Chapter 4

The methods and principles which I have described in the case of the criminal are used for illustration, not that I am interested today in discussing the special problem of the criminal, but because principles can best be exemplified in extreme cases. The same methods, the same maxims should control punishment in general; our dealings, for instance, with the misdeeds of which our own children are guilty. Here, too, there should be by no means unvarying gentleness and pleading, but when need arises the sharp check, that evil may be instantaneously stopped. Here, too, there should be the temporary disgrace, the clear presentation of the magnitude of the fault, if it have magnitude, the humiliation that calls forth penitence and good resolutions. Here, too, there should be sedulous care, to work out the better habits. And all these steps should be taken with a view to ultimate reconciliation, forgiveness, and the holier bond between parent and child.

But now can we take one step further? Can we dispose our minds and our hearts in the same fashion toward oppressors? I have in mind, for instance, the hard proprietors of houses who pitilessly wring the last penny from their tenants; the cruel taskmasters who drive the workers, sometimes only children not yet full-grown, twelve and fifteen hours a day; the unscrupulous exploiters on a large scale, who raise the price of the people's food, and in their eagerness for fabulous gain conspire by every corrupt means to crush their less crafty or less shameless competitors. As we hate wrong, must we not hate them? Shall we assail greed and exploitation merely in the abstract? What effect will that have? Which one of the oppressors will not hypocritically assent to such abstract denunciation? If we seek to produce a change, must we not proceed to more specific allegations and point the finger of scorn at the offenders, saying as the Prophet Nathan said to King David: "Thou art the man"? Is it not necessary to arouse the popular anger against the oppressors and to encourage hatred against the hateful?

Clearly the case is not the same as that of the criminal in the dock. He stands there dishonored; the evil he has done has been brought home to him; he is covered with the garment of shame. But those others are invested--despite the evil they have done and are still doing--with every outward symbol of success; they triumph defiantly over the better moral sense of the community; they inhabit, as it were, impregnable citadels; they have harvested unholy gains which no one seems strong enough to take from them; and the influence they wield in consequence of their power to benefit or harm is immense. Is it a wonder, then, that such oppressors are branded as monsters, and that the hoarse note of some of the Hebrew psalms is sometimes to be heard re-echoing in the cry of the social radicals of our time--Let vengeance be visited upon the wicked; let the oppressors be destroyed from the face of the earth!

But the logical and inevitable conclusion of the thought I have developed to-day is, that we are bound to recognize the indefeasible worth latent even in the cruel exploiter and the merciless expropriator. I have already sufficiently indicated that the spiritual view is consistent with severe and stringent treatment. Checks there should be by the heavy hand of legislation laid upon the arrogant evildoers. They should be stopped if possible in mid-career. The oppressed, also, should oppose those who oppress them. No one is worth his salt who is not willing to defend his rights against those who would trample on them. So far from ruling out conflict, I regard conflict as a weapon of progress--an ethical weapon, if it be waged with the right intentions. Furthermore, when speaking of oppression, I have in mind not merely the cupidity of the few as it operates mercilessly upon the many, but also the banded arrogance of the many as it sometimes displays itself in contempt for the rights of the few. From whichever side oppression proceeds, there should be resistance to it; the check imposed by resistance is one of the means of educating to new habits those who find themselves checked. Individuals, and social classes, too, as history proves, learn to respect the rights which they find in practice they cannot traverse. First come the limits set to the aggression, and then the opening of the eyes to perceive the justice of the limitation. But conflict is an ethical weapon only if it is wielded like the knife in the surgeon's hands. The knife wounds and hurts; the method is apparently cruel; but the purpose is benevolent. So should the battle of social reform be animated by concern not only for the oppressed, but also for the oppressor. And such a motive does not exceed the capacity of human nature, but, on the contrary, is the only motive which will permanently satisfy human nature. Certain of the Socialists have made it their deliberate policy for years to stir up hatred between the poor and the rich, on the ground that hatred alone can overcome the lethargy of the masses and arouse in them the intensity of feeling necessary for conflict. On the contrary, hatred engenders hatred on the opposite side, action provokes reaction. As the individual can be uplifted in his life only by accepting the spiritual motive, by trying to act always so as to recognize in others and to make manifest the indefeasible worth of the human soul, so the social classes can be uplifted only by acting on the same spiritual motive. Despite the efforts of a hundred years, the real progress that has been achieved in ameliorating the relations between the social classes at the present day is slight, and sometimes one is impelled to doubt whether there has been any progress at all. The egotism of one side is met by the egotism of the other side. But appeals to mass egotism will no more elevate mankind, than appeals to individual egotism. Appeals to sympathy also will not permanently help. Only the highest motive of all can furnish the power needed to accomplish the miracle of social transformation; only that conflict which is waged for the purpose not of striking down the oppressor and rescuing his victim, but for the rescue of both the victim and the oppressor, will attain its end.

The oppressor may be regarded as a man who has consented so to degrade himself as to become for the time being a heartless automaton, ruthlessly working for gain, a being like one of those terrible ogres of the popular mythology who feed on human flesh. But he is not a mere automaton or ogre. There is a better side to his nature, as we often discover, to our amazement, when we learn about the facts of his private life. These private virtues do not indeed condone his social sins--far from it--but they indicate that there exists a better side. If that side could be made victorious, if conditions could be shaped so as to starve out the worse nature and bring to the fore the better nature in the oppressor as well as in the oppressed, the problem would be advanced toward a solution.

There is a story told of two brothers, sons of the same father, who grew up in the same home and were deeply attached to each other. It happened that the older wandered away and fell into the power of an evil magician, who changed him into a ravening wolf. The younger mourned his loss, and treasured in his heart the image of the brother as he had been in the days before the wicked spell fell upon him. Impelled by his longing, he at last went out into the world to find his brother, and if possible to redeem him. One day as he passed through a lonely forest, a hungry wolf set upon him. The horrid, brutal face was near to his, the hot breath breathed upon him, and the fierce eyes flamed into his own. But by the might of his love, the younger brother was able to detect beneath the wolfish disguise the faint outlines of the brother whom he had long ago lost, and by the strength of his gaze, which saw only the brother and refused to see the wolf, he was able to give shape and substance to that faint outline. The outer frame of brutishness gradually melted away, and the human brother was restored to his senses and to his home. This is a parable of the spiritual attitude toward oppressors, toward those who oppress the people in public, as well as toward those who oppress us in our private lives. We must liberate them from the brutal frame in which they are inclosed; we must give them back their human shape!

IV. THE TWO SOULS IN THE HUMAN BREAST.

Sunday, Dec. 11, 1904.

Painful and revolting associations are called up by the phrase--"leading the double life." To the aversion provoked by the evil itself, is added in such cases the disgust excited by the hypocrisy with which it is cloaked. He who leads a double life offends not only by the wrong he does, but by borrowing the plumes of virtue. He lives a perpetual lie; he is "a whited sepulchre, clean on the outside, full of filth and corruption within." The Beecher trial at the time so profoundly agitated the whole country, because the accusations brought forward associated the name of one of the most prominent characters of the nation, a man of brilliant talent and meritorious service, with secret impurity. The more meritorious such a man's services, the more damning the charges if they be established. Nor do we admit in such cases the sophistical argument, that the interests of public morality require the facts to be hushed up in order to avoid a scandal. Nothing is so imperative where guilt really exists as that it be confessed and expiated. The public conscience requires the truth. Let the sinner make a clean breast of it; let the atmosphere be cleared by an act of public humiliation. No injury to the cause of public morality is so great as the lurking suspicion that men who stand forth as exponents of morality are themselves corrupt. Lurking suspicion, distrust of all the moral values, is worse than recognition of human weakness, however deplorable.

There are other examples of the double life, with which all who have knowledge of the world's ways are familiar. That of the merchant, for instance, who, though he has long been virtually a bankrupt, conceals his position behind a screen of opulence, emulating the sumptuous expenditure of the rich, living a life of glittering show; tortured inwardly by the fear of exposure, yet not courageous enough to be honest; sinking deeper himself and, what is worse, dragging others down with him. A young man at college sometimes leads a double life, his letters home being filled with accounts of his legitimate employments, while at the same time he is leading the life of the prodigal, the spendthrift, the dissipated sot.

The dual life has been depicted in powerful colors by poets and writers of fiction; as, for instance, by Hawthorne in his "Scarlet Letter," by Robert Louis Stevenson in his "Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde." I suppose if there be such a thing as hell on earth, the double life is another name for it. Yet I know of no writer of fiction whose plummet has sounded the depths of this hell. In Stevenson's story one gets the impression of a too mechanical separation between the two sides. The man is at one moment the benevolent doctor, and at another the malignant fiend. The device of the drug is introduced to explain the transition; but the transformation is too sudden, too abrupt. Jekyll and Hyde dwell side by side in the same body, and the relations between them have not been wrought out with sufficient subtlety. It is rather a broad moral parable than a subtle study of man's dual nature.

The initial point I desire to make is, that in certain cases the inner torture and anguish of the dual life can only be ended by publishing the secret, so long and jealously hidden. Just as the criminal must stand judgment in a court of law, so must the double-minded man stand judgment in the court of public opinion. It is not possible to determine by a hard and fast line, when such exposure is obligatory; but in general it may be said that it is required in those cases where publicity is necessary to set things right and to repair the wrong that has been done to others.

There are, however, cases in which others are not affected, or only indirectly so; in which the evil relates to the personal life and its consequences are private to the man himself. The situation is such as is described by Goethe, when he speaks of the two souls dwelling within the human breast; the soul itself in its own sphere being divided against itself. The man is conscious of rectitude in one part of his conduct, of magnanimous impulses, of high and noble aspirations. He feels himself allied on one side to what is best and purest, and at the same time is aware of another side which in his saner moments fills him with loathing, and poisons for him life's cup of satisfaction. It is of this class of cases that I propose to speak. And here the terrible fact stares us in the face, that if the dual life be interpreted in this sense, there is hardly a man who is not leading it. Even the best of men have been aware of an abhorrent side of their nature. What else can St. Paul mean when he speaks of the continual warfare between the two laws--"the law of the flesh that is in his members, and the law of God that is in his spirit"? What else do the confessions of St. Augustine reveal but the continual oscillations of a finely poised nature between the two extremes? What else can we gather from certain passages in Tennyson's writings, but hints of a miserable and grievous struggle of the same sort? And what an intolerable burden to any person of integrity, to any one who would at least be honest, to think that he passes for better than he is, to think that if men only could see his heart as he sees it, they would pass him by with scorn instead of admiration! Yet as a rule, in such cases self-revelation is not only not demanded, but not even allowable. The opening of the secret chambers of one's life to the public, confessions like those of Rousseau, are, if anything, indecent and nauseating. The case of a man in such situations is bad enough, but the remedy for it is perforce committed to his own hands. Let him put his hand to the plough and not turn back, let him grapple with the evil in his nature and subdue and transform it, let him accomplish his inner redemption, let him make himself what he ought to be--what others perhaps think he is. What aid can the spiritual view of life extend to him in this stupendous business?

The cardinal thought I have in mind, which I believe will provide an escape from such intolerable moral dilemmas, can best be set forth by contrasting it with its diametrical opposite. This opposite is contained in the Buddhistic doctrine of the Karma. The doctrine of Karma implies that we are what we are to-day, good or bad, or good and bad, in consequence of good or bad deeds which we performed in previous states of existence. Our present life, according to this view, is but a link added to the chain of the innumerable lives which we have left behind us. It is true, we do not remember those past existences; but all the same, they have left their indelible mark upon us. Our fortunes, too, in this present existence, are determined by our meritorious or unmeritorious behavior in the past. If, for example, a man acts as your enemy to-day, it is because in a previous state you wantonly injured him or some one like him. Bear your disappointments, then, and the harm you receive from others without complaint; you are but suffering the penalty you deserve. Not only our fortune but our character, as has been said, is thus predetermined; we are what we are, in virtue of what we have been. If a man is a mean miser, it is because in a previous existence he was already unduly covetous of wealth. 'Tis but the seed he sowed in the past, that blossoms out in the present. If a man commit murder, it is because he was already guilty of unchecked violence in previous lives. The beginnings which he made in the past culminate in the awful present.

This is indeed a plausible theory, and it would help us to read some dark riddles if it were true, but there is not the slightest reason for supposing that it is. If ever there was a theory in the air, this is one. We not only have no recollections of any past incarnations, but we have no ground for inferring that there were any. I have mentioned the theory merely in order to exhibit its opposite. And the opposite is this: that a man is not responsible for the attractive or repulsive qualities with which he is born; that these are not to be accounted as his, in the sense that he is accountable for them. The son of the dipsomaniac, for instance, is not responsible for the morbid craving that stirs in him. He begins life, so far as responsibility is concerned, so far as merit or demerit is concerned, with a fresh start. He is not responsible for the craving; he is responsible only for assenting to it. True, the pull in his case is incomparably stronger than in others; still he can resist. He is responsible, not for the hideous thing itself, but for the degree in which he yields to it. He is meritorious to the extent of the effort he puts forth not to yield to it. The reason why this point is often obscured is that from the first awakening of consciousness, from the time when first we have been capable of deliberate choice, we have more or less often assented to these evil propulsions and have thus made them our own. It has therefore become impossible to separate clearly between that element in our acts which is imposed upon us from without, and that deliberate element in the act which is our own. Nevertheless, no fair-minded person will dispute that there are qualities or predispositions, for which--hideous as they may be--we are no more responsible than we are for being born with an unprepossessing face. Men are born with certain attractive qualities and certain atrocious qualities, but moral goodness and badness consists not in having these predispositions, but rather in consenting to them and adopting them into our will.

Now this, it seems to me, throws an entirely new light upon the duality of our inner life. The fact that we discover that there is baseness within us from which we recoil as we should from a venomous snake, need not shake our throne of reason or overthrow our balance. These base things are not we; our true self does not reside in them, until, indeed, we unite with them by assenting to them. A man's natural propensities are motley, but his soul is white. One hears much nowadays of the "white man's burden." There is such a thing as the white soul's burden. These dipsomaniac cravings with which some men are handicapped, these explosive irascibilities with which some are accursed, these tendencies to impurity with which others are defiled--these are the white soul's burden. Some men are more heavily burdened than others. But it is not the nature of the burden that makes men good or bad; it is the way they bear it, or rather it is the extent to which they transform this initial nature of theirs into a better nature. There is a distinction between the natural character and the moral character; the moral character results from the changes produced in the natural character, by the power of the moral will, or by the energy of the soul striving to imprint its nobler pattern on this difficult, oft intractable material.

But if we are not blameworthy for the repellant propensities, neither are we praiseworthy on account of the attractive and gracious qualities we may possess. The state of mind of one who is conscious of a divided inner life is torture. Nothing but an heroic treatment, nothing but a radical cure will free him from that torture; the cure is to realize that our seeming virtues are often not virtues at all. We must sacrifice our fancied virtues, if we would escape from the horrid sense of utter depravity that arises from our vices. A man puts to himself the question: How is it possible that at one moment I should be sympathetic and kind, should strive to compass the happiness of my fellow-beings, should take a generous interest in public causes, and try to act justly; and that at another moment I am so selfish and base? How can there be this oscillation from one pole to the other of human character? It is the contradiction that makes the tragedy. Am I, too, not "truly one but truly two"; am I, too, a Jekyll and a Hyde, both dwelling under the same skin? The answer is: You are neither the Hyde nor the Jekyll unless you elect to be. The true self is a principle in you superior to both these natural characters, a kind of oversoul, as Emerson puts it.

Sympathy and kindness lend themselves to the building up of a virtuous character, they are the psychological bases of virtue, but they must not be confounded with virtue itself. Taken by themselves, they represent merely a felicitous mixture of the elements of which we are compounded, no more praiseworthy than their opposites are blameworthy. Sympathy and kindness must be governed and regulated by principle, if they are to be rated as moral qualities. Left uncultivated, they often produce positively immoral results. Likewise, what is called justice is often no more than a hard adherence to rules, a love of order in our relations to others, which must be tempered and softened by the quality of mercy, before it can be accounted a moral virtue. Again, a willingness to advance the interests of a class or of a people is often no more than an enlarged egotism, with most of the defects of the narrower egotism, and must be regulated by a moral principle, if it is to attain to the dignity of a moral attribute. It is only by the conformity of our thoughts, our feelings, and our acts to principle, that morality is achieved. It is only by such means that the genial and attractive tendencies of our nature are converted into genuine virtues, and the way of escape from the double life is along the line of the moral transformation of our seeming virtues. _Mend your virtues, and your vices will take care of themselves._

But if the illusion is dispelled that the goodness or badness of an action as it appears to the eye is the measure of the virtuousness or viciousness of the agent; if the principle that governs the act and the effort put forth to conform to the principle be recognized as the true standard by which we are to judge, then two consequences will follow with respect to the conduct of life. The first is that the seemingly petty occasions of life are to be treated as grand occasions in so far as a moral principle is involved. For instance, a petty falsehood spoken for the purpose of securing business advantage or of avoiding business loss may seem to the average man a trivial affair; and it is so, so far as the results are concerned. And yet a morally high-bred man could no more condescend to such a falsehood than a man of cleanly habits would willingly steep himself in the mire. It is not the consequences, one way or the other, that matter. It is the eternal issue between the moral realities, truth and untruth, that is at stake. And in the light of this issue, in the light of the principle involved, petty as the circumstances may be, the occasion is not to be considered trivial. The eternal forces that have been at war since mankind first existed are at war on this occasion also; he must cast in his lot on the side of the good.