CHAPTER I

SOLUTIONS AND DISSOLUTIONS

I

The Problem

And so we come through our five episodes in the history of the reconstructive mind, and find ourselves in the bewildering present, comfortably seated, let us say, in the great reading room of our Columbia Library. An attendant liberates us from the maze of “Nietzsche’s Works” lying about us, and returns presently with a stack of thirty books purporting to give the latest developments in the field of social study and research. We are soon lost in their graphs and statistics, their records and results; gradually we come to feel beneath these dead facts the lives they would reveal; and as we read we see a picture.

* * * * *

It is the picture of one life. We see it beginning helplessly in the arms of the factory physician; it is only after some violence that it consents to breathe,--as if it hesitates to enter upon its adventure. It has a touch of consumption but is otherwise a fair enough baby, says the factory physician. It will do,--not saying for what or whom. Luckily, it is a boy, and will be able to work soon. He does; at the age of nine he becomes a newsboy; he is up at five in the morning and peddles news till eight; at nine he gets to school, fagged out but restless; he gives trouble; cannot memorize quickly enough, nor sit still long enough; plays truant, loving the hard lessons of the street; school over, he has a half-hour of play, but must then travel his news route till six; after supper he has no taste for study; if he cannot go down into the street, he will go to bed. At fourteen, hating the school where he is beaten or scolded daily, he connives with his parents at certain falsehoods which secure his premature entrance into the factory. He works hard, and for a time happily enough; there is more freedom here than in the school. He discovers sex, passes through the usual chapter of accidents, and finally achieves manhood in the form of a sexual disease. He falls in love several times, and out as many times but one; he marries, shares his disease with his wife, and begets ten children,--nearly all of them feeble, and two of them blind; he does not want so many children, but the priest has told him that religion commands it. He works harder to support them, but his health is giving way, and life becomes a heavy burden to him. The factory installs scientific management, and he finds himself performing the same operation every ten seconds from seven to twelve and from one to six;--some three thousand times a day; he protests, but is told that science commands it. He joins a union, and goes out on strike; his family suffer severely, one of the children dying of malnutrition; he wins a wage-increase of five per cent; his landlord raises his rent, and a month later his wife informs him that the prices of food and clothing have gone up six per cent. His country goes to war about a piece of territory he has never heard of; his one fairly strong boy rushes off to the defence of the colors, returns (age twenty) with one leg and almost an arm, and sits in the house smoking, drinking, and dribbling in repetitious semi-torpor his memories of battle. Then comes street-corner talk of socialism, capitalism, and other things new and therefore hard to understand; a glimmer of hope, a cloud of doubt, then resignation. Four of the children die before they are twenty; two others become consumptive weaklings. The father is sent away from the factory because he is too old and feeble; he finds work in a saloon; drink helps him to slip down; he steals a bracelet from the factory-owner’s kept woman, is arrested, tries to hang himself, but is discovered when half dead, and is restored to life against his will. He serves his sentence, returns to his family, and becomes a beggar. He dies of exposure and disease, and his widow is supported by two of his daughters, who have become successful prostitutes.

It is the picture of one life. And as you look at it you see beyond it the hundred thousand lives of which it is one; you see this suffering and meaninglessness as but one hundredth part of a thousandth part of the meaningless suffering of men; you hear the angry cries of the rebellious young, the drunken laughter of the older ones who have no more rebellion in them, the quiet weeping of the mothers of many children. Around you here you see the happy faces of young students, eloquent of comfortable homes; at your elbow a gentleman of family is writing a book on the optimism of Robert Browning. And then suddenly, beneath this world of leisure and learning, you feel the supporting brawn of the wearied workers; you vision the very pillars of this vast edifice held up painfully, hour after hour, on the backs of a million sweating men; your leisure is their labor, your learning is paid for by their ignorance, your luxury is their toil.

For a moment the great building seems to tremble, as if rebellion stirred beneath and upheaval was upon the world. Then it is still once more, and you and I are here with our thirty books.

One feels guilty of sentiment here (after reading Nietzsche!), and hurries back to the sober features of those crowded volumes. Here, in cold scientific statement, is our social problem: here are volumes biological on heredity, eugenics, dietetics, and disease; volumes sociological on marriage, prostitution, the family, the position of woman, contraception and the control of population; volumes psychological on education, criminology, and the replacement of supernatural by social religion; volumes economic on private property, poverty, child labor, industrial methods, arbitration, minimum wage, trusts, free trade, immigration, prohibition, war; volumes political on individualism and communism, anarchism and socialism, single tax, Darwinism and politics, democracy and aristocracy, patriotism, imperialism, electoral and administrative methods; methodological volumes on trade-unions and craft-unions, “direct action” and “political action,” violence and non-resistance, revolution and reform. It is a discouraging maze; we plunge into it almost hopelessly. Several of these authors have schemes for taking the social machine apart, and a few even have schemes for putting it together again; hardly one of them remembers the old warning that this machine must be kept going while it is being repaired. And each of these solutions, as its author never suspects, is but an added problem.

Let us listen to these men for a while, let us follow them for a space, and see where they bring us out. They may not bring us out at all; but perhaps that is just what we need to see.

II

“Solutions”

1

_Feminism_

And first, with due propriety, let us listen to the case of woman _vs._ the _status quo_. We imagine the argument as put by a studious and apparently harmless young lady. She begins gently and proceeds _crescendo_.

“The case for woman is quite simple; as simple as the case for democracy. We are human beings, we are governed, we are taxed; and we believe that just government implies the consent of the governed.

“We might have been content with the old life, had you masters of the world been content to leave us the old life. But you would not. Your system of industry has made the position of most young men so hopeless and insecure that they are year by year putting back the age of marriage. You have forced us out of our homes into your factories; and you have used us as a means of making still harder the competition for employment among the men. Your advocates speak of the sacredness of the home; and meanwhile you have dragged 5,000,000 English women out of their homes to be the slaves of your deadening machines.[291] You exalt marriage; and in this country one woman out of every ten is unmarried, and one out of every twenty married women works in your unclean shops. The vile cities born of your factory-system have made life so hard for us, temptations so frequent, vice so attractive and convenient, that we cannot grow up among you without suffering some indelible taint.

“Some of us go into your factories because we dread marriage, and some of us marry because we dread your factories. But there is not much to choose between them. If we marry we become machines for supplying another generation of workers and soldiers; and if we talk of birth-control you arrest us. As if we had no right to all that science has discovered! And the horror of it is that while you forbid us to learn how to protect ourselves and our children from the evils of large families, you yourselves buy this knowledge from your physicians and use it; and one of your societies for the prevention of birth-control has been shown to consist of members with an average of 1.5 children per family.[292] Your physicians meet in learned assemblies and vote in favor of maintaining the law which forbids the spread of this information; and then we find that physicians have the smallest average family in the community.[293] One must be a liar and a thief to fit comfortably into this civilization which you ask us to defend.

“But we are resolved to get this information; and all your laws to prevent us will only lessen our respect for law. We will not any longer bring children into the world unless we have some reasonable hope of giving them a decent life. And not only that. We shall end, too, the hypocrisies of marriage. If you will have monogamy you may have it; but if you continue merely to pretend monogamy we shall find a way of regaining our independence. We shall not rest until we have freed ourselves from the sting of your generosity; until our bread comes not from your hand in kindness but from the state or our employers in recognition of our work. Then we shall be free to leave you, and you free to leave us, as we were free to take one another at the beginning,--so far, alas! as the categorical imperative of love left us free. And our children will not suffer; better for them that they see us part than that they live with us in the midst of hypocrisy and secret war.

“Because we want this freedom--to stay or to go--this freedom to know and control the vital factors of our lives, therefore we demand equal suffrage. It is but a little thing, a mere beginning; and beware how you betray your secrets in your efforts to bar us from this beginning. Are you afraid to share with us the power of the ballot? Do you confess so openly that you wish to command us without our consent, that you wish to use us for your secret ends? You dare not fight fair and in the open? Is the ballot a weapon which you use on us and will not let us use on you? It is so you conceive citizenship! Or will you ask us to believe that you are thinking not of your own interests but of posterity?

“But we shall get this from you, just as we get other things from you,--by repetition. And then we shall go on to make the world more fit for women to live in: we shall force open all the avenues of life that have been closed to us before, making us narrow and petty and dull. We shall compel your universities to admit us to their classes; we shall enter your professions, we shall compete with you for office, we shall win the experiences and dare the adventures which we need to make us your rivals in literature and philosophy and art. You say we cannot be your comrades, your friends; that we can be only tyrants or slaves; but what else can we be, with all the instructive wealth of life kept from us? You hide from us the great books that are being written to-day, and then you are surprised at our gossip, our silly scandal-mongering, our inability to converse with you on business and politics, on science and religion and philosophy; you will not let us grow, and then you complain because we are so small. But we want to grow now, we want to grow! We cannot longer be mothers only. The world does not need so many children; and even to bring up better children we must have a wider and healthier life. We must have our intellects stimulated more and our feelings less. We have burst the bonds of our old narrow world; we must explore everything now. It is too late to stop us; and if you try you will only make life a mess of hatred and conflict for us both. And after all, do you know why we want to grow? It is because we long for the day when we shall be no longer merely your mistresses, but also your friends.”

2

_Socialism_

Another complainant: a young Socialist: such a man as works far into almost every night in the dingy office of his party branch, and devotes his Sundays to _Das Kapital_; bright-eyed, untouched by disillusionment; fired by the vision of a land of happy comrades.

“I agree with the young lady,” he says; “the source of all our ills is the capitalist system. It was born of steam-driven machinery and conceived in _laissez-faire_. It saw the light in Adam Smith’s England, ruined the health of the men of that country, and then came to America, where it grew fat on ‘liberty’ and ‘the right to do as one pleases with one’s own.’ It believed in competition--that is to say war--as its God, in whom all things lived and moved and sweated dividends; it made the acquisition of money, by no matter what means, the test of virtue and success, so that honest men became ashamed of themselves if they did not fail; it made all life a matter of ‘push’ and ‘pull,’ like the two sides of a door in one of those business palaces which make its cities great mazes of brick and stone rising like new Babels in the face of heaven. Its motto was, Beware of small profits; its aim was the greatest possible happiness of the smallest possible number. Out of competition it begot the trust, the rebate, and the ‘gentleman’s agreement’; out of ‘freedom of contract’ it begot wage-slavery; out of ‘liberty, equality and fraternity’ it begot an industrial feudalism worse than the old feudalism, based on the inheritance not of land, but of the living bodies and souls of thousands of men, women and children. When it came (in 1770) the annual income of England was $600,000,000; in 1901 the annual income of England was $8,000,000,000; the system has made a thousand millionaires, but it has left the people starving as before.[294] It has increased wages, and has increased prices a trifle more. It has improved the condition of the upper tenth of the workers, and has thrown the great remaining mass of the workers into a hell of torpor and despair. It has crowned all by inventing the myopic science of scientific management, whereby men are made to work at such speed, and with such rigid uniformity, that the mind is crazed, and the body is worn out twenty years before its time. It has made the world reek with poverty, and ugliness, and meanness, and the vulgarity of conspicuous wealth. It has made life intolerable and disgraceful to all but sheep and pigs.

“There is only one way of saving our civilization--such as there is of it--from wasting away through the parasitic degeneration of a few of its parts and the malnutrition of the rest; and that is by frankly abandoning this _laissez-faire_ madness, and changing the state into a mechanism for the management of the nation’s business. We workers must get hold of the offices, and turn government into administration. Without that our strikes and boycotts, our ‘direct action’ and economic organization, arrive at little result; every strike we ‘win’ means that prices will go up, and our time and energy--and dues--have gone to nothing but self-discipline in solidarity. We can control prices only by controlling monopolies; and we can control monopolies only by controlling government. That means politics, and it’s a scheme that won’t work until the proletariat get brains enough to elect honest and sensible men to office; but if they haven’t the brains to do that they won’t have the brains to do anything effective on the economic or any other field. We know how hard it is to get people to think; but we flatter ourselves that our propaganda is an educative force that grows stronger every year, and has already achieved such power as to decide the most important election held in this country since the Civil War.

“Already a large number of people have been educated--chiefly by our propaganda--to understand, for example, the economic greed that lies behind all wars. They perceive that so long as capital finds its highest rate of profit in the home market, capitalists see to it that peace remains secure; but that when capital has expanded to the point at which the rate of interest begins to fall, or when labor has ceased to be docile, because it has ceased to be unorganized and uninformed, capitalists then seek foreign markets and foreign investments, and soon require the help of war--that is, the lives of the workers at home--to help them enforce their terms on foreign governments and peoples. Only the national ownership of capital can change that. We thought once that we were too civilized ever to go to war again; we begin to see that our industrial feudalism leads inevitably to war and armaments, and the intellectual stagnation that comes from a militaristic mode of national life. We begin to see all history as a Dark Age (with fitful intervals of light),--a long series of wars in which men have killed and died for delusions, fighting to protect the property of their exploiters. And it becomes a little clearer to us than before that this awful succession of killings and robberies is no civilization at all, and that we shall never have a civilization worthy of the name until we transform our industrial war into the coöperative commonwealth, and all ‘foreigners’ into friends.”

3

_Eugenics_

“My dear young man,” says the Eugenist at this point, “you must study biology. Your plan for the improvement of mankind is all shot through with childish ignorance of nature’s way of doing things. Come into my laboratory for a few years; and you will learn how little you can do by merely changing the environment. It’s nature that counts, not nurture. Improvement depends on the elimination of the inferior, not on their reformation by Socialist leaflets or settlement work. What you have to do is to find some substitute for that natural selection--the automatic and ruthless killing off of the unfit--which we are more and more frustrating with our short-sighted charity. Humanitarianism must get informed. Our squeamishness about interfering with the holy ‘liberty of the individual’ will have to be moderated by some sense of the right of society to protect itself from interference by the individual. Here are the feeble-minded, for example; they breed more rapidly than healthy people do, and they almost always transmit their defect. If you don’t interfere with these people, if you don’t teach them or force them to be childless, you will have an increase in insanity along with the development of humanity. Think of making a woman suffer to deliver into the world a cripple or an idiot. And further, consider that the lowest eighth of the people produce one-half of the next generation. The better people, the more vigorous and healthy people, are refusing to have children; every year the situation is becoming more critical. City-life and factory-life make things still worse; young men coming from the country plunge into the maelstrom of the city, then into its femalestrom; they emerge with broken health, marry deformities dressed up in the latest fashion, and produce children inferior in vigor and ability to themselves. Given a hundred years more of this, and western Europe and America will be in a condition to be overcome easily by the fertile and vigorous races of the East. That is what you have to think of. The problem is larger than that of making poor people less poor; it is the problem of preserving our civilization. Your socialism will help, but it will be the merest beginning; it will be but an introduction to the socialization of selection,--which is eugenics. We will prevent procreation by people who have a transmissible defect or disease; we will require certificates of health and clean ancestry before permitting marriage; we will encourage the mating, with or without love, of men and women possessed of energy and good physique. We will teach people, in Mr. Marett’s phrase, to marry less with their eyes and more with their heads. It will take us a long while to put all this into effect; but we will put it. Time is on our side; every year will make our case stronger. Within half a century the educated world will come and beg us to guide them in a eugenic revolution.”

4

_Anarchism_

A gentle anarchist:

“You do well to talk of revolution; but you do wrong to forget the individual in the race. Your eugenic revolution will not stop the exploitation of the workers by the manufacturers through the state. Give men justice and they will soon be healthy; give them the decent life which is the only just reward for their work, and you will not need eugenics. Instead of bothering about parasitic germs you should attend to parasitic exploiters; it is in this social parasitism that the real danger of degeneration lies. Continued injustice of employers to employees is splitting every western nation into factions; class-loyalty will soon be stronger than loyalty to the community; and the time will come when nations in which this civil war has not been superseded by voluntary mutual aid will crumble into oblivion.

“And yet men are willing to be loyal to the community, if the community is organized to give them justice. If exploitation were to cease there would be such bonds of brotherhood among men as would make the community practically everlasting. All you need do is to let men coöoperate in freedom. They long to coöperate; all evolution shows a growth in the ability to coöoperate; man surpassed the brute just because of this. Nor is law or state needed; coercive government is necessary only in societies founded on injustice. The state has always been an instrument of exploitation; and law is merely the organized violence of the ruling class. It is a subtle scheme; it enables industrial lords to do without any pangs of conscience what but for their statute-books might give them a qualm or two. Notice, for example, how perfectly Christian such slaughters as those in Colorado or Virginia can be made to appear--even to the slaughterers--by the delightful expedient of the statute-book. They kill and call it law, so that they may sleep.

“And then we are told that one must never use violence in labor disputes. But obviously it is precisely violence that is used against labor, and against the free spirit. As a matter of history, rebels did not begin to use violence on the authorities until the authorities had used violence on them. We feel ourselves quite justified in using any means of attack on a system so founded in coercion. The whole question with us is one not of morals but of expediency. We have been moral a little too long.”

5

_Individualism_

“Precisely,” says the Stirnerite anarchist; “it is all a question of might, not of right; and we exploited ones may be as right as rectitude and never get anywhere unless we can rhyme a little might to our right. Each of us has a right to do whatever he is strong enough to do. ‘One gets farther with a handful of might than with a bagful of right.’ He who wants much, and knows how to get it, has in all times taken it, as Napoleon did the continent, and the French Algeria. Therefore the only point is that the respectful ‘lower classes’ should at length learn to take for themselves what they want.”

6

_Individualism Again_

And lastly, _Advocatus Diaboli_, Mr. Status Quo:

“I agree with you right heartily, Sir Stirnerite anarchist; it is time you children came to understand that everything is a question of power. Let the fittest survive and let us all use whatever means we find expedient. I am frank with you now; but you must not be surprised if to-morrow I write out a few checks for the salaries of the liars whom I have in my employ. Why should we tell the truth and go under? Surely you will understand that not all knowledge is good for all men. If it gives you satisfaction, for example, to spread information about birth-control, you will not feel hurt if it gives us satisfaction to oppose you, for the sake of the future armies of unemployed without which our great scheme of industry would be seriously hampered.

“And I agree with your fellow-anarchist, that the state is often a nuisance. I can make use of a little government; but when the state begins to tell me how to run my business then I feel as if your criticism of the state is very just--and convenient. I am an individualist,--a good old American individualist,--like Jefferson and Emerson. The state can’t manage industry half as well as we can. You know--as our Socialists do not--that government ownership is only ownership by politicians, by Hinky-Dinks and Bath-house Johns; and I can tell you from intimate knowledge of these people that they will do anything for money except efficient administrative work.

“Your scheme of having the workers take over the industries is a good scheme--for the millennium. Where would you get men to direct you? They come to us because we pay them well; if your syndicalist shops would pay them as well as we do, they would be the beginning of a new aristocracy; if you think these clever men will work for ‘honor’ you are leaning on an airy dream. Destroy private property and you will have a nation of hoboes and Hindus.

“As to exploitation, what would you have? We are strong, and you are weak; it is the law of nature that we should use you, just as it is the law of nature that one species should use the weaker species as its prey. The weaker will always suffer, with or without law. Even if all bellies are full, the majority will envy the intellectual power of their betters, and will suffer just as keenly on the intellectual plane as they do now on the physical. The alternative of the under-dog is to get intelligence and power, or ‘stay put.’

“My advice, then, is to let things be. You can change the superficial conditions of the struggle for existence and for power, but the fundamental facts of it will remain. Monarchy, aristocracy, democracy,--it’s all the same. The most powerful will rule, whether by armies or by newspapers; it makes no difference if God is on the side of the biggest battalions, or the side of the biggest type. We bought the battalions; we buy the type.

“Come, let us get back to our business.”

III

Dissolutions

Here is a _reductio ad absurdum_ of our social _’isms_; and here is the history of many a social rebel. From dissatisfaction to socialism, from socialism to anarchism, from anarchism to Stirnerism, from Stirnerism and the cult of the ego to Nietzsche and the right to exploit;--so has many a man made the merry-go-round of thought and come back wearily at last to the _terra firma_ of the thing that is. We sail into the sea of social controversy without chart or compass or rudder; and though we encounter much wind, we never make the port of our desire. We need maps, and instruments, and knowledge; we need to make inquiries, to face our doubts, to define our purposes; we shall have to examine more ruthlessly our preconceptions and hidden premises, to force into the light the wishes that secretly father our illegitimate thoughts. We must ask ourselves questions that will reach down to the tenderest roots of our philosophies.

You are a feminist, let us say. Very well. Have you ever considered the sociological consequences of that very real disintegration of the “home” which an advancing feminism implies? Granted that this disintegration has been begun by the industrial revolution. Do you want it to go on more rapidly? Do you want women to become more like men? Do you think that the “new woman” will care to have children? It is surely better for the present comfort of our society that there should be a considerable fall in the birth rate; but will that expose the people of Europe and America to absorption by the races of the East? You argue that the case for feminism is as simple as the case for democracy; but is the case for democracy simple? Is democracy competent? Is it bringing us where we want to go? Or is it a sort of collective determination to drift with the tide,--a sort of magnified _laissez-faire_? And as to “rights” and “justice,” how do you answer Nietzsche’s contention that the more highly organized species, sex, or class, must by its very nature use, command, and exploit the less highly organized species, sex, or class?

You are a Socialist; and you yearn for a Utopia of friends and equals; but will you, to make men equal, be compelled to chain the strength of the strong with many laws and omnipresent force?--will you sacrifice the superiority of the chosen few to the mediocrity of the many? Will you, to control the exploiter, be obliged to control all men, even in detail?--will your socialism really bring the slavery and servile state that Spencer and Chesterton and Belloc fear? Is further centralization of government desirable? Have you considered sufficiently the old difficulty about the stimulus to endeavor in a society that should restrict private property to a minimum and prohibit inheritance? Have you arranged to protect your coöperative commonwealth by limiting immigration--from Europe and from heaven?[295] Are you not, in general, exaggerating the force of the aggregative as against the segregative tendencies in human nature? And do you think that a change of laws can make the weak elude the exploiting arm of the strong? Will not the strongest men always make whatever laws are made, and rule wherever men are ruled? Can any government stand that is not the expression of the strongest forces in the community? And if the strongest force be organized labor, are you sure that organized labor will not exploit and tyrannize? Will the better organized and skilled workers be “just” to the unskilled and imperfectly organized workers? And what do you mean by “justice”?

And as to the eugenist, surely it is unnecessary to expose his unpreparedness to meet the questions which his programme raises. Questions, for example, as to what “units” of character to breed for, if there are such “units”; whether definite breeding for certain results would forfeit adaptive plasticity; whether compulsory sterilization is warranted by our knowledge of heredity; whether serious disease is not often associated with genius; whether the native mental endowments of rich and poor are appreciably different, and whether the “comparative infertility of the upper classes” is really making for the deterioration of the race; whether progress depends on racial changes so much as on changes in social institutions and traditions. And so on.

And the anarchist, whom one loves if only for the fervor of his hope and the beauty of his dream,--the anarchist falters miserably in the face of interrogation. If all laws were to be suspended to-morrow, all coercion of citizen by state, how long would it be before new laws would arise? Would the aforementioned strong cease to be strong and the weak cease to be weak? Would people be willing to forego private property? Are not belief and disbelief in private property determined less by logic and “justice” than by one’s own success or failure in the acquisition of private property? Do only the weak and uncontrolled advocate absolute lack of restraint? Do most men want liberty so much that they will tolerate chaos and a devil-take-the-hind-most individualism for the sake of it? Can it be, after all, that freedom is a negative thing,--that what men want is, for some, achievement, for others, peace,--and that for these they will give even freedom? What if a great number of people dread liberty, and are not at all so sensitive to restraint and commandment as the anarchist? Perhaps only children and geniuses can be truly anarchistic? Perhaps freedom itself is a problem and not a solution? Does the mechanization, through law and custom, of certain elements in our social behavior, like the mechanization, through habit and instinct, of certain elements in individual behavior, result in greater freedom for the higher powers and functions? Again, to have freedom for all, all must be equal; but does not development make for differentiation and inequality? Consider the America of three hundred years ago; a nation of adventurous settlers, hardly any of them better off than any other,--all of a class, all on a level; and see what inequalities and castes a few generations have produced! Is there a necessary antithesis between liberty and order, freedom and control?--or are order and control the first condition of freedom? Does not law serve many splendid purposes,--could it not serve more? Is the state necessary so long as there are long-eared and long-fingered gentry?

As for your revolutions, who profits by them? The people who have suffered, or the people who have thought? Is a revolution, so far as the poor are concerned, merely the dethronement of one set of rulers or exploiters so that another set may have a turn? Do not most revolutions, like that which wished to storm heaven by a tower, end in a confusion of tongues? And after each outbreak do not the workers readapt themselves to their new slavery with that ease and torpid patience which are the despair of every leader, until they are awakened by another quarrel among their masters?

* * * * *

One could fling about such questions almost endlessly, till every _’ism_ should disappear under interrogation points. Every such _’ism_, clearly, is but a half-truth, an arrested development, suffering from malinformation. One is reminded of the experiment in which a psychologist gave a ring-puzzle to a monkey, and--in another room--a like puzzle to a university professor: the monkey fell upon the puzzle at once with teeth and feet and every manner of hasty and haphazard reaction,--until at last the puzzle, dropped upon the floor, came apart by chance; the professor sat silent and motionless before the puzzle, working out in thought the issue of many suggested solutions, and finally, after forty minutes, touched it to undo it at a stroke. Our _’isms_ are simian reactions to the social puzzle. We jump at conclusions, we are impinged upon extremes, we bound from opposite to opposite, we move with blinders to a passion-colored goal. Some of us are idealists, and see only the beautiful desire; some of us are realists, and see only the dun and dreary fact; hardly any of us can look fact in the face and see through it to that which it might be. We “bandy half-truths” for a decade and then relapse into the peaceful insignificance of conformity.[296]

It dawns on students of social problems, as it dawned long since on philosophers, that the beginning of their wisdom is a confession of their ignorance. We know now that the thing we need, and for lack of which we blunder valiantly into futility, is not good intentions but informed intelligence. All problems are problems of education; all the more so in a democracy. Not because education can change the original nature of man, but because intelligent coöperation can control the stimuli which determine the injuriousness or beneficence of original dispositions. Impulse is not the enemy of intelligence; it is its raw material. We desire knowledge--and particularly knowledge of ourselves--so that we may know what external conditions evoke destructive, and what conditions evoke constructive, responses. We do not, for example, expect intelligence to eradicate pugnacity; we do not want it to do so; but we want to eradicate the environmental conditions which turn this impulse to wholesale suicide. Men should fight; it is the essence of their value that they are willing to fight; the problem of intelligence is to discuss and to create means for the diversion of pugnacity to socially helpful ends. Character is _per se_ neither good nor bad, but becomes one or the other according to the nature of the stimuli presented. What we call moral reform, then, waits on information and consequent remoulding of the factors determining the direction of our original dispositions. We become “better” men and women only so far as we become more intelligent. Just as psychoanalysis can, in some measure, reconstruct the personal life, so social analysis can reconstruct social life and turn into productive channels the innocent but too often destructive forces of original nature.[297]

Our problem, then, to repeat once more our central theme, is to facilitate the growth and spread of intelligence. With this definition of the issue we come closer to our thesis,--that the social problem must be approached through philosophy, and philosophy through the social problem.