Part 14

If, as Professor Huxley maintains, the test of progress is approximation to the ideal, then one condition of progress is that man shall be conscious, to whatever extent is necessary for the purpose, of the ideal, shall feel that the ideal of love, tenderness, compassion, justice, truth, beauty, etc., is a thing for him to strive for, an end for him to attain. To the chosen few--the great artists, the moral or religious reformer--a sense of the ideal is dealt in a larger measure than to the rest of men. By the chosen few it is manifested to the many. But it does not become the cause of progress, unless it leavens the mass, unless they too are inspired by it to do better and be better. In a word, when, or if, ever the ideal has been manifested in its fulness, it is not a fresh revelation which is necessary for progress, but fresh conviction in us and renewed determination. Indeed, so long as we do not act up to the light that we have, even an imperfect revelation of the ideal may serve for imperfect beings.

So far, then, as the genius in art or science, or the reformer in religion or morals, is the cause of the progress that is made by his school, his disciples, and them that follow after, it is clear that he is the cause and not the product of evolution. It is his works or words which inspire his followers with a fresh sense of the reality of the ideal and a fresh resolve to devote their lives to the pursuit of art or the service of science. But it is only because his perfect work is felt by them, judging for themselves, to realise the ideal that it has this effect on them; and they could not judge it to approach the ideal more closely than anything known to them before, unless they had some surmise, however vague, of the ideal, with which to compare this work, perfect as it seems to them. It is not necessary to suppose that this vague surmise existed, or if it existed that it was attended to, previously: it may have been first called into existence or into notice by the contemplation of the master's work, but its presence, however evoked, is attested by the judgment that his work does come nearest to the ideal. The manifestation of the masterpiece may be the occasion of this fresh revelation of the ideal, but the revelation must be made if the work is to be judged highest and is to inspire the disciple.

It is, however, one thing to have an ideal, and another to live up to it. "To scorn delights and live laborious days" in the search for truth or in single-minded devotion to the cause of art requires some will. Granted that the ideal has been revealed, either to the disciple on the occasion of another's teaching or directly as to the master, for progress there is further required will. It requires an act of will to prefer the ideal, with its laborious days, and to scorn delights; and it requires many acts of will to make any progress. Yet the will to believe and the will to act are the same will. We may, if we choose, define belief as the readiness to act, and take action as the test of belief: if a man in a hurry makes a short cut, _i.e._ goes straight from one point to another rather than round a corner, his action is proof that he believes that a straight line is the shortest distance between two points. From this point of view we may regard the many acts of will which are necessary to progress, _i.e._ movement in the direction of the ideal, as so many reaffirmations of the original act of will by which we affirmed our belief that the ideal was the goal of progress; and if our object is to show that the behaviour of man, so far as he pursues the ideal, can be exhibited as a logical and rational behaviour, we are justified in thus demonstrating that our renewed resolutions to realise the ideal are but the logical consequences of our original will to believe in the ideal as the proper goal of action. Our belief in the ideal is thus shown to be the principle from which our subsequent acts of will can be logically deduced, just as Nature's uniformity can be shown to be the principle from which the conclusions of science logically flow.

But it may be doubted whether this logical order of ideas is the chronological order of events. As a matter of fact, we go through a number of struggles and temptations long before we reflect, if ever we do reflect, upon them in such a way as to see what is the general principle logically implied by our repeated if intermittent resistance to temptation, just as a child acts in a way that for its logical justification would require a formal recognition of the uniformity of Nature, though the infant of two years, or less, does not formulate that principle as a condition precedent of crying for its food or its nurse. Chronologically, then, the will to act seems to precede the will to believe in the uniformity of Nature, and in the case of most human beings is never followed by any fully conscious formulation of the principle on which we act as an abstract principle in which to believe. That fact, however, does not in the least detract from the value which the formulation of the abstract principle has: when formulated it becomes in the hands of science as Ithuriel's spear for the detection of lingering superstitions and confusions of thought--

"for no falsehood can endure Touch of celestial temper, but returns Of force to its own likeness."

At touch of the question, "Does it contradict the uniformity of Nature?" error is seen for what it is, and is exploded sooner thus than in any other way.

The ideal of truth, then, with its "celestial temper," is logically implicit in the earliest acts of will, but chronologically is developed in consciousness later, if indeed and when it reaches that later stage of its evolution from the potential to the actual. The ideals of morality and religion, again, though equally implicit in the acts of will which form their earliest manifestation, are, as a rule, both in the individual and the race, more slowly evolved from the particulars in which they are immersed. The period of their gestation is longer, and results in the birth of a higher organism.

Thus, when we reach the age of reflection, whenever it may come, we wake up to find that we have been acting as though we had beliefs, when, as in our infancy, we could have had no beliefs, and as though we willed our actions, at a time when we can scarcely be said to have had any will in the matter. For years we have been acting as we should have done supposing that we had believed certain things and had willed our action accordingly. When we wake up to this state of things the question is, Are we bound to go on in this way? are we bound now to believe as well as to act as though we believed in God, morality, and Nature's uniformity? Does the fact that our physiological and psychological mechanism has been started--perhaps by Nature's cosmic forces, perhaps by the social environment, certainly not by us--to run in certain grooves, prove either that we ought or that we must continue to run the particular organism we are in charge of on the same lines? The agnostic and the atheist exercise their freedom of will to say No. They claim the right and exercise the power of free choice. The agnostic, further, is fully aware that in choosing to believe the uniformity of Nature his choice is not determined by evidence--it is "a great act of faith," no amount of evidence could justify it, the only evidence anyone can bring to justify his belief in the general abstract principle is the fact that he does believe it in every concrete, particular instance. In a word, he believes it because he chooses to believe it--and that is exactly what is meant by the dictum, which he finds it so hard to understand, that his will is self-determining.

When it comes to the question of morality and religion, the agnostic again exercises his freedom of choice: he wills to believe in the former and not in the latter--the evidence for and against either being equally _nil_. It is not, therefore, the evidence which determines his choice; and he shows that it is not his previous history, not the momentum which his psychological mechanism gained during the period when he had no conscious or no self-conscious control over it, which determines his choice, for in the first place he denies that it ought or must influence him, and next he shows that it does not, by willing differently in the case of the two principles. In both cases his will is equally self-determining, though his will is to believe in the moral principle or ideal and not to believe in the religious.

If we wish either to define progress or to make it, we must choose, arbitrarily or otherwise, some particular goal and say, definitely and decidedly, any movement which being continued in the same straight line leads to that goal is progress, every other movement is regress, being necessarily away from the goal. If we choose, by a great act of faith or otherwise, to say the ideal is the goal, then we have therein a principle both of belief and action: we have a standard by which to test everything offered for judgment, a general principle to apply to every particular case; and we have an object to aim at, a principle to carry out in every act of our lives, an ideal to strive for. But whether we choose the ideal as the goal or something else, our choice is the free act of a self-determining will. Progress, on the human side, is--as indeed is regress--the expression of the free will of human beings, whose choice, though free, is limited to the alternatives offered to them. Those alternatives reduce themselves ultimately to aiming at the ideal or at something else.

What, then, of the environment, of the cosmos, in which man finds himself, in which he has to act and may act so as to advance or not to advance towards the ideal? To begin with, we may distinguish between those forces in the cosmos which man can to some extent control, and those over which he has no control. The former, from this point of view, the point of view of action, are means whereby man secures his ends: his regulation of them effects that adaptation _of_ the environment which, according to Professor Huxley, is essential to ethical progress. Now, as a matter of observed fact, no one doubts that the advance which civilised man has made in controlling the forces of Nature is due to science and to civilised man's devotion to the scientific ideal of truth. Even the savage made what little progress he did make in this direction by acting fitfully and unconsciously, or at the most semi-consciously, on the principle of the uniformity of Nature: the savage was faithful in little things to the scientific ideal--which was revealed to him but dimly--the _savant_ is fully conscious of the principle on which he acts, walks in its light, and strives by example and precept to save his fellow-men from relapsing into the darkness of error and superstition. It is not merely because of the material advantages, the comforts and luxuries, which science indirectly secures to mankind, that the man of science devotes himself to the scientific ideal and seeks to make it universal: it is for the sacred cause of truth. In a word, what at first sight presents itself merely as a principle of the scientific reason, proves, in the conception of those who have spent their lives in endeavouring to seek the scientific ideal and to ensue it, to be a manifestation of the moral reason, to be not merely in harmony with the moral ideal, but to have been its harbinger, making the way straight for it. Belief which implies a violation of the uniformity of Nature is denounced not because it violates a scientific principle, but because it is immoral, a pretence, and a lie. The final cause of science is thus made out to be to subserve the moral ideal, to secure that adaptation of the environment without which ethical progress is impossible. The labour of adapting his environment would have for man as a rational being no sufficient reason if it did not tend to realise his moral ideal. Man may use his science and the power of adapting his environment for other than moral ends; but such use is not, according to this view, progress. In other words, it is not science or the scientific ideal alone which enables us to lay down the line of progress, but science and morality together: one point cannot give us our direction, but the line which connects two points may.

Thus far, then, by taking the environment into consideration, we seem to have introduced no new factor into our conception of progress. It seems that when I wake up from childhood's slumber I find myself surrounded by men who believe that they can do certain things--make rain, send telegraphic messages, etc.; and I am told that if certain assumptions--that there is a God, that Nature is uniform, etc.--be true, then it will be well for me to behave in a certain way. But what if the assumptions be not true? My elders tell me that experience--in the individual, in the race, enlarged by science and the theory of evolution--shows it is quite safe to assume that they are true, at any rate as a provisional hypothesis. Of course, if the future is going to resemble the past, then experience of the past is a good guide to the future: but that is just the question, _is_ the future going to resemble the past? In other words, what attitude am I to assume towards my environment, the cosmos? Am I to assume that it will work, and for countless ages has worked, in such a way as to make it possible for me, with some co-operation on my part, to do things which my elders tell me are desirable and which I feel for myself I should rather like to do?

If I assume that the cosmic power does work thus, in such a way that I can know the truth and do the right, and love the Power that gives me the chance and makes it possible, even for me, so to do, I am only exercising the will to believe in that principle which is logically implied by every act of the scientific or moral life.

It is the common faith of mankind that experience may be trusted; and it is the common experience of mankind that progress is approximation to the ideals of truth, of goodness, and of love. It is not the common experience of mankind that all men or all peoples approximate equally to those ideals. The measure of progress is to be found in the clearness and consistency with which men have carried out in science the principle of the uniformity of Nature, in their dealings with their fellow-men the principles of morality, in their dealings with the supernatural the principle of love.

Science, and especially the theory of evolution, has enormously extended our inferential experience, but it has done so only by accepting the common faith that experience may be trusted, that is to say, that the environment, the cosmos, is trustworthy within our experience of it. When, then, the optimist alleges that the process of evolution has been, on the whole, a course of progress, he is but showing that the common faith in the trustworthiness of the reality in which we move and have our being justifies itself. But he does not show us, nor does science show us, why the real, the cosmos, is trustworthy: he ends by showing that it is trustworthy because he began, like all of us, by trusting it. He is quite right: it is the only way in which to demonstrate that either science, or morality, or religion is trustworthy--by giving our faith, to start with. Only when we are satisfied as to the fact can we profitably inquire the reason; and the reason is to be found only in the nature of the real, as revealed to us in the sum total of our experience, scientific, moral, and religious. But the will to believe that experience and to trust the real which it reveals, is free: if a man will not accept it as trustworthy, there is for him no reason why.

The case is different with the man who does accept the testimony of consciousness as evidence of the reality to which it testifies. For him the one reality is Will, and the ideals of science, morality, and religion are the expressions of that Will. In accepting them as the principles of thought and action he does not learn what is the purpose of evolution, the final cause of the cosmos: he chooses to believe that, by so accepting them and by striving to realise the ideal, he is fulfilling the Divine Will and contributing his share to the realisation of the rational purpose to which, he assumes, the process of evolution is tending.

But in so doing he does not renounce his freedom: his resolution to believe is an exercise of his free will, an act, "a great act," of faith. If carried into effect in his daily life, his resolution, daily renewed and ever free, may in the end become a daily act of love, and then he will understand the reason why the cosmos, or the cosmic power, is trustworthy. Only love of man could have given man, as his ideals, to know the truth and do the right. Only if man's ideals are so given is the cosmos trustworthy--if it is trustworthy. If it is not, then there is no truth to know, no right to do, no inference can be drawn from the past to the future, for the past, even of a minute ago, may be a delusion.

But though the will to believe that the cosmos is untrustworthy cannot in practice be carried out in all its logical (or illogical) conclusions, it can be and is acted on intermittently, and such action is regress. So far as it is carried out, it is the negation of progress; if it could be carried out completely and by all men, there would be an end of progress; science, morality, and religion would be extinguished; evil would triumph over good. The history of evolution shows that, as a matter of fact, such unfaith in the reality of our ideals has been only intermittent; for the course of evolution has been, on the whole, progress. Individual experience shows that there comes a point, soon or late, at which the will, acting freely, refuses to go further with its rejection of morality: there are some things which even a bad man will not do--however oddly they may seem chosen. In theory, in philosophy, there is a point at which the will refuses to go further with its rejection of the common reason, in which all men share: there are some things which even the sceptic refuses to disbelieve, _e.g._ those which are necessary to his conviction that nothing can be believed.

These considerations may serve to confirm us in the belief that progress has been the law of evolution in the past and will increasingly be in the future. They should so confirm us, for they do but carry out, as far as history, individual experience, and imagination can take us, our fundamental faith in the reality of those ideals that are revealed in consciousness to all of us. Belief in the possibility of progress at all carries with it, as its logical postulate, faith in the wisdom and goodness of God. But if wisdom and goodness are the source of all reality, and if the final purpose of evolution is the realisation of the ideal--viz. love of truth, of our fellow-beings, and of God--what are we to say of evil? Is it not real? It is real, in the same sense that our pleasures and pains are real, but not in the same sense that the ideal is real. The real things which our sense-experience reveals to us are real in the sense that they are permanent, independent of us, and self-identical. The same characteristics attach to the realities revealed to us in our moral and spiritual experience. The laws of morality and the goodness of God do not come and go with our fleeting recognitions of them; they are permanent, independent of us, and are ever the same: God's goodness faileth never. The uniformity of Nature is but one expression of the uniformity of the Divine love for man: it is that which makes it possible for man to know the truth and survive in the struggle for existence. But evil is not independent of us men: it exists only so far as we will it to exist. It is not permanent: it comes and goes with our passing acts of will. It is not self-identical, but tends to self-destruction. It is the will to believe nothing, and therefore, as action involves belief, the will to do nothing--that is, to revert to the condition of mere inert matter, as matter is conceived by the materialist to exist.

But though evil be illusive, though it is the fool who says in his own heart, "There is no God," or "Tush! He will not see it," the illusion is voluntary. It is we who deceive or sophisticate ourselves, when we will to believe that this act is not really wrong, or that our peculiar circumstances constitute a special, a highly special exception, on this occasion only, to the rules for ordinary occasions and ordinary men. And though the illusion is subjective, _i.e._ is not generally shared by the onlookers, and is consciously subjective (for we avoid onlookers, because they would spoil the illusion), nevertheless, subjective though it be, it is a fact in your particular subjective history, and a damning fact. If the evil that you will is confined in its range to your will, and if its existence can only be recreated by a fresh act of will in you or another, that is an argument to show that there is mercy in the scheme of things, but it does not prove that you incur no responsibility in offering yourself or another the example and the opportunity of doing wrong. We are not, and, if the will be free, we cannot be responsible for what others do; but we are responsible for what we do--for evil, if it be evil; for good, if we----but there is no pressing need to consider that contingency.

The question underlying the previous paragraph is that of our social environment and its effects. We are apt to forget that _we_ are the social environment. If we bear the fact in mind, we shall perhaps be less inclined to seek the origin of all our misdeeds outside ourselves: we cannot shift the burden of our own wrong-doing on to the shoulders of society by any process which does not bring back at least an equivalent burden. The fact is that neither can we cause others, nor can others cause us to do evil. What we can do is to supply them with an opportunity, which, but for our action, would not indeed have existed, but which also, so far from necessitating evil action on their part, may by their free will be made the occasion for a victory over wrong. The fact, however, that they alone are responsible for their evil-doing prevents us from taking any credit for their good deeds. It is for our own acts of will that we are responsible, and it is by willing evil that we become evil. We create evil, consciously, by every wrong act of will that we perform, and then we talk of the origin of evil as a mystery, so thoroughly do we sophisticate ourselves! Why should there be evil? Why, indeed? There is no reason, no rational answer can be given, because evil is irrational--it is the will to reject the common reason or common sense or faith of mankind, in this detail or that. It is the arbitrary element, self-will, and if it could be eliminated we should have a uniformity of human nature and of human love corresponding to the uniformity of the Divine. Progress is the process of its elimination.