Part 2

At the end of the sixteenth century, it was above all the sudden expansion of the world that inspired human effort and aspiration. In later days science has carried on the same movement by revealing world within world. A chief element in the spirit of the French Revolution was, as Taine pointed out, that scientific activity which centred around Newton. In our own time the impulse has come from scientific discoveries much more revolutionary, far-reaching and relative to life, than any of Newton’s. The conception of evolution has penetrated every department of organic science, especially where it touches man. Darwin personally, to whom belongs the chief place of honour in the triumph of a movement which began with Aristotle, has been a transforming power by virtue of his method and spirit, his immense patience, his keen observation, his modesty and allegiance to truth; no one has done so much to make science--that is to say, all inquiry into the traceable causes or relations of things--so attractive. The great and growing sciences of to-day are the sciences of man--anthropology, sociology, whatever we like to call them, including also that special and older development, now become a new thing, though still retaining its antiquated name of Political Economy. It is difficult for us to-day to enter into the state of mind of those who once termed this the dismal science; if the question of a man’s right to a foothold on the earth is not interesting, what things are interesting? Our hopes for the evolution of man, and our most indispensable guide, are bound up with all that we can learn of man’s past and all that we can measure of his present. It was by a significant coincidence that that great modern science which has man himself for its subject was created by Broca, when he founded the Société d’Anthropologie of Paris in the same memorable year of 1859 which first saw “The Origin of Species.” Man has been brought into a line with the rest of life; a mysterious chasm has been filled up; a few fruitful hints have been received which help to make the development of all life more intelligible. This has, on the one hand, given a mighty impulse to the patient study of nature and to the accumulation of facts now seen to bear such infinite possibilities of farther advance; just as the discovery of America in the sixteenth century produced a like spirit of adventure which led men to all parts of the globe. On the other hand, this devotion to truth, this instinctive search after the causes of things, has become what may be called a new faith. The fruits of this scientific spirit are sincerity, patience, humility, the love of nature and the love of man. “Wisdom is to speak truth and consciously to act according to nature.” So spake the old Ephesian, Heraclitus, to whom, rather than to Socrates, men are now beginning to look back as the exponent of the true Greek spirit; and so also speaks modern science. It is a faith that has become a living reality to many; Clifford, for instance, as revealed in his “Lectures and Essays,” has long been a brilliant and inspiring member, often called typical, of the company of those who are filled with the scientific spirit. Huxley, one of the most militant and indefatigable exponents of the scientific spirit during the past half century, has lately set forth its aim, which has been that of his own life:--“To promote the increase of natural knowledge and to forward the application of scientific methods of investigation to all the problems of life to the best of my ability, in the conviction, which has grown with my growth and strengthened with my strength, that there is no alleviation for the sufferings of mankind except veracity of thought and of action, and the resolute facing of the world as it is, when the garment of make-believe, by which pious hands have hidden its uglier features, is stripped off.” It is important to note that this spirit is becoming widely diffused; it would be easy to point to manifestations in various departments of this open-eyed, sensitive observation, not pretending to know prematurely, ready to throw away all prepossessions and to follow Nature whithersoever her caprices lead, without crying “Out upon her!” It is impossible to forecast the magnitude of the results that will flow from this growing willingness to search out the facts of things, and to found life upon them, broadly and simply, rather than to shape it to the form of unreasoned and traditional ideals. There was long abroad in the world a curious dread of all attempts to face simply and sincerely the facts of life. This audacious frankness and scarcely less audacious humility aroused horror and suspicion; and those who marched at the front heard with considerable pain many members of the rear black-guard hurling “Materialist!” and other such terms of scorn at their backs. The sting has now died out of these terms. We know that wherever science goes the purifying breath of spring has passed and all things are re-created. We realize that it is, above all, by following the light that is shed by the low and neglected things--the “survivals”--of the world, that the reasonable path of progress becomes clear. We cried for the moon for so many thousand years before we conquered the world. We know at last that it must be among our chief ethical rules to see that we build the lofty structure of human society on the sure and simple foundations of man’s organism.

These three great movements are clearly allied, and certainly the practical applications of this scientific spirit, of which there is more to say immediately, will rest very largely in the hands of women. The great wave of emancipation which is now sweeping across the civilized world means nominally nothing more than that women should have the right to education, freedom to work, and political enfranchisement--nothing in short but the bare ordinary rights of an adult human creature in a civilized democratic state. But many other changes will follow in the train of these very simple and matter-of-fact changes, and it is no wonder that many worthy people look with dread upon the slow invasion by women of all the concerns of life--which are, after all, as much their own concerns as anyone’s--as nothing less than a new irruption of barbarians. These good people are unquestionably right. The development of women means a reinvigoration as complete as any brought by barbarians to an effete and degenerating civilization. When we turn to those early societies, which are as lamps to us in our social progress, we find that the arts of life are in the possession of women. Therefore when the torch of science is placed in the hands of women we must expect them to use it as a guide with audacious simplicity and directness, because of those instincts for practical life which they have inherited.

The rise of women--who form the majority of the race in most civilized countries--to their fair share of power, is certain. Whether one looks at it with hope or with despair one has to recognize it. For my own part I find it an unfailing source of hope. One cannot help feeling that along the purely masculine line no striking social advance is likely to be made. Men are idealists, in search of wealth usually, sometimes of artistic visions; they have little capacity for social organization. It is sometimes said that the fundamental inferiority of women is shown by the very few surpassing women of genius in the world’s history. In their anxiety to combat this argument women have even enlisted Semiramis and Dido into their ranks. But it is a fact. For all great solitary and artistic achievements--the writing of Divine Comedies, the painting of Transfigurations, the construction of systems of metaphysic, the inauguration of new religions--men are without rivals; the more abstract and unsocial an art is, the easier it is for men to attain eminence in it; in music and in the art of erecting philosophies men have had, least of all, any occasion to fear the rivalry of women. Such things are precious, although it may be that what we call “genius” is something abnormal and distorted, like those centres of irritation which result in the pearls we likewise count so precious. Women are comparatively free from “genius.” Yet it might probably be maintained that the average level of women’s intelligence is fully equal to that of men’s. Compare the men and women among settlers in the Australian bush, or wherever else men and women have been set side by side to construct their social life as best they may, and it will often be to the disadvantage of the men. In practical and social life--even perhaps, though this is yet doubtful, in science--women will have nothing to fear. The most important mental sexual difference lies in the relative and absolute preponderance in women of the lower, that is, the more important and fundamental nervous centres.[1] What new forms the influence of women will give to society we cannot tell. Our most strenuous efforts will be needed to see to it that women gain the wider experience of life, the larger education in the full sense of the word, the entire freedom of development, without which their vast power of interference in social organization might have disastrous as well as happy results.

[1] The detailed analysis of the elements which women, by the facts of their constitution, must bring to the organization of life, cannot be entered into in this volume. I hope to deal with it in part elsewhere.

We most of us began in youth with literature; the seeds of art and imagination found a kindly soil in childhood and puberty; and we spent our enthusiasm on Scott or Shelley, on Gautier or Swinburne. As we grew older we tired of these, developing instincts that craved other satisfaction, discovering sometimes even that our idols had clay feet. Then we turned to the things that had seemed to us before so dull and stupid that we had scarcely looked at them; we began to be fascinated by economics and the growth of society, the problem of surplus value turns out to be full of attraction, and the historic development of the relationship between men and women as charming as any novel. In the same way the men of 1859, who were nurtured on “The Origin of Species,” naturally and rightly turned their militant energies against theology and fought over the book of Genesis. To-day, when social rather than theological questions seem to be the legitimate outcome of the scientific spirit, and when all things connected with social organization have become the matters of most vital interest to those who are really alive to the time in which they live, even in youth such questions begin to grow enchanting, and those who are older feel the same fascination; the man who shared with Darwin the honour of initiating a new scientific era becomes a land nationaliser, William Morris a socialist, and the poet laureate who sixty years earlier had sung fantastic poems of a coming Utopia grasps at length the concrete problems with which we have to deal. All this is hopeful, for we have scarcely yet got to the bottom of the questions raised by the growth of democracy.

The influence of science on life is an accomplished fact, and we can distinctly trace its gradual development; the influence of women is on the eve of attaining its outward consummation, and it is not altogether impossible to forecast some of the changes which it will involve. But the influence of democracy, more talked of than either of the others, is much more vague, complex, and uncertain. Once it was thought that we had but to give a vote to every adult--outside the asylum and perhaps the prison--and democracy would be achieved. This crude notion has long since become ridiculous. We see now that the vote and the ballot-box do not make the voter free from even external pressure; and, which is of much more consequence, they do not necessarily free him from his own slavish instincts. We see that enfranchisement does not mean freedom, since the enfranchised are capable of running in a brainless and compact mob after any man who is clever enough to gain despotic influence over them. This is not democracy, though it is doubtless a step towards it. If we test the intelligence of the enfranchised by examining the persons whom they elect as their representatives, we soon realize the trifling character of the step. Even the free and generously democratic colonies of Australia show few brilliant results by this test. It is hard to get rid of the old distinction between a governing class and a governed, and to recognize that every man must be a member of the government.

If democracy means a state in which every man shall be a freeman, neither in economic nor intellectual nor moral subjection, two processes at least are needed to render democracy possible--on the one hand a large and many-sided education; on the other the reasonable organization of life.

The conception of education has within recent times undergone a curious development. Some of us can still remember the time when the word “education” meant as a matter of course the rudiments of intellectual education only, and when such education was regarded as a panacea for many evils; this kind of education has, in consequence, we may take it, been virtually secured to every child in all civilized countries. To this kind of education, however, it is no longer possible to attribute any satisfying sort of virtue. It may produce a very inferior order of clerk; but _education_--the reasonable development of the individual--it cannot deserve to be called; it merely puts a certain rude intellectual instrument into the hands of a still thoroughly uneducated person. Education, as we understand it now, must be founded on the harmonious exercise of body, senses, and emotions, as well as intellect; the whole environment is the agent of education. That is why we are now extending the meaning of the word indefinitely. Fresh air, good food, manual training, the cultivation of the art instincts, physical exercise and abundant recreation, wholesome home relationships--these are a few of the things which we now recognize as essential parts of the rational education of every boy and girl, and which we are seeking to obtain for all. Nor is education in this sense incompatible with intellectual development; on the contrary, it is the only sound foundation for such development. There is here no need for fear. We seem, indeed, to be rapidly approaching a period in which the excessive intension of knowledge, its confinement to a few persons, will give way to a marked extension of knowledge. Such a process is in the lines of our democratic advance. It is for the advantage of the men of science who have paid for the seclusion of extreme specialism by incapacity to understand popular movements and popular needs; it is to the advantage of all that there should be no impassable gulf between those who know and those who are ignorant. It is well to sacrifice much, if we may thereby help to diffuse the best things that are known and thought in the world, and make the scientific attitude, even more than scientific results, a common possession.

It is clear that education thus understood leads directly to the other great factor of democracy. Education is impossible without social organization: no advanced stage of social organization is possible without a complex and diffused education; they lead up to each other and go hand in hand. The average working man, in England at all events, is not an enthusiast for schemes of technical education; as things stand, such schemes constitute a method for supplying the capitalist with cheap instruments, and the working man cannot be expected to view with enthusiasm his own depreciation in the market. At the same time his lack of education leads him to overrate the value of a tawdry intellectual equipment, and he views with little anxiety the growth of a race of inferior clerks, for whom the world has few uses.

In England the love of independent individual initiative and the dislike of all harmonious social organization is certainly stronger than elsewhere; it is intimately associated with the best and worst qualities of the race, and it has spread over all the countries we have overrun. For three hundred years this tendency has had a free field. But during the last fifty years a new instinct of social organization has been slowly developing and gaining strength. Trades unions have been one of the most potent influences in this direction. All our factory legislation has been a sign of its growth, and the same movement has given enthusiasm to the County Council. There are very few things in our daily life which this spirit of social organization is not embracing or promising to embrace. The old bugbear of “State interference” (a real danger under so many circumstances) vanishes when a community approaches the point at which the individual himself becomes the State. It might be added that under no circumstances could the temper of the English people tolerate any considerable amount of “State interference.” The communalization of certain social functions corresponds--without being an exact analogy--to the process by which physiological actions become automatic. As it becomes a State function commerce will cease to absorb the best energy and enterprise of the world, and will become merely mechanical.

It may not be out of place to point out that while this process of socialization is rapidly developing, individual development so far from stopping, is progressing no less rapidly. It is too often forgotten that the former is but the means to secure the latter. While we are socializing all those things of which all have equal common need, we are more and more tending to leave to the individual the control of those things which in our complex civilization constitute individuality. We socialize what we call our physical life in order that we may attain greater freedom for what we call our spiritual life.

The growth of social organization is now beginning to open up possibilities which a few years ago would have seemed Utopian. It cannot remain limited within merely national bounds. It is concerned with the things of which all have a common need, and the interests of nations are here inextricably intertwined. This must sooner or later result in the formation of international tribunals, and this again will have decisive results in relation to war--a method of dispute rapidly becoming antiquated. Twenty-eight millions of men, ready to be put into the field (is not this a suggestive euphemism?) at a moment’s notice, in a corner of the world! Take a _plébiscite_ of the adult population of Europe, of whose life-blood these twenty-eight millions are, to-morrow--and what would the _régime_ of militarism be worth? We must certainly expect to see the same process repeated between nations which has everywhere taken place among individuals. When a strong power to which appeal can be made is established, individuals cease to fight and become litigants; this was seen in the Middle Ages, and again, as Maine pointed out, when a strong British executive was established in India. As soon as a sufficiently strong tribunal is formed, nations who once went to war must in the same way become litigants. This again will have its reaction on democracy and social life.

Along another line we may observe the approaching disappearance of war. The wars of modern times have, to a large extent, had commercial causes at their roots. The downfall of unrestricted competition, and the organization of industrialism, will remove this cause of war. In the profoundly interesting movement, witnessed to-day in the direction of trusts and syndicates, we see the natural and inevitable transition to a new era. Like all transitions, it can only be effected with much friction. From one point of view it is the last barricade of capitalism; from a wider stand-point it is the forging of a huge instrument to be taken up eventually by a vast international community who will thus control the means of providing for themselves by methods of simple and uneventful routine.

Before international organization can be realized there seems little doubt that a period of protective national organization must intervene. At present there is a floating population of the weakest and less capable--unable to emigrate to a new country--always flowing from a poorer country into a less poor country, and bearing with them the seeds of vagrancy and crime. No progress is possible if every little redeemed patch is at once flooded from over sea. It must be remembered also, that the dykes necessary to regulate the floating population are required even in the interests of the poorer countries. We are approaching a time when the general spread of information, especially by means of newspapers, will render it impossible for any country to tolerate the fact that the general level of its people’s existence should exceed in wretchedness that of any other nation. The evolution of a better state can only take place by the pressure resulting from the presence of these outcast elements of society. To reject them is but to disguise the condition of a nation and to imperil its destiny.