Part 16

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

Similarly, from what we have already said about Political Economy, it is obvious that satisfactory results in that science must depend immensely on the high degree of social instinct and feeling with which the student approaches it, and on the thoroughness of his acquaintance with the _actual life_ of a people; and that the development of these factors is fully as important a part of the science as that which consists in the logical ordering and arrangement of the material obtained.

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

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

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

But I can say no more. I have dragged you by the neck, as it were, through a recondite and difficult subject; and even so I do not feel that I have by any means done justice to it. But it is possible, perhaps, that I have cast the germ of an idea among you, which, if you think over it at leisure, may develop into something of value.

FOOTNOTES:

[40] Afterwards reprinted in a modified form, as "Modern Science--a Criticism," in the first edition (1889) of the present book.

[41] Elisée Reclus, in his remarkable paper, _La Grande Famille_, points out the wide-reaching _Friendship_, and free alliance for various purposes, of primitive man with the animals, existing long before the so-called "domestication" of the latter. See _Humane Review_, January, 1906.

THE NEW MORALITY

The tendency of the Evolution Theory, as it penetrates human thought, is to rub out lines--the old lines of formal classification. We no longer now put in a class apart those animals which have horns or cloven hooves, because we find that continuous descent and close kinship weave relations which are not bounded by horns or hooves. And, for a not dissimilar reason, modern thought, based on the theory of evolution, is tending to rub out the hard and fast lines between moral Right and Wrong--the old formal classifications of _actions_ as some in their nature good, and some in their nature bad.

The Eastern, or at least Indian, thought and religion rubbed out these lines long ago. Its philosophy indeed was founded on a theory of Evolution--the continuous evolution or emanation of the Many from the One. It could not therefore regard any _class_ of beings or creatures as essentially bad, or any _class_ of actions as essentially wrong, since all sprang from a common Root. The only essential evil was ignorance (_avidya_)--that is, the fact of the being or creature not knowing or perceiving its emanation from, or kinship with, the One--and of course any action done under this condition of _avidya_, however outwardly correct, was essentially wrong; while on the other hand _all_ actions done by beings fully realising and conscious of their union with the One were necessarily right.

Of this attitude towards Right and Wrong there are abundant instances in the Upanishads. The choice of the path does not lie _between_ Good and Bad, as in the _Pilgrim's Progress_, but it lies above and in a region transcending them both. "By the serenity of his thoughts a man blots out _all_ actions, whether good or bad."[42] "He does not distress himself with the thought, Why did I not do what is good? Why did I do what is bad?"[43] All religions indeed, by the very fact of their being religions, have indicated a sphere above morality, to which their followers shall and must aspire. What else is St. Paul's reiterated charge to escape from the dominion of sin and law, into the glorious liberty of the children of God? And in all ages the great mystics--those who stand near the fountain-sources of evolution and emanation--have seen and said the same. Says Spinoza:--"With regard to good and evil, these terms indicate nothing positive in things considered in themselves, nor are they anything else than modes of thought, or notions which we form from _the comparison of one thing with another_. For one and the same thing may at the same time be both good and evil, or indifferent."[44]

Here indeed, in these pregnant words, we come upon the very root of the matter. A thing, an action, may be called good or bad in respect to a certain purpose or object; but in itself, No. Wine may be good for the encouragement of sociability, but may be bad for the liver. The Sabbath-day may be pronounced a beneficial institution from some points of view, but not from others. A scrupulous respect for private property may certainly be a help to settled social life; but the practice of thieving--as recommended by Plato--may be very useful to check the lust of private riches. To speak of wine as in its nature good or bad is manifestly absurd; and the same of a pious respect for private property or the Sabbath-day. These things are good under certain conditions or for certain purposes, and bad under other conditions or for other purposes. But of course it belongs and goes with the brute externalising tendency of the mind, to stereotype the actual material thing--which should be only the vehicle of the spirit--and give _it_ a character and a cult as good or bad. The Sabbath ceases to be made for man, and man is made for the Sabbath. Law, Custom, Pharisaism, and Self-righteousness spring up and usurp the sphere of morality, and all the histories of savage and civilised nations, with their endless fetishes and taboos and superstitions and ceremonies, and caste-marks and phylacteries, and petty regulations and proprieties,--including bitter scorn and persecution of those who do not fulfil them,--are but illustrations of this process.

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

It seems strange indeed that so great a man as Tolstoy should have lent himself to this process--to the pinning down of the excellent spirit of Christ (who by the way was man enough to drive the money-changers out of the Temple) to a mere formula, as one might pin a dragon-fly to a labelled card--_Thou shalt not use Violence: thou shalt not Resist!_ And all the while to cleave to a formula only means to admit the evil in some other shape which the formula does not meet--to forswear the stick only means to resort to rebuke and sarcasm in self-defence, which may inflict more pain and a deeper scar, and in some cases more injury, than the stick; or if self-defence in any shape is quite forsworn then that only means to resign and abandon one's place in the world completely.

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

Against these weaknesses of Christianity Nietzsche was a healthy reaction. It was he insisted on the terms "good" and "bad" being restored to their proper use, as terms of relation--"good" for what? "bad" for what? But his reaction against maudlin altruism and non-resistance led him towards a pitfall in the opposite direction, towards the erection of the worship of Force almost into a formula, Thou _shalt_ use Violence, thou _shalt_ Resist. His contempt for the feeble and the spooney and the knock-kneed and the humbug is very delightful and entertaining, and, as I say, healthy in the sense of reaction; but one does not get a very clear idea what the strength which Nietzsche glorifies is for, or whither it is going to lead. His blonde beasts and his laughing lions may represent the Will to Power; but Nietzsche seems to have felt, himself, that this latter alone would not suffice, and so he passed on to his discovery or invention of the Beyond-man,--_i.e._ of a childlike being who, without argument, _affirms_ and creates, and before whom institutions and conventions dissolve, as it were of their own accord.[45] This was a stroke of genius; but even so it leaves doubtful what the relation of such Beyond-men to each other may be, and whether, if they have no common source of life, their actions will not utterly cancel and destroy each other.

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

The question arises, What do _we_ need? We are to-day, in this matter, in a somewhat parlous state. The old codes of Morality are moribund; the Ten Commandments command only a very qualified assent; the Christian religion as a real inspiration of practical life and conduct is dead; the social conventions and Mrs. Grundy remain, feebly galling and officious. What are we to do? Are we to bolster up the old codes, in which we have largely ceased to believe, merely in order to have a code?--or are we to let them go?

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

Mr. Gilbert Chesterton, taking up this subject not long ago in a criticism[46] of Mr. Orage's little book on Nietzsche, said that all this talk about "beyond good and evil" was nonsense; that we must have some code; and that in effect, any code, even a bad one, was better than none. And one sees what he means. It is perfectly true, in a sense, that the harness, the shafts, and the blinkers keep a large part of the world on the beaten road and out of the ditch, and that folk are always to be found who, rather than use their higher faculties, will rely on these external guides; but to encourage this kind of salvation by blinkers seems the very reverse of what ought to be done; and one might even ask whether salvation by such means is salvation at all--whether the ditch were not better!

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

And the question is, whether the time has not really come for us to stand up--like sensible men and women--and _do without rules_; whether we cannot trust ourselves at last to throw aside the blinkers. The question is whether we cannot realise that solid and central life which underlies and yet surpasses all rules. For truly, if we cannot do this, our state is pitiable--having ceased to believe in the letter of Morality, and yet unable to find its spirit!

It is here, then, that the New Morality comes in, as more or less clearly understood and expressed by the progressive sections to-day. Modern Socialism, in effect, taking up a position in its way somewhat similar to that of Eastern philosophy, says: Morality in its essence is not a code, but simply the realisation of the Common Life;[47] and that is a thing which is not foreign and alien to humanity, but very germane and natural to it--a thing so natural that without doubt it would be more in evidence than it is, did not the institutions and teachings of Western civilisation tend all along to deny and disguise it. To liberate this instinct of the Common Life, freeing it from hard and cramping rules, and to let it take its own form or forms--grafted on and varied of course by the personal and selective element of Affection and Sympathy--is the hope that lies before the world to-day for the solution of all sorts of moral and social problems.

And the more this position is thought over, the more, I believe, will it commend itself. The sense of organic unity, of the common welfare, the instinct of Humanity, or of general helpfulness, are things which run in all directions through the very fibre of our individual and social life--just as they do through that of the gregarious animals. In a thousand ways: through heredity and the fact that common ancestral blood flows in our veins--though we be only strangers that pass in the street; through psychology, and the similarity of structure and concatenation in our minds; through social linkage, and the necessity of each and all to the others' economic welfare; through personal affection and the ties of the heart; and through the mystic and religious sense which, diving deep below personalities, perceives the vast flood of universal being--in these and many other ways does this Common Life compel us to recognise itself as a fact--perhaps the most fundamental fact of existence.

To teach this simple foundational fact and what flows from it to every child--not only as a theory, but as a practical habit and inspiration of conduct--is not really difficult, but easy. Children, having this sense woven into their very being, grow up in the spirit and practical habitude of it, and from the beginning possess the inspiration of what we call Morality--far more effectually indeed than copy-book maxims can provide. Respect for truth, consideration towards parents and elders, respect for the reasonable properties, dignities, conveniences of others, as well as for one's own needs and dignities, become perfectly natural and habitual. And that this is no mere hypothesis the example of Japan has lately shown where every young thing is brought up so far drenched in the sentiment of community that to give one's life for one's country is looked upon as a privilege.[48] The general lines, I say, of morality would be secure, and much more secure than they now are, if we could only bring the children up in an educational and practical atmosphere of that solidarity which as a matter of fact is demanded to-day by socialism and the economic movement generally.

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

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

I say equally sacred: because there has been a tendency (no doubt due to certain causes) to look upon personal affection, in its various phases from slight inclinations of sympathy to the stronger compulsions of passion, as something rather dubious in character, at best an amiable weakness not to be encouraged. Tolstoy, in one of his writings, figures the case of a little household in days of famine not really having bread enough for their own wants. Then a stranger child comes to the door and pleads for food. Tolstoy suggests that the mother ought to take the scanty crust from her own child to feed the stranger withal, or at least to share the food equally between the two children. But such a conclusion seems to me doubtful.

Whatever "ought" may mean in such a connexion, we know pretty well that such never _will_ be the rule of human life, we may almost say never can be; perhaps we should be equally justified in saying, never "ought" to be. For obviously there must be preferences, selections. Our affections, our affinities, our sympathies, our passions, are not given us for nothing. It is not for nothing that every individual person, every tree, every animal has a _shape_, a shape of its own. If it were not so the world would be infinitely, inconceivably, dull. Yet to ask that a mother should in all cases treat strange children exactly the same as her own, that a man from the oceanic multitude should single out no special or privileged friends, but should love all alike, is to ask that these folk in their mental and moral nature should become as jellyfish--of no distinct shape or satisfaction to themselves or any one else. Profound and indispensable as is the Law of Equality--the law, namely, that there is a region within all beings where they touch to a common and equal life--the other law, that of Individual predilection, is equally indispensable. Try to reduce all to the one motive of the general interest, and you might have a perfect morality, but a morality woodeny, hard and dull, without form and feature. Try to dispense with this, and to found society on individual affection and love, and on individual initiative, without morals, and you would have a flighty, unstable thing, without consistency or backbone.

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

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