has terminated fatally
so invariably in the past will ever eventuate in

74

Civilisation : Its Cause and Cure

the establishment of a higher and more perfect
health-condition, we may for our consolation remem-
ber that to-day there are features in the problem
which have never been present before. In the
first place, to-day Civilisation is no longer isolated,
as in the ancient world, in surrounding floods of
savagery and barbarism, but it practically covers
the globe, and the outlying savagery is so feeble
as not possibly to be a menace to it. This may
at first appear a drawback, for (it will be said)
if Civilisation be not renovated by the influx
of external Savagery its own inherent flaws will
destroy society all the sooner. And there would
be some truth in this if it were not for the following
consideration, namely, that while for the first
time in History Civilisation is now practically
continuous over the globe, now also for the first
time can we descry forming in continuous line
within its very structure the forces which are destined
to destroy it and to bring about the new order.
While hitherto isolated communisms, as suggested,
have existed here and there and from time to time,
now for the first time in History both the masses and
the thinkers of all the advanced nations of the world
are consciously feeling their way towards the
establishment of a socialistic and communal life
on a vast scale. The present competitive society
is more and more rapidly becoming a mere dead
formula and husk within which the outlines of
the new and Auman society are already discernible.
Simultaneously, and as if to match this growth, a
move towards Nature and Savagery is for the first

75

.

Civilisation : Its Cause and Cure

time taking place from within, instead of being
forced upon society from without. The nature
movement begun years ago in literature and art
is now, among the more advanced sections of the
civilised world, rapidly realising itself in actual
life, going so far even as a denial, among some,
of machinery and the complex products of Civilisa-_
tion, and developing among others into a gospel
of salvation by sandals and sunbaths! It is in
these two movements—towards a complex human
Communism and towards individual freedom and
Savagery—in some sort balancing and correcting
each other, and both visibly growing up within,
though utterly foreign to—our present-day
Civilisation, that we have fair grounds, | think, for
looking forward to its cure.

NOTES
(See p. 26) The following remarks by Mr. H. B. Cotterill on the

natives around Lake Nyassa, among whom he lived at a time,
1876-8, when the region was almost unvisited, may be of interest.
“In regard of merely ‘animal’ development and well-being,
that is in the delicate perfection of bodily faculties (perceptive),
the African savage is as a rule incomparably superior to us. One
feels like a child, utterly dependent on them, when travelling or
hunting with them. It is true that many may be found (especially
amongst the weaker tribes that have been slave-hunted or driven
into barren corners) who are half-starved and wizened, but as a
rule they are splendid animals. In character there is a great want
of that strength which in the educated civilised man is secured
bythe roots striking out into the Past and Future—and in spite
of their immense perceptive superiority they feel and acknowledge
the superior force of character in the white man. ‘They are the

76

Civilisation : Its Cause and Cure

very converse of the Stoic self-sufficient sage—like children in
their ‘admiration’ and worship of the Unknown. Hence their
absolute want of Cozceit, though they possess self-command and
dignity. ‘They are, to those they love and respect, faithful and
devoted—their faithfulness and truthfulness are dictated by no
* categorical imperative,’ but by personal affection. ‘Towards an
enemy they can be, without any conscientious scruples, treacherous
and inhumanly cruel. I should say that there is scarcely any
possible idea that is so foreign to the savage African mind as that
of general philanthropy or enemy-love.”

“In endurance the African savage beats us hollow (except
trained athletes). On one occasion my men.rowed my boat with
10 foot oars against the wind in a choppy sea for 25 ours at one
go, across Kuwirwe Bay, about 60 miles. ‘They never once stopped
or left their seats—just handed round a handful of rice now and
then. I was at the helm all the time—and had enough of it! ...
They carry 80 lbs. on their heads for ro hours through swamps
and jungles. Four of my men carried a sick man weighing 14
stones in a hammock for 200 miles, right across the dreaded Mali-
kata Swamp. But for sudden emergencies, squalls, etc., they are
nowhere.”

(See p. 27) “ So lovely a scene made easily credible the sugges-
tion, otherwise highly probable, that the Golden Age was no mere
fancy of the poets, but a reminiscence of the facts of social life
in its primitive organisation of village and house-communities.”
(J. S. Stuart-Glennie’s Europe and Asia, ch. i. Servia.)

_ (See p. 72) “It was only on the up-break of the primitive
socialisms that the passionate desire of, and therefore belief in,
individual Immortality arose. With an intense feeling, not of
an independent individual life, but of a dependent common life,
there is no passionate desire of, though there may be more or less
of belief in, a continuance after death of individual existence.”

(Jdid, p. 161.)

Following is an extract from a letter from my friend Havelock
Ellis, which he kindly allows me to reprint. The passage is

77

Civilisation : Its Cause and Cure

interesting as indicating ome cause, at any rate, of the failure of
the modern civilisations. ‘“‘ Your remark that you are re-publishing
Civilisation : its Cause and Cure has led me to read it once again,
and I see how well adapted it is for reissue just now when there
is so widespread a discontent with ‘ civilisation.’ I do not see
any reason for changing the essay, though, no doubt, much might
be added to supplement it. What has, however, struck me is
that you leave out of account the reason for the greater health,
vigour, and high spirit of savages (when such conditions exist),
and that is the more stringent natural selection among savages owing
to the greater hardness of their life. You doubtless know ch. xvii
of Westermarck’s Mora/ Ideas, where he shows how widespread
among savages (when they have got past the first crude primitive
stage), and in the ancient civilisations, was the practice of infanticide
applied to inferior babies and the habit of allowing sick persons
to die. ‘That was evidently the secret of the natural superiority
of the savage and of the men of the old civilisation, for the Greeks
and Romans were very stringent in this matter. ‘The flabbiness
of the civilised and the prevalence of doctors and hygienists, which
you make fun of, is due to the modern tenderness for human life
which is afraid to kill off even the most worthless specimens and
so lowers the whole level of ‘ civilised’ humanity. Introduce a
New Hardness in this matter and we should return to the high
level of savagery, while the doctors would disappear as if by
magic. I don’t myself believe we ca# introduce this hardness ;
and that is why I attach so much importance to intelligent
eugenics, working through birth-control, as the only wow possible
way of getting towards that high natural level you aim at.”—
Havetocx Ets (1920).

78

MODERN SCIENCE:
A CRITICISM

x XS Xé ” > ~
TavVTt oyy OyOCe tG0C AVTIKEITAl.

one who suggests that modern science is

not wholly satisfactory, that it is immedi-
ately assumed that the writer is covertly defending
what Ingersoll calls the “rib-story,” or that he
wishes to restore belief in the literal inspiration of
the Bible. But, religious controversy apart, and
while admitting that Science has done a great work
in cleaning away the kitchen-middens of super-
stition and opening the path to clearer and saner
views of the world, it is possible—and there is
already a growing feeling that way—that her
positive contributions to our comprehension of
the order of the universe have in late times been
disappointing, and that even her methods are only
of limited applicability. After a glorious burst
of perhaps fifty years, amid great acclamations
and good hopes that the crafty old universe was
going to be caught in her careful net, Science, it
must be confessed, now finds herself in almost

79

|: is one of the difficulties which meet any-

«a

Civilisation: Its Cause and Cure

every direction in the most hopeless quandaries ;
and, whether the rib-story be true or not, has at
any rate provided no very satisfactory substitute
for it. And the reason of this failure is very
obvious. It goes with a certain defect in the
human mind, which, as we have pointed out
(note, p. 57), necessarily belongs to the Civilisa-
tion-period—the tendency, namely, to separate
the logical and intellectual part of man from the
emotional and instinctive, and to give it a locus standi
of its own. Science has failed, because she has
attempted to carry out the investigation of nature
from the intellectual side alone—neglecting the
other constituents necessarily involved in the
problem. She has failed, because she has attempted
an impossible task ; for the discovery of a per-
manently valid and purely ztellectual representa-
tion of the universe is simply impossible. Such
a thing does not exist.

The various theories and views of nature which
we hold are merely the fugitive envelopes of the
successive stages of human growth—each set of
theories and views belonging organically to the
moral and emotional stage which has been reached,
and being in some sort the expression of it ; so
that the attempt at any given time to set up an
explanation of phenomena which shall be valid
in itself and without reference to the mental con-
dition of those who set it up, necessarily ends in
failure ; and the present state of confusion and
contradiction in which modern Science finds itself

is merely the result of such attempt.
80

— Ss le eS

Modern Science: A Criticism

Of course this limitation of the validity of
Science has been recognised by most of those
who have thought about the matter ;1 but it is
so commonly overlooked, and latterly the notion
has so far gained ground that the “laws” of
science are immutable facts and eternal statements
of verity, that it may be worth while to treat the
subject a little more in detail.

The method of Science is the method of all
mundane knowledge ; it is that of limitation or
actual ignorance. Placed in face of the great
uncontained unity of Nature we can only deal
with it in thought by selecting certain details and
isolating those (either wilfully or unconsciously)
from the rest. That is right enough. But in
doing so—in isolating such and such details—we
practically beg the question we are in search of ;
and, moreover, in supposing such isolation we
suppose what is false, and therefore vitiate our
conclusion. From these two radical defects of
all intellectual inquiry we cannot escape. The
views of Science are like the views of a mountain ;
each is only possible as long as you limit yourself
to a certain standpoint. Move your position,
and the view is changed.

Perhaps the word “ species ’’ will illustrate our
meaning as well as any word; and, in a sense,
the word is typical of the method of Science. I

t See note, p. II9.

2 Since the above was written there has certainly been a great
change, and the dogmatic confidence in the verity of the scientific
“laws” has now (1920) almost disappeared.

81 F

Civilisation : Its Cause and Cure

see a dog for the first time. It is a fox-hound.
Then I see a second fox-hound, and a third and a
fourth. Presently I form from these few instances
a general conception of “ dog.”
I see a grey-hound and a terrier and a mastiff,
and my old conception is destroyed. A new one
has to be formed, and then a new one and a new
one. Now I overlook the whole race of civilised
dogs and am satisfied with my wisdom ; but
presently I come upon some wild dogs, and study
the habits of the wolf and the fox. Geology turns
me up some links, and my conception of dog
melts away like a lump of ice into surrounding
water. My species exists no more. As long as
I knew a few of the facts I could talk very wise
about them; or if I limited myself arbitrarily,
as we will say, to a study only of animals in England
at the present day, I could classify them ; but
widen the bounds of my knowledge, the area
of observation, and all my work has to be done
over again. My species is not a valid fact of
Nature, but a fiction arising out of my own
ignorance or arbitrary isolation of the objects
observed.

Or to take an instance from Astronomy. We
are accustomed to say that the path of the moon
is an ellipse. But this’ is a very loose statement.
On enquiry we find that, owing to perturbations said
to be produced by the sun, the path deviates con-
siderably from an ellipse. In fact in strict calcu-
lations it is taken as being a certain ellipse only
for an instant—the next instant it is supposed to

82

But after a time ©

it ae

ee

Modern Science: A Criticism

be a portion of another ellipse. We might then
call the path an irregular curve somewhat resembling
an ellipse. This is a new view. But on further
enquiry it appears that, while the moon is going
round the earth, the earth itself is speeding on
through space about the sun—in consequence of
which the actual path of the moon does not in the
least resemble an ellipse! Finally the sun itself
is in motion with regard to the fixed stars, and
they are in movement too. What then is the path
of the moon? No one knows; we have not the
faintest idea—the word itself ceases to have any
assignable meaning. It is true that if we agree
to ignore the perturbations produced by the sun
—as in fact we do ignore perturbations produced
by the planets and other bodies—and if we agree
to ignore the motion of the earth, and the flight
of the solar system through space, and even the
movement of any centre round which that may be
speeding, we may then say that the moon moves
in an ellipse. But this has obviously nothing to
do with actual facts. The moon does not move
in an ellipse—not even “ relatively to the earth”
_-—and probably never has done and never will
do so. It may be a convenient view or fiction
to say that it would do so under such and
such circumstances—but it is still only a fiction.
To attempt to isolate a small portion of the
phenomena from the rest in a universe of
which the wity is one of Science’s most cher-
ished convictions, is obviously self-stultifying and
useless,

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Civilisation : Its Cause and Cure

But you say it can be proved by mathematics
that the ellipse would be the path under these
conditions ; to which I reply that the mathematical
proof, though no doubt cogent to the human mind
(as at present constituted in most people), is open
to the same objection that it does not deal with
actual facts. It deals with a mental supposition,
i.e., that there are only two bodies acting on each
other—a case which never has occurred and never
can occur—and then, assuming the law of gra-
vitation (which is just the thing which has to be
proved), it arrives at a mental formula, the ellipse.
But to argue from this process that the ellipse is
really a thing in Nature, and that the heavenly
bodies do move or even tend to move in ellipses,
is obviously a most unwarrantable leap in the
dark. Finally you argue that the leap is warranted
because, by assuming that the moon and planets
move in ellipses, you can actually foretell things
that happen, as for instance the occurrences of
eclipses ; and in reply to that I can only say that |
Tycho Brahé foretold eclipses almost as well
by assuming that the heavenly bodies moved in
epicycles, and that modern astronomers do apply
the epicycle theory in their mathematical formule.
The epicycles were an assumption made for a
certain purpose, and the ellipses are an assumption
made for the same purpose. In some respects
the ellipse is a more convenient fiction than the
epicycle, but it is no less a fiction.

In other words—with regard to this “ path of
the moon ”’ (as with regard to any other phenomenon

84

Modern Science : A Criticism

of Nature)—our knowledge of it must be either
absolute or relative. But we cannot know the
absolute path ; and as to the relative, why all we
can say is that it does not exist (any more than
species exists)—we cannot break up Nature so ;
it is not a thing in Nature, but in our own minds
—it is a view and a fiction.?

Again, let us take an example from Physics
—Boyle’s law of the compressibility of gases.
This law states that, the temperature remaining
constant, the volume of a given quantity of gas is
inversely proportional to its pressure. It is a
law which has been made a good deal of, and at
one time was thought to be true, 7.e., it was thought
to be a statement of fact. A more extended and
careful observation, however, shows that it is only
true under so many limitations, that, like the
ellipse in Astronomy, it must be regarded as a
convenient fiction and nothing more. It appears
that air follows the supposed law pretty well,
but not by any means exactly except within very
narrow limits of pressure; other gases, such as
carbonic acid and hydrogen, deviate from it very
considerably—some more than others, and some
in one direction and some in the opposite. It was
found, among other things, that the nearer a gas
was to its liquefying point, the greater was the
deviation from the supposed law, and the con-
clusion was jumped at that the law was true for

1 Such fictions, however, are (I need not say) quite necessary

as our only means of thinking out, however imperfectly, the
problems before us (1920).
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Civilisation : Its Cause and Cure

perfect gases only. This idea of a perfect gas of
course involved the assumption that gases, as they
get farther and farther removed from their liqui-
fying point, reach at last a fixed and stable condi-
tion, when no further change in their qualities
takes place—at any rate for a very long time—and
Boyle’s law was supposed to apply to this condition.
Since then, however, it has been discovered that
there is an ultra-gaseous state of matter, and on
all sides it is becoming abundantly clear that the
change in the condition of matter from the liquid
state to the ultra-gaseous state is perfectly continuous
—through all modifications of liquidity and con-
densation and every degree of perfection and imper-
fection of gasiness to the utmost rarity of the
fourth state. At what point, then, does Boyle’s
law really apply? Obviously it applies exacily
at only one point in this long ascending scale—at
one metaphysical point—and at every other point
it is incorrect. But no gas in Nature remains or
can be maintained just at one point in the scale
of its innumerable changes. Consequently, all
we can say is that out of the innumerable different
states that gases are capable of, and the innumerable
different laws of compressibility which they there-
fore follow, we could theoretically find one state
to which would correspond the law of compressi-
bility called Boyle’s law ; and that, if we could
preserve a gas in that state (which we can’t), Boyle’s
law really would be true just for that case. In
other words, the law is metaphysical. It has no
real existence. It is a convenient view or fiction,
86 .

“

‘Modern Science: A Criticism

arising in the first place out of ignorance, and only
tenable as long as further observation is limited
or wilfully ignored.

This then is the Method of Science. It con-
sists in forming a law or statement by only looking
at a small portion of the facts ; then, when the
other facts come in, the law or statement gradually
fades away again. Conrad Gessner and other
early zoologists began by classifying animals accord-
ing to the number of their horns! Political
Economy begins by classifying social action under
a law of Supply and Demand. When people be-
lieved that the earth was flat, they generalised the
facts connected with the fall of heavy bodies into
a conception of “up and down.’ These were
two opposite directions in space. Heavy bodies
took the ‘‘ downward ”’ ; it was their nature. But
in time, and as fresh facts came in, it became
impossible to group animals any longer by their
horns ; “ up and down ”’ ceased to have a meaning
when it was known that the earth was round. Then
fresh laws and statements had to be formed.
In the last-mentioned case—it being conceived
that the earth was the centre of the universe—the
new law supposed was that all heavy bodies tended
to the centre of the earth as such. This was all
right and satisfactory for a while ; but presently
it appeared that the earth was zor the centre of the
universe, and that some heavy bodies—such as
the satellities of Jupiter—did not in fact tend
to the centre of the earth at all. Another lump
of ignorance (which had enabled the old generalisa-

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Civilisation : Its Cause and Cure

tion to exist) was removed, and a new generalisa-
tion, that of universal gravitation, was after a time
formed. But it is probable that this law is only
conceived of as/ true through our ignorance ; nay
it is certain that belief in its truth presents the
. gravest difficulties.

In fact here we come upon an important point.
It is sometimes said that, granting the above argu-
ments and the partiality and defectiveness of the
laws of Science, still they are approximations to
the truth, and as each fresh fact is introduced the
consequent modification of the old law brings us
nearer and nearer to a limit of rigorous exactness
which we shall reach at last if we only have patience
enough. But is this so? What kind of rigorous
statement shall we reach when we have got a//
the facts in? Remembering that Nature is one,
and that if we try to get a rigorous statement for
one set of phenomena (as say the lunar theory)
by isolating them from the rest, we are thereby
condemning ourselves beforehand to a false
conclusion, is it not evident that our limit is at all
times infinitely far off? If one knew all the facts
relating to a given inquiry except two or three,
one might reasonably suppose that one was near
a limit of exactness in one’s knowledge; but
seeing that in our investigation of Nature we only
know two or three, so to speak, out of a million, it
is obvious that at any moment the fresh law arising
from increased experience may completely upset
our former calculations. There is a difference

between approximating to a wall and approximat-
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Modern Science: A Criticism

ing to the North Star. In the one case you are
tending to a speedy conclusion of your labours,
in the other case you are only going in a certain
direction. ‘The theories of Science generally belong
under the second head. They mark the direction
which the human mind is taking at the moment
in question, but they mark no limits. At each
point the appearance of a limit is introduced—which
becomes, like a mirage in the desert, an object
of keen pursuit ; but the limit is not really there
—it is only an effect of the standpoint, and disap-
pears again after a time as the observer moves.
In the case of gravitation there is for the moment
an appearance of finality in the law of the inverse
square of the distance, but this arises probably
from the fact that the law is derived from a limited
area of observation only, namely the movements
(at great distances from each other) of some of the
heavenly bodies.t The Cavendish and Schehallien
experiments do not show more than that the law
at ordinary distances on the earth’s surface does
not vary very much from the above ; while the so-

t Tt is not generally realised how feeble a force gravitation is.
It is calculated (Encycl. Brit., Art. Gravitation) that two masses,
each weighing 415,000 tons, and placed a mile apart, would exert
on each other an attractive force of only one pound. If one,
therefore, was as far from the other as the moon is from theearth,
their attraction would only amount to =¢5c00,c00th of a pound.
This is a small force to govern the movement of a body weighing
415,000 tons! and it is easy to see that a slight variation in the
law of the force might for a long period pass undetected, though
in the course of hundreds of centuries it might become of the
greatest importance.

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Civilisation: Its Cause and Cure

called molecular forces compel us (unless we make
the very artificial assumption that a variety of
attractions and repulsions co-exist in matter along-
side of, and yet totally distinct from, the attraction
of gravitation) to suppose very great modifications
of the law for small distances. In fact, as we
saw of Boyle’s law before—the Newtonian law
is probably metaphysical—true under certain
limited conditions—and the appearance of finality
has been given to it by the fact that our observa-
tions have been made under such or similar condi-
tions. When we extend our observation into
quite other regions of space, the law of the
inverse square ceases to appear as even an
approximation to the truth—as, for instance, the
law of the inverse fifth power has been thought
to be nearer the mark for small molecular
distances.

And indeed the state of the great theories of
Science in the present day—the confusion in which
the Atomic theory of physics finds itself, the dismal
insufficiency of the Darwin theory of the survival
of the fittest ; the collapse in late times of one of
the fundamental theories of Astronomy, namely
that of the stability of the lunar and planetary
orbits ; the cataclysms and convulsions which
Geology seems just now to be undergoing ; the
appalling and indeed insurmountable difficulties
which attach to the Undulatory theory of Light ;
the final wreck and abandonment of the Value-
theory, the foundation-theory of Political Economy
—all these things do not seem to point to very

go

Modern Science: A Criticism

near limits of rigorous exactness! An impreg-
nable theory, or one nearing the limit of impreg-
nability, is in fact as great an absurdity as an
impregnable armour-plate. Certainly, given the
-cannon-balls, you can generally find an armour-
plate which will be proof against them ; but given
the armour-plate, you can always find cannon-
balls which will smash it up.

The method of Science, as being a method of
artificial limitation or actual ignorance, is curiously
illustrated by a consideration of its various branches.
I have taken some examples from Astronomy,
which is considered the most exact of the physical
sciences. Now does it not seem curious that
Astronomy—the study of the heavenly bodies,
which are the most distant from us of all bodies,
and most difficult to observe—should yet be the
most perfect of the sciences? Yet the reason is
obvious. Astronomy is the most perfect science
because we know least about it—because our ignorance
of the actual phenomena is most profound. Situated
in fact as we are, on a speck in space, with our
observations limited to periods of time which,
compared with the stupendous flights of the stars,
are merely momentary and evanescent, we are in
somewhat the position of a mole surveying a rail-
way track and the flight of locomotives. And
as a man seeing a very small arc of a very vast
circle easily mistakes it for a straight line, so we
are easily satisfied with cheap deductions and solu-
tions in Astronomy which a more extensive
experience would cause us to reject. The man

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Civilisation: Its Cause and Cure

may have a long way to go along his “ straight
line’ before he discovers that it 1s a curve; he
may have much farther to go along his curve
before he discovers that it is not a circle; and
much farther still to go before he finds out whe-

ther it is an ellipse or a spiral or a parabola, or |

none of these; yet what curve it is will make
an enormous difference in his ultimate destination.
So with the astronomer; and yet Astronomy is
allowed to pass as an exact science !!
Well then, as in Astronomy we get an

¢

* exact

1 As another instance of the same thing, let me quote a passage
from Maxwell’s Theory of Heat, p. 31; the italics are mine:
“In our description of the physical properties of bodies as related
to heat we have begun with solid bodies, as those which we can
most easily handle, and have gone on to liquids, which we can
keep in open vessels, and have now come to gases, which will
_ escape from open vessels, and which are generally invisible. ‘This
is the order which is most natural in our first study of these different
states. But as soon as we have been made familiar with the most
prominent features of these different conditions of matter the most
scientific course of study is in the reverse order, beginning with gases,
on account of the greater simplicity of their laws, then advancing
to liquids, the more complex laws of which are much more im-
perfectly known, and concluding with the little that has been hitherto
discovered about the constitution of solid bodies.” ‘That is to
say that Science finds it easier to work among gases—which are
invisible and which we can know little about—than among solids,
which we are familiar with and which we can easily handle!
This seems a strange conclusion, but it will be found to represent
a common procedure of Science—the truth probably being that
the laws of gases are not one whit simp/er than the laws of liquids
and solids, but that on account of our knowing so much less about
gases it is easier for us to feigz laws in their case than in the case
of solids, and less easy for our errors to be detected.

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Modern Science: A Criticism

science,” because the facts and phenomena are
on such a tremendous scale that we only see a
minute portion of them—just a few details so to
speak—and our ignorance therefore allows us to
dogmatise ; so at the other end of the scale in
Chemistry and Physics we get quasi-exact sciences,
because the facts and phenomena are on such a
minute scale that we overlook a// the details and see
only certain general effects here and there. When
a solution of cupric sulphate is treated with ammonia,
a mass of flocculent green precipitate is formed.
No one has the faintest notion of all the various
movements and combinations of the molecules
of these two fluids which accompany the appearance
of the precipitate. They are no doubt very
complex. But among all the changes that are
taking place, one change has the advantage of
being visible to the eye, and the chemist singles
that out as the main phenomenon. So chemistry
at large consists in a few, very few, facts taken at
random as it were (or because they happen to be
of such a nature as to be observable) out of the
enormous mass of facts really concerned: and
because of their fewness the chemist is able to
arrange them, as he thinks, in some order, that
is, to generalise about them. But it is certain
as can be that he only has to extend the number of
his facts, or his powers of observation, to get all
his generalisations upset. The same may be said
of magnetism, light, heat, and the other physical
sciences ; but it is not necessary to prove in detail
what is sufficiently obvious.

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But now, roughly speaking, there is a third
region of human observation—a region which
does not, like Astronomy (and Geology), lie so far
beyond and above us that we only see a very small
portion of it ; nor, like Chemistry and Physics, so
far below us and under such minute conditions of
space and time that we can only catch its general
effects ; but which lies more on a level with man
himself—the so-called organic world—the study
of man, as an individual and in society, his history,
his development, the study of the animals, the
plants even, and the laws of life—the sciences of
Biology, Sociology, History, Psychology, and the
rest. Now this region is obviously that which
man knows most of. I don’t say that he genera-
lises most about it, but he knows the facts best.
_ For one observation that he makes of the habits
and behaviour of the stars, or of chemical solutions
—for one observation in the remote regions of
Astronomy or Chemistry—he makes thousands
and millions of the habits and behaviour of his
fellowmen, and hundreds and thousands of those
of the animals and plants. Is it not curious then
that in this region he is least sure, least dogmatic,
most doubtful whether there be a law or no?
Or, rather, is it not quite in accord with our con-
tention, namely that Science, like an uninformed
boy, is most definite and dogmatic just where
actual knowledge is least.

It will however be replied that the phenomena
of living beings are far more complex than the
phenomena of Astronomy or Physics—and that

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Modern Science: A Criticism

is the reason why exact science makes so little way
with them. Though man knows many million
times more about the habits of his fellow-men than
about the habits of the stars, yet the former subject
is so many million times more complicated than
the latter that all his additional knowledge does
not avail him. This is the plea. Yet it does not
hold water. It is an entire assumption to say that
the phenomena of Astronomy are less complicated
than the phenomena of vitality. A moment’s
thought will show that the phenomena of Astronomy
are in reality infinitely complex. Take the move-
ment of the moon : even with our present acquain-
tance with that subject we know that it has some
relation to the position and mass of the earth,
including its ocean tides ; also to the position and
mass of the sun ; also to the position and mass of
every one of the planets; also of the comets,
numerous and unknown as they are; also the
meteoric rings; and finally of all the stars !
The problem, as everyone knows, is absolutely
insoluble even for the shortest period ; but when
the element of Time enters in, and we consider
that to do anything like justice to the problem
in an astronomical sense we should have to solve
it for at least a million years—during which interval
the earth, sun, and other bodies concerned would
themselves have been changing their relative posi-
tions, it becomes obvious that the whole question
is infinitely complex—and yet this is only a small
fragment of Astronomy. ‘To debate, therefore,
whether the infinite complexity of the movements

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of the stars is greater or less than the infinite com-
plexity of the phenomena of life, is like debating
the precedence of the three persons of the Trinity,
or whether the Holy Ghost was begotten or pro-
ceeding : we are talking about things which we
do not understand.

Nature is one; she is not, we may ghess less >
profound and wonderful in one department than
another ; but from the fact that we live under
certain conditions and limitations we see most
deeply into that portion which is, as it were, on
the same level with us. In humanity we look
her in the face ; there our glance pierces, and we
see that she is profound and wonderful beyond all
imagination ; what we learn there is the most
valuable that we can learn. In the regions where
Science rejoices to disport itself we see only the
skirts of her garments, so to speak, and though we
measure them never so precisely, we still see them
and nothing more.

There is another point, however, of which much
is often made as a plea for the substantial accuracy
of the scientific laws and generalisations, namely
that they enable us to predict events. But this
need not detain uslong. J. S. Mill in his “ Logic”
has pointed out—and a little thought makes it
obvious—that the success of a prediction ddes
not prove the truth of the theory on which it is
founded. It only proves the theory was good
enough for that prediction.

There was a time when the sun was a god going
forth in his chariot every morning, and there was

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Modern Science: A Criticism

a time when the earth was the centre of the universe,
and the sun a ball of fire revolving round it. In
those times men could predict with certainty that
the sun would rise next morning, and could even
name the‘hour of its appearance ; but we do not
therefore think that their theories were true.
When Adams and Leverrier foretold the appear-
ance of Neptune in a certain part of the sky, they
made a brief prediction to an unknown planet
from the observed relations of the movements of
the known planets ; that does not show, however,
that the grand generalisation of these movements,
called the “law of gravitation,” is correct. It
merely shows that it did well enough for this very
brief step—brief indeed compared with the real
problems of Astronomy, for which latter it is
probably quite inadequate.

Tycho Brahé, excellent astronomer as he was,
kept as we saw to the epicycle theory. He imagined
that the moon’s path round the earth was a fixed
combination of cycle and epicycle. Kepler in-
troduced the conception of the ellipse. Later
on the motion of the perigee and other deviations
compelled the abandonment of the ellipse and the
- supposition of an endless curve, similar to an ellipse
at any one point, and maintaining a fixed mean
distance from the earth, but never returning on
itself or making a definite closed figure of any
kind. Finally the researches of Mr. George
Darwin have destroyed the conception of the fixed
mean distance, and introduced that of a continually
enlarging spiral. Certainly no four theories could

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Civilisation : Its Cause and Cure

well be more distinct from each other than these ;
yet if an eclipse had to be calculated for next year
it would scarcely matter which theory was used.
The truth is that the actual problem is so vast that
a prediction of a few years in advance only touches
the fringe of it so to speak; yet if the fulfilment of
the prediction were taken as a proof of the theory
in each of these different cases, it would lead in
the end to the most hopelessly contradictory
results.

The success of a prediction therefore only
shows that the theory on which it is founded has
had practical value so far as a working hypothesis.
As working hypotheses, and as long as they are
kept down to brief steps which can be verified,
the scientific theories are very valuable—indeed
we could not do without them; but when they
are treated as objective facts—when, for instance,
the “ law of gravitation ”—derived as it is from a
brief study of the heavenly bodies—has a universal
truth ascribed to it, and is made to apply to pheno-
mena extending over millions of years, and to
warrant unverifiable prophecies about the plane-
tary orbits, or statements about the age of the earth
and the duration of the solar system—all one
can say is that those who argue so are flying off
at a tangent from actual facts. For as the tangent
represents the direction of a curve over a small
arc, so these theories represent the bearing of
facts well enough over a small region of observa-
tion ; but as following the tangent we soon lose
the curve, so following these theories for any dis-

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Modern Science: A Criticism

tance beyond the region of actual observation we
speedily part company with facts.

To proceed with a few more words about the
_ general method of Science. Science passes from
phenomena to laws, from individual details which
can be seen and felt to large generalisations of an
intangible and phantom-like character. That is
to say, that for convenience of thought we classify
objects. How is this classification effected? It
is effected through the perception of identity amid
difference. Among a lot of objects I perceive
certain attributes in common; this group of
common attributes serves, so to speak, as a band
to tie these objects together with—into a bundle
convenient for thought. I give a name to the
band, and that serves to denote any unit of the
bundle by. Thus perceiving common attributes
among a lot of dogs—as in an example already
given—I give the name foxhound to this group
of attributes, and thenceforth use the name fox-
hound to connect these objects by in my mind ;
again perceiving other common attributes among

t All our thoughts, theories, “laws,” etc., may perhaps be
said to touch Nature—as the tangent touches the curve—at a point.
They give a direction—and are true—at that point. But make
the slightest move, and they all have to be reconstructed. ‘The
tangents are infinite in number, but the curve is one. ‘This may
not only illustrate the relation of Nature to Science, but also of
Art to the materials it uses. ‘The poet radiates thoughts: but
he sets no store by them. He knows his thoughts are not true
in themselves, but they touch the Truth. His lines are the envelope
of the curve which is his poem.

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Civilisation: Its Cause and Cure

other similar objects, I invent the word greyhound
to denote these latter by. The concept foxhound
differs from the objects which it denotes, in this
respect that these latter are (as we say) rea/ dogs
with thousands and thousands of attributes each :
one of them has a broken tooth, another is nearly
all white, another answers to the name “ Sally,”
and so on ;_ while the concept is only an imaginary
form in my mind, with only a few attributes and
no individual peculiarities—a kind of tiny G.C.M.
arising from the contemplation of a long row of
big figures.

Now having created these concepts “* foxhound,”’
“greyhound,” and a lot of other similar ones,
I find that they in their turn have a few attributes
in common and thus give rise to a new concept
“dog.” Of course this “dog” is more of an
abstraction than ever, the concept of a concept.
In fact the peculiarity of this whole process is
that, as sometimes stated, the broader the generalisa-
tion becomes the less is its depth ; or in other
words and obviously, that as the number of objects
compared increases, the number of attributes
common to them all decreases. Ultimately as
we saw at the beginning, when a sufficient number
of objects are taken in, the concept (“ dog” or
whatever it may be) fades away and ceases to have
any meaning. This therefore is the dilemma of
Science and indeed of all human knowledge,
that in carrying out the process which is peculiar
to it, it necessarily leaves the dry ground of reality
for the watery region of abstractions, which ab-

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Modern Science: A Criticism

stractions become ever more tenuous and ungras
able the farther it goes, and ultimately fade into
mere ghosts. Nevertheless the process is a quite
necessary one, for only by it can the mind deat
with things.

To dwell for a moment over this last point :
it is clear that every object has relation to every
other object in the world—exists in fact only in
virtue of such relation to other objects ; it has
therefore an infinite number of attributes. The
mind consequently is powerless to deal with such
object—it cannot by any possibility think it. In
order to deal with it, the mind is forced to single
out a few of its attributes (the method of ignorance
or abstraction already alluded to)—that is a few
of its relations to other objects, and to think them
first. The others it will think afterwards—all
in good time. In thus stripping or abstracting
the great mass of its attributes from our object,
and leaving only a few, which it combines into a
concept, the mind practically abandons the real
article and takes up with a shadow ; but in return
for this it gets something which it can handle,
which is light to carry about, and which, like
paper-money, for the time and under certain
conditions does really represent value. The only
danger is lest it—the mind—carried away by
the extensive applicability of the partial concept
which it has thus formed, should credit it with
an actual value—should project it on the back-
ground of the external world and ascribe to it
that reality which belongs only to objects them-

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Civilisation : Its Cause and Cure

selves, i.e., to things embodying an infinite range
of attributes.

The peculiar method of Science is now clear to
us, and can be abundantly illustrated from modern
results. Our experience consists in sensations, we
feel the weight of heavy bodies, we see them fall
when let go, we have sensations of heat and cold,
light and darkness, and so forth, But these sensa- .
tions are more or less local and variable from
man to man, and we naturally seek to find some
common measure of them, by which we can talk
about and describe them exac#ly, and independently
of the peculiarities of individual observers. Thus
we seek to find some common phenomenon which
underlies (as we say) the sensations of heat and
cold, or of light and darkness, or something which
explains (i.e. is always present in) the case of
falling bodies—and to do this we adopt the method
of generalisation above described, 7.e., we observe
a great number of individual cases and then see
what qualities or attributes they have in common.
So far good. But it is just here that the fallacy
of the ordinary scientific procedure comes in ;
for, forgetting that these common qualities are
mere abstractions from the real phenomena we
credit them with a real existence, and regard the
actual phenomena as secondary results, ‘‘ effects ”’
or what-not of these “causes.” This in plain
language is putting the cart before the horse—or
rather the shadow before the man. ‘Thus finding
that a vast number of variously shaped and coloured
bodies tend to fall towards the earth, we erect this

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Modern Science: A Criticism
common attribute of falling into an independent

existence which we call “attraction ”’ or “ gravita-
tion ’’—and ultimately posit a universal gravitation
acting on all bodies in Nature !|—or finding that a
number of different substances, such as water,
air, wood, etc., convey to us the sensation we call
- sound, and that in all these cases the common
element is vibration, we detach the attribute
vibration, credit it with a separate existence, and
speak of it as the cause of sound. But though we
may thus shink of the shadow as separate from
the man, the shadow cannot de separate from the
man; and though we may try to think of the
falling or the vibration as separate from the wood
or the stone, such falling and vibration cannot
exist apart from these and other such materials,
and the effort to speak of it as so existing ends in
mere nonsense. More strange still is the fatuity,
when, as in the case of the undulatory Theory
of light or the Atomic theory of physics, the con-
cepts thus erected into actualities are composed
of purely imaginary attributes—of which no one
has had any experience—an undulatory ether in
the one case, a hard and perfectly elastic atom in
the other. The total result is of course—just
what we see—Science landing itself in pure absurdi-
ties in every direction. Beginning by detaching
the attribute of falling from the bodies that fall
—hbeginning that is by an abstraction, which of
course is also a falsity—it generalises and generalises
this abstraction till at last it reaches a perfectly
generalised absurdity and thing without any
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Civilisation : Its Cause and Cure

meaning—the law of gravitation. The statement
that “every particle in the universe attracts every
other particle with a force proportional to the mass
of the attracting particle and inversely proportional
to the square of the distance between the two”
is devoid of meaning—the human mind can give
no definite meanings to the words “ mass,”
“attract,” and “force,” which do not overlap
and stultify each other. The law in every way
baffles intelligence. Newton, who invented it,
declared that no philosophic mind would suppose
that bodies could thus act on one another “ without
the mediation of anything else by and through
which their action might be conveyed ;”’ scientific
men to-day are fain to see that a material mediation
of this kind would only make the law still more
remote from our comprehension than it already is,
while, on the other hand, an immaterial mediation
or a fourth-dimensional mediation, such as some
propose, would simply remove the problem out
of the regions of scientific analysis.2 Again, the

t See the report of the joint meeting of the Royal Society and
the Royal Astronomical Society, November 6, 1919, when Ein-
stein’s theory was discussed.

2 It is obvious that the Einstein theory, in which ‘Time enters
as a kind of fourth dimension in relation to Space, removes us
at once out of the whole field of ordinary scientific reasoning and
lands us, so to speak, in a new world. ‘The nature of Space (or
of the universal medium, whatever it is) in any region—its
possible fundamental accelerations there, its ‘‘ curvature ” or non-
Euclidean character, and so forth—is supposed, according to this
theory, to vary with the amount of matter in, or density of,
that region; and the movements of bodies are consequently

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Modern Science: A Criticism

form of the law is declared to be the inverse square of
the distance ; but this is the law by the nature
of space itself of any perfect radiation, and if
true of gravitation involves the conclusion that that
radiation of force (whatever its nature may be)
takes place without loss or dissipation of any kind.
This would make gravitation absolutely unique
among phenomena. More than this, its propaga-
tion is supposed to be instantaneous over the most
enormous distances of space, and to take place
always unhindered and unretarded, whatever be
the number or the nature of the bodies between !
What can be more clear than that the law is simply
metaphysical—a projection into a monstrous uni-
versality and abstraction, of partially understood
phenomena in a particular region of observation—
a Brocken-shadow on the background of Nature of
the observer’s own momentary attitude of thought?

Again, the undulatory theory of Light. Study-
ing the phenomena of a vast number of coloured
supposed to take on the characters (accelerations, etc.,) which
we ascribe to the action of Gravitation. Gravitation in fact
in any region is the manifestation in Time of the attributes of
the universal Medium in that region—which latter again is
dependent on the degree of Matter present. Thus, Matter,
Time, and Space are ome phenomenon.

The whole Einstein theory, in fact, is a device to present
these three Protean and variable elements of all material exist-
ence (Matter, Time and Space) as so far involved and inter-
laced in each other that they form always an absolute and
complete unity. As such the theory is no doubt suggestive,
and along the line of future speculation: but it awaits corro-
boration. If corroborated it will point the way to a new
conception of the Universe.

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Civilisation : Its Cause and Cure

and bright bodies, Science finds that it can think
‘about these phenomena—can generalise and tie
them into bundles best by assuming that the bodies
are all in a state of vibration; a vibration so
minute that (unlike the vibrations connected with
Sound) it cannot be directly perceived. So far
good. ‘There is no harm in the assumption of
vibration, as long as it is understood to be a mere
assumption for a temporary convenience of thought.
But now Science goes farther than this, and not
only supposes a common attribute to all visible
bodies, but credits this common attribute with
a real existence independent of the visible bodies
in which it was supposed to inhere—and makes
this the cause of their visibility ! Obviously now
a common and universal medium is required for
this common and universal assumed vibration (just
as Newton required a medium for his universal
“falling ”’)—and so, hey presto! we have the
Undulatory Ether. And having got it we find
that to fulfil our requirements it must have a
pressure of 17 million million pounds on the
square inch, and yet be so rare and tenuous as not
to hinder the lightest breath of air; that while
it is thus rare enough to surpass all our powers of
direct scrutiny, its vibrations must yet be capable
of agitating and breaking up the solidest bodies ;

that it must pass freely through some dense and
close structures like glass, and yet be excluded
by some light and porous, like cork, and so on and
on! In fact we findthatitis unthinkable. Against
this adamantine, impalpable Ether, as against

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Modern Science: A Criticism

this instantaneous, untranslatable gravitation,
Science bangs its devoted head in vain. Havin

created these absurdities by the method of “ per-
sonification of abstractions ’’! or the “ reification
of concepts,’’? it seriously and in all good faith
tries to understand them ; having dressed up its
own Mumbo Jumbo (which it once jeered at
religion for doing) it piously shuts its eyes and
endeavours to believe in it.

The Atomic Theory affords a good example
of the ‘‘ method of ignorance.’”’ When we try
to think about material objects generally—to
generalise about them—that is, to find some attribute
or attributes common to them, we ere at first
puzzled. They present such an immense variety.
But after a time, by dint of stripping off or abstract-
ingall such attributes or qualities as we think we
perceive in one body and not in another—as for
example, redness, blueness, warmth, saltness, life,
intelligence, or what not—we find an attribute
left, namely resistance to touch, which is common
to all material bodies. This quality in the body
we call “‘ mass,” and since it is only known by
motion, mass and motion become correlative
attributes which we find useful to class bodies by,
not because they represent the various bodies
particularly well, but because they are found in
all bodies ; just as you might class people by their
boots—not because boots are a very valuable
method of classification, but simply because every

: J. S. Mill.
2 See Stallo’s excellent Concepts of Modern Physics.
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Civilisation : Its Cause and Cure

one wears boots of one kind or another. So far
there is no great harm done. But now having
by the method of ignorance thought away all the
qualities of bodies, except the two correlatives of
mass and motion, we set about to exp/ain the pheno-
mena of Nature generally by these two “ thinks ”
that are left. We credit these “thinks ’’ (mass
and motion) with an independent existence and
proceed to derive the rest of phenomena from
them. The proceeding of course is absurd, and
ends by exposing its own absurdity. Thinking
of mass and motion as existing in the various bodies
apart from colour, smell, and so forth—which of
course is not the case—we combine the two attributes
into one concept, the atom, which we thus assume
to exist in all bodies. The atom has neither colour,
smell, warmth, taste, life or intelligence ; it has
only mass and motion ; for it came by the method
of divesting our thought of everything Juz mass
and motion. It is a projection of a “think”
upon the background of nature. And it is an
absurdity. No such thing exists in all the wide
universe as mass and motion divested from colour,
smell, warmth, life and intelligence. The atom
is unthinkable. It is perfectly hard and it is per-
fectly elastic—which is the same as saying that it
bends and it doesn’t bend at the same time ; it
has form, and it hasn’t form ; it has affinities and
yet is perfectly indifferent. To justify to men
the ways of their Mumbo Jumbo has sorely exer-
cised the votaries of the Atom. One philosopher
says that it is mere matter, passive, exercising no
108

>

Modern Science: A Criticism

_ force but resistance ; another says that it is a centre
of force, without matter ; a third suggests that it is
not itself matter, but only a vortex in other matter |!
All agree that it is not an object of sense, and there
remains no conclusion but that it is nonsense ! }

t See, for instance, the last new thing in this style—the Helm-
holtz molecule as improved upon by Sir William Thomson ;
it is described as follows: ‘“‘ A heavy mass connected by massless
springs with a massless enclosing shell; or there may be several
shells enclosing each other connected by springs with a dense mass
in the centre (far more dense than the ether).” It is not, of course,
seriously maintained that this nonsensical creation exists—but that
if it did exist it would account for certain unexplained phenomena
in the disperson of light, etc.

Later still (1920) we have the following delightful verdict
on the Structure of the Atom, given by Sir Ernest Rutherford—
and which I commend to all lovers of clear thinking :—

“The Bakerian Lecture was delivered yesterday before the Royal
Society by Sir Ernest Rutherford, whose subject was ‘ ‘The Nuclear
Construction of the Atom.’ He said that during recent years
much attention had been paid to the nature and structure of atoms.
The atomic theory of matter had been definitely proved. The
mass of the individual atoms, and the number in any given weight
of matter, were now known with considerable accuracy. Not
only was matter known to be made up of atoms, but electricity
was also atomic in nature, and there was a definite unit of electrical
charge which could not further be subdivided. The negative
electron, which was a constituent of all atoms of matter, was
probably nothing more than an isolated unit of negative electricity,
and its small mass was electrical in origin. It had long been con-
sidered probable that the atom is an electrical structure, consisting
of positive and negative particles, held in equilibrium by electric
or magnetic forces. In recent years evidence had accumulated
that an atom consists of a positively charged nucleus surrounded at
a distance by a distribution of electrons to make it electrically
neutral.” (From The Morning Post of June 4, 1920.)

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Civilisation : Its Cause and Cure

And so on in all directions. Human thought
flying off at its tangents from Nature lands itself
in infinite nothings afar off, poor ghostly skeletons
and abstractions from Nature—which indeed is
all right, for human thought as yet can only see
ghosts and not realities; but let there be no
mistake, let these ghosts not be mistaken for
realities—for they are not even compatible with
each other. The Atom that suits the physicist
does not suit the chemist. The Ether that does
for the vehicle of Light will not do for the vehicle
of universal Gravitation.

It would be hardly worth while entering into
these criticisms, were it not evident that Science
in modern times, either tacitly or explicitly, has
been seeking, as I said at the beginning, to enounce
facts independent of Man, the observer. Seeing
that the ordinary statements of daily life are obviously
inexact and relative to the observer—charged
with human sensation in fact—Science has naturally
tried to produce something which should be
exact and independent of human sensation ; but
here it has of course condemned itself beforehand
to failure ; for no statement of isolated phenomena
or groups of phenomena cau be exact except by
the method of ignorance aforesaid, and no statement
obviously can be really independent of human
sensation. When aman says Jt is cold, his state-
ment, it must be confessed, is deplorably human
and vague. J¢—what is that? Js—do you mean
is ? or do you mean feels, appears ? Cold—in what

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Modern Science: A Criticism

sense? Cold to yourself, or to other people, or
to polar bears, or by the thermometer? And so
on. Science therefore steps in with an air of
authority and sets him right. It says the tempera-
ture is 30° Fahrenheit, as if to settle the matter.
But does this really settle the matter? Temperature
—who knows what that is? What is the scientific
definition of it? I find (Clerk-Maxwell’s Theory
of Heat, p. 2.) “the temperature of a body is a
quantity which indicates how hot or how cold the
body is.” This sounds very much like saying,
“the colour of a body is a quantity which indicates
how blue, red, or yellow the body is.’”’ It does
not bring us much farther on our way. But
in the next paragraph Maxwell shows the object
of his definition (which of course is only preliminary)
by saying, “ By the use, therefore, of the word
temperature, we fix in our minds the conviction
that it is possible not only to feel, but to measure,
how hot a body is.” ‘That is to say he clearly
maintains that it is possible to find an absolute
standard of hotness or coldness—or rather of the
unknown thing called temperature—outside of
ourselves and independent of human sensation.
When the man said he was cold he was probably
just describing his own sensations, but here Science
indicates that it is in search of something: which
has an independent existence of its own, and which
therefore when found we can measure exactly
and once for all. What then is that thing?
What is temperature? say, what is it?

We cudgel our brains in vain. Perhaps the

III

Civilisation : Its Cause and Cure

remainder of the sentence will help us. ‘ The
temperature is 30° Fahrenheit.” “The unknown
thing is thirty degrees.”’ What then is a degree?
That is the next question. When the Theory of
Heat went out from sensation and left it behind,
one of its first landing places was in the expansion
of liquids—as in thermometer tubes, Here for
some time was thought to be a satisfactory register
of ‘‘ temperature.” But before long it became
apparent that the degree—Fahrenheit, Réaumur,
or what-not—was an entirely arbitrary thing,
also that it was not the same! thing at one end
of the scale as the other, and finally that the scale
itself had no starting point! ‘This was awkward,
SO a move was made to the air thermometer, and
there was some talk about an absolute zero and
absolute temperatures ; it was thought that the
Unknown thing showed itself most clearly and
simply in the expansion of air and other gases,
and that the “degree”’ might fairly be measured
in terms of this expansion. But in a little time
this kind of thermometer—chiefly because no
gas turned out to be ‘theoretically perfect ’—
broke down, absolute zero and all, and another
step had to be made—namely, to the dynamical
theory. It was announced that the Unknown
thing might be measured in terms of mechanical
energy, and Joule at Manchester proclaimed that

t The very fact alone that the degrees on a thermometer are
egual space divisions shows that they must bear a varying relation
to the total volume of liquid as that expands from one end of the
tube to the other. .

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Modern Science: A Criticism

the work done by any quantity of water falling
there a distance of 772 feet is capable of raising
that water one degree Fahrenheit.t Here seemed
something definite. ‘To measure temperature by
mass and velocity, to measure a degree by the
flight of a stone, or the heat in the human body
by the fall of a factory chimney—if rather round-
about and elusive of the main question—seemed
at any rate promising of exact results! Unfortu-
nately the difficulty was to pass from the theory
to its application. The complicated nature of
the problem, the “imperfection” of the gases
and other bodies under consideration, the latent
and specific heats to be allowed for, the elusive
nature of heat in experiment, and the variable
value of the degree itself—all render the con-
clusions on this subject most precarious ; and the
general equations connecting the Fahrenheit or
other temperatures with a thermo-dynamic scale
—while they become so unwieldy as to be practi-
cally useless—are themselves after all only approxi-
mate.

Finally, to give a last form to the mechanical
theory of heat, the conception of flying atoms or
molecules was introduced, and a number of neat
generalisations were deduced from dynamical
considerations. Of course it was inevitable, having
once started with a mechanical theory, that one
should arrive at the Atom some time or other—
and (from what has already been said) it was also

t A statement obviously applying—from what has been already
said—at only one point in the scale.

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Civilisation : Its Cause and Cure

inevitable that the result should be unsatisfactory.
It is sufficient to say that the molecular theory of
heat is wot in accordance with facts. Such things
as the law of Charles and the law of Boyle, which ©
according to it should be strictly accurate and of
general application, are known to be true only
over a most limited range. This failure of the
theory may be said to arise partly from its being
pursued by the statistical method ; but if, on
the other hand, we were to try and follow out the
individual movement of each molecule we should
be landed in a problem far exceeding in complexity
the wildest flights of Astronomy, and should
have exchanged for the original difficulty about
“temperature ’’ a difficulty far greater.

The result of all this has been that notwithstand-
ing the talk about energy and atoms, Science has
sadly to confess that it can still give no valid mean-
ing to the word temperature : the unknown thing
is still unknown, the independent existence
round the corner still escapes us. By the very
effort to arrive at something independent of human
sensation, Science has, in a roundabout way,
arrived at an absurdity. When the man said
he was cold, his statement—deplorably vague as
it certainly was—had some meaning; he was
describing his feelings, or possibly he had seen
some snow or some ice on the road ; but when,
in the endeavour to leave out the human and to
say something absolute, Science declared that
the temperature was thirty degrees, it committed
itself to a remark which possibly was exact in

114

/

Modern Science: A Criticism

form, but to which it has never given and never
can give any definite meaning.!

Similarly with other generalities of Science :
the “law” of the Conservation of Energy, the
“law” of the Survival of the Fittest—the more
you think about them the less possible is it to give
any really intelligible sense to them. The very
word Fittest really begs the question which is
under consideration, and the whole Conservation
law is merely an attenuation of the already much
attenuated “‘law”’ of Gravitation. The Chemical
Elements themselves are nothing but the pro-
jection on the external world of concepts consisting
of three or four attributes each: they are not
more real, but very much less real than the indi-
vidual objects which they are supposed to account
for ; and their ‘“‘ elementary” character is merely
fictional. It probably is in fact as absurd to speak
of pure carbon or pure gold, as of a pure monkey
or a pure dog. There are no such things, except
as they may be arrived at by arbitrary definition
and the method of ignorance.

In the search for exactness, then, Science has
been continually led on to discard the human and
personal elements in phenomena, in the hope
of finding some residuum as it were behind them

1 I am not, of course, here arguing against the use of ther-
mometers or other instruments for practical purposes. ‘This is
certainly the legitimate field of Science. But (as in the case of
prediction before mentioned) the exactness of results obtained is
a very different matter from the truth of the generalities which

are supposed to underlie these results. In using a thermometer
you need not even mention the word “ temperature,”

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Civilisation: Its Cause and Cure

which should not be personal and human but
absolute and invariable. And the tendency has
been (hitherto) in all the sciences to get rid of
such terms as blue, red, light, heavy, hot, cold,
concord, discord, health, vitality, right, wrong,
etc., and to rely on any less human elements dis-
coverable in each case ; as for instance in Sound,
to deal less and less with the judgments and sen-
sations of the ear, and to rely more and more on
measurements of lengths of strings, numbers of
vibrations, etc. Each science has been (as far
as possible) reduced to its lowest terms. Ethics
has been made a question of utility and inherited
experience. Political Economy has been exhausted
of all conceptions of justice between man and man,
of charity, affection, and the instinct of solidarity ;
and has been founded on its lowest discoverable
factor, namely self-interest. Biology has been
denuded of the force of personality in plants,
animals, and men; the “self’’ here has been set
aside, and the attempt made to reduce the science
to a question of chemical and cellular affinities, pro-
toplasm, and the laws of osmose. Chemical affinities,
again, and all the wonderful phenomena of Physics
are emptied down into a flight of atoms ; and the
flight of atoms (and of astronomic orbs as well)
is reduced to the laws of dynamics—which the
student sitting in his chamber may write down on
a piece of paper. Thus the idea, formulated by
Comte, of a great scale of sciences arising from
the simplest to the most complex, has tacitly under-
lain modern scientific work. It—Science—has
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Modern Science: A Criticism

sought to “‘ explain’ each stage by reference to
a lower stage—‘blueness” by vibrations, and
vibrations by flying atoms—the human always
by the sub-human. Going out from humanity
dissatisfied, it has wandered through the animal
and vegetable kingdoms, through the regions of
Chemistry and Physics, into that of Mechanics.
“ Here at last, in Mechanics, is something outside
humanity, something exact in itself, something
substantial,” it has said. ‘‘ Let us build again on
this as on a foundation, and in time we shall find
out what humanity is.’’ This I say has been the
dream of Modern Science ; yet the fallacy of it
is obvious. We have not got outside the human,
but only to the outermost verge of it. Mass
and motion, which in this process are taken to
be real entities and the first progenitors of all
phenomena, are simply the last abstractions of
sensible experience, and our emptiest concepts.
The material explanation of the universe is simply
an attempt to account for phenomena by those
attributes which appear to us to be common to
them all—which is, as said before, like accounting
for men by their boots :—it may be possible to
get an exact formula this way, but its contents have
little or no meaning.

The whole process of Science and the Comtian
classification of its branches—regarded thus as
an attempt to explain Man by Mechanics—is
a huge vicious circle. It professes to start with
something simple, exact, and invariable, and from
this point to mount step by step till it comes to

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Civilisation: Its Cause and Cure

Man himself; but indeed it starts with Man.
It plants itself on sensations low down (mass,
motion, etc.), and endeavours by means of them
to explain sensations high up, which reminds one
of nothing so much as that process vulgarly
described as “‘climbing up a ladder to comb
your hair.” In truth Science has never left the
great world, or cosmos, of Man, nor ever really
found a /ocus standi without it; but during the
last two or three centuries it has gone in this
direction, outwards, continually. Leaving the
central basis and facts of humanity as too vast and
unmanageable, and also as apparently variable
from man to man and therefore affording no
certain consent to work upon, it has wandered
gradually outwards, seeking something of more
definite and universal application Discarding thus
one by one the interior phases of sensation—as
the sense of personal relationship, the sense of
justice, duty, fitness in things or what-not (as too
uncertain, or perhaps developed to an unequal
degree in different persons, embryonic in one and
matured in another), drifting past the more special-
ised bodily senses, of colour, sound, taste, smell,
etc., as “for similar reasons unavailable—Sciente |
at last in the primitive consciousness of muscular
contraction and its abstraction ‘‘ mass ”’ or “‘ matter ”’
comes toa pause. Here in this last sense, common
probably to man and the lowest animals, it finds
its widest, most universal ground—its farthest
limit from the Centre. It has reached the outer-
most shell, as it were, of the great Man-cosmos.
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Modern Science: A Criticism

Even this shell is partially human; it is not
entirely osseous, and so far not entirely exact
and invariable ; but Science can go no farther—
and there, for the present, it may remain !

Some day perhaps, when all this showy vesture
of scientific theory (which has this peculiarity
that only the learned can see it) has been quasi-
completed, and Humanity is expected to walk
solemnly forth in its new garment for all the
world to admire—as in Anderssen’s story of the
Emperor’s New Clothes—some little child standing
on a door-step will cry out: “‘ But he has got
nothing on at all,” and amid some confusion it
will be seen that the child is right.

NOTE

““T fear I have very imperfectly succeeded in expressing my
strong conviction that, before a rigorous logical scrutiny, the Reign
of Law will prove to be an unverified hypothesis, the Uniformity
of Nature an ambiguous expression, the certainty of our scientific
inferences to a great extent a delusion.” (Stanley Jevons, Principles
of Science, p. ix.)

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THE SCIENCE OF THE FUTURE:
A FORECAST

Once let that [the human ideal] slip out of the thought, and
science is of no more use than the invocations in the Egyptian
papiri—RicHarD JEFFERIES.

paper, that in some sense a mistake has

been made in the method of modern
scientific work; not that the vast amount of
labour expended in it has been altogether wasted,
for in return for this there is a mass of practical
results and detailed observations to show ; but
that in attempting to solve the problem of science
by the intellect alone, a radical mistake has been
made which cou/d only land us in absurdity, and
that this mistake has for the time being also vitiated
the results that have been attained. For—in
reference to this last point—the divorce of the
intellectual from the emotional has caused a great
portion of our scientific observations to become
merely pedantic and trifling ; while it has turned
the practical results—as industrial and military
machinery, etc.—into engines of evil as often as
into engines of good.

|; would appear then, from the preceding

120

Science of the Future: A Forecast

Science in searching for a permanently valid
and purely intellectual representation of the uni-
verse has, as already said, been searching for a
thing which does not exist. The very facts of
Nature, as we call them, are at least half feeling.
If we try to clean the feeling out of a fact and to
produce a statement which shall be devoid of the
human or sense element, it simply amounts to
cleaning the meaning out ; and though our resulting
statement may be exact it is nugatory and of no
value. We might as well try to take the clay
out of a brick. It must never be forgotten that
the logical processes—important as they are—
cannot stand by themselves, have no standing
ground of their own. ‘They presuppose assump~
tions and are the expression of things that are
unreasoning, perhaps illogical. The strictest
logic is a mere hooking together of links in a chain,
and the last link is of no use—you can put no
stress on it—unless the first is secured some-
where. The strength of the intellectual chain is
no greater than that of the staple from which it
hangs—and that is a human feeling The strength
of Euclid is no greater than that of the axioms—
and shey are feelings ; they are unreasoning state-
ments of which ail that we can say is, “I feel
like that.” In fact all the propositions of Geo-
metry are nothing but the analysis and elaborate
expression, so to speak, of these primary convictions
—and the Geometry-structure stands and falls
with them. There is no such thing as intellectual
truth—that is, I mean, a truth which can be stated

121

Civilisation : Its Cause and Cure

as existing apart from feeling. If, for instance,
a proposition in Geometry can be really shown to
be based on the axioms, it is true, not intellectually
or absolutely, but as an expression of my primary
Geometrical sense ; and if my giving a few pence
to a crossing sweeper is based not on a mere im-
pression of duty, or an anxiety to appear charitable,
or wish to escape his importunity, but on genuine
regard for the man, then it is true, not in any absolute
signification, but just as an expression of what it
professes to represent—namely my primary sense
of humanity. Indeed the truest truth is that
which is the expression of the deepest feeling,
and if there is an absolute truth it can only be
known and expressed by him who has the absolute
feeling or Being within himself.

This being so—and the nature of the intellec-
tual processes being, like the links in a chain,
transitional—it becomes obvious that the intellec-
tual results may figure as a means but never as
an end in themselves. To hang any weight of
reliance on them in the latter sense is like the
Chinese Trick—described by Marco Polo—of
throwing a rope’s end up in the air and then
climbing up the rope. Hence it appears that
our scientific theories are perfectly legitimate, as
long as they are formed as a means towards
practical applications. In that sense they are
transitional ; they are formed, not as substantial
truths, but merely as links in a chain towards some
definite practical result. For this purpose we may
form whatever theories are convenient: if we

122

Science of the Future: A Forecast

are calculating the strength of bridges, we may
adopt what generalisations we like concerning
mechanical structure, as long as they give us actual
and practical results ; if we are predicting eclipses,
we may make use of any theory that will do. The
theory does not matter, as long as it hauls the prac-
tical result after it, just as it does not matter whether
your cable is of iron or hemp or silk, as long as
you can get your ship into dock with it. In this
sense our Modern Science is, I conceive, admirable.
For practical results and brief predictions it affords
a quantity of useful generalisations—shorthand
notes and conventional symbols and_ pocket
summaries of phenomena—which bear about the
same relation to the actual world that a map does
to the country it is supposed to represent. It
cannot be said to have any resemblance to the real
thing—but, when you understand the principle
on which it is formed, it is exceedingly useful for
finding your way about. As long as Science
therefore keeps the practical end in view, and
starting from sense seeks to return to sense again,
its intermediate theorising is perfectly legitimate ;
but the moment it credits its theory with a positive
and authoritative existence, as an actual repre-
sentation of facts—and endeavours to pass by means
of it into unverifiable and abstract regions, as of
invisible germs or atoms, or far distances of space,
or the remote past or future—it is simply throw-
ing its rope’s end into the sky and trying to climb
up! That “the wish is father to the thought ”
is in its wide sense profoundly true. In the indivi-
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Civilisation : Its Cause and Cure

dual, feeling precedes thinking—as the body
precedes the clothes. In history, the Rousseau
precedes the Voltaire. There is, I believe, a
physiological parallel ; for behind the brain and
determining its action stands the great sympathetic
nerve—the organ of the emotions. In fact here
the brain appears as distinctly transitional. It
stands between the nerves of sense on the one
hand and the great sympathetic on the other.

Change the feeling in an individual, and his whole
method of thinking will be revolutionised ; change
the axiom or primary sensation in a science, and
the whole structure will shave to be re-created.
The current Political Economy is founded on the
axiom of individual greed ; but let a new axiomatic
emotion spring up (as of justice or fair play
instead of unlimited grab), and the base of the
science will be altered, and will necessitate a new
construction. ,

So when people argue (on politics, morality, art,
etc.) it will generally be found that they differ at
the dase ; they go out, perhaps quite unconsciously,
from different axioms and hence they cannot agree.
Occasionally of course a strict examination will
show that, while agreeing at the base, one of them
has made. a false step in deduction ; in that case
his thought does zor represent his primary feeling,
and when this is pointed out he is forced to alter
it. But more often it is found that the difference
lies deep down at a point beyond the reach of
reason ; and they disagree to the end. In this
case neither is right and neither is wrong.

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Science of the Future: A Forecast
They simply feel differently ; they are different

ersons.

The Thought then is the expression, the out-
growth, the covering of underlying Feeling. And
in the great life of Man as a whole, as in the lesser
life of the individual, his continual new birth
and inward growth causes his thought-systems also
continually to change and be replaced by new ones.
Like the bud-sheaths and husks in a growing
plant or tree they give form for a time to the life
within ; then they fall off and are replaced. The
husk prepares the bud underneath, which is to
throw it off. The thought prepares and protects
the feeling underneath, which growing will in
evitably reject it; and when a thought has been
formed it is already false, i.e., ready to fall.

We are now, then, in a position to come back
to the question of a genuine Science, truly so-
called.

As there is no invariable and absolute datum
on the fringe of Humanity—no definable flying
atom on which we can found our reasonings—
and as Modern Science, considered as an actual
representation of the universe, falls miserably to
pieces in consequence—is it possible that we have
made a mistake in the direction in which we have
sought for our datum ; and may it be that we should
look for that in the very Centre of Humanity in-
stead of in its remotest circumference? In that
direction evidently, if we could penetrate, we
should expect to find, not a shadowy intellectual
generalisation, but the very opposite of that—an

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Civilisation : Its Cause and Cure

intense immutable fee/ing or state, an axiomatic
condition of Being. Is it possible that here,
blazing like a sun (if we could only see it—and
the sun is its allegory in the physical world),
there exists within us absolutely such a thin
—the one fact in the universe, of which all else
are shadows, zo which everything has relation,
and round which, itself unanalysable, all thought
circles and all phenomena stand as indirect modes
of expression ?

Is it possible? That is the question—the
question wh'ch each one of us has to solve. At
any rate, let us throw this out as a suggestion.
Let us suggest that as we have got nothing satis-
factory by cleaning the sense-element out of
phenomena, we should take the opposite course
and put as much sense into them as we can |!

‘Facts’ are, at least, half feelings. Let us
acknowledge this and not empty the feeling out
of them, but deepen and enlarge that which we
already have in them. Who knows whether
we have ever seen the blue sky? Who knows
whether we have ever seen each other? Is it
not a commonplace to say that one man sees in
the common objects of Nature what another is
wholly unconscious of? “The primrose on
the river’s brim a yellow primrose is to him—and
nothing more.’ ‘To what extent may the facts
of Nature. thus be deepened and made more
substantial to us—and whither will this process
lead us?

Do we not want to feel more, not less, in the

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Science of the Future: A Forecast

presence of phenomena—to enter into a living
relation with the blue sky, and the incense-laden
air, and the plants and the animals—nay, even
: with poisonous and hurtful things to have a keener
sense of their hurtfulness? Is it not a strange
kind of science, that which wakes the mind to
pursue the shadows of things, but dulls the senses
to the reality of them—which causes a man to
try to bottle the pure atmosphere of heaven and
then to shut himself in a gas-reeking, ill-ven-
tilated laboratory while he analyses it ; or allows
him to vivisect a dog, unconscious that he is
blaspheming the pure and holy relation between
man and the animals in doing so? Surely the
man of Science (in its higher sense, that is) should
be lynx-eyed as an Indian, keen-scented as a
hound—with all senses and feelings trained by
constant use and a pure and healthy life in close
contact with Nature, and with a heart beating in
sympathy with every creature. Such a man
would have at command, so to speak, the key-
board of the universe ; but the mechanical, un-
healthy, indoor-living student—is he not really
ignorant of the facts ?—Certainly, since he has not
felt them, he is.

The process of the true Science consists first
in the naming and defining of phenomena (i.e.,
the facts of human consciousness), and secondly,
in the discovery of the true relation of these
phenomena to each other ; and since the defini-
tions of phenomena and their relations keep vary-
ing with the standpoint of the observer, the process

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Civilisation : Its Cause and Cure

evidently involves all experience, and ultimately
the discovery of that last fact of experience to
which and through which all the other facts are
related. It is therefore an age-long process, and
has to do with the emotional and moral part of
man as well as with the logical and intellectual.
It is, in fact, the discovery of the nature of Man
himself, and of the true order of his being.
- Modern Science—though seeking for a unity
in Nature—fails to find it, because, from the
nature of the case, any large body of knowledge
in which all people will agree is limited to certain
small regions of human experience—regions in
which very likely no unity is discoverable. It
takes the emerald, and breaks it up ; treats of its
colour and light-refracting qualities on the one
hand ; of its crystalline structure and hardness
on the other ; of its weight and density ; and of
its chemical properties ; all separately, and pro-
ducing long strings of generalisation from each
aspect of the subject. But how all these qualities
are conjoined together, what their relation is
which constitutes the emerald—yea, even the
smallest bit of emerald dust—it (wisely) does not
attempt to say. It takes the man and dissects
him ; treats of his blood, his nerves, his bones,
his brain; of his senses of sight, of touch, of
hearing ; ‘but of that which binds these together
into a unity, of their true relation to each other
in the man, it is silent.

Yet the man knows of himself that he zs a unity ;
he knows that all parts of his body have relation

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Science of the Future: A Forecast

to him, and to each other; he knows that his
senses of sight and hearing and touch and taste
and smell are conjoined in the focus of his indivi-
dual life, in his “‘I am ;” he knows that all his
faculties and powers, however much they may
belong to different planes, spiritual or material,
or may come under the inquisition of different
Sciences, have an order of their own among each
other—that there zs an ultimate Science of them
—even though he be not yet wholly versed in
it. And he knows, moreover, that in a grain of
dust, or in an emerald, or in an orange, or in any
object of Nature, the different attributes of the
object—which the Sciences thus treat of separ-
ately—are only the reflexion of his different senses ;
so that the problem of the conjunction of different
attributes in a body comes back to the same pro-
blem of the union of various senses and powers
in himself—each individual object being only
a case, externalised as it were, and made a matter
of consciousness, of the general relation to each
other of his own sensations and feelings. Know-
ing all his—I say—he sees that the understanding
of Nature in general and of the laws or relations
which he thinks he perceives among external
things must always depend on the relations and
laws which he tacitly assumes, or which he is
directly conscious of, as existing between the
various parts of his own being; and that the
ultimate truth which Science—the divine Science—
is really in search of is a moral or psychologic Truth
—an understanding of what man is, and the discovery
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Civilisation : Its Cause and Cure

of the true relation to each other of all his
faculties—involving all experience, and an exer-
cise of every faculty physical, intellectual, emo-
tional and spiritual, instead of one set of faculties
only.

Not till we know the law of ourselves, in fact,
shall we know the law of the emerald and the
orange, or of Nature generally ; and the law of
ourselves is not learnt, except subordinately,
by intellectual investigation ; it is mainly learnt
by life. The relation of gravity to vitality is
learnt not so much by outer experiment in a
laboratory as by long experience within ourselves
from the day when as infants we cannot lift our-
selves above the floor, through the years of the
proud strength of manhood scaling the loftiest
mountains, to the hour when our disengaged spirits
finally overcome and pass beyond the attraction
of the earth ; and just as the sense of weight—
which first appears as a quite external sensation
—is thus at last found to stand in most. pregnant
relation with our deepest selves, so of the other
senses which feed the individual life—the senses
of light, of warmth, of taste, of sound, of smell.
Taste, which begins as it were on the tip of the
tongue, becomes ultimately, if normally developed,
a sense which identifies itself with the health
and well-being of the whole body ; the pleasure
of taste becomes vastly more than a mere surface
pleasure, and its discrimination of food more than
a mere regard for the nutrition of the ordinary
corporeal functions. ‘The sense of Light, which

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Science of the Future: A Forecast

begins in the material eye, grows and deepens
inwardly till the consciousness of it pervades
the whole body and mind with a kind of inward
illumination or divine Reason, showing the
places of all things and enfolding the sense
of beauty in itself. The sense of Warmth in
the same mannre is related to and leads up to
Love ; and Sound, in the voices of our friends or
the divine chords of music, has passed away from
being an external phenomenon and has established
itself as the language of our most tender and inti-
mate emotions.

All the senses thus, as they develop and deepen,
are found to unite in the very focus of individual
life. Slowly, and through long experience, their
relation to each other, their very meaning unfolds,
or will unfold ; and as this process takes place
the man knows himself ove, a unity, of which the
various faculties are the different manifestations.
Then further through his less localised feelings
or more glorified senses the individual finds his
relation to other individuals. Through his loves
and hatreds, through his senses of attraction,
repulsion, cohesion, solidarity, order, justice,
charity, right, wrong and the rest—these feelings,
each like the others deepening back more and
more as time goes on—he gradually discovers
his true and abiding relationship to other indi-
viduals, and to the divine society of which they
all form a part—and so at last, if we may venture to
say so, his relationship to the absolute and uni-
versal, At present, since our most important

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Civilisation: Its Cause and Cure

-relation to each other is conceived of as one of
rivalry and Competition, we of course think of .
the objects of Nature as being chiefly engaged
in a Struggle for Existence with each other ; but
when we become aware of all our senses and feelings,
and of ourselves as individuals, as having relation
to the Absolute and universal, proceeding from
it, as the branches and twigs of a tree from the
trunk—then we shall become aware of a Divine
or absolute science in Nature; we shall at last
understand that all objects have a permanent
and indissoluble relation to each other, and
shall see their true meaning—though not till
then.

Is it possible then that Science, having hitherto
—and we shall see in time that this process has
been really most valuable and important—gone
outwards from the centre towards the very fringe
of Humanity—emptying facts as far as possible
as it went of all feeling, and reducing itself at
last to the most shadowy generalisations on the
very verge of sense and nonsense—is it possible,
I say, that it will now return, and frst filling up
facts with feeling as far as practicable (that 1s,
by direct and the most living contact with Nature
in every form, learning to enter into direct per-
sonal sense-relationship with every phenomenon
and phase), will so gradually ascend to the great
central fact and feeling, and then at last and for
the first time become fully conscious of a vast
organisation—absolutely perfect and intimately knit
from its centre to its utmost circumference—

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Science of the Future: A Forecast

(the true cosmos of Man—the conceptions of
man and god combined)—existing inchoate or
embryonic 1n every individual man, animal, plant,
or other creature—the object of all life, experience,
suffering, and toil—the ground of all sensation,
and the hidden, yet proper, theme of all thought
and study ?

For this is it possible that Science will, speaking
broadly, have to leave the laboratory and become
one with Life ; or that the great currents of human
life will have to be turned on into these often
Augean stables of intellectual pruriency ?—the
investigation of Nature no longer a matter of the
intellect alone, but of patient listening and the
quiet eye, and of love and faith, and of all deep
human experience, bearing not superciliously its
weight towards the interpretation of the least
phenomenon—every “fact”? thus deepened to
its utmost—all experience (rather than experi-
ment) courted, and filial walking with Nature,
rather than tearing of veils aside—the life of the
open air, and on the land and the waters, the
companionship of the animals and the trees and
the stars, the knowledge of their habits at first
hand and through individual relationship to them,
the recognition of their voices and languages, and
listening well what they themselves have to say ;
the keenest education of the senses towards the
physical powers and elements, and the acceptance
of a// human experience, without exception—
til! Science become a reality.

Is it possible that in some sense, instead of

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Civilisation : Its Cause and Cure

reducing each branch of Science to its lowest
terms, we shall have to read it in the light of its
highest factors, and “take it up”’ into the Science
above—that we shall have to take up the mechani-
cal sciences into the physical, the physical into
the vital, the vital into the social and ethical, and
so forth, before we can understand them? Is
it possible that the phenomena of Chemistry
only find their due place and importance in their
relation to living beings and processes ; that the
phenomena of vitality and the laws of Biology
and Zoology—Evolution included—can only be

‘explained ”’ by their dependence on self-hood—
both in plants and animals ; that Political Economy
and the Social Sciences (which deal with men as
individual selves) must, to be undertstood aright,
be studied in the light of those great ethical principles
and enthusiasms, which to a certain extent over-
tide the individual self ; and that, finally, Ethics
or the study of moral problems is only compre-
hensible when the student has become aware of. a
region beyond Ethics, into which questions of
morality and immorality, of right and wrong,
do not and cannot enter?

Of this reversal of the ordinary scientific method
Ruskin has given a great and signal instance in
his treatment of Political Economy ; it remains,
perhaps, for others to follow his example in the
other branches of Science.?

t Thus the study of Geometry would be primarily an education
of the eye, and the mind’s eye, to the perception of geometrical
forms and facts, the judgment of angles, etc.—and secondarily

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Science of the Future: A Forecast

With regard to the absolute datum question
we have seen that Science has two alternatives
before it—either to be merely intellectual and to
seek for its start-point in some quite external
(and imaginary) thing like the Atom, or to be
divine and to seek for its absolute in the innermost
recesses of humanity. We have two similar
alternatives in the doctrine of Evolution, which
looks either to one end of the scale or the other
for its interpretation—either to the amoeba or to
the _man—to something it knows next to nothing
of, or to that which it knows most of. Goethe,
when gazing at a fan-palm at Padua, conceived
the idea of leaf-metamorphosis, which he after-
wards enunciated in the now accepted doctrine
that all parts of a plant—seed-vessel, pistil, stamens,
petals, sepals, stalk, etc.—may be regarded as
modifications of a leaf or leaves. In this view
the distinctions between the parts are effaced, and
we have only one part instead of many—but the
question is “‘ what is that part?” It is of course
arbitrary to call it a leaf, for since it is continually
varying it is at one time a leaf, and at another a
stalk, and then a petal or a sepal, and so forth.

only a process of deductive reasoning—a body of empirical know-
ledge strengthened and tied together by bands of logic; the study
of Natural History would be primarily an affectionate intimacy
with the habits of animals and plants, and classification would be
treated as a secondary matter and asa help to the former ; Physiology
would be studied in the first place by the method of Health—
the pure body—becoming gradually transparent with all its organs
to the eye of the mind—and dissection would be used to corroborate
and correct the results thus attained; and so on,

135

Civilisation : Its Cause aud Cure
What then is it? For the moment we are

baffled.

So with the doctrine of Evolution as applied
to the whole organic kingdom up to man. Like
the doctrine of leaf-metamorphosis it obliterates
distinctions. Geoffroy St. Hilaire proposed to
show the French Academy that a Cephalopod
could be assimilated to a Vertebrate by supposing
the latter bent backwards and walking on its
hands and feet. ‘There is a continuous variation
from the mollusc to the man—all the lines of
distinction run and waver—classes and species
cease to exist—and Science, instead of many, sees
only ove thing. What then is that one thing ?
Is it a mollusc, or is it a man, or what is it? Are
we to say that man may be looked upon as a varia-
tion of a mollusc or an amoeba, or that the amoeba
may be looked on as a variation of man? Here
are two directions of thought ; which shall we
choose? But the plain truth is, the Intellect can
give no satisfactory answer. Whichever, or
whatever, it chooses, the choice is quite arbitrary
—just as much so as the choice of the “leaf”
in the other case. ‘There is no answer to be given.
And thus it is that the appearance of the doctrine
of Evolution is the signal of the destruction of Science
(in the ordinary acceptation of the word). For
Evolution is the successive obliteration of the
arbitrary distinctions and landmarks which by
their existence constitute Science, and as _ soon
as Evolution covers the whole ground of Nature
inorganic and organic fet before long it will do)

13

Science of the Future: A Forecast

—the whole of Nature runs and wavers before
the eye of Science, the latter recognises that its
distinctions ave arbitrary, and turns upon and
destroys itself. This has happened before, I
believe—ages back in the history of the human
race—and probably will happen again.

The only conceivable answer to the question,
“What is that which is now a mollusc and nowa
man and now an inorganic atom?”’! is given
by man himself—and his answer is, I fear, not
“scientific.” Itis “I Am.” “I am that which
varies.”’ And the force of his answer depends
on what he means by the word “I.” And so
also the only conceivable answer to the absolute
datum question is to be found in the meaning
of the word “I”—in the deepening back of
consciousness itself. Man is the measure of all
things. If we are to use Science as a minister
to the most external part of man—to provide
him with cheap boots and shoes, etc.—then we
do right to seek our absolute datum in his external
part, and to take his foot as our first measure. We
found a science on feet and pounds, and it serves
its purpose well enough. But if we want to
find a garment for his inner being—or, rather,
one that shall fit the who/e man—to wear which
will be a delight to him and, as it were, a very inter-
pretation of himself—it seems obvious that we
must not take our measure from outside, but
from his very most central principle. The whole

* Compare the Sphinx-riddle: What is that which goes on
four legs, etc.

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Civilisation : Its Cause and Cure

question is, whether there is any absolute datum
in this direction or not. ‘There have been men
through all ages of history (and from _ before)
who have declared that there is. They have
perhaps been conscious of it in themselves. On
the other hand there have been men who, starting
from their feet, declared that consciousness itself
was a mere incident of the human machine—
as the whistle of the engine—and thus the matter
stands. On the whole, at the present day, the
feet have it, and (notwithstanding their variety
in size and_ boot-induced conformation) are
generally accepted as the best absolute datum
available.

Under the foot régime the universe is generally
conceived of as a medley of objects and forces,
more or less orderly and distinct from man, in
the midst of which man is placed—the purpose
and tendency of his life being “‘ adaptation to his
environment.” ‘To understand this we may im-
agine Mrs. Brown in the middle of Oxford Street.
"Buses and cabs are running in different directions,
carts and drays are rattling on all sides of her.
This is her environment, and she has to adapt
herself to it. She has to learn the laws of the
vehicles and their movements, to stand on this
side or on that, to run here and stop there, con-
ceivably to jump into one at a favourable moment,
to make use of the law of its movement, and so get
carried to her destination as comfortably as may
be. A long course of this sort of thing “ adapts ”’
Mrs. Brown considerably, and she becomes more

138

Science of the Future: A Forecast

active, both in mind and body, than before. That
is all very well. But Mrs. Brown has a destina-
tion. (Indeed how would she ever have got into
the middle of Oxford Street at all, if she had not
had one? and if she did get there with no des-
tination at all, but merely to skip about, would
there be any Mrs. Brown left in a short time ?)
The question is, ‘‘ What is the destination of
Man?”

About this last question unfortunately we hear
little. The theory is (I hope I am not doing it
injustice) that by studying your environment
sufficiently you will find out—that is, that by
investigating Astronomy, Biology, Physics, Ethics,
etc., you will discover the destiny of man. But
this seems to me the sameas saying that by studying
the laws of cabs and "buses sufficiently you will find
out where you are going to. These are ways
and means. Study them by all means, that is
right enough ; but do not think shey will tell you
where to go. You have to use them, not they

ou.

In order therefore for the environment to act,
there must be a destination. This I suppose is
expressed in the biological dictum, ‘‘ organism
is made by function as well as environment.”
What then is the function of Man? And here
we come back again to the meaning of the word
ce | Sok

Nothwithstanding then the prevalence of the
_ foot régime, and that the heathen so furiously rage
together in their belief in it, let us suggest that

139

Civilisation : Its Cause and Cure

there is in man a divine consciousness as well as
a foot-consciousness. For, as we saw that the
sense of taste may pass from being a mere local
thing on the tip of the tongue to pervading and
becoming synonymous with the health of the whole
body ; or as the blue of the sky may be to one
person a mere superficial impression of colour,
and to another the inspiration of a poem or picture,
and to a third—as to the “ god-intoxicated ”
Arab of the desert—a living presence like the an-
cient Dyaus or Zeus ; so may not the whole of
human consciousness gradually lift itself from a
mere local and temporary consciousness to a divine
and universal? ‘There is in every man a local
consciousness connected with his quite external
body ; that we know. Are there not also in
every man the makings of a universal conscious-
ness? That there are in us phases of con-
sciousness which transcend the limit of the bodily
senses, is a matter of daily experience; that
we perceive and know things which are not
conveyed to us by our bodily eyes or heard by
our bodily ears, is certain ; that there rise in us
waves of consciousness from those around us,
from the people, the race, to which we belong,
is also certain ; may there not then be in us the
makings of a perception and knowledge which
shall not be relative to this body which is here and
now, but which shall be good for all time and every-
where? Does there not exist, in truth, as we
have already hinted—an inner Illumination—of
which what we call light in the outer world is the
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Science of the Future: -A Forecast

partial expression and manifestation—by which
we can ultimately see things, as they are, beholding
all creation, the animals, the angels, the plants,
the figures of our friends and all the ranks and
races of human kind, in their true being and order
—not by any local act of perception but by a cosmical
intuition and presence, identifying ourselves with
what we see? Does there not exist a perfected
sense of Hearing—as of the morning-stars singing
together—an understanding of the words that are
spoken all through the universe, the hidden meaning
of all things, the word which is creation itself—
a profound and far pervading sense, of which our
ordinary sense of sound is only the first novitiate
and initiation? Do we not become aware of an
inner sense of Health and of Holiness—the transla-
tion and final outcome of the external sense of
taste—which has power to determine for us abso-
lutely and without any ado, without argument
and without denial, what is good and appropriate
to be done or suffered in every case that can
arise ?

And so on; it is not necessary to say more.
If there are such powers in man, then there is
indeed an exact science possible. Short of it
there is only a temporary and phantom science.
“Whatever is known to us by (direct) con-
sciousness,’’ says Stuart Mill in his System of
Logic, “‘is known to us beyond possibility of
question ;”” what is known by our local and
temporary consciousness is known for the moment
beyond possibility of question; what is known

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Civilisation : Its Cause and Cure

by our permanent and universal consciousness
is permanently known beyond possibility of
question.?

« See for continuation of this subject the chapter on “ A Rational
and Humane Science,” p. 219 infra.

142

DEFENCE OF CRIMINALS:
A CRITICISM OF MORALITY

The State is the actually existing realised moral life. For it
is the unity of the universal essential Will with that of the individual,
and this is “‘ Morality.”—Hecet.

CRIMINAL is literally a person accused
A —accused, and in the modern sense of

the word convicted, of being harmful
to Society. But is he there in the dock, the patch-
coated brawler or burglar, really harmful to Society ?
is he more harmful than the mild old gentleman
in the wig who pronounces sentence upon him?
That is the question. Certainly he has infringed
the law : and the law is in a sense the consolidated
public opinion of Society : but if no one were to
break the law, public opinion would ossify, and
Society would die. As a matter of fact Society
keeps changing its opinion. How then are we
to know when it is right and when it is wrong?
The Outcast of one age is the Hero of another.
In execration they nailed Roger Bacon’s manu-
scripts out in the sun and rain, to rot crucified
upon planks—his bones lie in an unknown and

143

Civilisation : Its Cause and Cure

unhonoured grave—yet to-day he is regarded as
a pioneer of human thought. The hated Chris-
tian holding his ill-famed love-feasts in the darkness
of the catacombs has climbed up to the throne
of S. Peter and the world. The Jew money-
lender whom Front-de-Beeuf could torture with
impunity is become a _ Rothschild—guest of
princes and instigator of commercial wars ; and
Shylock is now a highly respectable Railway
Bondholder. And the Accepted of one age is
the Criminal of the next. All the glories of Alex-
ander do not condone in our eyes for his cruelty
in crucifying the brave defenders of Tyre by
thousands along the sea-shore ; and if Solomon
with his thousand wives and concubines were
to appear in London to-morrow, even our most
frivolous circles would be shocked, and Brigham
Young by contrast seem a domestic model. The
judge pronounces sentence on the prisoner now,
but Society in its turn and in the lapse of years
pronounces sentence on the judge. It holds
in its hand a new canon, a new code of morals,
and consigns its former representative and the —
law which he administered to a limbo of con-
tempt.

It seems as if Society, as it progresses from point
to point, forms ideals—just as the individual does.
At any moment each person, consciously or un-
consciously, has an ideal in his mind toward which
he is working (hence the importance of literature).
Similarly Society has an ideal in its mind. These
ideals are tangents or vanishing points of the direc-

144

Defence of Criminals

tion in which Society is moving at the time. It
does ‘not reach its ideal, but it goes in that direc-
tion—then, after a time, the direction of its move-
ment changes, and it has a new ideal.

When the ideal of Society is material gain or
possession, as it is largely to-day, the object of its
special condemnation is the thief—not the rich
thief, for he is already ih possession and therefore
respectable, but the poor thief. There is nothing
to show that the poor thief is really more immoral
or unsocial than the respectable money-grubber ;
but it is very clear that the money-grubber has
been floating with the great current of Society,
while the poor man has been swimming against
it, and so has been worsted. Or when, as to-day,
Society rests on private property in land, its counter-
ideal is the poacher. If you goin the company of
the county squire-archy and listen to the after-
dinner talk you will soon think the poacher a
combination of all human and diabolic vices ;
yet I have known a good many poachers, and
either have been very lucky in my specimens or
singularly prejudiced in their favour, for I have
generally found them very good fellows—but
with just this one blemish that they invariably
regard a landlord as an emissary of the evil one !
The poacher is aS much in the right, probably,
as the landlord, but he is not right for the time.
He is asserting a right (and an instinct) belonging
to a past time—when for hunting purposes all
land was held in common—or to a time in the
future when such or similar rights shall be restored.

145 K

Civilisation : Its Cause and Cure

Cesar says of the Suevi that they tilled the ground
in common and had no private lands, and there is
abundant evidence that all early human communi-
ties, before they entered on the stage of modern
civilisation, were communistic in character. Some
of the Pacific Islanders to-day are in the same
condition. In those times private property was
theft. Obviously the man who attempted to
retain for himself land or goods, or who fenced
off a portion of the common ground and—like
the modern landlord—would allow no one to till
it who did not pay him a tax—was a criminal of
the deepest dye. Nevertheless the criminals
pushed their way to the front, and have become
the respectables of modern Society. And it is
quite probable that in like manner the criminals
of to-day will push to the front and become the
respectables of a later age.

The ascetic and monastic ideal of early Christian
and medieval ages is now regarded as foolish,
if not wicked ; and poverty, which in many times
and places has been held in honour as the only
garb of honesty, is condemned as criminal and
indecent. Nomadism—if accompanied by poverty
—is criminal in modern Society. To-day the
gipsy and the tramp are hunted down. To have
no settled habitation, or worse still, no place to
lay your head, are suspicious matters. We close |
even our outhouses and barns against the son of
man, and so to us the son of man comes not.
And yet—at one time and in one stage of human
progress—the nomadic state is the rule ; and the

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settler is then the criminal. His crops are fired
and his cattle driven off. What right has he
to lay a limit to the hunting grounds, or to spoil
the wild free life of the plains with his dirty agri-
culture ?

As to the marriage relation and its attendant
moralities, the forms are numerous and notorious
enough. Public opinion seems to have. varied
through all phases and ideals, and yet there is no
indication of finality. Modern investigations
show that in primitive human societies the affinities
admitted or barred in marriage are most various
—the relation of brother and sister being even
in cases allowed ; in the present day such a bond
as the last-mentioned would be considered inhuman
and monstrous.! Polyandry prevails among one
people or at one time, polygyny prevails among
another people or at another time. In Central
Africa to-day the chief offers you his wife as a
mark of hospitality, in India the native Prince
keeps her hidden even from his most intimate

guest. Among the Japanese, public opinion holds

young women—even of good birth—-singularly
free in their intercourse with men, #// they are
mariied; at Paris they are free after. In the
_ Greek and Roman antiquity marriage seems, with

t Yet there is no doubt that lasting and passionate love may
exist between two persons thus nearly related. ‘The danger to
the health of the offspring from occasional in-breeding of the
kind appears to arise chiefly from the accentuation of infirmities
common to the two parents. In a state of society free from the
diseases of the civilisation-period, such a danger would be greatly
reduced.

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some brilliant exceptions, to have been a prosaic
affair—mostly a matter of convenience and house-
keeping—the woman an _ underling—little of
the ideal attaching to the relationship of man and
wife. ‘The romance of love went elsewhere.
The better class of free women or Hetairai were
those who gave a spiritual charm to the passion.
They were an educated and recognised body,
and possibly in their best times exercised a healthy
and discriminating influence upon the male youth.
The respectful treatment of Theodota by Socrates
and the advice which he gives her concerning her
lovers : to keep the insolent from her door, and
to rejoice greatly when the accepted succeed
in anything honourable, indicates this. That
their influence was at times immense the mere
name of Aspasia is sufficient to show; and if
Plato in the Symposium reports correctly the word
of Diotima, her teaching on the subject of human
and divine love was probably of the noblest and
profoundest that has ever been given to the
world.

With the influx of the North-men over Europe
came a new ideal of the sexual relation, and the
wife mounted more into equality with her husband
than before. The romance of love, however, still
went mainly outside marriage, and may, I believe,
be traced in two chief forms—that of Chivalry,
as an ideal devotion to simple Womanhood ; and
that of Minstrelsy, which took quite a different
hue, individual and sentimental—the lover and
his mistress (she in most cases the wife of another),

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the serenade, secret amour, etc.—both of which
forms of Chivalry and Miinstrelsy contain in
themselves something new and not quite familiar
to antiquity.

Finally in modern times the monogamic union
has risen to pre-eminence—the splendid ideal of
an equal and life-long attachment between man
and wife, fruitful of children in this life, and
hopeful of continuance beyond—and has become
the great theme of romantic literature, and the
climax of a thousand novels and poems. Yet
it is just here and to-day, when this ideal after
centuries of struggle has established itself, and
among the nations that are in the van of civilisa-
tion—that we find the doctrine of perfect liberty
in the marriage relationship being most success-
fully preached, and that the communalisation of
social life in the future seems likely to weaken
the family bond and to relax the obligation of
the marriage tie.

If the Greek age, splendid as it was in itself
and in its fruits of human progress, did not hold
marriage very high, it was partly because the ideal
passion of that period, and one which more than
all else inspired it, was that of comradeship, or
male friendship carried over into the region of
love. The two figures of Harmodius and Aristo-
giton stand at the entrance of Greek history as
the type of this passion, bearing its fruit (as Plato
throughout maintains is its nature) in united self-
devotion to the country’s good. The heroic
Theban legion, the “sacred band,” into which

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no man might enter without his lover—and which
was said to have remained unvanquished till
it was annihilated at the battle of Cheronzea—
proves to us how publicly this passion and its place
in society were recognised ; while its universality
and the depth to which it had stirred the Greek
mind are indicated by the fact that whole treatises
on love, in its spiritual aspect, exist, in which no
other form of the sentiment seems to be contem-
plated ; and by the magnificent panorama of
Greek statuary, which was obviously to a large
extent inspired by it. In fact the most remarkable
Society known to history, and its greatest men,
cannot be properly considered or understood
apart from this passion ; yet the modern world
scarcely recognises it, or if it recognises, does so
chiefly to condemn it. ?

Other instances might be quoted to show how
differently moral questions are regarded in one
age and another—as in the cases of Usury, Magic,
Suicide, Infanticide, etc. On the whole we pride
ourselves (and justly I believe) on the general
advance in humanity ; yet we know that to-day
the merest savages can only shudder at a civilisa-
tion whose public opinion allows—as among us
—the rich to wallow in their wealth, while the

t Modern writers fixing their regard on the physical side of
this love (necessary no doubt here, as elsewhere, to define and
corroborate the spiritual) have entered their protest as against
the mere obscenity into which the thing fell—for instance in the
days of Martial—but have missed the profound significance of

the heroic attachment itself. It is, however, with the ideals
that we are just now concerned and not with their disintegration.

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poor are systematically starving ; and it is certain
that the vivisection of animals—which on the
whole is approved by our educated classes (though
not by the healthier sentiment of the uneducated)
—would have been stigmatised as one of the
most abominable crimes by the ancient Egyptians !
—if, that is, they could have conceived such a
practice possible at all.

But not only do the moral judgments of man-
kind thus vary from age to age and from race
to race, but—what is equally remarkable—they
vary to an extraordinary degree from class to class
of the same society. If the landlord class regards
the poacher as a criminal, the poacher, as already
hinted, looks upon the landlord as a selfish ruffian
who has the police on his side ; if the respectable
shareholder, politely and respectably subsisting
on dividends, dismisses navvies and the frequenters
of public-houses as disorderly persons, the navvy
in return despises the shareholder as a sneaking
thief. And it is not easy to see, after all, which is
in the right. It is useless to dismiss these dis-
crepancies by supposing that one class in the nation
possesses a monopoly of morality and that the other
classes simply rail at the virtue they cannot attain
to, for this is obviously not the case. It is almost
a commonplace, and certainly a fact that cannot
be contested, that every class—however sinful
or outcast in the eyes of others—contains within
its ranks a large proportion of generous, noble,

1 In the /ater Egyptian centuries vivisection apparently became
an approved practice.

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self-sacrificing characters; so that the public
opinion of one such class, however different from
that of others, cannot at least be invalidated on
the above ground. There are plenty of clergy-
men at this moment who are models of pastors—
true shepherds of the people—though a large
and increasing section of society persist in regarding
priests as a kind of wolves in sheep’s clothing.
It is not uncommon to meet with professional
thieves who are generous and open-handed to
the last degree, and ready to part with their last
penny to help a comrade in distress ; with women
living outside the bounds of conventional morality
who are strongly religious in sentiment, and
who regard atheists as really wicked people ; with
aristocrats who have as stern material in them as
quarry-men ; and even with bondholders and
drawing-room loungers who are as capable of
bravery and self-sacrifice as many a pitman or
ironworker. Yet all these classes mentioned have
their codes ‘of morality, differing in greater or
lesser degree from each other; and again the
question forces itself upon us: Which of them
all is the true and abiding code ?

It may be said, with regard to this variation of
codes within the same society, that, though various
codes may exist at the same time, one only is
really valid, namely, that which has embodied
itself in the law—that the others have been rejected
because they were unworthy. But, when we
come to look into this matter of law, we see that
the plea can hardly be maintained. Law re-

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presents from age to age the code of the dominant
or ruling class, slowly accumulated, no doubt,
and slowly modified, but always added to and
always administered by the ruling class. To-day
the code of the dominant class may perhaps best
be denoted by the word Respectability—and
if we ask why this code has to a great extent over-
whelmed the codes of the other classes and got
the law on its side (so far that in the main it char-
acterises those classes who do not conform to it
as the criminal classes), the answer can only be:
Because it is the code of the classes who are in
power. Respectability is the code of those who
have the wealth and the command, and as these
have also the fluent pens and tongues, it is the
standard of modern literature and the press. It
is not necessarily a better standard than others,
but it is the one that happens to be in the ascendant ;
it is the code of the classes that chiefly represent
modern society ; it is the code of the Bourgeoisie.
It is different from the Feudal code of the past,
of the knightly classes, and of Chivalry ; it is
different from the Democratic code of the future—
of brotherhood and of equality ; it is the code
of the Commercial age—and its distinctive watch-
word is property.

The respectability of to-day is the respectability
of property. There is nothing so respectable
as being well-off. The Law confirms this :
everything is on the side of the rich ; justice is
too expensive a thing for the poor man. Offences
against the person hardly count for so much as

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those against property. You may beat your
wife within an inch of her life and only get three
months ; but if you steal a rabbit, you may be
“sent” for years. So again, gambling by thou-
sands on Change is respectable enough, but pitch
and toss for half-pence in the streets is low, and
must be dealt with by the police ; while it 1s a
mere commonplace to say that the high-class
swindler is “‘received”’ in society from which
a more honest but patch-coated brother would
infallibly be rejected. As Walt Whitman has it,
“There is plenty of glamour about the most
damnable crimes and hoggish meannesses, special
and general, of the feudal and dynastic world
over there, with its personnel of lords and queens
and courts, so well-dressed and handsome. But
the people are ungrammatical, untidy, and their
sins gaunt and ill-bred.”

Thus we see that though there are, for instance
in the England of to-day, a variety of classes and
a variety of corresponding codes of public opinion
and morality, one of these codes, namely that of
the ruling class whose watchword. is property,
is strongly in the ascendant. And we may fairly
suppose that in any nation from the time when
it first becomes divided into well-marked classes
this is or has been the case. In one age—the
commercial age—the code of the commercial or
money-loving class is dominant; in another—
the military—the code of the warrior class is
dominant ; in another—the religious—the code
of the priestly class; and so on, And even

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before any question of division into classes arises,
while races are yet in a rudimentary and tribal
state, the utmost diversity of custom and public
opinion marks the one from the other.

What, then, are we to conclude from all these
variations (and the far greater number which
I have not mentioned) of the respect or stigma
attaching to the same actions, not only among
different societies in different ages or parts of the
world, but even at any one time among different
classes of the same society? Must we conclude
that there is no such thing as a permanent moral
code valid for all time ; or must we still suppose
that there is such a thing—though society has
hitherto sought for it in vain?

I think it is obvious that there is no such thing
as a permanent moral code—at any rate as apply-
ing to actions. Probably the respect or stigma
attaching to particular classes of actions arose
from the fact that these classes of actions were
—or were thought to be—beneficial or injurious
to the society of the time ; but it is also clear that
this good or bad name once created clings to the
action long after the action has ceased in the
course of social progress to be beneficial in the
one case, or injurious in the other ; and indeed
long after the thinkers of the race have discovered
the discrepancy. And so in a short time arises
a great confusion in the popular mind between
what is really good or evil for the race and what
is reputed to be so—the bolder spirits who try
to separate the two having to atone for this con-

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fusion by their own martyrdom. It is also pretty
clear that the actions which are beneficial or injuri-
ous to the race must by the nature of the case vary
almost indefinitely with the changing conditions
of the life of the race—what is beneficial in one
age or under one set of conditions being injurious
in another age or under other circumstances—so
that a permanent or ever-valid code of moral
action is not a thing to be expected, at any rate
by those who regard morality as a result of social
experience, and as a matter of fact is not a thing
that we find existing. And, indeed, of those who
regard morals as intuitive, there are few who have
thought about the matter who would be inclined
to say that any act in itself can be either right or
wrong. ‘Though there is a superficial judgment
of this kind, yet when the matter comes to be
looked into, the more general consent seems to
be that the rightness or wrongness is in the motive.
To kill (it is said) is not wrong, but to do so with
murderous intent is ; to take money out of another
person’s purse is in itself neither moral nor immoral
—all depends upon whether permission has been
given, or on what the relations between the two
persons are; and so on. Obviously there is no
mere act which under giveh conditions may not
be justified, and equally obvious there is no
mere act which under given conditions may not
become unjustifiable. To talk, therefore, about
virtues and vices as permanent and distinct classes
of actions is illusory : there is no such distinction,
except so far as a superficial and transient public
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opinion creates it. The theatre of morality is
in the passions, and there are (it is said) virtuous
and vicious passions—eternally distinct from each
other.

Here, then, we have abandoned the search for
a permanent moral code among the actions ; on
the understanding that we are more likely to find
such a thing among the passions. And I think
it would be generally admitted that this is a move
in the right direction. There are difficulties
however here, and the matter is not one which
renders itself up at once. Though, vaguely
speaking, some passions seem nobler and more
dignified than others, we find it very difficult,
in fact impossible, to draw any strict line which
shall separate one class, the virtuous, from the
other class, the vicious. On the whole we place
Prudence, Generosity, Chastity, Reverence, Courage
among the virtues—and their opposites, as
Rashness, Miserliness, Incontinence, Arrogance,
Timidity, among the vices ; yet we do not seem
able to say that Prudence is always better than
Rashness, Chastity than Incontinence, or Reverence
than Arrogance. There are situations in which
the less honoured quality is the most in place ;
and if the extreme of this is undesirable, the extreme
of its opposite is undesirable too. Courage, it
is commonly said, must not be carried over into
foolhardiness ; Chastity must not go so far as the
monks of the early Church took it ; there is a limit
to the indulgence of the instinct of Reverence. In
fact the less dignified passions are necessary some-

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times as a counterbalance and set-off to the more
dignified, and a character devoid of them would
be very insipid ; just as among the members of
the body, the less honoured have their place as
well as the more honoured, and could not well
be discarded. it

Hence a number of writers, abandoning the
attempt to draw a fixed line between virtuous
and vicious passions, have boldly maintained that
vices have their place as well as virtues, and that
the true salvation lies in the golden mean. The
tmisikeea and owopocbvn of the Greeks seem:
to have pointed to the idea of a blend or
harmonious adjustment of all the powers as the
perfection of character. Plutarch says (Essay on
Moral Virtue), ‘‘'This, then, is the function of
practical reason following nature, to prevent our
passions either going too far or too short. ..°.
Thus setting bound to the emotional currents,
it creates in the unreasoning part of the soul moral
habits which are the mean between excess and
deficiency.”’

The English word ‘ gentleman ”’ seems to have
once conveyed a similar idea. And Emerson,
among others, maintains that each vice is only
the “‘excess or acridity of a virtue,” and says
“the first lesson of history is the good of evil.”

According to this view rightness or wrongness
cannot be predicated of the passions themselves,
but should rather be applied to the use of them,
and to the way they are proportioned to each other
and to circumstances. As, farther back, we left

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the region of actions to look for morality in the
passions that lie behind action, so now we leave
the region of the passions to look for it in the power
that lies behind the passions and gives them their
place. This is a farther move in the same direc-
tion as before, and possibly will bring us to a more
satisfactory conclusion. There are still difficulties,
however, the chief ones lying in the want of
definiteness which. necessarily attaches to our
dealings with these remoter tracts of human
nature ; and in our own defective knowledge of
these tracts. |

For these reasons, and as the subject is a complex
and difficult one, I would ask the reader to dwell
for a few minutes longer on the considerations
which show that it is really as impossible to draw
a fixed line between moral and immoral passions
as it is between moral and immoral actions, and
which therefore force us, if we are to find any
ground of morality at all, to look for it in some
further region of our nature.

Plato in his allegory of the soul, in the Phedrus,
though he apparently divides the passions which
draw the human chariot into two classes, the
heavenward and the earthward—figured by the
white horse and the black horse respectively—
does not recommend that the black horse should
be destroyed or dismissed, but only that he (as
well as the white horse) should be kept under
due control by the charioteer.. By which he
seems to intend that there is a power in man
which stands above and behind the passions,.

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and under whose control alone the human being
can safely move. In fact, if the fiercer and so-
called more earthly passions were removed, half
the driving force would be gone from the chariot
of the human soul. Hatred may be devilish at
times—but, after all, the true value of it depends
on what you hate, on the use to which the passion
is put. Anger, though inhuman at one. time, is
magnificent at another. Obstinacy may be out
of place in a drawing-room, but it is the latest
virtue on a battle-field, when an important position
has to be held against the full brunt of the enemy.
And Lust, though maniacal and monstrous in its
aberrations, cannot in the last resort be separated
from its divine companion, Love. To let the
more amiable passions have entire sway notoriously
does not do: to turn your cheek, too literally,
to the smiter, is (pace Tolstoi) only to encourage
smiting ; and when society becomes so altruistic
that everybody runs to fetch the coal-scuttle, we
feel sure that something has gone wrong. The
white-washed heroes of our biographies, with their
many virtues and no faults, do not please us. We
have an impression that the man without faults
is, to say the least, a vague, uninteresting being—
a ‘picture without light and shade—and the con-
ventional semi-pious classification of character
into good and bad qualities (as if the good might
be kept and the bad thrown away) seems both
inadequate and false.

What the student of human nature rather has
to do is not to divide the virtues (so-called) from

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the vices (so-called), not to separate the black
horse and the white horse, but to find out what
is the relation of the one to the other—to see the
character as a whole, and the mutual interdepen-
dence of its different parts—to find out what
that power is which constitutes it a unity, whose
presence and control makes the man and all his
actions “‘ right,’ and in whose absence (if it is
really possible for it to be entirely absent) the
man and his actions must be “ wrong.”

What we call vices, faults, defects, appear often
as a kind of limitation: cruelty, for instance, as
a limitation of human sympathy, prejudice as a
blindness, a want of discernment ; but it is just
these limitations—in one form or another—which
are the necessary conditions of the appearance of
a human being in the world. If we are to act or
live at all we must act and live under limits. ‘There
must be channels along which the stream is forced
to run, else it will spread and lose itself aimlessly
in all directions—and turn no mill-wheels. One
man is disagreeable and unconciliatory—the direc-
tions in which his sympathy goes out to others are
few and limited—yet there are situations in life
(and everyone must know them) when a man who
is able and willing to make himself disagreeable
is invaluable : when a Carlyle is worth any number
of Balaams.

Sometimes again vices, etc., appear as a kind
of raw material from which the other qualities have
to be formed, and without which, in a sense, they
could not exist. Sensuality, for instance, underlies

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all art and the higher emotions. ‘Timidity is
the defect of the sensitive imaginative tempera-
ment. Bluntness, stupid candor, and want of
tact are indispensable in the formation of certain
types of Reformers. But what would you have?
Would you have a rabbit with the horns of a cow,
or a donkey with the disposition of a spaniel ?
The reformer has not to extirpate his brusqueness
and aggressiveness, but to see that he makes good
use of these qualities ; and the man has not to
abolish his sensuality, but to humanise it.

And so on, Lecky, 1 in his ‘‘ History of Morals,”
shows how in society certain defects necessarily
accompany certain excellences of character.
“Had the Irish peasants been less chaste they
would have been more prosperous,” in his blunt
assertion, which he supports by the contention
that their early marriages (which render the said
virtue possible) “are the most conspicuous proofs
of the national improvidence, and one of the most
fatal obstacles to industrial prosperity.” Similarly
he says that the gambling table fosters a moral
nerve and calmness “ scarcely exhibited in equal
perfection in any other sphere’”’—a fact which
Bret Harte has finely illustrated in his character
of Mr. John Oakhurst in the “‘ Outcasts of Poker
Flat ;”’ also that “the promotion of industrial
veracity is probably the single form in.which the
growth of manufactures exercises a favorable
influence upon morals ; ’’ while, on the other hand,
‘“Trust.in Providence, content and resignation in
extreme poverty and suffering, the most genuine

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amiability, and the most sincere readiness to
assist their brethren, an adherence to their religious
opinions which no persecutions and no bribes
can shake, a capacity for heroic, transcendent,
and prolonged self-sacrifice, may be found in some
nations, in men who are habitual liars and habitual
cheats.” Again he points out that thriftiness
and forethought—which, in an industrial civilisa-
tion like ours, are looked upon as duties “ of
the very highest order”—have at other times
(when the teaching was “‘ take no thought for the
morrow ’’) been regarded as quite the reverse,
and concludes with the general remark that as
society advances there is some loss for every gain
that is made, and with the special indictment
against “civilisation ’”’ that it is not favorable to
the production of “self-sacrifice, enthusiasm,
reverence, or chastity.”

The point of all which is that the so-called vices
and defects—whether we regard them as limita-
tions or whether we regard them as raw materials
of character, whether we regard them in the
individual solely or whether we regard them
in their relation to society—are necessary elements
of human life, elements without which the so-called
virtues could not exist ; and that therefore it is
quite impossible to separate vices and virtues into
distinct classes with the latent idea involved that
one class may be retained and the other in course
of time got rid of. Defects and bad qualities
will not be treated so—they clamour for their
rights and will not be denied ; they effect a lodg-

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ment in us, and we have to put up with them.
Like the grain of sand in the oyster, we are forced
to make pearls of them.

These are the precipices and chasms which
give form to the mountain. Who wants a mountain
sprawling -indifferently ,out on all sides, without
angle or break, like the oceanic tide-wave of which
one cannot say whether it is a hill or a plain?
And if you want to grow a lily, chastely white
and filling the air with its fragrance, will you not
bury the bulb of it deep in the dirt to begin
with ?

Acknowledging, then, that it is impossible to
hold permanently to any line of distinction between
good and bad passions, there remains no course
for us but to accept both, and to make use of them
—redeeming them, both good and bad, from their
narrowness and limitation by so doing—to make
use of them in the service of humanity: For as
dirt is only matter in the wrong place, so evil in
man consists only in actions or passions which
are uncontrolled by the human within him, and
undedicated to its service. The evil consists
not in the actions or passions themselves, but in
the fact that they are inhumanly used. The
most unblemished virtue erected into a barrier
between one self and a suffering brother or sister
—the whitest marble image, howsoever lovely,
set up in the Holy Place of the temple of Man,
where the spirit alone should dwell—becomes
blasphemy and a pollution.

Wherein exactly: this human service consists

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is another question. It may be, and, as the reader
would gather, probably is, a matter which at the
last eludes definition. But though it may elude
exact statement, that is no. reason why approxi-
mations should not be made to the statement of
it; nor is its ultimate elusiveness of intellectual
definition any proof that it may not become a real
and vital. force within the man, and underlying
inspiration of his actions. ‘To take the two con-
siderations in order. In the first place, as we saw
from the beginning, the experience of society is
continually leading it to classify actions into
beneficial and harmful, good and bad; and thus
moral codes are formed which eat their way from
the outside into the individual man and become
part of him. These codes may be looked upon
aS approximations in each age to a statement of
human service ; but, as we have seen, they are
by the nature of the case very imperfect ; and
since the very conditions of the problem are con-
tinually changing, it seems obvious that a final
and absolute solution of it by this method is im-
possible. The second way in which man works
towards a solution is by the expansion and growth
of his own consciousness, and is ultimately by
far the most important—though the two methods
have doubtless continually to be corrected by each
other. In fact, as man actually forms a part of
society externally, so he comes to know and fee/
himself a part of society through his inner nature.
Gradually, and in the lapse of ages, through the
development of his sympathetic relation with his
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fellows, the individual man enters into a wider
and wider circle of life; the joys and sorrows,
the experiences, of his fellows become his own
joys and sorrows, his own experiences ; he passes
into a life which is larger than his own individual
life ; forces flow in upon him which determine
his actions, not for results which return to him
directly, but for results which can only return to
him indirectly and through others ; at last the
ground of humanity, as it were, reveals itself within
him, the region of human equality—and his actions
come to flow directly from the very same source
which regulates and inspires the whole movement
of society. At this point the problem is solved.
The growth has taken place from within ; it is
not of the nature of an external compulsion, but
of an inward compunction. By actual conscious-
ness the man has taken on an ever-enlarging life,
and at last the life of humanity, which has no fixed
form, no ever-valid code; but is itself the true
life, surpassing definition, yet inspiring all actions
and passions, all codes and forms, and determining
at last their place.

It is the gradual growth of this supreme life in
each individual which is the great and indeed
the only hope of Society—it is that for which
Society exists: a life which so far from dwarf-
ing individuality enhances immensely its power,
causing the individual to move with the weight
of the universe behind him—and exalting what
were once his little peculiarities and defects into
the splendid manifestations of his humanity.

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To return then for a moment to the practical
bearing of this on the question before us, we
see that so soon as we have abandoned all codes
of morals there remains nothing for us but to put
all our qualities and defects to human use, and
to redeem them by so doing. Our defects are our
entrances into life, and the gateway of all our dealings
with others. Think what it is to be plain and
homely. The very word suggests an endear-
ment, and a liberty of access denied to the faultlessly
handsome. Our very evil passions, so called, are
not things to be ashamed of, but things to look
straight in the face and to see what they are good
for—for a use can be found for them, that is
certain. [he man should see that he is worthy
of his passion, as the mountain should rear its
crest conformable to the height of the precipice
which bounds it. Is it women? let him see
that he is a magnanimous lover. Is it ambition ?
let him take care that it be a grand one. Is it
laziness ? let it redeem him from the folly of unrest,
to become heaven-reflecting, like a lake among
the hills. Is it closefistedness? let it become
the nurse of a true economy.

The more complicated, pronounced, or awkward
the defect is the finer will be the result when it
has been thoroughly worked up. Love of appro-
bation is difficult to deal with. Through sloughs
of duplicity, of concealment, of vanity, it leads
its victim. It sucks his sturdy self-life, and
leaves him flattened and bloodless. Yet once
mastered, once fairly torn out, cudgeled, and left

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bleeding on the road (for this probably has to be

done with every vice or virtue some time or other),
it will rise up and follow you, carrying a magic
key round its neck, meek and serviceable now,
instead of dangerous and demoniac as before.

Deceit is difficult to deal with. In some sense
it is the worst fault that can be. It seems to
disorganise and ultimately to destroy the character.
Yet I am bold to say that this defect has its uses.
Severely examined perhaps it will be found that
no one can live a day free from it. And beyond
that—is not “a noble dissimulation”’ part and
parcel of the very greatest characters : like Socrates,
“the white soul in a satyr form’’? When the
divine has descended among men has it not always,
like Moses, worn a veil before its face ? and what
is Nature herself but one long and organised system
of deception ?

Veracity has an opposite effect. It knits all
the elements of a man’s character—rendering
him solid rather than fluid; yet carried out too
literally and pragmatically it condenses and solidi-
fies the character overmuch, making the man
woodeny and angular. And even of that essential |
Truth (truth to the inward and ideal perfection)
which more than anything else perhaps constitutes
a man—it is to be remembered that even here
there must be a limitation. No man can in act
or externally be quite true to the ideal—though
in spirit he may be. If he is to live in this world
and be mortal, it must be by virtue of some partiality,

some defect.
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Defence of Criminals

And so again—since there is an analogy between
the Individual and Society—may we not conclude
that as the individual has ultimately to recognise
his so-called evil passions and find a place and a
use for them, society also has to recognise its so-
called criminals and discern their place and use?
The artist does not omit shadows from his canvas ;
and the wise statesman will not try to abolish the
criminal from society—lest haply he be found
to have abolished the driving force from his social
machine.!

From what has now been said it is quite clear
that in general we call a man a criminal, not be-
cause he violates any eternal code of morality—
for there exists no such thing—but because he
violates the ruling code of his time, and this
depends largely on the ideal of the time. The
Spartans appear to have permitted theft because
they thought that thieving habits in the com-
munity fostered military dexterity and discouraged
the accumulation of private wealth. They looked
upon the latter as a great evil. But to-day the
accumulation of private wealth is our great good
and the thief is looked upon as the evil. When
however we find, as the historians of to-day teach
us, that society is now probably passing through
a parenthetical stage of private property from
a stage of communism in the past to a stage of
more highly developed communism in the future,

t The derivation of the word “ wicked ” seems uncertain.
May it be suggested that it is connected with “ wick ” or “ quick,”
meaning alive?

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it becomes clear that the thief (and the poacher
before-mentioned) is that person who is protesting
against the too-exclusive domination of a passing
ideal. Whatever should we do without him?
He is keeping open for us, as Hinton I think
expresses it, the path to a regenerate society, and
is more useful to that end than many a platform
orator. He it is that makes Care to sit upon
the Crupper of Wealth, and so, in course of
time, causes the burden and bother of private
property to become so intolerable that society
gladly casts it down on common ground. Vast
as is the machinery of Law, and multifarious
the ways in which it seeks to crush the thief,
it has signally failed, and fails ever more and
more. ‘The thief will win. He will get what
he wants, but (as usual in human life!) in a
way and in a form very different from what he
expected.

And when we regard the thief in himself, we
cannot say that we find him less human than
other classes of society. ‘The sentiment of large
bodies of thieves is highly communistic among
themselves ; and if they thus represent a survival
from an earlier age, they might also be looked
upon as the precursors of a better age in the future.
They have their pals in every town, with runs and
refuges always open, and are lavish and generous
to a degree to their own kind. And if they look
upon the rich as their natural enemies and fair
prey, a view which it might be difficult to gainsay,
many of them at any rate are animated by a good

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deal of the Robin Hood spirit, and are really
helpful to the poor.

I need not I think quote that famous passage
from Lecky in which he shows how the prostitute,
through centuries of suffering and ill-fame, has
borne the curse and contempt of Society in order
that her more fortunate sister might rejoice in
the achievement of a pure marriage. The ideal
of a monogamic union has been established in a
sense directly by the slur cast upon the free woman.
If, however, as many people think, a certain
latitude in sexual relations is not only admissible
but, in the long run, and within bounds, desir-
able, it becomes clear that the prostitute is that
person who against heavy odds, and at the cost of
a real degradation to herself, has clung to a tradi-
tion which, in itself good, might otherwise have
perished in the face of our devotion to the splendid
ideal of the exclusive marriage. There has been
a time in history when the prostitute (if the word
can properly be used in this connection) has been
glorified, consecrated to the temple-service and
honoured of men and gods (the hierodouloi of
the Greeks, the kodeshoth and kodeshim of the
Bible, etc.) There has also been a time when
she has been scouted and reviled. In the future
there will come a time when, as free companion,
really free from the curse of modern commercialism,
and sacred and respected once more, she will
again be accepted by society and take her place
with the rest.

And so with other cases. On looking back

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Civilisation: Its Cause and Cure

into history we find that almost every human
impulse has at some age been held in esteem
and allowed full play ; thus man came to recognise
its beauty and value. But then, lest it should
come (as it surely would) to tyrannise over the
rest, it has been dethroned, and so in a later age
the same quality is scouted and banned. Last
of all it has to find its perfect human use and to
take its place with the rest. Up to the age of
Civilisation (according to writers on primitive
Society) the early tribes of mankind, though
limited each in their habits, were essentially
democratical in structure. In fact, nothing had
occurred to make them otherwise. Each member
stood on a footing of equality with the rest ;
individual men had not in their hands an arbitrary
power over others ; and the tribal life and standard
ruled supreme. And when, in the future and on
a much higher plane, the true Democracy comes,
this equality which has so long been in abeyance
will be restored, not cnly among men but also,
In a sense, among all the passions and qualities
of manhood: none will be allowed to tyrannise
over others, but all will have to be subject to the
supreme life of humanity. The chariot of Man
instead of two horses will have a thousand ; but
they will all be under control of the charioteer.
Meanwhile it may not be extravagant to suppose
that all through the Civilisation-period the so-
called criminals are keeping open the possibility
of a return to this state of society. They are
preserving, in a rough and unattractive husk
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Defence of Criminals

it may be, the precious seed of a life which is to
come in the future; and are as necessary and
integral a part of society in the long run as the
most respected and most honoured of its members
at present.

The upshot then of it all is that ‘ morals ”’ as
a permanent code of action have to be discarded.
There exists no such permanent code. One age,
one race, one class, one family, may have a code
which the users of it consider valid, but only they
consider it valid, and then only for a time. The
Decalogue may have been a rough and useful
ready-reckoner for the Israelites ; but to us it
admits of so many exceptions and interpretations
that it is practically worthless. ‘‘ Thou shalt not
steal.” Exactly ; but who is to decide, as we saw
at the outset, in what “stealing’’ consists? The
question is too complicated to admit of an answer.
And when we have caught our half-starved tramp

“sneaking ”’ a loaf, and are ready to condemn him,
lo! lLycurgus pats him on the back, and the
modern philosopher tells him that he is keeping
open the path to a regenerate society! If the
tramp had also been a philosopher, he would per-
haps have done the same act not merely for his
own benefit but for that of society, he would
have committed a crime in order to save man-
kind,

There is nothing left but Humanity. Since
there is no ever-valid code of morals we must
sadly confess that there is no means of proving
ourselves right and our neighbours wrong. In

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Civilisation : Its Cause and Cure

fact the very act of thinking whether we are right
(which implies a sundering of ourselves, even in
thought, from others) itself introduces the element
of wrongness ; and if we are ever to de “right”
at all, it must be at some moment when we fail
to notice it—when we have forgotten our apartness
from others and have entered into the great region
of human equality. Equality—in that region
all human defects are redeemed ; they all find their
place. To love your neighbour as yourself is the
whole law and the prophets ; to feel that you are
“equal ”’ with others, that their lives are as your
life, that your life is as theirs—even in what tri-
fling degree we may experience such things—is
to enter into another life which includes both sides;
it is to pass beyond the sphere of moral distinctions,
and to trouble oneself no more with them. Be-
tween lovers there are no duties and no rights ;
and in the life of humanity, there is only an instinctive
mutual service expressing itself in whatever way
may be best at the time. Nothing is forbidden,
there is nothing which may not serve. The
law of Equality is perfectly flexible, is adaptable
to all times and places, finds a place for all the
elements of character, justifies and redeems them
all without exception ; and to live by it is perfect
freedom. Yet not a law: but rather as said, a
new life, transcending the individual life, work-
ing through it from within, lifting the self into
another sphere, beyond corruption, far over the
world of Sorrow.

The effort to make a*distinction between acting

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Defence of Criminals

for self and acting for one’s neighbor is the basis
of “‘ morals.’’ As long as a man feels an ultimate
antagonism between himself and society, as long
as he tries to hold his own life as a thing apart
from that of others, so long must the question arise
whether he will act for self or for those others.
Hence flow a long array of terms—distinctions of
right and wrong, duty, selfishness, self-renuncia-
tion, altruism, etc. But when he discovers that
there is no ultimate antagonism between himself
and society ; when he finds that the gratification
of every desire which he has or can have may be
rendered social, or beneficial to his fellows, by
being used at the right time and place, and on
the other hand that every demand made upon
him by society will and must gratify some portion
of his nature, some desire of his heart—why,
all the distinctions collapse again; they do not
hold water any more. A larger life descends
upon him, which includes both sides, and prompts
actions in accordance with an unwritten and un-
imagined law. Such actions will sometimes be
accounted “selfish” by the world; sometimes
they will be accounted “unselfish”? ; but they
are neither, or—if you like—both ; and he who
does them concerns himself not with the names
that may be given to them. The law of Equality
includes all the moral codes, and is the stand-
point which they cannot reach, but which they
all ‘aim fat.

Judged by this final standard then, it may
doubtless fairly be said—since we all fall short

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of it—that we are all criminals, and deserve a
good hiding ; and even that some of us are greater
criminals than others. Only of this real
criminality the actual moral and legal codes afford
but ineffectual tests. I may be a far worse or
more self-included (‘‘idiotic”? or brutal) man
than you, but the mere fact that I have violated
the laws and been clapped into prison does not
prove it. There may be, probably is, a real and
eternal difference represented by the words Right
and Wrong, but no statement that we can make
will ever quite avail to define it. One use, however,
of all these laws and codes in the past, imperfect
though they were, may have been to gradually
excite the consciousness in the individual of his
opposition to society, and so prepare the way for
a true reconcilement. As Paul says, “I had not
known sin, but by the law,” and, if we had not
been cudgeled and bruised for centuries by this
rough bludgeon of social convention, we should
not now be so sensitive as we are to the effect of
our actions upon our neighbours, nor so ready for
a social life in the future which shall be superior
to law.

Of course, the ultimate reconcilement of the
individual with society—of the unit Man with
the mass-Man—involves the subordination of the
desires, their subjection to the true self. And
this is a most important point. It is no easy lapse
that is here suggested, from morality into a mere
jungle of human passion, but a toilsome and long
ascent—involving for a time at any rate a deter-

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mined self-control—into ascendancy over the
passions ; it involves the complete mastery, one
by one, of them all, and the recognition and allow-
ance of them only because they are mastered.
And it is just this training and subjection of the
passions—as of winged horses which are to draw
the human chariot—which necessarily forms such
a long and painful process of human evolution.
The old moral codes are a part of this process ;
but they go on the plan of extinguishing some of
the passions—seeing that it is sometimes easier
to shoot a restive horse than to ride him. We
however do not want to be lords of dead carrion,
but of living powers ; and every steed that we can
add to our chariot makes our progress through
creation so much the more splendid, providing
Phoebus indeed hold the reins, and not the incap-
able Phaeton.

And by becoming thus one with the social self,
the individual, instead of being crushed, is made
far vaster, far grander than before. The re-
nunciation (if it must be so called) which he has
to accept in abandoning merely individual ends
is immediately compensated by the far more
vivid life he now enters into. For every force
of his nature can now be utilised. Planting him-
self out by contrast he stands all the firmer because
he has a left foot as well as a right, and when he
acts, he acts not half-heartedly as one afraid, but,
as it were, with the whole weight of Humanity
behind him. In abandoning his exclusive in-
dividuality he becomes for the first time a real

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Civilisation : Its Cause and Cure

and living individual; and in accepting as his
own the life of others he becomes aware of a life
in himself that has no limit and no end. ‘That
the self of any one man is capable of an infinite
gradation from the most petty and exclusive exis-
tence to the most magnificent and inclusive seems
almost a truism. ‘The one extreme is disease and
death, the other is life everlasting. When the
tongue for example—which is a member of the
body—regards itself as a purely separate existence
for itself alone, it makes a mistake, it suffers an
illusion, and descends into its pettiest life. What
is the consequence? Thinking that it exists
apart from the other members, it selects food just
such as shall gratify its most local self, it endeavours
just to titillate its own sense of taste ; and living
and acting thus, ere long it ruins that very sense
of taste, poisons the system with improper food,
and brings about diseaseand death. Yet, if healthy,
how does the tongue act? Why, it does not
run counter to its own sense of taste, or stultify
itself. It does not talk about sacrificing its own
inclinations for the good of the body and the other
members ; but it just acts as being one in interest
with them and they with it. For the tongue
is a muscle, and therefore what feeds it feeds all
the other muscles ; and the membrane of the
tongue is a prolongation of the membrane of
the stomach, and that is how the tongue knows
what the stomach will like; and the tongue 4s
nerves and blood, and so the tongue may act for
nerves and blood all over the body, and so on,
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regi ee,

Defence of Criminals

Therefore the tongue may enter into a wider life
than that represented by the mere local sense of
taste, and experiences more pleasure often in the
drinking of a glass of water which the whole
body wants, than in the daintiest sweetmeat which
is for itself alone.

Exactly so man in a healthy state does not act
for himself alone, practically cannot do so. Nor
does he talk cant about “serving his neighbors,”
etc. But he simply acts for them as well as for
himself, because they are part and parcel of his
life—bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh ; and
in doing so he enters into a wider life, finds a more
perfect pleasure, and becomes more really a man
than ever before. Every man contains in him-
self the elements of all the rest of humanity. They
lie in the background ; but they are there. In
the front he has his own special faculty developed
—his individual facade, with its projects, plans
and purposes: but behind sleeps the Demos-
life with far vaster projects and purposes. Some
time or other to every man must come the con-
sciousness of this vaster life.

The true Democracy, wherein this larger life
will rule society from within—obviating the need
of an external government—and in which all
characters and qualities will be recognised and
have their freedom, waits (a hidden but necessary
result of evolution) in the constitution of human
nature itself. In the pre-Civilisation period these
vexed questions of ‘“‘ morals ”’ practically did not
exist ; simply because in that period the individual

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was one with his tribe and moved (unconsciously)
by the larger life of his tribe. And in the post-
Civilisation period, when the true Democracy is
realised, they will not exist, because then the man
will know himself a part of humanity at large,
and will be consciously moved by forces belonging
to these vaster regions of his being. The moral
codes and questionings belong to Civilisation,
they are part of the forward effort, the struggle,
the suffering, and the temporary alienation from
true life, which that term implies.!

t For further on the same subject see the last chapter, ixfra,
on “The New Morality.”

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EXFOLIATION

** Creation’s incessant unrest, exfoliation.”
WHITMAN.

THINK it may perhaps be agreed, once for
| all, that the human mind is incapable of

really defining even the smallest fact of
nature. The simplest thing, or event, baffles
us at the last. It is like trying to look at the
front and back of a mirror at the same time. The
utmost squinting avails not. The ego and the
non-ego dance eluding through creation. To
catch them both in any mortal object and pin them
there, surpasses our powers. And yet they are
there. Montaigne quotes somewhere the words
of S. Augustine : Modus quo corporibus adhaerent
Spiritus . . . omnino mirus est, nec comprehendt
ab homine potest; et hoc ipse homo est. “ The
manner whereby spirits adhere to bodies is alto-
gether wonderful, and cannot be conceived of by
men; and yet this is man.” Man _ himself
contains, or rather is, the reconcilement of
this and numberless other contradictions. We
actually every day perform and exhibit miracles
which the mental part of us is utterly powerless

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Civilisation : Its Cause and Cure

to grapple with. Yet the solution, the intelli-
gent solution and understanding of them 4s
in us; only it involves a higher order of
consciousness than we usually deal with—
a consciousness possibly which includes and
transcends the ego and the non-ego, and so can
envisage both at the same time and equally—a
fourth-dimensional consciousness to whose gaze
the interiors of solid bodies are exposed like mere
surfaces—a consciousness to whose perception
some usual antitheses like cause and effect, matter
and spirit, past and future, simply do not exist.
I say these higher orders of consciousness are in
us waiting for their evolution ; and, until they
evolve, we are powerless really to understand any-
thing of the world around us.

Meanwhile, since we must have formule and
generalisations to think by, we are fain to accept
our local views, and look on the world from this
side or from that. Sometimes we are idealists,
sometimes we are materialists ; sometimes we
believe in mechanics, sometimes in human or
spiritual forces. ‘The science of the last fifty years
has, as pointed out in a preceding paper, looked
at things more from the mechanical than the
distinctively human side—from the point of view
of the non-ego, rather than of the ego. Reacting
from an extreme tendency towards a subjective
view of phenomena, which characterised the older
speculations, and fearing to be swayed by a kind
of partiality towards himself, the modern scientist
has endeavoured to remove the human and con-

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Exfoliation

scious element from his observations of Nature.
And he has done valuable work in this way—but
of course has been betrayed into a corresponding
narrowness.

In fact the main scientific doctrine of the day,
Evolution, is obviously suffering from this treat-
ment, and the following remarks are merely a few
notes by way of suggestion of some things which
may be said on its more specially human side.
For since each man is a part of nature, and in
that sense a part also of the evolution-process,
his own subjective experience ought at least
to throw some light on the conditions under
which evolution takes place, and to contribute
something towards an understanding of the
problem.

If the question is : What is the cause of Varia-
tion among animals ? some approximation towards
an answer ougat to be got by each person asking
himself, ‘““ Why do I vary?” Why—he might
say—am I a different person from what I was ten
years ago, or when I was a boy? Why have I
varied in one direction and my brothers and
sisters from the same nest in other directions ?
Though my individual consciousness only covers
the small ground of my own life, and does not
extend back to that of my father or forward to
that of my son, still the intimate knowledge that
I have of the forces acting on me during that short
period may help me to an understanding of the
forces that bring about the modification of men
and animals at large. and the discovery of some

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Civilisation : Its Cause and Cure

laws of my own growth may reveal to me the laws
of race-growth.

In answer to such a question, it would speedily
appear that there were two general causes deter-
mining direction of change or growth in the
individual, which might. be conveniently dis-
tinguished from each other—an external and an
internal. In the first place the supposed person
might say, “ External conditions forced me along
these lines. My father was a town artisan, but
he apprenticed me to a farmer. I grew up a far-
mer’s boy, and became an agricultural type as you
see. I did not particularly care for farming,
sometimes indeed I would have been glad to be
out of it; but practically I succumbed to cir-
cumstances, and here I am.” But in the second
place he might answer thus :—‘‘ My father was
himself a farmer ; I was early used to the craft,
and should no doubt have grown up in it, had
I not hated it like poison. I loved music, broke
away from home, joined a band, got on the musical
staff of a small theatre, and am now a professional
musician. My frame is comparatively slight, and
my hands are of the nervous type, as you see. Of
course, I have some of the old agricultural stock
left in me, but I feel that that is dying out.”
The one cause would be a change of external
conditions, forcing the man to accommodate him-
self to them; the other would be a change of
internal conditions, an inward growth, expressing
itself first in the form of an intense desire, and
compelling the man to change himself and pro-

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Exfoliation

bably also his environment in obedience to it.
Two such general sets of causes, I say, could be
roughly distinguished from each other; and
probably indeed are recognised less or more dis-
tinctly by everyone as acting to modify his life.
Nor can the life of a man at any time be said to
be ruled by one of these forces alone. No man
is modified by external conditions alone, with-
out any play or reaction of inner needs and desires
and growth from within ; nor is any man trans-
formed in obedience to an inner expansion without
sundry lets and hindrances from without. The
two forces are in constant play upon one another ;
but in some ways that would appear to be the
more important which proceeds from the Man
(or creature) himself, since this is obviously vital
and organic to him, and therefore the most con-
sistent and reliable factor in his modification,
while the external force—arising from various
and remote causes—must rather be regarded
as discontinuous and accidental.

I propose, therefore, in these few pages to
consider especially this inner force producing
modification in man and animals—to try and
find out of what nature it is, what is the law, and
what are the limits of its action—premising always,
as already suggested, that this distinction between
“inner” and “ outer,” which is convenient and
easy to handle on certain planes of thought, may
ultimately, and in the last resort, prove very
difficult or even impossible to maintain.

It is often said by Biologists that function precedes

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Civilisation : Its Cause and Cure

- organisation—that is, man fights with his fellows
before he makes weapons to fight with; the
rudimentary animal digests food (as in the case
of the amoeba) before it acquires a stomach or
organ of digestion ; it sees or is sensitive to light
before it grows an eye ; in society letters are carried
by private hands before an organised postal system
is created. Such facts properly considered are
of vital importance. They show us, as it were by
a sign-post, the direction of creation. They show
how any new thing or modification of an old thing
may come into being. They may be supplemen-
ted by a second statement—namely that desire
precedes function. ‘That is, man desires to injure
his fellow before he actually fights with him ; he
experiences the wish to communicate with distant
friends before ever he thinks of sending such a
thing as a letter; the amoeba craves for food
first, and circumvents its prey afterwards. Desire,
or inward change, comes first, action follows,
and organisation or outward structure is the
result.

In man this “ order of creation,” if it may so
be called, z.e., from within outwards, is very marked.
Whenever a man creates anything new he pursues
it; when he builds a house, for instance, or com-
poses a poem or piece of music, or designs an
Alpine tunnel, or whatever it may be. The
order seems to be: first, a feeling—a dim want
or desire; then the feeling becomes conscious
of itself, takes shape in thought; the thought
becomes more defined and issues in a distinct plan ;

186

¢ ,

Exfoliation

the plan is committed to paper, models are made,
etc. ; and finally the actual work is begun and
completed. ‘The process appears as a movement
from within outwards—the earliest and most
authentic discernible source of the movement
being a feeling—(though there may lie something
behind that). Even in ordinary action the same
order is manifest ; for, though of course every
action is not preceded by desire—since we know
that actions soon become habitual and more or
less unconscious—still a vast number of them are
immediately so preceded ; and in the case of any
action that is zew, either to the individual or to
the race, its inception is generally accompanied
by effort so painful that it would not be exerted
unless the desire were very strong. The difficulty
which a man experiences in learning any new art,
and the records of the many failures, struggles,
oppositions, persecutions, etc., which have at-
tended every new invention or innovation of
any kind in human history, afford plenty of evi-
dence of this last point. Certainly the effort that
accompanies a new action is not always faced so
much from sheer desire of the new thing itself
as from fear perhaps of something else—as it
may be contended that monkeys did not take
to climbing trees because they loved trees, but
because they fearéd the beasts below, or that the
giraffe did not stretch its neck because it particu-
larly desired to feed on leaves, as because it could
not get food any other way—but still, even in
these cases the desire may be said to exist, though
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Civilisation : Its Cause and Cure

it is secondary—being founded upon another
and more elementary desire—the desire namely
of escaping pain or obtaining food. In either
case a desire of some kind is a precedent condition
of the new action. And so as we know of no
case of a new action coming into play without
being preceded by desire, we seem to be justified
in supposing that all our actions when they were
first initiated (in our forefathers, if not in ourselves)
were so preceded. _If this is so, then, since function
is always preceded by desire, and organisation 1s
preceded by function, organisation must necessarily
be preceded by desire. And if this is the order
of creation in man, should we not reasonably
look in this direction for the key to the variation
of animals and the order of creation in general ??

If a farmer’s son is occasionally born who hates
farming and loves music, and who ultimately
through the force of his desire (driving him into
oppositions and difficulties and penurious strug-
gles) transforms himself into a musician, is it
not also likely that occasionally an animal is born
who hates the customs of his tribe, and at last
(also through struggles) transforms himself into
something else? Even if he does not succeed
(the animal) in entirely transforming himself,
~ he likely transmits the desire in some degree to

t This does not, of course, preclude the action of external
conditions, or imply that organisation is determined by desire
alone. In fact organisation may ke regarded as the exfressicn
of desire acting under condition;—as in the cases cf the monkey

and giraffe above.
188

be

Exfoliation

his descendants, and the transformation is thus
carried on and completed later. For everywhere
among the animals there zs desire, of some kind
or another, obviously acting ; and if in man, by
our own experience, desire is the precursor and
first expression of growth, is there any reason
why it should not also be so among animals?
Lamarck gives the instance—among others—
of a gasteropod ; how the need or desire of touch-
ing bodies in front of it as it crawled along would
result in the formation of tentacles. The gaste-
ropod, he says, would keep making efforts to feel
with the front of its head, and the determination
of consciousness that way would be accompanied
by a supply of nervous and other fluids, which would
nourish the part and cause growth there—the
form of the growth continuing in the same way
to be determined by need—till at last two or more
tentacles would appear. True, the inward deter-
minations of consciousness may not be so vivid
and varied in animals as they are in men; but
they are persistent, and by the very cumulative
force of habit which is so strong in animals, must
at length penetrate down through function into
organisation and external form. Who shall say
that the lark, by the mere love of soaring and
singing in the face of the sun, has not altered the
shape of its wings, or that the forms of the shark
or of the gazelle are not the long-stored results
of character leaning always in certain directions,
as much as the forms of the miser or the libertine
are among men?
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Civilisation : Its Cause and Cure

Such modification as this is very different from
the “survival of the fittest”? of the Darwinian
evolution theory. We may fairly suppose that
both kinds of modification take place ; but the
latter is a sort of easy success won by an external
accident of birth—a success of the kind that would
readily be lost again ; while the former is the uphill
fight of a nature that has grown inwardly and-
wins expression for itself in spite of external obstacles
—an expression which therefore is likely to be
permanent. If the progenitors of man took to
going upright on two legs instead of on all fours,
merely because a few of them by chance were
born with a talent for that position, which enabled
them to escape the fanged and pursuing beasts,
then when this danger was removed they might
have plumped down again into the old attitude ;
but if the change was part and parcel of a true
evolution, the fulfilment of a positive desire for
the upright position, a true unfolding of a higher
form latent within—an organic growth of the
creature itself, then, though the moment of the
evolution of this particular faculty might be deter-
mined by the fanged beasts, the fact of such evolu-
tion could not be determined by them. Besides,
are we to suppose that Man, the lord and ruler
of the animals, came merely by way of escape
from the animals? Do lords and rulers generally
come so? Was it fear that made him a man?
Were it not likelier that in that case he would
have turned intoa worm? He would have escaped
better perhaps that way. Is it not rather probable

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Exfoliation

that it was some nobler power that worked trans-
forming—some dim desire and prevision of a
more perfect form, the desire itself being the
first consciousness of the urge of growth in that
direction—that prompted him to push in the one
direction rather than the other when he had to
hold his own against the tigers? In fact is it not
thus to-day, when a man has to meet danger, that
the ideal which he has within him determines
how he shall meet that danger, and others like it,
and so ultimately determines the whole attitude
and carriage of his body?

On the whole then, judging from man himself
(and it seems most cautious and scientific to derive
our main evidence from the being that we are
best acquainted with), it certainly seems to me
that, though the external conditions are a very im-
portant factor in Variation, the central explana-
tion of this phenomenon should be sought in an
inner law of Growth—a law of expansion more or
less common to all animate nature. Partly because,
as said before, the unfolding of the creature from
its own needs and inward nature is an organic
process, and likely to be persistent, while its
modification by external causes must be more
or less fortuitous and accidental and sometimes
in one direction and sometimes in another ; partly
also because the movement from within outwards
seems to be most like the law of creation in general.
Under this view the external conditions would
be considered a secondary—though important
cause of modification; and regarded rather as

191

Civilisation : Its Cause and Cure

the influences that give form and detail to the
great primal impulse of growth from within ;
while the creature’s own ingenuity and good luck
would occupy the ground between the two—as
the means whereby the external conditions in
each individual case would be turned to account
to satisfy the inner needs, or the inner life would
be accommodated to the external conditions.

If we take the external view of Variation—which
is the one most favoured by modern science—
modification or race-growth appears as an uncon-
scious or accretive process, similar to the forma-
tion of a coral reef. There is no line of growth
native in the race itself, but at any moment it
is supposed to have an equal tendency to vary
in any direction. Surrounding conditions act
selectively ; and by a process of weeding out
certain types survive; small successive modi-
fications are thus accumulated ; ; and gradually
and in the lapse of ages a more pliable and differ-
entiated creature, and more adaptable to a variety
of conditions, is produced—in whom however
mind is incidental, and has played but small part
in the creature’s evolution. This in the main
is the Darwinian-evolution theory.

If we take the internal view, growth is from
the first eminently conscious. Every change
begins in the mental region—is felt first as a desire
gradually taking form into thought, passes down
into the bodily region, expresses itself in action”
(more or less dependent on conditions), and
finally solidifies itself in organisation and structure,

192

e

|

ad Sal oa a i eee

Exfoliation

The process is not accretive, but exfoliatory—
a continual movement from within outwards.
When the desire or mental condition, which at
first was painfully conscious, has overcome opposi-
tion and established itself in altered bodily structure,
it has done its work, and becomes unconscious—
—the bodily function continuing for a long period
to act automatically, till finally it is thrown off
to make room for some later development. Thus
race-growth or Variation is a process by which
change begins in the mental region, passes into
the bodily region where it becomes organised,
and finally is thrown off like a husk. This may
be called the theory of Exfoliation.

To illustrate our meaning. Let us take the
development of an eye. In the amoeba there
is a dim pervasive sensitiveness to light over the
whole body, but there is no eye, nothing that
we should call vision. Still this vague sensitive-
ness is of use to the amoeba. The shadow of its
prey falling upon the creature and exciting a
sensation hardly yet differentiated from touch
helps to guide its movements. On this dim sen-
sation it relies to some extent; its attention is
directed towards it. Gradually, and in some
descendant form, there comes to be a point on
the body on which this attention is most specially
concentrated. The faculty is localised ; and from
that moment a change is effected there, a differen-
tiation and a special structure ; everything that
favours sensitiveness is encouraged at that place,
everything that dulls it is removed; and before

193 N

Civilisation : Its Cause and Cure

long—there. is a rudimentary eye. To-day we
use our perfected eyes, and are hardly conscious
that we are doing so; but every power of vision
that we have was thus won for us by some lowlier
creature, step by step, with effort and with con-
centration. Or to take an illustration from society.
To-day society is ill at ease; a dim feeling of
discontent pervades all ranks and classes. A new
sense of justice, of fraternity, has descended
among us, which is not satisfied with mere chatter
of demand and supply. For a long time this new
sentiment or desire remains vague and unformed,
but at last it resolves itself into shape ; it takes
intellectual form, books are written, plans formed ;
then after a time definite new organisations, for
the distinct purpose of expressing these ideas,
begin to exist in the body of the old society ; and
before so very long the whole outer structure of
society will have been reorganised by them. After
a few centuries the ideas for whose realisation
we now fight and struggle with an intense con-
sciousness will have become commonplace, accepted
institutions, more or less effete and ready to
succumb before fresh mental births taking place
from within.

The modern evolution theory would maintain
that among many amoebas and descendant forms,
one would at last by chance be born having the
usual sensitiveness localised in a particular spot,
and, surviving by force of this advantage, would
transmit this “eye” to its posterity ; or that in
the progress of society, new economic conditions

194

Exfoliation

having arisen, that people would prosper best

which most effectually and rapidly adapted itself
to them. But though there is doubtless truth
in this view, yet it seems, when all has been said,
to be inadequate and even feeble ; it omits at least
one half of the problem. If we look at ourselves,
as already pointed out, we see the two forces—
the inner and the outer—acting and re-acting
on each other. May it not be so in animals?
Lamarck, poorly off, blind, derided, was a true
poet. “Animals vary from low and primitive
types chiefly by dint of wishing ’’—and the world
laughed and still laughs. But it was his deep
sympathy even with the worms and insects (which
he studied till he could discern them with his
mortal eyes no longer) that led Lamarck to see
the human nature and the human laws that moved
within them ; and as his outward sight grew dim
there arose before him the inward vision of the
true relationship which binds together all living
creatures—which was indeed a vision of divine
things, and as different from the mere mechanism-
theory of the survival of the fittest as the sight

of the starry heavens is different from a governess’s

lesson on the use of the globes.

On the theory of Exfoliation, which was practi-
cally. Lamarck’s theory, there is a force at work
throughout creation, ever urging each type onward

into new and newer forms. ‘This force appears

first in consciousness in the form of desire. Within

each shape of life sleep needs and wants without

number, from the lowest and simplest to the most
3 195

Civilisation : Its Cause and Cure

complex and ideal. As each new desire or ideal
is evolved, it brings the creature into conflict
with its surroundings, then gaining its satisfac-
tion externalises itself in the structure of the creature,
and leaves the way open for the birth of a new ideal.
If then we would find a key to the understanding
of the expansion and growth of all animate creation,
such a key may exist in the nature of desire itself
and the comprehension of its real meaning. It
is not certain that it can be found here; but it
may be.

What then is desire in Man? Here we come
back again, as suggested at the outset, to Man
himself. ‘Though we see pretty clearly that desire
is at work in the animals, and that it is the same
in kind as exists in man, still, among the animals
it is but dim and inchoate, while in man it is deve-
loped and luminous ; in ourselves, too, we know it
immediately, while in the animals only by inference.
For both reasons, therefore, if we want to know
the nature of desire—even to know its nature
among animals—we should study it in Man.
What then is this desire in Man, which seems to —
be the instigation and origin of all his growth
and development? At first it seems a hydra-
headed senseless thing without rhyme or reason ;
but the more one regards it the more clearly one
sees that even in its lowest forms it is steadily
building up and liberating all the functions of
the human being. In its most perfect form—
as in what we call Love—it is the sum and solution
of human activities, that in which they converge,

196

+

ae a re

Exfoliation

for which they all exist, and without which they
would be considered useless. The more you
look into this matter, the plainer it becomes.
The lesser desires—the self-preservation desires—
hunger, thirst, the desire of power—exist, but
when they are satisfied they empty themselves
into this one; they find their interpretation in
it. The other desires are nothing by themselves
—the most absorbing, avarice, ambition, desire
of knowledge, taken alone, stultify themselves
—but love perpetuates itself : it is a flame which
uses all the rest as its fuel. And this Love,
which is the culmination of desire, does it not
appear to us as a worship of and desire for the
human form? In our bodies a desire for the
bodily human form; in our interior selves a
perception and worship of an ideal human form,
the revelation of a Splendour dwelling in others,
which—clouded and dimmed as it inevitably
may come to be—remains after all one of the most
real, perhaps the most real, of the facts of exist-
ence? Desire, therefore—as it exists in man,
look at it how you will—as it unfolds and its ulti-
mate aim becomes clearer and clearer to itself,
is seen to be the desire and longing for the deliver-
ance and expression of the real human Being.

May it not, must it not, be the same thing in

animals and all through creation? Beginning
in the most elementary and dim shapes, does it
not grow through all the stages of organic life
clearer and more and more powerful, till at last
it attains to self-consciousness in humanity and

197

Civilisation : Its Cause and Cure

becomes avowedly the leading factor in our develop-
ment?

The desire which runs through creation is one
desire. Rudimentary at first and hardly con-
scious of itself, throwing out a tentacle here, a
foot there, developing an eye, a claw, a nostril,
a wing, it seeks in innumerable shapes and with
ever partial success to realise the image it has
dimly conceived. The animal kingdom is the
gymnasium, the school, the antechamber, of human-
ity; to walk through a zoological garden is to
see the inchoate types of man, perched on branches,
or browsing grass, or boring holes in the ground ;
it is to witness a grand rehearsal of some stupen-
dous part, whose character we do not even yet
fully see or understand. From such _half-con-
scious beginnings the desire grows, its aim be-
comes clearer, till in the higher animals—the horse,
the dog, the elephant, the bird, and many others
—it becomes a marked and unmistakable force
drawing them close to man, uniting them to him
in a kind of acknowledged kinship, and as obviouslv
at work modifying their structure as can be.
Finally in man himself it becomes an absorbing
power ; love becomes a conscious worship of the
divine form ; generation itself is the means where-
by, in time, the supreme object of desire is realised.
When at last the perfect Man appears, the key to
all nature is found, every creature falls into its
place and finds its Interpreter, and the purpose
of creation is at last made manifest.

The Theory of Exfoliation then differs from

198

Exfoliation

that very specialised form of Evolution which
has been adopted by modern science, in this
particular among others: that it fixes the atten-
tion on that which appeats last in order of Time,
as the most important in order of causation, rather
than on that which appears first ; and recalls
to us the fact that often in any succession of pheno-
mena, that which is first in order of precedence
and importance is the last to be externalised.
Thus in the growth of a plant we find leaf after
leaf appearing, petal within petal—a_ continual
exfoliation of husks, sepals, petals, stamens and
what-not ; but the ‘object of all this movement,
and that ‘which in a sense sets it all in motion,
namely the seed, is the very last thing of all to be
manifested. Or when a volcano breaks out—
first of all we have a cracking and upheaval of
superficial layers of ground, then of layers below
these, then the outflow of lava, and /ast of all the
uprush of the inner fires and forces which set
it all agoing. What appears first in time, or in
the outer world is—in the case of the building of
a house, the making of bricks; in the case of
the flower, the outermost bracts. ; in the case of
a volcano, the stirring of the surface of the ground ;
and in the case of Life on the Earth, the appear-
ance of protoplasms and primordial cells. The
bricks are not the cause of the house (if indeed
the word “cause’”’ should be used here at all)
but rather the house—or the conception of the
house—is the cause of the bricks’; and the cells
are not the origin of Man, but Man is the original

199

Civilisation : Its Cause and Cure

of the cells. The rationale of sea-anemones and
mud-fish and flying foxes and elephants has to
be looked for in man: he alone underlies them.
And man is not a vertebrate because his ancestors
were vertebrate ; but the animals are vertebrate,
because or in so far as they are forerunners and
offshoots of Man. |

It has been frequently said that great material
changes are succeeded by intellectual and finally
by moral revolutions— as the conquests of Alexan-
der passed on into the literary expansion of the
Alexandrian schools and thence into the estab-
lishment of Christianity, or as the mechanical
developments of our own time have been followed
by immense literary and scientific activities, and
are obviously passing over now into a great social
regeneration ; but a reconsideration of the matter
might, I take it, lead us not so much to look on
the later changes as caused by the earlier, as to look
on the earlier as the indications and first outward
and visible signs of the coming of the later. When
a man feels in himself the upheaval of a new moral
fact, he sees plainly enough that that fact cannot
come into the actual world all at once—not with-
out first a destruction of the existing order of
society—such a destruction as makes him feel
satanic; then an intellectual revolution; and
lastly only, a new order embodying the new impulse.
When this new impulse has thoroughly materialised
itself, then after a time will come another inward
birth, and similar changes will be passed through
again. So it might be said that the work of each

2.00

a

Exfoliation

age is not to build o# the past, but to rise out of
the past and throw it off ; only of course in such
matters where all forms of thought are inadequate
it is hard to say that one way of looking at the
subject is truer than another. As bekoee, we
should endeavour to look at the thing from different
sides.

We are obliged to use images to think by—e.g.
the opening of a flower or the accretive growth
of a coral reef—and possibly it would save a good
deal of trouble if we did not disguise by long words _
the truth that all our theories in science and philo-
sophy are simply metaphors of this kind—but
the fact still lies behind and below them.

Perhaps, if we are to use the word Cause at
all, we should do well to use it in the old sense in
which the fiza/ cause and the efficient cause are
one (the eidos of Aristotle)—to use it not so much
to link phenomena or externals to each other as
to link each phenomenon in a group to the thought
or feeling which underlies that group. The notes
in the Dead March in Saul, for instance. We
cannot say that one note is the cause of another,
but we might say that each note stands in a causal
subordination to the feeling which inspired the
piece—which is the origin of the piece and the
result of its performance—the alpha and omega
of it. Similarly, the ground floor in a house
is not the cause of the first floor, nor the first floor
of the second floor, nor that of the roof ; but these
actualities and the whole house itself stand in
strict relationship to a mental something which is

201

Civilisation : Its Cause and Cure

not in the same plane with them at all, nor an
actuality in the same sense.

According to this view the notion that one
configuration of atoms or bodies determines the
next configuration turns out to be illusive. Both
configurations are determined by a third something
which does not belong to quite the same order of
existence as the said atoms or bodies. Chance
“laws ’”’ of succession may doubtless be found
among physical events, and are valuable for prac-
tical purposes, but at any moment—owing to their
superficiality—they may fail. Thus, an insect
observing the expansion of the petals of a chry-
santhemum might frame a law of their order
of succession in size and colour, which would be
valid for a time, but would fail entirely when the
stamens appeared. Or, to take another illus-
tration, physical science acts like a man trying
to find direct causal relations between the various
leaves of a tree, without first finding the relations
of these to the branches and trunk—and so solving
the problem indirectly. It deals only with the
surface of the world of Man.

In thinking about such matters, Music, as
Schopenhauer shows, is wonderfully illustrative,
because in creating music man recognises that
he is creating a world of his own—apart from
and not to be confused with that other world of
Nature (in which he does not recognise any of
his handiwork). Supposing a non-musical person
were to examine and analyse the score of a Beet-
hoven symphony, he would be in the same posi~

202

a

Exfoliation

tion as a man examining and analysing Nature
by purely scientific or intellectual methods. He
would discover the recurrence of certain groups
among the. notes, he would establish laws of their
sequences, would make all kinds of curious generali-
sations about them, and point out some remark-
able exceptions, would even very likely be able
to predict a bar or two over the page ;_his treatise
would be very learned, and from a certain point
of view interesting also, but how far would he be
from any real understanding of his subject ?
Let him change his method : let him train his ear,
let him hear the symphony performed, over and
over, till he understands its meaning and knows
it by heart ; and then he will know at any rate
something of why each note is there, he will see
its fitness and feel in himself the “law” of its
occurrence, and possibly in some new case will
be able to predict several bars over the page !
The symphony is not understood by examination
and comparison of the notes alone, but by experi-
ence of their relation to deepest feelings ; and
Nature is not explained by laws, but by its be-
coming—or rather being felt to be—the body
of Man; marvellous interpreter and symbol
of his inward being.

There is a kind of knowledge or consciousness
in us—as of our bodily parts, or affections, or
deep-seated mental beliefs—which forms the base of
our more obvious and self-conscious thought. This
systemic knowledge grows even while the brain
sleeps, It is not by any means absolute or infalli-

203

Civilisation : Its Cause and Cure

ble, but it affords, at any moment in man’s history,
the axiomatic ground on which his thought-
structures, scientific and other, are built. hus
the axioms of Euclid are part of our present sys-
temic knowledge, and afford the ground of all
our geometry structures. But as the systemic
consciousness grows, the ground shifts and the
structures reared upon it fall. All our modern
science, for instance, is founded on the accepta-
tion of mechanical cause and effect as a_ basic
fact of consciousness ; but when that base gives
way the entire structure will cave in, and a new
edifice will have to be reared. Similarly, when
the human form becomes distinctly visible to us
in the animals—as an unavoidable part of our
consciousness—this consciousness will form a new
base or axiom for all our thought on the subject,
and the theory of evolution, as hitherto con-
ceived by science, will be entirely transformed.

Thus, although the experimental investigatory
coral-reef accretion method of modern science
is very valuable within its range, it must not be
forgotten that the human mind does not progress
more than temporarily by this method—that its
progression is a matter of growth from within,
and involves a continual breaking away of the
bases of all thought-structures; so that, while
this latter—z.e., the progression of the systemic
consciousness of man—is necessary and continuous,
the rise and fall of his thought-systems is accidental,
so to speak, and discontinuous.

It is then finally in Man—in our own deepest

2.04.

Exfoliation

and most vital experience—that we have to look
for the key and explanation of the changes
that we see going on around us in external
Nature, as we call it; and our understanding of
the latter, and of History, must ever depend Eon
point to point on the exfoliation of new facts in
the individual consciousness. Round the ulti-
mate disclosure of the essential Man all creation
(hitherto groaning and travailing towards that
perfect birth) ranges itself, as it were, like some
vast flower, in concentric cycles; rank beyond
rank ; first all social life and history, then the
animal kingdom, then the vegetable and mineral
worlds. And if the outer circles. have been the
first in fact to show themselves, it is by this last
disclosure that light is ultimately thrown on the
whole plan ; and, as in the myth of the Eden-
garden, with the appearance of the perfected human
form that the work of creation definitely completes
itself,

205

CUSTOM

“Whatever is off the hinges of custom is believed to be also
off the hinges of reason; though how unreasonably, for the most
part, God knows.”—Monraicne.

F- stew human being grows up inside a

sheath of custom, which enfolds it as

the swathing clothes enfold the infant.

The sacred customs of its early home, how fixed
and immutable they appear to the child! It
surely thinks that all the world in all times has
proceeded on the same lines which bound its tiny
life. It regards a breach of these rules (some of
them at least) as a wild step in the dark, leading
to unknown dangers. :
Nevertheless its mental eyes have hardly opened
ere it perceives, not without a shock, that whereas
in the family dining-room the meat always pre-
cedes the pudding, below-stairs and in the cottage
the pudding has a way of coming before the
meat; that, whereas its father puts the manure
on the top of his seed-potatoes in spring, his
neighbor invariably places his potatoes on top
of the manure. All its confidence in the sanctity

206

Custom

of its home life and the truth of things is upset.
Surely there must be a right and a wrong way
of eating one’s dinner or of setting potatoes,
and surely, if any one, “father”? or “ mother”
must know what is right. The elders have always
said (and indeed it seems only reasonable) that
by this time of day everything has been so thor-
oughly worked over that the best methods of
ordering our life—food, dress, domestic practices,
social habits, etc., have long ago been determined.
If so, why these divergencies in the simplest and
most obvious matters ?

And then other things give way. The sacred
seeming-universal customs in which we were
bred turn out to be only the practices of a small
and narrow class or caste; or they prove to be
confined to a very limited locality, and must be
left behind when we set out on our travels ; or
they belong to the tenets of a feeble religious sect ;
or they are just the products of one age in history
and no other. And the question forces itself
upon us, Are there really no natural boundaries ?
has not our life anywhere been founded on reason
and necessity, but only on arbitrary habit? What
is more important than food, yet in what human
matter is there more unaccountable divergence of
practice? The Highlander flourishes on oatmeal,
which the Sheffield ironworker would rather starve
than eat ; the fat snail which the Roman country
gentleman once so prized now crawls unmolested
in the Gloucestershire peasant’s garden ; rabbits
are taboo in Germany ; frogs are unspeakable

2.07

Civilisation : Its Cause and Cure

in England ; sauer-kraut is detested in France ;
many races and gangs of we are quite certain
they would die if deprived of meat, others think
spirits of some kind a necessity, while to others
again both these things are an abomination.
Every country district has its local practices in
food, and the peasants look with the greatest
suspicion on any new dish, and can rarely be
induced to adopt it. Though it has been abun-
dantly proved that many of the British fungi
are excellent eating, such is the force of custom
that the mushroom alone is ever publicly recog-
nised, while curiously enough it is said that in some
other countries where the claims of other agarics
are allowed the mushroom itself is not used !
Finally, I feel myself (and the gentle reader probably
feels the same) that I would rather die than subsist
on insects, such is the deep-seated disgust we
experience towards this class of food. Yet it is
notorious that many races of respectable people
adopt a diet of this sort, and only lately a book
has been published giving details of the excellent
provender of the kind that we habitually over-
look—tasty morsels of caterpillars and_ beetles,
and so forth! And indeed, when one comes to
think of it, what can it be but prejudice which
causes one to eat the periwinkle and reject the
land-snail, or to prize the lively prawn and pro-
scribe the cheerful grasshopper ?

It is useless to say that these local and other
divergencies are rooted in the necessities of the
localities and times in which they occur. They

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Custom

are nothing of the kind. For the most part they
are mere customs, perhaps grown originally out
of some necessity, but now perpetuated from simple
habit and inherent human laziness. This can
perhaps best be illustrated by going below the
human to the kingdom of the animals. If cus-
toms are strong among men they are far stronger
among animals. ‘The sheep lives on grass, the
cat lives on mice and other animal food. And
it is generally assumed that the respective diets
are the most “ natural’’ in each case, and those
on which the animals in question will readiest
thrive, and indeed that they could not well live
on any other. But nothing of the kind. For
cats can be bred up to live on oatmeal and milk
with next to no meat; and a sheep has been
known to get on very comfortably on a diet of port
wine and mutton chops! Dogs, whose “ natural ”’
food in the wild state is of the animal kind, are
undoubtedly much healthier (at any rate in the
domestic state) when kept on farinaceous sub-
stances with little or no meat, and indeed they take
so kindly to a vegetable diet that they sometimes
become perfect nuisances in a garden—eating
strawberries, gooseberries, peas, etc., freely off
the beds when they have once learned the habit.
Any one, in fact, who has kept many pets knows
what an astonishing variety of food they may be
made to adopt, though each animal in the wild
state has the most intensely narrow prejudices
on the subject, and will perish rather than over-
step the customs of its,tribe. Thus pheasants
2.09 °

Civilisation : Its Cause and Cure

will eat fern-roots in winter when snow covers
the ground, but the grouse “ don’t eat fern-roots,”’
and die in consequence. A wolf of an inquiring
turn of mind would probably find strawberries
and peas as good food as a dog does, but it is
practically certain that any ordinary member of the
genus would perish in a garden full of the same
if deprived of his customary bones.

All this seems to indicate what an immensely
important part mere custom plays in the life of
men and animals. The main part of the power
which man acquires over the animals depends
upon his establishing habits in them which, once _
established, they never think of violating : and
the almost insuperable nature of this force in animals
throws back light on the part it plays in human
life.

Of course, I am not contending in the above
remarks upon food that there is no physiological
difference between a dog and a sheep in the matter
of their digestive organs, and that the one is not
by the nature of its body more fitted for one kind
of food than the other ; but rather that we should
not neglect the importance of mere habit in such
matters. Custom changed first; the change of
physiological structure followed slowly after.
What happened was- probably something like
this. Some time in the far back past a group of
animals, driven perhaps by necessity, took to
hunting in packs in the woods ; it developed a
modified physical structure in consequence, and
special habits which in the course of time became

2.10

Custom

deeply fixed in the race. Another group saved
its life by taking to grazing. Grass is poor food ;
but it was the only chance this group had, and
in time it got so accustomed to eating grass that
it could not imagine any other form of diet, and at
first would refuse even oysters when placed in
its way ! Another group saw an opening in trees ;
it developed a long neck and became the giraffe,
But the fact that the giraffe lives on leaves, and
the sheep on grass, and the wolf on animal matter,
and that custom is in each so strong that at first
the creature will refuse any other kind of diet,
does not of itself prove that that diet is the best
or most physiologically suitable for it. In other
words, it is an assumption to suppose that “ adap-
tation to environment’”’ is the sole or even the
main factor in the constitution of well-marked
varieties or genera ; for this is to neglect (among
other things) the force of mere use or wont, which
has about the same import in race-growth that
momentum has in dynamics ; and causes the race,
once started in any direction, to maintain its line
of movement—and often in despite of its environ-
ment—eyen for thousands of years.

Returning to man we see him enveloped in a
myriad customs—local customs, class customs,
race customs, family customs, religious customs ;
customs in food, customs in clothing, customs in
furniture, form of habitation, industrial production,
art, social and municipal and national life, etc. ;
and the question arises, Where is the grain of
necessity which underlies it all? How much

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Civilisation: Its Cause and Cure

in each case is due to a real fitness in nature, and
how much to mere otiose habit! The first thing
that meets my eye in glancing out of the window
is a tile on a neighboring roof. Why are tiles
made S-shaped in some localities and flat in others P
Surely the conditions of wind and rain are much
the same in all places. Perhaps far back there
was a reason, but now nothing remains but—
custom. Why do we sit on chairs instead of
on the floor, as the Japanese do, or on cushions like
the Turk? It is a custom, and perhaps it suits
with our other customs. The more we look into
our life and consider the immense variety of
habit in every department of it—even under
conditions to all appearances exactly similar—
the more are we impressed by the absence of any
very serious necessity in the forms we ourselves
are accustomed to. Each race, each class, each
section of the population, each unit even, vaunts
its own habits of life as superior to the rest, as
the only true and legitimate forms ; and peoples
and classes will go to war with each other in asser-
tion of their own special beliefs and practices ;

but the question that rather presses upon the
ingenuous and inquiring mind is, whether any
of us have got hold of much true life at all ?—
whether we are not rather mere multitudinous
varieties of caddis-worms shuffled up in the cast-
off skins and clothes and débris of those who have
gone before us, and with very little vitality of
our own perceptible within? How many times
a day do we perform an {action that is authentic

212

_

Custom

and not a mere mechanical piece of repetition ?
Indeed, if our various actions and practices were
authentic and flowing from the true necessity,
perhaps we shouldn’t quarrel with each other
over them so often as we do.

And then to come to the subject of morals.
These also are customs—divergent to the last de-
gree among different races, at different times,
or in different localities ; customs for which
it is often difficult to find any ground in reason
or the “‘ fitness of things.” ‘Thieving is supposed
to be discountenanced among us, yet our present-
day trade-morality sanctions it in a thousand dif-
ferent forms; and the respectable usurer (who
can hardly be said to be other than a thief) takes
a high place at the table of life. To hunt the
earth for game has from time immemorial been
considered the natural birthright and privilege
of man, until the landlord class (whom wicked
Socialists now denounce!) invented the crime
of poaching and hanged men for it. As to
marriage customs, in different times and among
different peoples, they have been simply innum-
erable. And here the sense of inviolability in
each case is most powerful. ‘The severest penalties,
the most stringent public opinion, biting deep
down into the individual conscience, enforce the
various codes of various times and places; yet
they all contradict each other. Polygamy in
one country, polyandry in the next ; brother and
sister marriage allowed at one time, marriage
with your mother’s cousin forbidden at another ;

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Civilisation: Its Cause and Cure

prostitution sacred in the temples of antiquity,
trampled under foot in the gutters of our great
Cities of to-day ; monogamy respectable in one
land, a mark of class-inferiority in another ; celi-
bacy scorned by some sections of people, accepted
as the highest state by others ; and so on.

What are we to conclude from all this? Is
it possible, once we have fairly faced the immense
variety of human life in every department of arts,
manners, and morals—a variety, too, existing
in a vast number of cases under conditions to
all intents and purposes quite similar—is it pos-
sible ever again to suppose that the particular
practices which we are accustomed to are very
much better (or, indeed, very much worse) than
the particular practices which others are accus-
tomed to? We have been born, as I said at first,
into a sheath of custom which enfolds us with our
swaddling-clothes. When we begin to grow to
manhood we see what sort of a thing it is which
surrounds us. It is an old husk now. It does
not bear looking into ; it is rotten, it is inconsistent,
it is thoroughly indefensible ; yet very likely we
have to accept it. The caddis-worm has grown
to its tube and cannot leave it. AQ little spark of
vitality amid a heap of dead matter, all it can do
is to make its dwelling a little more convenient
in shape for itself, or (like the coral insect) to pro-
long its growth in the most favourable direction
for those that come after. The-class, the caste,
the locality, the age in which we were born has
determined our form of life, and in that form very

214

Custom

likely we must remain. But a change has come
over our minds. The vauntings of earlier days
we abandon. We, at any rate, are no better than
anybody else, and at best, alas! are only half
alive.

If these, then, are our conclusions, is it not
with justice that children and early races keep
so rigidly to the narrow path that custom has made
for them? MHave they not an instinctive feeling
that to forsake custom would be to launch out on
a trackless sea where life would cease to have any
special purpose or direction, and morality would
be utterly gulfed? Custom for them is the line
of their growth ; it is the coral-branch from the
end of which the next insect builds; it is the
hardening bark of the tree-twig which determines
the direction of the growing shoot. It may be
merely arbitrary, this custom, but that they do
not know ; its appearance of finality and necessity
may be quite illusive ; but the illusion is necessary
for life, and the arbitrariness is just what makes
one life different from another. Ti// he grows
to manhood, the human being, he cannot do without
tt.

And when he grows to manhood, what then ?
Why he dies, and so becomes alive. The caddis-
fly leaves his tube behind and soars into the upper
air ; the creature abandons its barnacle existence
on the rock and swims at large in the sea. For
it is just when we die to custom that, for the first
time, we rise into the true life of humanity ; it
is just when we abandon all prejudice of our own

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Civilisation : Its Cause and Cure

superiority over others, and become convinced
of our entire indefensibleness, that the world opens
out with comrade faces in all directions; and
when we perceive how entirely arbitrary is the
setting of our own life, that the whole structure
collapses on which our apartness from others
rests, and we pass easily and at once into the great
ocean of freedom and equality.

This is, as it were, a new departure for man,
for which even to-day the old world, overlaid with
myriad customs now brought into obvious and
open conflict with each other, is evidently preparing.
The period of human infancy is coming to an
end. Now comes the time of manhood and true
vitality.

Possibly this is a law of history, that when
man has run through every variety of custom a
time comes for him to be freed from it—that is,
he uses it indifferently according to his require-
ments, and is no longer a slave to it ; all human
practices find their use, and none are forbidden.
At this point, whenever reached, “ morals ’’ come
to an end and humanity takes its place—that is to
say, there is no longer any code of action, but
the one object of all action is the deliverance of
the human being and the establishment of equality
between oneself and another, the entry into a new
life, which new life when entered into is glad and
perfect, because there is no more any effort or
strain in it; but it is the recognition of oneself
in others, eternally.

Far as custom has carried man from man,

216

Custom

yet when at last in the ever-branching series the
complete human being is produced, it knows at
once its kinship with all the other forms. “I
have passed my spirit in determination and com-
passion round the whole earth, and found only
equals and lovers.” More, it knows its kinship
with the animals. It sees that it is only habit,
an illusion of difference, that divides; and it
perceives after all that it is the same human creature
that flies in the air, and swims in the sea, or walks

biped upon the land.

217

The two following chapters—though not part of
the original work—are included in the present edition
because they form continuations or expansions of the
chapters which criticise modern Science and modern
Morality respectively. The chapter entitled “ A
Rational and Humane Science” is in fact a re-
print of an address given before. the Humanitarian
League in London in 1896. Jt was first included
in the present volume in 1906. The chapter entitled
“The New Morality” is, with shght alterations,
a reprint of an article which appeared in the Albany
Review in September, 1907, under the title “* Morality
under Socialism” ; and it now appears in the present
book for the first time.

218.

A RATIONAL AND HUMANE
SCIENCE

Rational and Humane Science you will

perhaps forgive me if I dwell for a few
moments on some points of personal history in
relation to it. After reading mathematics for
some four years at Cambridge, it happened to me
for the next ten years or so to be engaged in the
study of the physical sciences, and in lectures on
these subjects. Naturally, during the earlier part
of this period I accepted the current methods and
conclusions without any question. But as time
went on I became aware of a certain dissatisfac-
tion; I felt that many of the laws of Science,
enounced as universal truths, were of very limited
application only, that many of the conclusions, so
strongly insisted on, were of quite doubtful validity ;
and at last this increasing dissatisfaction cul-
minated in a rather violent attack or criticism of
Modern Science which I wrote and published
about the year 1884.?

1 Afterwards reprinted in a modified form, as “ Mcdern Science
—a Criticism,” in the first edition (1889) cf the present Ecok.

219

|" bringing before you this subject of a

Civilisation: Its Cause and Cure

Now, looking back, at this interval of time,
though I admit that my attack was somewhat
hasty and crude in detail, I feel that in its main
contention it was thoroughly justified, and I do
not feel the least inclined to withdraw it.

What was that main contention? It was as
follows. Modern Science is an attempt (and no
doubt it would accept this definition of itself)
to survey and classify the phenomena of the world
in the pure dry light of the intellect, uncoloured
by feeling ; and so far is an effort to separate the
intellectual in man from the merely perceptive,
the emotional, the moral, and so forth. It was
in this very fact that my criticism lay ; for I con-
tended that such a separation was in the long run
quite impossible.

But before proceeding to defend this position,
let me admit at once that this attempt of Modern
Science to get rid of human feeling and to look
at everything in the dry light of the intellect was
in some respects a very grand one. When you
consider what the Old-time Science was, with its
fancies and prejudices, its dragons pasturing upon
the sun and moon in eclipses, its immolations of
hundreds of human beings to appease some god
of pestilence or earthquake, its panics, its super-
stitions, and its incapability of regarding anything
except from the point of view of that thing’s in-
fluence on man’s own comfort and his little hopes
and fears, it was indeed a grand advance to try
and see facts, uncoloured and for themselves alone.
It was an effort of Man as it were to rise above

2.20

7

A Rational and Humane Science

himself, to which I accord the fullest credit and
honour. |

And yet, during the time spoken of, it kept
growing on me: first, that the attempt was an
impossible one ; secondly, that the Science so-called
was not a true Science ; and thirdly, that in its
pretence to an intellectual exactitude which it
did not really possess, this Modern Science was
leading to a narrow-mindedness and a dogmatism
as bad as the old.

There is in fact (so I think) a fallacy in the attempt.
But how shall I describe it? Our relations to’
the world may, quite roughly speaking, be divided
into three groups—those that are sensuous and
perceptional, those that are purely intellectual,
and those that are of an emotional and moral order.
Take any object of Nature—a bird, for instance.
We may look upon the bird as an object of sense-
perceptions—its form, its colour, its song, and
so forth. Some people attain to extraordinary
skill and quickness in this department, recognising
in a moment the note or even the flight of a songster.
Then again we may look upon the bird from the
intellectual side—we may study it in relation to
its surroundings—the form of its wings, the length
of its leg, the character of its beak, and their adap-
tation to its habits, to its locality, to its food, and
so forth. Thus we may get a whole series of
purely intellectual results—relations of the bird
to the world in which it lives. This is the special
field of the present-day Science. But, again, we
may regard the bird in its emotional and moral

221

~— - i

Civilisation : Its Cause and Cure

relations to us. One man at the sight of it may
be affected with admiration of its beauty, with
tenderness towards it, or sympathy; another
may be stimulated to wonder whether he can kill
it, or whether it is good to eat !_ Modern Science
is indifferent to what this last set of relations may
be ; it does not concern itself much with the first ;
but it takes the middle term, the purely intellec-
tual, and seeks to abstract that from the others,
to study the bird, or whatever the object may
be, in the one aspect only. But can that really
be done ? The answer is, of course, No.

To show my general meaning, and why I
consider the claim an impossible one, let us
imagine a little cell—one of the myriads which
constitute the human body—-professing in the same
sort of way to stand outside the body and explain
the laws of the other cells and the body at large.
It is obvious that the little cell, swept along in
the currents of the body and swayed by its emotions,
in close proximity and contact with some portions
of the organism, and far remote from others,
cannot possibly pretend to any such impartial.
judgment, It is obvious not only that it would
not have all the clues of the problem at its command,
but that its own needs and experiences would
prejudice it frightfully in the interpretation of
such clues as. it had. _ Yet man is such a little
cell in the body of Nature, or, if you like, in
the body of the Society of which he forms a

art.

There is, however, one way, it seems to me,

2.2.2

A Rational and Humane Science

in which a cell in the human body might come
to an adequate understanding of the body ; and
that would be rather through experience than
through direct reasoning. It is conceivable that
there might be some cell in the body which, through
the nerves, etc., was in actual touch and sym-
pathetic relationship with every other cell. Then
it certainly would have the materials of the required
solution. Every change in other parts of the
body would register itself in this particular cell ;
and its little brain (if it had one), without exactly
making any great effort, would reflect sympatheti-
cally the structure of the whole body—would
become, in fact, a mirror of it. This will perhaps
give you the key to my notion of what a true
Science might be.

But before proceeding to that, I want to go a
little more in detail into the fallacy of the absolute
intellectual view of Science. I say, first, that a
complete summary of any object or process in
Nature is impossible ; secondly, that such sum-
mary as we do make is, and must inevitably and
- necessarily be, coloured by the underlying feeding
with which we approach that phase of Nature.

To take the first point. - You say, Why is a
complete summary not possible? A watch or
other machine may be completely described and
defined ; why should not (with a little more
knowledge) a fir-tree, or the human eye, or
the solar system, be completely described and
defined ?

And this brings us to what may be called the

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Civilisation: Its Cause and Cure

Machine-view of Science. It is curious (and yet
I think it will presently be seen that it is quite
what might have been expected) that during this
century or so, in which Machinery has played
such an important part in our daily and social life,
mechanical ideas have come to colour all our
conceptions of Science and the Universe. Modern
Science holds it as a kind of ideal (even though
finding it at times difficult to realise) to reduce
everything to mechanical action, and to show each
process of Nature intelligible in the same sense
-as a Machine is intelligible. Yet this conception,
this ideal, involves a complete fallacy. For the
moment you come to think of it, you see that
no part of Nature really even resembles a
machine.

What is a machine in the ordinary sense? It is
an aggregation of parts put together to fulfil
certain definite actions and no others. A sewing-
machine fulfils the purpose of sewing, a watch
fulfils that of keeping time, and they fulfil those
purposes only. All their parts subserve those
actions, and in that sense may be completely
described—as far as just their mechanical action
is concerned—the same by a thousand mechanicians.
But I make bold to say that xo object in Nature
fulfils just one action, or series of actions, and no
others. On the contrary, every object fulfils an
endless series of actions.

Let us take the Human Eye. And I choose
this as an instance most adverse to my position,
for there is no doubt that the Human Eye is one

2.24,

A Rational and Humane Science

of the most highly specialised objects in creation.
Helmholtz, as you know, is said to have remarked
concerning it that if an Optician had sent him an
instrument so defective he should have returned
it with his compliments. Helmholtz was a great
man, and I will not do him the injustice to suppose
that he did not know what he was saying. He
knew that, regarded.as.a machine for focussing
rays of light, the.eye ~-was decidedly defective ;
but then he knew well enough, doubtless, why
it was defective—namely, because it is by no
means merely such a machine, but a great deal
more.

The Eye, in fact, not only fulfils the action of
focussing rays of light—like an Opeta Glass or
a Telescope—but it might be compared to another
instrument, a Photographic Camera, in respect
of the fact that it forms a picture of the outer world
which it throws on a sensitive plate at the back
—the Retina. But then, again, it is unlike any
of these ‘‘ machines,” in the fact that it was never
made by any Optician, human or divine, for any
one definite purpose. On the contrary, as we
know, it has grown, it has evolved ; it has come
down to us over the centuries, and over thousands
and thousands of centuries, from dim beginnings
in the lowliest organisms who first conceived the
faculty of Sight, continually modified, continually
shapen by small increments in various directions,
in accordance with the myriad needs of a myriad
creatures, living, some of them in water, some
of them. in air, requiring some of them to see at

2.25 P

Civilisation: Its Cause and Cure

close quarters, some at great distances, some by
one kind of light, some by another, and so forth.
So that to-day it not only contains a great range
of inherited, yet latent, faculties, but it is actually,
in its complex structure, an epitome and partial
record of its own extraordinary history.

As an instance of this last point, let me remind
you that Sight was originally a differentiation of
Touch. The light, the shadows, falling on the
sensitive general surface of a primitive organism
provoke a tactile irritation. In the course of evolu-
tion this sense specialises itself at some point of
the surface into what we call Sight. Now, to-day,
when the little picture formed by the fore-part
of the Human Eye falls upon the Retina at the
back, it falls upon a screen formed by the myriad
congregated finger-tips, so to speak, of the optic
nerve—the rods and cones, so-called—which cover
like a mosaic the whole ground of the Retina, and
fee! with their sensitive points the images of the
objects in the outer world. And so Sight is still
Touch—it is the power of feeling or touching at
a distance—as one sometimes in fact becomes
aware in looking at things.

But then again on and beyond all these things
—beyond the focussing and photographing of
rays, beyond the latent adaptations to the needs
of innumerable creatures, and the epitomising of
ages of evolution—the Human Eye has faculties
even more far-reaching perhaps and wonderful.
It is the marvellous organ of human Expression.
By the dilatations and contractions of the iris, by

2.26

ry ae

A Rational and Humane Science

the altering convexities of the lens and the eye-
ball, and in a hundred other ways, it manages
somehow to convey intelligence of Command,
Control, Power, of Pity, Love, Sympathy, and all
those myriad emotions which flit through the
human mind—an endless series—a perfect encyclo-
pedia. It is difficult even to imagine the eye
without this power of language. And what other
functions it may have it is not necessary to inquire.
Highly specialised though it is, it is already
obvious enough that to call it a Machine for

focussing rays of light is monstrously and ludi-

crously inadequate—even as it would be to call
the Heart (the very centre of emotion and life,
and the symbol of human love and courage) a
common Pump.

Nature is an infinitude, and can at no point be
circumscribed by the human intellect. Nor ob-
viously is there any sense in taking one little portion
of Nature and isolating it from the rest, and then
describing it exhaustively as if it really were so iso-
lated. A thousand mechanicians will agree, as
I have said, in their description of a machine,
because in fact they will agree to view the machine
just in the one aspect of its particular action ;
but ask a thousand people to describe one and the
same face—or, better still, get a thousand por-
trait-painters, skilled in their art, to paint portraits
of the same face—and you know perfectly well
that all the likenesses will be different. And why
will they be different ? Simply because every face,
however rude, has infinite sides, infinite aspects,

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Civilisation: Its Cause and Cure

and each painter selects what he paints from his
own point of view. And the same is true of every
object and process in Nature.

Then if these things are true (you ask again) how
is it that scientific men do arrive at definite con-
clusions, and do agree with each other so far as
they do?

It 1s, and obviously must be, by the method of
isolation ; by the method of selecting certain aspects
of the problems presented to them, and ignoring
others. For since a// the relations of any pheno-
menon of Nature cannot possibly be compassed,
the only way must be to ignore some and concentrate
attention on others ; and when there is a kind of
tacit agreement as to which aspects shall be passed
over and which considered, there is naturally an
agreement in the results. Thus by this method,
waiving all other aspects of the problem, the
Eye may be described and defined as an optical
instrument, the Heart as a common Pump, and
the Solar System as a neat illustration of certain
mechanical laws discovered by Galileo and
Newton.

On the subject of the Solar System and Astron-
omy I will dwell for a few moments, as here—in
this great example of the perfection of Modern
Science—we have again a case apparently most
adverse to my contention. The generalisations
by which Newton established the nature of the
planetary orbits has been a wonder to succeeding
generations ; the positions of the planets can
be foretold, eclipses can be calculated with

2.28

a

A Rational and Humane Science

amazing accuracy. Yet every tyro in Mathe-
matics knows that the equations which give these
results can only be solved by what is called
“neglecting small quantities ’—that is, the prob-
lems cannot be solved in their entirety, but by
leaving out certain terms and elements, which do
not appear important, a solution can be approached.
And naturally it has been an important point to
show that these small quantities may be safely
neglected. In the case, for instance, of the orbits
of the planets round the sun, and of the moon
round the earth, it was for a long time taken as
proved that the small variations in the shape and
position of each elliptic orbit would never be
accompanied by any permanent increase or dimi-
nution in its s#ze—that is, that the mean distances
of the planets from the sun, and of the moon from
the earth, would always remain within certain
limits. Of late years however Professor George
Darwin, taking up one of these poor little neglected
quantities in the theory of the moon, found that
it indicated after all very vast and very permanent,
though of course very slow, changes in her mean
distance from the earth ; so that now it appears
probable that the Moon’s true orbit, instead of being
a limited ellipse, is a continually though gradually
enlarging Spiral, which may some day carry the
Moon to a great distance from the earth. If an
eclipse were calculated for twenty years in advance
on the Elliptic theory or the Spiral theory, it would
probably—so slow would be the divergence—make
no perceptible difference; but in a hundred
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Civilisation: Its Cause and Cure

centuries the two theories would lead to results
utterly different.

Thus the certitude of Astronomy as a Science
arises largely from the fact that our times are so
brief compared with Celestial periods. The
proper periods of Celestial changes are to be
reckoned by thousands, perhaps millions, of years 5
but we, ignoring Het aspect of the problem, fix
our observations on one little point of time, and
are quite satisfied with the result !

As another illustration of my meaning, consider
the Fixed Stars, so-called. These stars in their
groups and clusters, which we know so well by
sight, have remained apparently in the very same,
or nearly the same, relative positions during all
the 2,000 or 3,000 years that we have any record
of the shapes of the Constellations. Yet now by
minute telescopic and spectroscopic examination
we know that they are moving, and have been
moving all the time, in various differing directions
with great velocities, amounting to miles per second,
Nevertheless, so great are the spaces concerned,
so great the times, that all this long period has
not sufhced to bring them into any greatly changed
attitude with regard to each other! What would
you think of an intelligent foreigner who, coming
to England to study the game of cricket, remained
on the cricket field for a quarter of a minute—
during which time the players would have hardly
changed their positions—and having noted a few

oints, went away and wrote a volume on the
fee of the game? And what are we to think of
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A Rational and Humane Science

poor little Man who, having noted the stars for
a few centuries, is so sure that he understands
their movements, and that he is versed in all the
“ordinances of heaven.’

Thus it would appear that every Nature-problem
is so enormously complex that it can only be got at
by what we have called the Method of Ignorance.
Let us take a practical Science problem like that
of Vaccination. The question here, put in its
simplest terms, seems to be, Whether Vaccination,
with calf or human lymph, prevents or alleviates
Smallpox ; and if it does, whether it does so without
engendering other evils at least as great. At
first sight this may appear to you a very simple
question, and easy to solve ; but the moment you
come to think about it, you see its extreme com-
plexity. In the first place, it is obvious that in
a question like this, individual cases afford no
test. It is obvious that the fact that A. is vacci-
nated and has not taken small-pox proves nothing,
for there is nothing to show that he would have
taken it if he had not been vaccinated. And
when you have got people vaccinated by the hundred
and the thousand, you still are not certain ;_ for
these people may belong to a certain class, or a
certain locality, or may have certain habits and
conditions of life, which may account for their
comparative immunity, and these causes must
be eliminated before any definite conclusion can
be reached. Thus it is not till the great mass
of the population is vaccinated that we can expect
reliable statistics, But the introduction of a pracs

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Civilisation : Its Cause and Cure

tice of this kind on so great a scale necessarily
takes a long period of years, and meanwhile
changes are taking place in the habits of the
people, Sanitation is being improved, customs
of Diet are altering, possibly (as so often happens
in the history of an epidemic) the disease, having
run its course, is beginning spontaneously to decline.
And thus another series of possible causes has
to be discussed.
_ Then, supposing the question, notwithstanding

all these difficulties, to be so far settled in favour
of the present system—there still arises that
whole other series of difficulties with regard to
the possibility of the spread of other diseases by
the practice, and with regard to the extent of such
spread, before we can arrive at any finale. This
series of questions is almost as complex as the
other; and it includes that great element of
uncertainty—the question what interval of time
may elapse between inoculation with a disease
and its actual appearance. For if in_ several
cases children break out with erysipelas immedi-
ately after vaccination, of course there is a certain
presumption that vaccination has been the cause ;
but if the erysipelas only appears some years
after, its connection with the operation may, though
real, be impossible to trace.

The matter standing thus, it seems to us almost
a mystery how it was that the medical authorities
of the early days of Jennerism were so cocksure
of their conclusions—until we remember that
in arriving at those conclusions they practically

2.32

A Rational and Humane Science

ignored all these other points that I have mentioned,
like changes of Sanitation, spontaneous decline
of Small-pox, the spread of other diseases, etc.,
and simply limited themselves to one small aspect
of the problem. But now, after this interval of
time, when the neglected facts and aspects have
meanwhile forced themselves on our attention, how
remarkable is the change of attitude as evidenced
by the finding of the late Royal Commission !
(1896).

From all this do not understand me to deride
Science—for I have no intention of doing that ;
on the contrary, I think the debt we owe to modern
investigation quite incalculable ; but I only wish
to warn you how complex all these problems
are, how impossible that notion of settling even
one of them by a cut-and-dried intellectual
formula.

But you will ask (for this is the second point
I mentioned some little time back) how people’s
emotions and feelings come in to colour their
scientific conclusions ? And the answer is—very
simply, namely by directing their choice as to
what aspects of the problem they will ignore and
what aspects they will envisage ; by determining
their point of view, in fact. To return to that
illustration of several portrait-painters painting
the same face ; just as each painter is led by his
feeling, his sympathies, his general temperament,
to select certain points in the face and to pass over
others, so each group of scientific men in each
generation is led by its sympathies, its idiosyn-

233

Civilisation : Its Cause and Cure

crasies, to envisage certain aspects of the problems
of the day and to ignore others.

The whole history of Science illustrates this.
We are all familiar with the way in which the
predilections of religious feeling in the time of
Copernicus and Galileo retarded the progress
of astronomical Science. As long as_ people
believed that a divine drama of redemption had
been enacted on this earth alone, they naturally
concluded that this earth was the centre of the
universe, and refused to look at facts which con-
tradicted their conclusion. When Galileo turned
his newly-made telescope on Jupiter and saw it
circled by its satellites, he saw in this an image
of the Copernican system and of the planets circling
round the central Sun ; but when he asked others
to share his observation and his inference, they
would not. ‘‘O, my dear Kepler,” he writes in
a letter to his fellow astronomer, “‘ how I wish we
could have one hearty laugh together. Here at
Padua is the principal Professor of Philosophy,
whom I have repeatedly and urgently requested
to look at the moon and planets through my glass ;
but he pertinaciously refuses to do so. What
shouts of laughter we should have at this glorious
folly |”

And though we laugh at the folly of those before
us, we do the same things ourselves to-day. ‘Take
the science of Political Economy. A revolution
has taken place in that, almost comparable to the
change from the geocentric to the heliocentric
view in Astronomy. During the distinctively

234

A Rational and Humane Science

commercial period of the last 100 years, the leading
students of social science, being themselves filled
with the spirit of the time, have been fain to look
upon the acquisition of private wealth as the one
absorbing motive of human nature ; and so it
has come about that the economists, from Adam
Smith to John Stuart Mill, have founded their
science on self-seeking and competition, as the
base of their analysis. To-day another series
of economists coming to the front—their minds
preoccupied with the great facts of Community
of life and Co-operation—have discovered that
Society is in the main an illustration of. these
latter principles, and have evolved a quite new
phase of the science. It is not that Society has
changed so much during this period, as that the
altered point of view of the students of Society
has caused them simply to fix their attention on
a different aspect of the problem and a different
range of facts.

I have alluded already to the way in which
the prevalent use of Machinery in practical life
has affected our mental outlook on the world.
It is curious that during this mechanical age of
the last 100 years or so, we have not only come to
regard Society in a mechanical light, as a concourse
of separate individuals bound together by a mere
cash-nexus, but have extended the same idea
to the universe at large, which we look upon
as a concourse of separate atoms, associated to-
gether by gravitation, or possibly by mere mutual
impact, Yet it is certain that both these views

235

Civilisation: Its Cause and Cure

are false, since the individuals who compose
Society are ot separate from each other; and
the theory that the universe, in its ultimate analysis,
is composed of a vast number of discrete atoms
is simply unthinkable.

When we come to a practical and modern ques-
tion like Medicine, the influence of the spirit in
which it is approached on the course of the science
is very easy to see. For if the science of Medicine
is approached (as it perhaps mostly is to-day)
in a spirit of combined Fear and Self-indulgence
—fear for one’s own personal safety, combined
with a kind of anxiety to continue living in the
indulgence of habits known to be unhealthy—
if it is approached in this uncomfortable and
contradictory state of mind, it is pretty obvious
that its course will be similarly uncomfortable :
that it will consist for the most part in a search for
drugs which shall, without effort on our part,
palliate the effects of our misconduct ; in the
discovery, as in a kind of nightmare, that the air
round us is full of billions of microbes ; in a terri-
fied study of these messengers of disease, and in
a frantic effort to ward them off by inoculations,
vaccinations, vivisections, and so forth, without
end.

If, on the’ other hand, the science is approached
from quite a different side—from that of the
love of Health, and the desire to make life lovely,
beautiful and clean ; if the student is filled not
only with.this, but with a great belief in the essential
power of Man, and his;command in creation, to

2.36

A Rational and Humane Science

control not only all these little microbes whose
name is Legion, but through his mind all the
processes of his body ; then it is obvious enough
that a whole series of different facts will arise
before his eyes and become the subject of his
study—facts of sanitation, of the laws of cleanly
life, diet, clothing and so forth, methods of control,
and the details and practice of the influence of
the mental upon the physical part of man—
facts quite equally real with the others, equally
important, equally numerous perhaps and com-
plex, but forming a totally different range of
science.

In conclusion, you begin to see doubtless that
I do not believe in a science of mere Formulas,
which can be poured from one brain to another
like water in a pot. I believe in something more
organic to Humanity—which shall combine Sense,
Intellect and Soul ; which shall include the keenest
training of the Senses, the exactest use of the
Brain, and the subordination of both of these to
the finest and most generous attitude of Man
towards Nature.

To come to quite practical aspects, I think that
Physical Science, and for that matter Natural
History too, ought to be founded on the closest
observation and actual intimacy with Nature.
It is notorious that in many respects the per-
ceptions, the Nature-intuitions, of savage races
far outdo those of civilised man. We have let
that side go slack, and too often the man of science
when he comes out of his study is a mere baby

237

Civilisation : Its Cause and Cure

in the external world. I look back with a kind
of shame when | think that I studied the mathema-
tical side of Astronomy for three or four years
at Cambridge and absolutely at the time hardly
knew one star from another in the sky. But
such are the methods of teaching that have been
in use. They ought however to be reversed,
and practical acquaintance with the facts should
come a long way first, and then be succeeded by
inductive and deductive reasoning when the difh-
culties of the subject have forced themselves on
the student’s mind.

Then in Natural History and Botany I think
that we have hitherto not only neglected the
perceptive side, but also what may be called the
intuitive and emotional aspects. If any one will
attend to the subject, I believe they will perceive
that there are dormant in the mind the finest in-
tuitions and instincts of relationship to the various
animals and plants—intuitions which have played
a far more important part in the life of barbaric
races than they do to-day.t Primitive peoples
have a remarkable instinct of the medicinal and
dietetic uses of herbs and plants—an instinct
which we also find well developed among animals
—and I believe that this kind of knowledge would
grow largely if, so to speak, it were given a chance.

t Elisée Reclus, in his remarkable paper, La Grande Famille,
points out the wide-reaching Friexdship, and free alliance for
various purposes, of primitive man with the animals, existing
long before the so-called ‘‘ domestication” of the latter. See
Humane Review, January, 1906.

238

A Rational and Humane Science

The formal classification of animals and plants
—which now forms the main part of these
sciences—would then come in simply as an aid
and an auxiliary to the more direct and human
study.

Again, let us take the science of Physiology.
At present this is mainly carried on by means
of Dissection or Vivisection. But both these
methods are unsatisfactory. Dissection, because
it amounts to studying the organisation of a
living creature by the examination of its dead
carcase ; and Vivisection, because it is not only
open to a similar objection, but because it necessarily
violates the highest relation of man to the animal
he is studying. There is, I believe, another
method—a method which has been known in the
East for centuries, though little regarded in the
West—which may perhaps be called the method
of Health. It consists in rendering the body,
by proper habits of life, pure and healthy, till
it becomes, as it were, transparent to the inner
eye, and then projecting the consciousness inward
so as to become almost as sensible of the structure
and function of the various internal organs, as
it usually is of the outer surface of the body. Of
course this is a process which cannot be effectu-
ated at once, and which may need help and cor-
roboration by external methods of study, but I
believe it is one which will lead to considerable
results. There is no doubt that many of the
Yogis of India attain to great skill in it.

Similarly, from what we have already said

239

Civilisation : Its Cause and Cure

about Political Economy, it is obvious that satis-
factory results in that science must depend im-
mensely on the high degree of social instinct and
feeling with which the student approaches it,
and on the thoroughness of his acquaintance with
the actual life of a people ; and that the develop-
ment of these factors is fully as important a
part of the science as that which consists in the
logical ordering and arrangement of the material
obtained.

I need not, I think, go any further into detail
of new methods in each Science. You remem-
ber what I said at the beginning about the Cell
studying the Body of which it formed a part. We
may imagine, if we like, three stages in this process.
In the first stage the Cell regards the other cells
and the Body simply from the point of view of
how they affect i#, and its comfort and safety.
This might be taken to correspond to the Old-
time Science. In the second stage the Cell, with
its tiny experience of the other cells and the small
part of the body in which it is placed, becomes
highly intellectual, and professes to lay down the
laws of the structure of the body generally. This
corresponds to the attitude of Modern Science.
In the third stage the Cell, growing and evolving,
and coming daily into closer sympathetic relation-
ship with all parts of the body, begins to find its
true relation to the other cells, not to use them,
but to fulfil its part in the whole. Gradually
drawing all the threads together and coming
more and more, so to say, into a central position,

240

leet ied Side ae

A Rational and Humane Science

it at last in its little brain spontaneously and in-
evitably reflects the whole, and becomes the mirror
of it. This would answer to what we have called
a really rational and humane Science.

Man has to find and to fee/ his true relation to
other creatures and to the whole of which he is
a part, and has to use his brain to further this.
Science is, as we all know, the search for Unity.
That is its ideal. It unites innumerable pheno-
mena under one law; and then it unites many
laws under one higher ; always seeking for the
ultimate complete integration. But (is it not
obvious ?) Man cannot find that unity of the
Whole until he feels his unity with the Whole.
To found a Science of one-ness on the murderous
Warfare and insane Competition of men with each
other, and on the Slaughter and Vivisection of |
animals—the search for unity on the practice of
disunity—is an absurdity, which can only in the
long run reveal itself as such.

I do not know whether it seems obvious to
you, but it does to me, that Man will never find
in theory the unity of outer Nature till he reaches
in practice the unity of his own. When he has
learnt to harmonise in himself all his powers,
bodily and mental, his desires, faculties, needs,
and bring them into perfect co-operation—when
he has found the true hierarchy of himself—
then somehow I think that Nature round him
will reflect this order, and range itself in clear
and intelligible harmony about him.

But I can say no more. I have dragged you

241 Q

Civilisation: Its Cause and Cure

by the neck, as it were, through a recondite and
dificult subject ; and even so I do not feel that
I have by any means done justice to it. But it is
possible, perhaps, that I have cast the germ of an
idea among you, which, if you think over it at
leisure, may develop into something of value.

242

THE NEW MORALITY

as it penetrates human thought, is to rub
out lines—the old lines of formal classi-
fication. We no longer now put in a class apart
those animals which have horns or cloven hooves,
because we find that continuous descent and close
kinship weave relations which are not bounded
by horns or hooves. And, for a not dissimilar
reason, modern thought, based on the theory
of evolution, is tending to rub out the hard and
fast lines between moral Right and Wrong—the
old formal classifications of actions as some in their
nature good, and some in their nature bad.
The Eastern, or at least Indian, thought and
religion rubbed out these lines long ago. Its
philosophy indeed was founded on a _ theory
of Evolution—the continuous evolution § or
emanation of the Many from the One. It
could not therefore regard any class of beings
or creatures as essentially bad, or any c/ass of
actions as essentially wrong, since all sprang
from a common Root. The only essential evil
was ignorance (avidya)—that is, the fact of the
243

[os tendency of the Evolution Theory,

Civilisation: Its Cause and Cure

being or creature not knowing or perceiving its
emanation from, or kinship with, the One—
and of course any action done under this condi-
tion of avidya, however outwardly correct, was
essentially wrong ; while on the other hand a//
actions done by beings fully realising and con-
scious of their union with the One were necessarily
right.

Of this attitude towards Right and Wrong
there are abundant instances in the Upanishads.
The choice of the path does not lie between Good
and Bad, as in the Pilgrim’s Progress, but it -lies
above and in a region transcending them both.
“By the serenity of his thoughts a man blots
out a// actions, whether good or bad.”: “ He
does not distress himself with the thought, Why
did I not do what is good? Why did | do what
is bad?” 2 All religions indeed, by the very
fact of their being religions, have indicated a
sphere above morality, to which their followers
shall and must aspire. What else is St. Paul’s
reiterated charge to escape from the dominion of
sin and law, into the glorious liberty of the chil-
dren of God? And in all ages the great mystics
—those who stand near the fountain-sources of
evolution and emanation—have seen and said the
same. Says Spinoza :—‘‘ With regard to good
and evil, these terms indicate nothing positive
in things considered in themselves, nor are they
anything else than modes of thought, or notions

1 Maitrayana-Brahmana-Upanishad, vi. 34, 4.
2 Taittiriyaka-Up, ii. 9, etc.
24.4

The New Morality

which we form from the comparison of one thing
with another. For one and the same thing may
at the same time be both good and evil, or in-
different.”

Here indeed, in these pregnant words, we
come upon the very root of the matter. A thing,
an action, may be called good or bad in respect to
a certain purpose or object; but in itself, No.
Wine may be good for the encouragement of
sociability, but may be bad for the liver. The
Sabbath-day may be pronounced a_ beneficial
institution from some points of view, but not from
others. A scrupulous respect for private property
may certainly be a help to settled social life ; but
the practice of thieving—as recommended by
Plato—may be very useful to check the lust of
private riches. ‘To speak of wine as in its nature
good or bad is manifestly absurd ; and the same
of a pious respect for private property or the
Sabbath-day. These things are good under
certain conditions or for certain purposes, and
bad under other conditions or for other purposes.
But of course it belongs and goes with the brute
externalising tendency of the mind, to stereotype
the actual material thing—which should be only
the vehicle of the spirit—and give it a character
and a cult as good or bad. The Sabbath ceases
to be made for man, and man is made for the
Sabbath. Law, Custom, Pharisaism, and Self-
2 saan ae spring up and usurp the sphere
of morality, and all the histories of savage

t Spinoza’s Ethic, part iv.
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Civilisation : Its Cause and Cure

and civilised nations, with their endless fetishes
and taboos and superstitions and ceremonies, and
caste-marks and phylacteries, and petty regulations
and proprieties,—including bitter scorn and
secution of those who do not fulfil them,—are
but illustrations of this process.

All the prophets and saviours of the world have
been for the Spirit as against the letter—and the
teachings of all religions have in their turn become
literalised and fossilised ! Perhaps there has been
no greater anti-literal than Jesus of Nazareth,
and yet perhaps no religion has become more a
thing of forms and dogmas than that which passes
under his name. Even his counsels of Gentle-
ness and Love—which one would indeed have
thought might escape this process—have been
corrupted into mere prescriptions of morality,
such as those of Non-resistance, and of philan-
thropic Altruism.

It seems strange indeed that so great a man
as Tolstoy should have lent himself to this process
—to the pinning down of the excellent spirit of
Christ (who by the way was man enough to
drive the money-changers out of the Temple)
to a mere formula, as one might pin a dragon-fly
to a labelled card—Thou shalt not use Violence:
thou shalt not Resist! And all the while to cleave ©
to a formula only means to admit the evil in some
other shape which the formula does not meet
—to forswear the stick only means to resort to
rebuke and sarcasm in self-defence, which may
inflict more pain and a deeper scar, and in some

246

The New Morality

cases more injury, than the stick; or if self-
defence in any shape is quite forsworn then that
only means to resign and abandon one’s place in
the world completely.

And the same of the somewhat spooney Altruism,
which was at one time much recommended as the
maxim of conduct. For all the while it is notorious
that the specially altruistic people are as a rule
painfully dull and uninteresting, and afford far
less life and charm to those around them than many
who are frankly egotistic ; and so by following
a formula of Altruism it seems they wreck the very
work they set before themselves to do—namely,
that of making the world brighter!

Against these weaknesses of Christianity
Nietzsche was a healthy reaction. It was he
insisted on the terms “good” and “ bad ”’ being
restored to their proper use, as terms of relation—
“good ” for what ? “ bad” for what? But his re-
action against maudlin altruism and non-resistance
led him towards a pitfall in the opposite direction,
towards the erection of the worship of Force
almost into a formula, Thou sha/t use Violence,
thou sha/t Resist. His contempt for the feeble
and the spooney and the knock-kneed and the
humbug is very delightful and entertaining, and,
as I say, healthy in the sense of reaction ; but
one does not get a very clear idea what the strength
which Nietzsche glorifies is for, or whither it is
going to lead. His blonde beasts and his laugh-
ing lions may represent the Will to Power ; but
Nietzsche seems to have felt, himself, that this

247

Civilisation : Its Cause and Cure

latter alone would not suffice, and so he passed
on to his discovery or invention of the Beyond-
man—i.e. of a childlike being who, without argu-
ment, affirms and creates, and before whom institu- |
tions and conventions dissolve, as it were of their
own accord.! This was a stroke of genius ; but
even so it leaves doubtful what the relation of
such Beyond-men to each other may be, and
whether, if they have no common source of life,
their actions will not utterly cancel and destroy
each other.

The truth is that Nietzsche never really pene-
trated to the realisation of that farther state of
consciousness in which the deep underlying unity
of man with Nature and his fellows is perceived
and felt. He saw apparently that there is a life
and an inspiration of life beyond all technical
good and evil. But for some reason—partly
because of the natural difficulty of the subject,
partly perhaps because the Eastern outlook was
uncongenial to his mind—he never found the
solution which he needed ; and his outline of
the Superman temains cloudy and _ uncertain,
vague and variously interpreted by followers and
criNcs.

The question arises, What do we need? We
are to-day, in this matter, in a somewhat parlous
state. The old codes of Morality are moribund ;
the Ten Commandments command only a very

t It must be remembered that Nietzsche supposes three stages
of the spirit—(1) the Camel, (2) the Lion, and (3) the Child.
And the Beyond-man properly corresponds to the last stage.

248

_The New Morality

qualified assent ; the Christian religion as a real
inspiration of practical life and conduct is dead ;
the social conventions and Mrs. Grundy remain,
feebly galling and officious. What are we to
do? Are we to bolster up the old codes, in
which we have largely ceased to believe, merely
in order to have a codef—or are we to let
them go?

Of course, if we have decided what the final
purpose or life of Man is, then we may say that
what is good for that purpose is finally “ good,”
and what is bad for that purpose is finally “ evil.”’
The Eastern philosophy, as I have said, deciding
that the final purpose of Man is identification with
Brahm, declares a// actions to be evil (even the
most saintly) which are done by the self as separate
from Brahm ; and all actions as good which are
done in the condition of vidya or conscious union.
But here, though a final good and evil are allowed
and acknowledged, as existing respectively in
the conditions of vidya or avidya, those condi-
tions altogether escape any external rule or classi-
fication.

Mr. Gilbert Chesterton, taking up this subject
not long ago in a criticism ' of Mr. Orage’s little
book on Nietzsche, said that all this talk about
“beyond good and evil’’ was nonsense; that
we must have some code ; and that in effect, any
code, even a bad one, was better than none. And
one sees what he means. It is perfectly true,
in a sense, that the harness, the shafts, and the

t Daily News, December 29, 1906.
249

Civilisation: Its Cause and Cure

blinkers keep a large part of the world on the
beaten road and out of the ditch, and that
folk are always to be found who, rather than
use their higher faculties, will rely on these
external guides ; but to encourage this kind of
salvation by blinkers seems the very reverse
of what ought to be done; and one might even
ask whether salvation by such means is_ sal-
vation at all—-whether the ditch were not
better !

Besides, what can we do? It is not so much
that we are deliberately abandoning the codes
as that they are abandoning us. With the gradual
infiltration of new ideas, of Eastern thought, of
Darwinian philosophy, of customs and creeds of
races other than our own, with Bernard Shaw
lecturing on the futility of the Ten Command-
ments, and so forth, it is not difficult to see that
in a short while it will be impossible to rehabilitate
any of the ancient codes or to give them a sanction
and a sense of awe in the public mind. If with
Gilbert Chesterton we should succeed in bolster-
ing up such a thing for a time—well, it will
only be for a time.

And the question is, whether the time has not
really come for us to stand up—like sensible men
and women—and do without rules; whether we
cannot trust ourselves at last to throw aside the
blinkers. ‘The question is whether we cannot
realise that solid and central life which underlies
and yet surpasses all rules. For truly, if we cannot
do this, our state is pitiable—having ceased to

250

The New Morality

believe in the letter of Morality, and yet unable to
find its spirit !

It is here, then, that the New Morality comes
in, as more or less clearly understood and ex-
pressed by the progressive sections to-day. Modern
Socialism, in effect, taking up a position in its way
somewhat similar to that of Eastern philosophy,
says : Morality in its essence is not a code, 5
simply the realisation of the Common Life ;
and that is a thing which is not foreign and tec
to humanity, but very germane and natural to it—
a thing so natural that without doubt it would be
more in evidence than it is, did not the institu-
tions and teachings of Western civilisation tend
all along to deny and disguise it. To liberate
this instinct of the Common Life, freeing it from
hard and cramping rules, and to let it take its own
form or forms—prafted on and varied of course
by the personal and selective element of Affection
and Sympathy—is the hope that lies before the
world to-day for the solution of all sorts of moral
and social problems.

And the more this position is thought over,
the more, I believe, will it commend itself. The
sense of organic unity, of the common welfare, the
instinct of Humanity, or of general helpfulness,
are things which run in all directions through the
very fibre of our individual and social life—just
as they do through that of the gregarious animals.

t I need hardly say that this does not mean, as Nietzsche so
often and sardonically suggests, the realisation of the common-place
life, but something very different.

251

Civilisation : Its Cause and Cure

In a thousand ways: through heredity and the
fact that common ancestral blood flows in our
veins—though we be only strangers that pass
in the street; through psychology, and the
similarity of structure and concatenation in our
minds ;_ through social linkage, and the necessity
of each and all to the others’ economic welfare ;
through personal affection and the ties of the
heart; and through the mystic and religious
sense which, diving deep below personalities,
perceives the vast flood of universal being—in
these and many other ways does this Common
Life compel us to recognise itself as a fact—per-
haps the most fundamental fact of existence.

To teach this simple foundational fact and
what flows from it to every child—not only as
a theory, but as a practical habit and inspiration
of conduct—is not really difficult, but easy. Chil-
dren, having this sense woven into their very being,
grow up in the spirit and practical habitude of
it, and from the beginning possess the inspira-
tion of what we call Morality—far more effectu-
ally indeed than copy-book maxims can _ provide.
Respect for truth, consideration towards parents
and elders, respect for the reasonable properties,
dignities, conveniences of others, as well as for
one’s own needs and dignities, become perfectly
natural and habitual. And that this is no mere
hypothesis the example of Japan has lately shown
where every young thing is brought up so far
drenched in the sentiment of community that
to give one’s life for one’s country is looked upon

252

The New Morality

as a privilege.t The general lines, I say, of
morality would be secure, and much more secure
than they now are, if we could only bring the
children up in an educational and practical at-
mosphere of that solidarity which as a matter of
fact is demanded to-day by socialism and the
economic movement generally.

And on this ground-work, as I have hinted,
Personal Affection and Sympathy would build
a superstructure of their own ; they would outline
a society as much more beautiful, powerful and
closely knit than the present one founded on the
Cash-nexus, as, say, the Athenian society of the
time of Pericles was superior to that of the
Lapithe who first bitted and bridled the horse.

» While the general Life, equal, pervasive, and
in a sense undifferentiated, is a great fact which
has to be acknowledged ; so this personal Love
and Affection, choosing, selecting, and giving
outline and form to that life, is equally a fact,
equally undeniable, equally sacred—and one
which has to be taken in conjunction with the
other.

I say equally sacred : because there has been
a tendency (no doubt due to certain causes) to
look upon personal affection, in its various phases
from slight inclinations of sympathy to the stronger
compulsions of passion, as something rather dubi-

t Many Japanese committed suicide on account of not being
allowed to join in the Russian War. See also Lafcadio Hearn’s
description of the habitual dignity and courtesy of the youth of
Japan.—Life and Letters, vol. i, pp. 12, 113.

253

Civilisation : Its Cause and Cure

ous in character, at best an amiable weakness not
to be encouraged. Tolstoy, in one of his writings,
figures the case of a little household in days of
famine not really having bread enough for their
own wants. Then a stranger child comes to the
door and pleads for food. ‘Tolstoy suggests that
the mother ought to take the scanty crust from
her own child to feed the stranger withal, or at
least to share the food equally between the two
children. But such a conclusion seems to me
doubtful.

Whatever “ought”? may mean in such a
connexion, we know pretty well that such never
will be the rule of human life, we may almost
say never can be; perhaps we should be equally
justified in saying, never ‘“‘ought” to be. For
obviously there must be preferences, selections.
Our affections, our affinities, our sympathies,
our passions, are not given us for nothing. It
is not for nothing that every individual person,
every tree, every animal has a shape, a shape of
its own. If it were not so the world would be
infinitely, inconceivably, dull. Yet to ask that a
mother should in all cases treat strange children
exactly the same as her own, that a man from the
oceanic multitude should single out no special
or privileged friends, but should love all alike,
is to ask that these folk in their mental and moral
nature should become as jellyfish—of no distinct
shape or satisfaction to themselves or any one
else. Profound and indispensable as is the Law
of Equality—the law, namely, that there is a

2.54

The New Morality

region within all beings where they touch to
a common and equal life—the other law, that
of Individual predilection, is equally indispensable.
Try to reduce all to the one motive of the general
interest, and you might have a perfect morality,
but a morality woodeny, hard and dull, without
form and feature. Try to dispense with this,
and to found society on individual affection and
love, and on individual initiative, without morals,
and you would have a flighty, unstable thing,
without consistency or backbone.

My contention, then, is that our hope for the
future society lies in its embodiment of these
two great principles jointly : (1) the recognition
of the Common Life as providing the foundation-
element of general morality, and (2) the recogni-
tion of Individual Affection and Expression—
and to a much greater degree than hitherto—as
building up the higher groupings and finer forms
of the structure. And in proportion as (1) pro-
vides a solider basis of morals than we have hitherto
had, so will it be possible to give to (2) a width
of scope and freedom of action hitherto untried
or untrusted. Conjointly with the strengthening
of these principles of Solidarity and Affection
in society must of course come the strengthening
of Individuality—the right and the desire of every
being to preserve and develop its own proper
shape, and so to add to the richness and interest
of life—and this involves the right of Resistance,
and (once more) the relegation of the formula of
non-resistance into the background.

255

Civilisation : Its Cause and Cure

These considerations, however, are leading us
too far afield, and away from the special subject
of our paper. I mention them chiefly in order
to show that while we are considering Morality
as a foundation-element of Society, it must never
be lost sight of that it is not the only element,
and that it would be comparatively senseless and
useless unless grafted on and complemented and
completed by the others.

The method of the New Morality, then, will
be to minimise formule, and (except as illustra-
tions) to use them sparely ; and to bring children
up—and so indirectly all citizens—in such con-
ditions of abounding life and health that their
sympathies, overflowing naturally to those around,
will cause them to realise in the strongest way
their organic part in the great whole of society
—and this not as an intellectual theory, so much
as an abiding consciousness and foundation-fact
of their own existence. Make this the basis
of all teaching. Make them realise—by all sorts
of habit and example—that to injure or deceive
others is to injure themselves—that to help others
somehow satisfies and fortifies their own inner
life. Let them learn, as they grow up, to regard
all human beings, of whatever race or class, as
ends in themselves—never to be looked upon as
mere things or chattels to be made use of. Let
them also learn to look upon the animals in the
same light—as beings, they too, who are climbing
the great ladder of creation—beings with whom
also we humans have a common spirit and interest.

2.56.

The New Morality

And let them learn to respect themselves as worthy
and indispensable members of this great Body.
Thus will be established a true Morality—a morality
far more searching, more considerate of others,
more adaptive and more genuine than that of
the present day—a morality, we may say, of
common-sense.

For it may indeed be said that Morality—taking
a downright and almost physiological view of it—
is simply abundance of fife. That is, that when a
man has so abounding and vital an inner nature
that his sympathies and activities overflow the
margin of his own petty days and personal ad-
vantage, he is by that fact entering the domain
of morality. Before that time and while limited
to the personal organism, the creative life in each
being is either non-moral like that of the animals,
or simply selfish like that of the immature man ;
but when it overflows this limit it necessarily becomes
social, and moves to the support and considera-
tion of the neighbour. Having formerly found
its complete activity in the sustentation of the
personal self it now spreads its helpful energies
into the lives of the other selves around. Altru-
ism, in fact, in its healthy forms, is the overflow
of abounding vitality. It is a morality without
a code, and happily free fron limiting formulz.t

t This morality, indeed, may be said to be implicit in much
of the teaching of Christ; yet, curiously enough, it has never
been seriously adopted by the Churches. And as to the regard
for animals as ends in themselves, the Roman Catholic Church,
I believe, positively repudiates any such attitude.

257 R

Civilisation : Its Cause and Cure

And if it be again said that a morality of this
kind, which rests on a principle and a mental
attitude only, is a danger, let us pause for a mo-
ment to consider how much more dangerous is
one which rests on formule. If morality with-
out a code is a serious matter, how much more
serious is one which is nailed up within a code!
For looking back on history it would sometimes
seem that the black-and-white, the this-thing-
right-and-that-thing-wrong morality has been the
most wicked thing in the world. It has been
an excuse for all the most devilish deeds
and persecutions imaginable. A formula of the
Sabbath-day, a formula about Witchcraft, a
formula of Marriage (regardless of the real human
relation), a formula concerning Theft (regardless
of the dire need of the thief)—and burnings,
hangings, torturings without mercy! The terrible
thing about this Right-and-Wrong morality is
not only that it leads to these dreadful reprisals ;
but that it brands upon the victim as well as upon
the oppressor the fatuous notions that a certain
thing is right or wrong, and that what one has
to do is to save onese/f—two notions both of which
are directly contrary to true Morality. A boy
tells a verbal lie—perhaps through fear, perhaps
through inadvertence. He has broken a formula
and is immediately caned. Moral: he will
keep to verbal truth afterwards—however mean
or insidious it may be—and be pharisaically self-
satisfied ; but he will never realise that the im-
portance of truth and lies rests not in the words,

258

The New Morality

but in the confidence and mutual trust which
they either create or destroy. The peculiarly
English worship of Duty is open to the same
objection. “Lilies that fester smell far worse
than weeds,” and splendid as is the conception
and practice of Duty, as a self-oblivious inspira-
tion and enthusiasm, it becomes a truly revolting
thing when it takes the all-too-common form
““T have done my Duty, I’m all right!” “I
am going to do my Duty, whatever becomes of
you.” Can anything be imagined more dis-
integrating to society, more certain to split it
up into a dustheap of self-regarding units, than
a formula of this kind? “It is my painful Duty
to condemn you to be hanged by the neck until
you are dead,’”’ says the Judge to the wretched
girl who, in a frenzy of despair, has drowned her
baby. What he really means is that while he
perfectly recognises the monstrosity of the Law
which he has sworn to administer, and the soul-
killing effect on the girl which his sentence may
have, yet in order to save himse/f from the risk or
the wrong of breaking that Law, he is willing and
ready to pronounce that sentence. “It is my
duty to burn you,” says the Inquisitor to the heretic ;
and the implication is really, ‘‘ I am afraid that if
I do not burn you I shall get burnt myself, in the
next world.”

The sooner an end can be made of this sort of
morality, the better—which under the cloak of
public advantage or benefit is only thinking about
self-promotion and self-interest, either in this

259

Civilisation : Its Cause and Cure

world or the next, and which truly is calculated
not to further human solidarity but to destroy it.
It runs and trickles through all of modern society,
poisoning the well-springs of affection, this morality
which, having paid its domestic servants their
regular wages, is quite satisfied with itself, and
expects them to do ¢heir duty in return, but is
silent about their real needs and welfare ; which
treats its wage-workers as simple machines for
the grinding out of profits, and lifts its eyebrows
in serene surprise when they retaliate against such
treatment ; which can only regard a criminal
as a person who has broken a formula, and in return
must be punished according to a formula; and
a pig as an animal for which you provide reason-
able provender and a stye, and which in return
you are entitled to eat. Pharisaical, self-centred
and self-interested, materialistic to the last degree,
and really senseless in its outlook, this current
morality is indeed, and very seriously, a public
peril.

Thou shalt not steal: an empty feat,
When it’s so lucrative to cheat.

Keep within the code, within the letter ; always
speak the nominal truth (whoever may suffer
thereby) ; keep up the accepted formule of
marriage and the sex-relation (though hearts may
be bleeding and perishing) ; pay every respect
to property, and so forth; and you may have
the gratification of being looked upon as a bul-
wark of society. But none the less it is probable
260

The New Morality

that you are undermining and corrupting that
society to the core. Your outlook is merely on
the surface, while you are condoning deep-seated
ill.

Of course the New Morality—to look within,
to feel and refer to the needs of others almost
as instinctively as to one’s own, to refuse to regard
any thing as in itself good or bad, and to look upon
all beings, oneself included, as ends in them-
selves and not as a means of personal self-advance-
ment and glorification—while it is the more natural,
is also the more difficult in a sense, as providing
no set pattern or rule. But surely the time has
arrived for its adoption. It is the morality which
must underlie the freer, more varied forms of the
society of the future ; and it is the only escape
from the corruption of the old order.

To take particular examples. ‘Truth, in word
or act, is—we all feel—very important, very
fundamental. It is the basis of the common
understanding of which I have spoken. It is
the basis of the expression of oneself, and of the
recognition of others. Any one who is deeply
imbued with the consciousness of the common
life will necessarily have a deep respect for the
Truth ; he will also have a deep respect for the
Life, the Property, the good Name, the Affec-
tions, and so forth, of others, as well as for his
own similar attributes. He will not be able to
say, as a formula: I will sever deceive another
(tell a lie); I will zever take the life of others,
man or animal (kill) ; and so on, because he knows

261

Civilisation : Its Cause and Cure

there are situations in which that very Life arising
within him, or even his own absolute necessity,
will demand such actions, will compel him to
the performance of them ; but all the same he will
in his ordinary existence carry out the principle
which underlies these formule, and much more
thoroughly, probably, than the formule themselves
would demand.

Similarly about such matters as sexual morality.
There are outcries against Lady-Godiva-shows
and living statuary—apparently because folk are
afraid of such things rousing the passions. No
doubt the things may act that way. But why,
we may ask, should people be afraid of rousing
passions which, after all, are the great driving
forces of human life? Clearly it is because they
think the other forces which should guide these
passions or give them a helpful and useful direction
are too weak. And in this last respect they are
right. The guiding and inhibiting forces in our
present society are feeble—because they consist
only in a few conventional formule, which are
rapidly being undermined. We are generating
steam in a boiler which is already cankered
with rust. The cure is not to cut off the
passions, or to be weakly afraid of them, but to
find a new, sound, healthy engine of general
morality and common-sense within which they
will work. And this is what in the future we
must try to do.

This morality, this organic, vital, almost phy- ~
siological morality of the common life—which

262

The New Morality

means a quick response of each unit to the needs
of the other units, and much the same in the body
politic as health means in the physical body—
must underlie and be the basis of the societies
of the future. It will mean the liberation of
a thousand and one instincts, desires and capa-
cities which since our childhood’s days have
lain buried within us, concealed and ignored because
we have thought them wrong or unworthy, when
really all they have wanted has been recognition
and the opportunity to become healthy dy
recognition—by the process in fact of balancing
against each other, and against opposing and com-
plementary elements, and so finding their places
in the Whole. On this new Morality of accept-
ance and recognition and wide-reaching redemp-
tion, it will be possible, as I have already said, to
graft not only a stronger expression of indivi-
duality all round, but also a higher and more varied
and more gracious life of personal affection—
which now alas! lies like a thing wounded and
half dead. Its establishment will, I take it, mean -
the oncoming of a society which will liberate
personal affection and love—will liberate forces
hitherto artificially crippled because their libera-
tion would tear our current morality of formule
to mere rags and tatters. It means, I take it,
the oncoming of a society whose main motive will
no longer be the struggle for Bread (since that is
ruled out by the enormous growth of our wealth-
producing powers), but the desire for the satisfac-
tion of the Heart—thus preparing no doubt new
263

The New Morality

and unforeseen difficulties and sufferings, yet
filling life with such beautiful things that the motives
of greed and the mean pursuit of money, which
now weigh upon the world, will be like an evil
nightmare of the Past from which the dawn
delivers us. |

2.64

APPENDIX

S the author’s attacks in the body of this book
upon the Civilisation peoples have sometimes been
regarded as extreme and unjustified, it has been
thought appropriate, here in the Appendix, to

collect a few notes from reliable authorities on the
characteristics and customs of pre-civilised men—not so
much of course with the object of proving the latter
always superior to the former, as of bringing to light
the many admirable virtues of the early peoples, which a
cheap modern civilisation has neglected or somewhat con- .
temptuously ignored.

No one would deny that there are many cases of primitive
folk—folk unclean and ignorant and absurdly superstitious
—who can hardly be said to command our admiration.
On the other hand there are a vast number of cases of
an opposite sort—cases which present to us the realisation
of some remarkable human characteristic or social capacity
well worthy of consideration or even of imitation. If our
Civilisation is ever to move on to some form better than
the present, it is these latter cases which ought to be of
assistance ; for they not only direct our attention to human
possibilities, but by showing what has been realised in the
past assure us that such ideals are by no means unattainable
now.

It is therefore with a view to cases of this kind that
the following Appendix has been framed.

FE. C
267

Civilisation : Its Cause and Cure

Civilisation does not Engross all the Virtues.

Quotations from Herman Melville’s Type pp. 225, etc,
(John Murray, 1861.)

*¢ Civilisation does not engross all the virtues of humanity :
she has not even her full share of them. They flourish
in greater abundance and attain greater strength among
many barbarous people. ‘The hospitality of the wild Arab,
the courage of the North American Indian, and the faithful
friendships of some of the Polynesian nations, far surpass
anything of a similar kind among the polished communities
of Europe. If truth and justice, and the better principles
of our nature, cannot exist unless enforced by the statute-
book, how are we to account for the social condition of
the Typees? So pure and upright were they in all the
relations of life, that entering their valley, as I did, under
the most erroneous impressions of their character, I was
soon led to exclaim in amazement: ‘ Are these the fero-
cious savages, the bloodthirsty cannibals of whom I have
heard such frightful tales! ‘They deal more kindly with
each other, and are more humane, than many who study
essays on virtue and benevolence, and who repeat every
night that beautiful prayer breathed first by the lips of
the divine and gentle Jesus.’ I will frankly declare, that
after passing a few weeks in this valley of the Marquesas,
I formed a higher estimate of human nature than I had
ever before entertained. But alas! since then I have
been one of the crew of a man-of war, and the pent-up
wickedness of five hundred men has nearly overturned all
my previous theories.

* * * * *

How little do some of these poor islanders comprehend,
when they look around them, that no inconsiderable part

268

Appendix

of their disasters originate in certain tea-party excitements,
under the influence of which benevolent-looking gentlemen
in white cravats solicit alms, and old ladies in spectacles,
and young ladies in sober russet low gowns, contribute
sixpences towards the creation of a fund, the object of
which is to ameliorate the spiritual condition of the Polyne-
sians, but whose end has almost invariably been to accomplish
their temporal destruction !

*“* Let the savages be civilised, but civilise them with
benefits, and not with evils; and let heathenism be des-
troyed, but not by destroying the heathen. “The Anglo-
Saxon hive have extirpated Paganism from the greater part
of the North American continent ; but with it they have
likewise extirpated the greater portion of the Red race.
Civilisation is gradually sweeping from the earth the
lingering vestiges of Paganism, and at the same time the
shrinking forms of its unhappy worshippers.

‘*“Among the islands of Polynesia, no sooner are the
images overturned, the temples demolished, and the idolaters
converted into nominal Christians, than disease, vice, and
premature death make their appearance. “The depopulated
land is then recruited from the rapacious hordes of enlightened
individuals who settle themselves within its borders, and
clamorously announce the progress of the Truth. Neat
villas, trim gardens, shaven lawns, spires, and cupolas arise,
while the poor savage soon finds himself an interloper in
the country of his fathers, and that too on the very site of
the hut where he was born.

* * * * *

** During my whole stay on the island I never witnessed

a single quarrel, nor any thing that in the slightest degree

approached even to a dispute. ‘The natives appeared to

form one household, whose members were bound together

by the ties of strong affection. The love of kindred I
269

Civilisation : Its Cause and Cure

did not so much perceive, for it seemed blended in the
general love ; and where all were treated as brothers and
sisters, it was hard to tell who were actually related to each
other by blood.

“Let it not be supposed that I have overdrawn this
picture. J have not done so. Nor let it be urged that
the hostility of this tribe to foreigners, and the hereditary
feuds they carry on against their fellow-islanders beyond
the mountains, are facts which contradict me. Not so:
these apparent discrepancies are easily reconciled. By
many a legendary tale of violence and wrong, as well as
by events which have passed before their eyes, these people
have been taught to look upon white men with abhorrence.
The cruel invasion of their country by Porter has alone
furnished them with ample provocation ; and I can sympa-
thize in the spirit which prompts the Typee warrior to
guard all the passes to his valley with the point of his levelled
spear, and, standing upon the beach, with his back turned
upon his green home, to hold at bay the intruding European.”

Influences of “ Civilisation ”

From R. L. Stevenson’s In the South Seas, p. 43. (Chatto
and Windus, 1908.)

[It is asked] “‘ Was not the Polynesian always unchaste ?
Doubtless he was so always : doubtless he is more so since
the coming of his remarkably chaste visitors from Europe.
‘Take the Hawaiian account of Cook: I have no doubt
it is entirely fair. ‘Take Krusenstern’s candid, almost
innocent description of a Russian man-of-war at the
Marquesas ; consider the disgraceful history of missions
in Hawaii itself . . . add the practice of whaling fleets’
to call at the Marquesas and carry off a complement of

270

Appendix

women for the cruise . . . and bear in mind how it was
the custom of the adventurers, and we may almost say the
business of the missionaries, to deride and infract even the
most salutary tapus (taboos).”

Captain Cook at Owyhee in 1799

From his Life and Voyages, p. 379. (George Newnes,
1904.)

“* In the progress of the intercourse which was maintained
between our voyagers and the natives, the quiet and inoffen-
sive behaviour of the latter took away every apprehension
of danger, so that the English trusted themselves among
them at all times and in all situations. The instances of
kindness and civility which our people experienced from
them were so numerous that they could not easily be re-
counted. A society of priests, in particular, displayed a
generosity and munificence of which no equal example
had hitherto been given: for they furnished a constant
supply of hogs and vegetables to our navigators, without
ever demanding a return, or even hinting at it in the most
distant manner.”” Of the island of Wateeoo (p. 309),
“ the inhabitants are very numerous, and many of the young
men were perfect models in shape.”

Natives of Tahiti

From Havelock Ellis’ Sex im relation to Soctety, p. 148.
(1910.)
“The example of Tahiti is instructive as regards the
_ prevalence of chastity among peoples of what we generally
consider low grades of civilisation. An early explorer,
271

Civilisation : Its Cause and Cure

J. R. Forster (Observations made on a voyage round the
World, 1778), speaks of the fine climate and the beauty
of the females, as inviting powerfully to the enjoyments
and pleasures of love. Yet he is over and over again im-
pelled to set down facts which bear testimony to the virtues
of these people. ‘Though rather effeminate in build they
are athletic, he says. Moreover in their wars they fight
with great bravery and valour. ‘They are, for the rest,
hospitable. He remarks that they treat their married women
with great respect, and that women generally are nearly
the equals of men, both in intelligence and social position ;
he gives a charming description of the women. ‘In short
their character,’ he concludes, ‘is as amiable as that of any
nation that ever came unimproved out of the hands of
Nature’ [!]”

“When Cook,” ” continues Ellis, “‘who visited ‘Tahiti
many times, was among this ‘ benevolent, humane’ people,
he noted their esteem for chastity, and found that not only
were betrothed girls strictly guarded before marriage, but
that men also who had refrained from sexual intercourse
for some time before marriage were believed to pass at death
immediately into the abode of the blessed.”

Radack—one of the Caroline Islands

From Chamisso’s Reise um die Welt, p. 183. (Leipzig.)

*““"Thus we made acquaintance with a people who have
endeared themselves to me more than any others of the
children of Earth. ‘The very weaknesses of the Radack
folk removed mistrust on our side; their very gentleness
and goodness caused them to be trustful towards us, the
all-powerful strangers; we became declared friends. I
found among them simple, unsophisticated manners, charm,

272

ee eee ee

Appendix

natural grace, and the pleasant bloom of modesty. In
the matter, certainly, of strength and manly independence
the O-Waihier [Owyhees] are greatly their superiors.
My friend, Kadu, who, though not belonging to this island-
group, attached himself to us, was one of the finest characters
I have ever met and one of the most dear to me of human
beings; and he afterwards became my instructor with
regard to Radack and the Caroline Islands.”

Adaptation of Early Peoples to Surroundings

Tue Drnxas (Central Africa): from Grogan’s Cape to
Cairo, p. 278. (Hurst & Blackett, 1900.)

“Every one in Dinka-land carries a long spear, or
pointed fish-spear, and a club made of a heavy purple
wood, while the more important gentlemen wear enormous
ivory bracelets round their upper arm; strict nudity is
the fashion, and a marabout feather in the hair is the
essence of chic. ‘They are all beautifully built, having
broad shoulders, small waist, good hips, and well-shaped
legs. ‘The stature of some is colossal. It was most curious
to see how these Dinkas, living as they do in the marshes,
approximate to the type of the waterbird. “They have
much the same walk as a heron, picking their feet up very
high and thrusting them well forward; while their feet
are enormous. ‘Their colossal height is indeed a great
advantage in the reed grown country in which they live.
The favourite pose of a Dinka (on one foot, with the
other foot resting on the knee) is in reality the favourite
pose of a water bird. . . . They are the complete antithesis
of the pigmy, as the country in which they live is the
complete antithesis of the dense forest which is the home
of the dwarfs. . . . Our camp was near a large village

273 s

Civilisation : Its Cause and Cure

where there were at least 1,500 head of cattle, besides sheep
and goats, and the chief brought me a fine fat bull-calf—
which settled the nervous question of food for two days. . . .
The rambling village with its groups of figuresand long lines
of home-coming cattle, dimly seen in the smoke of a hundred
fires as I approached at sunset, was very picturesque.”

Tue Picmies: from Cape to Cairo, pp. 144 and 161.

“The pigmies have no settled villages, nor do they
cultivate anything. ‘They live the life of the brute in
the forests, perpetually wandering in search of honey or
in pursuit of elephant; when they succeed in killing
anything, they throw up a few grass shelters and remain
there till all the meat is either eaten or dried. They
depend upon the other natives for the necessary grain,
which they either steal or barter for elephant meat or honey.
All their knives, spearheads and arrow-heads they likewise
purchase from other people, but they make their own
bows and arrows. So well are these made that they are
held in great esteem by the surrounding people.” .. .
“An hour later I met an elderly pigmy in the forest and
managed to induce him to talk. He was a splendid little
fellow, full of self-confidence, and gave me most concise
information, stating that the white man with many belong-
ings had passed near by two days before, and had then gone
down to the lake-shore, where he was camped at that
moment. ‘These people must have a wonderful code of
signs and signals, as despite their isolated and nomadic
existence they always know exactly what is happening
everywhere. He was a typical pigmy as found on the
volcanoes—squat, gnarled, proud, and easy of carriage.
His beard hung down over his chest, and his thighs and
chest were covered with wiry hair. He carried the usual
pigmy bow made of two pieces of cane spliced together

274

—~ * a

Appendix

with grass, and with a string made of a single strand of
a rush that grows in the forests. “The pigmies are splendid
examples of the adaptability of Nature to her surroundings;
the combination of strength and conciseness enabling them
to move with astonishing rapidity in the pig-runs that
form the only pathway through the impenetrable growth,
and to endure the fatigue of elephant-hunting.”

Natives IN Ruanpa (near Lake Kivu): Cape to Cairo,
p. 118.

“Society in Ruanda is divided into two castes, the
Watusi and the Wahutu. The Watusi are the descend-
ants of a great wave of Galla invasion that reached even
to Tanganyika. ‘They still retain their pastoral instincts,
and refuse to do any other work than the tending of cattle ;
and so great is their affection for their beasts, that rather
than sever company they will become slaves, and do the
menial work of their beloved cattle for the benefit of their
conquerors. ‘This is all the more remarkable when one
takes into account their inherent pride of race and contempt
for other peoples, even for the white man. . . . Many
signs of superior civilisation, observable in the peoples
with whom the Watusi have come into oars are traceable
to this Galla influence.

“The hills are terraced, thus increasing ‘the area of
cultivation, and obviating the denudation of fertile slopes
by torrential rains. In many cases irrigation is carried
out on a sufficiently extensive scale, and the swamps are
drained by ditches. Artificial reservoirs are built with side
troughs for watering cattle. ‘The fields are in many cases
fenced in by planted hedges of euphorbia and thorn, and
similar fences are planted along the narrow parts of the
main cattle tracks, to prevent the beasts from straying or
trampling down the cultivation.

275

Civilisation: Its Cause and Cure

“There is also an exceptional diversity of plants culti-
vated, such as hungry rice, maize, red and white millet,
several kinds of beans, peas, bananas, and the edible arum.
Some of the higher growing beans are even trained on
sticks planted for the purpose. Pumpkins and sweet
potatoes are also common ; and the Watusi own and tend
enormous herds of cattle, goats and sheep. Owing to the
magnificent pasturage the milk is of excellent quality,
and they make large quantities of butter. “They are ex-
ceedingly clever with their beasts, and have many calls
which the cattle understand. At milking time they light
smoke-fires to keep the flies from irritating the beasts. . . .
They are tall slightly built men of graceful nonchalant
carriage, and their features are delicate and refined. I
noticed many faces that, bleached and set in a white collar,
would have been conspicuous for character in a London
drawing-room. The legal type was especially pro-
nounced.” ... 2

“The Wahutu are their absolute antithesis. “They are
the aborigines of the country, and any pristine originality
or character has been effectually stamped out of them.
Hewers of wood and drawers of water, they do all the
hard work, and unquestioning in abject servility give up
the proceeds on demand. ‘Their numerical proportion to
the Watusi must be at least a hundred to one, yet they
defer to them without protest ; and in spite of the obvious
hatred in which they hold their over lords, there seems to
be no friction.”

Natives of the Andaman Islands

The following extracts, about the Andaman-islanders
of the Bay of Bengal, the Bushmen of South Africa, and
the Eskimo tribes of Northern latitudes, are specially inter-

276

Appendix
esting because they deal with peoples whose present-day
culture is undoubtedly on a par with, and in all probability
directly inherited from, the peoples of a long-past Stone
Age. ‘Thus we get indirectly a glimpse of what the culture
of the Stone Ages was—both in its material acquisitions
and its grade of social and psychological evolution.

From In the Andamans and Nicobars, p. 184, by C. Boden
Kloss. (Murray, 1903.)

“The Andaman Islands are inhabited by people of pure
Negrito blood, members of perhaps the most ancient race
remaining on the earth, and standing closest to the primitive
human type. . . . It would be impossible to find anywhere
a race of purer descent than the Andamanese, for ever
since they peopled the islands in the Stone Age, they have
remained secluded from the outer world. . . . In stature
they are far below the average height ; but although they
have been called dwarfs and pygmies, these words must
not be understood to imply anything in the nature of a
monstrosity. Their reputation for hideousness, like their
poisoned arrows and cannibalism, has long been a fallacy
which, though widely popular, should now be exploded.
The average heights of the men and women are found to
be 4 feet 103 inches, and 4 feet 7} inches respectively,
and their figures, which are proportionately built, are very
symmetrical and graceful. Although not to be described as
muscular, they are of good development, the men being
agile, yet sturdy, with broad chests and square shoulders.”

From E. H. Man on The Aborigines of the Andaman Islands,
p. 14. (Triibner, 1883.)

“No idiots, maniacs or lunatics have ever yet been
observed among them, and this is not because those so

277

Civilisation : Its Cause and Cure

afflicted are killed or confined by their fellows, for the
greatest care and attention are invariably paid to the sick, —
aged and helpless.”

Mr. Man also remarks (Fourn. Anthrop. Inst. X11, 92):
“It has been observed with regret by all interested in the
race, that intercourse with the alien population has, generally
speaking, prejudicially affected their morals ; and that the
candour, veracity, and self-reliance they manifest in their
savage and untutored state are, when they become asso-
ciated with foreigners, to a great extent lost, and habits
of untruthfulness, dependence and sloth engendered.”

The Bushmen

Extract from F. C. Selous’ African Nature-Notes, pp. 344
and 347. (1908.)

“When I met with the first Bushmen I ever saw, on
the banks of the Orange River in 1872, I was a very young
man, and, regarding them with some repugnance, wrote
in my diary that they appeared to be removed by a very
few steps from the brute creation. “That was a very foolish
and ignorant remark to make, and I have since found out
that though Bushmen may possibly be to-day in the same
backward state of material development and knowledge as
once were the palzolithic ancestors of the most highly
cultured European races in prehistoric times, yet funda-
mentally there is very little difference between the natures
of primitive and civilised men, so that it is quite possible
for a member of one of the more cultured races to live
for a time quite happily and contentedly amongst beings
who are often described as degraded savages, and from whom
he is separated by thousands of years in all that is implied
by the word “civilisation.” I have hunted a great deal
with Bushmen, and during 1884 I lived amongst these

278

Appendix

people continuously for several months together. On
many and many a night I have slept in their encampments
without even any Kafir attendants, and though I was
entirely in their power I always felt perfectly safe among
them. As most of the men spoke Sechwana I was able
to converse with them, and found them very intelligent,
good-natured companions, full of knowledge concerning the
habits of all the wild animals inhabiting the country in
which they lived... . I have never seen their women
and children ill-treated by them, and I have seen both the
men and the women show affection for their children.”

Elsewhere Selous speaks of “‘ John ’’—a member of the
close-related Korana clan—who was in his service, as
“of a pale yellow-brown colour, beautifully proportioned,
with small delicately made hands and feet.”

From preface by Henry Balfour to the book Bushmen
Paintings Copied, by Helen Vongue.

“Tt is certain that the designs representing animals, etc.,
which are painted upon the walls of their caves and rock-
shelters, frequently exhibit a realism and freedom in treat-
ment which are quite remarkable in the art of so primitive
a people. ‘The skill with which many of the characteristic
South African animals are portrayed testifies not only to
unusual artistic efficiency, but also to a close observance
of and an intimate acquaintanceship with the habits and
peculiarities of the animals themselves. . . . The paintings
are remarkable not only for the realism exhibited by so
many, but also for a freedom from the limitation to delinea-
tion in profile which characterises for the most part the
drawings of primitive peoples, especially where animals are
concerned. Attitudes of a kind difficult to render were
ventured upon without hesitation, and an appreciation even
of the rudiments of perspective is occasionally to be noted,”

279

Civilisation : Its Cause and Cure

Note from the same book, by S. Bleek, daughter of the
well-known Dr. Bleek, of the Grey Library at Cape
Town (1870).

‘* Bushmen are called liars and thieves all over the Colony,
but all those who stayed with us were truthful and very
honest. On no occasion did they steal even a pocket-knife
lost in the garden, or fruit from the trees. They might
have taken sheep from hostile farmers, but they would
never rob a friend or neighbour. ‘They were cleanly in
their habits, and most particular about manners. . . . As
a people they were grateful and revengeful, independent
in spirit, excellent fighters—who preferred death to cap-
tivity. . . . Captives were sometimes made servants, but
not often well-treated, nor did they take to a settled life
easily. Even kind masters found their longing for freedom
hard to conquer.”

The Nechilli Eskimo

From Amundsen’s North West Passage, vol. i, p. 294.
(Constable, 1908.)

*““'We were suddenly brought face to face here with
a people from the Stone Age: we were abruptly carried
back several thousand years in the advance of human
progress, to people who as yet knew no other method of
procuring fire than by rubbing two pieces of wood together,
and who with great difficulty managed to get their food
just lukewarm, over the seal-oil flame on a stone slab,
while we cooked our food in a moment with our modern
cooking apparatus. We came here, with our most in-
genious and most recent inventions in the way of firearms,
to people who still used lances, bows and arrows of reindeer
horn. . . . However, we should be wrong if from the

280

Appendix

weapons, implements, and domestic appliances of these
people we were to argue that they were of low intelligence.
Their implements, apparently so very primitive, proved
to be as well adapted to their existing requirements and
conditions as experience and the skilful tests of many
centuries could have made them.”

Ugpi, an Eskimo

From Amundsen vol. i, p. 190.

“‘Ugpi or Uglen (the ‘ Owl’) as we always called him,
attracted immediate attention by his appearance. With his
long black hair hanging over his shoulders, his dark eyes
and frank honest expression, he would have been good-
looking if his broad face and large mouth had not spoilt
his beauty from a European standpoint. There was
something serious, almost dreamy, about him. Honesty
and truthfulness are unmistakably impressed on his features,
and I would never have hesitated for a moment to entrust
him with anything. During his association with us he
became an exceptionally clever hunter both for birds and
reindeer. He was about thirty years old and was married
to Kabloka, a very small girl of seventeen.”

Eskimo and Civilisation

From Amundsen vol. i, p. 48.

“* During the voyage of the Gyea, we came into contact
with ten different Eskimo tribes in all . . . and I must
state it as my firm conviction that the Eskimo living abso-
lutely isolated from civilisation of any kind are undoubtedly

281

Civilisation: Its Cause and Cure

the happiest, healthiest, most honorable and most contented
among them. It must therefore be the bounden duty of
civilised nations who come into contact with the Eskimo
to safeguard them. against contaminating influences, and
by laws and stringent regulations protect them against
the many perils and evils of so-called civilisation. Unless
this is done they will inevitably be ruined. . . Mysincerest
wish for our friends the Nechilli Eskimo is that Civili-
sation may mever reach them.”

High Standard of Tribal Morality among the Aleoutes

Witnessed to by the Russian missionary, Veniaminoff.
See Mutual Aid, pp. 99 and 100, by P. Kropotkin.

The high standard of the tribal morality of the Eskimos
has often been mentioned in general literature. Never-
theless the following remarks upon the manners of the
Aleoutes—nearly akin to the Eskimos—will better illustrate
savage morality as a whole. ‘They were written, after a
ten years’ stay among the Aleoutes, by a most remarkable
man—the Russian missionary, Veniaminoff. I sum them
up, mostly in his own words :—--

Endurability (he wrote) is their chief feature. It is
simply colossal. Not only do they bathe every morning
in the frozen sea, and stand naked on the beach, inhaling
the icy wind, but their endurability, even when at hard
work on insufficient food, surpasses all that can be imagined.
During a protracted scarcity of food, the Aleoute cares
first for his children ; he gives them all he has, and himself
fasts. ‘“[hey are not inclined to stealing ; that was remarked
even by the first Russian immigrants. Not that they
never steal ; every Aleoute would confess having sometime

282

Appendix

stolen something, but it is always a trifle; the whole is
so childish. ‘The attachment of the parents to their children
is touching, though it is never expressed in words or pettings.
The Aleoute is with dificulty moved to make a promise,
but once he has made it he will keep it whatever may happen.
(An Aleoute made Veniaminoff a gift of dried fish, but it
was forgotten on the beach in the hurry of the departure.
He took it home. ‘The next occasion to send it to the
missionary was in January; and in November and
December there was a great scarcity of food in the
Aleoute encampment. But the fish was never touched
by the starving people, and in January it was sent to
its destination. )

Home Life of the Eskimo

By Villialm Stefannson. From Harper's Monthly, October,
1908.

Stefansson lived for thirteen months in the household
of a Chief, Ovaynak, on the Mackenzie River, and knew
his subject well. He says :—

“With their absolute equality of the sexes and perfect
freedom of separation, a permanent union of uncongenial
persons is well-nigh inconceivable. But if a couple find
each other congenial enough to remain married a year or
two, divorce becomes exceedingly improbable, and is much
rarer among the middle-aged than among us. People of
the age of twenty-five and over are usually very fond of
each other, and the family—when once it becomes settled
—appears to be on a higher level of affection and mutual
consideration than is common among us. In an Eskimo
home I have neyer heard an unpleasant word between a

2.83

Civilisation : Its Cause and Cure

man and his wife, never seen a child punished, nor an old
person treated inconsiderately. Yet the household affairs
are carried on in an_ orderly way, and the good
behaviour of the children is remarked by practically
every traveller.

“These charming qualities of the Eskimo home may
be largely due to their equable disposition and the general
fitness of their character for the communal relations ;
but it seems reasonable to give a portion of the credit to
their remarkable social organisation ; for they live under
conditions for which some of our best men are striving—
conditions that with our idealists are even yet merely
dreams.”

Religious Beliefs among the Eskimos

From Rasmussen’s People of the Polar North, pp. 125 and
127. (1908.)

-“ Their religious opinions do not lead them to any sort
of worship of the supernatural, but consist—if they are to
be formulated in a creed—of a list of commandments and
rules of conduct controlling their relations with unknown
forces hostile to man.”

““ A wise and independent thinking Eskimo, Otag the
Magician, said to me of death: ‘ You ask, but I know
nothing of death; I am only acquainted with life. I
can only say what I believe: either death is the end of
life, or else it is the transition into another mode of life.
In neither case is there anything to fear. Nevertheless I
do not want to die, because I consider that it is good to
live.” This calm way of envisaging death is not unusual ;
I have seen many pagan Eskimos go to meet certain death
without a trace of fear.”

2.84.

Appendix

Periodical Distributions to Obviate Accumulations of
Wealth

From Kropotkin’s AZutual Aid, p. 97. (Heinemann,
1908.)

““(The Eskimos) have an original means for obviating
the inconveniences arising from a personal accumulation
of wealth—which would soon destroy their tribal unity.
When a man has grown rich he convokes the folk of his
clan to a great festival, and after much eating, distributes
among them all his fortune. On the Yukon river Dall
saw an Aleoute family distributing in this way ten guns,
ten full fur dresses, two hundred strings of beads, numerous
blankets, ten wolf furs, two hundred beavers and five
hundred zibellines. After that they took off their festival
dresses, and putting on old ragged furs, addressed a few
words to their kinsfolk, saying that, though they are now
poorer than any one of them, they have won their friend-
ship.t_ Like distributions of wealth appear to be a regular
habit with the Eskimos, and to take place at a certain season,
after an exhibition of all that has been obtained during the
year. In my (Kropotkin) opinion, these distributions
reveal a very old institution, contemporaneous with the
first apparition of personal wealth ; they must have been
a means for re-establishing equality among the members
of the clan, after it had been disturbed by the enrichment
of the few. ‘The periodical redistribution of land and the
periodical abandonment of all debts, which took place in
historical times with so many different races (Semites,
Aryans, etc.), must have been a survival of that old
custom.”

t Dall, Alaska and its Resources, Cambridge, U.S., 1870.
285

Civilisation : Its Cause and Cure

The Samoyedes

. From Icebound on the Kolguev, p. 384, by A. Trevor-Battye.
(Constable, 1895.)

““ Family affection among the Samoyeds is very strongly
developed. It would be impossible to find greater evidence
of this among any people. Another extremely marked
character among them is family order. All everyday offices
and occupations are carried out by a well-defined method
and subdivision of labour. I never saw a single instance
of anything approaching a family quarrel. . . . They are
very handy sailors, patient and successful hunters and fisher-
men, and admirable workmen with such tools as they
understand. No man can repair a damaged boat more
quickly than a Samoyed, and from the roughest drift-wood
(such as an English carpenter would throw on the fire),
they fashion bows, arrows, sleighs, spoons, drinking-
cups, bullet-moulds, and a variety of articles of everyday
use,””

The Belle of Ko!lguev
From Icebound on the Kolguev, p. 130.

“‘Her sister-in-law Ustynia was really, if you accept
the type, a pretty girl. . . . Her eyes were bright, and a
pleasant smile played about her lips. When she laughed
—and these people are always laughing—she betrayed the
most perfectly beautiful teeth it is possible to imagine.
Indeed all these people, even old Uano, had most wonderful
teeth—white, regular and perfectly shaped. On her fingers
Ustynia wore heavy rings of white and yellow metal,
and her hands, like those of all Samoyeds, were faultless in

286

Appendix
shape and extraordinarily supple. If you add to this a
dress reaching to the knees, formed of young reindeer
skin, worked in many stripes of white and brown, the
skirt banded with scarlet cloth and dogskin fur, and foot
and leg coverings of soft patterned skin reaching above
the knee—there you have Ustynia, the belle of Kolguev.”

The Todas
Quoted from The Todas, by W. H. Rivers (1906).

These people live on a very lofty and isolated plateau
of the Nilgiri Hills in South India; and are especially
interesting to us because till 1812 “they were absolutely
unknown to Europeans,” and developed their own customs
untouched by Western civilisation. “* They are a purely
pastoral people, limiting their activities almost entirely to
the care of their buffaloes and to the complicated ritual
which has grown up in association with these animals.”
(p. 6) . . . They have a completely organised and definite
system of polyandry. When a woman marries a man, it
is understood that she becomes the wife of his brothers
at the same time. When a boy is married to a girl, not
only are his brothers usually regarded as also the husbands
of the girl, but any brother born later will similarly be
regarded as sharing his older brother’s rights.” (p. 515.)

“The men are strong and very agile ;_ the agility being
most in evidence when they have to catch their infuriated
buffaloes at the funeral ceremonies. ‘They stand fatigue
well, and often travel great distances. . . . In going from
one part of the hills to another a Toda always travels as
nearly as possible in a straight line, ignoring altogether
the influence of gravity, and mounting the steepest hills
with no apparent effort. In all my work with the men

287

Civilisation: Its Cause and Cure

it seemed to me they were extremely intelligent. “They
grasped readily the points of any enquiry on which I entered,
and often showed a marked appreciation of complicated
questions. . . . I can only record my impression, after
several months’ intercourse with the Todas, that they were
just as intelligent as one would have found any average
body of educated Europeans. . . . The characteristic note
in their demeanour is their absolute belief in their own
superiority over the surrounding races. ‘They are grave
and dignified, and yet thoroughly cheerful and well-disposed
towards all.” (pp. 18-23.)

Nudity

Tue Perew Istanps: from J. G. Wood (vol. America,
p- 447). See Captain H. Wilson, who was wrecked
there in 1783.

“The inhabitants are of a dark copper colour, well-
made, tall, and remarkable for their stately gait. “They
employ the tattoo in rather a curious manner, pricking the
patterns thickly on their legs from the ankles to a few
inches above the knees, so that they look as if their legs
were darker in colour than the rest of their bodies. They
are cleanly in their habits, bathing frequently and rubbing
themselves with coco-nut oil, so as to give a soft and glossy
appearance to the skin. . . . The men wear no clothing,
not even the king himself having the least vestige of rai-
ment, the tattoo being supposed to answer the purposes of
dress. . In spite, however, of the absence of dress, the
deportment of the sexes towards each other is perfectly
modest. For example, the men and women will not
bathe at the same spot, nor even go near a bathing place
of the opposite sex unless it be deserted.”

288

Appendix

Natives of the Amazon Region

Alfred Russell Wallace, in his Travels on the Amazon
(1853), speaks most warmly about the aborigines of that
district—both as to their grace of form, their quickness
of hand, and their goodnatured inoffensive disposition.
He says (chap. xvii): “‘ Their figures are generally superb ;
and I have never felt so much pleasure in gazing at the finest
statue as at these living illustrations of the human form.”
In his My Life, vol. i, p. 288, he says: “ ‘Their whole
aspect and manner were different (from the semi-civilised
tribes) ; they walked with the free step of the independent
forest-dweller . . . original and self-sustaining as the wild
animals of the forest . . . living their own lives in their
own way, as they had done for countless generations before
America was discovered. ‘The true denizen of the Ama-
zonian forests, like the forest itself, is unique and not to
be forgotten.”

From The Putumayo, or Devil’s Paradise. By W. E.
Hardenburg (1912).

“The Huitotos are a well-formed race, and although
small, are stout and strong, with a broad chest and a promi-
nent bust; but their limbs, especially the lower, are but
little developed. . . . That repugnant sight, a protruding
abdomen, so common among the ‘ whites’ and half-breeds
on the Amazon, is very rare among these aborigines. . . .
Notwithstanding some defects it is not rare to find among
these women many who are really beautiful—so magnifi-
cent are their figures, and so free and graceful their move-
ments.” (p. 152).

** Unions are considered binding among the Huitotos,
and it is very rarely that serious disagreements arise between

289 +

Civilisation: Its Cause and Cure

husband and wife. ‘The women are naturally chaste, and
it was not till the advent of the rubber collectors that
they began to lose this primitive virtue—so generally met
with among people not yet in contact with white men”
(p. 154).

[N.B.—These were some of the people so villainously
tortured—men, women and children—for the collection
of rubber, by commercial scoundrels, whose atrocities were
exposed by Roger Casement and others. E.C.]

Fine Figures and Features of the Dyaks

Quotations from Beccar’s In the Forests of Borneo, pp.
325 and 329. (Constable 1904.)

“ On the morning of October 19, as previously arranged,
Ladja, with eight other Dyaks, came to the fort duly
equipped for the journey. Ladja was a handsome young
man, tall like most of his companions, slender, and beauti-
fully made. His profile was nearly regular, the nose
perfectly straight, but the cheek bones rather too prominent
and the chin rather pointed. His complexion was very
light.” . . . “Our Arno boatmen in Florence always
pole where the river is shallow, and use their poles exactly
as the Dyaks do theirs, only they certainly cannot compare
with the latter in the length of the journeys thus performed
with their light canoes. Ours literally flew over the water
handled with incomparable dexterity by my six young
savages. “There is to my mind no lighter and more
pleasant mode of progression, and certainly no kind of
work displays so well the elegant movements and perfect
proportions of these young Dyaks, who, practically un-
encumbered with clothing, are truly splendid specimens
of humanity.”

290

Appendix

From Ida Pfeiffer’s book Meine zweite Weltreise, vol. i,
p. 116. (Vienna, 1856.)

“I must confess that I would gladly have journeyed
longer among the free Dayaks. I found them wonderfully
honourable, gentle and modest ; indeed in these respects
I put them above any people that I have as yet become
acquainted with. I could leave all my things about, and
go away for hours together, and never was the least thing
missing. ‘They begged me occasionally for many an object
they saw, but immediately gave way when I explained that
I needed it myself. ‘They were never over-pressing or
tiresome. It will be said, in denial of this, that the beheading
of corpses and preservation of skulls does not look exactly
like gentleness ; but it must be remembered that this sad
custom is chiefly the result of rude and ignorant superstition.
I stick to my opinion, and as a further proof, would cite
their domestic and thoroughly patriarchal mode of life,
their morals and manners, the love that they have for
their children, and the respect their children show to
them.”

A Rodiya Boy

Ernst Haeckel in his Visit to Ceylon, describes the devo-
tion to him of his Rodiya serving-boy at Belligam near
Galle. ‘The keeper of the rest-house there was an old
man whom Haeckel, from his likeness to a well-known
head, called by the name of Socrates. And Haeckel con-
tinues : “It really seemed as though I should be pursued
by the familiar aspects of classical antiquity from the first
moment of my arrival at my idyllic home. For as Socrates
led me up the steps of the open central hall of the rest-
house, I saw before me, with uplifted arms in an attitude

291

Civilisation : Its Cause and Cure

of prayer, a beautiful naked brown figure, which could
be nothing else than the famous statue of the ‘ Youth
Adoring.’ How surprised I was when the graceful bronze
statue suddenly came to life, and dropping his arms fell
on his knees, and after raising his black eyes imploringly
to mine bowed his handsome face so low at my feet that
his long black hair fell on the floor! Socrates informed
me that this boy was a Pariah, a member of the lowest
caste, the Rodiyas, who had lost his parents at an early
age. He was told off to my exclusive service, and in answer
to the question what I was to call my new body-servant,
the old man informed me that his name was Gamameda.
Of course I immediately thought of Ganymede, for the
favorite of Jove himself could not have been more finely
made, or have had limbs more beautifully proportioned
and moulded,

*“ Among the many beautiful figures which move in
the foreground of my memories of the Paradise of Ceylon,
Ganymede remains one of my dearest favorites. Not
only did he fulfil his duties with the greatest attention and
conscientiousness, but he developed a personal attachment
and devotion to me which touched me deeply. The poor
boy, as a miserable outcast of the Rodiya caste, had been
from his birth the object of the deepest contempt of his
fellow-men, and subjected to every sort of brutality and
ill-treatment. He was evidently as much surprised as
delighted to find me willing to be kind to him from the
first. . . . I owe many beautiful and valuable contributions
to my museum to Ganymede’s unfailing zeal and dexterity.
With the keen eye, the neat hand, and the supple agility
of the Cinghalese youth, he could catch a fluttering moth
or a gliding fish with equal promptitude ; and his nimble-
ness was really amazing when, out hunting, he climbed
the tall trees like a cat, or scrambled through the densest
jungle to recover the prize I had killed.” (p. 200.)

2.92

Appendix

Second Sight

Native “‘ diviners” in South Africa, from The Spiritualism
of the Zulu, by C. H. Bull, of Durban.

** Many years ago I was riding transport between Durban
and the Umzimkulu. I checked my loads at Durban
and found them correct with the waybill, but when I
reached my destination I discovered that I was one case
short, for which I had to pay. On my return to my farm,
I mentioned the fact to my brother, who proposed, more
in the spirit of fun than anything else, that we should visit
a diviner, and endeavour to discover what had become of it.
I consented, and together we repaired to a native diviner.
He immediately informed us of the object of our visit,
although, so far as I can tell, it was morally impossible for
him to have known it through any ordinary channels,
and then he went on speaking as though in a dream: ‘I
see a waggon loaded with cases climbing up the Umgwababa
Hill ; there has been a lot of rain and the roads are slippery.
Half way up the hill the rains have washed a gully ; into
this the waggon lurches, displacing a small case, which
falls to the ground, but the driver, who is busy urging his
team up the hill, does not notice it. Now the waggon
has passed out of sight, but I see a Kaffir coming up the hill.
When he reaches the spot where the case is lying, he stops
for a few moments to examine it, and then proceeds to
the top of the hill, where he stands for a few moments
shading his eyes with his hand, as though looking beyond.
Now he returns to where the case is lying, and lifting it
up, crosses the road, and pushing his way through some
tall tambootie grass, he reaches a large indonie tree ; under
the tree there is a stunted clump of wild bananas. He places
the case in the centre of the clump, and after concealing it

293

Civilisation: Its Cause and Cure

with some of the dry leaves, he goes on his way. The
case is still there.’

“Though wholly incredulous of the truth of the vision,
I sent two ‘ boys’ to the spot indicated, and they returned
bringing with them the lost case, having found it exactly
where the diviner said that he saw it.”

The Zulus

Tue Zuxvus : Quotations from General Sir W. Butler’s
Naboth’s Vineyard, p. 263 (given in Blyden’s African
Life and Customs, p. 43).

“In all the sad history of South Africa few things are
sadder than the Zulu question. Where the Zulu came
(in those days), no lock or key were necessary. No man
who knew the Zulu—not even the white colonist, whose
rage was largely the result of his being unable to get servile
labour from him—could say that he had not found the
Zulu honest, truthful, faithful ; that the white wife and
child had not been entirely safe from insult or harm at
the hands of this black man; or that money and property
were not immeasurably more secure in Zulu charge than
in that of Europeans or Asiatics,”’

From Blyden’s African Life and Customs, p. 37.

“* There are to-day hundreds of so-called civilised Africans
who are coming back to themselves. “They have grasped
the principles underlying the European social and economic
order and reject them as not equal to their own as means
of making adequate provision for the normal needs of all
members of society both present and future—from birth
all through life to death. They have discovered all the

2.94.

Appendix

waste places, all the nakedness of the European system,
both by reading and travel. The great wealth can no
longer dazzle them, or conceal from their view the vast
masses of the population living under what they once
supposed to be the ideal system—who are of no earthly
use to themselves or to others. . . . Under the African —
system of communal property and co-operative effort, every
member of a community has a home and a sufficiency of
food and clothing and other necessaries of life—and for
life ; and his children after him have the same advantages.
In this system there is no workhouse and no necessity for
such an arrangement.”

Over-government

From Wallace’s Malay Archipelago, p. 336. (1894 edition.)

“This motley, ignorant, bloodthirsty, thievish popu-
lation (Papuans, Javanese, Chinese, etc.), live here without
the shadow of a government, with no police, no courts,
and no lawyers ; yet they do not cut each other’s throats ;
do not plunder each other day and night ; do not fall into
the anarchy such a state of things might be supposed to
lead to. Itis very extraordinary ! It puts strange thoughts
into one’s head about the mountain-load of government
under which people exist in Europe, and suggests the idea
that we may be over-governed. ‘Think of the hundred
Acts of Parliament annually enacted to prevent us, the
people of England, from cutting each other’s throats, or
from doing to dur neighbours as we would ot be done by.
Think of the thousands of lawyers and barristers whose
whole lives are spent in telling us what the hundred Acts
of Parliament mean, and one would be led to infer that
if Dobbo has too little law England has too much.”

295

Civilisation : Its Cause and Cure

Society without Government

From Morley’s Rousseau, vol. ii, p. 227, note. (Eversley
edition, 1910.)

*¢ Jefferson, who was American minister in France from
1784 to 1789, and absorbed a great many of the ideas
then afloat, writes in words that seem as if they were
borrowed from Rousseau: ‘I am convinced that those
societies (as the Indians), which live without government,
enjoy in their general mass an infinitely greater degree
of happiness than those who live under European govern-
ments. Among the former public opinion is in the state of
law, and restrains morals as powerfully as laws ever did any-
where. Among the latter, under pretence of government,
they have divided the nation into two classes, wolves and
sheep. I do not exaggerate; this is a true picture of

Europe.’” (From Tucker’s Life of Fefferson, vol. i, p. 255.)

Security without Government

From Tafilet, p. 353. By W.B. Harris. (Blackwood, 1895.)

“The Moors have a proverb, and it is a very true one,
that safety and security can only be found in the districts
where there is no government—that is to say, where the
government is a tribal one.”

Degradation through “ Civilisation ”

From The Spiritualism of the Zulu. By C. H. Bull, or
Durban.

“Thirty-two years ago, I lived for some time in a district
in Natal, then thickly populated with natives, still con-
296

Appendix

forming to the primitive customs of their race, yet honest,
manly and intelligent people, with very definite ideas in
regard to moral questions. After an absence of thirty
years, just prior to my sailing for England, I again visited
the district and was amazed to observe the change which
had taken place in the people ; their habits, characters and
physique. Sordid poverty, dressed in mean rags or tawdry
finery, suggestive of service to vice, had displaced the old
dignity, born of conscious physical strength and symmetry
of form, which once, though attired only in the trappings
that simple art could devise from the rough products of
nature, was characteristic ; whilst drunkenness, dishonesty
and immorality sought shelter under the meagre cloaks
of the religion dispensed by the different sections of belief,
established in the little iron, or wattle and daub churches,
which everywhere disfigured the country side. The
change was complete and deplorable, nor were the natives
unconscious of their degradation, or without regret for

the passing of the old days.”

Slavery

From Waitz’s Anthropologie der Naturvilker, vol. ii, p. 281.
(Leipzig, 1860.)

“One finds that the fate of Slaves among the ruder
peoples is much happier than among the civilised ; indeed
it seems to grow worse and worse in proportion to the
civilisation of the ruling folk. Strange and incredible as
at first sight this seems, the following facts establish it
beyond doubt. And indeed it is not difficult to explain.
The chief reason is that with the increase of merely
material culture, ‘Time and Labour-force are more and
more prized, and consequently always more violently and

297

Civilisation : Its Cause and Cure

‘unscrupulously exploited, while on the contrary among
primitive people in general a lesser value is placed on
these things.”

The Fraud of Western Civilisation

Extract from “A Letter to a Chinese Gentleman,” by
Leo Tolstoy. (Published in Saturday Review, Decem-
ber 1, 1906.)

““ Amongst all these Western nations there unceasingly
proceeds a strife between the destitute exasperated working
people and the government and wealthy, a strife which is
restrained only by coercion on the part of deceived men
who constitute the army; a similar strife is continually
waging between the different states demanding endlessly
increasing armaments, a strife which is any moment ready
to plunge into the greatest catastrophes. But however
dreadful this state of things may be, it does not constitute
the essence of the calamity of the Western nations. ‘Their
chief and fundamental calamity is that the whole life of
these nations who are unable to furnish themselves with
food is entirely based on the necessity of procuring means
of sustenance by violence and cunning from other nations,
who like China, India, Russia and others still preserve a
rational agricultural life.

“‘ Constitutions, protective tariffs, standing armies, all
this together has rendered the Western nations what they
are—people who have abandoned agriculture and become
unused to it, occupied in towns and factories in the production
of articles for the most part unnecessary, people who with
their armies are adapted only to every kind of violence
and robbery. However brilliant their position may appear
at first sight it is a desperate one, and they must inevitably
perish if they do not change the whole structure of their

298

Appendix

life founded as it now is on deceit and the plunder and
pillage of the agricultural nations.”

From O’Brien’s White Shadows in the South Seas. (New
York, 1919.)

“A hundred years ago there were 160,000 Marquesans
in these [South Sea] Islands. To-day their total number
does not reach 2,100.” O’Brien describes the bad effects
of Christianity on these “savages.” For he says the so-
called superstitions of these races had a great vitalising
influence. ‘Their dancing, their tattooing, their religious
rites, their chanting and their warfare gave them a zest in
life. But “to-day all Polynesians from Hawaii to Tahiti
are dying because of the suppression of the play-instinct
that had its expression in most of their customs and
occupations.” And they are now “nothing but joyless
machines” and “tired of life.”

Failure of Our Civilisation

For a searching comparison between our social conditions
and those of the many savage communities visited by him
—and much to the general advantage of the latter—see
A. R. Wallace’s Malay Archipelago (1st ed. 1869), pp.
456, 7 (ed. 1894). And he ends the book by saying :

= Until there is a more general recognition of this failure
of our civilisation—resulting mainly from our neglect to
train and develop more thoroughly the sympathetic feelings
and moral faculties of our nature, and to allow them a
larger share of influence in our legislation, our commerce,
and our whole social organisation—we shall never, as
regards the whole community, attain to any real or import-
ant superiority over the better class of savages. ‘This is
the lesson I have been taught by my observations of un-
civilised man.

“I now bid my readers—Farewell !”

299

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