¶1Waking World (1934) CONTENTS PREFACE I. THE SCOPE OF THIS BOOK A. COMMUNISM AND FASCISM B. ANOTHER OUTLINE C. HUMANISM AND SUPERHUMANISM II. THE WORLD-AIM A. STATEMENT OF THE SOCIAL IDEAL B. UNEMPLOYMENT AND TOIL C. THE HARMFULNESS OF MACHINERY D. THE TRUE VALUE OF MACHINERY III. THE WORLD TO-DAY A. OUR NATURE AND OUR NURTURE B. DECLINE AND FALL? C. THE ONE HOPE IV. ANIMAL AND MAN A. MAN’S ANIMAL CAPACITIES B. INTELLIGENCE AND IMAGINATION C. MAN MORE THAN ANIMAL V. PERSONALITY AND SOCIETY A. INTELLIGENCE AND THE ANIMAL LIFE B. SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS AND OTHER-CONSCIOUSNESS C. THE PERSONAL IDEAL D. SOCIETY AND THE WORLD-AIM VI. ART
¶2A. ART AND CRAFTSMANSHIP B. PURE ART, PLASTIC C. PURE ART OF OTHER KINDS D. SUMMARY OF THE IMPORTANCE OF ART VII. MODERN SCIENCE A. NEED FOR SCEPTICISM ABOUT SCIENCE B. AIMS AND METHODS OF SCIENCE C. THE NATURE OF MATHEMATICS D. PHYSICS, BIOLOGY, PSYCHOLOGY E. DETERMINACY AND FREEDOM VIII. THE VALUE AND DANGER OF MODERN SCIENCE A. SCIENCE AND THE PUBLIC B. TRUE SCIENTISTS AND TRUE CRITICS C. THE UPSHOT OF SCIENCE FOR THOUGHT IX. HISTORY A. METHODS AND PRINCIPLES OF HISTORY B. THE UPSHOT OF HISTORY X. PHILOSOPHY A. THE SCOPE OF PHILOSOPHY B. THE NECESSITY OF SCEPTICISM C. THE POSITIVE OUTCOME XI. RELIGION A. SHAM RELIGION AND GENUINE RELIGION B. EFFECTS OF GENUINE RELIGION C. HOW MEN INVENT GODS D. THE ESSENCE OF THE MATTER XII. CHRISTIANITY AND THE MODERN WORLD A. THE RELIGION OF LOVE
¶3B. THE CHRISTIAN CHURCHES C. OUTGROWING A GREAT RELIGION XIII. MAN AND FATE A. LOYALTY TO MAN AND DELIGHT IN FATE B. THE ANALOGY OF ART C. SCEPTICAL PROTESTS D. ECSTASY AND THE MORAL WILL E. A MYTH OF MAN AND FATE XIV. WORLD-REVOLUTION? A. THE ECONOMIC REVOLUTION B. PACIFISM C. DEMOCRACY, FREE SPEECH, THE WORLD-STATE D. THE EDUCATIONAL REVOLUTION XV. THE WILL FOR C HANGE OceanofPDF.com
¶4The first edition OceanofPDF.com
¶5PREFACE WHATEVER MERIT THERE is in this book is largely due to the fact that I have had the benefit of criticism by several alert minds of very different stamp. To Mr. Victor Gollancz’s shattering comments on an earlier and abortive experiment I owe much. I thank him for the tonic. To Mr. L. H. Myers, of Cambridge, who criticized the first version of many of the following chapters from a point of view remote from that of Mr. Gollancz, and differing from my own in the opposite direction, I owe more. Mr. E. V. Rieu helped me at a late stage to see what was wrong with the book as a book, namely that it was not a book at all. He caused me a lot of extra work which, I hope, has produced not only unity but also the point and drive which was lacking. Professor L. C. Martin, of Liverpool, gave detailed and most useful criticism of the whole. I tried hard not to call on him for help. Fortunately, though at the eleventh hour, I succumbed to the temptation. To my wife I am indebted for careful work on the proofs, and many helpful suggestions. Since most of the ideas here pieced together have been gathered from other men’s writings, I have given a short bibliography of works which, amongst many others, I have found helpful thinking about the various subjects treated, will be noted that they are very diverse, and some cases mutually repugnant.
¶6I am indebted to Messrs. Victor Gollancz Limited for permission to use certain passages from my contribution to An Outline for Boys and Girls; and to Messrs. George Allen and Unwin Limited who have allowed me to plagiarize from my chapter in Manifesto. O. S. OceanofPDF.com
¶7I. THE SCOPE OF THIS BOOK OceanofPDF.com
¶8A. COMMUNISM AND FASCISM THE PRESENT CRISIS in the affairs of man can be summed in a sentence. He has gained mechanical power, but he has not gained wisdom. He has stumbled upon a valuable and dangerous tool, and he uses it mainly for trivial ends. This book arises from the conviction that there is something more seriously wrong with the world even than economic and social disorder. Social reconstruction is, no doubt, our most pressing need. Owing to the fact that economic power is in the hands of a few, who wield it mainly in the interest of their own class, the great majority of human beings live cramped lives, and are unable to develop such human capacity as they have. Social revolution is the most urgent task before the world to-day. But if revolution is to achieve its end permanently and universally, if it is to carry mankind from our present condition of universal barbarism to universal civilization, it must be inspired by something more positive than the will to destroy a bad economic system. That the present economic system must be destroyed, or at the very least remoulded out of all recognition, appears to me indubitable. But if the revolutionary will to destroy it is to be worthy of its task, it must be inspired and controlled by the most penetrating and comprehensive insight into human nature, into the needs and potentialities of men and women, and especially into the needs and potentialities that young human beings will conceive when they are not born into a crippling and perverting economic environment. In fact the enduring purpose needed for world-revolution must be rooted in a conscious, and deeply felt, and far-reaching, ‘philosophy of life.’ The Russian Revolution was thus rooted. I am not in a position to judge whether
¶9the philosophical basis of Russian Communism, which was obviously capable of inspiring the actual revolution, is also adequate for the more delicate task of constructing a new society. From the little that I know of it I suspect that it is a far deeper and more pregnant thing than we of the West are inclined to believe. The official philosophy of Communism, as worked out by Lenin on the basis of Marx, is a direct expression of a passionate and generous experience in a mind of very great intellectual power. Of this there can be no doubt. The combination of devotion and clear vision enabled Lenin, not only to lead to victory a revolution which without him would very quickly have succumbed, but also to give to Russia an effective social ideal which, directly or indirectly, is changing the outlook of all the peoples. But whatever the truth about the philosophical theories of the Communists, the actual mentality of the new Russia is apparently in one respect no better than our own. Though the Communists of Russia have magnificently rejected the poison of Western economic individualism, they seem still to suffer from that more subtle disease of the Western world, the hypnotic reverence for machinery and mechanization. I do not suggest that the Russian Government has made a mistake in seeking to develop Russian industry. This policy was absolutely necessary. I mean that, like ourselves, the Russians seem to be allowing the usefulness and glamour of machinery to cast a spell upon their minds, in such a manner that, perhaps even more naively than the Western peoples, they tend to set up as their ideal for individual and for society sheer industrial activity. Russia is already deeply infected by what might be called ‘the mechanic’s mentality’. The mechanic is a useful, and in many ways a very admirable, type. But there are important aspects of the world and of human nature which his way of life tends to obscure from him. He tends to be ‘materialistic’, not in philosophy but in actual life. He is apt to be
¶10insensitive to all but the crude, material values. The cast of mind which mechanism produces is not such as can afford a satisfactory mental style for a whole civilization. Now the philosophical basis of Communism is a theory which is said to be ‘materialistic’. But this theory, which Communists call the ‘materialist dialectic’, merely asserts that the world is what it is, independently of human opinion and desire, and that everything in the world, including human society, changes in virtue of a necessity in its own nature. This is at the least a reasonable theory, and is a very different kind of ‘materialism’ from the materialism of the mechanic’s mentality. The materialistic philosophy of Communism is a development of the idealist philosophies of Spinoza and Hegel, and it does not seek to interpret the whole of existence in terms of ‘physical mechanism’. But the average Russian mind, like the average Western mind, is being far less influenced by philosophy than by nineteenth-century science, and its concrete manifestation, machinery. To-day, just when Western Europe is perhaps beginning to realize that its devotion to machinery is somewhat barren (partly through beholding its reductio ad absurdum in America), Russia and the East are enthusiastically sacrificing at the mechanic’s shrine. ‘The mechanic’s mentality’ is the product of a life dominated by machinery. Machinery is a product of Western science. But the huge success of machinery has itself had a very far-reaching effect on the development of Western science, and on the whole mental activity of Western man. It has inclined him to think certain kinds of thoughts rather than certain others, and to value certain kinds of activities rather than certain others. I shall discuss this matter in detail in later chapters. Meanwhile I will merely suggest that the most important of all problems before man at present is the problem of making full use of natural science, and of scientific invention,
¶11and of machinery, without succumbing to their hypnotic spell, without falling into the trance of ‘the mechanic’s mentality’. Or rather, the problem is no longer to avoid falling into that trance, but to struggle out of it, and thereby to discover at last the true use of science and of machinery. But though Communism has been seriously infected by the mechanic’s mentality, it has certainly inspired large numbers of men and women with a new social loyalty and zeal. To use a hackneyed phrase, it has given them a new vision. If that vision is in most cases limited to the cruder and less distinctively human values, the fault is due not so much to Communist theory as to the hypnotic spell of Western industrialism. One other serious fault, besides adulation of industrial power, is committed by Russian Communism today. The Government makes a resolute and seemingly successful attempt to impose uniformity of thought and feeling, or at least to prevent the public expression of ideas opposed to its own ‘ideology’. It educates the young in a thoroughly doctrinaire manner, instead of encouraging them to use their intelligence critically in all directions. This error, this most pernicious folly, is on the increase all over the world to-day. At a later stage I shall discuss the importance of free expression in some detail, but for the moment it is enough to assert dogmatically that freedom of speech, freedom of the Press, and impartiality of broadcasting, are absolutely essential for the creation of a fully adult human world. Even if they cause inconvenience to governments, they must never under any circumstances whatever be infringed. Any attempt to restrict them convicts the violating authority as barbarian and muddle- headed. But Russia is not the only country where free expression is restricted. Even in England, pioneer of free speech, a serious effort is now being made to copy the crazy policy of other countries in this respect. The coming fight
¶12for free expression in England is of world-wide importance. It seems to be the special task of the saner and more courageous sections of our own people to lead a crusade against this particular and most insidious kind of reaction. An effective struggle in England may well do immense service to the disheartened forces of sanity in Fascist Italy and Fascist Germany, where there is now less freedom of expression than in Russia. Fascism is at present the only social ideal which competes with Communism in its emotional appeal. Now Fascism is not a coherent theory or policy. It is merely a jumble of principles gathered from many sources, and used according to the exigences of the moment. But it has undoubtedly roused enthusiasm in the two great nations which have recently suffered seriously from a sense of inferiority. This enthusiasm seems to have two very different roots. Like Communism, Fascism makes an appeal to a distressed class, in this case the middle class. In Western Europe to-day the middle class is as important a factor as the proletariat. Any idea which captures its imagination is bound to have far-reaching effects, for good or ill. Fascism is, in part, a protest of the much-harassed middle class against the tyranny of big business on the one hand, and the dreaded upward thrust of the revolutionary proletariat on the other. But this is not the only source of Fascist enthusiasm. The other, though the less effective influence in Fascist policy, is the more significant root of Fascism for any one who would understand the present mental crisis of mankind. To the Russian Communist, Fascism naturally appears as no more than a backwash of the Capitalist torrent on its fated course toward disaster. There can indeed be no doubt that Fascism owes its power to the fact that big business has found a use for it, and is unobtrusively financing it. But to the sincere Fascist himself Fascism appears, I imagine, as a heroic protest of ‘ordinary decent folk’ against mechanization, against materialism, against
¶13the destruction of local culture by one or other of the two great mechanizing influences, namely Capitalism and Communism. The fantastic and often self-contradictory ideology of Fascism is, no doubt, a confused outcome of many conflicting needs, and of a vast campaign of propaganda which has sought to give those needs an expression convenient to the capitalists, the militarists, and the mere demagogues who thrive upon this movement. The result is a strange medley of borrowed ideas and slogans, and a policy which vacillates between sham socialism and frank capitalism, between technocracy and agrarianism, between peace and war. But beneath all this opportunism of Fascist leadership there lies, I suggest, in the rank and file of Fascists in all countries an obscure but sincere conviction that there is something radically wrong with the contemporary ‘scientific’ culture of Europe and America. Fascists are united in their hatred of ‘Bolshevism’, and by Bolshevism they seem to mean, not merely a social policy, but ‘materialistic’ culture and the mechanization of society. Unfortunately the leaders of Fascism, like their rank and file, are apparently quite incapable of critical thought, and so they have to fall back upon archaic notions and trivial ideals. Revolting against commercialism, they praise martial and barbaric virtues, the tribal spirit, and the fictitious entity which they call ‘the race Sickened by the ineffectiveness of so-called democracy, they crave a dictator, and ruthless suppression of all criticism. And inevitably their dictator, since ruthlessness is demanded of him, encourages the most flagrant hooliganism and sadism on the part of the horde of muddle-headed young men whom he uses to enforce his will. It is all extremely puerile, and pitiable, and extremely hurtful to the community. Owing to the sinister fact that Fascism, throughout the world, is financed and manipulated by big industrialists for their own ends, it has
¶14been changed from a confused but sincere emotional protest to a very serious menace, comparable in more ways than one to poison gas. But we shall not deal with it effectively if we ignore the underlying sense that civilization has somehow, somewhere, taken a wrong turn, that mechanization has led us to adopt false ideals, and that the view of human nature accepted by the typical ‘scientific’ culture of recent decades is incomplete. If this analysis is correct, one of the urgent tasks before us to-day is to work out and to propagate, in as simple terms as possible, a view of human nature which, though truly scientific and not sentimental or superstitious, shall also take into account the limitations of contemporary science. Further, with the help of such a comprehensive view of human nature, we must set forth a social ideal which shall make full use of man’s new-found mechanical power, and yet also pass far beyond the mechanic’s mentality. OceanofPDF.com
¶15B. ANOTHER OUTLINE IN THIS BOOK I shall describe human nature, or rather human behaviour, as simply as possible from a certain point of view which is at once very friendly toward modern science and very critical. I shall not try to give a detailed defence of my position or of the view which I observe from it. For the most part, I shall merely describe. I shall attempt to paint a picture, or at least to draw a very slight sketch, of man and his relation to the rest of things, as they appear from my chosen position. Of course, my sketch is certain to be only a very crude caricature, but caricatures have their use. They select and emphasize significant aspects of their subject. This, then, is really a book of dogmas. Take them or leave them; but do not expect me to defend them at all thoroughly, for that is not what I am setting out to do. An adequate defence would involve writing many books and repeating much that has already been said far better than I can say it. Few of the ideas contained in this book are original. Not even the pattern into which they are woven has any claim to be essentially novel. All I can hope is that this particular expression of them may be comprehensive and clear. A few of my dogmas are indeed more or less original; but these, like the others, appear without detailed defence. For my aim in this book is to paint a picture, not to prove that it is true to the facts of life. I shall, of course, try to say only what I believe to be true, or at least consider more likely to be true than false. The most that any one can possibly say on such a great subject as this must inevitably turn out in the long run to be mistaken. Nevertheless it may be well worth saying and
¶16hearing. Errors clearly expressed may lead to truth by clearly exposing themselves to criticism. The reader may protest, ‘Do you expect me to trouble my head about your dogmas if you yourself do not take them seriously?’ I answer that I do at present take them very seriously indeed. I believe (to-day) that the main tenor of this book is both true and important, that it presents (however inadequately) the body of truths which is most important for our age, the truth which must come to be believed far and wide if our civilization is to save itself from destruction. But I know very well that I may be mistaken, and I hold myself free to change my mind at any moment, perhaps even before this book appears in public. In the present fluid state of thought no individual has the right to adopt an attitude more confident than this. Of course, I do not feel that I shall, in fact, change my mind. I feel sure, probably much more sure than is reasonable, that my view, which grows clearer year by year, month by month, is the right view. But how often does that feeling mislead one! I refrain not only from defending my picture but also from filling it in with detail. I present only an outline. Now ‘Outlines’ are treacherous things. When they are lucid, they give the reader a dangerous illusion that he understands. When they are obscure, even if their obscurity springs from the author’s sheer muddle-headedness, they suggest to the reader that he is up against a mystery beyond the plain man’s comprehension. Such at least are the dangers of outlines of special subjects put forward by experts. But I am no expert. Though I have had some special training in philosophy, I cannot claim to be a professional philosopher. I am a ‘plain man’, though one who has had the opportunity of wandering from field to field of thought and of talking to experts at work in their respective spheres.
¶17I have brought away only gleanings. But these gleanings, gathered from many fields, are, I believe, good samples of man’s mental agriculture. But why not let the experts speak for themselves? I answer respectfully, but firmly. Specialists do not always see as clearly as spectators the relation between their special subjects and other activities. Human experience has become so very complicated that correlation of its many aspects is more necessary than ever; and correlation must be carried out, not simply by experts, but by persons who, though themselves unspecialized, are sensitive to the specialists, and have, moreover, a certain imaginative power of ‘seeing things whole’. I claim that power, or some degree of that power. Hence this book. It is for the reader to judge whether I substantiate the claim, whether I have that power in a degree adequate to the task of producing a helpful sketch of man in relation to his world. But for my own part, since I seem to see a clear and unifying principle running through all my experience of the world, I must try to describe the world in terms of that principle, even at the risk of producing a mere hotch-potch of the obvious and the preposterous. On almost every page of this book the reader may find statements which he will regard as too obvious to need restating, and others which will seem to him too dubious to be stated without lengthy defence. I make no apology. I have undertaken simply to trace out the pattern as it appears to me. Take it or leave it! The book may be rather good and significant; or it may be very bad and misleading. I do not pretend to know which it is. But the pattern which it tries to trace is for me the supreme thing in life. The world’s chief outliner is Mr. H. G. Wells. This little book cannot for a moment compete with the vast and able summaries which he has produced. It makes no attempt to do so. Mr. Wells is in his own sphere beyond criticism. To belittle his achievement as mere bourgeois blundering,
¶18or as mere plebeian blundering, is silly. But Mr. Wells does, it seems to me, ignore much that is of importance, and something that is of very great importance. I should say that, though he is an extraordinarily good observer and describer, the point of view from which he observes is not finally adequate. He adopts a position from which it is impossible to see things whole. Very much, I repeat, he sees with great accuracy and describes with great sincerity and courage. But something else is shut out from his vision. And because of this lack the whole picture that he paints turns out to be, in spite of its boldness and truth in so many respects, in others seriously incomplete, both as a photograph of man’s present state and as a symbol capable of firing him to change his state. I myself have learnt much from Mr. Wells. I gladly recognize that his work is of very great importance to our age. But I refuse to be blinded by gratitude. I must be at once grateful and critical. I must not overlook that character of his work which the Communist condemns as ‘bourgeois’, and that other character which the mental aristocrat condemns as ‘plebeian’. I find myself in the uncomfortable position of sympathizing with much that is said by both types of Mr. Wells’s critics. This is strange, for they do not often sympathize with one another. I am impressed by the Communist charge that he has greatly under-estimated the significance of the Communist movement throughout the world, both as a revolutionary force rooted (if I may so put it) in the dialectic of modern conditions, and as a germ destined to reorganize much of modern thought. In particular, he seems to me to do far less than justice to the doctrine of the economic interpretation of history. On the other hand, I agree with much of the criticism levelled against Mr. Wells from the opposite camp, criticism which, I imagine, good Communists would dismiss as mere ‘blather’ put up by the highbrow
¶19sections of bourgeois society. Now I am no highbrow, or only a very imperfect one. But bourgeois I certainly am, in up-bringing and in present circumstances. I live chiefly on dividends and other ill-gotten gains, even while I proclaim that the system on which I live must go. But live I must, or will; and so must, or shall, my family; and as amply as is needed for their development in personality. Having failed to earn enough by honest toil (toil there has been, but of a sort that society does not see fit to recompense adequately), I fall back with due thankfulness on dividends, until such time as the community has the sense to take to itself the ownership of the means of production, and to afford me some less disreputable source of income. Such being my case, it is clear that I am a bourgeois. Therefore, in the Communist theory, all my views about the individual and society are sure to be subtly and dangerously prejudiced by a capitalistic bias that I myself can never bring into the focus of my consciousness. Now I recognize that this may be so. I recognize that in this age both social organization and thought are passing through an exceptionally drastic revolution; and that people like me may be so blinded by circumstance that they cannot possibly contribute anything useful to that revolution; and, further, I am convinced that the body of ideas called Communism has a very important part to play in founding the new order. But also I remind myself that every great revolutionary movement tends, owing to the exigencies of the struggle and the uncomprehending bitterness of its opponents, to develop extravagance and blind dogmatism. It is very unlikely that Communism is an exception. It is possible therefore that some of those who, like myself, are outside the main current of revolution may yet be able to see some aspects of it which are obscured from the view of those who are in the thick of it. But to return to Mr. Wells. It is not my purpose to criticize his position in detail, but only to salute his achievement, and pass on, taking my
¶20difference with him as a point of departure. And this difference I would express by saying that, from my point of view, he is at once not Communist enough in social principles, and yet too limited in general outlook by the assumptions that lie not only under Communism but under all distinctively ‘modern’ thought. Mr. Wells is a ‘humanist’, at least in one sense of that word. He holds that the proper object of man’s devotion is man. But some of us feel that he does not take the whole of man’s nature into account. He regards man as a fairly intelligent mammal, which he is; but he does not see all that is involved in being such a creature. Mr. Wells never quite grasps the fact, or at least never thoroughly realizes the full implications of the fact, that the gifts of intelligence and imagination open up for man vast spheres of activity which cannot in the present state of knowledge be fully understood in terms of our biological concepts. These activities, and even the most subtle modes of them, are just as necessary to man’s human fulfilment as eating and mating are to his animal fulfilment. The purely biological view of man was a very wholesome reaction from the pre-scientific view. It made us realize that man is all of a piece with his world, and not a princely alien in a strange land. But those who are sympathetic to the biological view of man, and are able to reject the pre- scientific doctrines, incur a special danger. If they are not very careful, if they do not constantly exercise their critical powers on their own scientific theories as well as on the doctrines of the unscientific, they are likely to reject too much, to pour out the baby with the bath water, to ignore all that is most distinctively human, simply because it cannot yet be stated adequately in biological terms. With diffidence, but also with firmness, I would suggest, then, that the insufficiency of Mr. Wells lies in the superficiality of his view of human
¶21nature, and the consequent triviality of his particular kind of humanistic ideal. In this book I shall try to give a picture of human nature which will be more comprehensive, one which, though no less true biologically, will also do justice to the features of human nature which the primarily biological view cannot yet satisfactorily explain. OceanofPDF.com
¶22C. HUMANISM AND SUPERHUMANISM I SHALL ALSO attempt to do something of a different kind. It is no use ignoring the fact that many human beings crave more than the satisfaction which is afforded by humanism even in its most developed and comprehensive form. They need as the supreme ruling principle of their lives something more than loyalty to human society, or to the ideal of a perfected human society, or even a perfected human nature. They fully admit that these are very important principles which must be greatly strengthened if our world is to save itself from destruction or stagnation; but they feel an impulse of admiration, or of piety, toward something other than man. And this object of their piety, though they cannot describe it at all clearly either in religious or in scientific jargon, somehow gives a meaning and a passion to their human loyalty which otherwise would be lacking. It is as unscientific to belittle this impulse as it is to make it an excuse for superstition. Their purely scientific friends, and their purely humanistic friends also, tell them that they are simply deceiving themselves, that this craving for the superhuman, which has so misled men in the past, must be outgrown, that the vague object which they seem to discover is but a creature of their own desire. Well, though the people whom I have in mind are quite unable to accept any orthodox religious account of this obscure but compelling object of their piety, they are equally unable to dismiss it merely as illusion and a dangerous irrelevance.
¶23Toward the end of this book I shall try to complete my outline of man, or of man-in-his-world, by describing this impulse of piety in some detail, and distinguishing as well as I can between the essence of it and the doctrines that have grown up around it. I shall represent it as a genuine human capacity, and no mere aberration or perversion. I shall represent the object on which it is directed as no mere illusion. But at the same time I shall try to show that what generally passes for this piety is in fact nothing of the sort, and that the orthodox accounts of its object of worship are for the most part untrue and cramping to the fledgeling spirit of man. And I shall try, in all humility, to give an account of this piety and its object in such a vein as to help toward a clearer apprehension of them. This is the only part of my book which can make any claim to originality. The earlier part consists entirely of ideas selected from the chaotic mass of contemporary thought, and put together as a pattern. For the selection I am of course partly responsible, but not for the several ideas. For the main contention of Chapter XIII, however, no one can be blamed but myself. If, as is all too likely, I fail to effect a liaison between the relentlessly scientific people and the relentlessly religious people, and merely get myself ridiculed by the one party and damned by the other, or simply ignored by both, no great harm will have been done. Before giving any detailed account of human nature and its relation to the environment, I shall set down a purely abstract and even platitudinous declaration of the true social aim. I shall emphasize what should surely by now be obvious to all thinking persons, and should be unwittingly assumed by all others, namely that the social aim, the practical ‘world-aim’ is the fulfilment of man’s capacities, both his animal capacities and his distinctively human capacities, whatever these in fact are. I shall then
¶24briefly argue that mechanical power has put man for the first time in a position to realize this ideal, though it has also confronted him with very serious material and spiritual dangers. This also should be obvious, but is not universally recognized. Readers who have already clearly envisaged the ‘world-aim’ and the proper use of machinery are urged to skip these chapters. I shall then maintain that in our own day the state of the world is changing rapidly for the worse, and that the root of the trouble is not only economic, but psychological, or rather spiritual. Nothing can save us, I shall maintain, but a much more vivid and comprehensive view of human nature, and a much more resolute and much more widespread devotion to the ‘world-aim’. I shall then be ready to embark on my main theme, namely an account of man as a strange medley of three natures, the animal, the distinctively human, and a halting and bewildered propensity toward the superhuman. This will involve describing what I take to be the essential features of personality and personal relationships, and of the activities of art, science, history, philosophy and religion. The last two chapters will set forth a bare outline of the basic principles of action, which, I believe, must be rigorously adhered to if we are to pass from our present barbarism into true civilization. OceanofPDF.com
¶25II. THE WORLD-AIM OceanofPDF.com
¶26A. STATEMENT OF THE SOCIAL IDEAL IN THIS CHAPTER I shall try to set down the outlines of the ideally best kind of human world, the kind of world which, when we are mentally most awake, and able to take everything into account, we cannot but desire. In fact I shall indulge for a while in a blend of platitude and naive idealism. For this I make no apology. You cannot proceed upon your journey unless you know at least the general direction of your goal. We desire that every one in the world should live fully, according to his capacity. Now capacities vary. Even in the ideal world there would be many different types of people, fitted for the many different kinds of life which would be needed for the great communal life of the world. Some, for instance, would be apt at handicraft of one sort or another, others apt at organizing, others at inventing things, others at amusing their fellows, others at teaching. Some, again, would be fitted for creating works of art, some for exploring the physical universe scientifically, some for philosophy, and so on. Perhaps some would be best simply at being beautiful persons, excellent in mind and body, and some perhaps would be best at loving. But neither sort would be content to do nothing but be beautiful, or nothing but love; for every one in the ideal world would be a real human being, developed on every side. Still, I see no reason why there should not be some whose special gift lay in personal beauty, and whose first duty was to make full use of their gift. They would be the ‘film-stars’ of the ideal world. But they would be very different from our present film-stars. We desire that each may do chiefly what he can do best, and with a sense of fullest vitality in his work.
¶27We desire the work of each, and the whole life of each, to help, not hinder, the lives of others; and to fit harmoniously into the pattern of the whole world’s life. Each must be able to play his own special part in the great work of the world; and also each must enjoy and profit by the lives of others and their work. I do not mean merely that the growers of corn should have full enjoyment of the things made in factories, and the factory workers have as much corn and meat and vegetables as they require. This is obvious. But also each sort of worker must know what the other sort is doing, how he spends his life, what special troubles and delights come to him from his kind of work, and what difference his work makes to his outlook upon the world. We want the bank-clerk (or whatever in the ideal world corresponds to the bank-clerk), to realize what it is to hew coal in a mine, and to know how such work influences the character of a man; and we want the miner (or whatever in the ideal world corresponds to a miner) to know the same of the clerk. We demand all this so that there may be no waste of energy in strife between different workers or different minds, and’ so that each may be enriched by his understanding and his respect for others. The differences between us should not be such as to make us enemies. The greater the diversity of men’s characters the better, so long as they are also gifted with strong enough imagination to enter sympathetically into each other’s points of view. Differences should make us more interesting and valuable to each other. Each of us should be able to enlarge his own mind by seeing into and enjoying minds different from his own. The differences between Englishmen and Frenchmen and Japanese are of no value at all to the world unless Englishmen are enriched by understanding and admiration of those somewhat different beings, Frenchmen. And so with the rest.
¶28In the ideal world each person must know at least in outline the pattern of the life of the world; and prize it, and be proud to have a part to play in it. If he does not feel this, he will be a stranger, an alien in the world’s life; and sooner or later he will become an enemy of the world. He will run amok, and damage the intricate tissue of the world. He will be like a cancer cell in the great body of the race, living for itself alone and harming the whole. If he gains power, and help from others, he may do very great harm. The world that we seek to make must be such that in its general form it will seem right to every kind of person in the world. And the people of that ideal world must be all of them sane enough to approve of the pattern of the world. They will not, of course, all approve of every detail. They will often work to make changes in the organization of the world; and no doubt they will often disagree violently with each other’s suggestions. But if the world is really to be a satisfactory world, it must be of such a kind that any intelligent and right-minded man will gladly accept the general plan of it. And the people of the world must be all intelligent enough and right-minded enough to be able to appreciate the world and feel loyal to it. In spite of their great differences of character and talent, they must be able to agree to this extent. They must have this one precious thing in common. None of them must be so stupid or so mean that he cannot be a willing citizen of the world. None must be so unjustly treated, or so cramped and crippled by circumstances, that instead of rejoicing in the world, he hates it. None must come into the world with such a nature that he is bound to be a failure, either in body or mind, and therefore always miserable or harmful to others. None must be diseased or crippled or insane. There must be plenty of high- grade intelligence to do the exploring and the inventing, plenty of fresh and daring minds to see things in new ways and feel things in new ways, so as to do away with old outworn customs and traditions, and work out better
¶29ones. This pioneering will certainly lead to conflict between the originators and the rest, as in our own world. But there will be this difference that in the ideal world every conflict will always be tempered by consciousness of an underlying concord. Even in the ideal world there will be not only differences between persons of equal personal development, but also differences in degree of personal development itself. It is not true that men are born equal in personal capacity; nor is it, perhaps, desirable that they should be so. Even in the ideal world there will be a place for the relatively less awakened and a place for the relatively more awakened. But it is desirable that there should be none below a certain minimum of personal capacity, or mental development, namely the minimum which is required for intelligent and spontaneous participation in the corporate life of the community. It is desirable also that this minimum should be ever a rising minimum, so as to make possible an ever more awakened communal life. Though there will be many kinds of persons, and as many persons of each kind as are needed for the world’s full living, there will not be too many of any kind. Otherwise there would be overlapping and clashing of work, and also wasted lives. People would keep on interfering with one another. Many would have no chance of using their powers fully and for the common good. And so they would have nothing better to do than to be mischief-makers, hindering the lives of others and of the whole. In the ideal world each must have work, and work suited to his abilities. There must be no square pegs in round holes. No one who is by nature fitted for a life of action must be forced to do work which allows his powers no exercise. No one who is by nature timid must be put into a position of constant danger. Further, no one must be favoured, whether in respect of money or power or
¶30pleasure or education. A man should have special advantages only if for some reason the world needs him to have special advantages. In short, the world of men and women must be a thing worthy of all men’s loyalty, and therefore cherished by all, served by all, fully organized, but allowing plenty of freedom to every one. Each human being in the world must be allowed to live as seems best to him, except when what he wills is harmful to the world. But all will have been so educated that, whatever their differences, they will spontaneously desire always to subordinate their private good to the good of the world. Conflicts, of course, there will be within the organized world; but they must be only conflicts which serve the life of the whole, as conflicts between football teams serve the whole game, or as the strain between opposed muscles of a limb serve to keep it steady and under exact control. Wars there certainly must not be, but only rivalries in working well for the sake of the world. Within the world-group there will be many kinds of lesser groups, such as families, cities and peoples; and each group will, so far as possible, live its own life in its own way, and manage its private affairs. But the affairs that affect all in common will be managed by the world as a whole. We may sum the matter in a formula. We desire a world in which all may have the opportunity to fulfil their capacities for their own delight and the good of the world. And for the world as a whole we desire that it should be such as to realize the fullest possible development of human nature. This consists chiefly in the development of intelligence and imagination in such a manner that man may know the universe as fully and truly as possible, admire and cherish whatever is most admirable in it, and create a human society that shall become mentally ever richer and more awakened. This is the kind of world that we desire when we think seriously about the world as a whole. Unfortunately we have not only to desire it, but to
¶31fight for it, in one way or another. If we are to do this, we must will it earnestly and constantly. And if we are to do this, we must see it with the mind’s eye. We must imagine as clearly and as fully as we can the world that we intend to make. It must come alive in our hearts. We must prove it on our pulses. OceanofPDF.com
¶32B. UNEMPLOYMENT AND TOIL THIS SECTION, LIKE the preceding one, will seem to some readers a laboured platitude. Let them merely glance at it to assure themselves of its obviousness, and then pass on. There are other persons for whom this extremely important platitude may still be arresting. Anyhow it must be stated, since it is essential to my argument. It is one thing to see what kind of a world would be best, or most desirable, and another thing to decide how far it is possible to realize that ideal in this very unsatisfactory world of ours. Nevertheless there is today a real and unique opportunity of producing a state of affairs much more like the ideal than was possible in any earlier age. We are often told that the hard facts of life make it quite impossible in any age and any society for more than a very small number of persons to have the chance of fulfilling the finer, more developed capacities of human nature. Most, it is said, must inevitably spend their strength in cramping toil of one sort or another. Men’s bodies have to be kept alive. They must have food. And food can only be produced by hard labour on the soil. All the necessaries and comforts of our civilization depend, not only on machine power, but on the movements of the muscles of men and women during the long working hours of each day. At the end of the day the workers are bound to be too tired to do more than rest and amuse themselves in easy ways. Whatever finer powers they may have at first, these are doomed to disappear through lack of exercise. The most that the toiling masses can expect of life is physical health and comfort and as much easy play as they can cram into their scanty leisure. The only kind of more awakened activity
¶33that they can possibly enjoy is personal intercourse. In mutual understanding, co-operation, friendship, family affection, sexual love, they have, no doubt, some insight into human personality. But, we are told, since all those with whom they have intercourse must be undeveloped personalities like themselves, even their appreciation of personality must necessarily be crude and blundering. A few individuals who happen to be very fortunate, or very brilliant and resolute, may escape from the necessities of soul-destroying labour; but the millions of their fellows, even the many who have it in them to develop finely, are doomed never to enjoy, never even to suspect the existence of, the more awakened kinds of human living. They must remain too tired and dull and inexpert to apprehend the more subtle features of personality, or to appreciate art, science, and philosophy, or to form a clear and commanding vision of the enterprise of man on this planet. Not long ago this argument seemed unanswerable. Even for the present generation it holds good in the main. But if it is meant to refer to the future, even the near future, it is entirely false. The economic circumstances of mankind are changing every year, every day, under our eyes. Very soon there will be, or there should be, no need whatever for men and women to spend their lives in cramping toil. Indeed even today, if we could contrive to reorganize the economic structure of society, we could do away with all life-long drudgery, and also ensure that every one should have the means for much richer fulfilment than has been the lot of most men hitherto. Certainly, even in our day, no one who has the finer capacities should be forced to go through life without using them. So quickly are the circumstances of mankind changing, that already, even while we continue to cry out against the necessity of toil, we are also crying out against the fact that there is no longer enough toil to go round, and to produce a miserable
¶34wage for every one. The fact that mankind is rapidly learning to keep itself alive and in comfort without toil should be a blessing; but owing to our bad economic organization and our confused thinking it is turned into a curse. Every country to-day has, or soon will have, its ‘unemployment problem’. Every country tries to increase toil within its own borders, and to prevent other countries from toiling for it. In our society, ‘unemployment’ is bad for two reasons. The first is that most people can only obtain money by working for wages, and without money they cannot gain any fullness of life. But strictly speaking this means not that unemployment itself is bad, but that in our society it produces a bad effect, namely poverty, the lack of money to spend on fulfilling one’s capacities. Society in our age is organized, so far as the economic slaves are concerned, on the principle of ‘no work no pay.’ This principle arose in a world in which work was necessary to society and toilsome to the worker. There is no reason why it should continue to hold good in a world in which drudgery is ceasing to be needed for the maintenance of society. Our age, of course, is transitional. A great deal of toil is still necessary. An immense amount of human pulling and pushing, and other monotonous work, must still be done; and must be paid for in wages, so long as society is organized on the principle of wages. But this is no reason why we should refuse a full livelihood to those from whom we no longer need toil. Of course, in our transitional age it is bound to be very difficult to discard the outworn principle that a man must toil in order to live, and to organize society on a principle suited to the modern world. The present world-economic crisis and its consequent unemployment problem are hard facts which it will take all man’s skill to conquer. But let us never forget that the problem is simply one of organization. There is nothing in the
¶35physical world to prevent us from creating such a prosperous and such a vital society as has never before existed. If all goes well, we shall be able to produce, decade by decade, more and more goods with less and less human toil. There is no lack of demand for the goods. Nearly two thousand million people are needing them. The difficulty is simply to get the goods to the people. And this difficulty is caused wholly by our fantastic economic system. The second reason why unemployment is bad in our world is that inactivity deadens a man’s powers of action. He loses the habit of spurring himself to effort, and he loses or never acquires the skilled capacities which work entails. He also feels himself to be stranded, useless, left out of the world’s activity. This feeling destroys his self-respect, or fills him with hate against the world. At present, as we all know, unemployment in the industrial nations is doing great damage. Millions of people, even if they are not actually starving, are living in misery and suffering a steady moral decay. Very much precious human capacity is failing to find a healthy expression, and is failing to be of service to society. This is indeed a tragic state of affairs. But many people still hope to remedy it in a way which is bound to fail, and would be disastrous if it could succeed. Many want simply to decrease unemployment by restoring the old tyranny of toil in the world. They desire only to see the unemployed once more grinding out their lives in low-grade activities in exchange for a bare livelihood. But unemployment has come to stay. What we must do is to turn it into a blessing instead of a curse. Or rather, industrial unemployment has come to stay; and this fact gives us a unique opportunity to ensure that men shall be able to employ themselves in other and more vital ways.
¶36The present increase of unemployment has evidently two distinct causes, namely the decline of markets and the rapid increase of labour- saving devices. It is not for me to explain the economic causes of the decline of markets, but clearly it is in part due to causes inherent in the capitalist system. Capitalism can only thrive on expanding markets. If expansion ceases, decline must occur. World-planning could perhaps have saved capitalism. But since economic individualists have sought, in the main, private profit rather than social prosperity, there has been an almost complete absence of economic planning on the world scale, and even on the national scale. The confusion has been complicated by economic nationalism. Each nation desires to give industrial employment to its own members rather than to foreigners. For if a nation contains a large number of unemployed persons, much wealth has to be spent in keeping them alive; and they give nothing in return. Now this ungoverned individualism and this nationalistic dread of losing employment to other nations could be overcome by world-planning. Of course, the problems involved are extremely complex; but I cannot believe that they are so complex as to defeat human intelligence. What prevents them from being solved is the fact that the class which is at present in power over-estimates its own importance and the importance of the social system which it supports. The other cause of unemployment, the increase of labour-saving devices, is of a very different kind. It might, perhaps, with great difficulty, be abolished if nearly all men agreed to abolish it. But they certainly will not agree. And anyhow if they did, the result would be disastrous. Ever since the beginning of the mechanical age some have urged that machinery ought to be abolished; and to-day many hold that it ought at least to be severely restricted, so that the old manual labour may once more be needed, and men may once more find employment. Now perhaps in
¶37particular cases, when an invention threatens to throw thousands of men suddenly out of work, this restriction of machinery may be necessary for a while. But to stop the whole great tendency toward mechanization is impossible, and would be retrograde. The fact that machinery has been used very largely hitherto for evil must not blind us to the immense good which might come of it if it were wisely used. Doubtless in our day man is in a sense a slave of machinery; but there is no reason why he should not break free, and use the tyrant as an obedient and mighty djinn for the making of a more fully human world. OceanofPDF.com
¶38C. THE HARMFULNESS OF MACHINERY LET US TRY to form a clearer idea of the kind of world which machinery should make possible, if we can reorganize our economic system, and if we can keep clearly in view what it is that is desirable. Machinery has not yet come into its own. It has scarcely begun to take effect on the life of mankind. But probably, if invention is allowed full scope and nationalism does not lead us into successive world-wars, not many years will pass before it is possible for us to abolish or very greatly reduce every kind of toil which is too fatiguing or too monotonous to be a wholesome life-work for a human being. There will be no longer necessity that any one, in order that society may be kept going, should spend his best hours in mere pulling or pushing, or in executing day after day some single movement in a factory. Every kind of routine work will be done automatically by machines that are self-regulating, or by the pressing of switches, or the dropping of coins into slots. Only where there is a call for intelligent control will human action come into play, only where there must be skilled adjustments, or new correlations of one operation with another, or the invention of new processes. Now a world which was completely mechanized in this way might be either very good or very bad. There are some people who seem to think that it must be good. Apparently they feel that intricate mechanical operations are the true end of human life. Or perhaps they would argue that the sole purpose of machinery is to enable large numbers of persons to occupy their whole lives with such low-grade pleasures as the tired workers of today seek in their evenings. If all the work is done by machinery, then, they say,
¶39life will be one glorious uninterrupted holiday. In fact we shall all be the ‘idle rich’. Such a state they regard as satisfactory. Others, horrified by this prospect, feel that a completely mechanized world must be bad. In such a world, they say, there would be nothing worth doing. Every one would be bored to distraction. Men would lose all their fine qualities, their courage and skill, their generosity and loyalty, all that makes human nature admirable. No doubt there would still be intelligence, but it would be only a very low kind of intelligence, fit only for controlling machines, a sort of mechanic’s cunning. Moreover, they see another danger. A great deal of unintelligent labour, they think, would still be necessary for the daily routine of tending the machines. A perfectly mechanized world, then, would sooner or later come to consist of two classes. There would be a managing class, highly intelligent in the mechanical way; and also there would be an almost sub- human working class, consisting of creatures specialized for the various kinds of routine work, and incapable of anything but their work and the simplest animal pleasures. Such a world would, indeed, be very bad. No one in it would be a real human being. It would be no better than a huge ant’s nest. The harmfulness of mechanization does not lie solely in its grinding, crippling effect on the workers, though that is very grievous. The real trouble lies deeper. Both workers and employers, and indeed all individuals in a mechanized society, become mentally poisoned by the prevailing atmosphere of mechanization. A mechanized society is one in which all individuals tend to become over-specialized. All have to adapt themselves to very special functions, and have no experience of life beyond their particular grooves. Each becomes a mere cog in a huge machine. Moreover in a mechanized society machinery comes to dominate most minds to such
¶40an extent that unwittingly they incline to regard mechanical industrialism as good in itself. To produce goods at an unheard-of rate, to travel at an unheard-of speed, to displace man-power by machine power in field after field, come to seem a sufficient goal for human endeavour. In such a society the life of the mind inevitably suffers. Education of a sort may become more wide-spread; but it will not be true education. It will seek to equip individuals to be efficient cogs in the great machine, to fit them each for his special function, and all with an identical set of ‘machine-made’ and socially approved ideas. Such is the charge which is justly made by those who inveigh against the effects of machinery in our modern world. But though their diagnosis is correct, their cure is impracticable, and also deadening. They urge us to do away with machinery, and to go back to the good old days of handicrafts, when every man’s work was varied, and to some extent skilled. Indeed, in a sense it was even creative, since it consisted not in the monotonous performance of a stereotyped act, but in the production of a finished object. In those days, they say, every man could fulfil much of his capacity in his work. He could live in his work. In a mechanized world, he cannot. Now there is indeed a very real danger in mechanization. All around us we see a tendency towards the state of affairs which these prophets describe. But the danger lies not simply in machinery, but in our inability to put machinery to its proper use. If the mass of men and women can be induced to form a clear idea of the world that might be created, and if they can be persuaded to desire it, mechanization will be a blessing, not a curse. Indeed, without complete mechanization, that world cannot exist. OceanofPDF.com
¶41D. THE TRUE VALUE OF MACHINERY THE TRUE FUNCTION of machinery is to emancipate all men from drudgery and to give to all the opportunity of living a fully human life. In the world which we desire to create there will be no ‘working class’. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that every one will belong to the working class, but work will be a very different kind of thing from the drudgery that constitutes work for most men to-day. Our great populations of tired, ill-clad, ill-developed, ill-educated ‘workers’ will have vanished as a mist melts in sunlight. The mass of mankind, on whom in the last resort the policy of the world depends, will not be the anxious, jealous, bewildered, easily hating creatures that they are to-day. They will move through their streets and their fields with the assurance of free men, knowing clearly what they want, responsible for their world, and well content with it. Their minds will not be haunted by the problem of earning a little more. They will not be obsessed by class resentment. They will not be satisfied with the ludicrously trite amusements of the populace to-day. They will be chiefly concerned with two things, two kinds of genuinely human activity. First, each person will be occupied for part of his time with his own share of the practical work of keeping the world-society in being, or advancing its life into new spheres. Second, all will be very largely employed in understanding and enjoying the world and all those countless beauties and mysteries which are properly the main occupation of full- grown human minds. In fact we must make a world in which, for the mass of men, frustration, pain, grief will be so reduced as to be no longer an intolerable and deadening burden but a vitalizing challenge, a world in
¶42which joy will be the rule and sorrow the needed exception. There must be for every man and woman joy of every order, from the loftiest possible to him to the common daily delights and animal well-being. Is this nothing but a fantastic dream? Far from it. It is very serious practical politics. We are conceiving a world which, though, of course, it cannot spring into being to-morrow morning, should already be the conscious aim of world-policy, and might, if we set our minds to it, begin to be realized to-morrow, and be well advanced within fifty years. In that world much of the practical work will consist of the control of mechanical processes. The making and care of machinery will be one of the commonest outlets for the constructive impulse. Intellectuals often despise this kind of activity; and indeed in the case of uneducated persons, or half- educated persons, contact with machines certainly can produce a harsh and insensitive kind of mind. But to the mind that is well nurtured, and not in danger of cloddishness or harshness it can be, in its degree, an enlightening activity. Possibly, if the ‘highbrows’ had some actual acquaintance with it, they would come to realize that it has its own special value in disciplining the mind and keeping it in touch with concrete reality. In no other pursuits, save scientific experiment (which will also be common), is there a more imperious need for accuracy and conscientiousness, or a better opportunity of gaining a vivid sense of the independent reality of the material world. It is not to be regretted, then, that in the ideal world many will probably be by profession either scientists engaged upon practical invention, or engineers, or agriculturalists, or that, since large-scale agriculture will be completely mechanized, the typical agriculturalist will be something of an engineer. There will no doubt also be a great deal of intensive manual agriculture, of the ‘market gardening’ and horticultural types. This will be
¶43carried out largely for the joy of the work, but also for experimentation and superfine production. The amount of human energy, of strength and intelligence and will, spent on this task of keeping material civilization in being, will be a very small proportion of the total available human energy. How should the rest be spent? In the first place, whatever a man’s official practical work might be, he would probably not devote to it more than three or four hours a day. It might be thought desirable that every one should play some part in the upkeep of material civilization; and so work of this kind would perhaps be very carefully ‘rationed’. The fact that so much human energy will be set free from the task of maintaining the bare necessities of civilization might have one surprising and very good effect. Many kinds of articles which in our day are produced solely by machinery might once more be produced by hand with all the loving skill and originality of the true craftsman. A good deal of furniture, pottery, woven materials, and certain kinds of metal articles, might be made in innumerable hand-workshops in every land, not simply as a means to gain a livelihood, but for love of the work, and for the privilege of producing things of beauty for the service of society. There are appropriate uses for machine-made goods, and appropriate uses for hand-made goods. There is also an appropriate beauty of machine-made goods, and an appropriate beauty of hand-made goods. In the ideal world men would be in a position to make full use of both, and appreciate both, each in its special way. As I see it, a great deal of the surplus energy of the race would be spent on handicrafts. But just as no one in the ideal world would be a mere engineer or agriculturalist, so no one would be a mere craftsman. No one would be a
¶44mere anything, though every one would probably have some particular kind of work as the first and most important call on his energy. There will no doubt be many whose main task is to organize or correlate the activity of others, not in the spirit of the master or governor but rather in the spirit of the ambassador or liaison officer. But no one will be solely an organizer. One very large class of persons will be the teachers, but they, like the rest, will spend only a short time on professional work. Many of us who are fortunate in our work would, in certain moods, gladly spend all day and all night upon it. I do not suggest that in the ideal world such enthusiasm would be discouraged. But it would be restricted by the definite social convention that a man must keep himself in perfect physical condition, and mentally responsive to the surrounding life of the community. Hours of official work would probably be short, holidays would be frequent and long. Many people might spend much of their time on skilled physical activities, such as games, swimming, skating, rock-climbing. Dancing of various kinds might play an important part in life. There would, of course, be much social intercourse both of a light and a serious nature. Every one would have plenty of time to make many intimate friends and to be constantly coming into contact with strangers whose lives are cast in different manners from his own. Long holidays would be spent in travel over all the continents. There would be an immense amount of reading, not merely of the desultory kind, but also serious study for sheer love of knowledge, and in sheer admiration of the complexity and delicacy of the universe, including, of course, human nature. Probably there would be much listening to radio programmes, light and serious. Music would be an important factor in the life of the world. Not only would every one have the opportunity of listening frequently to the best music performed by leading musicians, but also those who had musical ability would spend much time
¶45in musical performance, to the delight of themselves and their friends. There would be much pure art of every sort, much painting, sculpture, literature. There would also be widespread scientific research in which the motive would be the will to increase man’s knowledge of the universe; and there would be a still wider interest in the progress of science. There would also be much philosophy; every intelligent person would be a philosopher to some extent. This is the kind of world that machinery makes possible. This is the kind of world which, we may hope, is actually coming into existence, though slowly, painfully and precariously. We live in the death-throes of the old world and the birth-throes of the new. Unfortunately most of us are still afraid to help that birth. We prolong the agony of the change by seeking to mend and bolster up the old world, for we are mostly blind to the possibility of the new world. Perhaps we are blind because we do not really want it, because we are still obsessed with the outworn values of the old world, especially with cravings for private wealth and national power. In the world of the future, when it is at last fully established, the most serious attention of mankind will be given to art, science, philosophy, and in some sense religion. I do not suggest that every one will spend very much of his time amusing himself by dabbling in these activities; though indeed most people will doubtless seek serious experience of them. I mean rather that art, science, philosophy and religion will be universally recognized as the supreme functions of human society; much as, in our day, national power is often regarded as the final justification of all policy. Art, science, philosophy and religion will not merely be regarded as fulfilments of individual capacity; they will be taken to be also the supreme enterprise of the community, of the organized human race.
¶46Perhaps this point should be rather differently expressed. It is more accurate to say that the supreme enterprise of human society will be the advancement of the human spirit toward a goal which is ever veiled, yet ever revealing itself; and that for the present, and for ages to come, such advancement must consist in art, science, philosophy and religion, and the perfecting of world-society itself. The goal of human action is not strictly a goal, a fixed point to be attained, but a direction in which to strive. Most accurately, but perhaps rather barrenly, it may be described in this way. It is the broadening and deepening of man’s knowledge of the universe, the refining of his appreciation of all that calls for admiration in the universe, and the actual beautifying and perfecting of the only bit of the universe which is at present under man’s control, namely the human world itself. Nothing less than this can be the supreme goal or direction of human activity. In our day the world-society of men and women is so disorganized, and men and women themselves are in the main so hopelessly crippled and blind, that it may well seem a waste of time to talk about a supreme goal. The house is on fire. Some urge us to drop art and philosophy, and use science only for the invention of fire-extinguishers. But if the trouble was caused by the fact that the house was inhabited by a lot of wild children who had nothing better to do than play with lighted matches, it is just as important in the long run that they should discover the true use of a house as it is that they should put out this particular fire. Some say that if this ideal world were to be made actual, life would lose its savour, and the human spirit, spurred no longer by adversity, would soon become debased, slothful, and obtuse. With justice they point out that there is danger in perfect freedom of activity, complete absence of tension, the resolving of all conflicts, the abolition of all repressions. Only in the tension of antagonist muscles can a limb function properly. Only through the
¶47conflict of opposed desires can the mind become mature, learning to rise above its conflict to a higher order of percipience and will. Only through the strife of opposed groups within the social order can the community avoid stagnation. All this is true. Man’s finest achievements are expressions of frustration and agony. But there is no cause for anxiety. It will be time to guard against a dearth of frustration when, through triumphant social advance, it appears as a real danger. In our present distressed world, we need not trouble about any hypothetical dearth of distress in the ideal world. Moreover the ideal world is not a static world, in which all ends are already attained. It is one which, by its very nature, will be continually opening up before itself new vistas of endeavour, new worlds to conquer. When we compare man and animal, we find that man has not only the greater possibility of pleasure, but the greater possibility of distress also. His life is not necessarily more pleasurable and less painful, but it is more vital; and, because of its more difficult enterprise, it demands more, not less, courage and loyalty and intelligence than any animal could muster. As I see it, the same relation will hold between the more vital world of the future and our present world. The future will call out more, not less, of man’s distinctively human powers. If all goes well, there will probably come a time when every one of the particular problems which now distress and perplex man so grievously will have been finally solved; but upon a higher plain of mentality, and with a higher order of difficulty, new problems will ever arise and confront the race with desperate situations, perhaps even far more terrible than our own. OceanofPDF.com
¶48III. THE WORLD TO-DAY OceanofPDF.com
¶49A. OUR NATURE AND OUR NURTURE HAVING SAID WHAT, in my view, is the true world-aim, the only sane ideal for human society, I shall now say something about the difficulties which stand in the way of attaining that ideal. Though we must have the courage to be idealists, we must also face the actual at its worst. The root of all our trouble is this. The truly civilized world that we desire has to be created by the barbarian world that exists. The halfsavage beings of the present world have stumbled upon tremendous powers which can be used either for good or ill. And since on the whole the will of a halfsavage race is inevitably low-grade will, though in the main not positively evil will, there is a very serious danger that those tremendous powers will be used on the whole blindly and destructively. The present world is composed of individuals most of whom are doomed by innate constitution and also by circumstance to be of mediocre calibre. The great majority of us are by nature rather stupid, rather unimaginative, rather callous toward one another, little able to control our more trivial impulses even for the sake of ends which we ourselves recognize as supreme. A few, no doubt, are of much higher type than others, but as a species we are still on the whole blind and weak. The difference between ourselves and the apes is far less than the difference between us and the ideally developed human type which we can already vaguely conceive, but cannot attain. Nevertheless, poor as our inborn nature is, it is capable of very much finer achievement than is possible in the circumstances of the present world. If society could be drastically reorganized according to the best principles as yet known to us, even without any eugenic alteration of the present
¶50innate constitution of man, our grandchildren might grow up to be as mentally superior to ourselves as we are to the most abject savages. Our intellectual and moral unsoundness is due far less to nature than to nurture. Even to-day those few who are psychologically fortunate in early life may display in maturity such a generous and well-grown mentality as we are tempted to call god-like. But these are a minute minority. Most men have no chance of developing properly such capacity as they possess. The circumstances of most lives are hostile to the proper growth of body and mind. Physically, whole populations are stunted or actually diseased. Mentally, there is scarcely an individual among us who is not in some respect distorted. The laws of physical health are, indeed, becoming known to some extent. We are even beginning to apply this knowledge, and to take pride in developing our bodies as fully as possible in strength and beauty. But of the laws of mental health we know as yet little, and what we know we seldom apply. Though physically we are no longer pock-marked, deformed and prematurely senile, mentally the great majority of us have secret festering sores. Some grow permanently distorted. Most are cramped into rigidity of mind even before their bodies reach full maturity. In childhood we are marred by parents and other adults who have neither talent nor experience to fit them for their work. They do as well by us as they have it in them to do; but the upshot is that we are one and all deformed. Not merely our feet, as in old China, or our heads, as in certain parts of Africa, but our very minds they patiently, stupidly, lovingly, or with unconscious hate, bind and distort. Little by little, year by year, in the nursery and at school, we are clipped and trimmed into the herd-approved pattern. All the ‘correct’ sentiments are cultivated in us. We are trained to respond with the orthodox emotion to all the well-worn out-of-date phrases, to ‘King and Country’,’ the British
¶51Empire’,’ the English gentleman’, to ‘the done thing’, the ‘not done’, and so on. The coarser-grained among us easily adapt themselves to their coarse- grained environment, and soon become at home in a world of misshapen minds. The more sensitive among us, and the more vital, are tortured into a bitter madness of their own. Since those who thwart and shame us most inwardly are those whom on other accounts we trust and love, our minds are torn between conscious love and a hate which is all the more harmful through being, in most cases, unconscious. Through such conflicts we develop deep strains and stresses, which, though we may be unaware of them, torment and confuse us for ever after. We grow up with the need to love; but at the same time, since we are wounded and abased, we contract a need to hate, and an unacknowledged delight in cruelty. We come to take a devilish self-righteous joy in torturing whatever we can contrive to condemn. And since those whom we condemn most zestfully are those of whom we are secretly jealous for their power or their excellence, these we most delight to hurt. We are primed with all the accepted moral principles, such as the gospel of love and gentleness, universal brotherhood, contempt for riches and material power. But we soon discover that in actual life these principles are not practised. Through the overwhelming force of suggestion and example, and even deliberate exhortation, most of us come to accept the conviction that the important things in life are patriotism and personal success. From biased history books and newspapers we learn that our own nation is the greatest in the world, always right, always wronged, always victorious in war, specially gifted to lead the world. Though we are made to pay lip- service to peace and internationalism, we are more effectively encouraged to admire military prowess and all the trappings of war.
¶52Even those whose upbringing is more generous are almost inevitably corrupted when they go out into the world. No sooner do they enter the great dog-fight of economic competition than they have to subordinate all finer impulses to the need to earn a livelihood at the expense of others. If they did not, they would fall into penury and futility. No wonder that they tend to value only material wealth, for self and nation. The great majority of us spend our days in toil that has as its first aim the benefit of our employers, and not the enrichment of the world. Our short leisure hours we spend in snatching simple amusement with as little effort as possible. How could it be otherwise? By the end of the working day we are tired, our powers are blunted. Moreover, we have never been helped to discover the most zestful uses of leisure. We derive our ideal of life from the American cinema, and from the commercial newspapers. And the aim of these is not to show us the truth about life and about the world, but to trade upon our primitive emotions. Consequently our knowledge of the world we live in is, in most cases, fragmentary and grossly distorted. Consequently, also, very few of us have any conception either of what the awakened personality can be, or of what the world of man might become. Such are the beings on whom the making of the new world depends. Surely it is well not to found our courage on optimism, for optimism is untenable. There is scarcely more than a bare chance, a forlorn hope, that such beings may waken to their great task. Only if, like the early Christians, they can somehow be set on fire with a new vision; only if they can be goaded by a new sense of what existence is, and what man’s part in it is, and what the human world might be, will they ever wrench themselves to a higher level of being. There is only the bare chance. But it is the bare chance of something so splendid that we must risk everything for it.
¶53B. DECLINE AND FALL? MEANWHILE, WHAT IS happening? The dog-fight becomes more desperate, more insane. We cannot trust one another as individuals, still less as nations. We are all obsessed by the terrified desire to be independent, self-sufficing. Because we dare not co-operate with one another, we are all becoming poorer, and can buy only a few of the things we need for the fullness of life. And because we cannot buy, machinery lies idle, workers are unemployed, unpaid, poverty-stricken. Corn, coffee, rubber, and a thousand other commodities needed all over the world, are destroyed because they cannot be sold at a paying price. Little by little the Western peoples, dismayed by the unexpected downfall of their prosperity, begin here and there to realize that the only way to save themselves is by world- organization. But they cannot trust one another. Each regards the rest as fundamentally its enemies. None dare surrender one shred of sovereign power. The jealousy of nations and the jealousy of the possessing class thwarts every effort at reshaping. As the years pass, it becomes clear that throughout Europe and America there is a grave mental deterioration which, if it is not checked, will end our era. It began when the old religion, which had long since lost its power over men’s hearts, failed to cope with science and industrialism. For centuries the European peoples have pursued a false ideal, and now their mistake is ruining them. Because their religious creed failed them, and because they had not the strength to live up to the ethical ideal of their religion, they had to find other gods. Two new gods were at hand, the national state and the machine.
¶54Industrialism produced in Europe and America huge town populations of cramped, over-specialized beings, incapable of any depth or breadth of experience. It produced also a plutocracy obsessed by the two ideals of wealth and nationalism. Steadily, decade by decade, especially in America, men have been turned into machines and automatic patriots. The whole life of the West has become a vast thoughtless grinding out of wealth and weapons, a vast aimless automatism which is galvanized into an appearance of life by the outworn virtues of patriotism. To-day, when the whole world-system is breaking down, the mental deterioration is hastened by false economies. Every one is to live somewhat less healthily than before the War. Conditions are to be worse. Food will be worse. Though there is widespread unemployment, the hours of those who still have work must be longer, so that the machines may be more profitable. Education must be cheaper, and therefore, in the long run, less efficient, less humane, more vocational, less prolonged. Children must be forced more strictly into the approved pattern. They must be mechanically stamped with the information and ideas and sentiments needed for the fulfilling of their automatic function in society. No longer will governments even pretend to give effect to the view that the children of the race should all, if possible, be turned into fully developed human beings and intelligent citizens. They have to become cogs in the machine. Unfortunately the machine itself is falling to pieces, and the loose cogs and wheels tend to behave in a more and more ungoverned way. This is most evident in the United States. There, where mechanism has become most developed, a vast counter machine of lawless organization, based on private machine-guns, has arisen to be the great dominant machine’s mechanical parasite. The racketeers and gangsters of Chicago display very clearly how the world is faring.
¶55Meanwhile the East is assiduously learning the vices of the industrial and nationalistic peoples. It practises them with a frankness and brutality hitherto rare in the modern world. Who knows what horrors Japan will perpetrate? Strange unhappy people, martyred on a cross made up of the ancient and the modern! Theirs was a past of elegance and chivalry. They have a present in which Western industrialism and nationalism combine with Eastern fanaticism to make the overcrowded Japanese islands the chief danger-spot of the world. The people of Japan are probably not more blind and heartless than the rest of us. But they are more resolute, because not yet so far advanced in disillusion. And so they are more dangerous. They are said to tell their children that Japan has a sacred mission to punish the nations of the West; that Japan is destined to be lord of the world. Pernicious folly! But is it much worse than our own superstition that Britons are born to rule the ‘backward races’? But Japan is not merely the Japanese army, still less a clique of ambitious generals. Japan is a swarm of unhappy and deluded human animals, much like any other nation, like that other island-swarm, the British. Like us, the Japanese need food and space. Like us, they have been brought up on lies and false sentiments. And if there is any hope that we ourselves may be cured of the twofold madness of industralism and nationalism, there is as good a hope for them. We are not made of different stuff from the countrymen of the Lady Murasaki. We are farther advanced in the disease, that is all. In us the fever is already giving way to lassitude and despond, and making room (let us hope) for a new health, a new resolution. And because we are nearer to convalescence, we have somehow to help the Japanese in their delirium. Not an easy task! But how do we prepare ourselves for it? We repress India. We see Russian bogies everywhere. We gleefully revive our war-hatred of Germany. To the
¶56insanely conquering Japan, we protest deprecatingly, with a smile. And in that smile there is some suggestion of a wink. Clearly the plight of the modern world is very serious. Owing to mechanical power, unwise human actions can do more harm than in earlier periods, and wisdom is at least as rare as formerly. The machinations of governments, the bombast of rival patriots, the intrigues of trading organizations, the planned emotionalism of the commercial press, may at any time produce such a world-war that whole populations will be destroyed and civilization will vanish. Even if by some miracle this does not happen within the next few years, economic disorganization bids fair to produce the same result, though less dramatically. The economic problem has become so complicated, and so involved with class jealousy and national jealousy, that no one knows how to cope with it. In face of modern world conditions human nature seems to be proving itself insufficient, both intellectually and morally. Most of our problems simply defeat our intelligence; and even when the solution is visible, it involves such a deep change of heart that we cannot will it. OceanofPDF.com
¶57C. THE ONE HOPE AT THE BEGINNING of this chapter we set out to take the worst possible view of the modern world. Let us now consider the right way of dealing with this extremely unpromising state of affairs. First let us remind ourselves that the important distinction between men to-day is not between nations and social classes but between those who do, and those who do not, see something of the world-aim, and give their allegiance whole-heartedly to it. Not very many even pay it lip-service; extremely few accept it without qualification as the supreme practical goal of all political and social action. They are scattered in every land and every social class. They pursue many callings. A few are in high places, struggling against the mob and its demagogues to bring order into the machine-ridden, class-ridden, nation- ridden world. Far more are doing humbler but no less vital work in their own professions and trades. A few are thrashing out by the clash of their differing minds the new form that is to be given to the world. All are at a terrible disadvantage in comparison with the mob and its demagogues, for the mob desires, and the demagogues provide, simple familiar ideals and policies; but these few, who are the salt of the earth, the main hope of the future, see that the old simple ideals and policies are no longer appropriate to this modern and immensely complex and explosive world. Because they see this, they are desperately engaged on working out a new ideal, a new world-plan, a five-or a fifty-year plan, or a five-century plan, for the making of the new world. But they are not only thinking. They are beginning to act. And indeed they must take charge effectively as soon
¶58as possible, before the mob and its demagogues and its comfortable do- nothing politicians ruin everything. But how are they to take charge? They have no force. They have no glib popular appeal. No party, no class will back them up. On every side they have enemies. The patriots will revile them, and presently may begin shooting them, or worse. The daily press will rouse popular fury against them. The politicians, the military, the wealthy, the industrial magnates, the churches, will be against them. And when the struggle begins to grow serious, there will be no mercy. Unless they become extraordinarily persuasive the great conservative mass of British labour, and its counterpart in other countries, will follow the hue and cry against them. And so, also, though for different reasons, may the great class-conscious ‘left-wing’ masses. For the men whom I have in mind, though they will probably demand an economic policy very like Communism, will also be far from accepting the whole ideology of Moscow. They would as soon bow to Rome, Fascist or Papist. Then what hope is there? There is hope in the sheer brutal pressure of circumstances. Sooner or later the peoples will surely be forced to see the one clear way before them. World conditions in our day are such that no policy but that of cosmopolitanism in service of the world-aim can in fact succeed. And though men are blind, there are limits to their blindness. They may cling long and desperately to policies and aims which their changing world has already rendered futile, and to customs which their own natures are already outgrowing; but in time they will be thrust by grim facts into the single way of survival and advancement. The danger is that widespread mental deterioration, consequent on decades of mistaken aims and policies, may blind the peoples fatally. Then
¶59the brutal pressure of circumstances will fail to enlighten them, and will destroy them. This is a very real danger, some would say a probability. But there is at least a shred of hope. Ideas have sometimes had tremendous power to influence the course of events. Doubtless ideas themselves are produced by the pressure of circumstances, economic, biological, psychological; but it is sometimes through the ideas which circumstances generate in men’s minds that circumstances produce their most striking effect. We may agree that Christianity was an effect of the social conditions of the Mediterranean peoples; but we must also insist that it was an effect of those conditions acting on men’s minds to produce a new and potent idea. It is possible that, in our day also, circumstances are beginning to act on men’s minds so as to produce a new and potent idea capable of raising us, as the early Christians were raised, to a more awakened mentality. The world is not divided sharply into the few who can and the many who cannot already see and accept the inevitable world-aim. Between them in all countries there is a great population of those who do not as yet, but might, give their allegiance to the world-aim sincerely and effectively. They are of all nations and all social classes. They are also of all ages; but the great majority of them are young, even very young. In fact they are mostly those who, though they have not yet fully opened their eyes to the facts of the world, have also not yet been blinded by false traditions. These, surely, are a potential strength for the remaking of the world. Unfortunately they are also the world’s most pressing danger. They are generous, innocent, eager; but these very qualities are apt to lead them astray. They long to feel that they serve in a great cause. They see that the world is crumbling, and they are impatient to rebuild it. And so they are ready to accept any plausible leader, any pinchbeck ideals and policies.
¶60They become Fascists, Nazis, imitation Bolsheviks, and the like. Under the influence of their leaders they learn to be satisfied with patriotism, race- hatred, ruthlessness, flags, badges, uniforms, and innumerable catch-words. Already in two countries they have come out bodily on the wrong side. They have made it impossible for those who are pledged to the world-aim to live in those countries. This is the real tragedy of the modern world, that ‘so much superb young life is being deluded and debased. If these generous young people could be won over in their millions and disciplined for the world-aim, how soon would the new world be made! If, before they become irrevocably set in blindness and brutality, they could be made to see that they have been gulled, and that they have betrayed the one true cause, which now most urgently needs their service! How are they to be won? Those who have the true cause at heart must somehow win them. And chiefly the task is for those of the young themselves who have not been gulled, who already see and accept the world-aim. It is for the more awakened young to laugh their deluded fellows out of their folly, and shame them out of their brutality, and show them something more desirable than their barbarian ideals. We shall all be faced with a prolonged occasion for heroism; and most of us are persons who have no natural gift for heroism. We shall need also superhuman tact and insight. We have to show that, though we can when necessary be as uncompromising and ruthless as our opponents, our general method is that of understanding and sympathy. We have to show that we understand our opponents better than they understand themselves, that we know better than they do what they really want, and how to get it. And it is for all of us together, young and old alike, to think out as clearly and precisely as possible what we can do to contribute to the
¶61founding of the new world. A desperate stand must be made before it is too late. OceanofPDF.com
¶62IV. ANIMAL AND MAN OceanofPDF.com
¶63A. MAN’S ANIMAL CAPACITIES WE HAVE SEEN that mechanical power, though a most perilous instrument, might be used for the construction of a world community incomparably more vital than any that has hitherto existed. We have seen that what stands in the way of this consummation is the fact that the ideal world depends for its realization on the present half-savage world. The contemporary human race has no serious will to create a world in which all men will be able to live a fuller life. If this will is to be propagated, one of the main tasks is to set forth a clear and compelling idea of what human nature really is, and especially what in it is distinctively human and most to be prized. We cannot cope with the task of remaking our world on a better plan unless we have a comprehensive view of man’s needs and potentialities, a view which does full justice both to his animal nature and to that in virtue of which he is more awakened mentally than any sub-human animal. Not only do we need a clear intellectual statement of the distinctively human in man, so that we may create a new world which shall be appropriate; we also need to realize far more vividly that this truly human factor in human nature is something to be greatly prized, something worth living for and dying for, something which should rightly command the allegiance that we are apt to squander on lesser ends. European thought has for long been passing through a phase of revulsion from the view that man is essentially different from any other living creature. This revulsion was salutary, but the pendulum has swung too far. It is now fashionable to hold that the difference between man and other mammals is but superficial. All the formerly most-prized attributes of man have been described in terms of the attributes which he has in common
¶64with other mammals; and though the description is, up to a point, true and instructive, it is also subtly falsifying to the distinctively human in man. The result has been that the old naïve view that man was a princely or divine alien in a strange land has given place to an equally false view that he is just a peculiarly cunning ape. Hence the far-reaching disillusionment, cynicism, apathy, of our time. In the following chapters I shall offer a cautious revindication of human nature. I shall briefly present the view that, though a man is indeed ‘at bottom’ an animal, or more strictly a mere electro-magnetic system, he has certain powers which in other animals are almost entirely undeveloped, powers which transform his whole experience and behaviour. The exercise and development of these powers, I shall claim, constitute the proper function of each individual and of the race as a whole. This chapter will be concerned with a purely theoretical discussion of the relation of the animal and the human in man. To readers who feel that abstract thought is a waste of time, I would urge that this is a subject on which clear thinking is urgent, since false and fashionable theories have recently done so much to obscure man’s knowledge of himself and coarsen his purpose. My aim is to give an outline of human capacity in such terms as to do justice to the scientific view of man and yet to pass cautiously beyond the limitations of contemporary science. Let me confess at the outset that I have nothing original to say on this subject. The need is only to give a balanced judgement on conflicting views. Any man, say John Smith, may be regarded as a system of needs or capacities for action. Of course, John Smith is a unique individual. Though in some respects he is similar to others of his kind, he is also very different from any other. Moreover, since his mind is not merely a bundle of separate parts or elements, but an extraordinarily unified thing, in which every part
¶65permeates every other, there is nothing in him which is not in some manner unique. Even the characteristics which he shares with others appear in him with a unique tone or flavour all his own. What is common to him and Tom Jones is a system of very abstract or general characters which each makes concrete in his own manner. Further, it is on the whole in his less- developed, less subtle aspects that John Smith is most like his fellows. It is rather on the distinctively human than on the animal plane that men begin to differ greatly from one another. Some of the actions of which John Smith is capable are comparatively simple, some are much more complex. Some he shares with other mammals, though he generally exercises them in his own distinctive manners; some are of kinds beyond the reach of other mammals. I shall argue that all John Smith’s distinctively human capacities are the outcome of his distinctively human degree of intelligence and imagination. But let us first consider John Smith as an animal. As an animal he has certain capacities which he cannot exercise apart from an appropriate physical, chemical and social environment. For fulfilment as a human being he needs the even more complex environment of human society. We can dismiss the physical and chemical requirements of his animal nature in a few words. He needs a planet with a certain gravitational attraction; for if gravity were removed, or if it were greatly increased, he could not walk. He needs also a certain atmospheric pressure. Too much or too little would soon incapacitate him. He needs a certain constancy of temperature. Only if he is warm enough, but not too warm, can he continue to live. He needs sunlight. Without it he soon begins to ail; with excess of it, his skin and his eyes are damaged. He needs innumerable chemical substances, all in due proportions, and in due season. Oxygen, water, many compounds of carbon, hydrogen,
¶66calcium, iron, and so on, he requires in large and regular doses. Countless other substances, though he uses them in smaller proportions are no less necessary to him. A slight excess or shortage of any one of them may reduce his body to sickness or death, his mind to disorder. Only in our own day are we beginning to realize the extreme complexity of his chemical needs and the extent to which his intelligence and his temperament are dependent on them. As an animal John Smith needs not merely to have certain chemicals in his system, but also to procure them and assimilate them. In fact he needs, if he is to maintain his vitality, the complex activities of breathing, drinking and eating. Not only so, but in some form or other he must seek his food. He must do something corresponding to the animal activity of hunting or grazing. If he is merely fed, and has no occasion to exert himself, he turns sluggish in body and mind. As an animal he is equipped for an active life. He must therefore have occasion to use his legs for locomotion, his hands for manipulation, his eyes, ears, nose, and his hands also, for perceiving and discriminating the characters of his environment. Possibly, also, he needs for full animal well-being perceptions of the kind of environment to which his animal nature is adapted, perceptions of hills and trees and forests rather than of streets and buildings and roaring traffic. There may be tracts in his brain adapted to the one rather than to the other; but this is doubtful. He has sexual organs, specially adapted to intercourse with females of his kind. When he has reached maturity his mind is deeply influenced by these organs. He develops, for instance, strong impulses to perceive and to delight in members of the opposite sex. He needs also the simple animal activity of sex, in due season, and with due frequency. He is a gregarious animal, and he needs some degree of fellowship with his kind. Prolonged loneliness preys upon him, as it does on his relative the
¶67ape. He craves to feel at one with the herd. He needs the herd’s physical protection and mental approval. To be opposed to the herd is to find himself single against the universe, and this terrifies him. It also painfully stimulates the human in him as opposed to the animal, for it fosters a brooding self- consciousness. Like the ape, he needs to have opportunity of combining his social and his sexual capacities by means of more or less enduring companionship with a partner or partners of the opposite sex. In one respect his purely animal nature seems to go farther than that of the highest sub- human mammals. In them the female alone has strong impulses to protect and foster, and this activity she normally directs almost entirely on her own offspring. In the human species, not only has the male as well as the female considerable capacity for spontaneous protectiveness, but also in both sexes this impulse is far more catholic in its direction than in any other species. Like other animals, John Smith needs in his relations with his kind not only animal companionship, but also opportunities of asserting himself in the animal way, and of abasing himself. He needs to lead and to be led. He needs opportunities of rivalry. He has also an animal capacity for self- assertion in combat. In the wild state he would no doubt express this with the action of teeth and claws upon any rivals that roused his anger reflexes. On the human plane, he finds other modes of expression. In the ideal world, no doubt, this impulse would not be allowed to exercise itself in the jungle manner nor in defence of the jungle self, but it would have to be taken into account and given some kind of socially harmless outlet, such as competitive games, or rivalry in social service. Another capacity which John Smith has in common with some other animals, for instance the apes, is inquisitiveness, the impulse to investigate situations which, though on the whole familiar, are in some notable respect strange. These situations and this impulse together provide an occasion for
¶68the exercise of intelligence, and thus is formed the germ which in man himself gives rise to theoretical interests and activities. Yet another important animal capacity in John Smith is the impulse to construct. Like the apes, he has hands and the necessary brain organization for manual dexterity. These organs he delights to use. But his constructive impulse does not confine itself to manipulation. With the aid of distinctively human intelligence and imagination it finds expression in many other fields, such as art and theoretical activity. OceanofPDF.com
¶69B. INTELLIGENCE AND IMAGINATION SUCH, IN BRIEF, are the animal capacities of John Smith. I have already said that his distinctively human capacities are all the outcome of the distinctively human degree of his intelligence and imagination. Now intelligence and imagination are not, strictly speaking, confined to man. Indeed, in the broadest sense of the word ‘intelligence’, all animals may be said to have that capacity to some extent, however slight; and in the higher mammals, especially the apes, it is comparatively well developed. Nevertheless in man alone does it play so great a part as to transform behaviour from a simple and mainly innate routine to the age-long adventure which has brought us (for good or ill) to our present pass. The reader may protest that, since, after all, the difference between man and animal is only one of degree of intelligence and imagination, it is not fundamental. True, it is not fundamental; but it is supremely important. Even a slight difference of degree may make just all the difference. A dam may withstand a huge pressure of water; but there comes a point when only a slight increase will burst the dam and devastate a countryside. The difference of degree between human and animal intelligence is not slight but great. The ‘tension’ of human intelligence is such that whole worlds, which the animal cannot enter at all, are opened up for man. If we allow that man’s nature is very largely ‘animal we should perhaps also affirm that animals, in so far as they manifest intelligence, are to that extent ‘human.’ We have admitted that the distinction between animals and men, though extremely important, is not absolute. This does not necessarily
¶70mean that the human being can be wholly described in terms of recognized principles of animal biology and psychology. Indeed, it may be that even the nature of a sub-human animal demands for its full explanation principles which are to be discovered only on the human plane. Intelligence may be defined as the power of solving novel problems by means of insight into their essential features, and into the relation between those features and relevant past experiences. Intelligence only operates in response to some need or needs which cannot be fulfilled in any purely innate or purely habitual way. Strictly speaking, even in the most stereotyped instinctive or habitual situation there is bound to be some slight amount of irregularity or novelty, and therefore some slight demand for intelligence. But for practical purposes there is an important difference between acts which are mainly instinctive or habitual and acts which are mainly intelligent. Here it is worth while to quote a famous example of animal intelligence in which the essential nature of intelligence is very clearly seen. Professor Kohler, seeking the limits of intelligence in apes, performed many interesting experiments on his chimpanzees. The need which spurred them to intelligent behaviour was hunger. They were kept without food for a while, then introduced to a situation in which food was visible, but could not be reached in any familiar manner. For instance, they would discover fruit hanging by a cord from the cage-roof, and too high to be secured by jumping. But in the cage there would be a number of packing-cases, which could be built up as a tower under the fruit. Packing-cases do not occur in the jungle. The ape has no instinctive aptitude for building towers. But these captive apes had already been allowed to have opportunities of playing with packing-cases and familiarizing themselves with the potentialities of these objects. In the test-situation the more intelligent apes would in time see the
¶71connexion between this ‘situation demanding climbing’ and the climbable character of a tower of packing-cases, such as they had already often made in play. Then they would proceed, very clumsily, to build a precarious tower, on to which, with native agility, they would climb for the fruit. This example may be taken as the type of all intelligence, both simple and complex, both practical and theoretical. The differences between ape intelligence and human intelligence may be summed as follows. 1. Man has superior insight into the essence of the problem itself. He discriminates more quickly and surely between the significant aspect of the situation and those features of it which are irrelevant to the problem. 2. He has superior power of recalling past experience. When he is faced with a problem, his mind is less likely to remain blank. Images and ideas more or less relevant to the problem may crowd in on him. 3. He has sharper insight into the relations between the problem and the images and ideas which well up in his mind. He can detect significant relations which the ape would miss. 4. When he sets about the practical line of action in relation to the problem, he can more delicately and appropriately modify his familiar actions so as to suit the problem. 5. One advantage which man has over the ape in respect of intelligence, an advantage which perhaps underlies all the others, and certainly affords him an incomparably greater scope of experience and action, is his far ampler and far more discriminative apprehension of his world. In the first place, a man perceives his physical environment better than an ape. He apprehends it in much greater detail, and far more accurately and systematically. What appears to a man as an orderly coil of rope is to the ape indistinguishable from a tangle. Moreover, what a man notices is relevant
¶72not only to his animal needs but to his much more complex human needs, which are themselves very largely the outcome of past intelligent activity. One has only to think of the special interest with which the farmer perceives his land and the weather, the engineer his machines, the artist the coloured shapes of nature. But in addition to his perceived environment man has other fields of experience in which to exercise his intelligence. Of these, perhaps the most important is the inner world of his own mental activities, and the inferred world of other minds. In this direction he exercises a delicacy of percipience or ‘sensibility’ impossible to any other animal. And this percipience is itself sharpened and refined by, if not created by, the constant use of intelligence. The starting-point for the advance into this inner world would seem to consist in man’s intelligent discrimination between his activity of experiencing and that which he experiences; between on the one hand, desiring, fearing, perceiving, remembering, thinking, and so on, and on the other that which he desires, fears, perceives, remembers, thinks, and so on. Even in the fully developed human mind this discrimination remains so obscure and precarious that some schools of thought stoutly deny the possibility of any such distinction. I shall not argue the matter, but merely affirm that to me it is obvious that the distinction must be made for practical purposes; and that even philosophically it must be maintained in some sense or other. To say this is not to pledge oneself to metaphysical dualism, in which matter and mind are taken to be ultimate substances, in the philosophical sense. It might be that there was only one kind of substance, but that every particular substance had two attributes, namely its own consciousness and its physical manifestation to other substances.
¶73In the sphere of personality countless problems arise which are distinctively human. Such problems are experienced by all who attempt to ‘know themselves and by all who love or hate in an awakened manner, or are in any way brought into ‘personal contact’ with one another. One great class of these problems is discovered in the heart-searchings of the religious devotee. All these aspects of personality are illustrated and developed in the drama and in the novel of manners, or of ‘sensibility’. From this introspective experience may arise a vast and subtle tissue of distinctively human motives which can only by gross over-simplification be described wholly in terms of simple animal motives. One may well suspect that in this direction lie whole worlds of possible experience which are not accessible to the present type of human mind. Contemporary man has indeed come to take stock by indirect methods of the lowly, primitive and often infantile motives of his so-called ‘unconscious mind’; and it is possible that future generations, properly educated, will be fully conscious of the deepest roots of their own motives. We may well doubt, however, whether our own species will ever rise to loftier modes of experience, to a new biological level of self-consciousness as superior to man’s present level as that is to the ape’s. On the other hand, a few spiritual geniuses of our race may even now attain to experiences impossible to the ordinary man. And in any case we have no reason to suppose that the most developed or ‘awakened’ mode of human experience is the most awakened that can occur at all in the universe. Another sphere in which human intelligence has to operate is the sphere of abstract thought, which includes mathematics, science and philosophy. Here the ultimate data are still certain characters first apprehended in sense perception, or in introspection; but these characters are clearly discriminated from their particular context, and identified with other
¶74instances of their kind, experienced in other contexts. Thus it is that the human mind becomes conscious of universal characters, as such, and begins to manipulate them in imagination in the manner of abstract thought. The motive of this treatment may be some need to solve a particular practical problem, or it may be sheer curiosity, or the will to analyse and to see things whole. The word ‘imagination’ is ambiguous. In one sense, intelligence itself involves imagination; for it involves the power of imagining possible actions in relation to a problem. In this sense, then, wherever there is intelligence there is some degree of imagination. In another sense ‘imagination’ itself involves intelligence. For by ‘imagination’ we often mean the power of constructing mentally patterns of images, ideas, actions and emotions; and this involves intelligent discrimination between those images or ideas or actions or emotions which are, and those which are not, relevant to the pattern which it is desired to construct. This kind of imaginative activity is special to man; and it is in this sense that I use the word ‘imagination’ when I say that intelligence and imagination are distinctively human activities. The phrase ‘creative imagination’, which has many senses, may perhaps be most conveniently used to apply to those most original acts of imaginative insight by which, in any field of experience, the mind may leap to the apprehension either of order in what formerly appeared as chaotic, or of far-reaching significance in what formerly appeared as barren, or of ‘transparency’ and new vistas of reality through what formerly appeared as opaque. In this sense certain apprehensions of personality (in oneself or another), and certain outstanding achievements of art, science and philosophy, might fittingly be called works of creative imagination.
¶75These are the activities which the awakened mind prizes most in itself and others. We all value in ourselves and others breadth and depth of self- consciousness and of sensibility to other persons. We admire self- transcendence in generous behaviour. We admire aesthetic sensitivity, intellectual honesty and penetration. These attributes we prize not only for their utility to society, but as intrinsically good. It may be that the superior merit which we assign to them is due partly to their greater difficulty and rarity; and that, if they happened to be easy and common, we should tend to prize them less. There is a sense in which every exercise of vital capacity, of whatever order, is as desirable as every other; since all equally are needed for full personal expression. In this sense simple muscular activity is no less desirable than poetry. But since in actual life it is the distinctively human that is more in danger of frustration, this tends to be the more cherished by minds capable of appreciating both. Nevertheless this extraneous, ‘economic’ value is not the sole cause of our admiration of the distinctively human. The more difficult, more human activities are, I submit, experienced as actually more awakened, more vital, more deeply fulfilling to the personality, than the less awakened, animal activities. The problem is complicated by the fact that, as I shall maintain in more detail in the next chapter, the awakened mind may discover in the animal activities themselves a depth of significance to which in all probability the animal is insensitive. OceanofPDF.com
¶76C. MAN MORE THAN ANIMAL I HAVE DESCRIBED as clearly as I can the essential difference between the distinctively animal and the distinctively human in man. It is now necessary to consider the relation between them, and in particular the view which seeks to explain the distinctively human motives and activities wholly in terms of the impulses which man has in common with other animals. In this section I am concerned with an abstract philosophical problem. To readers who consider such problems unimportant, I would protest that this particular philosophical problem is really very important, because of its indirect effects on private conduct and social policy. The ‘animal view’ of John Smith is the view that he is born with certain dispositions which occur also in other mammals, and that his behaviour, like theirs, can be fully understood by considering the relation between these dispositions and his environment throughout his life. The only difference between him and other mammals, in this view, is, not that, owing to his greater intelligence and versatility, he has kinds of needs which they lack, but merely that his greater intelligence and versatility enable him to satisfy his basic animal needs or fulfil his basic animal dispositions in ways which are not open to lower animals. The satisfaction may sometimes be produced by the actual direct fulfilment of an animal need, as when a hunter, craving food, uses intelligence in order to capture and cook his quarry; or it may be a fictitious satisfaction, produced by mere imagination of actual fulfilment, as when hungry explorers describe feasts to one another, or dream of banquets; or it may be veiled or unconscious
¶77satisfaction, as when the sexually starved take delight in religious rituals which are obscurely symbolical of sex, or as when one whose self- assertiveness has been continuously thwarted in youth exhibits in maturity a cruel and domineering disposition. Always, in this view, the actual driving motive of human conduct is either some simple animal craving, such as self-assertiveness, or hunger, or fear, or sex, or parential protectiveness, or ‘herd instinct’; or else it is a compound of these. Unfortunately no one yet knows at all clearly what primitive motives there really are, or, indeed, whether there are any such basic or unanalysable motives at all. In some sense or other, no doubt, all mammals have dispositions to ‘assert’ themselves, to seek sexual intercourse, to seek fellowship with their kind, and so on. In some sense all human behaviour is, indeed, an expression, extremely indirect, of these dispositions. And it is very important to realize that this is so, and that often the one really effective, though unwitting, motive behind a seemingly exalted act is sheer self-regard, or sheer sex, and so on. The theory of ‘unconscious’ or unacknowledged motivation is one of the most far-reaching discoveries of modern times. But when the advocates of this theory of human nature claim that all human conduct can in theory be adequately described in terms of primitive animal impulse and the principle of unconscious motivation, they over- simplify the problem. No doubt every human act affords satisfaction to one or more animal impulses. Nevertheless such impulses may happen not to constitute the effective motive of the act. When a man attends a political meeting he may find satisfaction for his gregarious impulse, but it does not follow that gregariousness was his real motive. This satisfaction may be incidental.
¶78There can, I think, be little doubt that, in one sense, every human act could theoretically be analysed into a tissue of animal impulses, much as a painting may be analysed into a tissue of ‘brush-strokes’ of different sizes and shapes and colours distributed in a certain order. This account of the picture would be very inadequate, but no less so than the account of human activity presented solely in terms of animal impulses. The advocates of the animal theory of human nature fall into the error of oversimplification. They think, for instance, that, if they can point to all the primitive motives which are involved in the production of a particular work of art, they have shown that the whole motive of it is simply a medley of animal cravings. They fail to realize that, in the human mind, those same ‘animal’ cravings themselves have been transmuted into something more subtle; that, simply by the operation of intelligence and imagination, the ‘animal’ motives of self, sex, society, and so on, acquire additional characteristics over and above those which, so far as we can judge, they manifest in the lower mammals. So to speak, man discovers more in them than the subhuman animal can apprehend. Further, those psychologists who interpret human behaviour solely in terms of animal motive fail to realize that a second order of transmutation occurs even within the human sphere, as between the basic motives of the most primitive human mind and the basic motives of the most developed. For the primitive human cravings may be changed beyond recognition simply through the continued operation of intelligence and imagination in a highly civilized environment. So that the ‘self’ which the fully developed human mind seeks to ‘assert’ may be a very different ‘self’ from that which a child or a savage asserts; and sexual satisfaction for such a mind may be something infinitely richer and more subtle than that which is craved by the crudest sort of human being; and in civilized man the craving for society
¶79and social approval is very different not only from animal but from primitive human gregariousness. So also with art, though we rightly admire the sincere and often deeply moving aesthetic achievements of primitive peoples, it is mere affectation to ignore the fact that the finest art of the most aesthetically conscious civilizations far outstrips the primitive in breadth and delicacy of significance. No doubt, for fullness of life the developed mind must have a due measure of satisfaction upon the strictly subhuman and the primitive human planes; but it must also have very much else. For, through the prolonged operation of intelligence and imagination it discovers vast spheres of experience (and therefore of needs and satisfactions) which can no more be adequately described in terms of the crude primitive motives than a plant can be described as a mere enlargement of a seed. Now the attempt to explain developed human behaviour in terms of the primitive and the animal is salutary. It tends to diminish man’s conceit, and it goes to work with the sound scientific principle of explaining the complex in terms of the simple, wherever possible. But this appears to be one of the spheres in which it turns out not to be possible fully to explain the complex in terms of the simple, or rather in terms of our present knowledge of the simple. Those who favour this kind of explanation may come to think that to show the primitive origins of developed behaviour is to show that developed behaviour is but an unimportant veneer laid over the ‘solid structure’ of primitive animal nature. In view of this danger it is very necessary to bear in mind on the one hand the uncertainty and abstractness of all our present psychological knowledge, and on the other the actual features of developed behaviour and experience. Those who have ever found themselves intensely conscious of the personality of another individual, and those who have ever had vivid
¶80and intimate acquaintance with any art, or with the life of intellect, or with genuine religion, are apt to feel, when they are confronted with a psychological explanation of their experience, that the psychologist simply had no clear apprehension of the kind of thing to be explained. Now I believe they are mistaken; I believe the psychologist very often has a clear apprehension of these developed experiences; but that as soon as he tries to account for these experiences in terms of his psychology, he becomes more interested in his theories than in the matter to be explained, and begins to lose sight of those aspects of it which cannot be adequately described in terms of his theories. Thus his description is apt to seem like an account of Hamlet without the Prince of Denmark. The policy of explaining the more complex and developed in terms of the more simple and undeveloped is well justified by success in many scientific fields. But it incurs one serious danger. The desire for intellectual neatness and simplicity may lead to distortion of the data to be explained. The mind may become blind to everything which cannot be described in terms of the principles derived from study of the simpler matter. Those who hold what I am calling the animal view of human nature themselves bring the charge of oversimplification against those who seek to account for animal behaviour solely in terms of chemistry and physics. They feel that such extreme simplification is unjustified. Their opponents, on the other hand, feel that simplification should be pushed to its logical conclusion, that not only the highly developed activities of man but animal instincts also should be reduced to simpler terms. Some day, they declare, instinctive reactions will be wholly described in terms of nerve-tracts and glandular secretions; and these in turn will be wholly described in terms of biochemical principles, which will ultimately be reduced to the principles of electro-magnetism. A man, they hold, is simply a chemical system; and a
¶81chemical system is a system of electrons and protons, or whatever ultimate units physicists recognize. My main contention with regard to both the animal view and the physical view of man can be stated in a few words. Possibly human behaviour will eventually be fully described in terms of biological principles; but if so, biological principles will be very different from those which biologists are content to accept to-day. Possibly human and animal behaviour will eventually be described in terms of fundamental physical principles; but if so, physical principles will be very different from those which physicists are content to accept to-day. Meanwhile, though we should indeed try to describe human behaviour so far as possible in terms of our biology and our physics, we must anxiously beware lest in our scientific zeal we turn a blind eye to important characteristics in human behaviour. This caution is necessary because the recent tendency to describe human nature in the oversimplified terms of biology and physics has falsified the distinctively human, and has produced a widespread and emasculating disillusionment with regard to the nature of man. It should be obvious that mental events, states of awareness, experiencings, cannot, in principle, be described in terms of chemistry or physics. Those sciences deal only with physical events which are all reducible to movement. Desiring, fearing, thinking and perceiving lie entirely outside their range. Of course, if we accept the view of the extreme Behaviourists, and deny the existence of experiencings or consciousness, we need not admit that there is anything in animal or human behaviour other than the events studied by physics. But if we refrain from this fantastic denial of consciousness we must agree that the concepts of contemporary physics cannot even in principle describe the whole of human nature.
¶82But it might still be possible to show that, though physical science can never describe mental life, there exists a regular relation between every mental event and certain physical events in a living body; and that for understanding the sequence of mental events the important procedure is to understand the physical events which determine them. Anger, for instance, is said to be the mental accompaniment of a certain chemical condition of the body. Therefore if you would understand the anger responses of an animal or a man, if you seek to predict them or control them, you must study the causes of that chemical condition. In this view, then, although consciousness does exist, it is entirely ineffective. Acts of will, for instance, do not really produce either the mental or the physical changes which we ordinarily suppose them to produce. The real causes of these changes are said to be physical, and the conscious volition is a by-product. Some people regard this view with horror. For my part I do not see why they should distress themselves. If a man behaves well, what matter whether that in him in virtue of which he behaves well is physical or mental or both or neither? To my mind courage, generosity, intellect, artistic sensibility, religious sensibility, and so on, are no whit less admirable if they are mechanically and physically caused. I admire them for what they are, not for their causes. On the other hand, one may well feel sceptical of the theory that animal and human behaviour can in principle be understood simply in terms of the familiar concept of physical causation. It demands a naïve, childlike trust in the principles of contemporary science. It springs from a wholly false assumption that what we now call the physical aspect of existence must be the most significant, the fundamental aspect. This assumption has been
¶83caused partly by the fact that the physical has proved the easiest to study accurately and also the most profitable in the quest for power. There is, moreover, a real danger in the view that animal and human behaviour are physically determined, simply and absolutely. It creates an irrational tendency to pay more attention and respect to the physical than the mental in man, and to the simpler and more mechanical activities than to the more complex and developed and distinctively human activities. I myself, to repeat, do not greatly care whether man’s distinctively human behaviour is to be accounted for wholly by physical laws describing the movements of the physical units of his body, or not. If physics were to succeed in doing this, I should take off my hat to it, and recognize that there was more in it than at first appeared. But what I do care for is that the distinctively human ways of behaving should not be therefore ignored or disparaged. As a matter of fact the mechanistic theory of human nature would probably not tend to belittle the distinctively human activities if it could really account for them. But since all it can do is to give a very superficial and distorting account of them, it does to-day tend to make its adherents misconceive them and disparage them. OceanofPDF.com
¶84V. PERSONALITY AND SOCIETY OceanofPDF.com
¶85A. INTELLIGENCE AND THE ANIMAL LIFE HAVING NOTED THE essential difference between the human and the animal factors in man’s nature, we may set about the task of forming a more detailed view of the part played by intelligence and imagination in human life. The spheres in which human intelligence and imagination operate are as follows: (i) a man’s experience of his own bodily life and perceived environment; (2) his experience of himself as a person; (3) his experience of other persons; (4) his experience of society as a system of persons engaged in complex practical and theoretical activities; (5) his aesthetic, intellectual and religious experience. Even in experience of the perceived world and of his own simple animal activities John Smith may, by means of intelligence and imagination, become aware of attributes which in all probability the non-human animal does not apprehend at all. Not only has he, compared for instance with an ape, a far greater practical scope for intelligence, but also he is more prone (in favourable circumstances) to be interested in the world for its own sake, simply as an object of curiosity and study, and not merely as a field in which to exercise his own capacities. Even the ape has a degree of sheer curiosity and ‘meddlesomeness’ quite exceptional among animals; but his curiosity is much less disinterested than man’s, much more subservient to his own play-impulses, less objective, less scientific and aesthetic. This objectivity of interest not only leads man to natural science, but also, in some individuals at least, it produces, I submit, that heightened consciousness in perception which is so important in all art.
¶86Let us now consider some of the ways in which John Smith’s experience differs from that of a sub-human animal in the sphere of perception and especially in the consciousness of his own bodily life. This is a subject on which it is very difficult to avoid vagueness and sentimentality. But it should not, on that account, be merely shirked. Every one of the common bodily actions may afford to the awakened human being a sense not merely of fulfilling his own bodily functions but of performing as it were a religious rite, or of coming into touch with some very solid and deeplying reality. Some hold that this strange quality of veiled significance which the simple bodily acts and simple perceptions may have is sheer illusion. But though, of course, we may describe it wrongly, or ‘read too much into it’, the experience itself is what it is, and ought not to be ignored. This is one of the points where, I suggest, we do well to remember that our modern science is not the last word of truth, and that to reject all that it cannot yet accommodate may be as misguided as to accept indiscriminately every kind of superstition. It may well be that the more alive, more awakened, mind can discover even in the primitive bodily life actually a deeper kind of fulfilment than is afforded to the less developed mind. It is this experience, primitive but indescribable, that has persuaded some that the life of bodily action and of sensation is the only truly ‘spiritual’ life, and that the life of intellect is unreal and barren. Possibly those who hold this extreme view have been starved of full bodily experience, or else have been disgusted by the shallow intellectualism and prudery of an earlier age. Even those who feel strongly that the life of the intellect is very far from barren may also feel that the leaders of thought have often unwisely neglected and disparaged the life of bodily action and of sensation, and that
¶87this contempt has actually debased it in our age. Partly through the influence of the churches, there has arisen a notion that to delight in the primitive action of limbs and sense organs is unworthy of such a dignified being as man. ‘Sensuality’, it is said, is deadening to the spirit. Thus the appreciation of bodily life, and also of the sensed qualities of the external world, tends to become superficial and obtuse, and also furtive. John Smith needs a full sensual life as much as he needs an intellectual life. If he is starved of it or if he regards it as base, he will still crave it; but he will pursue it in a style that is brutish, greedy and ashamed. The finer quality of it will escape him. He will react to it as the sheer animal, lacking human sensibility and discrimination. One way in which a man may miss full awareness of his bodily life and of the vivid sensory presence of the world around him is this. He may become so deeply concerned with planning for a future, whether a year hence or a day or a minute, that he has no attention to spare for the present moment. Now ‘taking the future into account’ is an activity which men perform to a far greater extent than any sub-human animals. One might almost say that planning for a future is a distinctively human activity which the higher sub-human animals practise only to a minute extent. But it has its peculiar danger. It may lead to loss of contact with the present. A man may become so absorbed in carrying out his plans that he seldom pauses to regard the actual colours and shapes of things, or hear the subtleties of noise, or appreciate touched shapes and surfaces, with all their roughs and smooths, warms and cools; or he may fail to note the shadowy and the emphatic odours on the air. Thus he may never perceive clearly the living texture of his momentary world. He may take all these delicate sensory creatures merely as signals, signs of conditions and situations useful or
¶88dangerous to him. In this way his world may become curiously unreal, empty, tasteless; and his mind desolate. Even the ends that he sets himself to realize in the future will tend to lose their meaning. They will become mere formulae, empty phrases obsessing him. We may sum this matter by saying that John Smith may fail to grasp the full significance of his animal life in either of two ways. He may fail through sheer brutish greed, through incapacity to pause in the midst of it and regard it with human sensibility and discrimination. He may also fail through contempt and neglect of it. Let us note one striking example of the way in which the animal and the human may co-operate in human experience. As a male animal, John Smith will respond with delight and yearning to the appearance of a well-formed young woman. But as a human being he may see in her far more, even as a stimulus to sex, than any mere animal could ever see. The visible beauty of the body and the audible beauty of the voice may express for him characters of personality far beyond the apprehension of the animal. Even the body that is merely a well-grown body, and expresses just physical strength and grace and agility, affords to John Smith’s perception more than it can afford to the non-human mind. But there is a subtler, more exquisite kind of bodily beauty in which every curve and volume, every movement, and even the bloom of the skin, seem to express together, indescribably perhaps, but none the less vividly, many subtle characteristics of human personality, and of one unique person. There is nothing mysterious about this. It is to be expected that for human sensibility and intelligence the subtler qualities of bodily form should become significant of the subtler qualities of mental life. OceanofPDF.com
¶89B. SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS AND OTHER- CONSCIOUSNESS ONE OF THE most important spheres in which intelligence and imagination operate to make man superior to a chimpanzee is his awareness of personality, in himself and others. Self-consciousness and other- consciousness open up to him a vast world of experience which is almost wholly closed to other animals. By discriminating between his mental activity and its objects, John Smith gradually attains a more or less clear awareness of himself as an enduring centre of mental activities. Endless philosophical discussion is possible about the nature of this ‘centre and innumerable shades of opinion, from the view that it is an ‘eternal soul’ to the view that it is nothing whatever but a ‘unity of pattern’ running through all his behaviour. But whatever the philosophically correct description of the ‘unity of consciousness’ may be, clearly there is a unity and continuity in John Smith’s mental life, and he is aware of it in a sense in which in all probability an ape is not aware to any considerable extent. This discrimination between experiencing and its objects is not alone enough to produce full self-consciousness in John Smith. His awareness of himself as a person is largely the product of his awareness of other persons. The two kinds of experience augment one another. It is true that, without direct acquaintance with his own experiencing, he could never come to regard others as experiencing selves; but equally true that, without awareness of the interactions and differences between himself and others, he could never have more than the vaguest notion of himself. Very much of
¶90his knowledge of himself is derived from the ‘reflection’, so to speak, of himself in other minds. Indeed, not merely his knowledge of his own person but the actual character of his own person is very largely the product of his relations with others. His dealings with others call forth in him many kinds of activities which otherwise would be impossible. Through the realization of others as experiencing selves he attains to distinctively human love and hate, admiration and contempt, compassion, ridicule and so on. Awareness of his personal continuity from day to day and year to year greatly influences John Smith’s behaviour. However short-sighted we may call him, he is much more foreseeing and prudent than any ape. The aims which he conceives for his future self may vary greatly in respect of the degree of the futurity of their realization. He may look forward for an hour, a day, a year, a lifetime. As a member of a national group or of the world- community, he may co-operate in planning for a consummation which will take centuries to achieve. There may well come a time when the race will habitually lay its plans for periods of thousands and even millions of years in the future. John Smith’s aims may also vary greatly in respect of the kind of self which he seeks to fulfil in the future. He may be concerned with himself regarded simply as an animal needing food, shelter, sex-life, companionship, or dominance over others. But he may also be concerned with a more distinctively human self, craving a more self-conscious and other-conscious life. He may conceive and seek to realize an ideal self of some particular kind, such as an ‘honest man’, a ‘decent sort’, a dare-devil, a statesman, an artist, a scientist, and so on. He may set himself an ideal of personal conduct and development.
¶91There is another important way in which awareness of personality makes a difference to John Smith’s behaviour, namely in his reaction to other persons. This is a subject in which it is all too easy to fall into the error of oversimplification. John Smith is capable of genuine selfishness and genuine altruism. To some extent he controls his impulses for the sake of his enduring self, and, probably to a lesser extent, for the sake of other selves. Many of his acts, of course, are performed deliberately for the advancement of himself as a particular person among other persons; but some are, in exactly the same sense, performed for the advancement of some other person or persons, or for the sake of some group, or for the great, vaguely conceived group called society. The Christian injunction to ‘love thy neighbour as thyself’ is not in principle an impossible, though it is in fact a very difficult, commandment. Human beings are unfortunately far more capable of prudent self-regard than of true altruism; but true altruism does occur. We are all at some time or other genuinely altruistic; although perhaps, on most occasions when we persuade ourselves that we are being altruistic, we are at heart being self- seekers. In genuine altruism and genuine love a man takes the well-being of another person as an end in itself in exactly the same sense as he takes the well-being of his own person as an end. Any one who has loved, and has not been confused by false psychology, knows that this is possible. He wants the beloved to prosper, not merely as a means to his own prospering, but for the beloved’s sake. Of course he may also want himself to prosper, for instance, in respect of enjoying the society of the beloved; but that is another matter. Further, if a conflict arises between his self-love and his other-love, self-love may very well prove the more earnest impulse. But that, again, is another matter.
¶92The difference between altruism and love may be roughly defined as follows. In love the motive is direct admiration or appreciation of a particular individual known to the lover. In altruism the motive springs from a generalization of a man’s particular experiences of other individuals as intrinsically worth while; and consists of the will to treat all human beings, known and unknown, as ends, not merely as means. Every one of John Smith’s acts is a ‘self-centred’ act, in the sense that he is pleased to do it. In every case, but in a special sense, he does what he does because he wants to do it; and in so far as he succeeds he has the experience of pleasure. Thus he has pleasure (though probably also on other counts displeasure) in the successful achievement of a thoroughly selfish act; and pleasure also (though also on other counts displeasure) in an act of self-sacrifice for the sake of another person’s well-being. It is true that, just as, in the selfish mood, he finds more pleasure in selfish behaviour than in generous behaviour, so, in the generous mood he finds more pleasure in generosity than in selfishness. But in neither mood does he seek simply 6 the abstraction ‘pleasure for myself He seeks particular ends for their own sake. Personal fulfilment of himself is one of the ends which he seeks; he may also seek personal fulfilment of some one else. Always what he desires is that certain events should occur. Some of the events which he desires are simple, like sleeping and eating. Some are more complicated, like playing a game, or working for sheer love of his work. Some are even more complicated, like personal fulfilment for himself or for another, or like the prospering of his nation or of the world, or the triumph of a certain ideal, such as socialism or Christianity. All a man’s capacities and activities are obviously included among ‘his capacities and activities’, and therefore their fulfilment constitutes part of his self-fulfilment. In the nature of the case he cannot conceivably seek any
¶93end which will not, by the very fact of his seeking it, be constituted part of his self-fulfilment. Even if, in disgust at his own egotism, he seeks to deny himself, self-denial becomes for him the way to self-fulfilment, in this sense. If we define self-fulfilment as the fulfilling of a man’s desires, then, since every one of his acts springs from some desire of his, and has as its aim some element in self-fulfilment (as defined), his whole conduct is a seeking of self-fulfilment. But this is only to say that, in each and all of his acts, what he seeks is the fulfilment of his desire, which is as much as to say that what he seeks is what he seeks. This is not very illuminating. The only significant sense of the phrase ‘self-fulfilment’ is that in which ‘myself’ is contrasted with other selves, as one particular person among others. In this sense John Smith does not necessarily seek only self- fulfilment. He may seek the fulfilment of another for its own sake in exactly the same sense as he seeks the fulfilment of himself. Through the operation of intelligent discrimination between mental activities and their objects, he comes to be aware of himself as a person, and apprehends the fulfilling of that person as good or desirable. A capacity to desire that end is awakened in him. In the same sense, and by the same means, he comes to be aware of others as persons, and apprehends the fulfilling of those persons as good or desirable. A capacity to desire that end is awakened in him. It is true, of course, that his capacity to desire his own fulfilment is immensely stronger than his capacity for altruism. Even in the most generous and intense kind of love of one individual for another the motive is partly self-regarding. The lover needs and desires community with the beloved for his own well-being. But this makes no difference to the fact that he also seeks the well-being of the beloved for its own sake, and would perhaps bring himself actually to sacrifice the desired community, or even
¶94to sacrifice life itself, for that end. Both love and altruism ‘stand on their own feet’, so to speak. They are not in essence instruments of self-regard. It is true that there is a very great deal of spurious altruism and false love, a great deal of altruistic activity the effective motive of which (often unwitting, unnoticed by the agent himself) is sheer self-pride, or the desire to gain respect or protection or ‘credit in heaven’, or simply the desire to gain the friendship of the beneficiary, or the ‘love’ of the ‘beloved’. It is true that even genuine altruism may be complicated by such motives; and indeed it generally is. But this makes no difference to the fact that John Smith can and does, up to a point, care for others for their own sakes, does, in however feeble a way, love his neighbour as himself. It is true that, even in spontaneous love, he is probably in the first instance drawn toward the other by discovering in him or her some intense fulfilment for his own personal needs for companionship or beauty. But this makes no difference to the essential fact that in time he comes to discover or realize the other as a living person, a centre of vital and mental activity, just as he discovers himself; and that he now loves the other as he loves himself, and perhaps even (in rare cases) far better. Self-fulfilment, then, may happen to be the overwhelmingly most powerful motive of John Smith’s life, but it is not, in any significant sense of the phrase ‘self-fulfilment’, the root of all his other motives. He is capable of realizing that self-fulfilment, or personal fulfilment, which is good in his own case, is equally good wheresoever it occurs. This power of realizing other individuals as selves, and of willing their fulfilment, is one which lies upon the upper limit of human capacity. In our present half-developed mentality it is weak and inconstant. Only the best of us have enough imaginative insight into others, and enough of the power of controlling their self-regarding impulses, to be spontaneous lovers of our
¶95fellow men. But the rest of us are to some extent strengthened by the social approval of love and of altruism. Mere self-regard induces us to contract habits of generosity and of self-detachment which, if they depended only on spontaneous other-regard might well prove impossible to us. The power of treating others as selves, which is among the distinctively human capacities, involves more than merely treating others as beings like oneself. One must also treat them as beings different from oneself, as persons having their own unique characters and capacities, not as mere replicas of oneself. Clearly the power of imaginative insight into the peculiar capacities and peculiar needs of others is of very great social importance. It is the root of Christian love, which, if only we could practise it constantly and thoroughly, would be by far the most effective cement for the consolidation of society. The world which we desire to create is one in which individuals will be extremely diverse, yet indissolubly bound by mutual insight. This activity of becoming delicately aware of a personality involves besides intelligence and imagination, something which we may call ‘sensibility’, and is at once a cause of and a product of the other two. By sensibility I mean a combination of two powers; namely in the first place sensitivity to slight variations of behaviour, to gestures, tones of voice, choice of words, and so on; and in the second place intelligent grasp of the problems which the person’s behaviour poses for one’s understanding. It involves, of course, interpretation of his behaviour in terms of one’s acquaintance with desires, moods, emotions of one’s own mind; but also it involves imaginative creation, in oneself, of his unique forms of those desires moods, emotions. The capacity of sensibility to other persons does not necessarily lead to generous or altruistic conduct. Altruism is, indeed, its natural expression;
¶96but it may be inhibited by a very strong self-regarding disposition. Dramatists, novelists, and some psychologists, are particularly well developed in the ‘sense of personality’; but often they are also extremely self-regarding persons, and may be inclined to use their awareness of others chiefly for selfish ends. What is desirable, then, is, not merely awareness of other persons in this sense, but so vivid a realization of them that they seem ‘as real as oneself’, and their prospering as no less desirable than one’s own prospering. Those who have this power of vivid realization of others in a high degree are likely incidentally to develop their own personalities very fully and subtly. Every person whom they learn to know is a source of enrichment to themselves. By virtue of the fruits of their sympathetic insight into others, and championship of others, they themselves are enlarged and deepened. They continually discover aspects of existence which, unaided, they could never have discovered; and they discover ways of behaviour appropriate to those aspects which otherwise would have been impossible to them. OceanofPDF.com
¶97C. THE PERSONAL IDEAL TO BE ‘MORE developed’ in personality consists in having a more accurate and comprehensive experience of the universe, including one’s own nature, and also a power of behaving more appropriately to every kind of experienced situation. ‘Experience of the universe’ must, of course, be understood in the broadest sense. It must include every field of experience, the perceptual, the introspective, the personal, the social, the scientific, the artistic, the religious, and so on. The word ‘accurate’ implies an objective distinction between true and false. The word ‘appropriate’ implies an objective distinction between right and wrong, in some sense. For my part I am content to say that appropriate or right action consists always in action which takes into account, in just measure, all the demands imposed by the objective situation; and that these demands of the objective situation are found to be, in actual experience, the needs and capacities of human beings, or of any beings whatever that are capable of personality or of vital activity in any degree whatever. In this statement many difficult philosophical problems are raised. For instance, how can we measure the relative value of capacities, and how the relative value of individuals? I shall not discuss these problems, important though they are. Here I will only point out that, difficult or impossible as it is to make judgments of the worth of capacities and of persons, we do in practice attempt to make them in our daily life. The principle which we try to use, though we seldom formulate it, might be very roughly defined thus. The capacity which is judged to be the more awakened is prized the more highly. The individual who is judged to be the more awakened, more
¶98developed in personality, is the more admired. The words ‘awakened’ and ‘personality’ have to be understood in terms of knowing, feeling and creative doing. The ideal for any person is not merely the satisfaction of such desires as he actually has, but the development of his personality in this sense, his advancement toward ever more penetrating and more comprehensive knowing or awareness, ever more appropriate feeling and willing, ever more creative doing. The phrase ‘creative doing’ calls for very careful interpretation. Here I am content to say that ‘creative doing’ is that kind of action which issues from ‘creative imagination’ in any sphere, in the sense mentioned in the preceding chapter. This advancement in personality is not necessarily a steady acquiring of facts and a steady adjusting of the will. The mind can, of course, and often does, make this steady progress. It may also have periods of retrogression, when its power of apprehension seems to deteriorate, its feeling to coarsen, its will to disintegrate. But also it has, or may have, periods of ‘revelation’, so to speak, when large tracts of its experience, or the whole of its experience, suddenly or gradually acquire a new significance, when it ‘comprehends’ things in a new pattern, opens up new vistas of intellectual significance or new illuminations of feeling, and consequent new determinations of will. The stride from an almost animal infancy to a crudely human childhood, though perhaps not rapid, is more or less of this nature. Similar again is the passage from childhood to self-conscious adolescence. And farther advances, less spectacular but no less revolutionary, are possible at later stages of life. So far-reaching can they be that a man may sometimes look back on his self of the previous year and wonder how he could have been so obtuse, so spiritually torpid. The word ‘spiritually’ is dangerous, but valuable none the less. I offer a rough definition of ‘spiritual’ as I shall use it in this book. Those activities
¶99are spiritual, for the purposes of this book, which lie at or beyond the highest reach of normal mental development. The word may be used either in an absolute sense, in which the standard is taken to be the highest reach of the human mind, or in a relative sense, in which the standard is the highest reach of the particular mind under consideration, whether John Smith’s or Tom Jones’s or a chimpanzee’s or an angel’s. It must not be taken to mean merely intellectual development, but the unitary development of knowing, feeling and willing. Thus for the mind normally below the level of self-consciousness, the tentative reach into self-consciousness and forethought is a spiritual activity. For the mind normally incapable of knowing others as selves the tentative reach from mere animal tenderness and protectiveness to genuine other-conscious love is a spiritual act. For the average human being egoistic prudence is too well established to deserve the adjective spiritual; but genuine altruism and love are upon, or in some cases perhaps beyond, the limit of his capacity. These are therefore spiritual activities, in that they involve a power of insight or sensibility to which he can only precariously attain. There are, I believe, other activities, to be discussed later, which involve a still higher reach of development and are even more aptly to be called spiritual. These activities may occur along with the more normal activities of personal relationship or less particularized social conduct, or with normal aesthetic or intellectual pursuits; but they are not identical with any of them. For the present I will only say of them that personal relationships or social activities or the aesthetic or intellectual pursuits may seemingly come to reveal a new significance, a universal significance almost impossible to describe; and that this new significance may produce a subtle and far- reaching change in the person’s attitude and behaviour. This statement is, I
¶100admit, vague and emotive; but for the present it must stand as a mere token of a more careful discussion in the sequel. OceanofPDF.com
¶101D. SOCIETY AND THE WORLD-AIM THE SUPREME GOAL of all our world-remaking or world-revolution must be the spiritual development of human personality. I cannot prove it, but to me it is self-evident that the ruling purpose of every individual life and of organized society should be the spiritual awakening of the human species, in the sense defined above. I cannot but regard myself and every other human being as essentially an instrument on which some theme of spiritual awakening should be played. I cannot but feel (I do not say believe) that in some sense, which certainly I myself do not at all clearly understand, ‘I’, an ephemeral human being, am under obligation to become as spiritually awakened as I can, so that before I die I may salute as fittingly as I may, in however brief a life, some facet of the beauty of the world, or perhaps it would be better to say some facet of the sheer intricate actuality of the world. I, the bare individual, am of no account. What matters is the theme or melody of knowing, feeling and creative action which may be created through me. All the bare, ephemeral individuals that ever were or will be are of no account. What matters is the music which each in his place and time produces, and which unfolds through the ages. Whether this supreme aspect of the world-aim, this religious aspect, is to be advanced solely by the spiritual advancement of individuals, or whether also by the awakening of some kind of racial mind, it is impossible to know. At our early stage of the adventure it is of no practical importance. For us what is important is that one field in which spiritual awakening may occur is the individual’s awareness of his own social matrix.
¶102I have said almost nothing about John Smith’s relation to society as a whole. It is now time to face this extremely confusing subject. We must distinguish between the animal way of reacting to the social group and the distinctively human way. Unfortunately the distinctively human way of reacting to society is even more rare than the distinctively human way of reacting to another individual. As an animal, John Smith is gregarious. Though at times he requires to be alone for the proper development of his distinctively human capacities, he does also, as man and as animal, require community. An animal reacts to the group as a certain complex stimulus in its environment. It no more conceives the group as a community of selves than it conceives its mate or itself as a self in the full sense of the word. A man’s purely animal reactions to the group may be summed as follows. In prolonged isolation from the group he is more or less distressed, and tends to put an end to his isolation by seeking the group. He behaves more or less as the other members of the group behave. He combines with the group to persecute those individuals who behave differently. He combines with the group to attack other groups. If he is strongly self-assertive, he leads the group, and suppresses rivals. John Smith reacts to the various groups of which he is a member in this animal way. But even his ‘animal’ reactions to groups are different from, and more complex than, the reactions of sub-human animals. He may react to the group of selves much as the animal reacts to the group of perceived animal bodies. Thus he craves for his personal comfort not only the physical presence of the group but also mental community with the group, the sense that he has the group’s ‘moral support’ and approval. Mental or moral isolation from the group may be for him more painful than physical isolation. This kind of reaction is not purely animal, since it involves some degree of awareness of mental life; but it is not, I should say, genuinely
¶103human, since it does not involve full realization of others as selves, to be prized for their own sakes. It regards them, so to speak, as objects in the mental environment, not as themselves subjects, centres of vital and conscious activity, on the same footing as the agent himself, and deserving to be taken into consideration as ends in themselves. This realization, of course, can only come to a man in concrete personal relationships; but it gradually extends to afford him an abstract conception of society as a system of selves, mostly unknown to him, but none the less real. The distinctively human apprehension of society as a system of selves may be faint or intense, fleeting or enduring, ineffective in controlling behaviour or a dominant influence. It may, moreover, apply only to a small group or a large group, or to the whole human race, or to the group composed of all personal beings whatever throughout the universe. It may, of course, fluctuate in its scope from day to day, hour to hour, according to the fluctuations of John Smith’s moods. When the distinctively human social reaction is aroused by any group less than the human race, it is compatible with animal hostility toward ‘foreign’ groups; and, indeed, hostility is made all the more resolute and bitter by the distinctively human realization of one’s own group as a group of selves. But the more a foreign group is realized as a group of selves, the less is it possible to feel animal hostility toward it. No sooner does a man begin to realize a foreign group at all vividly as a group of selves, than he begins to transcend the limitations of his own group-loyalty. By ‘animal hostility’ I mean the disposition to attack foreign groups or foreign individuals simply because they are foreign. Animal hostility, or reflex hostility, is probably a very powerful motive in international strife. Genuine economic and political conflicts, no doubt, also play an important part, but it is animal hostility to a vaguely conceived ‘foreign pack’ which provides
¶104the emotional force needed for war. In very many individuals, moreover, this primitive vindictiveness is apparently greatly increased during childhood by the unconscious vindictiveness of parents and guardians. Thus the great majority of us, including, no doubt, many diplomats and foreign ministers, have an unacknowledged sadistic, and irrational leaning toward war. No wonder that the cause of peace makes little headway! In any one with a strong and constant realization of the human race as a system of selves animal hostility toward foreigners as such is not likely to occur. The impulse has to find other outlets. It may, for instance, express itself against nationalists and militarists of one’s own and other nations; or against any of the countless and mighty forces which are opposed to the making of a more human world. We might here discuss interminably the problem as to whether the world-society has any intrinsic worth over and above the worth of the individuals that make it up; whether all individuals exist for society, or society for its individuals. It is surely enough to say that, since society is nothing whatever but a system of individuals in physical and mental relation, and since on the other hand the individual’s mind is in-formed through and through by his social environment, the problem is meaningless. We must insist, however, that since society is not itself a self, a centre of mental activity, the spiritual awakening which we desire can only occur in individual minds. The sole justification of social organization is that it is a means to the fulfilling of the capacities of individuals. This implies, of course, their spiritual awakening. The utilitarian ideal of the greatest happiness of the greatest number still holds good if we may interpret ‘happiness’ to mean, not merely a pleasurable state of mind, but the free exercise of capacities, and especially of those capacities which are by definition spiritual. Society, then, should be a means for the spiritual
¶105awakening of individuals. If the world-community were itself a single self of very superior order, the subordination of individual fulfilment to the spiritual awakening of the communal self might be justified. But, though conceivably there might be such a communal self, there is no good reason whatever to suppose that anything of the sort actually exists to-day. Though the true goal of social organization is not organization itself, but the fulfilment of individuals, it does not follow that all individuals in society deserve equal consideration simply because all are individuals. So far as political rights are concerned, all normal individuals should indeed be treated equally; for political organization is far too clumsy an instrument to adjust itself rightly to the differences of intrinsic worth between individuals. But individuals do differ in respect of their degree of mental and spiritual aliveness. We may be good democrats without pretending to believe that men are born equal, which plainly they are not. OceanofPDF.com
¶106VI. ART OceanofPDF.com
¶107A. ART AND CRAFTSMANSHIP THE MAIN CONTENTION of this book is that we shall not save our civilization from disaster unless we boldly set ourselves a far higher and more comprehensive social ideal than has hitherto seemed practicable. We must use our new-found mechanical power consciously and strictly in service of the world-aim; and the world-aim must be conceived not merely as the maintenance of the world-population in health and affluence (though this is, of course, essential) but as the creation of a truly civilized world- community, in which every human being shall have full opportunity to develop whatever capacity he has for the distinctively human, the mentally and spiritually awakened, life. Less exalted social aims are no longer practicable. The present state of the world is tragic evidence of the way in which they defeat themselves. Through obsession with the aims of economic individualism and of nationalism and imperialism we are losing even the opportunity of world-wide prosperity. Further, nothing less than the fully conscious world-aim can any longer call forth the lasting devotion and courage which alone can save us. What is needed, then, is loyalty to the distinctively human in our nature; and in order to rise to this loyalty we must form a clear idea of those activities which involve the distinctively human intelligence and imagination. So far I have tried to describe the human activities of personal relationship and social life. I must now give some account of the activity of art, which has, I believe, not only very great intrinsic worth, but also an extreme social and even racial importance. Lest it should be misunderstood, this statement must be amplified at once. By saying that pure art (in whatever medium) is an activity of high
¶108intrinsic worth, I mean that in the discriminate appreciation of works of art, and more strikingly in their production, man does, in my view, actually attain a degree of mental vitality, a kind of percipience and of creativeness, which not only is impossible to the sub-human animal but also is in general absent from the affairs of ordinary human life. In artistic experience we learn, in a very real sense, to look at the world from a new angle, or with new eyes, and to enjoy it in an entirely new manner. We begin to delight in certain aspects of the objective world itself for their own sake, and not merely for their ordinary human usefulness. To experience these objective characters is itself enough to create in the awakening mind a delighted interest in them and a need for further experience of them. Sometimes, when confronted with a work of art which happens to ‘strike home’ upon our particular sensibility, we may have an experience comparable to that which occurs when, after climbing a mountain-side, we suddenly reach the crest and open up an entirely new view. But in the case of art what is revealed is not a new landscape but a new aspect of familiar things. These statements are shockingly vague, and may perhaps be unjustified. But the experience is compelling, and should not be ignored simply because contemporary science cannot give a satisfactory account of it. It is undeniable that in genuine aesthetic experience the mind does have this exhilerating sense of coming into the presence of new and excellent reality. The fact that the experience is indescribable suggests only that words, which have evolved in response to practical and theoretical needs, are not fitted to describe it. By saying that art is of extreme social and racial importance I mean that, though for the artist art is, or should be, an end in itself, it has also an incalculable social utility, not on the practical plane, but as one of the chief instruments by which the world-aim, the awakening of human mentality
¶109may be advanced. Though artists are so prone to stand aloof from social organization and the social enterprise in general, their work is a truly civilizing influence in the community. Directly or indirectly it helps all men to be more human than they otherwise could be. Not only so, but the aesthetic interest may very well be actually one of those growing points of the human spirit which are searching like tendrils (perhaps vainly, perhaps triumphantly) for kinds of experience and aspects of objective reality which at present lie wholly beyond our reach. One qualification should be made to the claim that artists perform a very important function in society. Like every other highly developed activity, art has its special danger. In this case the danger is that persons with no strong aesthetic powers will be tempted to devote themselves to the production of so-called works of art which are in fact worthless. Such persons are prone to cover their own emptiness under a cloak of mystery, and to insist that their art is so subtle as to be almost wholly incommunicable. They take their world of trivial fantasies to be the real world; the great vulgar world of common life they despise and shun. In fact, failing to become artists, they become ‘arty’ persons. It is well to remember that in art the possibility of self-deception and downright quackery is greater than in any other sphere. Before trying to form a clear view of art, we may note that one of the primitive sources of artistic activity is the impulse to construct or experiment. This primitive impulse, which man shares with some other animals, especially with the apes, rises to distinctively human expression not only in art but in all practical intelligent making, such as handicraft, agriculture, engineering. It plays a part also in social organization and management, and again in the theoretical constructions of science and philosophy. The activity of ‘making whether for practical, aesthetic, or theoretical ends, is among the most humanly satisfying of all activities.
¶110Inevitably the practical is the commonest field for its exercise. Even in the ideal society practical construction, manipulation and organization for practical ends, must inevitably be the main outlet for the constructive impulse. On the other hand, even to-day it is in art, and in theoretical activity (though in very different manners) that constructivity finds its most satisfying and stimulating expression. We may best approach the subject of art by trying to form a clear idea of the attitude of mind of the man who is earnestly employed in making something. In this way we shall trace art to its primitive, biological sources, and at the same time emphasize the simplest of its distinctively human attributes. Thus, when we pass from handicraft to pure art, we shall be prepared to regard all aesthetic activity as essentially a kind of ‘making’, the aim of which is to produce objects significant to the most awakened mentality. The aim of handicraft is primarily to make articles useful to man’s practical needs, but it develops an interest in the article itself and the material itself and the making itself. In pure art the practical need may have fallen away, and interest may centre wholly upon the object itself and its significance for the awakened mind. Things (and thoughts too) may be well made or badly made. We do not always trouble to make a thing as well as possible, since very often a roughly made thing will serve. We do not need packing-cases to be as neat and strong as dining-room tables. But the good worker tries to make things as well as is needful, and indeed, a little better. For the making is itself a joy to him, and a badly made thing offends him. If he makes furniture, the joints must be as accurate as possible. If he makes clothes, the stitches must be as fine and regular as possible. Not only so, but the design of the furniture and the pattern of the clothes must be well thought out, and the best possible for the purpose. Those who are interested in making things desire them not only
¶111to be well made but to appear well made. They wish them also to appear the things they are, and not something else. If they are designing a house, they will not try to make it look like a church, or a castle, or a ship, or a bit of rock. To do so, they feel, would be as inept as to make a man look like a tree. Because they are interested in the make of things, they want the look of the thing to express as well as possible both the purpose that the thing serves and the workmanship that has gone to the making of it. If they are making or designing a chair, they want it both to be and to look comfortable, to be and look strong, to be and look handy. Also, they will not try to hide the way in which it is made. They will let the good cabinet- making show itself frankly. If they are making something of wood they will not make it look like stone or metal; though indeed they may find some tricks of stone-work or metalwork suitable for woodwork also. Those who delight in making things (whether material things or thought patterns) become so interested in the making, and in the things, that they itch to go on putting more and more work into each thing that they make. Even when they have made the thing fulfil its practical purpose as well as they can, they must spend more time and energy on it, if they have any time and energy to spare. The only way to put more work into it is to decorate it. This may be done either by making it throughout with even better workmanship than is needed, and letting the appearance of the excellent work delight the eye; or by decorating it in the ordinary sense, adding forms and colours to it simply to make it more attractive. A chair or a chest, for instance, may be carved or inlaid. A building may be embellished with sculpture. Cloth may be patterned. There is a danger that decoration may merely spoil the underlying form of the thing, so that it no longer seems beautifully fitted to its purpose. The true aim of decoration is to make the appearance of the thing delightful with
¶112an added beauty; but all too easily it may add not beauty but ugliness. Decoration may sometimes be intricate and rich; but always it should make the article appear to fulfil its purpose and its nature even better than it could seem to do without the decoration. There must be no unnecessary fuss about the decorative additions. Everything should be in its particular way relevant. Here a critic may protest that decoration is, as a matter of fact, unnecessary, irrelevant to the use of the thing; and that therefore it is bound to seem so. This view is mistaken. Though decoration cannot make the thing be more practically useful than it is, it can make it more fully express for the observer its purpose and its nature. Decoration that is well controlled can call out the spirit of the thing, so to speak. It can make woodwork look more delightfully ‘woodwork’, and a chest more delightfully ‘a chest’ than would be possible without decoration. It can emphasize the essential form and structure of things. But, in addition, decoration can do something else, so interesting and delightful that it may become an end in itself, and not merely a beauty added to useful things. In the first place, it can call up in our minds all sorts of activities and experiences, all sorts of joys and longings, that bear upon the main purpose of the thing decorated. Thus it may secretly, without our knowing how, put us into the right mood for using the thing. For instance, the decoration of a church should affect people in such a way that they will feel quiet and thoughtful, and inclined to worship; but the decoration of a picture-house should be more exciting. A book’s binding and general form should put one in the right mood for reading that particular book. Certain prehistoric peoples seem to have been very prone to decorate their weapons, their tools, their crockery, the walls of their caves. Perhaps this was done with the idea of casting spells, and blessing the article and the use of it, so as to bring success. It may well have achieved its end; for it
¶113would tend to put the user into the right mood for performing the action confidently and skilfully. But perhaps the magical or religious purpose of these early artists was an afterthought. It may well be that when they had made a tool or a weapon, the sheer joy of making was not yet appeased, and so they were impelled to go on adding decoration in any way which seemed interesting and appropriate. OceanofPDF.com
¶114B. PURE ART, PLASTIC DECORATION SOMETIMES PLAYS a small and sometimes a great part in the form of well-made practical things. But artists also make things which have no practical purpose at all, and are thus in a sense pure decoration. Most pictures and statues are of this kind. Yet to call them pure decoration is not correct, for in a sense they are very much more. Musicians, painters, sculptors, poets, writers of imaginative prose, are all concerned with very highly skilled activities which undoubtedly afford a deep sense of vitality, of enhanced and triumphant aliveness. They are also concerned to produce in their various manners perceptual objects such as sonatas, pictures, poems, which, when conceived and contemplated rightly, will appear to have a special kind of excellence, generally called beauty. Now the word ‘beauty’ is used in many different senses. Often it has no intelligible meaning at all, and serves merely to arouse a glow of emotion. But to avoid using it in speaking about art is difficult and pedantic. It is a valuable word, although it is grossly misused. In this chapter I shall use the word ‘beauty’ to mean those attributes (of whatever kind) which a perceived object must have in order to arouse in the perceiving mind a genuine ‘aesthetic experience’. This experience I shall try to describe and explain so far as possible in scientific terms in the course of the chapter; but I suspect that there is something in the aesthetic experience which cannot as a matter of fact be fully accounted for by contemporary psychology. This is a field in which we must try, indeed, to be as scientifically severe as possible; but we must also beware lest we ignore facts which science cannot yet properly assimilate.
¶115To say that a thing is beautiful (in the sense which I intend) is to say, not merely that it has a certain intrinsic character, but that its character is such as to affect the mind in a certain way. Many kinds of physical objects may happen to be beautiful in this sense. They may be classified as follows: (i) works of art, such as pictures, sonatas, poems; (2) natural objects which are not alive, such as landscapes; — (3) living organisms, especially human beings. In works of art, beauty is the result of the activity of an artist. In lifeless objects it is an accident. In living creatures it is an expression of the vitality of the creature, and consists in the appearance of the perfect and harmonious functioning of the creature’s powers, physical, mental, and perhaps spiritual. Both in the living creature and in the work of art beauty consists very largely in the appearance of fine workmanship and of the harmonious fulfilment of powers. But it involves also much else, as I shall try to show. In passing we may distinguish between three orders of beauty. There is a beauty which is very familiar and easily appreciated. There is also a beauty which involves somewhat more developed powers of appreciation, and affords an exhilarating, but not seriously disturbing, sense of discovery or adventure. Finally there is a beauty which demands the exercise of capacities upon the extreme limit of our development, and outrages our normal dispositions with a sense of discord or perversion or sheer ugliness. We may call the first ‘prettiness’, the second ‘normal beauty’, the third ‘difficult beauty’. All three have their places. But since the chief function of art is to ‘stretch the mind’, to waken it to keener percipience and appreciation, the last is the most important. Incidentally let us remind ourselves that in this sphere of ‘difficult beauty’ quackery finds its most convenient opportunity.
¶116The truly creative artist, who is exploring and manifesting strange fields of difficult beauty, is brought to contempt by the host of imitators who gain notoriety by striving to affect the manner of the originator, so as to produce mere grotesques, shocking to the public. I have described the three kinds of beauty in terms of their effect on the observer. They may also be described in terms of the nature of the beautiful object itself, or of the apparent nature of the beautiful object. The appearance of a living organism, say a human body is in part an expression of its nature. The more spiritual human nature tends to appear physically with features which can be appreciated only by the more spiritual observer. In a work of art the more developed capacities of the artist express themselves in forms which can be appreciated only by the more developed observer. There are doubtless other activities no less vital than the creation and appreciation of pure art. But the depth and the mysteriousness of artistic experience has sometimes persuaded artists that in their work they rise to a superhuman, a godlike kind of aliveness. There is at least one sense in which this is obviously true, since the great artist does something which is far beyond the powers of the rest of us. And even we ourselves, in merely appreciating his works, may feel that we have awakened to a new order of being. For, if we are in a fit state to regard it rightly, a great work of art can actually produce in us new needs, can actually teach us highly developed mental activities which, without its help, never would have been possible to us. What is a painter doing when he paints a picture? He is making a material thing, a painted canvas, which by its coloured pattern shall satisfy certain obscure needs of his and of any spectator who can look at it properly. It is the itch of these needs which makes him paint; and the actual
¶117working, by disclosing to him new qualities of beauty, produces in him new needs. The artist is a maker, and like all true makers, he seeks to make something which shall fulfil its purpose as exactly as possible, and shall also display its own structure as satisfactorily as possible. But the purpose which his painted canvas is to fulfil is not a simple practical one like that of a chair or a house. It is an extremely complicated one, so complicated that the painter himself cannot say at all clearly what it is. What he can do is not to talk lucidly about his purpose, but to fulfil it, either very well or not so well. One difference between making things for practical purposes and making works of pure art is that, in the first case, the need which is to be fulfilled, the purpose or plan which controls the whole activity, is generally clear at the outset, whereas in the second it is far from clear. I do not mean merely that it has to be discovered in detail during the activity. The artist may, indeed, make sketches before he begins the picture; and also, in the actual painting of the picture, he may keep on discovering new possibilities of beauty. This is often, but not always, the case. But what is more striking about art is this. When the artist has produced his picture, he still cannot say why he has done it, what needs precisely it is meant to fulfil. Even if, as may sometimes happen, he sees in a flash the whole form of his work before he begins to embody it, he does not know what in him produced the vision and what delights in it. His aesthetic needs are to be discovered only by analysing the finished work. And this analysis neither artist nor critic can, in our day, at all satisfactorily accomplish. The artist’s activity, whether he is a painter or a musician or a writer, seems to include several different kinds of activities which must all be made to fit together. We may begin to realize the complexity of his aim by
¶118thinking of the complicated nature of his personality. A man has capacities for activities of many kinds. Not only has he an outfit of inborn capacities, but also the world acts upon him so as to develop these inborn powers into capacities for more subtle and diverse activities. At any time there are in him many simple and many more subtle capacities which his ordinary life does not properly exercise. These seek expression in his art. Some of these unfulfilled capacities are capacities for fine perception. In the case of the painter they are chiefly capacities for extremely subtle seeing and touching. Besides powers of perception, he has probably certain unsatisfied, or incompletely satisfied, animal instincts, assertive, sexual, protective, gregarious, and so on. He has also capacities for understanding and appreciating human life and the universe. Further, owing to the particular ways in which his environment has affected him from infancy onwards, he has acquired many special sentiments for certain objects, persons, perceptual forms, ideas. Though the origins of these sentiments are mostly forgotten, and in some cases too painful to remember, they largely determine his taste. All these diverse powers seek fulfilment in his art. The painter’s most obvious aim is to make a well-balanced pattern of coloured shapes. But what does this really mean? He seeks to make something which the eye will grasp as a single variegated thing, a whole of parts which fit well together in spite of, or because of, their differences. If he allows conflicts or discords in his pattern, they are there because the particular pattern needs them there. But why must the work of art have unity? The answer can be put in two ways. First, when we have to grasp a complicated mass of characters, we do so more effectively, and with more zest, if we can apprehend them, not merely as a chaos, but as an ordered unity, in which each part has its function. Second, if as I believe, the function of a work of art is to express
¶119and clarify an obscure mental or spiritual activity of the artist, every part of it should co-operate with every other for this end. Nothing should hinder the expression. The coloured shape that the painter makes has the power of suggesting to the mind other things than colour and seen shape. In the first place it obscurely suggests touched shapes, and also the movements which we should make if we were to trace out the shapes with hand and arm. The seen pattern calls up in us echoes of touch and movement; and these have to contribute to the picture in such a way that we shall experience it as a single whole, and not a mere collection of discordant things which have no purpose in the whole. But the picture gives us much more than a pattern made up of material for sight and touch and movement. Each of its parts, and the whole pattern also, suggests to us, in an obscure but potent way, many subtle and far- reaching matters which have been connected with such sights and touches and movements in our past lives, matters which were originally experienced and dealt with by us in our many kinds of activities, both simple and complex. For instance, it may suggest characteristics of the physical world, such as those which belong to trees, clouds, human bodies, houses, machinery, or mental characteristics of human beings, such as their fearfulness and courage, their passions and their peace, their meanness and their aspiration. This vast shadowy web of suggested matters need not be so obvious as to force itself on our attention. Indeed, most of it is much too shadowy and remote to do so. In the shadowiness and elusiveness lies its power to influence us deeply without our knowing how we are influenced. It plays mysteriously upon our emotions as the wind on a harp. The painter, then, seeks to make a pattern which shall have depth beyond depth of meaning for us. But the meaning is for the most part
¶120‘unconscious’, in the sense that, though it may have a strong effect on us, we cannot clearly apprehend it and analyse it. The picture’s seen shape must in a sense hold within it not only touched shape and movement but, so to speak, vistas of the world. Almost as water might hold in solution salt, sugar, and all kinds of biting and fragrant substances, the visible shape of the picture holds for us the tang, the taste and fragrance, of many experiences; little pleasing experiences, grave experiences, terrible experiences, and so on, according to the needs of the whole pattern of experience which the artist has embodied. Sometimes the painter frankly pictures actual objects like people and houses, and lets them work upon us without disguise. But even so, he does not simply reproduce’ them photographically. He suggests them, simplifies them, distorts them. According to his need of them, he emphasizes certain features of them, and neglects others. Sometimes he may be very sparing in his representation of physical objects, using instead mere coloured shapes, which, though they are not pieced together as actual things, are none the less characters abstracted from actual things, and able therefore to give us the elusive significance, the fragrance, the tang of forgotten experiences of many kinds. A painter’s main interest is always in the visible form of things rather than in their other characters. In extremely ‘abstract’ art, which avoids the use of natural objects entirely, it may seem that he cares for nothing but form. He becomes a kind of geometrician, though doubtless he would claim to be concerned with a different quality or aspect of form from that which interests the geometrician. He seeks to apprehend and delight in the ‘pure’ forms which are suggested by the confused forms of actual objects. He seeks pictorial symbols to enable him to grasp compendiously and enjoy
¶121intelligently the spatial relations of objects. Similarly, in music, a composer may be chiefly interested in the abstract relations of tones and rhythms. This aesthetic delight in pure form seems to be a development of intellectual interest and constructivity. But it is an aesthetic development. It is a detached appreciation of form for its own sake. This is undoubtedly a very important factor in all art. But those who seek to limit the aesthetic activity to abstract form would deprive art of very much of its empire. Moreover, the power or significance which the abstract artist finds in certain forms and not in others is in part the product of his own past experience, of his particular expertness in apprehending forms. Further, it is in part almost certainly a significance which the particular forms have for his ‘unconscious mind’, a significance derived from associations in his long-forgotten or repressed cravings and interests. We should admit, however, that in perceptual form and its deep associations in our experience we may also find a genuinely spiritual significance which cannot yet be scientifically described. Some artists, recognizing this, are solely concerned to express in strange ‘irrational’ shapes the dreamlike imagery that rises into consciousness from the depths of their minds. Such matter, they feel, is rich in spiritual, though unintelligible, meaning. Unfortunately that which rises from man’s ‘hidden depths’ is at least as likely to be mere gas, generated by repressed animal or infantile cravings, as to be the effervescence of true spiritual activity. While recognizing that these artists may, indeed, be the most important pioneers, one cannot but suspect that they, like so many other schools, have been misled into exaggerating one of the many functions of art at the expense of others no less important. Though the genuinely spiritual aesthetic activities may well entail, and emerge from, and transform, all manner of lower-order activities, they must also entail much else.
¶122But let us not consider the differences between the many schools; let us try to discover what is common and essential in all schools. A painter, then, makes a physical object which, though it is just painted canvas, may work deeply upon our nature, partly by inducing us to appreciate pure form, partly by opening up vistas of meanings, one behind the other, fading into remote obscurity. The work of art fulfils for us not actually, but in imagination, as dreams may do, all sorts of needs, of which the spectator and even the artist himself may have been hitherto unconscious. Indeed, he probably still remains unconscious of the sources of his satisfaction. These unconscious needs of the mind must be responsible for much of the deep emotional effect of many works of art. We all have our unwitting cravings, connected, for instance with sex and self-regard, cravings which, owing to social condemnation, or the peculiar condition’s of our early life, we dare not admit even to ourselves. Such repressed cravings, which may date back to infancy, deeply affect our appreciation. The work of art, by its veiled symbolism, may tap these deep sources of mystery and passion. But if this echoing of past experience were the only effect of a picture, painting would not be a very important activity. It would be merely assuaging, merely cathartic, purgative, releasing, instead of being, as it is, stimulating, awakening, spiritualizing. The vital, the life-giving fact about art is that it uses these echoes of the past to make something new and surprising, something enticing, challenging, and difficult to grasp. It shows us a quality of beauty which was formerly beyond our reach. Thus the artist in painting his picture, and the spectator in appreciating it, are all the while enriching their own nature, making themselves capable of ever finer, more delicate kinds of activity, making themselves more alive mentally, capable of more spiritual activity, more sensitive to the universe in which they live.
¶123Art can, no doubt, give some satisfaction even to our animal nature; it gives very keen satisfaction to our every-day human nature; but its true function, I submit, is to awaken in us the tentative first stirrings of a nature which is, in a special sense, ‘superhuman This is the really important office of all art. To create a work of art, or to appreciate it, is not merely to satisfy certain obscure needs that we possessed all along, but actually to learn new and more developed ways of experiencing, by which we may discover and appreciate ever more subtle characteristics of the universe. Simply by practice in observing works of art, and still more by practice in creating them, we learn to perceive delicacies of form and meaning which otherwise we should have missed. And so we produce in ourselves needs for this more subtle perceiving. Not only so, but by the same practice we may acquire new powers of appreciating all sorts of things besides perceptible shape. By becoming sensitive to the significance of art, we learn to detect and savour many subtle characteristics of human nature and of the world, to which we should otherwise have remained insensitive. Little by little, perhaps, we change our ideas as to what a human being should do with himself, and what kind of a world is desirable. Here I may mention fittingly an extremely important characteristic of all art, and one which is sometimes thought to be the essence of the whole matter. One of the ways in which the artist (in any medium) discovers and imparts finer modes of perceiving and feeling is through his ‘style or manner of execution. I have already said that he does not seek merely to reproduce natural objects; he selects what is relevant to his artistic aim. We must note also that he adds, by means of his style, features which do not belong to the forms of objects in nature. Working in some particular medium, such as paint, ink, stone, wood, or musical sound, he adds to his representations characters which belong to the
¶124medium itself and to his way of dealing with it, such as the marks of a brush, the fluent strokes of a pen, the firm strokes of a chisel. Not only so, but in his particular use of these instruments the spirit or style of his unique personality manages to express itself. We may say that he translates nature into the language of art, and into the unique idiom of that language which is determined by his unique personality, Whatever he conveys is expressed in his own hand-writing, so to speak. Thus not only does the picture, (or the statue, or music, or poem) display a technique which is intensely satisfying to the sheer constructive interest of the experienced observer, but also it refines and deepens his perception, and indeed his whole experience of life, though in a manner which would be extremely difficult, or perhaps impossible, to define in terms of contemporary psychology. For the artist’s technical style is the outcome of, and the significant symbol of, his most developed mental activities, or of his best ‘mental style’, so to speak. Thus the work of art, by means of the style or idiom in which it is executed, may to some extent impose upon a discerning observer the mentality and spirituality of the artist. OceanofPDF.com
¶125C. PURE ART OF OTHER KINDS ALL THIS THAT is true of the plastic arts is true also of music and poetry and all imaginative writing. A piece of music is a pattern of sounds, which, besides being exquisitely fitted together to make something which the ear can grasp as a single variegated thing, gives us also a pattern of the fragrances of many past experiences, so that when we hear it we may be deeply stirred, though knowing not why. Indeed, it goes deeper than our past experience. Even new-born infants, that have had almost no experience at all, are emotionally affected by sounds. They are frightened by sudden loud noises, soothed by cooings, amused by chucklings. Music makes use of all this, and of much more in our nature. It uses our inborn ways of feeling about sounds, as well as all the significance that particular sounds have gained through past experience. It uses primeval sound-patterns of terror, anger, gentleness, merriment, love, sorrow, joy; many of which must have had much the same power over our apelike ancestors. But it also does more than play upon the strings of the inborn emotional instrument in us. It echoes our own past experience of the world. It does not, of course, simply imitate noises that we have heard. It does not, if it is real music, give us sheer copies of the braying of donkeys and the twittering of birds. But it gives us hints, echoes, almost unrecognizable suggestions, and completely unrecognizable transformations, of past sound patterns, such as the voices of winds, thunder, rain, sea-breakers, rivulets. It translates the crude sounds of the world into the language, the technique, the convention, of music; just as painting translates the coloured shapes of the world into the language of pictorial art.
¶126One of the main sources of its power over us lies in its transformed echoing of the human voice. Here, no doubt, it uses our inborn, primeval responses to voice tones. It uses primitive intonations of fear, anger, sexual hunger, and so on. But also it deals in the innumerable acquired intonations and inflexions of actual speech, though all transformed into music. Sometimes, namely in song, it makes use of actual words and their significance; but more often it is wordless, though rich in the transformed echoes of voices. But all this subtle echoing which it achieves is done not merely so as to recapture past experience. It seeks to make something new for our surprised delight; something which, for its full appreciation, demands our keenest attention, something which will waken us into new and vivid mental activities, and present to us some quality of beauty which was formerly hidden from us. Poetry, like music, is a pattern of sounds, and has to some extent the same kind of inarticulate power as pure music. But words are sounds which also direct our attention to things other than themselves. In fact they make us think of things; and the meanings of the words are used as well as their sheer musical power. Each word has meaning, and also each phrase and each sentence has meaning; and the whole poem has meaning. And all these meanings have their own emotional powers over us. Poetry and all imaginative writing have therefore a scope and a kind of power which other arts have only to a much less extent. They have also perhaps a weakness. They cannot appeal quite so compellingly to the senses as do music, painting, sculpture. But on the other hand they can describe imaginatively every kind of experience, every experienced feature of the world. And so they can stir us very deeply and delicately, painting for the
¶127mind’s eye pictures more ample than actual pictures, and sounding in the mind’s ear music more articulate than actual music. Some hold that the making of works of pure art is the most fulfilling of all human activities, and that it is the expression of our nature in its most awakened, most alive, most spiritual mode. Some hold, further, that in the finest art we come into closest touch with the most fundamental characteristics of the universe, that in some way art gives us the most important kind of truth about the nature of the universe. This seems preposterous only if we are determined to reject all ideas which cannot be substantiated by contemporary science. But since contemporary science, in spite of its triumphs, is far from omniscient, and has sometimes a deadening effect on the mind, we should be careful not to be too much impressed by it in the sphere of art. Whatever the truth of the matter, all those who have any genuine artistic experience will agree that art is at any rate one of the most vitalizing activities, and that it has a ‘spiritual’ aspect, in the sense defined in an earlier chapter. There are two reasons for believing this. In the first place, artistic activity is actually experienced as giving a very deep fulfilment. In the second place, regarded objectively or scientifically, artistic activity can be shown to involve extremely complicated and subtle powers. Further, not only is it on both counts a highly developed activity, but also, even if it has no mystical bearing on the fundamental nature of the universe, art does bring us face to face with certain very subtle and significant features of it, for instance in the spheres of sense-perception and of human personality. Moreover, since it constantly brings together things that most of us would not be able to connect, and constantly fuses even opposed and jarring things into a unity, art may at least be thought of as symbolizing a hidden unity
¶128which, it may be, lies behind the apparent disorder of the experienced world. This leads to yet another aspect of art, and one the importance of which goes far beyond the field of art itself. It is characteristic of all art, but is most clearly seen in literature, especially in the novel and the drama. For true aesthetic appreciation the mind must not only enter with full sympathy into the human strivings which are expressed in the work of art, but also must at the same time remain a completely detached observer. Some art critics put it that there is a correct ‘distance’ from which to regard the work of art, neither too ‘near’ nor too ‘far.’ This metaphor is misleading. Rather we have to be in two places at once. We have to enter deeply into every passion and every experience which is expressed, and yet we must also remain outside and aloof. We must vividly ‘live through’ the strivings of the individuals in the drama, and yet look down on them from a celestial height. We must desire the issue of the play or the novel to be determined not by human sympathy but by the exigences of art itself, even if these involve a tragic end. The pure aesthetic delight in the form of the drama is much the same attitude as the abstract artist’s delight in perceived form. And, like this, it may, I should say with more plausibility than truth, be theoretically accounted for entirely in terms of primitive unconscious cravings. Perhaps, for instance, the scientific analysis of the delight in aesthetic tragedy would trace this ecstasy to repressed sadism and masochism. There may, indeed, be truth in this; but it cannot be accepted as the whole truth, since detachment is required no less in art which is not tragic than in the tragic itself. Indeed, this unity of sympathy and exalted detachment appears to be the essence of the aesthetic experience. It is at bottom the distinctively human and spiritual delight in the form of things for its own sake, not
¶129merely for utility in relation to ordinary human purposes. Springing, no doubt, in part from animal curiosity, this objectivity of interest develops into the world of aesthetic experience on the one hand, and into the world of scientific and philosophical experience on the other. At a later stage I shall have much more to say on this subject of detachment. I shall submit that it is essential to the truly spiritual attitude toward life as a whole and toward every factor in it. Art, then, performs a very great office in schooling us to this attitude. OceanofPDF.com
¶130D. SUMMARY OF THE IMPORTANCE OF ART FEW OF US have art as their main occupation in life. Very few have great artistic ability. But all have some power of making things beautifully and appreciating beautiful things. And all of us might have opportunity of using these powers. It is a mistake to suppose that art is only what is to be found in picture galleries and concert halls. Almost everything that we do may be done either in a beautiful way or in an ugly way. In our daily life, in our clothes and furniture and all our household goods, in our buildings and cars and ships, in our speech and gestures and the way we carry ourselves, there is an immense possibility of right making and wrong making, of ‘telling’ or significant appearance. Moreover, it should be possible for every normal person to learn some genuine appreciation of works of pure art. And if all of us were really sensitive in this way, such experience would play a great part in controlling our lives, and making us conduct ourselves in a more seemly, a better, a more vital and awakened, style. And then the world would be a very different thing from this actual world. Some hold that this kind of added excellence in life, the experience of beauty, is of little account in a world that is in serious disorder. Artists, they say, are merely fiddling while Rome burns. It may well be that there are crises in the career of mankind, when the most serious attention should be spent entirely on the task of remaking society. But if it is true that the supreme aim of mankind is to perceive and understand and appreciate its world and itself more truly, and to make human society more vital, then we cannot ever afford to neglect the aesthetic activity, since this is as a matter
¶131of fact one of the most vitalizing and mentally awakening of our activities, and one of the most powerful means of turning the world of to-day into a more human world. I would summarize my whole account of art as follows. Art fulfils many functions. The diverse schools within the various arts are prone, each of them, to single out some one particular function to the exclusion of all the others. The aesthetic experience has very complex sources. In its richest form it embraces in a single spiritual experience all the many functions of art. These functions may be enumerated thus. The artist apprehends perceptual form by means of simple but compendious symbols, visual, tactual, auditory, and so on. By the same means, and by the transmuted representations of natural objects, he affords expression to a vast tissue of obscure, and in some cases repressed, capacities of the mind. These capacities are roughly of three orders, the primitive, the normal human, and the spiritual, or those upon the upper limit of human development. The most important office of art is to elicit and express these highly developed or spiritual modes of apprehending the universe. Unfortunately it is not yet possible to describe these adequately in scientific terms. Consequently they tend to be either sentimentalized or denied. In fulfilling these various functions the artist finds intense satisfaction for his constructive impulse. His individual style or idiom is perhaps his chief means of conveying the spiritual significance of his work. Largely by means of his style, or by stylizing, he is able to impose a unity on many diverse and even conflicting elements. It is essential to the work of art that it should be a unified whole. Even if, regarded upon the normal human plane, it appears as confused and contradictory, yet this confusion must be purposeful. The artist must be seeking by means of this confusion to convey a single spiritual significance. Finally, the importance of art from
¶132the point of view of social advancement lies in the fact that it is one of the chief instruments for achieving that development of human sensibility and will which should be the goal of world-planning. Let us close this chapter by considering the actual achievement of the great company of artists throughout the ages. In every period there have been some individuals peculiarly gifted with the capacity for subtle perception and imaginative construction. Such persons have, of course, gained much from the culture into which they have been born, but they have also ventured, arduously and delightedly, into novel experiences of their own, into apprehensions of new aspects of the tangible, the visible, the audible, new aspects of the mind’s own life, with its whimsies and passions, new aspects also of the clash and harmony of minds, and of the whole experienced world. At all times these individuals have been, as it were, the herd’s creative eyes and ears and hands, and often also the herd’s most clearly self-conscious and other-conscious members. They have felt themselves to be different, alien, lonely. They have been treated now as seers, now as fools, now as mere craftsmen, now as demigods. They have never in any age known at all clearly what it was that they were doing. They explained themselves unconvincingly in terms of contemporary thought. But in their actual works they clarified and crowned, or surpassed, the culture of their time. Always these men were torn between two opposed impulses. The first was the passion to single out from all irrelevances, and to praise fittingly, the essential form of things, and of man’s life, and of the world. The second was the craving to escape the harsh compulsion of facts by solacing themselves with dreams, with comforting, voluptuous, elegant fantasies; or by propitiating the gods with images and symbols, finely wrought and
¶133deeply significant. In all ages they have expressed both these impulses, often inextricably in the same work. In art, in the essential aesthetic percipience, there has been no evolution; for in human capacity itself, within the little time since art began, there has been no evolution. The painters of the Stone Age were as true artists as Giotto or Cézanne. But their cultural background was simpler, and their technique less potent. The history of art reveals no progress, but a fugue of variations on one theme, namely the aesthetic aspect of existence. At the height of each culture, new and exquisite forms are created, works which the true artist of any age, if he is not blinded by the preconceptions of his own culture, should be able to salute as true art, and fittingly prize. Though within the little span of history there is no evolution in the essential capacity of art, but only fluctuations and reorientations, there is, or might be, a progressive enrichment of the culture within which artists live, and from which they draw their inspiration. Thus there might be, there should be, a progressive enrichment of art itself. Our own age is perhaps one of aesthetic reawakening. In all arts sincere experiments are being made. Some, it may be, are explorations of blind allies; some seem to be opening up new and far-reaching vistas. This aesthetic reawakening is possibly connected with the increasing tension of our life, and its increasing challenge to the awakening spirit. In this respect ours is not different from any other age of aesthetic recovery. But in one respect we do seem to have an advantage over all other ages, namely that we have access to the art of all other ages, and are, at our best, so far schooled in detachment as to be ready to appreciate and learn from the achievements of other ages. Thus we have the opportunity of enriching our own art with suggestions from all the past modes of art. Also, it may be
¶134hoped that we are becoming more conscious and discriminate in our conception of the nature of art, and of its office for the awakening spirit. OceanofPDF.com
¶135VII. MODERN SCIENCE OceanofPDF.com
¶136A. NEED FOR SCEPTICISM ABOUT SCIENCE WE MUST NOW consider the part which natural science plays in the life of the modern world, and the part which it should play in the better world which we desire to make. I shall first briefly summarize the whole argument of this and the following chapter, in order to show as clearly as possible how the present subject bears upon the general theme of the book. Scientific exploration is one of the distinctively human activities. No doubt it is a development of animal curiosity and animal experimentation; but, like art, which also has primitive roots, science is one of the growing points of the human spirit. It is therefore one of the activities which in a properly constituted world-society would be fostered for its own sake, and not merely because of its immense practical utility. In our day there is little danger that science will be neglected, but great danger that it will be prostituted; that as culture becomes more and more debased by industrialism, scientific interest and talent will be directed more and more exclusively toward practical and even purely commercial ends, less and less toward the awakening of human mentality. Already there are plentiful signs that science is becoming a deadening influence. Let us therefore form as clear an idea as possible both of its harmfulness and of its true value. In what sense can science be a spiritualizing influence? In the first place it is in an obvious sense ‘enlightening’. It gives information about the magnitude and intricacy of the universe, information which cannot but have a salutary effect on the more naïve kind of human self-complacency. Secondly, like art, but in a different sphere, it can waken the mind to new and more penetrating ways of experiencing. We may, for instance, be now in the course of learning a more accurate way of
¶137conceiving space and time. Man has only very recently begun to explore the world scientifically, but already the whole framework of physical knowledge has been altered, and possibly, if science develops unchecked, the coming centuries will bring profound changes, not merely in man’s scientific concepts, but even in his ‘common sense’ notions and intuitions of the physical world and of his own psychological nature. Finally, the spirit of scientific detachment, of respect for the facts, no matter what the conclusions to which they point, can be a truly spiritual discipline, and can for some minds open the way to a dispassionate yet fervent worship, not of a God conceived in man’s image, but of the inconceivable, and in a sense inhuman, reality which everywhere confronts the experiencing mind. I shall have more to say on this subject when I discuss religion. The dangers of science are as formidable as its promise is beneficent. Ours is said to be a scientific age. We have far more knowledge of the scientific kind than earlier peoples ever had, and owing to the effects of science our civilization is already very different from all earlier civilizations. In every country that has come under the influence of science men and women live in ways that were formerly impossible. Not only do they travel in trains, motor-cars and aeroplanes, speak to one another across continents, and make use of innumerable products of factories and laboratories, but also, through the influence of science, they are coming to have a new view of the world. Not only are the scientists themselves deeply influenced, but also the minds of ordinary men and women are increasingly dominated by the secondhand scientific ideas which they pick up from newspapers, books, wireless and the cinema. Every year the part that science plays in the world is greater than in the previous year. Scientists are becoming more and more important as a class; and some day they may possibly take charge of the government of the
¶138whole world, and control it far more effectively, for good or ill, than politicians can ever do. Many persons are quite unable to conceive that there should be any weakness or danger whatever in such a triumphantly successful thing as science. I have already, in Chapter I, suggested that they are mistaken. I shall presently try to show in more detail that, though science is one of the most splendid, and life-giving, and worldbuilding, of all our activities, it is also harmful, not merely because we use its inventions to destroy one another or enslave one another, but also because it may confuse our minds. Every age has its own peculiar mental climate, or fashion of thought, and ours is scientific. The prevailing climate of our time affects us all to some extent; but especially it affects those brilliant, but perhaps sometimes too confident persons, who are regarded by the man in the street as the advance guard of progress. It is very difficult for the ordinary more or less intelligent man, who is at pains to keep abreast of his period, to realize that the prevailing fashions may not be entirely sane. Unwittingly he is inclined to favour the fashionable set of arguments and beliefs and be suspicious of any less fashionable set. Though he may very well be far more open-minded in some respects than those who are definitely ‘behind the times’, yet his mind tends to be partly closed on one side. He is not quite open-minded enough, or clear-headed enough, or earnest enough in his thinking, to see the weak spots in fashionable ideas. In our age all normal persons have at least some scientific interest. Like apes and monkeys, human beings are by nature inquisitive animals, and meddlesome or experimenting animals. They have also some capacity for understanding. If they are to attain complete wellbeing, they must exercise these capacities. To-day, the way in which they exercise them most easily is
¶139by means of science. Most of us, even those who have no special bent for scientific work, are deeply influenced by scientific ideals of thought. This is entirely to the good, so long as it does not close our minds to experiences which science does not consider. Science is a highly developed activity which is favoured by the circumstances of our age, and it is well for us to take advantage of our opportunity and be scientists so far as we can. We cannot all be expert scientists, any more than we can all be creative artists or philosophers or gardeners or postmen. But just as we all need to be artists and philosophers in some degree, so we all need to be scientists. On the other hand, since science is to-day more fashionable than art or philosophy, there is more danger that we may become blindly scientific than that we may become blindly artistic or blindly philosophical. OceanofPDF.com
¶140B. AIMS AND METHODS OF SCIENCE I SHALL NOW try to describe as clearly as I can the essential characteristics of modern natural science, in order that, in the following chapter, I may give a more detailed estimate of its value. It may be well to begin by pointing out that the word science’ has two meanings. In one sense every kind of intellectual inquiry may be said to be ‘scientific’ if it is unprejudiced and thorough; every kind of knowledge may be said to be ‘science’ if it has not been falsified by the demands of emotional satisfaction. In this sense our age is suffering not from too much but from too little ‘science Only those who believe that intellectual activity is essentially deceptive can object to ‘science’ in this wider sense of the word. But the ordinary meaning of ‘science’ in our day is more restricted. By ‘science’ we mean Modern Natural Science, a movement of thought which began to have importance in the Renaissance, and is now at its height. In this sense ‘science’ consists of the system of knowledge which modern scientists have constructed, and of the method, the process of inquiry, by which they make their discoveries. The system of knowledge that is called science is always changing. It keeps on spreading over new fields, becoming more exact in detail and more systematic as a whole. Scientists are ever making new discoveries, establishing new theories, reorganizing old theories. Matters which formerly lay beyond the reach of scientific inquiry are one by one tackled and scientifically understood.
¶141The method of inquiry, which is also called science, or more accurately ‘Scientific Method’, does not change. It is differently applied at different times and in different fields of research, but it remains essentially the same method always and everywhere. It varies only in being adapted now to one kind of scientific field, now to another, or in being now thoroughly and now inefficiently carried out. Of course, the observation of worms and jellyfish is a very different undertaking from the observation of stars, or again of human beings, or of electric currents. Each field of observation demands a special technique. Also, the technique of science to-day, in all its fields, is much more complicated and exact than the technique of the earliest true scientists. But in every age and every field of research the general method of science is identical. It is simply the method of observing events as carefully as possible and describing them as accurately and simply as possible, either by means of principles and formulae invented for the occasion, or preferably by principles and formulae already found useful on other occasions. This process of description often takes the form of explaining the perceived in terms of the hypothetical unperceived; but always scientific explanation is but an extended description, given in terms of concepts all of which are derived originally from our perception of the physical world. When a scientist’s curiosity is aroused by some kind of event in the physical world, he sets about observing, and if possible experimenting, so as to gather facts that bear upon his problem. He uses his senses. He looks, listens, touches, smells, tastes. Whenever possible, he uses sight rather than any other sense, because sight gives him much more varied and detailed information than the other senses; and especially because by careful seeing, and comparison with standard visible scales, he can very accurately measure the size, shape and position of things. But though he uses chiefly
¶142sight, he is apt to think very largely also in terms of the experience of touch, and of the resistance of physical objects to his effort Often the scientist devises instruments, such as microscopes, telescopes, balances, measuring rods, clocks, which will give his senses additional experiences, and his intelligence further data to interpret. By one means or another he tries to approach the puzzling kind of event from as many directions as possible, and also to collect as many examples of it as seem necessary to show him just what the essential common characters in all examples really are. When he has thus gathered a mass of facts, he tries to invent principles or laws or mathematical formulae which will describe them as accurately as possible and also as simply as possible. More precisely he sets out to describe, either in words or in mathematical symbols, principles which do actually characterize or hold good of, the observed facts. Sometimes he makes use of principles with which he is already familiar. He says, ‘at bottom this is just a special case of such and such a well-known law’. Sometimes, however, the facts are so odd that he cannot connect them with any familiar principle. He must then either discover a new principle or re-state an old one more accurately, to fit the new facts. If possible, he describes the facts in terms of the principles which apply over the widest field, and seem to underlie many of the special principles of particular fields. The principles which have actually proved most useful, and have seemed most fundamental, are those which are discovered in the study of moving objects, and their interactions with one another. Of course, the subtle laws of modern physics describe very queer objects and very queer movements, and indeed a very queer space and time. But in essence they are simply a development of common-sense experience of moving objects, seen and felt.
¶143When the scientist thinks he has found the principle which is the essential principle in all his facts, he works out logically or mathematically some of its possible consequences in various directions, and tries to confirm his predictions by fresh observations and experiments. If he still finds no facts which are inconsistent with his principle, he accepts it as a ‘law of nature’. By this he means that, whether his description of his principle is given in English or French or Chinese or mathematical symbols, and whether his measurements are made in inches or centimetres, miles or kilometres, pounds or kilograms, degrees Fahrenheit or degrees Centigrade, it is in fact a true description of the actual order or pattern in which events occur. If some day he comes upon a kind of event which seems to violate his law, either he has to show that this kind of event is not, after all, really relevant to his law; or if it is relevant, he has to see the underlying principle of his law more precisely, and re-state it in such a way as to cover the new kind of event. Let us consider one outstanding example. Early scientists discovered the principle which holds good of falling bodies near the earth. They described mathematically the rate at which falling bodies increase their speed every second. Newton discovered that the same principle, seen more broadly and accurately, was true of the movements of the planets. In our age, however, certain facts cropped up which suggested that the law of gravity had not, after all, been quite truly formulated. For instance, the planet Mercury did not behave precisely as was expected. Einstein and others, using a mathematical technique which had not hitherto served any practical purpose, described the principle behind the old law much more accurately, so that it was seen to include under its rule not only the awkward facts, but also vast new fields.
¶144It is extremely important to realize that the scientist works by the method of abstraction. All understanding consists in discovering some kind of order in a mass of facts which appear at first chaotic. If we are looking for order, we have first to distinguish different characters within the chaos, and to observe the relations which these characters have to one another. Then we attend specially to those characters or classes of characters which either happen to be of interest to us, or seem to be the essential characters for the understanding of the whole matter. This is the essence of the method of abstraction. It consists of drawing something away from something else which is left behind. When we abstract we attend to and think about certain characters within a complex mass of characters, and we ignore the rest. The pioneers of modern science were faced with the blend of confusion and order which we all meet in our ordinary perception of the physical world. They seized upon such tissues of order as were given in perception, and sought to extend them by relevant observations, experiments, and generalizations. Inevitably they attended to the more promising, more readily intelligible aspects of the physical world, and ignored the rest. Desiring to understand precisely and unambiguously, they sought wherever possible to gather data which could be measured, and they developed a mathematical technique for expressing the results of their measurements in comprehensive formulae. Little by little this process led them to concentrate chiefly upon movements, great and small, and to work out those very general dynamical concepts, such as energy, resistance, mass, momentum, which have played so great a part in physical science up to our own day. Though the advancement of science has proceeded by the inclusion of ever wider fields within the scope of research, it has also, in respect of its explanatory principles, involved an ever more rigorous exclusion of those aspects of the perceived world which were not amenable to mechanical and
¶145mathematical interpretation. This process gave us in the nineteenth century the conception of a universe composed of microscopic ‘billiard balls’ charged with electro-magnetic energy, but has since advanced even farther in abstraction. To-day the physicist has abandoned even this much of concrete perceived reality, and claims only to describe the mathematical relations of ‘somethings’ the qualitative nature of which lies entirely beyond his scope. Now the mathematical aspect of the objective world really is an aspect of it, and a very significant aspect of it. But qualitatively it is a very meagre aspect. Mathematics is extremely abstract. A physics which has excluded all but the mathematics of physical reality is in no position to afford the basic principles for explaining all things in heaven and earth. Let us spend a few moments in considering what the activity of mathematics really is. OceanofPDF.com
¶146C. THE NATURE OF MATHEMATICS MATHEMATICAL PHILOSOPHERS ARE far from agreeing about the nature of mathematics. Two important schools at least would reject the following account of the matter. But for what it is worth I shall sketch that view which accords with my whole picture of man-in-the-universe. The mathematician, then, like the rest of us, is faced by the huge mass of characters which make up the world, so far as it is presented to man. But, as a mathematician, he is interested most in one great set of these characters, one aspect of the world, namely the mathematical aspect, or the ways in which things, or characteristics of any sort, can be counted or computed. What, at bottom, is counting? What are the ‘numbers’ by means of which we count? Ages ago men noticed that there was a certain identical character in all groups of the kind which we now call ‘couples Whether the parts of the couple are hands, or stones, or stars, or men, or days, or pains, or thoughts, whether the parts are of the same kind or of different kinds (say a man and a woman, or a man and a day), always the couple has a certain character, in virtue of which it differs from all single things and triplets. And triplets themselves have all a certain character in virtue of which they differ from all quadruplets, and so on. Men noticed also that if a ‘single thing’ was added to another ‘single thing’, there was a ‘couple’; and if another thing was added to the ‘couple’, there was a ‘triplet’, and so on. Not only did they see that this always did happen whenever they added anything to a group, but also they saw that it must be so, because of the inherent nature of singles and couples, and so on;
¶147because a couple actually was one less than a triplet, and so on. And because of this inherent nature of groups, they were able to work out many very complicated mathematical laws. They also invented such things as ‘imaginary numbers’, which are not characters of any possible groups. Thus V — 2 is an imaginary number, since no number whatever multiplied by itself can give a minus quantity. Imaginary numbers seem at first to make nonsense of the view that mathematics deals only with the actual characters of groups. But there is, perhaps, a key to such puzzles. The three marks V — 2 do not really mean any one character at all. They mean three distinct things, namely ‘two’ (the character of any couple whatever), ‘minus’ (the operation of substracting or taking away), and ‘square root’ (the operation of finding what number multiplied by itself will give a required number). The two marks V4 mean a real number, but the three marks V — 2 do not. All the same they can be used in the game of mathematics as though they did in combination mean a real number. Similarly with the very many other paradoxical mathematical symbols, and formulae; if they are taken as wholes, they cannot mean any real character or possible operation, yet they may be analysed into elements each of which does mean a real character or a possible operation. We may significantly compare mathematics with a highly artificial game such as chess. No doubt chess was originally derived from the actual nature of contemporary warfare. Its pieces were stylized and simplified warriors, its rules and moves stylized and simplified martial operations. One striking difference there is between chess and mathematics. Games of chess cannot be used for finding out anything important about the conduct of modern war; games of mathematics can be used for finding out much of importance for the control of the physical world. This difference would seem to be due to the fact that the numerability of things remains always the
¶148same, but the operations of war have changed. Thus, though mathematics has indeed been very much ‘stylized’, and has proliferated into many forms and conventions which seem to have no application to the physical world, it has also produced a number of systems which do as a matter of fact continue to have such application. So long as mathematics deals with distinct individuals that can be numbered, it can operate without paradox. But when it attempts to deal with continuities, such as time or space, which seem not to be composed of atomic parts, mathematics becomes very paradoxical. It has to apply principles derived from one kind of objective experience (namely experience of distinct individuals) to another kind of objective experience (namely experience of continuous quantity), and this it cannot do without paradox. It has to pretend that continuity is composed of an infinite number of distinct and atomic units; and to deal with this infinity it has to invent many paradoxical concepts. But always, however metaphorical his thought, the mathematician thinks in terms of numerability such as he originally experienced in contrasting any group with a greater or smaller group. Calculating by means of the laws of number, scientists are able to predict confidently what would happen in all sorts of situations in which number is concerned. They are able to deal mathematically not only with separate ‘things’ but (though often paradoxically) with continuous quantities of any of the measurable characteristics that make up the perceived universe, such as length in space, duration in time, and all the characters that can be measured by means of length and duration, such as weight and pressure. Mathematicians find their mathematical activity intensely satisfying, since it fulfils so well their capacity for grasping order or system. They find in the intricacy and exactness of the science of pure number, or of the
¶149‘numerability’ of things, a severe beauty, like the beauty of certain kinds of music. Here mathematics seems to be related to the aesthetic delight in form. Partly through the sheer fascination of mathematics, partly through the fact that it applies to hosts of characteristics of the physical world, and is extremely useful for the control of physical events, men have sometimes been inclined to think that the mathematical aspect of the world was in some way the most real and fundamental thing about it, and that everything else could be explained by mathematics. Thus the philosopher Pythagoras said that everything was number. Such a view shows very clearly the danger of all abstraction, namely that in fixing attention on one kind of character in the world, we may come to think that nothing else matters, or that nothing else is real, or that, at any rate, everything can be explained by the principles or laws of one particular study, whether of mathematics, or of physics, or of psychology. But it should be obvious that, for instance, the world cannot simply consist of number, since, for there to be number, there must be ‘somethings’ other than number, to be numbered or numerous. Number implies numerous or numerable instances of some quality or other. But though the method of abstraction has its danger, it is very necessary. Indeed, all our intellectual knowledge of the world has been reached in this way, namely by attending to, and studying, certain characters and relations of character, and ignoring others. Human minds cannot attend to everything at once. So long as we remember that we are abstracting, and do not imagine that what we are studying is all that matters, no harm is done. Of course, if we want to know our world as truly as possible, we must try to see the relations of all our different kinds of abstract knowledge, so as to form a system of knowledge which takes everything into account. This is the task of philosophy.
¶150D. PHYSICS, BIOLOGY, PSYCHOLOGY SINCE THE DAYS when men first dared to doubt the accepted theories about physical nature, scientists have built up, generation by generation, a number of great sciences, great systems of knowledge about different kinds of events and facts. As time passes, these great systems become more detailed and accurate and also more closely connected with one another. The ideal of the scientists is to unite the many sciences together in one all- embracing science. But though they have made much progress in this enterprise, they have still very far to go. In our day there are many distinct sciences. Some are very closely connected in their fundamental nature, such as physics, chemistry, astronomy; some are much less thoroughly connected, such as physics and biology, physics and psychology. Physics is concerned with all the seemingly most fundamental characteristics of the physical universe, such as gravity and electro- magnetism, every kind of movement, and even space and time themselves. Whether or not these characters really are fundamental, or are merely aspects of something much deeper and much more all-embracing, they certainly are the most fundamental characters from the scientific point of view. Astronomy deals with the physical laws of the solar system, the stars, the nebulae, the galaxies, and with the physical structure of the cosmos as a whole. Chemistry studies the different kinds of matter, and so far as possible reduces their differences to fundamental physical characters. Geology studies the structure and history of the earth, seeking to interpret its data by means of physics. It also takes note of the fossilized remains of living things, thereby connecting itself with biology.
¶151Biology includes many sciences, such as physiology and zoology, all of which are concerned with living things, their general nature, their varieties, their structure and behaviour. In some respects biology has many connexions with chemistry and physics. Very many events in living bodies can be described by chemical laws. But whether all such events will ever be so described is at present uncertain. Some biologists insist that in the behaviour of a living thing as a whole, and in its form and origin, there is a purposefulness which cannot conceivably be described in terms of principles which are purely mechanical. Others are equally confident that all such ‘teleology’ is illusory. Psychology is concerned with the ways in which living things, and especially human beings, behave consciously; or with the description of their awareness and their striving. The kind of events which psychology studies cannot conceivably be completely described purely by the physical laws of moving bodies. Thinkings and desirings, admirations and hopes, are a different sort of event from fallings, explosions and electric currents. If we consider the great company of sciences, we see that they fall into three classes, namely: those which deal with ‘dead matter and describe its behaviour by purely mechanical laws; those which deal with living things, regarded externally, but regarded sometimes as purposive, and not as purely mechanical; and those which study and make use of man’s experience of his own mental life, of his knowing and feeling and striving. If the sciences are to be united as one great science, they must be shown to be all based on the same fundamental principles, or concepts, or laws. Either physics must swallow biology and psychology, or psychology must swallow biology and physics; or we must work out some science more fundamental and more comprehensive than either physics or psychology.
¶152If physics is to triumph, the seemingly purposive behaviour of living things must be explained away in terms of physical mechanism. The principle of mechanism may be roughly defined as that according to which, given event A, then event B will follow, whatever its consequences. This is contrasted with the principle of teleology, or purposiveness, according to which, given event A, there will follow a train of events conducive to an end Z. Teleology does not necessarily include any reference to consciousness. Mechanism is not necessarily confined to the physical. Mental processes, for instance, might be purely mechanical. In the fields of physical science mechanism has proved an extremely useful principle, teleology has been abandoned. Indeed, so accustomed have we become to the idea of mechanism that we seem to discover in it a logical necessity which we do not find in teleology. But this feeling of necessity in the connexion of physical cause and effect is illusory. All the laws of physics are based upon inductive observation. There is no demonstrable necessity in virtue of which an unsupported stone must fall; but we are so used to observing such events, that we confidently expect matters to turn out in the familiar manner. Though mechanism has, till recently, been unquestioned in physics, and is still making headway in the biological sciences, psychology is as yet very far from being reduced to physical mechanism. Of course, as was noted in an earlier chapter, it might turn out that all mental events were related to and dependent upon, certain physical events, say in the brain; and therefore that consciousness itself was entirely ineffective. This is far from being proved; but even if it were, our mental life itself would not be describable in actual physical terms. If psychology is to triumph over the other sciences, both biology and physics must be shown to be really dealing with the physical manifestations
¶153of striving minds. In the case of physics, the minds would have to be the minds of electrons and protons, or of whatever are the simplest physical things. All physical events, including volcanic eruptions and the movements of stars, would be the result of the massed strivings of innumerable ‘minute’ minds; save where they could be shown to be controlled by ‘larger’ minds, such as our own, or, say, the minds of galaxies or stars, or the mind of the cosmos as a whole. But even if this were shown to be the case, the physical aspects of minds would not be describable in psychological terms. At present psychology is obviously incapable of swallowing physics, and to the clear thinker physics seems quite as incapable of swallowing psychology. Each remains obstinately outside the other. But physics is a greedy science, and having already almost succeeded in swallowing chemistry, it looks hungrily toward biology, and toward psychology also. More accurately speaking, scientists have generally been more inclined to explain life and mind in terms of physical mechanism than to explain physics as the psychology of atoms or electrons, or of God’s imagination. It is easy to see how scientists have come to have so strong a faith in physical mechanism. The pioneers of modern science were not only inquisitive and intelligent, but apt with their hands. They enjoyed devising experiments and instruments. They did not feel bored when they were manipulating weights, pulleys, lenses, scalpels. Though many of them were interested in theology and philosophy, all of them were gifted also with a natural interest in tangible and visible things. Consequently they were favourably disposed toward explanations in terms of the tangible and the visible. It so happened that there were vast fields of exploration waiting to be opened up by people who were inclined to make practical experiments, and
¶154intelligent and patient enough to observe the results accurately. The experimenters met with surprising success. They found themselves able to make matters look intelligible and precise which had seemed erratic and more or less miraculous. As time passed, and the sciences became more and more detailed, and the idea of mechanism became more and more useful, many scientists began to feel that in describing the mechanical principles of things they were giving a complete account of the nature of things, and a complete explanation of their behaviour. It came to seem unnecessary and fantastic to explain events in terms of God’s will, or human purpose, or the striving of physical things themselves. Moreover, if you thought of things behaving mechanically and in definite ways according to their nature, you could make them serve your purposes. You could make steam engines and electric motors, you could perform surgical operations, and so on. The other idea was too vague to be of any use. Thus as our modern machine-served world developed, men became ever more impressed by mechanical explanations; ever more convinced that, to explain any mysterious set of facts, it was only necessary to show their relation to some familiar mechanical system; and that, if no such relation could be found, the mysterious facts must be unimportant or even unreal. Thus scientists, and the ever-increasing host of people who were deeply impressed by science, came to distinguish between the characters which, they said, really belonged to things, and those which merely seemed to belong to things, but were in fact mere figments of our minds. The real characters were those which were supposed to be mechanically effective, such as shape, size, movement, hardness. The unreal ones were those which seemed to play no direct part in the mechanical system of the world. These included the ‘secondary qualities’ (such as colour and sound), the beauty
¶155and ugliness of natural objects and works of art, the pleasantness and unpleasantness of all our activities, the rightness of certain human actions and the wrongness of others. The mysterious ‘inner life’ of a mind, with all its desirings and fearings, its passions, its acts of will, its insight into beauty and rightness and rationality, were held to be somehow caused in us by underlying mechanical events. Thus if a man believed that he moved his limbs by ‘an act of will’, he was mistaken. If he believed that they moved because he desired them to move in defence of his beloved, or to make money, or to go to church, he was mistaken. Their movement was wholly due to intricate mechanical causes whose nature was physical. The study of mental events was allowed to belong to psychology. But it was assumed that if the very backward science of psychology could do its work properly, it would somehow show that all its laws were at bottom physiological laws. And these, it was thought, must be at bottom merely special cases of the universal mechanical laws of physics. Unfortunately psychology remained backward. The study of the ‘inner life’ of a mind was very much more difficult than the study of moving objects, chemical combinations, and so on. Even to-day, in spite of the widespread interest in psychology, and the really important discoveries that have been made, our knowledge of ourselves and of the nature of mind is extremely vague and uncertain. The Newton of psychology has yet to be born. It is true that psychology has at last made a beginning. It can roughly classify the kinds of mental actions, and it can show that some are much simpler than others. It can also describe some of the differences between a healthy mind and an unhealthy mind, and tell us, up to a point, what is necessary for mental health. In co-operation with physiology, it can tell us a good deal about the
¶156ways in which mental life is influenced by bodily life, and the reverse. But how the one is related to the other, and what it is that experiences, and what the real natures of the most complicated and highly developed mental activities are, it cannot say. All it can do is to try to explain the more complicated in terms of the simpler, and these again in terms of the simpler still. Some psychologists expect to explain everything in terms of physiology; and physiology they would hand over to chemistry and physics. But this kind of explanation has to ignore, as it descends from stage to stage, everything which is distinctive of the higher stage. At present no one knows the true solution of the great problem of the relation of the physical, the biological and psychological sciences. It is something, at any rate, to see clearly that there is a problem, and to be on our guard against false solutions of it. OceanofPDF.com
¶157E. DETERMINACY AND FREEDOM SOME SCIENTISTS HAVE suggested that, when the simple physical units, say atoms or electrons, come together into certain very complicated patterns or organizations, an organism thus formed generates new powers, of which its parts, as loose units, had no trace whatever. Thus, they say, arises the unconscious purposefulness of simple living organisms, and on a still higher plane the consciousness of the more developed organisms, such as ourselves. But how a mere pattern can have such miraculous powers they cannot explain. Others suppose that even in the simple physical units there are, as a matter of fact, latent capacities which, when the units are not organized together as living things, cannot manifest themselves. Therefore they cannot be detected by our purely physical experiments. Similarly, these thinkers would say, human beings brought up in isolation from one another would never manifest the complex social ways of behaviour which we know in the actual world of men in society; but nevertheless there would be contained in them all the necessary capacities for such behaviour. It is insisted that if we could discover the whole nature of the seemingly merely physical units, we should be able to predict the behaviour of any kind of system made up of such units, even of living organisms. Others, again, are convinced that modern physics has discovered, even in the known physical behaviour of the physical units themselves, a fundamental arbitrariness. They claim, not merely that we are too ignorant to be able to predict the movements of a particular electron, but that its
¶158movements are absolutely unsystematic, unrelated to other facts, and therefore in their own nature unpredictable. If this view is correct, all ordinary physical laws of the behaviour of matter in bulk describe, not how matter must of necessity behave, but how the myriad arbitrary actions of the minute units will probably turn out in the long run. They might conceivably turn out very differently. A kettle of water on the fire might freeze instead of boiling. But there is a very great probability that on any particular occasion it will boil and not freeze. But what is probability? Is it anything more than our own irrational tendency to expect things to behave as they have formerly behaved? Or again is it an objective fact which determines our expectation, namely an actual though obscure connexion between objective events of certain types? Some scientists are confident that this view that the physical is indeterminate is confused and false. Those who hold it, they say, mistake the limitation and uncertainty of our scientific method for an uncertainty or arbitrariness in the actual physical world. They point out that though we may not be able to predict when an electron will jump, or where precisely it is at a given moment, we know that, sooner or later, jump it will, and that at a given moment it will be, at any rate in some sense, somewhere within a very narrow field. Had we a much more intimate knowledge of electrons, we should see (so they tell us) that the seemingly arbitrary behaviour of each electron is the exact expression of its nature in its particular environment. To many of us this view somehow ‘tastes’ more credible than the other. Perhaps in the last analysis the two accounts will turn out to be merely different ways of saying the same thing. We cannot help noting, however, that there may be kinds of facts about electrons and their environments which are not physical facts at all. Conceivably, for instance, the electron’s
¶159mysterious jumps are partly the result of its own mental nature, or of the influence exerted on it by hidden mental characters of the universe as a whole. Even if this were the case, however, its jumps might quite well turn out to be systematic, or ‘determinate’, and not arbitrary. Since the dispute between the determinists and the indeterminists in physics seems to have some relation to the ‘free will’ controversy, it is bound to be influenced by powerful though often unwitting emotional dispositions. Many people are outraged by the thought that their actions are determinate expressions of a personality which is itself the determinate outcome of a vast system of causes. They prefer to think of themselves as unique, uncaused, and gifted with the power of arbitrary choice. Any physical theory which seems to lend support to such a view is therefore agreeable to them. For similar reasons those who are strongly moral or moralistic welcome every theory which is opposed to the advance of determinism in science. If moral choice is determined, they say, all that seemed most precious in human nature is illusory. Now I myself am not at all distressed by the possibility that my acts are not arbitrary but determinate, and in theory predictable. I am content that my choice should be in every case an expression of the interaction of my nature and the environment; and that my nature itself should be an expression of an infinite series of past ancestral natures and past environments. I recognize that when, in youth, I was outraged by this possibility, I was moved only by a rather puerile self-pride; and that in my former insistence on ‘free moral choice’ I was actuated largely by an unlovely desire to blame and punish others and myself. Nor does the belief in determinism make me any less capable of ‘moral effort’. For determinism does not imply that human will is ineffective but only that it is a determinate expression of past causes. Within limits I am free to do as I
¶160will. My choice is effective; but how I shall choose is an expression of my extant nature, and possibly this is determinate. I did not arbitrarily make myself. The insistence on arbitrary free will seems after all rather smug, and even impious. One of the most salutary effects of science, I should say, has been this gradual schooling of our minds to overcome the self-complacent prejudice in favour of arbitrary choice. In this respect at least science has, I believe, had a spiritualizing effect. In giving man a sense of his indissoluble unity with the rest of the cosmos; and persuading him to be glad of it, the influence of science has been almost literally religious, binding, harmonizing. But there is another side to the matter. Determinism in the sphere of physics, and in the sphere of psychology, rests entirely on observation and induction. There is no reason whatever why the universe must be systematic through and through. Up to a point it has so far revealed itself as systematic, but it may break all our scientific laws to-morrow. The sun may assume the features of an old lady, and go pirouetting through the sky, winking and smiling. Men may sprout wings. The starry heaven may roll away and reveal Jehovah among his angels. All things are possible. But all things are not equally desirable. And for my part, at any rate, I find the determinate but mightily pregnant universe which the sciences are beginning tentatively to explore more desirable than an indeterminate one. There is yet another point. Determinism does not deny spontaneity. Even in the sphere of physics, and even if the truth is that the movements of electrons are determinate, yet their movements are in part spontaneous. If all electrons were merely passive, the whole universe would be passive, which clearly it is not. Each electron makes its own spontaneous contribution to the activity of the cosmos, though it is also influenced by others. Even if its actions are determinate, they are its actions, free
¶161expressions of its nature. A man is in the same case. His choice is absolutely spontaneous. In every choice he creatively contributes to the universe. What more of freedom is desirable? What matter if, within limits, we can work out inductive laws by which to predict how he probably will choose? Our laws do not constrain him. They are laws describing only how he and others are, in fact, observed to behave. Thus did he behave in the past: probably he will behave thus in the future. Our predictions are true of him only so long as he remains what he is. If by some sudden spiritual leap he rises to a higher nature and breaks some of our laws, we must make fresh observations and seek to discover more comprehensive laws. If even that creative leap itself is determinate, an expression of hitherto undiscoverable powers in him, of powers focused in him by age-long history and evolution, what matter? So long as my striving is allowed to be an actual effective influence in the world, what matter though it in turn is a product of the past world and the past age? There is no reason whatever to doubt that when we are aware of striving we are aware of exerting our own dynamic nature, and of taking effect on our environment. OceanofPDF.com
¶162VIII. THE VALUE AND DANGER OF MODERN SCIENCE OceanofPDF.com
¶163A. SCIENCE AND THE PUBLIC THE RESULT OF the relative strength of physics and weakness of psychology is that the mental atmosphere or fashion of thought of scientists, and of our whole modern civilization, is one in which immense respect is paid to physical facts, while all else tends to seem mere illusion. Probably our successors five hundred years hence will be much less impressed by the triumphs of our physical science than by our ignorance of all the kinds of reality which are less tangible than the movements studied by physics. They will surely smile at our childish faith that if only we can describe an event in terms of our neat little physical laws, we succeed in saying the main truth about it. Even to-day, many scientists themselves realize that though science gives us wonderful powers of predicting events and controlling them, it gives us very little insight into their real nature. It has progressed by ignoring more and more of the characters which we actually experience, and by concentrating more and more strictly on those few experienced characters which its method could study. The result is that to-day it is a vast system of mathematical formulae which do indeed describe very elegantly and comprehensively one aspect of the universe, namely movement. But, though they reveal much that could not otherwise be known about the immense movements of stars and the minute movements of electrons, and the many other movements that make up the physical universe, yet they tell us nothing whatever about anything but movements and some of the relations between movements and other facts. But though many true scientists are now keenly aware of the weakness of science, most of the large company of more or less scientifically minded
¶164persons are still naïvely inclined to believe that in science man has not only a mighty power for the exploration of the physical universe and the making of a better human society, but also a key to all mysteries and to the knowledge of good and evil. Not very long ago science was fighting for independence against the Christian Churches. The clergymen claimed that they knew more about the physical world by divine revelation than scientists could ever discover by observation and experiment. In those days it seemed to ordinary people that scientists were wickedly wrongheaded. On the strength of their seemingly pettifogging explorations scientists denied principles that all decent persons had long accepted as sacred. The earth, they said, was not the centre of the universe. Animals such as now exist had not been created in their present forms, but had been evolved from simpler types. Man himself was not utterly different from the animals, but had grown out of something ape-like. In those early days of science it was difficult for people to give up the old and respectable theories, and to adjust their minds to ideas that were not only new but shocking. In those days, therefore, all sincerely thoughtful persons had to rally to the cause of science. To-day the situation is very different, and rather complicated. In the first place, there are still many backward peoples, and backward sections of the more advanced peoples, who have not yet been influenced by science deeply enough to cast out the ancient superstitions and the old confused ways of thinking. Also, even among those who have not the excuse of ignorance, there are to-day swarms of more or less clever but also extremely foolish, or malicious, persons, who, though they tolerate science in some respects, fight tooth and nail against the spread of certain special kinds of scientific knowledge, such as the biology and psychology of sex. This they do because the scientific study of sex makes nonsense of their
¶165own moral prejudices. Against all such, and against the sheer ignorance of the backward sections of society, the scientifically minded must still carry on relentless war. But in our day science is not, in the main, a struggling, persecuted thing. It is a triumphant and venerated thing. And because it has now great honour in the hearts of men and great authority over their minds, there is a danger that it may come to exercise the same kind of tyranny as the churches have exercised for centuries, and do still exercise to a very large extent. It is not altogether unreasonable to feel that, while the effect of the churches in the modern world is in the main deadening, the effect of science is by no means wholly vitalizing, and that it may in time become as lethal to the spirit as the churches at their worst. Even to-day there is a tendency to regard contemporary science as eternal truth. Even to-day to be called ‘unscientific’ is almost as serious as in the old days it was to be called ‘immoral To doubt the value of science is coming to seem as wickedly heretical as formerly to doubt the value of religion. In many ways the scientists are becoming the priests of the modern world. Like the priests of old, they possess a vast body of ‘truth’, which, if it is not called divine, is at least treated as sacred. Like the priests, they are looked upon with respect and awe. Like the priests they are divided into two classes. Some of them live among us to help us and educate us, not with religious but with scientific wisdom. Others retire from the world to seek the truth, not in monasteries but in research laboratories. There they explore the sacred mysteries which mere laymen can never really understand. Like the priests, they wield immense power over our minds. They kindle our imagination, and give us a vision and an ideal, a vision of the immensity and intricacy of the universe, and an ideal of scientific
¶166knowledge and power. Also they threaten us with terrible consequences if we dare to rebel against the precepts of this new church, or if we lose faith in the sacred truth. With complete confidence, and with righteous indignation, they prophesy to the unscientific person, and to the unscientific nation, disease, poverty and death. No doubt their prophesies are in the main justified, and their practical influence is in the main beneficent. But it is inevitable that a great and priestly caste should seek to exaggerate the accuracy of its knowledge and the importance of its office. There was a time, long ago, when the priests of religion commonly stood for clear thinking, for genuine education, for the overthrow of tyrants and tyrannical classes, for the suppression of tribal and national hatreds, and for world civilization. To-day, when the priests, with some exceptions, have sunk into futility and reaction, the scientists still on the whole stand for mental and spiritual freedom — so long as these do not conflict with respect for science. But already there are signs that in the future the influence of science, like the influence of the churches, will be opposed to all independent thinking, will turn education into parrot-like repetition of sacred and meaningless formulae, will subject the peoples to the tyranny of a scientifically minded ruling caste, will even make national wars more frequent and more destructive, or will produce at best not world-civilization but world-mechanization. Already in our day, although there are still large numbers of people who are simply behind the times, and have never really been able to understand and accept the scientific point of view, there is also an ever-growing swarm of those who are too complacently at home in the mental atmosphere of to- day. They are proud to live in a scientific age, vastly impressed by all the products of scientific invention and with the very limited wisdom of science. They despise the helplessness and ignorance of earlier ages. They
¶167are intolerant of all those of their contemporaries who protest against the arrogance of science. They cannot distinguish between the protest which springs from mere prejudice and that which springs from serious criticism. They are eager to be up to date, to wear whatever mental clothing is worn by the leaders of scientific fashion. They cannot conceive that the present scientific fashion may some day look as clumsy and ridiculous as nineteenth-century dress. OceanofPDF.com
¶168B. TRUE SCIENTISTS AND TRUE CRITICS THE MAIN BULK of the world’s population, then, may be divided into the blindly unscientific and the blindly scientific. But there are some more thoughtful persons, who do not belong to either of these two classes. They also are of two kinds, and may be called the true scientists and the true critics of science. The true scientists are well aware that our science contains fundamental inconsistencies which bid fair to prove irresolvable, that at any moment its best-established doctrines may have to be so radically reinterpreted as to become unrecognizable, that at best they tell us almost nothing about the real nature of the world, that mathematical formulae of science are true only of one aspect of reality, that science can only very indirectly and haltingly help us to discover what is worth living for and dying for, what is most to be prized in life. But though the true scientists are aware of all this, they are also aware that at present we have almost no serviceable knowledge at all except science and our invaluable ‘common sense’ perception. About the spheres which science does not touch we have, indeed, only a number of vague feelings and guesses. These feelings and guesses may be the foundations of a much deeper kind of knowledge which has still to be built up, but at present they are very disconnected and unreliable. On the other hand, the scientist knows that science is definite, and within its true sphere reliable. Even to-day it has already been put to tremendous use, for good and for ill. But the scientist may well be more impressed by what science might do than by what it has already done. It has already given man great powers, but
¶169it has not yet been able to give him the wisdom to use those powers to the best advantage. The scientist rightly feels that the means to create a world- population fully developed in body and mind is a gift which cannot be overestimated. Every one in the world might with the help of science be given conditions of life more favourable than even the most fortunate of us can secure to-day. The average physique might be made to excel the average of today as the Greek athlete excels the most stunted of our industrial serfs. Not only so, but, as we have seen, science also gives the means to emancipate all men and women from drudgery; and in addition the means of filling the life of every individual with great diversity and subtlety of experience. It can even contribute to make him appreciate the kind of life which is most appropriate to properly nurtured human beings. Further, the vast development of communication which has already done much to bring remote peoples into touch with one another, should in the future enable every human being to appreciate all the manners of life and modes of mind which occur on the planet, and, indeed, to wander at will into any region of the earth as easily as he now wanders about his native county. But much more than this science has yet to achieve. All that has thus far been mentioned could be brought about by contemporary physics and chemistry and such rudimentary biochemistry and biology as we already possess. Psychology cannot as yet play more than a very small part. In the future, if all goes well, biochemistry, general biology, and psychology also, will very probably revolutionize our knowledge of our own nature. We shall learn to know and to use the fundamental laws of human motive as effectively as we now know the laws of dynamics, and we shall so control the growth of minds that the perversions of will which now cripple so many of us will be avoided, and all men will with clear vision seek to express the best that is in them.
¶170Further, as science advances, men will effectively explore those many fields which at present lie on the extreme limit of research. For the present we can do no more in these fields than register the suspicion that all contemporary scientific concepts are inadequate to these strange problems. In the vast dark continents whose mere fringes are now being fragmentarily mapped out by ‘psychical research’ there may await us discoveries which will subvert psychology as completely as astronomy has been subverted since the days of Ptolemy; nay, which may change our whole conception of the place of man in the universe. Greatly as he prizes all these actual and possible discoveries of science, the true scientist feels, also, I think, that science has another and very different kind of importance. For him science really does play something of the part which for many others is played by religion. In the first place, it is for him a mental discipline, for it imposes on him an ideal of efficient and conscientious work. He must not be slovenly or superficial or dishonest in his research. He must never spare himself in service of the truth. Indeed, the discipline which science imposes on him might well be called a spiritual discipline. He must learn to subject his personal desires for the sake of the great co-operative enterprise of science; and also he must try to take a detached view of all things human. He must distrust all human thought, even his own science, and look critically into all human desires and ideals. In the second place, science has a deep effect on the true scientist through the sheer vastness and intricacy of the cosmos which it reveals to him. He is overwhelmed by the multitude of stars, and of galaxies, and by the prodigious, crowded and variegated depths of past ages. The whole career of man seems to him but a strange flicker on a microscopic mote in the great dance of galaxies. Though he knows as well as the critics that mere size has nothing to do with beauty and goodness, yet the magnitude
¶171and variety of physical existence does afford him an intense exhilaration, like that which may be experienced by a man who, leaving a small and crowded room, finds himself under the stars. It also suggests to him that, just as man formerly underestimated the size of the cosmos, so perhaps he is now underestimating its mental and spiritual potentialities, and taking his own highest achievements in those directions much too seriously. In his own special study the scientist may have a very strong and inspiring sense of the independent reality of what he is exploring. He knows well that only the surface, the outer skin of this reality, is open to his exploration; but he has a keen sense that it is what it is, and not what he desires or expects it to be. He tries earnestly to ‘enter into the spirit of it’ and see it truly. He is anxious not to misinterpret it in accordance with his own preconceived ideas. When he looks beyond his subject and considers the universe as a whole, he regards it in the same way. He is intensely aware of its reality, and of the extreme complexity and vastness and independence of this reality. Since he is a man, and not merely a scientist, the upshot in his mind is apt to be two very deep but quiet emotions, or movements of the will. The first is loyalty to the great human enterprise of advance in knowledge and power and in discriminate appreciation. Science, he feels, opens up limitless possibilities of such advance. The second emotion is perhaps most truly to be called worship of the vast, intricate, non-human reality whose surface science studies. He worships it partly, I think, for its very ‘inhumanity’, for its apparent indifference to man; but also for its suggestion of limitless spiritual potentiality. The true critics of science, on the other hand, are more impressed by the dangers of science than by its benefits, more by the harm it does to common minds than by the discipline it affords to truly scientific minds. They see
¶172that it tends to regard the physical side of reality as the only important side; that it often makes men insensitive toward all the finer kinds of experience, such as the appreciation of human personality, and of art and religion. These experiences, they say, contemporary science cannot properly describe. And because it misdescribes them, leaving out the ‘nerve’ of them, so to speak, its devotees take them to be illusory and negligible. Science has destroyed something which could at least sometimes lift men out of themselves, or fortify their more human and spiritual nature against their purely animal nature. The true critics see also that science tends to give some men a false standard of values. By destroying the old ideals it either makes them care for nothing but personal pleasure and excitement, or it deludes them into prizing the mere power of controlling the material world, without questioning what should be done with that power. Now there is, indeed, one way in which science may help us to value things more accurately. It may help us to see them more clearly, and so enable us to decide more justly as to whether they have or have not the characters which we independently prize. But science itself cannot tell us what kind of thing is really desirable or really admirable. Some have claimed that because life (as they believe) is evolving into ever more complex and more capable forms, therefore what is desirable is whatever advances the evolutionary process. This argument is false. In the first place, evolution is a rare process. Very few types have actually advanced. In the second place, evolutionary advance is not good because it is the direction of evolution; it is good in so far as it tends in the direction which we independently approve, namely the direction of more awakened mental and spiritual being. The critics feel also that the effect of popular science on popular morality is very serious. The old standards are being rapidly discarded, and
¶173in their place comes an ethic which (they say) is at heart self-indulgent and degraded. It is an ethic based on very inadequate biological concepts, and devoid of that intuitive sense of rightness which men in the past regarded as an intimation of divine will. The proof of the insufficiency of modern morality, the critics say, is that the typically ‘modern’ young person is disillusioned, and disgusted with himself and the world. The critics of science feel that science is producing a swarm of cheap, standardized minds, incapable of any depth of experience, and intolerant of all who do not agree with them. Many of the serious critics of science are so disgusted by the effects of science upon men’s minds that they find their way back again into one or other of the churches. Feeling that the old religions really do take into account kinds of experience which are of very great importance and are ignored or despised by the more hasty kind of scientists, these desperate critics choose to accept all the orthodox doctrines of some church or other, including many which seem to be the products of merely animal or primitive craving and of confused thinking. Their disgust with science blinds them to the fact that these doctrines have, in many cases, no more claim to credence than fashionable scientific speculations themselves. It is, indeed, tragic that revulsion from science, and our science-obsessed civilization, should lead so many of our most sensitive minds to fly to the old religion and accept it uncritically, instead of facing the fact that not only science, but also religion itself, of the doctrinal kind, is inadequate. Both the true scientists and the true critics of science seem to have right on their side, though each is disinclined to do full justice to the other. Apart from the very urgent world-economic problem, there is no more important problem for mankind to-day than this one of realizing the danger and the true value of modern science. Before leaving this subject, I would suggest
¶174that we must constantly distinguish between the science of the true scientists and the science of the commoner and less truly scientific kind of scientists; who, even if they happen to be fine workers in their special fields, never manage to regard life as a whole in the truly scientific way, and never manage to look at science itself scientifically. OceanofPDF.com
¶175C. THE UPSHOT OF SCIENCE FOR THOUGHT I SHALL NOW attempt to describe briefly the whole upshot of contemporary science so far as it should bear upon the world-view of the ordinary intelligent person. Any part, or even the whole, of modern scientific thought may turn out to be in important respects wrong. Nothing in it deserves to be regarded as certain. But in all probability the general outline of it is in some sense true, even if it is systematically distorted by the omission of some far-reaching principle still hidden from us. Let us, then, try to set down the main tenor of modern science in a few bold strokes. In the first place, then, many of the notions of common sense, which have worked so well for many thousands of years, and many of the earlier notions of science itself turn out to be only very roughly true. For instance, in the long view of modern science the seemingly fixed order of space and the seemingly fixed order of time are seen to be very dependent on one another and on the point of view of the observer. But some other mysterious thing, neither mere space nor mere time but the reality which includes the two of them, is a fixed order. Seemingly our intuitions of space and time, though valid for our practical life, are superficial. They need to be qualified by some more subtle intuitions not yet possible to us. Again, energy, which science itself conceived, and took to be of an absolutely fixed amount in the universe, turns out not to be so; but once more, there is something else, much more complex, and to us quite unimaginable, which is the fixed reality behind energy. And so on. In fact, not only the world of common sense, but also the world of earlier science itself, is almost certainly very
¶176superficial and fragmentary aspects of a deeper and far more subtle world which lies at present almost entirely beyond our comprehension. Such at least is the case if modern science is to be trusted. Then there is the matter of mere size. If science is right, the universe turns out to be very much bigger than was supposed a little while ago. Astronomers tell us that if an ordinary page-size photograph of one of the galaxies, or star-systems, was enlarged to the size of Asia, the earth would remain invisibly small on it unless one used a powerful microscope. The solar system, with the earth in it, lies within one such star-system or galaxy. Our galaxy contains about a hundred thousand million stars. Our own sun is a star of average size, though it is probably very exceptional in having planets. Its volume is over a million times that of the earth. Though stars are so big, and there are so many of them in a galaxy, they are also so far apart that if a star be represented by an orange, its nearest neighbour would be many hundreds of miles distant. Some two million other galaxies are visible through our present telescopes. They are separated from one another and from our own galaxy by immense tracts of space. Beyond the farthest visible galaxy there lie, in all directions, a much greater number of galaxies, so distant that our most powerful telescopes cannot reveal them. It is said that there must be about a hundred thousand million of them. So there are as many galaxies as there are stars in one galaxy. If all the stars in all the galaxies were grains of sand, they would make up a bed hundreds of yards deep over the whole surface of England. But though the universe is so big, it has a definite size. It is not infinite. The smallest known physical object, an electron, occupies a definite proportion of the whole of contemporary space. This does not mean that there are boundaries to the universe, beyond which there is nothing, not
¶177even space. It means that if we were to go on travelling in what we call a straight line for long enough, we should at last arrive at the place from which we started. Light, which would take one-seventh of a second to travel round the earth, takes at least a hundred thousand years to travel ‘round’ the whole universe. According to one of the latest, but seemingly well-established, theories, the volume of space itself, compared with the smallest of all physical objects, is expanding; or, if you prefer it, the objects themselves are contracting. More accurately, the distances between the galaxies are ever increasing in comparison with the size of the galaxies themselves and the size of electrons and waves of light. The farthest visible galaxies are rushing away from us at a prodigious and ever-increasing rate, simply through this ‘expansion of space’. The farthest galaxies of all, far too remote to be seen, are receding much faster. Sooner or later they will be travelling faster than the speed of light, and will have no longer any connexion whatever with us. Not only does the universe turn out to be bigger, it turns out also to be much older than was supposed. The human species has perhaps existed for a million years, say thirty thousand generations. The first mammals probably appeared some twenty million years ago. It is perhaps about two thousand million years since the planets were formed from the substance of the sun. They were born, it seems, as the result of a very rare accident in the universe, namely the close approach of the sun and a passing star, and the drawing out of a part of the sun by the attraction of the other star. The sun itself is thought by some to have been formed out of the original nebula or gas-cloud about seven million million years ago. But in estimating the past we have to take into account the theory of the expanding universe. If that theory is true, then the expansion cannot have been going on for ever. There must have been a time when all the galaxies were
¶178crowded together like a swarm of bees hanging from a branch. The beginning of the process, it seems, cannot have been so very long ago, not so long as has been demanded for the condensation of the galaxies out of the primeval all-pervading gas. In fact there is a discrepancy in the time scales suggested for evolution. But, whichever account is right, the beginning of the physical universe must have been many millions of years ago. Looking into the future, we find that, though man has only existed for about a million years, probably the earth will still be a possible home for him two thousand million years hence, and perhaps much longer. Thus if we represent his past million years by a few days, he has still the prospect of a long lifetime before him; though of course he may be destroyed before his time by some astronomical catastrophe, or by biological changes beyond his control, or by the unwise use of the powers which science is giving him. But though the universe has a very long past history, and will have a very long future history, there was something like a Beginning, and there will be something like an End. The universe is apparently running down, like a clock. Knowing the rate of its unwinding, we infer that at some date, very long before the formation of the stars, it must have been started; and that at another date, very long after all the stars are reduced to cinders, it will stop. Of these most remote events scientists can tell us very little. Some believe that in the beginning God created the universe, and that in the end it will have fulfilled its purpose. Others, with at least as good reason, believe that the life of the universe consists of an extremely slow alternation of winding up and unwinding, like the alternate intake and output of a man’s breath. Others again say that, since the universe is finite, and no energy can be actually lost from it, and since its ‘end’ is not really a state of exhaustion, but an all-pervading agitation of light-waves, mere chance, operating
¶179through inconceivable myriads of aeons, must sooner or later result in a vast rewinding, a vast piling up of energy once more into certain places, so that the whole cosmical process must take place again. But all this is guesswork. What science actually tells us with some confidence is that the universe is very big and very long-enduring; that at present it is unwinding; that man is physically a very minute part of it, and one of very recent origin; that his planet is probably unique; that life itself, as we know it, depends on several peculiar and (in a loose sense) accidental features of this planet; and that man evolved from primitive life through the effects of still further accidents, such as the fact that some of his ancestors were forced to live in trees and develop good eyes and hands. Science suggests, in short, that man is a product of an amazing chain of lucky chances, or conjunctions of causes; and that to-day, as at every stage of his career, he is at the mercy of the obscure cosmical forces which, so far as science can tell, blindly produced him, and may as blindly destroy him. It suggests, moreover, that his mind, with all its desires and fears and its loftiest aspirations, is very largely determined by the seemingly blind workings of chemical and physical events within his body. If his digestion goes wrong, he becomes irritable or gloomy; if he is given certain drugs, he becomes hilarious, or ecstatic, or angry, or anxious, or dull, or brilliant, in response to the properties of the particular drug. All this that science asserts is perhaps humiliating to man’s self-esteem; but science tells us also something different. It tells us that, though in the past man has, indeed, been the sport of circumstance, and must, so far as scientists can judge, ever remain so to a great extent, yet in our age he seems to be coming into the possession of hitherto unimaginable powers of controlling his own destiny. If these powers are misused, they may well destroy him. But if they are used wisely, with clear consciousness of the
¶180desirable goal, they may, in the fullness of time, enable him to make of himself a very much more alive being than he is at present. Indeed, it is not inconceivable that man is the living germ which is destined to vitalize the whole cosmos. On the other hand, it is at least as possible that he is of no cosmical importance, that all the while there goes on upon the galactic or the cosmical plane, ‘over man’s head’, and unrevealed to him, some exalted life and mind and spiritual experience of a kind which he cannot possibly conceive. OceanofPDF.com
¶181IX. HISTORY OceanofPDF.com
¶182A. METHODS AND PRINCIPLES OF HISTORY FOR THOSE WHO seek to become more vividly and more precisely conscious of the spiritual adventure of man, history should be the most significant of all intellectual activities. Properly treated, it should combine the detachment of scientific research with the sympathy of dramatic art. We cannot all undertake historical research, any more than we can all be professional scientists. But we can at least, with the help of the historians, see our own lives and our own nation and the whole contemporary world as incidents in the great theme of man. With the aid of history, we can realize that our own civilization is only one among many phases in the growth of man, that our confident knowledge is not really the final and complete knowledge, but only a stage in the age-long effort to find the truth, to discover what is most desirable, and to establish it. Some of us, when we look back at the wisdom of the Middle Ages or of the Ancient Egyptians and compare it with our own, are apt to smile at its misunderstandings and confusions, and thank heaven that we at any rate can see more clearly. But if the study of history has given us a real historical sense, we cannot help believing that to a future age our own thought will seem almost as crude, and perhaps in some ways even more fantastic. A historian is one whose scientific curiosity is concerned to explore the past career of mankind. He undertakes to reveal past events, and if possible to explain them scientifically. He tries to discover the conditions of life in different ages, how men thought and felt in different ages, how society was organized, and how one phase of civilization gave place to another, or to barbarism. In fact he sets out to form clear ideas about the actual course of the great human adventure.
¶183Those who are concerned with the prehistoric ages are also in a sense historians, though they work with different material, and cannot achieve the same detail. Those also whose task it is to tell the story of the whole evolution of life on earth are, in the broadest sense, historians. The true historians and ‘prehistorians’ and historical biologists, though they work upon different ages and with very different methods, are all cooperating in the same task, the description of the events which led up to our present human world. The true historian, though he concentrates on the ‘historical’ period, and indeed on his own particular subject within it, cannot do his work properly unless he tries to see his special subject in its proper setting within the one great theme. He uses many distinct methods in his work, studying old documents and buildings, reading old books, critically examining other historical accounts of events. He may seek help from geographers, geologists, economists, psychologists, philologists. He collects as many facts as possible; and then, bearing his facts in mind, he tries to imagine the whole pattern of events which make up the period or movement that he is studying, both the pattern of external facts, such as changes in ways of living, and also the pattern of men’s minds, their ways of thinking, feeling and desiring. The historian’s first aim is, or should be, to describe the course of events as accurately as possible. But also he seeks to explain. This he does by trying to show events as the expression of very general principles which, by induction, he discovers to be true of the whole career of man. For instance, he makes use of the principle that men’s actions are determined very largely by the needs for food, safety and comfort. And since other activities can only be pursued when these needs are, up to a point, satisfied, he may also use the principle that civilization depends fundamentally on economic
¶184resources, such as the possibilities of agriculture in different countries, and the available supply of coal and iron. Another principle that he may use is, that to some extent the course of history is determined by ideas in men’s minds, by fears, hates, admirations, beliefs, faiths. But he may go behind this principle to another, namely that these controlling ideas themselves are at bottom the expression of needs which the peoples have felt as a result of the interplay of their particular natures and their particular circumstances. For instance, in the seventeenth century a new class rose into power, namely the commercial and industrial masters; and, owing to the needs and circumstances of this class, religion and morals had to be refashioned. One result was that in puritanism, the religious movement typical of the period, special emphasis was given to the commercially desirable virtues of industriousness, abstemiousness, honesty. The pursuit of beauty came to seem, both economically and spiritually, a shocking dissipation of resources. The theory of ‘economic determinism’ in history is one which arouses in some minds violent repugnance and in others fanatical acceptance. Let us try to formulate its meaning as dispassionately as possible, so that, if possible, we may see in what sense it is true. Like all scientific theories, its basis is inductive. It claims to be a very general description of the way in which mankind has behaved and may be expected to behave, of the way in which the free choice of individuals does in the long run direct itself. The contention is that the ‘economic motive’ is the sole effective influence determining behaviour and culture, that all movements of thought, taste and ideals are expressions, direct or indirect of the interaction between ‘economic motives’ and material conditions. Now the phrase ‘economic motives’ is not at all precise. We may clarify the idea by saying that the self-regarding, family-regarding and tribe-
¶185regarding impulses of men and women, considered in the mass, have inclined, regularly but spontaneously, toward certain kinds of behaviour and thought because of the economic potentialities of the environment, such as charateristics of climate and soil, the distribution of water and minerals (especially iron and coal and oil); and also because of the economic organization of society itself. This social environment is, of course, according to the theory an expression of the material environment, present and past. It is surely clear that the modern world-situation has in fact resulted mainly from such a process of economic determination. Beings which seek to fulfil their capacities, and cannot do so without the cooperation of the material environment, will undoubtedly determine their behaviour in relation to economic factors. Further, in the sphere of thought, those ideas which are directly or indirectly fostered by the economic environment will tend, in the long run, to be accepted in preference to those which are not thus favoured. This does not mean that the actions of each individual are one and all immediately and wholly determined by economic motives. Far from it. Strong as the economic motive must be in a community of economically constrained individuals, it is only one motive among others. A man may very often act in opposition to the economic interests of himself or his family or his tribe. But in such an economically constrained community economic factors will have an all-pervasive and, in the main, an irresistible influence on behaviour and feeling and thought. They will determine the general trend of history, which is after all largely an expression of the cumulative influence of the environment on average minds. In the economically constrained community even individuals who climb to affluence, or are born into it, are bound to be unwittingly and irrationally constrained by the general economic mental atmosphere. Like
¶186all human beings, they seek self-expression; and in such a community the readiest and most imposing kind of self-expression (apart from sheer force) is the exercise of economic power over one’s fellows. For these economically fortunate beings the prize is not mere subsistence, or even comfort, but prestige, and control of the lives of other men by economic manipulation. Up to our own day every human community has been economically constrained. Its actions have been in the main determined by economic necessity, and its thought has been subtly and unwittingly moulded by economic considerations. Individuals here and there, no doubt, have triumphantly rejected the prevailing influence. Even considerable groups of individuals, now and again, during phases of religious or tribal exaltation, have behaved in manners not explicable by economic determinism alone. But the ‘tribe’ itself and the ‘nation’ itself are fundamentally expressions of economic forces; and the same influence has much to do with the determination of the particular forms of religion. But though economic necessity has been by far the most important influence determining human behaviour and thought in the past, it does not follow that it must be so in the future. Only in an economically constrained community is the economic motive in the long run irresistible and all- pervasive. There is no inner necessity compelling men to be dominated by economic considerations. In a world in which every individual was assured of economic security, and in which the economic obsession left over from the past had been eradicated by sound education, economic determinism would cease to apply. Other motives, less urgent but more distinctively human, would usurp the power of the economic. The determining factor in human behaviour and culture, in the main and in the long run, might be the will for a more subtle kind of self-expression and social development. In
¶187fact the world-aim might at last come into its own as the ruling motive of the world community, the aim of developing human capacity toward true and comprehensive knowing, discriminate feeling, and appropriate willing. Now our modern world is as strictly determined by economic factors as any earlier community. Indeed, it is perhaps more consciously and grimly so than any other. Yet in our day, for the first time in history, mechanical invention is putting man physically into a position to escape wholly and for ever from the ancient tyranny of economic determinism. Unfortunately the economic mentality, the obsessive economic motive directed on behalf of self, family and tribe, is by now so firmly established in our social tradition that we may very well fail to avail ourselves of our new freedom. Like beasts born in captivity, whose cage doors are at last flung open, we may not have the wit to walk abroad. Of course, even during the tyranny of economic determinism men have often rebelled, have sought to be more faithful to their distinctively human nature. Such a rebellion occurred perhaps most strikingly among the early Christians. Throughout history, and in every land, there have been smouldering, though vain, revolts. Yet now, when at last the opportunity occurs, we seem incapable of seizing it. The very general revulsion against the theory of economic determinism springs from the sense that it depicts man as purely passive, mechanical, the sport of circumstances. But this is a mistake. Man need not be economically determined. Nothing compels him to will to live. But if he does will to live, he must allow himself to be economically determined, so long as the life of the individual and of the race is allowed to depend on economic toil. In searching for the general principles behind events, the historian has to bear in mind that mankind is both passive and active in its great adventure. At any particular point of history human actions result from the interplay of
¶188two forces or causes, namely the environment and the active nature of mankind itself at that time. Now human nature at a particular time is, indeed, a product of the past. But this does not mean that each movement of history can be wholly explained as a result of past environments alone. Even if we take the word ‘environment’ in its broadest sense, and not merely to mean ‘economic environment there must have been at every stage something for the environment to influence. History is the record of the ways in which past human actions interacted with past environments to produce new environments and new human nature. It is no more possible to explain history simply by environment than to explain it simply by human nature. If we trace the development of human nature back to our non-human, ape-like ancestors, to our reptilian ancestors, our fish-like ancestors, even to the first living forms and the pre-vital sources of life, we see it at every stage being moulded by the environment; but at the beginning and at every stage there must have been something having a character of its own, something capable of acting spontaneously in cooperation with the environment. Without the environment, no awakening; but equally without the ‘something’ itself, no awakening. Even in the very first stage of the evolution of life on the earth, our pre-vital ancestors, which were probably mere clusters of very complicated molecules, must have had some nature of their own for the environment to work upon, and in which it could awaken new powers. And so at every stage, there must be a ‘something’, itself the product not only of past environments but also of past ‘somethings’, which could respond to the environments. And at every stage the ‘something’, spurred by the environment, awakens into new powers.
¶189The historian is concerned not only with general principles but with particular individuals. Some of the events of history he will describe in terms of his general principles, biological, psychological, economic, cultural, and so on; but others he will attribute partly to the influence of dominant persons, who through superior vision and understanding of the state of society, or through sheer force of character, may sometimes take very great effect on the course of events. No doubt he will try to give a scientific account of these great men and of the ways in which circumstances influenced them; but his first concern will be simply to describe them accurately, so as to give a clear idea of the ways in which they themselves took effect on history. When he is dealing with the work of some great man, he will always try to show with equal clearness both that it was in the main the outcome of his social environment and also that in certain respects it was unique, that it introduced something actually new, though determinate, into the thought or organization of mankind. Thus, to give one outstanding example, he will try to show in the case of Jesus both that the Mediterranean peoples in that age were already in need of, and vaguely groping toward, the ideal of Christian love, and also that only the genius and insight of one particular great mind could clearly conceive that ideal and imprint it upon the hearts of men. Unfortunately in historical research it is more difficult than in physical science to interpret facts faithfully and without bias; for in the first place the evidence cannot be described with mathematical precision, and secondly, since the subject-matter of history is human behaviour, it is apt to arouse very deep emotions in those who study it. Consequently we find that historians are often in violent disagreement with one another. Some, for instance, insist that all history is to be understood as the expression of some single fundamental principle, such as the principle that historical events are
¶190determined wholly by economic necessity. Others no less confidently declare that any kind of scientific generalization is impossible in history, and that at bottom the story of man is simply the upshot of the adventures of the countless unique and incalculable personalities of all men and women. Others again say that history is an art, and that a historical work is not simply a record of facts, but a product of the creative imagination of the historian. We must beware of all these over-simple views of history. It is very improbable that such a complex animal as man, existing in vast populations and in very diverse circumstances, is moved in the long run by one sole motive, whatever the motive. History is never to be understood in terms of one principle, save the most general principle that what men seek to do with their environment is to use it for the fulfilment of their capacities. But what capacities? On the other hand, to say that scientific generalization is impossible in history means in the last resort that no human actions are predictable, that no human persons are ever to be relied upon to act at all as others have acted before them. To say that history is pure art, and has no objective truth, is merely to say that history, real history, has not yet been written, that historians have never dealt faithfully with their facts. There can be no doubt that all history that has ever been written has been to a greater or less extent biased. But also there can be no doubt that the only sane aim of writing history is to give as true an account as possible of the career of man; and that, as historical research advances, we become more able to write true history. Even to-day we can give an outline of that career, which, though nowhere certain, is in the main true with a high degree of probability. I will venture to set down the controlling points of that outline.
¶191B. THE UPSHOT OF HISTORY OUR EARLIEST OF all ancestors were not, it seems, what we should call living things at all. They were merely specks of very complex chemical substances. Yet in these substances lay, in some sense, the potentiality of producing in a favourable environment, Jesus, Nero, and the rest of us. The sun’s rays, working upon the simpler substances, had already built up our sub-vital ancestors, as in our own laboratories, chemists to-day build up sugar and other ‘organic compounds’. The conditions for this natural upbuilding have probably long since ceased. Our sub-vital ancestors came into being in the hot primeval waters. Through the sun’s power, many kinds of ‘organic’ substances must have been produced before ever there were living organisms. These substances drifted in the water. They contained in themselves a potentiality of future life; and also they constituted together a rich food, waiting for the future living things. Before there was life, there was soup! Under the continued influence of the sun’s rays, some of these food- stuff’s, these intricate molecules, themselves began to eat. Though their precarious organization was ever disintegrating, they constantly rebuilt it. They developed the power of annexing neighbouring material, breaking it up, and reforming it (with the aid of solar energy) upon their own molecular pattern. They began to hold together in intimate and complex clusters. These clusters grew. They subdivided, propagating themselves as generations of new young clusters, formed upon the parental pattern, and capable of growth. Thus, in the primeval soup, life began.
¶192The years passed in millions and in hundreds of millions. The primitive live things throve in the rich sea. They also fed upon one another. There was already strife in the waters, and death. The weak were overcome, and the strong multiplied. Of the strong kinds a few, very few indeed, became more complex in their structure, more subtle and more alive in their ways. Sooner or later, most of them succumbed; but one kind at least survived, and multiplied, and evolved, and diversified itself into new kinds. In time the plants were distinguished from the animals; for while some kinds of creatures continued to gather the sun’s energy and store it in their bodies for use in the processes of living, others lost this power, gaining instead the power to maintain themselves by preying upon the sun-rich flesh of the plants. The years continued to pass in millions and hundreds of millions. Many kinds of plants and animals appeared, and many kinds vanished; but a few, very few indeed, survived. And of these few, here and there one most fortunate kind continued to diversify, to evolve, to awaken into new powers. Of these again most kinds vanished; or settled into stagnation, being no longer spurred by the environment into fresh adventures. Many, fallen into easy circumstances, lost, age by age, their intricate organs and subtle prowess, and sank back once more into the ancient, clumsy and somnolent ways. Many throve by preying upon kinds more alive than themselves. But here and there a few kinds, very few indeed, were stung by the environment into still more vital forms and powers. They learned, for instance, to be sexual. They united in pairs, and mingled their substance before dividing again into new, rejuvenated generations. Also they learned not only to touch and taste, but to smell and see and hear. They began to be somewhat more precisely aware of the complexity and horror and beauty of the world.
¶193Emerging from the water, some developed lungs and legs. They crept and ran. Some of them climbed, some trusted themselves to the air, some flew. They preyed upon one another with ever more deadly weapons. They kept watch for one another with ever more delicate sensibility. Males and females courted and were courted, discovering to one another ever new delights. Mothers carried their young, and nursed them till they were fit for independence. And the young, basking in prolonged maternal care, grew up more slowly, remained young and pliable for many months, or even years. Thus they were able to learn more delicate and more variable adjustments to the environment, before stiffening into maturity. Mates now began to live together in service of offspring. Families hung together and became tribes. Individuals co-operated with one another, and the tribes prospered. The years passed in millions and tens of millions. Most of the kinds of animals and plants stagnated, or degenerated, or were destroyed. But one kind of tree-dwellers developed hands, developed eyes with new delicacy of perception for shape and colour, developed brains fitted to take advantage of these instruments. The new creatures remained young longer even than others, and so they went farther in learning. Their eyes and hands and great brains made them apt at distinguishing and relating, and also apt at manipulating. More intelligently than other creatures they solved the problems of their daily life. As the years passed in thousands and in hundreds of thousands, rare geniuses of the race invented new devices, forgetting them and rediscovering them day by day, so clouded were their minds. They threw stones at their prey. They smote their enemies with rocks. They chipped flints for weapons and tools. They made shelters. They defeated the very lions and bears and mammoths. They were men, or almost men.
¶194In thousands and hundreds of thousands the years continued to pass. The races of the brute-men kept on discovering and forgetting and rediscovering their precious inventions. Also they continually harried one another. One race, with superior cunning and finer weapons, triumphed. All the others were exterminated. The victorious kind multiplied, diversified, covered the world with many peoples, walked erect, grew ampler brains. They became true men. They made fire and used it. They hunted and trapped. They painted their cave-walls with beasts, to prosper the chase. They tamed dogs and herded cattle. They sowed seed and stored the crops for winter. They looked forward from year to year, from generation to generation. They took note of their own mental life. They became aware of themselves as persons, and of others also as persons, different from themselves. They loved and hated with new insight. Here and there they began to feel the mystery of their existence, and the terrible beauty of the world. They bowed before sun and moon, storm, thunder and fire. They conceived gods and goddesses in the likeness of their own sexual potency, their own cruelty, their own power and cunning, their own mercy. They deified their ancestors. They practised and enforced ritual worship. They sacrificed one another, singly or in hecatombs, to make their fields fertile or appease the jealous gods. And still, in thousands and in tens of thousands, the years passed. The races of men flooded about the earth in waves and eddies, or stagnated in places apart. Great leaders led their hordes against the settled peoples. Conquering tribes slaughtered or enslaved, or were absorbed by the conquered. In the fertile river-plains men lived richly, and the war-lords throve upon them. Cities appeared, temples, palaces. Empires were founded, knit together by roads, fenced in by frontier walls. Empires changed hands or crumbled into principalities. The mighty fought over them
¶195with paid armies. The swarming common folk toiled, spawned, paid taxes, bowed before their lords, sacrificed to their gods. The centuries passed. A certain Indian, gifted with peculiar insight into his own nature, found therein also, the reality which lies behind the world’s appearances. Or seemed to himself to find it. Certain Greeks, exceptionally curious and intelligent descendants of the first curious brute, inquired into the causes of things, naively sought the fundamental nature of all things, studied their own thinking, asked what was best in the world, and what was the nature of the good life. Thus at length began science and philosophy. A certain Jew, intensely aware of his fellows and of his own self, imagined in his likeness a God of Love, and died to make men discover their own power of loving. Thus for the first time a few men and women, very few indeed, began to see dimly what mankind should live to do, namely to seek the truth, to love one another, to make a more alive world, and to keep their hearts open to the supernal beauty. But again and again as the centuries passed, the vision was lost, rediscovered, and soon lost again. Wisdom and love were quenched, or at most they flickered hesitatingly along the centuries. Only the ritual survived. Churches flourished, and empires. Ships brought remote lands into touch with one another. Ships and trade and guns gave the West dominance. Men conceived nationality, disputed over religious doctrines, waged religious and national wars. They also invented scientific method, explored the stars and atoms and the human body, doubted the religious dogmas, and felt once more, here and there, the passion for knowledge of the natural world. They were overawed by the immensity and intricacy of the universe; yet they used their new knowledge chiefly for power, not for delighted appreciation. The fortunate increased their wealth by coal and steam, and by the labour of the unfortunate. These multiplied in the
¶196spreading slums, or toiled for landlords in the fields. Diseased, stunted, ignorant, helpless, they were easily deceived, easily led, easily stirred to fear and hate, now by their masters, now by those who schemed to become their masters. The comfortable masters were pained to see the filthy and brutish condition of the workers. To prove their own liberal mentality, they affected to speak to their inferiors as man to man, though they were secretly disgusted by the smell of them. They generously rewarded the more devoted of the workers with coppers. They wrote to the papers about social injustice. But they continued to make money out of the workers. And if ever the workers rebelled, the police restored order. Masters and slaves alike were blind to the true goal of living. They could conceive nothing better than to display wealth or squander it, or to exercise power over their fellows. Suddenly the nations, long terrified by one another’s lust of power, blundered into the first scientific war. Millions were killed or wounded, but a greater damage was done to the minds of those who survived, and to the following generations. For now, when some had begun to see clearly the outlines of a new world, a close-knit and awakened world-society, this aim was made to seem utterly ‘idealistic’, unrealizable. Men could no longer trust one another even so far as they had done before the War. Meanwhile in Russia, where tyranny had been worst and disorder greatest, a devoted party had organized the revolution and founded a new society, a society blind, perhaps, to very much of the true aim of living, but controlled by the firm will to make the new world, and eager for discovery. Alarmed by the prospect of losing their power, the economic masters in every country tightened their hold upon the minds of the workers. They propagated lies about the tyranny of Communism. Cleverly they appealed to the widespread craving for a less mechanized and less materialistic
¶197society, and condemned Communism as the extreme of mechanization and materialism. But in fact they, or the social forces which had produced them, were the true cause of mechanization and materialism. They praised the primitive and the martial. They condemned intellect as misleading, pacifism as unmanly, and the will for an orderly world community as sheer idealism. They exalted the tribe and sought tribal enemies. They financed dictators, who organized armies of deluded lads to enforce their will with exultant brutality. In country after country independent thinking and action became impossible. All who dared to protest were destroyed or driven abroad. Civilization became a mockery. What is to come? Year by year, the old blind barbarian will, terrified by the disintegration of the old order, becomes more desperate, more impotent to construct, more determined to strangle the new world in the act of birth. But also, year by year, decade by decade, the new will spreads and grows clearer. To be alive to-day, to be aware of the issues of to-day, is rare good fortune. For, without doubt, we live in one of the great ages of history, perhaps in the greatest of all that have yet occurred. If we succeed in our worldwide adventure, the future will look back on us not only with horror, pity, incredulous amazement, but also with generous admiration for our victorious, though faltering and blundering, crusade. Never before has such an issue faced mankind as that which is now dividing the world into two great factions. Never before has there been any effective will to devote the whole planet to the true world-aim, never before the means to do so. But never before have those who cannot conceive the new will been so well armed for mischief. Let us be clear in our own minds beyond all hesitation as to the turn that we must now seek to give to history. We must create for the first time a
¶198world-population of well-grown and fully awakened men and women. We must change the whole tenor of man’s life on this planet. We must turn him little by little from the disease-racked, ill-nourished, cowering, vindictive beast, that in the main he is, to the lover, the artist, the philosopher-king in command of his own destiny, that it is even now in him to become. By every means discoverable, by changes political, economic, educational, and some day eugenical, we must change human nature, we must begin to release the human from the brutish in man, to set his feet once and for all upon the way of the spirit. And our reward shall be that those nobler beings who shall follow us may sometimes pause in the midst of their greater endeavour and their greater joy to look back on us and say, ‘Halfhuman creatures that they were, they yet saw unmistakably a glimmer of the light. Hampered by their own faintheartedness and brutishness, they were made by their vision nobler than could otherwise have been. And from their dark tragic lives a world has sprung which they could not have conceived.’ OceanofPDF.com
¶199X. PHILOSOPHY OceanofPDF.com
¶200A. THE SCOPE OF PHILOSOPHY LIKE SCIENCE AND history philosophy is a highly skilled theoretical activity. It is more difficult to describe briefly than either of the other two. The philosopher has two distinct aims which cannot really be pursued apart from one another. His more ambitious aim, which in the present state of knowledge he cannot hope to fulfil, is to see the pattern of the whole of things, to see how everything is related to everything else, and is influenced by other things. He wants to ‘see together’, or to comprehend as one universe, not only all physical events, such as the birth of stars and the happenings within an atom, and all mental events, such as mankind’s slow awakening into clear awareness, and the mental growth and decay of individuals, but also much that is not events at all, like the truths of mathematics and logic, and truth itself, and goodness and beauty. He seeks to understand the bearing of each of these great kinds of fact on the others. Unfortunately this cannot really be done at all thoroughly until we have gained much more ‘piecemeal’ knowledge than exists at present. But though man’s mind in its present state cannot possibly do more than scratch the surface of this greatest of all theoretical problems, the desire to see things whole is the guiding motive of philosophy, and the enterprise of trying to see things whole is a pursuit which can have a very broadening and deepening effect on the mind. The other task which philosophers undertake is not quite so difficult. They single out the most important ideas on which all our thinking in each sphere of knowledge depends, and they try to make these ideas as clear and sound as possible, as true as possible to the facts that they describe. For instance, when they find biologists and psychologists talking about
¶201‘instinct’ in animals and men, they set about inquiring exactly what is meant by the word. Is an instinct part of the structure of a mysterious thing called a mind? Or is it a purely bodily structure, say in the brain? Or is it not a thing at all, but just a description of behaviour, not a hidden cause of the behaviour? When philosophers find physicists talking about ‘physical mechanism’, they seek to discover precisely what these two words mean, and in what ways ‘mechanical’ happenings differ from other possible kinds of happenings such as purposeful activity. It might be thought that the scientists themselves ought to be best fitted to work out the exact meaning of the ideas on which their various sciences are founded. And as a matter of fact some of them are very earnestly engaged on this work. But strictly, when they do this they are being philosophers. They are not, so to speak, merely playing the game of their own science according to the established rules; they are criticizing the rules themselves, and trying to make better ones. And in this work they may be helped by the pure philosophers, part of whose task it is to see each department of knowledge in the light cast by others. Another very important aim of philosophers is to form clear ideas of the nature of thinking itself. What does thinking really set out to do, and how far can it possibly succeed? Is it to be trusted? Does it ever give us real knowledge about anything more than our own experiencing? What precisely is the difference between true and false thinking? What is truth itself? When we say that an idea is true, do we mean merely that it fits in satisfactorily with all our other ideas, that it is not inconsistent with the pattern formed by the rest of our thought? Or do we mean that the fact which it asserts really is a character of the world? And if this is what we mean, have we any solid reason to believe that any idea ever is true in this sense? Or do we mean, when we say that an idea is true, that the idea is a useful idea, that if you
¶202think with it your thinking will lead to success in some practical way, but if you think without it, you will come to grief, sooner or later? Another great problem which philosophers have to face is the problem of the essential meanings of ‘good’ and ‘bad When a man says seriously that something is ‘good’, does he mean just that it pleases him, or that it is pleasing to all normal human beings; or does he mean that it in itself has a special character, namely ‘good ‘. Or, again, does he mean that it is the kind of thing which would please the ideally developed mind, the fully human mind, or the mind of an all-wise and all-loving God? Or again, when we look into the matter as closely as possible, and call something good, do we mean that it is a case of, or an instrument for, the fulfilling of the capacity of some living being, whether of a lowly or of an exalted order of vitality? If so, ‘better’ would seem to mean either ‘more fulfilling’ or ‘fulfilling to a more alive, more vital capacity And when we say that a man ‘ought’ to act so as to increase the good in the world and decrease the bad, what do we really mean? Do we, for instance, mean merely that if the man really wants the greatest possible happiness, or if he wants to fulfil his own nature completely, or if he wants the best to happen, he must take into account not merely his own needs as a particular individual, but also the needs of other individuals; since he himself is at bottom a social individual, who cannot himself be really happy or really fulfilled so long as others are unhappy or unfulfilled? Do we mean this, or do we mean simply that, whether a man wants to or not, he absolutely ought to increase the good? There is yet another great philosophical problem connected with ‘good’ and ‘bad Granted that we know the meaning of the terms, what things or states or acts have as a matter of fact the character ‘good and what have the character ‘bad and in what degrees? And further, what is the greatest good of all, the ideal which we should all be seeking? What is the best kind of life
¶203that a man can lead? What is the supreme end that he should try to realize in his individual life? And again, what is the best possible kind of human world, the ideal world which we should all be striving to make? Then there is the problem of beauty. What do we really mean when we say that a picture or a piece of music is beautiful? Do we simply mean that it pleases us; or that it pleases those whom we consider best able to judge; or that it has a unique character, which, even if no one admired it, it would still have; or that it is so arranged that, as a whole, it satisfies certain very special and subtle needs of human beings? Such are the problems which philosophers have to face. They all turn out to be extremely difficult; and though some of them have been discussed for thousands of years, none of them has been finally solved. This lack of definite results has made some people think that philosophy is a waste of time. But they are wrong, for two reasons. First, it is not really true that philosophers merely ‘go round in circles and never get nearer the truth’. It would be more accurate to say that, though indeed they do often seem to go round and round from one kind of theory to another, and finally arrive back where they were, yet as a matter of fact they move in a sort of spiral, and may actually be coming nearer and nearer to the central truths. The point is that, so long as past philosophy is remembered, many of the mistakes that were made in the past and then exposed, will be avoided in the future. That, at any rate, is a real advance. In our day the philosophers are much less influential than the scientists. This is partly because they cannot produce startling discoveries that make good ‘copy’ for the newspapers, and partly because, in a commercial age such as ours, philosophy seems to most people a waste of time, since it cannot increase the material wealth of man. But philosophers are not really without influence. In every age the exploring philosophers of that age,
¶204working more or less apart from their fellow men, do much to shape the common culture of the next age. They are channels through which the changing circumstances of the race take effect upon abstract thought, to produce ideas and ideals which will dominate men’s minds for good or ill in the coming age. One has only to think of Plato, Descartes, Spinoza, Hume, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, William James, and in our own day Bergson, Croce, Bertrand Russell, Whitehead, to realize that philosophers take effect on culture. The least of these has moulded the minds of thousands who may not even have heard of their names. We cannot all give our main attention to philosophy. But also, just as we must all be to some extent artists, scientists and historians, we must all be to some extent philosophers. Every intelligent and serious-minded person inevitably must try to see things whole, so far as he can. He must also try to make all his most important ideas as clear as possible. He cannot help trying to decide for himself what is really good, and what is the best kind of life, and so on. He must do so, partly because, if he does not he will live in a random, undirected way, or a crudely misdirected way, with no clear aim, or none that can stand criticism. But also he must inevitably philosophize because at man’s most alive level of being it is as much his nature to philosophize as it is the nature of a wolf to hunt. Philosophy, in spite of its seeming failure, is one of the supremely satisfying and distinctively human mental activities. The importance of philosophy is not only private. Its use is not merely that it gives exercise to the capacities of the awakened mind. It has also a social importance. Plato may have been mistaken in making the philosophers the supreme rulers of his ideal society, but only philosophy can say clearly what the aim of government should be. And philosophy alone can discover, little by little, as the ages advance, the true aim of the
¶205human species, of the whole enterprise of human life on this planet. Even to-day something extremely important can be said on that subject. But the slowly dawning idea has still to be thought out so exactly and stated so compellingly that it will be fit to win the allegiance of every intelligent human being. OceanofPDF.com
¶206B. THE NECESSITY OF SCEPTICISM I SHALL NOW describe the general upshot of philosophy, as I see it, in our strange, uncomfortable, transitional age. No doubt many philosophers would disagree with one point or other of my statement; but none, I think, would entirely reject the whole spirit of it. This would be done only by persons who have no real capacity for philosophy, who cannot even sincerely try to take all aspects of our experience into account. The first effect of the study of philosophy to-day is to make a man sceptical. He sets out with all sorts of confident and comfortable beliefs, and one by one they are found to have no reasonable justification. The process of stripping oneself of confident beliefs is curiously like the process of learning to do with fewer clothes. We may have been brought up to wear a thick and extensive covering of woven stuffs for warmth and decency. By the time we are grown up, we are so used to this burden that if we shed a garment we are miserable, and may even fall ill. Yet it may be that we are really over-clad, that all the while we were hampered by the failure of our bodies to rid themselves of excessive warmth. If only we could safely make the change to less clothes, perhaps we should be much better in the long run, much healthier, hardier, more vigorous, less frightened for our health, more able to enjoy life. As with clothes, so with beliefs. They are warm, comfortable, protective garments for the mind, but for spiritual health we should wear as few as possible, and they should be of the flimsiest texture. When they become threadbare they should be discarded. New ones can be chosen if necessary. We are mostly brought up to wear too heavy a clothing of beliefs; and when philosophy makes us discard many of them, we suffer
¶207keenly. We are chilled through and through. We feel indecently naked. We are pained by the indignation of our well-clad friends. But if we persevere, and if we effect the change wisely, we discover after a while that we are living more keenly, that our minds are less hampered and more active, that we can be completely honest with ourselves without fear, that in shedding false beliefs and the unfulfillable desires which support them or depend on them, we learn to realize more clearly what is truly desirable. Any one who studies philosophy very soon finds out that he cannot form any clear idea as to what he himself is. Is he anything more than the stream of his own passing thoughts, desires, sensations, and so on? Or is he just a body which performs these mental actions? Or is he after all something enduring and mental which deserves to be called a soul? The only answer is that all these views are incredible for one reason or another. He does seem to be something more than a stream of consciousness and more than a purely and strictly physical body; but what he is, no man can say. The evidence that he is an eternal soul, like the evidence that he is not an eternal soul, has scarcely any weight. But the loss of eternity may not distress him, for the more he studies philosophy, the less may he desire to be an eternal soul. Personal immortality, in any sense worthy of the name, may come to seem to him unimportant, and perhaps even obnoxious. We all prize human personality very highly. We are all, on occasion, revolted by the thought that a loved person may one day cease to exist. But philosophy, by making us constantly strive to see things in their universal setting, may persuade us to feel that the true office or function of a person in the whole of things is essentially a passing function, like the function of a melody in music. We may come to feel, in our most awakened moments, that the only kind of immortality desirable for our beloveds, and for ourselves, is, not to continue for ever, but to be ‘for all eternity’ a completed
¶208theme, or melody, having its due place in the music of the cosmos. It may, indeed, be that after death we pass into some other world, or other cosmos, or ‘order of being’, and that there we carry forward the adventure of personal development and social creation. There may be as many such ‘orders of being’ as there are grains of sand, and the least of us may have a part to play in every one of them. More likely is it that, though there is, indeed, such a multiplicity of ‘orders of being’, we have no part at all in them. However this may be, the desire that we, little somnolent and blundering spirits, should have a vast and glorious future seems, after all, a trivial desire. Little as the philosopher knows about himself, he knows no more about the world around him. So far as it is revealed to him, it appears as a mass of contradictions. Whatever it really is, it cannot possibly be simply what it seems. Eager to find the truth, he loses himself in a maze of theories about the status of sensed characters and of physical objects. If he was inclined to think that the most real thing about him was his body, he has now to discover that no one can tell him what a body is. Some say that the whole physical universe, including the stars and a man’s own body, is a figment of his mind. Others say that a body is ‘a system of possible sense data’ in six dimensions. Others are content to think of it as a dance of electrons; but what electrons are, they cannot say. The upshot is that the thing he thought of as a body is as unreal as the thing he thought of as a mind; and that if body and mind were real substances, there could not be any intercourse between them. Perhaps it would be safer to say that body and mind are both real enough in some sense, but no one knows what sense. And the queer relation between them suggests that they are not two things but one, or two aspects of one thing.
¶209When our philosopher inquires into the nature of God, he discovers that though no one can disprove the existence of a personal God, neither can any one give any clear reason for believing in him, or even form more than a wildly self-contradictory idea of the meaning of the words ‘personal God As for the more detailed dogmas of the Christian religion, though of course the philosopher can see a kind of remote metaphorical truth in some of them, his philosophical study makes it utterly incredible that they should be true in the sense claimed for them. Indeed, if he has taken philosophy seriously to heart, he probably comes to feel that they are not merely incredible, but in many cases puerile and unlovely. Yet he may well feel also that in the Christian religion, and in the Buddhist religion too, there is something more important than any dogma; and that if Christians could only shed their stuffy clothing of beliefs the true spirit of their master might revive in them, and a Christianity not of doctrine but of pure worship and of conduct might yet play a great part in the modern world. Perhaps the most disheartening of all the findings of our philosopher would be that the very activity of thinking is unreliable. Not only is each particular department of knowledge riddled with its own special contradictions, and hemmed in on every side by the vast unknowable, but also reasoning itself is shot through and through with falsity. Logical principles turn out to be much less trustworthy than they seemed, or rather they are extremely liable to be misused, and thus to betray the thinker. Almost the whole of human knowledge is at bottom not strictly knowledge but more or less shrewd guesswork. Almost every truth is true not absolutely and of necessity but probably, and with an unknown degree of doubtfulness and falsity. Not only so, but any particular thought, experienced by a particular thinker, may, it seems, be vitiated by some obscure prejudice or other which inclines him irrationally to one set of
¶210arguments rather than another, and is completely hidden from his attention. Even this is not all. Unwitting desires and hungers, thwarted and pent up since childhood, and still puerile in character, may be the really effective motives behind his most sacred loyalties and admirations. OceanofPDF.com
¶211C. THE POSITIVE OUTCOME IT MAY WELL seem that philosophy is an utterly barren and hopeless pursuit, and that we should be wiser to exercise our intelligence on cross- word puzzles. Yet at the very least it is better to know that one does not know than to believe falsely that one does. That is at least one bit of positive knowledge. Philosophy, moreover, should make a man tolerant and receptive toward those who disagree with him, and ready to consider their arguments. On the other hand, it should make him critical of all confident beliefs, whether in himself or others. It should make him both eager to have insight into every kind of belief, and also relentlessly critical of all beliefs. I do not think that if a man is earnest with philosophy it should paralyse him. The outcome of philosophy even in this bewildered age is not only bewilderment. Some facts remain unshaken even after the fiercest philosophical scrutiny. And some of them are all-important facts. To begin at the beginning, there really is something! And that something may be thought of as ‘the world’ and ‘I though it is not always clear where the line should be drawn between the two, and conceivably the distinction is not final. In various ways ‘I’ ‘know’ the ‘world’. A tiny fraction of it I know by direct observation or acquaintance through my senses. Of the data of pure sensation there can be no doubt. But most of my knowledge of the world is reached indirectly, and is certainly shot through and through by error. Yet my reasoning is not in principle doomed to failure. It starts with the solid data of sense, and if it
¶212works cautiously, and does not mistake probability for certainty, it may discover vast fields of extremely probable knowledge. The world, then, contains at least in some manner or other the multitudinous and diverse and fascinating events which are revealed to me in sensation. Whether these sensed events are characters of the world beyond my body, or characters of my body itself, may be disputed. But if they are characters of my body, my body must include the whole known universe. In this case it can scarcely be called ‘my body’, which is known as a very minute thing within the universe. If sensed characters are characters of my mind, then my mind must include the universe. This theory cannot be disproved. But it is incredible and unnecessary. At the very least the characters given in sensation are distinct from my activity of sensing them. And in all probability they are all of a piece with a vast field of objective existences which lie beyond my reach. Philosophy cannot deprive me of the richness of my perceived world, nor of the exhilarating experience of being in touch with at least the fringes of a vast and intricate reality. Almost certainly the world also contains a very great deal more than is revealed to my senses, or could be revealed to my senses. But how the characters that are revealed are related to the immensity that is not revealed is very doubtful. Anyhow, the world does contain ‘somethings’, or patterns of events, which are known by me very imperfectly as trees, chairs, storms, human bodies and minds, nations, past eras of mankind, stars, galaxies, and so on. These things are not mere figments of my mind. However imperfectly I grasp them, what I grasp really is at bottom a tissue of actual factors in the world. In the multitude of things that make up the world as I know it I can detect likenesses and differences. Things can be similar in respect of certain characters and different in respect of others. There really is something
¶213identical in all stones, in respect of which they differ from all cats, days, noises, and even from all lumps of mud or metal. But just what that identity really is, I may never clearly apprehend. It must be admitted that this theory of the objectivity of ‘universal characters’ is denied by many philosophers whom, on other accounts, I greatly respect. According to some the mind itself simply ‘projects’ characters on a characterless world. But to me it seems incredible that there should be nothing identical in all stones, and no objective difference between all stones and all cats. Another fact which survives all philosophical criticism is this. The events of the world really do hang together in definite patterns and causal sequences. Up to a point at least, things can be depended upon to act regularly. My pen goes on being a pen; it does not change into a snake. And in some sense ‘I’ can ‘control’ it. Within limits I can take effect upon the course of events in the world. Or, to be philosophically more accurate, within limits, certain muscular events in my body do take a course such that certain ends which I desire in the external world are attained. Turning to myself, I may at least feel sure that I am a real factor in the universe. Heaven knows what I am, but I am not nothing. Whatever I am, I am to some extent aware of a world and of my relations with it. I know it and strive with it. I have direct acquaintance not only with the characters of the world revealed by my senses, but also with my own experiencing. Not only do I sense, think, believe, desire, fear, and so on, but also I am aware of doing so. I have many simple and many subtle capacities for action, and I delight in exercising them. When they are thwarted I am distressed. I delight, too, in many features of the world which fit my capacities, and I loathe many that violate them. I cannot be absolutely sure that there are any selves besides my own self, but it is extremely probable that there are. The world around me almost
¶214certainly contains many human persons, and also less-conscious animals. Some of the human persons I myself encounter, but most are not even names to me. I cannot know other selves with the directness that I know colours and noises. I cannot know their mental life with the directness with which I know my own. Nevertheless, I can be much more sure of the existence of the selves which I call my neighbours than of prehistoric beasts or of atoms or of galaxies. And the selves that I know intimately are on the whole the most vivid things in the world to me. They are very diverse, and it is very hard to learn their true characters. Some of those whom I know I also like or admire. Some on the whole I dislike. A few I love. More accurately every person whom I encounter I both like and dislike, for different attributes in him or her, and in relation to different needs of my own. But in many cases, either liking or disliking preponderates. Even those whom I love I also hate to some extent. They are sure to have some attributes which conflict with my ideal or with my personal needs. But in some cases love overwhelmingly preponderates. Even though I am often selfish and unkind to those whom I love, I do recognize that they are intrinsically good, that they have a beauty and excellence of their own, which moves me deeply, and rightly claims my service. This is one of the most important facts for philosophy. Of almost equal philosophical importance is the fact that even towards those whom I do not love I feel the same kind of obligation in varying degrees. Toward myself also, as a person having vital capacities, I feel obligation to make the best of myself. I recognize unmistakably that the fulfilling of the vital capacity of persons in the most awakened way is absolutely and intrinsically good. Sceptical philosophy, by clearing away many false values, makes this value stand out most emphatically.
¶215Another thing stands out clearly when philosophy has done its destructive work, fn the light of history and the light of evolution man appears to have had a long and varied career. He is definitely more mentally awakened than his brute ancestors; and though biologically he is probably no more developed to-day than he was in any earlier historical age, his circumstances have on the whole enabled him to make fuller use of his capacities than was formerly possible. In the light of present world- conditions, however, it is terribly clear that mankind is in a very confused and precarious state; and that the great majority of human beings, far from sharing in such advancement as has been made, are but little more fortunate than abject serfs. But there is a real, though slender, hope that within a century all servitude and penury may be abolished. Finally, in the light of psychology and philosophy itself, the present human nature or human mentality appears as a half-formed thing, emerging from brute mentality, but as yet a merely brutish approximation to true human nature. There is little reason to suppose that the human species will automatically develop into a higher biological type. But by deliberate control of social conditions man might even now turn himself into an incomparably finer being. And some day he may even succeed in purging and improving his innate constitution. The philosopher can see fairly clearly the bare outlines of the true human nature which should be the goal of world-policy, though neither he nor any one else in our day can attain it. When he contemplates it, and when he realizes that, with social reconstruction of the world and with sound education, even creatures like ourselves could be made far more human, far more awakened, and happy, he cannot but earnestly desire that this work should be begun. He recognizes also an imperious command that he and his fellows should devote their lives to this supreme undertaking. But being
¶216only a philosopher and not a man of action he will probably be unable to do anything but talk about it. I believe there is one other very important fact about life which survives the most rigorous criticism of philosophy, though it comes out in a form extremely different from that with which it went in. Some people would call this fact ‘religious experience I am now going to have the audacity to talk about this very difficult matter. OceanofPDF.com
¶217XI. RELIGION OceanofPDF.com
¶218A. SHAM RELIGION AND GENUINE RELIGION WE HAVE BEEN inquiring into the capacities of men, and into the true aim of human life on this planet. We had to distinguish between capacities which men have in common with other mammals and capacities which deserve to be called distinctively human. We saw that, for true well-being, both the ‘animal’ and the distinctively human capacities should have expression; but that a man’s whole life, and the life of the whole human world, should be so organized as to give the fullest possible expression to the most distinctively human, or awakened, capacities. We have considered in detail some of the main kinds of distinctively human pursuits. Now many people would say that the most important of all these activities has yet to be considered, namely religion. This kind of activity, they would say, is the most awakened of all, and the only activity in which man proves himself more than a rather intelligent animal. They claim also that what is wrong with the world to-day is that most people have lost all true religion. Some even claim that religion alone, by which they generally mean the Christian religion, can induce men to behave considerately toward one another. Christianity, alone, they believe, can turn our world of jealous individuals and warring groups into a single world-society, knit together by love of the one God. Others tell us that religion is man’s greatest folly and disgrace. It is the expression, they say, of nothing more exalted in him than a desire for personal comfort ‘in eternity Moved by this desire, perhaps unwittingly, he persuades himself to believe all sorts of irrational doctrines which should be incredible and are unlovely and ridiculous. These beliefs prevent men from
¶219reaching full mental stature, and often lead them into terrified persecution of unbelievers. Religion, according to this view, is responsible for half the cruelty and bloodshed of the past, and to-day it is one of the greatest forces making for barbarism and checking the mental awakening of the race. What is the truth about this long-standing bitter dispute? Many members of each party, so long as they are not enraged against the other party, are capable of proving themselves admirable human beings. Neither party is to be dismissed off-hand as unworthy of serious attention. Each one of us has to face this problem and come to some decision as best he may. We cannot simply trust to authority, whether sacerdotal or scientific. Inevitably we have to judge between authorities. In order to do so we have to take into account, so far as possible, all points of view. I shall submit a view which, though in all probability it is inadequate, should, I think, be considered. I shall first argue that there is important truth on both sides. There is, I believe, something, which may be named by the misleading and debased word ‘religion’, and is the most distinctively human or awakened activity of man. But clearly there is something else, which is also called ‘religion’, and is his greatest folly and shame. One might almost say that ‘religion’ is both man’s crown and his dunce’s cap. It is the ring through his nose, by which he may be led hither and thither, and the mask which he wears to hide his brutishness. But also, in the other sense of the word ‘religion’, it is, I believe, a window through which he may see something of the superhuman, and through which he may be said, in a very special sense, to ‘have access to eternity’. The truth is that the word ‘religion’ means several very different kinds of activity. Some ‘religion’ is rather crude, but harmless. Some is both crude and extremely damaging to the individual and to the world. Some is a more awakened kind of activity, but in the main unwholesome in its effects. Some
¶220is perhaps the most alive, the most spiritually awakened kind of activity possible to members of our half-formed species. ‘Religion’ of this kind is, I should say, in a sense the true goal of all human living. Moreover, excellent in itself, it is also absolutely necessary for the proper organization of a man’s life and the life of the world. But ‘religion’ of the base and damaging kind is perhaps the worst of all humanity’s plagues. Since the word ‘religion’ has such very different meanings, perhaps the best plan would be to discard it altogether. Unfortunately this is impossible. People will still go on talking about ‘religion’, and meaning different things by it. All that can be done is to distinguish clearly between the two main senses of the word, between the sham, pernicious kind of religion and the genuine, life-giving kind of religion. This can be done fairly sharply in theory; but in practice it is often very difficult to discover whether a seemingly religious person is genuinely religious or not, and whether a seemingly irreligious person is what he seems to be. For those who are most truly religious are often so nauseated by the prevailing sham religion that they are eager to be thought irreligious. Another source of confusion lies in the fact that the two utterly different activities may even be carried out by the same person, and almost at the same time. The sham kind of religion is at bottom, I believe, always an expression of the desire to ‘save one’s soul’, or to curry favour with God or the gods, so that one may in some sense or other secure happiness, in this life or another. The genuine kind of religion I should describe as a self-forgetful love, or admiration, or worship, of something which is felt to be very ‘beautiful’ or ‘good’, and as in some manner superhuman. Religion of this kind may be worship of a god who is thought of as distinct from man; or it may be worship of a universe which includes man but is more admirable
¶221than man, or it may be ‘dumb’ worship of something vividly experienced but passing all understanding. At this stage I shall not discuss the question whether such admiration or worship is ever justified, whether there is in fact anything superhuman which deserves to be worshipped. At present I am only trying to distinguish between two mental activities, one of which is a sham in the sense that it pretends to be more exalted than it is, while the other, even if it is deluded, is none the less, I believe, a very clearly awakened activity, both from the point of view of the psychologist, studying human behaviour scientifically, and also in the actual ‘feel’ or experience of it. When men are behaving in the sham-religious way, their main motive, witting or unwitting, is self-preservation. With a view to securing prosperity in this world or another they demand and find some simple code or set of rules which they can keep without further thought, secure in their belief that if they do as God tells them he will reward them. Some, however, of those who practise religion of the sham kind (though these might not call themselves religious) are unable to believe in immortality, and so they cannot look for happiness hereafter; but instead they hope that by keeping certain rules they will be counted among the virtuous, will prove themselves, so to speak, spiritual aristocrats, of finer temper than other men. Their motive is at bottom the same as the motive of the heaven-seekers. Religion of the base kind is indeed a plague. It is handed on by tradition from generation to generation. It is widespread in every land. Men who suffer from it tend to become self-important, bigoted, narrow-minded, hard- hearted, careless of everything but the salvation of their own mean souls. In times when this kind of religion has a real hold over men there is small hope of remaking the world; for religious people of this sort do not at heart care about the misery of others. Sometimes they even persuade themselves
¶222that misery (in others) is after all a blessing, since it will be recompensed in heaven. This soulsaving kind of religion has perhaps not quite such a hold on men as formerly, at least in Europe. But sham religion is still one of the great forces in the world preventing men from rising to a more awakened mentality. Since unfortunately the language of religious leaders has often lent colour to the view that religion is nothing but a way of saving oneself from some kind of damnation, many people who are at heart genuinely religious are led astray into the belief that the root of their religion is after all the desire for personal salvation. Thus in the churches, European and Asiatic, there are many genuinely religious persons in whom religion is distorted by the influence of their church. If they could escape from the outworn conventions of their church, they would become more simply and spontaneously religious. The only genuine kind of religion is sheer admiration, intense and deeply rooted admiration, either of God or of gods or of the universe or at least of something more than human beings. Let us not even yet try to decide whether anything in the universe deserves such admiration. Let us merely try to discover what kind of activity this genuinely religious activity really is. The old word for such religious admiration is ‘worship’. Unfortunately the word ‘worship’ is as often misused as the word ‘religion’. It was once a good word; but to-day it calls up for many of us images of hymn-books and collection plates, and the whole gloomy business of soulsaving. Yet if we could strip it of these associations, ‘worship’ would be the right word. When a man rises to this activity of religious admiration he is not concerned with saving himself in any sense whatever. He is not interested in himself as a particular person, either to save himself or to sacrifice himself.
¶223The only shred of selfishness which is left in him is a desire in some way to serve what he so deeply and delightedly admires; or at least to express his admiration, to make some kind of gesture of loyalty. This impulse is natural and right, but it may snare him. He may be led to care more for the satisfaction of serving than for that which he serves, more for the joy of worshipping than for that which he worships. And so, little by little, he may slide into the false religion, interesting himself less directly in his God, or the universe, or whatever it is that he worships, than in his own need to be united with the admired thing. This desire to find some kind of union with the object which is worshipped is natural and right, so long as it does not hamper the impulse of sheer worship. It is right; but it is the least important side of genuine religion. And the only satisfaction that it ought to demand is the sense of union which admiration itself affords, the sense of being one in spirit with the admired thing. It is tempting to say that the climax of worship is the glad acceptance of the fact that one’s ‘God’ has no need whatever to be worshipped. OceanofPDF.com
¶224B. EFFECTS OF GENUINE RELIGION FEW CAN BE genuinely religious every day or for long at a time. Even on those rare occasions when we do achieve this action of spontaneous worship, the sham kind of religion inevitably steals in upon us very soon in some disguised form. For even at the best of times most of us never come more than half-awake. Many, perhaps, sleep out their whole lives without any inkling of the truly religious experience. But when a man really has the experience, he feels, with strange conviction, that in it he rises to his highest reach of vitality. Also, in this experience he seems to know something about the universe, or about ‘existence’, in general; but something which, if he tries to describe it, he almost certainly misdescribes. The only safe thing for him to say is that he finds himself confronted with a kind of overwhelming beauty or excellence invisible at other times. Yet even this is really not at all a safe thing to say; for it implies that the universe, or objective existence, in general, can have a character of intrinsic beauty which does not depend for its existence on our admiration. And many thinkers scoff at this idea. The truth is that ‘beauty’ and ‘excellence’ are both inappropriate words. But what other is more suitable? ‘Goodness’ is even worse. ‘Perfection’ suggests symmetry and neatness, which are certainly not intended. ‘Intrinsic rightness’ might serve, if it did not imply something merely moral. There is, indeed, no word to describe the quality or character which confronts us in the genuine religious experience. All that can be said about it is that it is just that unique quality or character which impels us to worship. Any one who has experienced this religious admiration, or impulse of praise, inevitably desires it to control his whole life. He cannot be always
¶225seeing that unique beauty (what better word is there?). But he wishes it to be always present at least ‘in the back of his mind’, influencing his behaviour, guiding him. Unfortunately, since he is only human, only a stage in advance of his sub-human ancestors, he is certain to wander from the path that he lays down for himself. But, with whatever strength he has, he will try to keep hold of his vision and to act in accordance with it. Just how, or in what direction, his sense of the beauty inherent in all existence will influence his conduct will depend on how he interprets it. And this will depend on his own temper and circumstances. In some cases, although his religious experience is itself a genuine experience, his mind may have been so warped by circumstances that he grossly misinterprets his experience. Thus it may actually become an evil influence in his life, and through him an evil influence in the world. But far more often religion, if it is indeed of the rare and genuine kind, makes a man a better man and a better member of the world-community than he could have been without it. Whether he interprets his experience as a vision of God, or of the world, or in some other way, it somehow quickens and intensifies all his other experiences, and especially those experiences which lie upon the limit of our powers. Thus, for instance, he comes to realize his fellow human beings more vividly, and is therefore more generous. He finds himself more able to rise above self-complacency and self-interest, and also above personal envy and hate. For always, at the back of his mind, there is a recollection, clear or vague, of the incomparably greater, more beautiful thing which he worships. I do not mean that he will always be a model of generosity and humility. If he happens to be of a rather selfish disposition, he will probably continue to have many lapses. But his recollection of the beauty that he has seen will at least be a very powerful force in his life strengthening all his most awakened capacities.
¶226If his religion is genuine, it should have another effect also. Since the beauty that he has experienced is felt to be in some sense superhuman, he should be helped to regard all things human with a certain detachment. He should find himself able to rise above the self-complacency and self-interest even of the human race as a whole. For instance, if he interprets his religious experience as a vision of the majesty and beauty of God, he will be able to regard even the greatest calamities of mankind with a fundamental peace of mind. This, indeed, is the danger of genuine religion, that it may lead a man merely to indulge his own need to worship, and so to neglect his fellows. This is one of the many ways in which the genuine may turn into the false religion. But in the perfectly religious man, in the true saint, this absolute inner peace and worship do not weaken, but actually strengthen, the will to take part with the right against the wrong, the good against the evil. But what seems right, and what good, will of course depend on the saint’s particular experience of the world. It may lead him to burn heretics so as to save the souls of others, or it may lead him to devote his life to helping the unfortunate. Now religion of the genuine kind is the world’s greatest need to-day. The old religious creeds are losing their hold upon men, and will continue to do so. It is true that millions of persons even in Europe and America still cling to the old doctrines and practices; but the number for whom Christianity is a vitalizing influence is probably small and decreasing. Also, those who in our day are still able to accept the Christian doctrines literally, and not merely as a first approximation to one aspect of the truth, are curiously simple souls, who, though genuinely religious, are somehow incapable of grasping what the peculiar spiritual problem of the modern world really is. They are relics left over from a less perplexed and a happier
¶227age. What is true of the West will perhaps in a few decades be true of the East, unless the whole tendency of Westernization ceases. The old gods can no longer call forth in the more awakened kind of human being the old activity of religious admiration. The result is that the best minds of our age are deeply unfulfilled. They have a certain spiritual capacity which they cannot properly exercise. Therefore they are miserable, not necessarily with clear consciousness of their misery, but obscurely. Often they do not know what they lack. They may, for instance, have been so disgusted by false religion that they refuse to recognize their need as a religious need at all. And since they do not know what it is that is wrong with them, they blame their parents or society or their digestions or the universe. But what is wrong with them is simply that, though they have outgrown the old God, they cannot discover beyond him something of more compelling excellence. The result of this lack of religion in the modern world is widespread disillusionment and world-weariness. There is a disheartening sense that after all nothing matters. It is agreed, of course, that all human beings should have the opportunity of fulfilling whatever capacities they happen to have; but since one man is as good as another, there is felt to be no reason why any one should sacrifice himself for another, still less for the social good, or for the founding of a better world. Consequently, most of us are concerned almost entirely with securing happiness for ourselves or those near and dear to us; and the policies of governments are tethered to the cynical, yet short-sighted, self-regard of the populace. It is true that Communism in Russia, and to an increasing extent elsewhere, is a not wholly ineffective substitute for religion, since it can inspire men with a vivid desire to live and die in a cause which is felt to be more important than their own well-being or even the happiness of their
¶228contemporaries. It can make them try to devote their lives to the founding of a happier world for future generations. But this ideal is only sufficient in times of revolutionary change. When the new world has been established, or is well on the way to being established, it must find some aim more compelling than the preservation of its own happiness. Amongst the Fascists and Nazis also there must be some tincture of genuine religious feeling, though ludicrously misguided, and entangled in the ideals of barbaric tribalism and romantic ruthlessness. Indeed, as I suggested at the outset, the one disinterested motive of the Fascist would seem to be a confused protest against what he conceives to be the ‘irreligion’ of the Bolsheviks. Clearly one of the most urgent tasks of to-day is to examine the genuine religious experience as calmly and precisely as possible, in order to find out what bearing, if any, it has upon our modern perplexity and our modern distresses. Even the world-economic problem, which is extremely urgent, demands the solution of the religious problem. For seemingly the economic problem will never be solved until we can outgrow our sentiments of economic individualism and nationalism; and this we shall not do until we have obtained a clear sight of something more admirable than the aims of these sentiments. Many, of course, would say that the ideal of making a unified and happier world is in itself a sufficient ideal to control our economic and nationalistic passions, and that nothing of the nature of a superhuman allegiance is needed. Not long ago I should have accepted this view. But there can be no doubt that superhuman worship has been in the past a far mightier power in men’s hearts than loyalty to mankind is to-day. And there can be no doubt that, if religion in some credible and exalting form were to be discovered by the modern generation, it would sweep the
¶229world, or at any rate the Western world, far more effectively than internationalism or even Communism. Pure humanism, or the acceptance of Man as the final object of admiration and loyalty, is after all in essence loyalty to our own nature, though perfected; and as such it is apt to seem prosaic and tiresome. Man has undoubtedly a very strong impulse to bow before a superhuman beauty; and it is when he believes himself to have glimpsed such a beauty that he is roused to live in the most alive way. What the modern world needs, then, is indeed religion. But if, as a matter of fact, we can find no justification for worshipping anything superhuman, we must honestly do without religion. To deceive ourselves by false though comfortable beliefs is to thwart one of our most awakened capacities, namely the capacity of dispassionate observation and understanding. If, as a matter of fact, there is nothing finer than man, let us at least try to make the best of human nature. But is there nothing admirable in the universe except ourselves, the human race? Millions of people have answered the question by saying, ‘There is God’. Mil lions of others as confidently declare, ‘There is no God, there is nothing admirable but man ‘. Millions more cannot give any confident answer at all. I shall presently try to describe briefly one kind of answer which, as it seems to me, is now very tentatively beginning to emerge here and there in the modern world. According to this view there is indeed something more than man for us to worship, yet something very different from any ordinary idea of God. I shall first try to describe how, so far as I can see, it came about that men developed the capacity for religious activity, or, as it is generally called, religious experience. In doing this I shall at the same time show how easy it is to ‘explain away’ the whole of religion by pointing to
¶230its psychological and historical sources. Some anthropologists and historians would no doubt disagree with the sketch that I shall give; for I shall purposely put the case against religion in its most sweeping and devastating form. Later I shall try to show that though some such explanation does undermine a great deal of so-called religion, and is therefore very important, it does not really touch the central fact of worship. You can no more explain away religion by describing its sources than you can explain away a man by saying that he was once a mere fertilized germ cell. OceanofPDF.com
¶231C. HOW MEN INVENT GODS THE MOTIVE OF pure worship has probably existed in some form ever since there were men; but in the earliest religions it was not clearly distinguished from the much commoner motive of seeking divine favours. Nearly all human beings in all ages have been brought up to respect their elders, and especially their fathers and the great men of their tribe or nation. From the beginning of mankind’s career, children and young people must have felt for their fathers and for all powerful adults not only fear and envy but also sometimes genuine admiration for their strength and skill and majesty. Fathers and the great ones were mighty and vengeful, and had to be constantly propitiated, so that they would display their more kindly and helpful qualities; but also they were admired. Thus in childhood human beings formed deep-rooted habits of seeking favours from the mighty; but also they formed habits of admiration. No doubt the respectful behaviour of the young toward their elders was largely the result of punishment and approval. But also it seems extremely probable that the young, who were relatively weak, timid, and inexperienced, did spontaneously admire adults for their strength, courage and prowess. Hero-worship is a very common characteristic of the young, and is one of the roots of genuine religious admiration. These habits of favour-begging and disinterested hero-worship, which were founded in childhood, persisted as capacities or needs of the grown man or woman. But the fathers and tribal chieftains who were the first objects of respect no longer seemed so very wonderful. The habits therefore were directed upon other things which appeared more worthy of fear and
¶232admiration. In early days men felt themselves to be surrounded by vindictive and benevolent powers. Religion was in the main a careful fawning upon those powers, an elaborate technique of propitiation. Sometimes what was fawned upon was some particular river or mountain or tree or some specially important kind of animal. Sometimes men propitiated the more general spirits of rain, flood, wind, sun, fire, and so on. Sometimes it was a man’s own dead father, or the dead heroes and founders of the tribe, that claimed praise and sacrifice. Those who in childhood had formed such strong habits of awe toward living fathers and chiefs must needs believe in the continued existence of these great ones; who, since they were still by habit feared and respected, were thought of as still wielding dangerous powers, though unseen. Even in this early stage the genuine religious admiration of men seems to have moved in two very different directions, toward the nonhuman environment and toward the ideal of human personality. The forces of nature were, of course, personified, made human; but also they were thought of as alien, careless of man, relentless. Thus early began the two great and often opposed motives of genuine religion, on the one hand loyalty to the ideal of fully developed human nature, and on the other a more obscure, more perplexing worship of the nonhuman world, or of the principles which were manifested in it. In time this side of religion was to develop into the Greek respect for fate and the Christian respect for divine law. Primitive men seem to have feared and respected something else besides natural forces and splendid persons, namely the tribe, the great many- bodied whole of which each man felt himself to be a member. Indeed, long before men had reached any clear self-consciousness, they were probably subject to the spell of the herd. And later this also appeared as something to
¶233be propitiated, something which seemed to have a sort of will of its own which one must obey both for safety’s sake, and also because somehow it entered into one, took possession, dominated one’s own will. To go against the tribe’s will, or against the well-worn custom of the tribe, gave one a sense not merely of loneliness but of disgrace, of having offended against something holy. Yet another thing seems to have moved early men to fear and awe, namely their own sexual power, and the mystery and magical charm of the other sex. Men, like the apes, are creatures having excess of sexual energy. The father of the family and the lords of the tribe had therefore always to be jealously guarding their women against the lusty young. Chastity in women was sanctified by tribal custom. The young men, fretted by their unsatisfied sexuality, came to see sex in everything, and came to regard sex as a specially holy and specially dangerous thing. To be a full-grown man was to have full sexual potency and sexual rights. And so the gods also must be sexual, and sex itself must somehow be a god, or even the god. Besides man’s own sexual potency, there was the strange beauty of women. This also was a supreme excellence, and must be divine. And woman as the mother, who brought new human beings into life and was the source of tenderness in every man’s childhood, she also had to be worshipped. When at last it was realized that fathers also played a part in the conceiving of babies, sex came to seem even more important than formerly, and was often regarded as the very essence of divine creativeness; so that even to make the land bear crops the sex god had to be invoked. Men made their gods in a confused and dreamlike way, so that the idea of a god was often self-contradictory and unintelligible. This did not matter. A god was not a thing to reason about, but a thing to fear and worship. His
¶234incomprehensibility made him all the more awful. There were certain persons (medicine men, wizards, priests) who were thought to have special knowledge of the gods, and special powers of interpreting their will and propitiating them. There is no need to suppose that such men were all charlatans. Many of them were probably more advanced in self- consciousness than their neighbours, and seemed to have an uncanny insight into human nature. They probably also picked up a certain amount of simple medical knowledge. These ‘different’ persons were apt to claim that it was dangerous for ordinary folk to try to see the gods or to understand the holy mysteries. Thus these professional wise men increased their own power. But human beings after all are more or less intelligent animals, and they were bound to use their intelligence to some extent in contemplating their gods. Moreover, as time passed, and life became on the whole more orderly and safe, men began to feel differently about the characters that a god must have in order to be truly admirable, worshipful. And so they gradually remade their gods. Earlier, a god was little more than a glorified chieftain or hero with magical powers. He hunted, and made love, and fought with his fellow gods. But in time men were inclined to think that one god, who was the father-god of their own tribe, was the greatest god of all, and that their own tribe was his chosen people. They conceived him as their law-giver, and as being not only mighty and vengeful but also just in his dealings with his own people. For at this stage, when society was beginning to be secure, they had come to admire law and order and justice more than the virtues of the courageous warrior. As time passed, and the tribes had more intercourse with one another, men began to think of their own particular tribal father-god as being not merely the greatest of all gods but the one and only true God. Either they
¶235claimed that the gods of other peoples did not exist, save as illusions in men’s minds; or they allowed that the other peoples were indeed worshipping the one true God, under a different name, and revealed under a different form. But the name which they themselves gave him, and the form which they themselves worshipped, they held to be God’s true name and form. Little by little the prophets and religious leaders came to endow God with new powers. In fact, they said he was not merely mighty but almighty, and also all-knowing, and the creator of all things. Men and beasts, rivers, fires and stars, behaved always according to the law of the nature which God in his wisdom had given them and ever maintained in them. This at least was one idea that men had about their almighty God. But sometimes they said that though he was almighty he had seen fit to give men freedom to obey or disobey his law according to their own caprice. This they said because it seemed to them that they could as a matter of fact choose freely; and because they preferred to think of themselves as free men, and not slaves, even to their own nature. Moreover, they wished to satisfy their desire for vengeance by blaming and punishing those who infringed the customs of society; so they had to believe that the wrong- doers could have done otherwise. Since it was also claimed that God was perfectly good, his worshippers were faced with the problem of showing how it could be that he had given man the power to do evil. They declared that he did so in order that some at least should attain the supreme good; and the supreme good, they said, was to will freely the right act, or to will freely and constantly what God himself willed. It was natural that they should consider this the supreme good, since for the maintenance of a healthy and harmonious society it was very desirable that individuals should freely will to behave as society needed
¶236them to behave. And by ‘the will of God’ what they unwittingly meant was the sanctified custom of society, the custom which on the whole and in the long run had made for society’s survival. When a prophet arose who saw that the sanctified custom of society was in some respect stupid or outworn, or simply brutish, he would claim that he saw the will of God more clearly than his fellows. Though seemingly he was opposed to the will of the herd, yet his moral originality was the product of the old herd-loyalty, combined with superior insight into the herd’s needs. Thus, little by little, men outgrew their earlier gods, which were expressions of their own primitive needs and fears, and conceived a single all-powerful divine person, who was an expression of their more developed needs and fears. The new God had in extreme degree all those powers which men had come to admire or fear in their new and more orderly world. Like some of the earlier gods, he embodied the old craving for a superhuman benevolent father, and equally the old fear of the father who, though just, was jealous. God was jealous for his dues. He exacted sacrifice and worship. Men had to conceive him in this way because they themselves had in their own nature a craving to propitiate something. In childhood they had contracted habits of feeling guilty when they disobeyed their parents. And throughout their lives they felt guilty when they infringed the law of the tribe. After sinning, a man felt like an unpunished dog, who is not happy until his misdeed is discovered and he has had his beating. At the outset the gods were merely vengeful; but as society became more organized, vengeance was condemned, and strict, dispassionate justice became God’s outstanding character. Moreover, as men began to be impressed by the relentless regularity of physical events, this regularity also was attributed to the intricate working of divine law. The theoretical
¶237capacities of man began to satisfy themselves by seeking the underlying principles of all events. The world had to be regarded as the systematic expression of God’s will, because men themselves delighted in system. In another mood men claimed union with God. At first the union which they sought was merely the mental accord of a child with its loving parent; but in time they demanded and believed that they attained a closer union. In sexual love, and also in membership of an enthusiastic crowd, they seemed to themselves, vaguely but intoxicatingly, to become more than single individuals. They therefore longed to have this exhilarating experience in a far higher degree. They desired to be freed from the limitations of their own private personalities. Under the pressure of their herd-feeling, they craved to be at one with the soul of the tribe. They had therefore to conceive it possible to be gathered into God, who was in some obscure way the personification of the tribe. And since all things were said to be expressions of God’s will, or thoughts projected from God’s creative mind, the more subtle of them believed that the final bliss must be to be gathered up once more into the mind of God. Thus and in a thousand other ways men persuaded themselves to believe what would satisfy their own craving to be almighty. In another mood it seemed to men that God must be Love. It came in time to be clear that mere justice was not enough for the well-being of society. If men were to be thoroughly at one with each other, and if society was to be completely harmonious, every person must be bound to his neighbours not merely by an externally imposed law but by the power of love in his own heart. The free mutual loyalty of friends is the best mortar to hold society together. Thus loving-kindness, brotherhood, charity, came to seem the most desirable of all characters; and the God who had been
¶238conceived as the just but relentless ruler came now to be personified as Love. OceanofPDF.com
¶239D. THE ESSENCE OF THE MATTER IT IS SURELY clear that every character which men have attributed to God has had one or other of two origins. Either it has been a character which for some reason men have at some time desired God to have; or it has been a character which, though not desired in him, seemed inevitable in a being whom they conceived in their own likeness. His vengefulness, for instance, was partly of this second kind. Probably it was also partly of the other kind. For men seem to have desired God to be vengeful because they themselves felt guilty. But if man’s idea of God can be explained so fully as mere ‘wish- fulfilment’, what reason is there to believe in God? If this sketch of the sources of religion is true, the upshot seems to be as follows. At the beginning and at every stage we find both favour-seeking and sheer admiration. Even admiration itself developed from simple prehuman roots under the influence of intelligence and imagination. There is nothing peculiarly ‘God-given’ about it. In primitive man, as in our own children, admiration is first directed on human persons and also on imposing features of the non-human world. From these two roots, namely admiration of persons and awe of the world, sprang, even in the primitive ages, genuine religious activity. Through the interaction of these two motives men conceived their ideas of gods, and later of a single God who was almighty and perfect. At each stage the particular characters which they assigned to their gods, or to God, were expressions of society’s needs at the time.
¶240Now to my mind the all-important point is this. Disinterested admiration is a distinctively human activity. It involves the distinctively human power of being interested in things for their own sakes, and not merely for their utility. This objectivity of interest, as we have seen, occurs in a purely dispassionate manner in all genuinely scientific activity. It is involved also, along with appropriate emotion, in the passion of love for another person, as also, in calm respect for another, and again in the fully awakened kind of loyalty to society. This same objectivity of interest and ‘disinterested’ admiration we now find to be the essence of genuine religion. But in this case the object which holds the attention, and is admired or worshipped for its own sake, is one of extreme subtlety. It has never been at all satisfactorily described. Indeed, it is almost certainly indescribable. Sceptics declare that because it is indescribable it must be a mere mental figment. But this is an error. One may admire very keenly without being able to describe at all clearly what it is that one admires. Ask a lover what it is that he admires in his beloved. He will respond either by well-worn and inadequate clichés, or by dumbness. Infinitely more difficult is it to say what we so admire when we worship. The only safe response is dumbness. In different ages and different lands men tried to describe what it was that roused them to religious admiration, and they could only describe it in terms of the confused thought and imagery at their command. They attributed to the object of their worship the various characters which they, in their circumstances, and with their intellectual equipment, conceived that it ought to have. It must be a superhuman person, almighty, allwise, all- loving, and so on. Each of these characters was a gratification of some human need. But to trace the stages by which men came to describe what they worshipped is not to explain away their worship as a mere disguised favour-seeking or self-gratulation. The truth seems to be that in every age
¶241some human beings have sometimes been moved to a peculiarly intense, zestful and bewildered admiration of Something which was not simply human, Something which they recognized as more admirable than any ordinary object of admiration but which they could only describe by means of falsifying metaphors. OceanofPDF.com
¶242XII. CHRISTIANITY AND THE MODERN WORLD OceanofPDF.com
¶243A. THE RELIGION OF LOVE “LET US NOW consider religion as it occurs in the, modern world, and try to form some idea of the part which it should play in the future. There is very much so-called religion in the world to-day, but it is mostly sham religion. The majority of mankind accept the doctrines of some great religious organization, and practise its form of worship; but on the whole it seems probable that Mohammedans, Christians, Buddhists, Hindus and the rest are most often concerned merely with securing for themselves some kind of personal salvation. They are merely paying their premium to ensure eternal happiness in some form or other. Genuine religion no doubt does occur here and there among all these kinds of devout persons, but it is rare and spasmodic, and extremely ineffective as a force in the world. Genuine religion in the modern world takes one or other of three forms. In one form, no doubt, the genuine religious experience is interpreted according to one of the great orthodox religious doctrines. In another form, all such doctrines are rejected, and the religious person persuades himself that, since in his view nothing in the universe deserves admiration except humanity, he must be worshipping simply humanity. In the third form, he feels very strongly that what stirs him so deeply, and is not any orthodox deity, is not humanity either. Loyalty to the great adventure of mankind on this planet has, he admits, a very important part to play in his religion. But this adventure, he feels, is not itself the thing that compels his worship. This other thing is after all something other than humanity. The object of his worship, then, is neither God nor man. What it is, he finds extremely difficult, indeed impossible, to say.
¶244For most Europeans and Americans the only orthodox religion that matters is Christianity, in one or other of its many forms. I shall now try to set down with as much understanding and sympathy as I can muster, what I take to be the essential meaning of Christianity to the sincere Christian of any church or sect. When Christians say that they love God, they seem to mean something like this. They very earnestly admire a certain person called Jesus. They also feel a deep tenderness toward him. Jesus, they believe, was an actual man who lived on earth many centuries ago; but also, in some subtle sense, he was and is God, the almighty creator. Christians find in the biblical account of the life and character of Jesus, the human person, something which they are compelled to admire more than anything else in the universe. They feel also that by thinking about his unselfishness, and his love of his fellow men, and his sayings, they themselves are made capable of more awakened living. They are convinced that Jesus had unique insight into the hearts of men, into their real nature; and that he discovered their greatest need, namely the need to realize one another as living selves and to cherish one another. He saw that ‘love’ in this sense, was needed not only for the fulfilling of each person, but also for the making of the new and more spiritually awakened world which he hoped to found. Jesus himself, so his followers believe, was so great a lover of his fellow men that his whole life was completely ruled by his will to help them, and especially to help them to the peace and joy of loving their fellows, and loving God. He himself was entirely possessed by this peace and joy. And because of his own great power of loving, and the beatitude which it gave him, he came to believe that the God who had made all things and all men, and had given all men in some degree the power to love, was
¶245not merely a just God but a loving God. Christians say that by feeling the beauty of the nature of Jesus they can reach the same conviction. They hold also that we all ought to believe in a loving God and ought to love him. Let us at once distinguish between certain very different kinds of beliefs held by Christians. Some of their beliefs seem to me true and very important. Some, I should say, are extremely uncertain, and anyhow cannot be true in the sense that matters to Christian believers. Some are quite certainly false and base. What is true and important is that genuine love is a brilliantly awakened activity, to be prized for its own sake; and that if we could all love one another, or even treat one another altruistically, the world would be much better than it is. What is very uncertain is that there is, in any sense that matters, a loving God, and that he will give us happiness after we are dead. What is, at least in my view, quite certainly false and harmful is the belief that each man’s chief concern should be to ‘save his soul in any sense whatever, whether by loving God or by loving his fellows, or by keeping a set of God-made rules, or even by making himself into as fine a personality as possible. Of the belief in the importance of love in Christianity, only this need be said. Though indeed love, and the appraisal of love, were the supreme achievement of Jesus, those of his followers are mistaken who believe that men can be induced to love one another merely by being made to see the importance of love, or merely by being exhorted to love. When I was young my elders told me to ‘love my neighbours’, and I saw that I ought to do so; but unfortunately the more I tried to love them, the more I disliked them and wished them out of the way. Christians often make the mistake of supposing that if only men really wanted to love one another they could. The truth is rather that if only we could, we would. But unfortunately our capacity for loving one another is
¶246extremely feeble; and, moreover, the circumstances of the modern world are so adverse to the proper development of men’s capacities that in very many cases constant thwarting and repression destroys what power of love they ever had, and breeds instead a vast capacity for hate. Let us now consider the belief in a loving God. No one can disprove the existence of such a being, at least if we may interpret the words ‘God’ and ‘loving’ in a sufficiently topsy-turvy way. It is quite possible that ‘God’, or ‘the universe’, or ‘fate’, gives us what is really best for us, but that what is best for us is very different from what we, in our human pettiness, actually want. It is quite possible that there is such a super-cosmical person as God, and that he appreciates the existence of each one of us. No one can produce any serious argument to disprove this view. Certainly science has no argument against it, though many people have thought that it had. On the other hand, no one can prove that there is a loving God. I cannot believe that any or all of the reasons which are offered in support of this theory would be taken as proof in a law court, unless the court was composed of persons already predisposed toward the doctrine. So far as I can see, only three of these reasons have any serious force at all. They may be called the argument from evolution, the argument from human personality, and the argument from the actual desire for a loving God. With regard to the argument from evolution, it is claimed that the fact that life on this planet has evolved is evidence that the universe is controlled by a mind which intended such evolution; and that, since the direction of evolution is toward ever more awakened living, the controlling mind must be benevolent. This claim ignores the fact that progress of biological species has been far less common than stagnation and actual degeneration. Few types have evolved at all. Very few have reached a high level. Only one has attained human rank. Evolution may be the result of divine purpose, but
¶247biology affords little evidence that it is so. And if it is, the purpose has apparently been carried out with almost ludicrous inefficiency. Some who admit all this maintain that it is unimportant. The vital fact, they say, is that life has evolved, at whatever cost. That so precious a thing should occur at all, they say, is proof of a benevolent divine purpose in the universe. To this the answer seems to be that all manner of perversions and horrors have also evolved. By analogy, the fact that these have occurred at all might be taken as proof of a supreme satanic purpose in the universe. The argument from human personality is as follows. It is claimed that human nature itself is evidence that there is a loving God, since the power which produced man must contain at least the attributes of man; and since human nature at its best is loving, moral, and capable of other highly developed activities, the power which produced it must be so also. My own feeling about this argument is that certainly it may be in some sense true, but that no human mind of our present order has the penetration to judge whether it is true or not. We are, of course, entitled to say that a universe which produced man had the capacity for producing man; but I see no reason to infer that it, or its creator, had, or has, the characters that man himself has. It is surely time for us to realize that our rudimentary minds are not yet capable of such daring metaphysical flights. The most effective reason for believing in a loving God is the desire for there to be a loving God. With many people this is still a very strong desire. And this strong desire has been taken as proof that the object of the desire must exist. How, it is asked, could men have come to conceive such a desire unless God himself had inspired them with it? A somewhat similar argument might be applied to food. How could men have come to desire food unless the physical environment had moulded their natures by providing them with possible food as a means to live? Now it is true that
¶248man’s needs are one and all the outcome of the influence of environment, past and present. But it does not follow that for every need there actually exists the object which would ideally satisfy it. The environment has made me desire food, but I have no reason to believe that it will supply me with the ideal banquet, here or hereafter. Similarly with God. Desire, then, affords no reason for belief in the existence of the desired object. Indeed, it affords, instead, reason for scepticism. Since strong desires are known to produce belief without logical proof, and known also to produce illusions of logical validity, the common desire for a loving God should surely warn men not to believe in any kind of theism without cogent proof. If religion depended on a number of precarious arguments for a cherished theory, it would certainly be doomed. But of course it does not. It depends on the religious experience, the immediate and overwhelming apprehension of something both superhuman and beautiful. This experience is often interpreted by the religious person to mean the existence of a loving God, because of his conviction that anything so excellent must be a mind, and a benevolent mind. But if the value of religious experience depends on the truth of this particular interpretation of it, it is indeed precarious. The theory that there is a loving God may very well be true in some obscure and topsy-turvy sense; but it is almost certainly not true in any sense which would satisfy ordinary Christian men and women. And when it is understood and believed in their sense, it has a bad effect. It tends to keep them mentally in the nursery. It tends to shield them from full realization of the precariousness of man’s position in the universe. If you demand immortality for human persons, a world in which there is no serious evidence of immortality must seem to you a thing of horror. You will be in danger of letting your desire rule your intelligence. Only if you can outgrow that desire, and outgrow even the desire that mankind as a race should win
¶249eternal life, can you begin to discover in existence what is, I believe, a far more satisfying beauty. By comforting men with a charming fairy tale of personal immortality, Christianity prevents them from ever exercising the muscles of the spirit (so to speak) by grappling with the more formidable aspects of existence. They never reach spiritual maturity; and so they never rise to the perception that this unsympathetic universe, or something in it, after all compels man’s disinterested worship. Of the Christian belief that each man’s chief concern should be to ‘save his soul’, all that need be said further is this. If it is taken in an ordinary sense it leads directly into mere sham religion. The only sense in which it may be truly said that one of man’s chief concerns should be to save his soul is a very metaphorical one, namely that, since he has more power to fulfil himself than to fulfil any one else, he should indeed be specially concerned to make his particular self as awakened a self as possible, while it lasts. But this is not at all what the devout Christian means. OceanofPDF.com
¶250B. THE CHRISTIAN CHURCHES THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION has played a very great part in the life of mankind, both for good and ill. Jesus has had an immense effect on the minds of Europeans. He has been a glorious and beloved example to many men and women. To deny this, as some do who are opposed to Christianity, is puerile. The Christian Churches, or rather the followers of Jesus, whenever they have really tried to carry out the teachings of their master, have done great service to the world. They have preached the brotherhood of all men. They have tried to make men outgrow their tribal feuds. They have tried to set up the authority of Jesus over the authority of kings and governments. They have tried to teach men loyalty not merely to a nation but to a way of life, namely to the brilliantly awakened life which Jesus had made them admire. In early days they worked earnestly for enlightment, for just laws, for the freedom of common men from the oppression of their masters. But the followers of Jesus have not always nor often been faithful to the spirit of Jesus. A church is a society of ordinary men and women. So long as they are inspired by the genuine self-ignoring admiration for their God of Love, they may behave better than they otherwise would have done. Some of them may even turn into saints and martyrs. But when this enthusiasm has become weak and inconstant, they are no better than other ordinary men and women. Indeed they are worse, for they cannot help pretending to be what they are not. They continue to use the words of religion, but they no longer mean them. They say they love their God and their fellow men, but in fact they care only for the respectability of church-going, and for keeping
¶251the rules of a ‘religious’ society which no longer stands for enlightenment, justice and mercy, but simply for the maintenance of its own organization and power. When this state of affairs has been reached, if the Church happens to be a powerful association with many members and much wealth, it may do immense hurt to the life of the people or of the world. There is a certain parasitic plant which lives in the ‘flesh’ of a tree and spreads its own roots or tentacles in all directions inside the branches and twigs of the tree, sapping the tree’s life, and giving nothing in return. In much the same way a church can spread its priests throughout a people, or the world, persuading men to support the Church, and giving them in return nothing but false comfort for their craving to be assured of eternal happiness. Sooner or later some exceptionally alive person or group within the Church may begin trying to put the teaching of Jesus into practice once more. And then a wave of new eager worship may spread far and wide. This kind of thing has happened again and again in the history of the Christian Church. Some earnest and religious man has founded a new religious order or sect. Its members have tried to imagine as vividly as possible the spirit of their master, Jesus, and have undertaken to live for the worship of the God of Love and for the help of their fellow men. Often they have been cruelly persecuted by the old Church, but persecution has only made them more earnest and resolute. For a while great things have happened, but soon the new movement has settled down, and the order or sect has become merely a comfortable society, within the Church or outside it. Presently another sect has been founded, which in turn has fallen comfortably asleep, and so on. The Protestant ‘Reformation’ was one of these attempts to revive the Christian religion. The original Protestant Churches have long ago settled down to a respectable life. Within them many ‘revivals’ have taken place,
¶252but in each case the new eager worship has soon faded. The new sect has contrived to make itself mentally comfortable. Its members have become very like the members of the other sects or churches, routine-loving people, amiable so long as they are not frightened or shocked, anxious to keep up the appearance of religion, although the real fire of worship in them, the falling in love with their God, has become at best a feeble flicker. Since there are two very different activities, both of which are called religion, there are two very different kinds of ‘religious revival Or rather, in any religious revival the people who take part have two very different motives. In a few the main motive is genuine self-forgetful worship. They are on fire with admiration of their divine, all-loving Jesus. But most are chiefly concerned to ‘save their souls to do whatever they believe is necessary to secure a happy life in the next world. Many, of course, have no clear aim at all, but are simply infected by the emotions of their neighbours, just as, when one person laughs, others are inclined to laugh too, even if they do not see the joke. This mere infection of emotion in religious revivals is bad, because it makes people believe they are really admiring something when they are not. It is unlikely that there will ever be another widespread Christian revival, unless modern science is forgotten and the whole modern way of thinking and feeling gives place to something else. For though science cannot disprove the existence of God, it does make men less dependent, emotionally, on the belief in God. It is not impossible that science should be lost, but we must hope that it will not. Although much of our modern ‘scientific’ culture is probably very unsound, and although in Christianity at its best there is something that we greatly need, to lose science would be to go back to the nursery. We must cling to it, not only for the power it gives
¶253us, but even more because it may help us to outgrow the childish desire to live for ever and be cared for by a heavenly father. During the last hundred years many of the beliefs that the churches had insisted upon have come to seem very improbable. The churches taught that God had made all the present kinds of animals separately. Science has shown very clearly that they have evolved from simpler kinds. The churches taught that man was created just as he is to-day. Science has shown that he also has evolved from a simpler animal. To doubt this, in our day, is almost as unreasonable as to doubt that the earth is round. The evidence, though rather complicated, is unmistakable. Now these questions have nothing to do with the beliefs that Christians think most important, such as the belief in a loving God who lived on the earth as Jesus. Gradually many Christians have given up the beliefs that science has disproved, and have clung only to their most cherished beliefs. But the fact that the churches had been mistaken weakened their power over men’s minds, and made some men rather more inclined to judge for themselves. At the same time it was coming to seem more and more unlikely that Jesus really was God in any sense that was not so far-fetched as to be useless to ordinary men and women. No one, indeed, could prove that he was not God; but no one could give any good reason to believe that he was. Most people, of course, still believed that he was a very great and good man who had played an extremely important part in the history of the European peoples. They recognized that he had roused men as no one else had roused them, both by the example of his generous and heroic character and by the religion of love that he had preached. If the Bible story was to be believed, he was indeed in some respects a perfect man, and so might well be called divine, in one sense. But it was not merely in this sense that the Christian Churches claimed that he was divine. They said that he was actually almighty God,
¶254the loving creator of all things; and that he had become a man in order that he might save us all from the eternal damnation which he himself, as the almighty and vengeful God, might otherwise have awarded us for our wickedness. To men who were trying to think for themselves this theory seemed very unsatisfactory. Moreover, since science had been at work, the universe was beginning to appear somehow not the sort of universe in which there would be either a just and wrathful or a loving God. After all, the Bible had been wrong in other respects, might it not be wrong also about the divinity of Jesus? Some religious people felt that it did not matter whether the man Jesus was God or not, so long as God was indeed a loving God. But as time passed it became more and more difficult to believe in a loving God, in any comforting sense. In the new world-view it seemed very improbable that human persons were immortal. Once more, no one could disprove the theory, but no one could give any serious reason to believe it true. Consequently men began to lose hold of the belief that God would compensate us for the miseries of our earthly life by giving us eternal joy. Incidentally the loss of the old terror of hell perhaps made the baser sort less anxious to behave themselves according to the conventional moral code. When Jesus interpreted his own religious experience to mean the existence of a loving God, he gave an account which to the more awakened of his contemporaries was both credible and inspiring. But in our day that interpretation, even though it may be in some obscure sense true, can no longer play a useful part in the awakening of the world. The churches, by clinging to it, have lost almost all their religious vitality, though in many cases they still exercise great power of a kind which is not truly religious. The Roman Church has a very firm hold on its adherents, and is likely to increase its membership in this age of bewildered craving for certainty
¶255and security. But though doubtless some members of the Roman Church are genuinely religious, the great power of Rome obviously rests on soul- saving, and uses the twin principles of suppressing ‘dangerous’ knowledge and drugging the mind with ritual. The ‘reformed’ churches are in a more pitiable state. Because they claim to be less intolerant of modern thought, they are more hard-pressed by it. Their priests are often kindly and devoted persons, and full of good works. But such power as they have over men rests almost entirely on their practical helpfulness toward those in distress, and very little on genuine religion. Some of them are, without doubt, truly religious men; but such hold as these have over their followers is due far more to their spirit of social service than to any power of kindling religious ecstasy in others. The best of them are sincere and, indeed, courageous believers in the doctrine of a loving God; but to-day this belief hampers them grievously, hedging them round as a child may be hedged round by fairyland. Because of their faith, or because of their ‘cloth’ or their collars, they can never make satisfactory contact with ordinary men; who, though they call themselves Christians, are, for good and ill, no longer Christians at heart. Many of us, when we are talking with any but the most exceptional ministers of religion, feel that we must play up to their expectations of us, as we play up to children or to old ladies. To be perfectly frank and natural with the average parson, we feel, would somehow be caddish, like hitting a man when his hands are tied. Religious leaders who have fallen into such a plight cannot help us in this tortured though pregnant age. Yet many of them are, indeed, courageous, generous, and even truly religious men. Many of them we respect; some we can heartily admire, even while we pity them and deal gently with them. There are other clerics, however, of a very different sort, toward whom it is less easy to feel charitable. These are the self-righteous condemners of all
¶256who do not acquiesce in the conventional morals and doctrines. In them the lust to condemn and punish, seemingly born of a sense of their own frustration, disguises itself as moral indignation, or even as love. Then there are the many comfortable and sanctimonious ones. But it is not only in the churches that complacency thrives. The main power of the churches lies neither with the lovable though harassed and ineffective sort of clerics, nor yet with the puritanical, nor with the easy-going. It lies rather with talented men who, though they may have no gift for religious perception, are outstanding either in rhetoric or in organization and diplomacy. Some of them, perhaps many of them, must have had in their youth some kind of genuine religious experience, but to judge from their present behaviour many of them have long since forgotten what it was like. They confuse genuine religion with church membership, and the sheer impulse to worship with conformity to intellectual doctrines about the nature of the universe, or with the approval of a particular moral code. And so, doubtless with no dishonourable motives, they use their talent and authority not to help men forward through the present transitional and painful age but solely to keep them in bondage to a creed. Consequently in almost every crisis the churches come out upon the wrong side. We shall not easily forget that when war broke out they made no stand for peace, but were content to deplore the necessity of bloodshed; nor that in the class war, while they piously sympathize with the workers, they preach obedience to the law of the masters. There has recently been some sign that the churches are determined to play a bolder and more generous part in the life of the community. They have been stung into activity by the taunt of futility, especially in respect of war and social injustice; and they have been strengthened somewhat by the obvious confusion which has fallen upon their main critics, the scientists.
¶257Consequently we find them now attempting to recapture the allegiance of men by means of a forward policy, and planning to lead a crusade for a more Christian spirit throughout social life. Many of their members, for instance, are in earnest in the will to destroy militarism. Some, it may be, are ready to face martyrdom for that cause. Others are in earnest, according to their lights, in attacking isolated social evils of one sort or another. But this effort at revival is doomed to failure, in the main and in the long run, for two reasons. The first is this. Militarism and social injustice cannot be eradicated, but only temporarily alleviated, without a much more far-reaching change in the social order than the churches dare contemplate. For the churches, one and all, depend in the main upon funds which are either directly dependent on the existing social order, or derived from persons whose wealth depends on the existing social order. Clerics, of all denominations, are selected not to be revolutionary prophets but to be gentle supporters of the existing order. A minority of a very different type does, indeed, find its way into the churches. But any of these who dare to take serious action against the established order will in the long run be eliminated. In the majority of clerics consciousness of their dependence will inevitably temper enthusiasm with caution and ‘broadmindedness’ to such an extent that they will never go so far as to make serious protest. The second reason for the impotence of the churches is simply that they have lost the vision and the fervour which alone could have fired them to break from this economic constraint. The passion needed for the making of the new world must germinate elsewhere or nowhere. Once it has germinated, much good material from the churches may be gathered into its system; but the churches themselves as institutions are doomed to be ineffective, save on the side of reaction.
¶258A great and sincere Christian revival, then, seems very unlikely, not only because modern knowledge makes many Christian beliefs hard to believe, but also because the churches are in the main no longer true to the spirit of their master. By their very constitution they are doomed to play for safety. And in the main they look not forward to a new world but backward for a vision that is lost, never to return. The trouble is not merely that the old vision is incredible. It is becoming undesirable. Many of us no longer want to believe in a loving God, and in immortality, and so on. I do not mean merely that we do not want to sit on a cloud for all eternity playing hymn-tunes on a harp. I mean that we are outgrowing, or, at the very least, feeling that we ought to outgrow, even the desire that there should be in the universe any sort of God or power which is concerned to preserve and bless human persons or the human race. Many of us do indeed crave something definite to worship, but the idea of a benevolent God does not rouse us. OceanofPDF.com
¶259C. OUTGROWING A GREAT RELIGION MOST MEN AND women of to-day in Europe and America were brought up more or less as Christians. In childhood we all accepted the belief in a loving God and human immortality; and in those early days we were glad to think that we should live for ever and be cared for always. It is difficult for young people to think of death without hoping that they will live again and that in the long run some one will comfort them. But for adults, if they have managed to grow up in mind as well as in body, it should be possible to face calmly the idea that when they are dead they will be like a flame that has been extinguished. Some of us, at any rate, when we feel that we are most alive, find that we do not want to live for ever, and do not want to be loved by God. We do not even want there to be a benevolent God for us to worship. Such doctrines no longer kindle us, because we have seen something which is in the deepest sense more beautiful. Sometimes, when we are feeling tired or ill or beaten or deserted, we may slip back into wanting such things. But even then we recognize that we are not as alive as we were, not at our best, not keeping hold of the very best thing; in fact that we are betraying something. The Christian religion is, indeed, at its best a very difficult and awakened way of living. It is also, for some people, a genuine way of worshipping. Few have been able to put the Christian religion into practice at all thoroughly. And yet, though in some ways it will always be far beyond us, in other ways we are outgrowing it, and ought to outgrow it. It is easy to see what it is in Christianity that is an awakened way of living, and still far beyond our capacity. Clearly, true Christian love of our fellow men,
¶260realizing them as selves, and serving their needs as our own, is the awakened way of living which is needed both for our private spiritual fulfilment and for the well-being of the world. The constant practice of this kind of behaviour is still far beyond us, and since it is part of the ideal behaviour, it will never have to be outgrown. What has to be outgrown is the belief in, and the desire for, personal ‘salvation’ of any sort, and also the belief in and the desire for a God who is Love. Why must we outgrow these beliefs? Not merely because to us of to-day they seem very uncertain. For who knows? They may still in some mysterious way turn out to be more true than false. The mind of man as he is to-day is not very much more developed than the mind of ape or dog. We have no right to trust our half- formed intellects in these very difficult matters. Then why is it so important that we should outgrow these beliefs to-day? Because for us to-day they are blinding, deadening beliefs; because they prevent us from doing something which is more alive than worshipping a benevolent God; because they prevent us from seeing something which in its own way can compel admiration more directly and surely than the theory that there is a loving God. When doubt of the Christian doctrines first began to spread, its effect on men was often very distressing. Some resolutely refused to give up cherished beliefs which had been a real strength to them. Some, through intellectual honesty, became unbelievers, but with a sense that life must be henceforth a sordid and a joyless thing. But, as time passed, a few here and there began to realize that the new pitiless universe was not only vaster and more formidable than the old kindly universe, but also more interesting, more challenging, more a place for men to live in. Not only so, but to some at least this new universe began to appear more satisfactory, more admirable, even from the religious point of view. In fact, to their own
¶261surprise, they found themselves apparently seized with an uncomprehending and heart-gripping worship of the very thing that had formerly seemed so repugnant to them. It was almost as though the new universe had created in them a new religious need which it alone could satisfy. I have said that what they worshipped was apparently the universe. But, strictly speaking, to say that they worshipped the universe is to say too much. All that is warranted by the religious experience itself is to say that they worshipped something which did not seem to be in any sense a loving God, and which some of them were inclined to interpret as being simply the whole of things. Perhaps we may safely say that they worshipped, or praised in their hearts, something which was ‘universal’, either in the sense that it simply was the universe, or in the sense that it permeated or characterized everything in the universe, somewhat as the personality of a human being may be said to permeate or characterize his actions. OceanofPDF.com
¶262XIII. MAN AND FATE OceanofPDF.com
¶263A. LOYALTY TO MAN AND DELIGHT IN FATE IN THIS CHAPTER I set out to describe as clearly and accurately as I can what it is that, in my view, we really experience in the distinctively human activity which may be called ‘religion’ in the best sense. My conclusion will be that, though it is possible to say with some confidence that the object of worship is not this, and not that, it is impossible to say anything positive about it save that it is that which we worship, and that it is in some manner superhuman. I shall try also to describe the kind of effect, a very far-reaching effect, that religion tends to have on our behaviour. In doing this, I lay myself open to criticism and ridicule from two sides. The anti-religious person will protest that I am allowing far too much weight to certain seductive but illusory experiences which, as I myself have admitted, can be plausibly explained in terms of modern psychology; and that all such attempts to rehabilitate religion are pernicious. The religious person will say that I give no evidence that I myself have any acquaintance with the actual religious experience; or that at best I misinterpret, and indeed shockingly falsify, such feeble gleams of religion as have occurred in my life. In an earlier chapter I suggested that religion was essentially a self- oblivious admiration or worship of something other than oneself and other than mankind. Now some tell us that, if we must worship anything, we should worship humanity, and nothing else. If this means simply that we should love our fellow human beings, in is — the Christian sense, and that we should cherish the achievement of the human species, and take as our supreme practical goal the improvement’ of our species and the perfecting
¶264of the human mind, I agree that in this sense we should ‘worship’ humanity. But for some of us this is not what worship means. We cannot worship humanity, simply as humanity. We can, I think, in an important sense be loyal to, or even love, mankind. But worship, in the strict sense, can be given only to something superhuman, something conceived as altogether of a higher order than ourselves, or than the most excellent of our fellow men. If there is nothing of such a kind, then there is nothing fit to be worshipped, nothing fit to be regarded with that very special and intense kind of admiration which worship is. There is, indeed, one sense in which we may worship humanity. We may worship it either as a part of, or an expression of, something more than humanity, something in essence superhuman. Some of those who profess to take humanity as their highest object of loyalty do, I think, unwittingly regard humanity in this way. Others do not. They merely feel kindliness and pity or admiration for their fellow men. Let us consider in more detail what ‘worship’ of humanity involves. The starting-point is sheer ‘love of mankind’. Now loving involves knowing the object of your love. Even though you may not be able to describe it, you must, in some sense, know it. You cannot love an individual human person unless you know something of him or her, unless you have a lively vision of him or her as a unique experiencing individual; and you cannot love mankind unless you know something of mankind. Still less can you worship it as having superhuman significance, unless you know something about it as a whole pattern of lives, unless you have a lively vision of it, not simply as a crowd of persons but as a world-wide adventuring host whose career is age-long. You must think of the persons that together make up mankind not merely as little selves, longing for all sorts of private joys and on the whole making a sad muddle of their lives, but as, each one of them, a pioneer in
¶265the great common enterprise, into which all are born, but which very few have even dimly understood. You must think of them as striving and blundering hither and thither, and hurting themselves and one another terribly in this almost blindfold adventure. You must think of each one as trying, in his own short life, to live fully, but as failing almost entirely, either through ignorance as to what full living really means, or through cowardice, or through adversity. You must think of them as animals whose nature has in it some rudiments of a much more alive nature, of the truly human nature, which may or may not some day come into existence, but must in any case be the goal of human endeavour. You must think of these animals which we call men as uncomfortably living a kind of life which is neither entirely animal nor entirely human, as alternately hating themselves for being mere animals and hating the disturbing sparks of humanity in them. You must realize something of the long and varied career which has brought them up to their present stage. You must form some idea of the ways in which our human nature must change and enrich itself, if it is to become more human. And, above all, you must prize this great theme not merely for its culmination but for its every phase. One who can hold all this together as a clear vision of mankind may be very deeply moved by it. He may feel for the strange multitudinous thing, mankind, the blend of admiration and tenderness and pity which is love. He may also feel, vaguely perhaps but strongly, that mankind is more than all the successive populations of the world. He may feel that its adventure is in some sense a sacred adventure, even perhaps one small episode in a universal crusade whose object in the long run is to fulfil whatever potentiality of life or mind or spirit there is in the cosmos. He may think of mankind as not simply an end in itself but an instrument whose true end is to produce the music of the fully awakened spirit. He may feel that man,
¶266conceived in this way, should be the one object of our loyalty. He may perhaps even feel that what matters most in the universe is this age-long adventure of waking into the most clear-sighted and large-hearted aliveness, of waking into the full, the true ‘humanity’, whether this is to be achieved by our own species or by beings alien to ourselves in remote parts of the universe. Yet there is something else to take into account, something more difficult to describe. The worship of mankind or, as I would rather call it, loyalty in the human enterprise, is indeed part of the true and wholly satisfying and most alive kind of worship; and Christian love of our fellow men is also part of it. But I at least cannot feel that love of our fellows and loyalty in the great adventure of mankind together make up the whole of religion. For, after all, to worship mankind is only to worship ourselves. For mankind is nothing but all of us together, striving in our different ways to make the best of life. Indeed, even to worship a loving God is really to worship our own nature made perfect. All the characters which are attributed to a benevolent and almighty and omniscient deity are idealizations of the distinctively human capacities. That is just where the trouble lies. We are so easily trapped into thinking that our own nature, perfected, is the finest thing there is, or can be. When a man is in the mood of unqualified loyalty to mankind, the thought may occur to him that, sooner or later, even if men do succeed at last in making the really splendid human world which at present we can only dimly imagine, that world will almost certainly be destroyed. There are many ways in which it might come to an end, but one way, if the others are avoided, seems almost inevitable. Our sun will cool, and his planets will be frozen. Even if men were to escape from the solar system, which is unlikely, wherever they were to go, they would be faced sooner or later with a
¶267cooling universe. Since all the stars are cooling, man must sooner or later be frozen to death. Of course, there may be intelligences in other worlds. There may be other kinds of life and mind, with different physical requirements from our own and different dispositions. The stars themselves, for all we know, may have minds. Even a galaxy may conceivably be the body of a single intelligent and desiring spirit. Nevertheless, vitality, on whatever scale, can only exist, so far as we can see, where energy is available for vital processes. And sooner or later energy will no longer be available. Of course, the theory that the universe is doomed to final quiescence and death may be false. Though at present physical nature is running down like a clock, it may some day be wound up again; or it may be all the while undergoing a rewinding of which we know nothing. But we should certainly face the possibility, even probability, that there is a final state of quiescence and death. And whether this dependence of life and mind on available energy is absolute or not, the idea of it is a very purging and enlightening idea. When a man is in the mood which is simply loyal to mankind, or to life, or to mind, he feels that this final destruction is nothing but a hideous disaster. In loving a person, one may long that the other should be young for ever and never die; and in the same way one may long that mankind, or at least some kind of fully awakened mind, should go on for ever and never fall into decay. But there is another way of feeling about the final destruction of mankind. It is a way that has much in common with the mood of science at its best and the mood of art. Modern science, even though it may have done much harm in other ways, does at least help one to stand outside oneself. It inclines a man to regard himself, and indeed the whole of mankind, with the quiet, almost reverent interest of a scientist who watches the behaviour of
¶268stars or micro-organisms. This calm scientific observation is perhaps, for some, the first step toward the mood which I shall describe; but the mood itself is far more than this, for it is a mood of very keen feeling. It is more like the intense admiration which we may feel for a work of art. OceanofPDF.com
¶269B. THE ANALOGY OF ART AS WAS NOTED in the chapter on art, the spectator at a stage play may find himself feeling in two very different ways about the play. The first is this. He sympathizes with the hero, and the heroine, and all the persons who are ‘on the right side and he wishes them to be successful in their enterprises. When their enemies succeed in thwarting them, he is indignant. If it is a tragic play, and in the end the hero comes to grief, he longs for a more cheerful ending. He wants to be told that the hero ‘lived happily ever after’. We all know this mood of sympathy with the ‘good’ characters of a play. The other way of feeling about a play is not so common, and not so easy. In this mood, though the spectator sympathizes with the hero, and indeed with all the characters, he cares most about the play as a play. I do not mean that he is interested to see how far and in what manner it fulfils the formal principles of dramatic art, but that he feels the play as a whole. If the spirit of the play is tragic, he wants it to fulfil its tragic nature. Although at the same time he grieves for the suffering persons, he delights in the terrible relentless way in which the opening situation of the play develops into the final tragedy. He recognizes that if this play had ended happily after all, it would not have been true to itself. Now even towards the human race and its great story, a man may feel in these two different ways. Sometimes he may feel sympathy alone, just the longing that the life of mankind may be always happy and triumphant, and have no tragic end. But sometimes he may feel himself rising above this sympathy, and finding a strange and deep delight in the great story which
¶270includes, not only man’s painful struggle into more awakened living, but also his fated downfall. In this mood a man feels that somehow humanity’s career would not be a complete and rounded thing unless it included not only growth and triumph but also degeneration and destruction. He is now caring not simply for mankind but for the universe, or at least for the universe so far as it is revealed to him, or for the whole matrix of things within which mankind is seen to play some part. He discovers that this seeming whole of things, though it lies mostly far beyond the reach of his understanding, does at least show itself to him as excellent, and that the rise and fall of mankind is necessary to its excellence. He is not merely resigned to this fate, he is deeply glad of it. He seems perhaps to see the cosmos as a vast darkness sprinkled with millions of ‘universes’, each one a cluster of millions of stars. He thinks of our sun as one among the myriads; and of the little earth, the grain on which we spend our lives. He thinks of the long history of living things on the earth, and of the recent yet very remote beginning of man. He thinks of man’s strange, troubled, blundering career, of the hosts of individual men and women of all the ages, striving for all sorts of ends, suffering, loving, groping for they know not what. He thinks of the promise of man’s nature, the possibilities that may be realized some day; and also of the expected end. He thinks dizzily of the potentialities of those myriads of stars, of possible worlds and mental types, and of the steady cooling and dying of the whole. He is overwhelmed by all this vastness, not merely of space and time and the multitude of things, but the vast possibilities of mind. He is overwhelmed, but he is deeply glad that it all is, and that he himself has a part in it. He is eager to play his part, however much it hurts him, simply because it is a part. And of mankind as a whole he feels, equally, let us play our part, however pitiably yet gladly, for at least it is a part in this beautiful, this most excellent theme.
¶271In a stage play the actors and actresses are not really suffering. They are only portraying the behaviour of suffering. The spectator may appease his sympathy with the persons of the play by remembering that, after all, they are ‘only pretending (Indeed, he cannot appreciate the play as a work of art unless he regards it all the time not as real life but as a product of artistry.) Now the drama of mankind is real life. The suffering and joy of all human beings in all ages is no mere pretence. In this case a man cannot appease his sympathy by telling himself that after all this pain is not real. It is terribly real, and no theory can ever explain it away. Then surely to delight in and admire a world in which there is so much pain must be utterly heartless. And yet in the mood which I am describing a man cannot help admiring it. Moreover, he feels very strongly that in this delight he is being not less but much more alive than when he feels sympathy alone. How can this be? We must not shirk the issue. We must not try to persuade ourselves that the pain and evil in the world is not so very great after all. We must realize it as fully as we can. And sometimes the mere imagination of it can crash upon us with appalling weight, so that we are overwhelmed with terror and compassion and indignation. How can such a diabolical universe be beautiful? Yet with horror we feel that after all it is beautiful. The conflict between its hideousness and its beauty defeats us. But let us now think of the suffering of the world as though it were the suffering not of others but of ourselves. Let me think of it as my suffering, and you as yours. This, I believe, is the enlightening way to think of it. It does not after all seem impossible that my suffering should be part of the scheme of things, a factor in the dreadful beauty of the universe. Many Christians, no doubt, feel in this way. Christian piety, of course, accepts the view that human suffering is included within the perfection of the universe,
¶272and is permitted by the all-loving God; but in the Christian theory our suffering is only compatible with that perfection and with God’s goodness if, in some manner, however indirect, we are compensated for it. This seems to me a wholly unjustified and, indeed, irreligious, qualification. It is one which follows inevitably from the attempt to think of the object of worship in terms of human personality. For if God is a person, he must be judged by the standards of human morality; and if he permits suffering to go unrecompensed, he must be condemned. When any one suffers pain or sorrow, he feels most often that the thing which has befallen him is simply bad, hideous. And yet there is a certain mood in which he may find himself strangely rising above his own suffering, and delighting in its very painfulness, or rather in the whole situation within which his pain is a part. This he can only do while he is mentally very alert and sensitive; and unfortunately the pain itself is likely to cripple his mind; so that if it increases beyond a certain point he loses this strange insight, and becomes simply a tortured animal. Think of a bird living in a forest of great trees. Imagine that the forest catches fire. The bird is forced by the flames to soar up out of his familiar world of leaves and branches into a greater world above the tree-tops, a world of sky and space and distant mountains, a world whose floor is the burning tree-tops. Let us pretend that, when our symbolical bird finds himself under the sky with the burning forest beneath him, he suddenly wakes up to be more than a bird, and to his own surprise finds this new world very beautiful, with its wide sky, its floor of burning forest, and his own fluttering terrified self in the midst of it all. If the flames are too fierce, if they reach up too high, the bird is caught by them, and his feathers are burnt, so that he drops out of the new world into the fire. But so long as he actually maintains himself in the upper world, he can somehow accept with
¶273peace, and even with ecstasy, the possibility that he may presently sink and be destroyed. In this parable, then, the bird stands for a human mind, and the flames are pain and sorrow. Some birds are stronger fliers than others and (let us suppose) can rise above flames which would have caught the weaker fliers. Some minds are more able than others to rise above their pain and sorrow. Many, perhaps, can never even reach the tree-tops, never for a moment escape into that vaster world. Some merely glimpse it before they collapse. Some, like great eagles, can rise above the most terrible agonies and griefs; but probably for each one there is a point beyond which he cannot go, at which he is caught by the flames, so that he drops headlong into his pain, and loses all vision of that strange celestial beauty. It is not only in pain that a man may have that vision. It comes, no doubt, as often in joy. The bird, let us say, may soar above the tree-tops for very joy of life, or to sing to its mate. But if the vision, which is itself joyful, comes in the course of ordinary joyful diving, it is likely to be confused with the more familiar joy. If it comes in pain, it stands out clearly by contrast. The sufferer notices that, though he is feeling pain, he is also, surprisingly, feeling a strange, a dreadful delight in the beauty of the universe which includes both pleasure and pain; or perhaps I should say, in order to avoid implications about the whole of things, simply the beauty of his experienced world, with all its actuality of victory and defeat. Now it seems to me that this way of feeling, which I can only describe as a sense of the severe beauty or rightness of existence, is a part at least of what men call religion. It may come during our personal pain or during our personal joy, or it may come when we are thinking of mankind, or when we are deliberately trying to see the pattern of the whole within which mankind is one small happening. It may come through the realization of the aliveness
¶274of another person, especially one for whom we feel deep affection. It may come in a moment of sheer animal perception or action, when we are not at all concerned with the universe as a whole or with mankind or with any loved person. In such a case we may be tempted to interpret the experience by saying that the minute particular event seems to be a window through which the ‘spirit of the whole’ confronts us. But probably what we ought to say is simply that the event vividly reveals its own exquisite rightness or beauty, that, indeed, wherever we turn (in this unique mood) we find the same underlying rightness or beauty; and that when we think of the whole cosmos, so far as it is possible for us to conceive it, we find in the theme which it seems to embody the same most excellent beauty. Christians take this experience to be a sense of the presence of their loving God. It is indeed an experience of the presence of something which commands worship; but such an experience alone is no evidence that the something is an almighty person, and loving. Are we entitled to say that in this experience, which does seem to have a reference beyond itself, we have actually a glimpse of the whole of things; and that the whole of things, which includes not only the stars and the great spaces and ages and all the intricacy of atoms and electrons but also the myriads of minds in all their subtle varieties of dullness and brilliance, somehow reveals itself as very beautiful? Unfortunately the statement that we actually glimpse the whole is scarcely more credible than the statement that we find ourselves face to face with God. Whatever it is that confronts us, it does not appear as favouring man. Indeed, it seems to the frank observer entirely careless of man, and of all the purposes of mankind. But whether it really is so or not, or whether there is even any sense in which it could be so, we simply do not know. In this mood, strangely, we do not want it to care for us, for we ourselves are
¶275entirely careless of ourselves, and of mankind, save as instruments of worship. We do not worship it for being in any sense like ourselves, or friendly towards us, but for being itself. We may sometimes have a strong sense that it is alive, and infinitely more alive, more splendidly alive, than we ourselves. It may indeed be so. But how can we possibly know? Probably to say, ‘There is God’, and to say, ‘There is no God’, and again to say, ‘The Whole is a living conscious Whole’, and to say, ‘It is not so’, are all equally false; so unreliable is our thinking. But what matter? In the mood which I am describing we feel, strangely, that whatever is in fact the truth about the universe, that must somehow be the best possible, even if we are too stupid to explain how it can be so. It is important to realize that in this experience, which seems to me the essence of the religious experience, there is, first, direct apprehension of some particular event or situation, great or minute. This objective situation presents itself as having a character to which the appropriate response is worship. But this worshipful character, though given in the particular event, does seem in some sense to be significant of very much more than the particular event. Even if it is not a window through which we see the Whole, it is, or seems to be, a window through which we see far more than the particular perceived or conceived event. But what that ‘more’ really is we cannot say. If the foregoing account is correct, we may say that religion is a mental or spiritual attitude of admiration, or praise, or worship, of a unique beauty and significance which may be discovered in or through any shred of existence, and in the whole of existence experienced by man. It is the ecstatic apprehension of a kind of beauty or rightness which may be called ‘superhuman’, in the sense that it is alien to, and superior to, every human
¶276activity, even the activity of worship, which this beauty itself awakens in man. Though the object of worship is itself seemingly indifferent to man, the apprehension of it may have a far-reaching effect on conduct. However it is interpreted, it tends to issue in a subtle blend of earnestness and detachment. It, and not (I submit) merely their theoretical and comforting interpretation of it, inspired the early Christians to face martyrdom without feeling hate for their tormentors, but only compassion. It made Christianity in its prime a greater power in the world than Communism alone can ever be. It demands on the one hand loyalty to man, to the ideal of creating the fully awakened personality, and on the other worship, and detachment from man. Communism preaches human loyalty, but not worship. In general and in comparison with the early Christians, the modern world may be said to have a far clearer and more comprehensive idea of the implications of human loyalty, but far less of the impulse to worship. This is chiefly due to the fact that worship has been brought into disrepute by the failure of Christianity. And this failure itself was due to the fact that Christians, early and modern, have confused their worship with theories which have come to seem improbable and puerile. In our day, and in the setting of our modern world-situation, the religious experience tends to give rise to a conviction as to what the aim of mankind should be. Men, we are convinced, ought to strive to become more and more able to perceive and delight in this strange beauty of existence; and also they should strive to contribute new and finer beauties to it from age to age by making a more alive world of men and women. For human lives seem to be in some sense parts of the music of existence. And the delight which human minds take in this music is itself a feature of the music. But though we feel very strongly the need that mankind should fulfil
¶277its half-formed nature, we feel also that when at last, in spite of all man’s effort, the human world begins to wither and die, this ending, which is disaster to mankind, is really no disaster for the music of the whole. It is just the grave but fitting end of one theme in the music. OceanofPDF.com
¶278C. SCEPTICAL PROTESTS IN THE MOOD which I am trying to describe we feel all this with complete certainty, and with a delight which is deeper than any other delight. But we may be mistaken, Indeed, it seems that in some way or other we must be mistaken, since this account of our religious experience is self- contradictory. We say almost in the same breath that the adventure of man ought to be heroically pursued to victory, yet that it is bound to be defeated in the end, and that, in spite of its defeat, the universe is perfectly beautiful. Is not this sheer nonsense? Some one is sure to ask us what exactly it is that delights us in a universe in which minds are so helpless and so tortured, in which, moreover, there will soon be no minds at all. Really, he may say, this is very queer music, which is beautiful although it is full of hideous discords, which consists simply in whatever happens, and is, moreover, in some strange way good in itself whether any one enjoys it or not. We have to admit that it is indeed strange. But there it is. This contradiction between, on the one hand, admiration of the known universe as in some sense perfect, excellent, wholly beautiful, and on the other hand, loyalty to the enterprise of man to spiritualize himself and his corner of the universe, lies in one form or another at the heart of all the great religions. It is at bottom the contradiction between fate and love; between, on the one hand, the acceptance of fate, or of ‘God’s will’, and, on the other, the love of human persons, or devotion in the cause of life’s struggle to become fully awake. And this devotion and this love are the roots of all morality. Well, there it is. We cannot give up either side of the contradiction, and yet we cannot solve it. When we have stripped religion of all precarious intellectual
¶279interpretations, all questionable doctrines, we are left with this dilemma. There is no solution visible to minds of our own half-developed type. All we can do is to be honest with ourselves, admit that our intelligence is defeated, and yet cling most earnestly to both sides of the dilemma. But our critic will smile at us. He will probably tell us that our delight in the universe can easily be explained by psychology without any muddle- headed notion that the universe itself, or existence itself, is beautiful or good. This delight of ours, he may say, is really just a sense of our own well-being, which we mistakenly ‘project’ upon the universe. Through some cause or other, he suggests, we are feeling extraordinarily ‘fit’ or alive, mentally; and, observing the universe, we find it after all a splendid place to live in, and so we call it beautiful. That we should sometimes have this sense of well-being in the midst of pain or fear or sorrow is doubtless strange, but not incomprehensible. Our trouble may happen to act on us as a tonic. It may be very nasty medicine, and yet it may make us more alive. Perhaps, for instance, our lives happen to have been too easy; and unwittingly we have acquired a deep and gnawing shame because we have never had to ‘face the stern reality’, and therefore have not really lived. When, at last, trouble comes and we face it with courage, we may have a glorious sense of being at grips with things. This delight in our own aliveness, we may be told, can become like a golden haze around us. We see the universe always through this glamour, and so the universe itself seems golden, beautiful. Another way in which our critic may explain away our worship of the whole of things or of the beauty of existence, is to say that, like the puppy that grovels before a big dog, we have an instinct to bow down before anything very great and terrible, and that in all worship men are merely giving themselves the satisfaction of grovelling, either before the universe
¶280or before the idea of some God. A more sinister explanation is possible. In all of us there are deep-laid impulses of cruelty. Civilization forbids us to satisfy these impulses fully and frankly. And because they are thus repressed, they afford us an overwhelming and bewildered delight when we contemplate the cruelty of the universe. There are many other ways in which our sense of the beauty of existence may be explained and explained away. All these explanations are at bottom the same. They consist in saying that we do not really delight in the universe, or in existence, at all, but in the fulfilling of some impulse or need of our own; and that we mistake our sense of personal well-being for a sense of the beauty of the world. But can this kind of explanation be true? As was said in another connexion, the experience to be explained seems to be so much richer, more subtle, more awakened, than any of the impulses that are offered as its explanation, or than all of them together. Yet in our present state of ignorance and confusion we cannot but allow that some such explanation may, after all, be the true one. Of course, to any one who has actually experienced existence in the religious way these plausible psychological explanations all seem far-fetched, almost comic, almost as fantastic as it would be to explain a picture by giving an account of the food which the artist had eaten every day since his birth. He cannot but question whether the psychologist really comprehends the kind of thing that he is undertaking to explain. Are we really such fools that we mistake the fulfilment of primitive impulse for delight in the universe, or in objective existence? In this experience we do indeed feel a great surge of vitality in ourselves, but we seem able to distinguish quite clearly between our own aliveness and the beauty with which we are confronted. And again, though we do indeed want to bow down before this greatness, we do not worship for the mere satisfaction of grovelling. It is no more true (and no less) to
¶281explain the genuine religious admiration as a kind of grovelling than to explain the puppy’s grovelling as a rudimentary kind of worship. And as for cruelty, we do indeed admire the universe partly because of its terribleness, but we do not simply delight in evil itself. We delight in the whole pattern of existence, within which evil is a dread but needed part. After all, though psychologists have made many important discoveries, they have not yet been able to describe our minds at all clearly or fully. They cannot even agree amongst themselves as to what the ground plan of our nature really is. It may very well be that there is a kind of experience which they cannot yet distinguish from other, seemingly similar, but really very different experiences. Under these circumstances, which ought we to trust, this seemingly most vital or awakened of all experiences or modern psychology? Those who have seen objective existence in this way can no more doubt their perception of it than, in full sunshine, they can doubt the light. We may describe it wrongly. We may be unable to say anything useful about it to other people. Let us remember always that we may be very seriously misreading our vision when we call it a vision of the beauty of the whole of things, or even a vision of the beauty inherent in all existence. For human minds are constantly deceiving themselves. Nevertheless, for us who see it, that beauty itself or rightness itself or excellence itself is simply there before us. And though, indeed, we may misinterpret it, we cannot deny it. However, we may perhaps be able to appease the psychologist by using his language. We may begin by agreeing that always what satisfies men is an environment suited to their nature. Then we may go on to remind the psychologist that the environment itself moulds human nature in conformity with itself. Through this influence, man seems to be constantly developing distinctively human capacities of appreciation adapted to the kind of environment which his distinctively human percipience discovers. Thus it
¶282comes that the environment most suited to our more awakened nature is after all this strange universe. This is only another way of saying that the universe itself evokes in us the capacity of discovering and appreciating in it a kind of beauty which we could not otherwise have seen. Those who have this experience of the beauty of existence, are sometimes dismayed by the knowledge that after all they may be deceiving themselves, that, though they cannot help believing their own eyes when they see this terrible-beautiful whole, they may be deluded. But they should not be dismayed. They should face this possibility. They may, indeed, be, after all, merely ‘projecting’ their own delicious well-being upon the universe. But so far from disheartening them, this doubt should turn their faith into a gallant adventure, of which the outcome is uncertain. OceanofPDF.com
¶283D. ECSTASY AND THE MORAL WILL FOR ANYONE WHO sees things in this way, it is this experience, this ecstasy, that makes life most worth living. So long as he can keep it in view, nothing can dismay him, nothing can turn him wholly aside from striving after the way of life that the ‘beauty of existence’ somehow seems to demand of him. It does not really demand anything of him but that he should be what he is, that he should be as fully alive as he has it in him to be. And this, of course, he will be. But the perception of the universe in this way changes a man. It makes him be different from what he was without it. Seeing things thus, he can no longer be merely a little greedy frightened self. He cannot even be merely a loyal servant of mankind. He will try to be that, but he will be something more also. He will, of course, eagerly, though perhaps ineffectively, strive to order his whole life so as to advance the great human enterprise; but in his heart of hearts he will be always quiet, and deeply glad whatever happens; because, in however dim and confused a way, he sees, or seems to see, something of the whole theme of existence, and accepts it with joy. Mankind he sees as a very little part in that great theme, and himself and all his striving as a very little part in the life of mankind. His own life and the life of all human beings, and the whole career of mankind, are seemingly doomed to incomplete fulfilment. He greatly longs for fulfilment for himself and mankind. Yet more deeply, because of the beauty of the theme, he welcomes fate. Lest the upshot of this chapter should seem to be sheer supine fatalism, let me repeat that this ecstatic acceptance of fate can, and I believe should, lead the mind not to passivity but to vigorous action. Mysteriously it can
¶284breed in conduct its very opposite, the emphatic resistance of evil, the will to take part effectively and without capitulation in the endless struggle for the awakening of the spirit in each individual and in the world as a whole, the will to fight for the truly human against the brutish, for life against death, for right against wrong. Let us always remember that these two attitudes of mind, which seem to our half-formed intelligence to be logically in conflict, can in practice be mutually supporting. Ecstatic acceptance, in the depth of one’s own being, demands in the life of action absolute devotion to the cause of the militant spirit. If examples are needed in support of this contention, the lives of Jesus and of Gautama Buddha may be cited as the supreme illustrations of the unity of acceptance and moral action. Nearer our own time we find the philosopher Spinoza exemplifying with strange perfection in his own life the union of courageous moral action and ecstatic acceptance, or, as he called it, ‘the intellectual love of God’. In our modern age the great common goal of all moral action must be, in some sense, revolution, world-revolution. The awakened mind has somehow to achieve at once both acceptance and the zeal of the revolutionary. In so far as a man falls short of acceptance, his zeal becomes fanatical, doctrinaire, callous, blind, and in the last resort inadequate to the needs of world-revolution. In so far as he fails in courage and loyalty to the revolutionary cause, the religious ecstasy of his acceptance is poisoned. This is perhaps a mystery, but it is true. OceanofPDF.com
¶285E. A MYTH OF MAN AND FATE LET US CONSTRUCT a myth to symbolize this and other contradictions. All striving, whether of animal or man or any more exalted being, may be thought of as in some sense the striving of the cosmical spirit to wake, to achieve beauty, to be aware of its achievement, and to rejoice in it. For beauty, there must be striving; and for striving, resistance. There must be the inertia of that which we call matter. There must be the sluggishness, the obtuseness, the callousness, of the less alive and the less awakened, ever thwarting and blindly torturing the more alive, the more awakened, in its effort toward further awakening. For fullness of beauty, the cosmos must include the whole gamut of triumph and tragedy upon every level of the spirit’s life. Let us conceive that at some date in the history of the cosmos, whether future to us or past, an all-knowing and all-praising mind does awaken as a result of past striving, does find the cosmical process very beautiful. Let us further suppose that by its own creative activity, by the adventure of its own life, it completes the cosmical beauty, that it perfects the cosmos, and rejoices in its own crowning achievement. Let it subsequently, through the physical degeneration of the cosmos, decay and vanish. Let the whole cosmos die. Embryonic minds such as ours cannot know that this is so. But if it is so, all is well, even though we cannot know it. We, for our part, achieve but little, know but confusedly, enjoy but obtusely. We cannot judge whether the cosmical process is, in fact, a perfect
¶286thing or not. We can be assured only that there is beauty scattered within it; and also pain and very great evil. And we know, we feel it in our depths, that we must strive for the awakening. It is our part always to strive, seldom to triumph. Though we cannot see the whole form of the cosmos, to see its beauty, we are, in fact, capable of that commanding and unintelligible ecstasy of worship, that seemingly unjustified conviction of the perfect rightness of all existence as a whole and in every part. Whence this experience? Time and space, though indeed real features of the cosmos, are not in reality just as they appear to us. Much in our experience suggests that we do not apprehend them truly and fully. We may well conceive that a more awakened mind, though it would not pronounce them mere illusion, would not be limited by them as we are limited. Let us then suppose that in our strange ecstasy of worship we obscurely participate in the ecstasy of that perfected mind, which, in the future or in the past, but also eternally, crowns and fittingly enjoys the whole drama of the cosmos, including its own downfall. We may suppose also, if we will (since time is so strange a thing) that the very mind which at some date awakens as the result of cosmical striving, and crowns the cosmos with its creative achievement and its delight, is also the eternal and all-creative source of the whole cosmos. If this be so, then the glorious goal of all striving, which in the process of time is momentarily achieved and lost, is yet also the indestructible and basic fact in the eternal reality of the cosmos. In the terms of this myth, the beauty of the cosmos is absolutely the outcome of the effort of all the individual spirits of every order, each striving according to its limited vision. But also it involves the inconceivable sum of agony, defeat, treason. To our minds in their blindness, this huge evil may well seem to mar the
¶287cosmical beauty. But to the perfectly awakened mind of the cosmos (let us suppose), to the mind which at some moment of cosmical time knows all, crowns all, and rejoices in all, even in its own impending degeneration and misery, the huge evil of the cosmical process is acceptable as a needed part of beauty; for to this mind it is evident that the goal of all striving, namely perfected beauty and complete awakening, is achieved. The perfectly awakened mind at last sees clearly that, though the defeat and agony of the myriad beings of the cosmos are irreducible facts, they are also needed factors in the excellence of the cosmos. We may say further, within the terms of our myth, that when any individual spirit, or any race, or any living world, gallantly strives to realize the best that is in it, but is defeated, it may yet find peace in the ecstasy of acceptance, and in the thought: This striving was demanded for the cosmical beauty, and so also was this defeat. But when any individual or race or world fails through baseness or weakness of will, and betrays its own best vision, still we must say: This issue, and even this betrayal, were demanded for the cosmical beauty. Yet shame to that betrayal! For its source was not the will for the fullness of beauty, which alone is the motive of the spirit. In some such terms we may, if we will, construct our myth. But let us never for a moment forget that it is of our own making, and that almost certainly the reality is not as we conceive it, even when we take into account all that we experience, and use our intelligence sincerely upon it. OceanofPDF.com
¶288XIV. WORLD-REVOLUTION? OceanofPDF.com
¶289A. THE ECONOMIC REVOLUTION THE KEY-NOTE OF the preceding chapter was a kind of fatalism, though an ecstatic fatalism. But even though the ecstatic acceptance of fate is one aspect of the truly awakened attitude to life, the other and no less important aspect was said to be the resolute will to act for the awakening of individuals and the human world as a whole, the will to fight for the awakened mentality against the brutish, for life against death, for right against wrong. I shall now try to outline the kind of world-policy which seems to be demanded if the foregoing account of human nature and the distinctively human activities is true. There is already a widespread conviction that, if we are to save our civilization, or rather if we are to transform our present barbarism into true civilization, certain revolutionary changes must be made in our world. To complete this book it seems necessary to state the main direction of these changes. It is not for me to describe them in detail. Only the expert sociologist or the inspired revolutionary leader could do so. But their main principles cannot he too often stated, and a brief account of them will give point to the earlier chapters. The influences which make it impossible to-day for men to be as human as they might be, and to recognize and accept the true world-aim, are the influences which turn nearly all of us in some degree or other into mental cripples instead of well-grown minds. The chief of these influences are bad economic organization and bad education. By education I mean the whole process of moulding minds by instruction, example, exhortation, and veiled suggestion, which begins in the cradle and ends at death.
¶290To these two underlying problems of economic organization and education we may add two other extremely important problems, namely the problem of democracy and the problem of peace. But both democracy and peace depend in the last resort on the interaction of economic factors and education. Thus the economic problem and the educational problem are the real roots of all our trouble. The economic organization of the world is bad for the obvious reason that the wealth of the world is controlled in the main by individuals or minor groups of individuals for their own profit. The result has been that economic power has fallen to a minority, who, though many of them in private life are generous and conscientious persons, are none the less, as a class, hidebound and unimaginative, and quite unable to see that their social principles are disastrous to the world. They use their power in the main for individual success rather than for the good of the world. The great majority of human beings are economically in bondage. They have very many capacities, animal and human, which, because of their economic bondage and penury, they cannot exercise. And because of the same disability, their power of consuming the products of industry is one-tenth, one-hundredth of what it might be, and the system of production is unable to find full outlet. During the period of industrial expansion the system of economic individualism worked without flagrant disaster; but in the present period of industrial stagnation when the great capitalist states are hungrily craving each other’s markets, it is ceasing to work even tolerably well, and it threatens to break down completely. To-day the immediate need of the world may be said to be the need for economic reorganization under a world-authority which has at heart the interests of all men and not merely the interest of the present economic masters, or of particular national states. But since the world as a whole has
¶291not yet come to desire this change, one is tempted to say that the most urgent need of all is for a change in education. Unfortunately the desire for educational revolution is even less widespread than the desire for economic revolution. The only way to deal with this vicious circle is to attack it from both sides at once. The problem of economic reorganization is an extremely complicated technical problem which calls for expert knowledge and great intelligence. I shall not attempt to discuss it. It can no more be solved by amateurs or by the populace as a whole than problems of medicine or engineering or astrophysics. On the other hand, though the details of the solution must be found by experts, it is for the community as a whole, or for those members of it who grasp the world-aim, to see that the experts do not become blinded by technicalities, do not lose sight of the goal which is to be attained by means of their technique. Briefly the goal may be summarized thus. The productive power of the world is to be controlled in such a manner that all extant human beings may be able to exercise their capacities to the full, and that the quality of civilization may continually improve. Though the details of economic reorganization are technical and extremely complex, it should be clear by now that reorganization, a very thorough reorganization, is necessary; and that the will, the passion, to carry it out must come not from the experts nor from the present class of economic masters but from the community as a whole, led by an intelligent and inspired minority. Further, if revolution is to succeed, the massed drive and resolution for the initial break with the old order, must gain its force from the indignation of that class which at present suffers most, the proletariat. But what of the ‘middle class that immense host of highly skilled workers and small employers who are used to fairly comfortable conditions,
¶292and are extremely dependent on social confidence and stability? They have much to lose. Unless their conditions gravely deteriorate, they will be chary of desperate remedies. On the other hand, their better fortune enables them to attain on the average a higher degree of general competence than the less fortunate. Without their active support no great change is possible. The West is not Russia. We have seen in Italy and Germany what the misguided enthusiasm of the middle class can effect. But though they can be gulled by those who play upon their fear and hate and sentimentality, they have also great capacities of common sense, balance, generosity, even, I believe, of vision. Unless they join the Revolution, Revolution in the West is assuredly doomed to failure. All those who demand a new world have to face the question: How is the present economic oligarchy to be divested of power? Is this great change to be brought about by mildness, by appeals to the moral sense of those who at present hold power, and by co-operation with them? Or must there be a struggle? And if so, can actual violence be avoided? Members of the dominant class, the economic masters, are human beings, like the rest. They are not devils or brutes. But neither are they angels. If you want to get something out of a man, it nearly always pays to appeal to the best in him. If your case is a sound one, and if you can state it in a way that he can understand and feel, he will want to do the right thing by you. If the cost is not too great, he will actually do it. But unfortunately the problem of dealing with the dominant oligarchy is complicated by the fact that even its best members sincerely believe that the system which they uphold is essential to the health of society. You may persuade them that particular evils in the system must be corrected, but you will never persuade them that the system itself should be abolished. The idea will always fall on
¶293a blind spot in their mental vision. It is too foreign to their whole style of thought, and its consequences are too unpleasant. Only exceptional members of the class will tolerate it. Struggle, then, seems inevitable, hateful as it is. We may, and indeed even for merely tactical reasons we must, work by persuasion and co- operation whenever possible. But time has already shown conclusively that patience and mildness alone will not produce the far-reaching change which is needed if mankind is to turn the present critical corner and advance into true civilization. We must face the fact that the root of the trouble cannot be extracted without a struggle. One way or another, it is likely to be a grim struggle. But must it be one of actual violence? In Russia the downfall of the dominant class came through a violent upheaval, in which a small party of resolute revolutionaries inspired the workers and guided them to victory. In the West the organization and resources and weapons of the economic masters are far more formidable than they were in Russia; and since the plight of the workers is not nearly so grievous as it was in Russia, their state of mind is as yet very far from resolute. Moreover, in Fascism the masters have a new and potent instrument for gulling the workers, side-tracking their drive toward revolution, and disciplining them in service of the present order. Every serious threat of a red revolution is a strength to Fascists. In England at least, there is at present a far greater possibility that the critical corner will be turned by peaceful and even politically constitutional methods than by civil war. In countries already dominated by Fascism, and in England too, if ever economic distress brings Fascism into power, revolution will probably entail an orgy of bloodshed, and will be grievously coarsened in spirit.
¶294If the economic oligarchy is not soon deposed, the economic disorder of the world will inevitably and at no very distant date produce violent upheavals, relentless tyranny, and greater economic distress. If things go thus from bad to worse, there may well come a time when, all else having failed, a bloody revolution, spreading from country to country, will be the last forlorn hope of those who would found the new world. Meanwhile, before that desperate plight is reached, what possibility is there of wresting power from the economic masters? What possibility is there of giving that power not merely to the national states but to a world- authority, not merely to some other single social class, such as the proletariat or the middle class, but to the whole world-community? There is at least some possibility that in the less tortured nations the pressure of circumstances, combined with the logic of intelligent leaders and the insistence of an awakening public opinion, may force the economic masters step by step toward abdication. Conceivably many of them, those who have special knowledge, and are social at heart, may be allowed to continue their work under the new authority. But they will no longer wield great economic power for private ends. As things stand in Europe to-day, with the capitalists in control both of arms and propaganda, and Fascism on the increase, the hope of a world- wide and thorough revolution is indeed forlorn. The makers of the new world must be content with forlorn hopes, and if Communism (in a broad sense) cannot be achieved peaceably, then they will have to fight, though almost without any hope at all, in the bloody and world-wide revolution in which at best nearly as much will be destroyed as will be created. OceanofPDF.com
¶295B. PACIFISM AT THIS POINT we may conveniently consider the whole problem of peace and war. Some hold that in no circumstances whatever is war, whether international or civil, either right or expedient. In their view the use of force save for ordinary police purposes always creates more evil than it cures. The greatest of all needs, they say, is to accustom the peoples to the idea of absolute pacifism. Only by establishing everywhere a resolutely pacific disposition can world-wide peace be secured. And this disposition, they say, is only to be inculcated by preaching the absolute rejection of war. This view deserves very serious consideration; but we should, I think, recognize that to fight for the new order might under certain circumstances become necessary. Absolute pacifism rests on the assumption that all men or the great majority of men are sufficiently sensitive, sufficiently awakened spiritually, to respond to the example of heroic non-resistance. In a world of predatory beasts absolute pacifism would be ineffective. The claim of the absolute pacifist is that all men have the capacity of gentleness, forgiveness and brotherhood, and that this capacity can be roused into action by the example of pacifism in others. I believe that in one sense this view is justified, and that the work of appealing by example and precept to the more pacific impulses of men is of very great importance; even, perhaps, in our day, of supreme importance. But though the pacific impulses of men may be roused by heroic example, they may not. Appeal to impulses of fear and hate may turn them into barbarians, into predatory beasts, into dangerous lunatics. In this case the example of non-resistance may fail to touch them, or may even
¶296infuriate them. If personal pacifism were itself the supreme end, we might stay our hands and damn the consequences. But it is not the supreme end. There are two social ends which are far more important in our day. One of them is the destruction of economic individualism, the other the establishment of a trustworthy world-authority. I do not say that violent methods are, as a matter of fact, necessary for the attainment of these ends; indeed I believe that violence nearly always does more harm than good. But if ever violence appears to be the one forlorn defence of these aims, pacifism must be abandoned. In private life it is a sound principle to refrain from violence under almost all circumstances. For instance, so far as possible we should leave hooligans to be dealt with by the police. But sometimes we may be called upon to aid the police; and sometimes, if the police become corrupt, or are used by anti-social powers, it may be necessary to resist them by force. Of course, in resorting to arms, even in a just cause, we inevitably do great hurt to public trust in peaceable methods and to the pacifist ideal. But a situation may arise in which such hurt would be the lesser evil. In the international sphere there is no supreme authority, and every imperialist government is a potential hooligan. Should we, then, arm the League of Nations? If the League were a true world-authority, this might be a sound policy. But the League as it stands is no such thing. Although many of the actual members of the Assembly are earnest internationalists, the League is doomed to impotence in all serious crises, because it is controlled by the very forces which it is meant to restrain, namely the great imperialistic powers. Though the Assembly unanimously condemned Japan’s invasion of Manchuria, no effort was made to restrain her. This was a crucial event in the history of our age. To its influence must be traced not only Japan’s increasing contempt for the League, but the desperate
¶297truculence of Germany. To it must also be traced the widespread conviction that the League, as at present constituted, is useless. To arm the present League would merely put power and moral authority into the hands of whatever great national governments were in effective control of the League itself. But though it would indeed be unwise to arm the League as it stands to- day, the makers of the new world must recognize the obligation to support, if necessary even by force, a properly constituted world-authority against a piratical national state, if ever such an authority is established. Even so, the resort to force would be the last, forlorn hope. Loyal citizens of the world would take up arms only when every other possible method had failed, and only with the bitter realization that in doing so, they were themselves doing grievous hurt to the very thing which they wished to defend, the civilized world. One thing at least is clear. Those who are pledged to the making of the new world will not fight in any purely national cause. The justification for this resolve is that a national government can always, by propaganda, make its war seem righteous in the eyes of its own people, and that the actual cause of war has nearly always been economic or imperialistic rivalry. The chances are always hundreds to one that even the most plausible appeal by a national government will turn out in the end to be based on conscious or unconscious falsification. The nations have declared by solemn treaty that they will chastise, if necessary by force, any state which attacks another state. This system seems to me impracticable, and even dangerous. When it comes to the point, national sovereign states will not sacrifice their own prosperity for the sake of public order. Further, in every serious crisis, it will be to the interest of some states actually to support the aggressor. It is too much to expect that
¶298they should take positive action in opposition to their own interests. The system may work in minor instances, but never in the great crises for which it is meant. Probably it would only work when the mass of capitalistic states felt moved to take concerted action against a socialist state which all regarded with hate. It would not be difficult to invent a casus belli. For my part, at any rate, I see no hope of abolishing war until national armaments are destroyed and a supranational authority is given a small but effective police-force. Meanwhile the makers of the new world will do all in their power to prevent national wars. Rather than fight in defence of any national state, they must face ridicule, contempt, imprisonment, death, and, if necessary, torture. They will preach militant pacifism, the pacifism which not merely will not take up arms, but condemns and ridicules those who do. They will scoff at the emblems and at the instruments of national military glory, at flags, uniforms, trophies, guns, warships, military aeroplanes. They will insist that such things are but dangerous and degrading toys, attractive to puerile minds, but not to men. They will call the brave young airman, who risks his life so brilliantly to bomb enemy cities, not a hero but a stupid blundering boy, who ought to be sent back to school, to a school where his eyes would be opened. They will dub all gallant defenders of their country blockheads and cowards; blockheads for not seeing that in defending their country they impose on it the most shattering and degrading of all experiences, namely war; and cowards because they betray the best for the sake of the second best, because for the sake of mere frightened patriotism they are disloyal to the hope of the new world. ‘This is all very well,’ the patriot will say, ‘but it simply does not apply to the world of to-day. Let us suppose that Britain alone were to disarm, and that the Nazi Government of Germany were to find it convenient to take
¶299charge of England so as to prevent anti-Nazi propaganda, and assimilate English culture to Nazi “culture”. The Nazi Government has clearly proved itself to lie beyond the pale of civilization. Its treatment of its opponents has been flagrantly barbarous. Its ideals are savage. Its policy is ruinous to the cause of the new world. Should we allow all that is free and noble in England to be blotted out by Nazi thugs?’ It must be admitted that this argument strikes home. Yet I believe it is mistaken. It would be true only if the mass of German men and women were, indeed, beyond the pale of civilization. They are not. The great majority of Germans are, individually, quite as decent folk as ourselves. Complex circumstances, for which the Allies are largely responsible, have driven them into a kind of social neurosis, an exaggerated dread of seeming ‘inferior This has put them at the mercy of a ruthless gang. They are suffering from the psychological consequences of defeat and of the foolish policy of the victors; perhaps also from the fact that on the whole the sense of the ridiculous is somewhat less developed among Germans than among some other peoples. Those who quote recent events in Germany to show that non-resistance is doomed to failure are drawing a false parallel. The failure to resist the violent methods of the Nazis was not due to pacifism but to sheer disheartenment and sheer folly. The republican government permitted the administration of law and education to remain in the hands of its opponents. It also permitted the creation of private armies. The makers of the new world, then, will declare it a solemn duty on the part of each people to refuse to make war under any circumstances, save under supranational command. They should declare, further, I suggest, that if a nation is attacked and invaded by a foreign nation, it would be well advised not to defend itself, but to meet invasion with non-resistance.
¶300Indeed, the time has come, they will say, when it is desirable that some great people, faced with invasion, should perform this supreme act of national heroism, should put its whole strength not into fighting the invaders but into pacific ‘non-co-operation’, so as to thwart them in their attempt to govern the ‘conquered’ country. The foreign army would enter the country; no army, no air force would oppose them. They would occupy the seat of government; no one would prevent them, but none of their decrees would be obeyed. Many of those who refused to carry out the instructions of the invaders would, of course, be shot. There would be much brutality on the part of the exasperated ‘conquerors’. But you cannot in cold blood shoot a whole people. If the people was resolute, and enough individuals were ready to accept martyrdom, the foreign occupation would collapse. No brilliant effort of imagination is needed to conceive what the moral effect of a heroic gesture of national non-resistance would be upon the attacking nation and on the rest of the world. If it were possible for a great people, or the large majority of it, to adopt this policy whole-heartedly and hold to it consistently, there can be little doubt that the effects of its action would change the whole political atmosphere of the world. I am well aware that every effort would be made by the enemies of peace to misrepresent its motives and prevent the world from knowing what had happened. But even modern methods of distortion and propaganda would be powerless to suppress so huge a fact. There is perhaps little likelihood that any one great people will be so much more pacifist than its neighbours that it will behave in this way. Such an act of non-resistance on the part of a whole people would need very great conviction, courage and resolution. It could only occur if in the invaded country there was a widespread and passionate allegiance to the world-aim,
¶301and a faith in the power of one brilliant example to call out the best in other peoples. If one nation had advanced to this pitch, it is probable that others, including the aggressor, would not be far behind; and that the effect of the example would be overwhelming. Though such an act of national heroism is unlikely, we must insist that it would not be the sheer suicide which our patriots would have us believe it to be. Even from the point of view of the invaded nation, it would be much less destructive than a war of defence, and much less debasing. Even if the foreign occupation endured for a long time, which is unlikely, it would be less destructive and less debasing than a modern war. There is surely no possibility of abolishing war until there is a far stronger and more widespread sense of the common humanity of all peoples, and of their fundamental identity of interest. Probably this sense of common humanity will not be attained in time to prevent another great disaster. But since it is essential to peace in the modern world, we must be ready to risk everything for its attainment. Caution and national self-interest having signally failed to bring real peace, we must now boldly rely on the fact that most men, so long as they are not confused by hunger or by emotional appeals to fear and hate, desire to ‘live and let live’. We must propagate the far-seeing self-interest which recognizes that in no circumstances can a modern war benefit the victorious people. We must, of course, work for the complete disarmament of all nations, and the international control of all aircraft, and the abolition of all private armament factories and armament firms. We must seek to infuse every section of every nation with the determination to act courageously and effectively, when the threat of a national war arises, in such ways as to make it impossible for its Government to open hostilities. We must try to persuade the workers to paralyse industry by a general strike. If transport
¶302and industry were to cease, war could not be maintained. We must try to include within the general strike, not only the proletariat, but also the middle class. We must try to make it clear, long before an actual occasion for war arises, that the war-machine simply cannot be put in action, because those on whom it depends will not play their part in it. But more anxiously we must work continuously for mutual trust and loyalty among the peoples, and for the creation in each people of so strong a will to peace that the machinations of armament firms and politicians will be ineffective. Unfortunately, as we have already noted, the most deep-rooted cause of war is probably not economic nor political, nor even ‘tribal’. It lies in the fact that the great majority of normal and kindly persons have acquired in youth strong though unconscious needs for hate and cruelty. It is from these secret cravings that war scares and war itself gain that crazy passion which is impervious to reason. The makers of the new world will strive to lay bare the root of this widespread insanity, and to work for the removal of its causes in the circumstances of the lives of the young. This is part of the needed revolution in education. OceanofPDF.com
¶303C. DEMOCRACY, FREE SPEECH, THE WORLD-STATE LET US NOW turn to the problem of democracy. In our day democracy, government of the people for the people by the people, is falling into disrepute. The makers of the new world will insist that in one sense democracy is essential, in another impossible. It is essential because a government which has not the approval of the people cannot help the people to fullness of life. Whatever it does, the people will resist. Moreover, since human nature is far from perfect, any government which does not depend ultimately on the expressed will of the people, is certain to lose touch with the people, is certain to consider itself the only true interpreter of the popular will, when as a matter of fact it has become incapable of imagining what the people really needs. On the other hand, and in another sense, democracy is impossible. It is impossible because a government which is merely the slave of an ill-informed and ever-shifting public opinion will not be able to govern at all. Democracy, then, is essential in the sense that sound government must depend on the general approval of the people; impossible if it means that all initiative should come from the public, and that every detail of executive government should be expressly sanctioned by the people. Even against democracy in the former sense a serious case may be stated. It may be argued, plausibly but dangerously, that popular decree, even as to what the aims of government should be, is only salutary for a people or a world that has awakened so far as to be intelligently loyal to the world-aim. For less awakened peoples, such as the most civilized that
¶304actually exist, democracy must be tempered to the degree of their backwardness, lest through stupidity or malice they harm themselves or one another. No people of the world to-day, it may be said, is fit for true democracy, since all are composed chiefly of mental cripples, who, at least in public matters, lack intelligence, knowledge and generosity. They cannot yet appreciate the true aim of government. Nor can they appreciate the intricacies of practical economic and political problems. Most even of the best citizens are bound to be incompetent politically, since they are absorbed (quite rightly) in their own special work, and have not the experience necessary for understanding complex matters in other spheres. There is force in this argument against democracy. But the answer to it is that, bad as democracy is in a world that is not more than half-awakened, no other kind of government is in the long run compatible with the true political aim, namely the free development of human personality. If the would-be makers of the new world think to achieve their end by any method of government which is essentially undemocratic, they deceive themselves. Democracy, in the broadest sense, is a necessary factor in the world-aim. It is, of course, possible that in revolutionary crises a socially minded minority, in order to oust from power another and tyrannical minority which has annihilated all expression of popular will, may have to seize control of the body politic and govern for a brief spell without the positive backing of popular will. But when it has achieved its end and put the people once more into a position to have a will, it must itself abide by the popular decision, or be untrue to the world aim. Further, though in one sense the half-awakened peoples of to-day are, indeed, incapable of true democracy, in that they have not attained the necessary wisdom, their governing is after all their concern, and not the
¶305privilege of any self-appointed caste or individual. Even those who have the true world-aim clearly in view must be content to accept the dictates of popular will, however misguided it may be. All they can do is to try to influence the popular will. Government must be carried out not by force but by persuasion. The best that can happen to any people of the present world is that a minority who have the true world-aim at heart, and great skill in governing, shall be able to educate and persuade the people intelligently to accept the true world-aim and the general lines of policy which follow from it; so that this enlightened people may support its governors wholeheartedly in the task of making the new world, and also be ready to overthrow them if at last they fall from grace. Effective democracy is impossible without universal freedom to state facts and express opinions. The people that is to govern itself or to exercise enlightened democratic control over its rulers must be well informed about the conditions of the world in which it lives, about all varieties of opinion among its members, and all arguments bearing on the general aim and detailed policy of government. No democracy that is not in this sense an educated democracy can avoid being misled by demagogues. It is often said that at least ideas harmful to the State or offensive to the moral sense of the community should be suppressed. The answer to this view is simple. In the first place, ideas cannot be permanently suppressed by force. They may, indeed, be driven underground for a while, as they were in Russia, but sooner or later they will either die of their own inherent folly or triumph through their own inherent sanity or rightness. During their sojourn underground they will inevitably become tainted with unnecessary hate and extravagance, so that when they do emerge they will be more dangerous and less true than formerly. On the other hand, if they are not suppressed, either they will succumb to the fire of criticism, or they will
¶306withstand criticism and even be strengthened by it, till they become incorporated in the theory and practice of the community. All this is obviously true of an educated democracy. In a half-civilized community, such as even the most enlightened of modern nations, ideas which do not deserve acceptance may, in fact, be spread by emotional propaganda, and in the same way sound ideas may be defeated. But even in such a community the frequent miscarriage of free expression is no justification for its abolition or partial limitation. The most urgent of all needs is to create an educated democracy, and this can only be done by permitting absolute freedom of expression. The cure for the ills of our present partial freedom of expression is not less freedom but more. The business of gulling the public depends on the fact that only certain kinds of ideas, and not others, can secure full publicity through the Press and the radio. Freedom of expression in our day involves freedom of private and public speech, freedom of the Press, and freedom of broadcasting. At the moment, and as the result of past struggles, we have in this country much freedom of private and even public speech. But we need much more. In respect of the Press our freedom is limited not only by law but also by the will of editors who fear to offend advertisers and readers. With books there is less restriction, since publishers do not depend on advertisers; but here again the government may intervene to suppress what it deems objectionable from the moral or political point of view. The case of broadcasting is, of course, different from the others. Since time and wave- lengths are limited, everything cannot be broadcast. But clearly the ideal is to give fair samples of every shade of opinion, and not only of opinion convenient to the government or the dominant class.
¶307The principle that the law should, in any of these mediums, prevent the expression of ideas which the government considers indecent, immoral or subversive is entirely false. If morality and decency are so insecure that they will really be shaken by free speech, they cannot be deeply founded in the popular will, and are not worth preserving. If a government seeks to limit the expression of seditious views, this must mean either that it doubts whether it can produce sound arguments against them, or that it is conscious of widespread and violent discontent with its rule. In this case, as in all others, it should allow criticism to express itself. Since every government is inevitably tempted to use its power for the suppression of criticism of its actions and of the ‘ideology’ on which it depends, the principle of free expression needs to be supported by some kind of permanent authority independent of the government of the moment, in the sense in which the legal system is supposed to be independent. Such an authority would no doubt be difficult to constitute; but it would not, I believe, be impossible, and it might be very beneficial. It would have to be autonomous, though financed by the State, as is the case with the judicature. Its function would be to detect, and bring to light, and ensure the correction of, all cases in which the principle of free expression had been violated, in whatever medium and by whatever power, whether governmental or private. On the other hand, it would also have the difficult task of exposing all false statements of fact, and ensuring public recantation by their perpetrators. In this connexion it would have to attack all flagrant cases in which misrepresentation had been achieved by suppression of relevant data. Here no doubt it would encounter very great difficulties. In all border-line cases it would content itself with publishing its own version of the facts, without exacting penalties from the offender. In the case of an offending
¶308journal it would have the right to compel the publication of its own version in that journal itself. To be at all effective, such a ‘Publicity Authority’ or ‘Universal Devil’s Advocate’ would have to be very carefully formed. Its officers throughout the country, or throughout the world, would have to constitute a highly trained profession with very strong esprit de corps and loyalty to the ideals of their profession. They should work in co-operation with special local councils of representatives from every section of the community. No doubt the launching of such an Authority would be very precarious, and might prove not merely ineffective but damaging. On the other hand, if the critical early stage could be successfully passed, the Authority would gain public confidence, and might soon become an invaluable instrument for the advancement of enlightenment and true democracy. In this and in many other ways the orthodox machinery of democracy needs to be either supplemented or remodelled. It may be, for instance, that the familiar kind of parliamentary government is too clumsy to serve the purposes of a great modern state. Its failure is clearly responsible for the widespread revulsion from democracy. But another and more satisfactory kind of democratic machinery may be possible. Indeed, such a one is perhaps in the act of being discovered. Though the present Soviet system in Russia and the Corporate State in Italy and Germany are certainly in practice far from democratic, they are democratic in principle, and could be used at any time as instruments of popular will. It is possible that some such hierarchy of elected councils, serving special purposes, and co-ordinated by a supreme council of representatives of the special councils themselves, may form the main democratic machinery of the future. On the other hand, it is possible that, for this country at any rate, it would be sufficient to
¶309improve and speed up the procedure of parliament without seriously altering its constitution. It goes without saying that the makers of the new world will demand the abolition of the sovereignty of national states and the setting up of a world- state. To-day this ideal still seems very remote. Few desire it. Each people fears that a world-government would oppress it more than its own national government, and would tend to obliterate its distinctive culture, and in short neglect all its special interests. No people cares seriously about the welfare of other peoples, and consequently every people fears to surrender any jot of its independence to a world-government which might become the tool of its enemies. But the pressure of circumstances is driving the world steadily, though slowly, toward a world-state. Already national sovereignty is being limited piecemeal by international agreements, boards, conferences for special purposes. Unfortunately such piecemeal limitation cannot be effective so long as there are national armaments. And national armaments will never be abolished till there is a general and insistent will for a world-state. World-unity, and the establishment of the world-state, need not harm the distinctiveness of national cultures, which is the only valuable thing about nationality. For the full life of the world, diversity of local culture is as necessary as diversity of individual minds. But, as with individuals, so with national groups, diversity must always be co-operative diversity, not exclusive diversity, always such as the diverse individuals or groups can appreciate in one another. The ideal is the diversity of intimate friends, not the diversity of strangers. Friends may have very great diversity and yet be able to enrich one another. Strangers may happen to be at heart very similar; and yet if their similarity consists partly in being self-centred, conceited, secretive and suspicious, they will never understand one another. Under a
¶310trusted world-authority, probably of a federal type, national diversity might actually be more, not less, appreciated and cherished. OceanofPDF.com
¶311D. THE EDUCATIONAL REVOLUTION MILITARISTIC NATIONALISM HAS its roots in the two great causes of all our present troubles, namely bad economic organization and bad education. These two causes support one another. Bad economic organization is, of course, an expression of economic individualism, which was brought about by the complex and far-reaching changes of the last few centuries. But also, in our own day, economic individualism and militant nationalism are driven into the minds of men by bad education. Bad education has two causes. One cause is the fact that the actual form of education is an expression, in the last resort, of the unconscious assumptions of the economic masters, who cherish material power and put their faith in economic individualism and economic nationalism. The other cause of bad education is the fact that, owing to our bad economic system, the great majority of individuals have to become wage-slaves, and consequently have no use for any kind of education but that which will help them to earn good wages. It is impossible to change education radically without changing the economic system, without wresting power from the economic masters who control education, and without abolishing the whole system of wage- slavery. Even if violent revolution could achieve this end, it alone could not sufficiently change the spirit of education. It might no doubt abolish the institutions which favour economic individualism, but the faith in material power, and the limitations of the mechanic’s mentality, would remain.
¶312Without a profound change in education, not only in schools and colleges, but in homes, and also in all the influences which mould the minds of adults themselves, there is no hope whatever of founding the new world, or even the purely economic system of the new world. Economic causes direct the course of history, but they work through the operation of thought and propaganda. The only way in which, in our day, a better economic system can be devised is by the deliberation of original minds. The only way in which it can be established is by creating a widespread will for it; and this is only to be done by propaganda, which must consist of reasonable persuasion and emotional appeal. The educational principles of a community are very deeply influenced by the economic conditions of the community. But an economic system which is collapsing produces the need not only for a new economic system but also for new educational principles suited to that system. And these will not arise simply by automatic action; they must be worked out by thought in relation to changing circumstances, and spread by propaganda. But such propaganda will be entirely ineffective unless at the same time steps are taken actually to change the economic system of the world. It is easy to see the main features of the educational policy which the makers of the new world must advocate. It is very difficult to persuade the world to adopt this policy. These fundamental educational principles, which seem obvious to some men and fantastic to others, may be stated as follows. The supreme aim of education should be to develop to the full the capacity for awakened personality in each member of the community. This involves developing him as a healthy animal, and as an intelligent and imaginative human being, at once courageously independent in thought, and in action constantly loyal to the world-aim. He must be inspired with a passion to come face to face with reality, however formidable it may prove,
¶313and to adjust appropriately thereto all his desires, all his acts, the whole course of his life. Education, in the fullest sense, should be regarded as the most important of all kinds of work in the world-community after the provision of the necessities of bodily life. Indeed, there is a sense in which education is more important even than agriculture and industry. A well-educated world will be able to satisfy its bodily needs; but a badly educated world, however well equipped for industry and agriculture, will fall into class strife and nationalistic strife. And the greater its power, the more will it torture itself. No profession should be more honoured or more carefully fostered than the teaching profession. For on the teachers, of all kinds, depends the intellectual and moral calibre of the world population. And on this depends everything. The profession must therefore be recruited only from individuals of the finest quality who have also the special gift of the teacher. These must be attracted to the profession, and not, as at present, driven into less important but more honoured or better-paid work, such as industry or law or medicine. Since the education of future citizens is so overwhelmingly important, no expense should be grudged. The vast sums now spent on armaments might all be transferred to education. The sanity of a community may be roughly measured by the proportion of its income which it assigns to genuine education. By genuine education I mean not merely vocational training, but education for the development of personality. Premises should be large and well equipped. Classes should be very small. Teaching should be based on minute psychological and physiological research. Every child in the world should have access to a school where he will be dealt with by highly trained teachers using the most efficient apparatus. Everything must be done to make the young people of the world
¶314realize that the world-community regards them as its most precious possession, and that they themselves have a supreme duty to develop their powers for the glory of the community. Every child, before leaving school, should be subjected to very careful study by teachers, psychologists and physiologists, so that his particular powers may be ascertained, and he may be advised as to what kind of career would best suit him. At the same time he should be given accurate information as to the actual openings in the life of the world for his particular powers. The control of the educational system of the world must be with the educators themselves, subject to the final control of the world-government. It must not lie with wealthy patrons, or fumbling city councils, or religious societies, or church dignitaries, or trade unions. Only the educators can know what is desirable in education. And since education is not merely a means but, in a manner, the supreme purpose of the world-community, the educators should be given greater autonomy than any other profession. Since in early childhood the mind is given a set or direction which will last till death, the education of young children, whether by parents or others, will have to be very carefully supervised. Bad homes make bad children, and bad citizens of the world. All education should have a twofold aim, namely to fit the individual for his work in the world, and to make the most of him as a personality. From the point of view of the individual himself, and equally from the point of view of the world, both these aims are necessary. For his own well-being he must have work, and also he must become as alive a personality as possible. For the world’s sake also he must have work; and that he may be an intelligent and responsible citizen, he must develop his personality. If people are not properly trained for their work, they will be incompetent, and the world will suffer. If they are not helped to develop all their capacities,
¶315and to be interested in all the many sides of the world’s living, and to appreciate and cherish the world-aim, they will be a danger to the world. Hitherto, such education as has been given has been essentially education for work and for social obedience. Henceforth, owing to the influence of economic change, education may and, indeed, must be dominated by the need to equip all men for the fullest possible use of their leisure, and the development of their personalities. Some still maintain that only a few should be allowed to grow into full personality, and that the masses should be trained merely to be docile and efficient slaves with as little high-grade capacity as possible. But the aim which the makers of the new world hold in view is that all ‘soul-destroying’ drudgery may be performed by machines. Even in our day all human beings should be educated to be true citizens of the world, understanding the general pattern of the world’s life, and accepting gladly the world-aim. In schools and colleges, though much time must necessarily be given to training young people for their work, the main guiding principle should be to develop them as personalities and help them to become not merely docile but independent, intelligent and responsible citizens of the world. The disorder of the modern world is not due to lack of vocational training, but to lack of true education. The first and the last aim of true education is to help the future citizens of the world to experience vividly, zestfully, in many spheres, to think about their experience honestly and accurately, and to will sanely, distinguishing between less important and more important ends. The makers of the new world will therefore clamour for an educational system such that in all schools and colleges the whole curriculum will be arranged so as to broaden and deepen experience. The future citizens must be helped to have precise and zestful sense-perceptions, and a vigorous
¶316bodily life. They must live intensely in the present moment. But also they must keep a firm hold on the past, and look far forward into the future. And above all they must become fearless thinkers, receptive and also critical, critical both of themselves and of others. The whole of education in home and school and college must be inspired and controlled by the world-aim. The child and the young man and woman must be helped to wake into understanding and devotion to the great human enterprise. They must come to feel that they are entering into a great heritage which is not merely national but human; and that, with whatever power they can discover in themselves, they must live to enrich that heritage, advance that enterprise. Both vocational training and general education should be quickened by this supreme idea. It is often said that propaganda should be eliminated from education. This is true in one sense but false in another. It is both impossible and undesirable to exclude from the educational system of the community the fundamental assumptions or principles (often unconscious) on which the community’s whole social policy depends. In practice all educational systems are inevitably given a bias, subtle or obvious. It is dishonest to pretend that a bias is not given when in fact it is. Also it would be folly to entrust the education of future citizens to persons definitely out of sympathy with the basic assumptions of the community. This contention needs to be carefully qualified. It is certainly the right policy to put all points of view forward with equal frankness, and to have them expressed by persons who sincerely and even passionately believe in them. No views on any subject whatever should be suppressed. Pupils must be urged to use their own intelligence and to judge for themselves. But two extremely important facts have to be taken into account. The first is that opinion is formed very largely by emotional appeal, and not merely by
¶317reason. The second important fact is this. The less awakened, less distinctively human attitude or opinion is apt to be much easier to adopt than the more awakened. The one arises out of the simpler and more firmly established mental reactions, the other demands a certain mental and spiritual strain. Consequently, it is very important to see that, though barbaric views are allowed full expression, pupils are definitely helped, both intellectually and emotionally, to attain the more civilized, more awakened view. But though in this limited sense it is desirable to give education a bias toward the most awakened mentality possible to the community, it is extremely important also to see that the young are not simply indoctrinated with a certain detailed set of theories and arguments, even the right ones, and prevented from having access to others. This danger may be avoided by insisting, in season and out of season, that the first duty of all teachers is to instil in their pupils an indefatigable will to be intellectually independent, and to do justice to every point of view, and to criticize intelligently and fearlessly everything that is put before them, even the most sacred principles of the community. Such are the general principles of a sound educational policy. This is not the place to discuss the application of these principles in detail. One or two outstanding points, however, should be mentioned. In order that national illusions may be abolished, the history text-books of each nation should be supervised by a committee of the historians of the world. Where agreement is impossible, opposed versions must be given. History should be so taught as to show the growing economic interdependence of the world, and the cultural unity which underlies all cultural differences. It should be made clear that the differences between the peoples are due far more to traditional upbringing than to innate
¶318characteristics. The future citizen must discover that each people is, or should be, enriched by every other people, not only economically by trade, but culturally by the interchange of ideas between peoples which, though fundamentally in accord, are also arrestingly diverse. Provision should be made for the young to travel in foreign countries as much as possible so that they may begin to appreciate to some extent the style of life and thought, the language and literature and art, of foreign peoples. This intercourse of the young of all peoples might be very greatly helped by broadcasting and by the cinema. Wars may be caused in part by the cupidity of powerful individuals, but its main cause is fear in the minds of the populace, fear of the supposedly alien mentality of foreign peoples. This fear is rooted in ignorance. The more we foster intercourse between the young of the various nations, the more mutual understanding will there be, and therefore the less fear and the less possibility of war. If the young are to appreciate foreign cultures, they must begin by appreciating their own. And in any case this is one of the main purposes of education. All those who have the necessary modicum of intelligence and sensibility must be enticed into certain regions of contemporary and past literature. But the makers of the new world will urge that literature should not be propounded as a body of sacred texts to be saluted by insincere gestures of veneration. It should be used as grist for the exercise of intelligence and discrimination, as a means of insight into human personality, and of exploration into the subtler characteristics of all that men experience. Literature must also be used to elicit aesthetic appreciation. But music and the plastic arts should be no less encouraged. Some hold that art is to be appreciated only by a few, and that the introduction of art into general education is useless, and likely to lead to insincerity and cant. No doubt the
¶319finer kinds of aesthetic experience are only for a few; but with proper treatment many are capable of this most awakening experience at least to some extent. And not only for their own sakes, but for the sanity of the community, it is extremely important that the artistic point of view should be fostered. This is, indeed, particularly important because science must inevitably play so large a part in modern education. The young human being must somehow be helped both to feel and to see intellectually the limitations of the contemporary scientific attitude. He must be led to regard science neither simply as a means to power for power’s sake, nor as absolute truth, but as a first sketch of a single aspect of the universe, and as a dangerous technique, which ought to be a powerful instrument for the making of the new world. He should, of course, be given an account of the world as it is tentatively revealed by science, of the vastness and intricacy of the physical universe, and of the story of the evolution of life on the earth. He must be helped to see the whole adventure of man as a brief, precarious, but glorious, movement in that longer story. If education all over the world were carried out strictly according to these principles, the mentality of the whole world would be profoundly changed within half a century. Or rather, this would happen only if, along with educational reform, we could accomplish an equally radical economic reform. However well educated the young might be, if, when they went out into the world, they found that society would not make use of them, and would not guarantee them the means for fullness of life, their sense of frustration would poison them. In rage and indignation they would condemn society, and be tempted to listen to any demagogue who promised to lead them into a new world by merely refurbishing or merely destroying the old one. OceanofPDF.com
¶320XV. THE WILL FOR CHANGE HOW IS THE present world-population, which consists mostly of minds poisoned by economic disorder and bad education, to be brought to will the new world? An increasing number of the working class demand far- reaching social change; but, very naturally, most of them are concerned almost entirely with the economic side of revolution. The educational side is for most of them subsidiary. Of the dominant class only a few seriously desire either economic or educational revolution. Somehow or other the makers of the new world have to persuade the young adults of all the peoples to demand not only economic but also educational changes of the most far-reaching kind. In the present state of the world it does, indeed, seem hopeless to expect the young to demand anything of the sort. Movements of reaction are becoming stronger every day. The peoples are inclining more and more to demagogues and tyrants, who have no conception of the world-aim, and maintain their power by appeals to primitive fear and hate, and to the mob’s passion for hero-worship and tribal assertiveness. The policy of the victorious nations since the War is having the results which it was bound to have. The great opportunity of civilization was missed; and now, in spite of our much-advertised trade-recovery, Europe, nay the world, seems to be taking the first step toward barbarism. Yet there is hope. There are still in every country some who have not been duped by demagogues, and a few who have definitely given their allegiance to the world-aim.
¶321As the situation grows more desperate, these few are coming to realize that they must take their allegiance much more seriously than they have done hitherto. Their main task is to fire men’s imagination by a well- thought-out policy and by effective propaganda. Whenever possible, also, they must capture the actual social machinery, and direct it for the making of the new world. Some of them must find their way into parliaments and city councils. Some must work through trade unions, others through associations of employers. Some must join in the great task of revitalizing education by permeating and capturing all kinds of education authorities. All must join to attack and transform, and use for their own ends, that most irresponsible and potent influence, the commercial press, which at present does so much to keep men enslaved to their baser passions. They must also seek, by one means or another, to gain access to the microphone, so that the eminently respectable ether may at last be forced to resound with their seditious doctrines. All this the makers of the new world must do. By all possible methods they must make a bold and vivid appeal to the imagination of the peoples. They must seek to become living examples of devotion to the greatest of all causes, the making of the new world. Sometimes, and perhaps increasingly often, they will have to bear witness in the most effective way of all, by martyrdom. For a short time after the War it seemed almost as though the new world might come into being easily, by the general will of the war-racked peoples, and without need of martyrs. But since then everything has changed. Through the revived nationalism of the same peoples and the folly of their rulers the great opportunity was missed. And as a result men are losing faith in pacifism and world-unity and all the principles which they used to applaud but have never yet put into practice.
¶322But the blackness of the outlook may help to waken a new spirit. There is a real chance that, if those who care for the true cause of humanity can behave to-day with intelligence and courage, they may yet light a fire such as has never before kindled mankind. They will not succeed unless they can first increase a hundred-fold the fire in their own hearts. How is this to be done? By self-discipline and meditation they must strengthen their belief in their cause. They must let it take complete possession of their minds, so that it becomes for them the all- absorbing topic, so that all lesser interests subordinate themselves to it. To serve in the making of the new world must be for them not a reluctant duty but the great passion of their lives. But, lest they should become narrow fanatics, they must strive as far as possible to fulfil themselves splendidly both in body and in mind, so as to become not only effective instruments for the creation of the new world but also examples of ample personality and generous citizenship. For the cause which they must serve, unlike so many other causes, is one that cannot be served well by fanatics but only by men of broad experience and understanding and sympathy. Yet they must consecrate themselves absolutely to the cause. If they climb mountains or compose music, it must be to the glory of the new world. If they fall in love, it must be to the glory of the new world. Everything that they do, everything great and small, public and private, they must consecrate to the new world. For mutual strengthening they must get together and cling together. Of many nations, they must yet recognize one another as one tribe, one chosen people, though scattered among all the peoples. Diverse in language, tastes, customs, even in ideas, they must yet hold together in virtue of the single supreme idea which they all serve. Of many social classes and occupations,
¶323they must transcend these limitations; but also they must preserve and use any special capacity which comes from class or occupation. Thus their thought, their breadth of understanding and depth of purpose, may perhaps come largely from those of them who are ‘intellectuals’; but their drive, their passion, their consecration, will come from those who are of the people, and are not unused to desperate remedies. They must get together; but they must none of them lose their individuality, their personal uniqueness. They must not sink to become mere mindless echoes of one another, or of a new herd-voice. If they do, they will go the way of so many other revolutionary movements. They will become slaves to their own dogma. Instead they must each one keep alive, in the roots of his own unique individual being, and test all things by the touchstone of his own most awakened reaction. The new world must not, of course, be a world of little hard, disconnected individualists; but neither must it be a world of mindless herd- mimics. It must be a world of real persons. Each must move forward, so to speak, upon his own feet, though shoulder to shoulder with his fellows. Each must contribute his own reality to the world; and at the same time each must be enriched and strengthened by his fellows, so that all together form a true community. And since this is what the new world is to be, the pioneers of that new world must themselves exemplify it in their own lives; else they cannot possibly produce it. In short, if they are to achieve their aim, they must form themselves into a very special kind of party or order, made up of very diverse persons, each one a vital self, but all united by the supreme world- aim. In some ways this order must be like the early Christian Church; for its purpose will be at bottom religious, a unity of vital individuals bound together by their deepest experience. In some ways it will be like the
¶324Bolshevik party of Russia in its earlier phase; for its aim will be revolutionary, anticapitalist and in one sense anti-religious. It will strive to bring about some kind of effective economic communism, and to free the world from the dead hands of big business and of the churches. In some ways it will even be like the Fascist party of Italy and the ‘Nazi’ party of Germany, in so far as these depend on youth and seek to revitalize society with a new devotion and a new protest against the mechanic’s mentality, if this devotion and this loyalty are indeed factors in the Fascist and Nazi movements. In many ways, too, it will be like Mr. Wells’s Open Conspiracy, for it will appeal to the great technicians of the world to bring their skill and their organizations to the service of the world-aim. But they must come to it not only to manage, not even only to serve, but also to waken those sides of their being which have lain dormant, and thereby to discover that the world-aim includes much which lies beyond the range of the mechanic’s mentality even at its most generous best. At bottom the party of the new world must at all cost be both revolutionary and in a special sense religious. In the present state of the world it would be foolish to hold at all confidently that such a movement as I have described will actually occur, still more foolish to feel hopeful that it will triumph. But there is a chance that it may do so. The time is ripe for such a reawakening. The Western peoples have suffered grave distresses and bitter disillusionment. They are beginning to be terrified at their own folly and baseness. They are longing for a new way of life, and are feeling their way toward it. Perhaps in fifty years’ time men will look back on our day as to the blackness before the dawn. It is not impossible that within a few years we shall see the spontaneous fire of the new life kindled in a thousand regions and spreading in every direction. It is not impossible that the human
¶325race is now about to solve triumphantly one of the greatest problems of its whole career; that it is about to pass at one stride out of the tentative, disorderly, blind, half-civilization, of the last ten thousand years into full civilization, consciously directed toward the true world-aim. It is not impossible. But let us not for a moment deceive ourselves into believing it probable. What seems probable is decline and widespread misery, or at best an age of confusion, of prolonged conflict between the old order and the new hope; and then at last, centuries hence, the dawn. Sooner or later man surely must begin to come into his own. Whether it is later or sooner depends very largely on the young of to-day. OceanofPDF.com