Chapter 11

In presenting these views, I am not assailing millionaires as men more objectionable or censurable than any other class. It is not true that the mere ability to gain wealth implies moral inferiority, for it implies many substantial and honorable qualities. Reverse the social ranks, give the wealth to the poor, and our condition would not be improved, perhaps it would be much worse. The fault lies in our social system of struggle and rivalry, and while that system generates, as it always has, extreme wealth and extreme poverty, we must combat these two evils, and to control them is the purpose of this essay. Whether a better social system is possible that would PREVENT them, is not now under consideration, but surely there must be a system which will make unlimited wealth and unlimited poverty impossible, for such conditions are incompatible with a permanent, peaceful, and prosperous republic. As well might we expect a successful voyage from a ship with four-fifths of its cargo on the upper deck, as from a republic top heavy with millionaire capital. Can we believe that republics are forbidden by the laws of progress and evolution; that they must, as Macaulay maintained, come to a fatal crisis? I trust not. But does not our social system, inherited from barbarism, built up on the hot ashes left where the fires of war have desolated, necessarily develop that inequality which has swept the great empires of antiquity to their doom. When all the wealth of the nation has fallen into the possession of two per cent. of the population, the period of danger has arrived. Five per cent. of our population had, in 1880, absorbed four fifths of the national wealth, and at present, according to the careful statistics of Mr. Shearman, less than two per cent. hold seven tenths of our wealth, and are rapidly advancing to nine tenths, their progress being assisted by the indirect taxation which places the burden of government on the shoulders of poverty. Popular ignorance of public affairs has tolerated this, and has tolerated a financial system far worse, which has given capital all possible advantage of labor. We are drifting in the rapids; how far off is our Niagara? But labor is roused, and a change in our system of taxation is imminent.

Unlimited wealth and unlimited poverty are the necessary results of the warlike stage of progress, which develops the conquerors and the conquered in the great battle of life. Unnumbered centuries of tribal and international war have developed to high perfection the wolfish and tigerish instincts of humanity. What is called peace is a state of financial war. Beneath the smooth skin of the civilized man, we find the wolf in undiminished vigor. The triumphant wolf rides in his chariot; the conquered wolf sleeps in the open air along the alleys, wharves, and streets; but what cares the wolf triumphant for that? for the 30,000 homeless in London? The policeman's club, or the bayonet, is the only thing that keeps down riot and arson, and the uncertainty of the result is all that hinders the French, German, and Russian wolves from turning a continent into a pandemonium. Is Europe truly a civilized country? Not if tried by an ethical standard. VON MOLTKE, the great man of Germany, who has so recently passed away, considered war a _permanent_ institution.

In this wolfish stage of human development, altruism is almost unknown, except as an eccentricity. It is safe to say, as a general rule to which there are not many exceptions, that _no man is fit to be entrusted with any more than he needs for his own comfortable existence_. Every dollar beyond that sum is wasted in his hands. He has not the faintest conception that he is a trustee of all such wealth, responsible to heaven for its use. As he cannot consume it, he can but squander it to gratify his vanity, and lift himself to a position from which he can, or thinks he can, look down upon his fellows. The leading idea of the average citizen is to construct a palace that will cost ten, twenty, fifty, or a hundred times as much as the residence that would be amply sufficient and pleasant.[17] His talent for the destruction of wealth grows by indulgence, and thus the millions that the financial conquerors have won from the conquered are thrown into the blazing flame of ostentation, and might as well be thrown into a literal conflagration. Such is the humanity with which we have to deal at present. Wealth, no matter who holds it, does not restrain the destruction of the resources of the commonwealth, but the growl of the suffering millions may, and may lead to a recognition of the grand truth that everything beyond the demands of human comfort is a sacred trust for humanity, and with the millions thus aroused, I believe it may be possible to introduce laws which will gradually change the entire condition of society, and leave in this broad land neither an American prince nor an American beggar--a change which will be a greater forward movement than that of 1776.

[17] Nob Hill, in San Francisco, is crowned with five huge buildings in imitation of foreign palaces, utterly unfit for private residences, which may possibly sometime be utilized for public purposes. They but illustrate the crazy ostentation of selfish wealth. Can it be possible, as stated by the St. Joseph _Herald_, that "George Vanderbilt is building a genuine old-fashioned mediæval baronial castle at Asheville, N. C., at a cost of $10,000,000"?

The leading purpose of such legislation will be the controlling of that lawless selfishness, which wantonly destroys all in which the community is interested; which on the prairies exterminates the buffalo, in the mountains and forests destroys the timber, bringing on as a consequence the drouth, floods, and desolate barrenness, under which a large part of the old world is suffering; which would exterminate the seals if government did not interfere, and would infect every city with pestilential odors of offensive manufactories; which would destroy the people's national money for the benefit of private bankers, and pervert all the powers of government for the benefit of monopoly and organized speculation.

May we not look to that struggle for justice which to-day assumes the forms of Nationalism, Farmers' Alliance, People's Party, Knights of Labor, and Land Nationalization, to accomplish this purpose and emancipate the present from the barbarian ideas of the past?

(_To be concluded in July Arena._)

HAS SPENCER'S DOCTRINE OF INCONCEIVABILITY DRIVEN RELIGION INTO THE UNKNOWABLE?

BY REV. T. ERNEST ALLEN.

The service rendered to humanity by Mr. Herbert Spencer in the elaboration of the Synthetic Philosophy, should command the admiration and gratitude of all broad-minded men. There are certain fallacies in the argument by which Religion is relegated into the "Unknowable," however, to which it will be the purpose of this essay to call the reader's attention. If Religion really be, by its very nature, unknowable, it follows that as man grows in intelligence, the extent to which it occupies his thought will tend to diminish towards final extinction. It is a thoroughly wholesome state of affairs that, like all things which claim our consideration, Religion should again and again be compelled to step into the arena to vindicate its right to hold sway over humanity. Nor is the attitude of many minds which places Religion upon the defensive, unreasonable, or the outgrowth of a perverse spirit, but, on the contrary, it results from the questionings of those eager to find the truth and anxious to "prove all things" and cast error aside. Let us see if Religion can withstand the fierce onslaught, threatening its very life, which Mr. Spencer makes in his "First Principles" (pp. 3-123).

Our author's first attempt is to "form something like a general theory of current opinions," so as neither to "over-estimate nor under-estimate their worth." As a special case from the examination of which he hopes to derive a general method, he traces the evolution of government from the beginning until now. It is held that no belief concerning government is wholly true or false; "each of them insists upon a certain subordination of individual actions to social requirements.... From the oldest and rudest idea of allegiance, down to the most advanced political theory of our own day, there is on this point complete unanimity." He speaks of this subordination as a postulate "which is, indeed, of self-evident validity," as ranking "next in certainty to the postulates of exact science." As the result of his search for "a generalization which may habitually guide us when seeking for the soul of truth in things erroneous," he concludes: "This method is to compare all opinions of the same genus; to set aside as more or less discrediting one another those various special and concrete elements in which such opinions disagree; to observe what remains after the discordant constituents have been eliminated, and to find for the remaining constituent that abstract expression which holds true throughout its divergent modifications."

What did Mr. Spencer discover by the application of his method to government? A postulate which he announces to be of "self-evident validity," an "unquestionable fact"--that is all! His method is a statement of the process of abstraction. Very useful though it is in determining what one or more predicates may be affirmed of many objects of thought which differ widely otherwise or in revealing truths, as he points out, respecting which men can by no possibility disagree, it cannot assist us in discriminating between true and false "discordant constituents," for which purpose a simple method would be helpful. Certainly this is not the method which gave us the most "advanced political theory" of the day! The fact is, that when used, as Mr. Spencer suggests, it shrivels the total content of any subject under consideration, down to the one truth lying at the foundation of the most primitive theory. In the case of Religion, he alleges that the one point upon which there is entire unanimity between the most divergent creeds, between the lowest fetichism and the most enlightened Christianity, is this: "That there is something to be explained." An interesting piece of information, surely! Yes, but "the Power which the Universe manifests to us is utterly inscrutable." Over against this, we have the magnificent superstructure of modern Science, erected by the employment of methods quite other than the one which he esteems competent to overthrow Religion.

The postulate, a straight line may be drawn between two points, while it makes a geometry possible, reveals nothing as to the properties of lines; so, in the present case, the proposition resulting from the process of abstraction, "there is something to be explained," affirms that, at least _à priori_, Religion is possible, but decides nothing as to the truth or falsity of unnumbered statements which millions of people have believed for centuries to belong to the domain of Religion. This method does not and cannot discredit Religion.

"Religious ideas of one kind or another," says Mr. Spencer, "are almost universal.... We are obliged to admit that, if not supernaturally derived, as the majority contend, they must be derived out of human experiences, slowly accumulated and organized.... Considering all faculties," under the evolutionary hypothesis, "to result from accumulated modifications caused by the intercourse of the organism with its environment, we are obliged to admit that there exist in the environment certain phenomena or conditions which have determined the growth of the feeling in question, and so are obliged to admit that it is as normal as any other faculty.... We are also forced to infer that this feeling is in some way conducive to human welfare.... Positive knowledge does not and never can fill the whole region of possible thought. At the utmost reach of discovery there arises, and must ever arise, the question--what lies beyond?... Throughout all future time, as now, the human mind may occupy itself, not only with ascertained phenomena and their relations, but also with that unascertained something which phenomena and their relations imply. Hence if knowledge cannot monopolize consciousness--if it must always continue possible for the mind to dwell upon that which transcends knowledge; then there can never cease to be a place for something of the nature of Religion; since Religion under all its forms is distinguished from everything else in this, that its subject matter is that which passes the sphere of experience." Religion is "a constituent of the great whole; and being such must be treated as a subject of Science with no more prejudice than any other reality."

It will suit our present purpose to divide the cognitive faculties into intuitive and non-intuitive. If I rightly understand Mr. Spencer, when he says of the subject matter of Religion that it "passes the sphere of experience," he means that the content of Religion results from the action of the non-intuitive faculties upon material furnished by the intuitive faculties, and not from the immediate action of the latter upon environment. For the sake of the argument, I will grant this position. In order that mankind may build up sciences in which it reposes such confidence, the action of the non-intuitive faculties must be trusted, for it is only through such action that sciences can ever be constructed from the materials of experience. Granting, then, the general trustworthiness of mental operations, the mind cannot abstract _out of_ human experiences what was not already in them; cannot evolve what was not involved. The separation of the true from the false in Religion, then, must be accomplished, as in the case of Science, by verifying the intuitions and going repeatedly over the chains of reasoning which lead to the conclusions farthest removed from intuitions, to guard as much as possible against error. Thus, because drawn out from given data, certain conclusions will embody to-day what is true in Religion, and later, with an enlarged experience, more or less modified conclusions will express what will then be seen to be true. This is in accord with the general law of evolution which holds for Science. From the present point of view, Mr. Spencer seems to concur in the above, since he says of religious ideas, that "to suppose these multiform conceptions" to "be one and all _absolutely_ groundless, discredits too profoundly that average human intelligence from which all our individual intelligences are inherited."

To the statement that the mind cannot abstract _out of_ human experiences what was not already in them, Mr. Spencer could make, I think, but one answer, to wit: that while the operations of the mind are generally reliable, and while there has been an element in human experience which seemed to warrant conclusions derived from them, nevertheless, mankind has egregiously erred in thinking that it had the power to build up a valid content to Religion, since the very nature of Religion is such, that the mental operations which are reliable in the realm of Science cannot be so in the realm of Religion. To answer this, we must consider the argument for conceivability as the touchstone which is to separate the "Knowable" from the "Unknowable." Corresponding to small objects, a piece of rock for example, where the sides, top, and bottom can be considered as practically all present in consciousness at once, and large ones, like the earth, where they cannot, our author divides conceptions into complete and symbolic. Great magnitudes and classes of objects also produce symbolic conceptions which, while indispensable to reasoning, often lead us into error. "We habitually mistake our symbolic conceptions for real ones." The former "are legitimate, provided that by some cumulative or indirect process of thought, or by the fulfilment of predictions based upon them, we can assure ourselves that they stand for actualities," otherwise "they are altogether vicious and illusive" and "illegitimate" and here belong religious ideas.

The foregoing is applied by Mr. Spencer in his argument relative to the origin of the Universe respecting which, he asserts that "three verbally intelligible suppositions may be made": (1) that it is self-existent, (2) that it was self-created, (3) that it was created by an external agency. "Which of these suppositions is most credible it is not needful here to enquire. The deeper question, into which this finally merges, is, whether any one of these is even conceivable in the true sense of the word." He shows that, since the mind refuses to accept the transformation of absolute vacuity into the existent, the theory of self-creation forces us back to a potential Universe whose self-creation was transition to an actual Universe, and that then, we must explain the existence of the potential Universe and that, similarly, creation by an external agency demands that we account for the genesis of the Creator, so that both of these theories involve the self-existence of a something. Therefore, I shall analyze his presentation of the first theory only. "Self-existence necessarily means existence without a beginning; and to form a conception of self-existence is to form a conception of existence without a beginning. Now by no mental effort can we do this. To conceive existence through infinite past-time, implies the conception of infinite past-time, which is an impossibility. To this let us add, that even were self-existence conceivable, it would not in any sense be an explanation of the Universe.... It is not a question of probability, or credibility, but of conceivability."

In making conceivability the supreme test as to what is knowable, Mr. Spencer sets up a criterion which he himself violates. If it can be shown that he places at the very foundation of Science a postulate or, what is generally conceded to be a demonstrated truth, which, equally with the conception of the Universe as self-existent, involves the conception of infinite past-time, it is evident that we shall have broken down the fundamental distinguishing characteristic which separates his "Knowable" from his "Unknowable," and thus leave Science and Religion standing upon the same level of validity in their relation to the human mind. In the second part of "First Principles," which treats of the "Knowable," Mr. Spencer says (p. 180): "The Indestructibility of Matter ... is a proposition on the truth of which depends the possibility of exact Science. Could it be shown, or could it with any rationality be even supposed, that Matter, either in its aggregates or in its units, ever became non-existent, there would be need either to ascertain under what conditions it became non-existent, or else to confess that Science and Philosophy are impossible. For if, instead of having to deal with fixed quantities and weights, we had to deal with quantities and weights which were apt, wholly or in part, to be annihilated, there would be introduced an incalculable element, fatal to all positive conclusions" (p. 172). Considering that in times past men have believed in the creation of Matter out of nothing and in its annihilation, he points out that it is to quantitative Chemistry that we owe the empirical basis for our present belief.

Next he inquires "whether we have any higher warrant for this fundamental belief than the warrant of conscious induction," and writes as follows of logical necessity (pp. 172-179): "The consciousness of logical necessity, is the consciousness that a certain conclusion is implicitly contained in certain premises explicitly stated. If, contrasting a young child and an adult, we see that this consciousness of logical necessity, absent from the one is present in the other, we are taught that there is a _growing up_ to the recognition of certain necessary truths, merely by the unfolding of the inherited intellectual forms and faculties. To state the case more specifically:--before a truth can be known as necessary, two conditions must be fulfilled. There must be a mental structure capable of grasping the terms of the proposition and the relation alleged between them; and there must be such definite and deliberate mental representation of these terms as makes possible a clear consciousness of this relation.... Along with acquirement of more complex faculty and more vivid imagination, there comes a power of perceiving to be necessary truths, what were before not recognized as truths at all.... All this which holds of logical and mathematical truths, holds, with change of terms, of physical truths. There are necessary truths in Physics for the apprehension of which, also, a developed and disciplined intelligence is required; and before such intelligence arises, not only may there be failure to apprehend the necessity of them, but there may be vague beliefs in their contraries.... But though many are incapable of grasping physical axioms, it no more follows that physical axioms are not knowable _à priori_ by a developed intelligence, than it follows that logical relations are not necessary, because undeveloped intellects cannot perceive their necessity.

"The terms '_à priori_ truth' and 'necessary truth' ... are to be interpreted," he continues, "not in the old sense, as implying cognitions wholly independent of experiences, but as implying cognitions that have been rendered organic by immense accumulations of experiences, received partly by the individual, but mainly by all ancestral individuals whose nervous systems he inherits. But when during mental evolution, the vague ideas arising in a nervous structure imperfectly organized, are replaced by clear ideas arising in a definite nervous structure; this definite structure, molded by experience into correspondence with external phenomena, makes necessary in thought the relations answering to absolute uniformities in things. Hence, among others, the conception of the Indestructibility of Matter.... Our inability to conceive Matter becoming non-existent, is immediately consequent upon the nature of thought.... It must be added, that no experimental verification of the truth that Matter is indestructible, is possible without a tacit assumption of it. For all such verification implies weighing, and weighing implies that the matter forming the weight remains the same. In other words, the proof that certain matter dealt with in certain ways is unchanged in quantity, depends on the assumption that other matter otherwise dealt with is unchanged in quantity."

In answer to the above it can be said:--