Part 5

Then Dives answered yet more placidly: “I never dream of wishing anything were otherwise than it is. I am frankly satisfied to have done with life. I have had a noble share of it, and I desire no more. I utterly disbelieve in a future life.”

At that moment, my respected friend Mr. Greg passed by, and heard what Dives was saying; on which, to my great surprise, he made the following observation: “This is, unquestionably, the harder--_may it not also be the higher_?--form of pious resignation, the last achievement of the ripened mind.”

As for Lazarus, on catching Mr. Greg’s remark, he turned himself painfully on the ground, and groaned: “I never heard before of anybody being ‘_piously resigned_’ to the woes and wants _of other people_. La Rochefoucauld was right, I suppose, to say, ‘_Nous avons tous assez de force pour supporter les maux d’autrui_’; but, for my part, I should not precisely call Dives’ satisfaction in his ‘noble share’ of the feast, while I am doomed to perish starving, by quite so fine a name as ‘pious resignation.’ Pray, Mr. Greg, with your large humanity, take _my_ case into consideration, before you credit Dives with anything better than stupendous egotism.”

Startled by the vehemence of poor Lazarus, I awoke.

I am, Sir, etc.

HYGEIOLATRY.

The advance of physical science and the simultaneous retreat of religious faith threaten, among their numerous consequences, to introduce a new principle into morals. We may call it Doctor’s Doctrine,--not because it is by any means the exclusive property of the medical profession, or that all doctors can be supposed to hold it, but because it is more rife among them and tells more directly on their work than in the case of other men. It is indeed excusable for a physician to attribute to bodily health, wherewith this new principle is concerned, more importance than a poet, a preacher, or a soldier, is likely to concede to it; and to this natural tendency is added, pretty frequently perhaps, a tolerably defined materialism, which not merely connects but identifies genius, happiness, and virtue with physical soundness, and stupidity, misery, and crime with diseased organization. With such views, and deprived of that vista of an eternal future which alone gives to human things their true perspective, it is not wonderful that many should come to regard bodily health as the _summum bonum_, and thence to deduce the principle to which I desire to call attention as an innovation in ethics. Reduced as nearly as possible to a formula, that principle is as follows:

_That any practice which, in the opinion of experts, conduces to bodily health or tends to the cure of disease, becomes_, ipso facto, _morally lawful and right._

I do not mean to imply that this principle has yet been clearly stated by any of its adherents, or that they are even generally conscious that they have adopted it. Possibly, many who have practically embodied it in their conduct for years may repudiate it on seeing it defined in words. Nevertheless, it may be traced as the substructure of innumerable arguments on all manner of subjects of public and private interest,--arguments which, if the principle were knocked from under them, would instantly be seen to fall baseless to the ground. It is, in short, the implied major term of a thousand syllogisms which we hear in every debate and read in every magazine and newspaper.

Now, to measure the extent of the change which the adoption of this Doctor’s Doctrine must introduce into ethics, it is only necessary to cast a glance backward at the older view of the relation of duty to health which has hitherto prevailed in the world, and been taught pretty equally by moralists of every school, with the exception of ascetics on one side, and pure hedonists on the other. That older lesson--which we may for convenience call Divine’s Doctrine, since it is the general teaching of every Protestant theologian and moralist, may be summed up in the canon--

_Bodily health may not be lawfully sacrificed to our desire of pleasure or fear of pain. It may and ought to be sacrificed to the health of our souls, to the service of our fellowmen, or to fidelity to God._

In other words, it has been taught that the man who injures his health by debauchery is guilty of a serious moral offence, and he who commits suicide is guilty of a crime; but that, on the other hand, the man who sacrifices his health in the performance of his duty as physician, clergyman, or soldier, or in endeavoring to save a fellow-creature from flood or fire, or who gives up life itself rather than forswear himself or renounce his religious faith, or commit a base or unclean action, is not only exonerated from any guilt, but is, in the highest degree, virtuous.

On these lines, Christian civilization may be said to have been built up. The natural selfishness of human nature has been counteracted by the sense of duty; and if, now and then, needless and exaggerated self-sacrifices without adequate reason have been made, and there was room for brave Charles Kingsley to preach the claims of the natural laws of life, a thousand times more often has the sense of duty enabled men and women to perform alike the painful daily tasks whereby our homes are made beautiful and sacred, and the occasional acts of heroism wherewith human existence on earth is crowned and glorified.

It needs no words to prove to any one who reflects that two-thirds of what we have been wont to reverence as homely virtue and all the martyrdoms of history consist precisely in the voluntary sacrifice of health, or of health and life together. To withhold from such sacrifices the meed of moral admiration would be to reverse the judgment of all the ages,--to prefer Sardanapalus and Heliogabalus to Curtius and Regulus, and to treat as a deluded fanatic the apostle who converted the Gentile world, but spent his years in perils by sea and land amid prisons and scourgings. From the crucifixion of Christ to the silent self-immolation of the poor consumptive girl who works half-blinded through the winter’s night to support her aged mother, the holiest and the sweetest things this earth has witnessed have been the actions of those who counted not their lives dear to them, so long as they could obey the law of truth, of righteousness, and of love.

But how is this recognition of the duty and glory of the sacrifice of health and life at the call of every higher law to be reconciled with the “Doctor’s Doctrine” that the interests of health are so supreme that they themselves constitute the highest law, and render any practice conducive to them _ipso facto_ lawful? Either we must admit, according to the Divine’s Doctrine, that moral interests transcend bodily interests, or we must hold, according to Doctor’s Doctrine, that bodily interests transcend moral interests. There is no third alternative. One principle or the other must prevail, and sooner or later leaven society with its ennobling or else its debasing influence. There are signs apparent that the Doctor’s Doctrine is already bearing its proper fruit, and that, soothed by a becalmed conscience, absolved by the authority of the priesthood of Science, men and women are beginning to be systematically selfish and self-indulgent where their health is concerned, or where there may appear a chance of curing their maladies in modes not hitherto witnessed. I can only indicate a few of the ways in which this deliberate self-preservation is exhibited.

Notably, it seems that the old courage of Englishmen is dwindling away. Almost every month, cases come to light wherein men, even soldiers, fail to stand by their comrades in danger; or wherein a crowd of fifty people witness a child drowning in a shallow pond without an effort to save it; or men who witness a cruel murder rush from the spot, leaving the yet breathing victim dying unaided on the ground. There is even, among young men, a cynical avowal of prudent concern for their own lives and limbs which constantly strikes the old, who remember the joyous youthful fearlessness of their fathers, as something altogether new and far indeed from pleasant to contemplate.

Nor are our personal acts of selfishness and cowardice on a small scale the only logical consequences of the new principle which are already visible. Cruelty of the most heinous and systematic kind is another result. The unanimous resolution passed by the great Medical Congress in the year of grace 1881 has proclaimed that vivisection leads to discoveries conducive to the cure of disease, and _therefore_ should be sanctioned and left unrestricted by law. That is to say, that all the fiendish imaginations of men like Mantegazza and Schiff, and Goltz and Bernard, and Paul Bert, should be freely permitted in England for the sake of a chance of useful hints for therapeutic science. Thus, the whole medical profession in England stands committed to the demand that the vice of cruelty in young men and old should be deliberately unchained, expressly for the sake of anticipated benefits to bodily health.

So far indeed has Doctor’s Doctrine made its way that, whenever any Bill concerning sanitary measures or public hygiene is before Parliament, there is exhibited by the speakers in the House, and by the journalists who discuss the matter, a readiness to trample on personal rights to an extent which would excite indignation, were any religious or commercial interest in question. Men may spread the most deadly _moral_ diseases, and teach doctrines which make virtue a mockery and life a hopeless desolation, and scarcely an effort is made to stop them. But let them threaten to spread bodily disease, and (unless they be medical men, and thus authorized transmitters of infection) the most stringent measures are adopted; and besides a Compulsory Vaccination Act and the ever-infamous Contagious Diseases Acts, even while these sheets are passing through the press, no less than three Bills are before Parliament to make compulsory the notification of infectious disease and segregation of infected persons. I am not now discussing the merits of these Acts and Bills: I am only observing that the spirit wherewith they are carried forward is quite an innovation in English legislation. Health of body has been accorded the importance which the--real or supposed--interests of the soul alone commanded two centuries ago; and the tyranny of the priesthood of Hygeia threatens to be as high-handed as ever was that of the Churches of Rome or of Geneva.

Lastly there is, outside of legislation, and hidden from the knowledge of the majority of the laity, one remaining application of the new principle of morals which more than all exhibits its evil, its disastrous tendency. For obvious reasons, I cannot write plainly of this moral poisoning, which I believe to be going on to a frightful extent, both in this country and abroad. I can only quote some observations made on it by an experienced minister of religion, published in the _Modern Review_ for April, 1880:--

Any one who will make a few casual inquiries will be amazed to discover the frequency with which medical men of high repute--men who are admitted to the friendship of good and unsuspecting women--offer counsel to young men, and even to boys, which strikes at the root of all morality, and indeed can proceed from nothing else than scepticism concerning the very possibility of morality itself. We speak what we know not of one, but of many, and what no medical man will deny, though many a medical man will revolt from the action of his fellow-practitioners as vehemently as we ourselves. What we ask of these purer spirits in the healing fraternity is that they will speak out on this and other matters of professional practice, and condemn their less honorable colleagues with no faltering tongue.

The Bishop of Bedford taking the chair at the meeting, May 3 of the present year (1882), of the Social Purity Alliance, alluded to this heavy charge against the medical profession in the following terms: “I know what doctors say, and I here publicly protest against the terrible thing that is often said by doctors to young men,--that sin is good for their health. I say God forgive those who have said it.”

But it will be replied: “All these evils have existed for ages. There have always been found selfish, cruel, cowardly, and profligate men, ready to transgress when their inclinations goaded them, willing to rank their own health, life, and enjoyment far before the law of God or the interest of their fellows. What signifies, then, a new formula of selfishness?”

It signifies, I venture to say, a great deal. Hitherto, men did evil; but they (or their neighbors for them) had at least the grace to recognize that it was evil. The selfish man was charged with selfishness. The cruel man did not assume the airs of a benefactor of mankind. The coward was kicked as a poltroon, not rewarded with sympathetic smiles for his candor. The man who sought the dens of vice did not go thither with his conscience pacified by his physician’s orders in his pocket. To teach men that “a practice conducive to health is _ipso facto_ morally right” is then, at one and the same moment, to damp every aspiration after the nobler kinds of virtue, and to supply a justification for every meaner kind of vice.

Neither selfishness, nor cowardice, nor cruelty, nor unchastity, can be justifiable by the plea that they may conduce to the bodily health of one man or of a thousand men; and he who will save his life by such means will assuredly lose all that makes “life worth living,” all for which life was given.

PESSIMISM, AND ONE OF ITS PROFESSORS.

The Rise and Progress of Buddhism in Europe may possibly form the subject of a long chapter in the hands of a Mosheim of the twentieth century. Hitherto, among all Western nations, not less than among the Jews, there has been a tolerable unanimous consensus that life, on the whole, is good, and that it is a pleasant thing for the eyes to behold the sun. Happiness, like health, has been assumed to be the normal condition of sentient beings; and misery, like disease, to be exceptional and abnormal. The dead have been pitied, inasmuch as they had passed away from so pleasant a world; more especially so by those classic peoples who believed that the departed dwelt in an insubstantial realm of shadows. No energetic Northern race, however, contented itself with a twilight Hades, but built up in imagination a Valhalla of feast and war for the worshipper of Odin; and, for the disciple of the Druid, a glorious ascension from the darkness of “Abred” to the light and felicity of “Gwynfyd.” Christianity, in its perverted forms, Catholic ascetic and Calvinist, took away, indeed, much of the joyfulness of the old heathen world, and made divines speak of our earthly abode as a “city of wrath” or “vale of tears.” But they were all the more urgent that men should fight the good fight, of which the crown should be “_life_ everlasting” in the New Jerusalem; and, for the majority of their flocks, even if this sinful planet remained, it would appear at all times, a sufficiently desirable habitation to make departure from it unwelcome.

Brought up in these common views, probably not one of us modern Europeans has perused, for the first time, a philosophical statement of the pessimist principles which underlie the vast religions of the farther East, without a shock of astonishment. Individually, we may have found our particular share of existence painful rather than pleasurable. Disease, poverty, disappointment, bereavement, may have embittered our years. But that any order of men, outside of lunatic asylums, should lay down as a postulate, whereon to build religion and morality, that Life is _per se_ an evil, and that, “whatever we have been, ’tis something better not to be,” and proceed benevolently to point out how we may, by much diligence, shake off not only this mortal coil, but the entire burden of being, and arrive at the consummation of nonentity,--this is an idea revolutionizing the order of our conceptions, and as nearly incredible as any assertion dealing with the vagaries of the human mind may be. Even yet, perhaps, some doubts may legitimately linger as to whether the Buddhist creed, elsewhere than in Nepaul (where it certainly does _not_ teach annihilation), really intends by “Nirvana” to set forth the emptiness, rather than the plenitude, of being. But that both Brahmin and Buddhist teachers have systematically dealt with life as an evil rather than as a good, there is, I apprehend, no question among competent inquirers. Here, then, are two absolutely contrasted, fundamental conceptions of the totality of human existence,--the Western, that life is a blessing; the Eastern, that it is a curse. The European cries,--

“’Tis life, not death, for which we pant,-- More life, and fuller, that we want.”

He “shudders at destruction,” and better endures to face even the tremendous threat of an eternal hell than to relax the tenacity of his belief in an immortal consciousness. The Indian, on the contrary, devoutly hopes that a life (or several lives) of self-abnegation, may bring him to the bourne whence the traveller leaps into the gulf of nothingness. Marvellous to add, as climax, there seems more likelihood that a certain number of highly educated Germans, Frenchmen, and Englishmen, may learn to sigh for Nirvana than that our missionaries will induce an equal number of intelligent Singalese, Chinese, or natives of Siam, to exchange their dreary anticipations for the hope of heaven.

Not to exaggerate the importance of the “School” (if such it can be accounted) of European Buddhists, we may, I think, properly afford to its existence the attention due to a remarkable “fault” in the strata of recent thought, and still more fitly ponder on the significant tokens, scattered through current literature, of pessimist tendencies quite other than the Western world has hitherto exhibited. Our modern owls may be heard responding to each other in their turrets of the _Nineteenth Century_ and the _Fortnightly Review_,--sometimes solemnly and seriously, as when Mr. Morley wrote of “that droning, piteous chronicle of wrong and cruelty and despair which everlastingly saddens the compassionating ear like the moaning of a midnight sea”; sometimes with odious pretension and self-conceit when smaller men and foolish women hoot and croak. In the brightest intellectual circles, many of us have learned to listen with well-bred calmness to assertions from smiling gentlemen and beautifully dressed ladies touching the general wrongness of all things, and the particular wretchedness of human nature, which, did we believe them, would cause us to rush from the dinner-table and hang ourselves on the nearest lamp-post. In Germany, matters have proceeded further; and Schopenhauer has been for some time as much the fashionable Philosopher, as Wagner is the Musician, of the age.

Of course there are various degrees and kinds of Pessimism everywhere to be noted. There is the Philanthropic Pessimist who thinks his fellow-creatures are merely wretched; and the Misanthropic Pessimist, who thinks them both wretched and despicable. There is the Theistic Pessimist, who still believes in God, but considers Him either to be a “baffled Ormusd,” or else to look down from such heights on human affairs as to regard them no more than we do the politics and catastrophes of an ant-hill. And, finally, there is the Atheistic Pessimist, who has abandoned the notion of an Intelligence at the helm of the Universe, and believes only in a blind Force, irresponsible for all the misery and crime of which He--or rather It--is the cause. For all these varied kinds of Pessimism there seem to be two quite distinct sources,--a good and noble, and a bad and base one. Each of these sources leads to results having an outward apparent similarity, and accordingly creates an illusory resemblance between the feelings and expressions of persons whose characters and actions are wide as the poles asunder. Let me endeavor to discriminate them.

It is, at the first glance, not a little remarkable that the development of Pessimism to which I have referred should have taken place in an age of almost unparalleled public prosperity. Probably the sufferings caused by disease, by want, and by injustice, are now at their minimum in the settled countries of Europe. And yet it is in our time that men are now beginning formally to pronounce the evil of the world to exceed the good, and to treat what their fathers deemed the “beneficent order of Providence,” as too harsh and unjust a system to be attributed to a benevolent Deity, or indeed to any intelligent Being at all. It was not in the days of old oppression and tyranny, of the great famines or the “Black Death,” that there was any such revolt. When earth was much more like hell than it is at present, few men entertained any doubt that there was a God in heaven. Now that its worst wrongs are in course of alleviation or remedy, and that there opens before our eyes a vista of almost illimitable progress for our race in happiness and virtue, the whole stupendous scheme is not unfrequently pronounced to be nothing better than a huge blunder.

The anomaly is certainly striking, and it may be carried further by noting _who_ are those persons who find the world so bad a place. As it is a prosperous age which has developed Pessimism, so it is almost always prosperous people who are Pessimists. It is the rarest thing possible to hear any expression of such ideas from the lips of the suffering or the dying, or even from those who see their beloved ones suffer and die. A hundred visits to sordid lodgings or miserable hovels, to workhouses, jails, hospitals, asylums for the blind or the incurably diseased, will scarcely afford us the chance of catching a phrase indicating that the inmate of the dreary abode thinks the world awry, and Providence to blame for it. We must pass to pleasanter scenes,--to the haunts of the well-paid lecture-frequenting artisan,--or the houses of the most cultivated and wealthy of the middle and upper classes, palaces which calamity has never visited, and where luxurious food, clothing, furniture, books, flowers, pictures, music, are accepted as matters of course; and _there_ we may, not improbably, be told that “none but bigots who voluntarily close their eyes to the terrible realities of life can dream of calling the world a happy place, or speak of its design as beneficent.” Sometimes there occurs in the experience of a single day a contrast, almost ludicrous, between the patience and gratitude manifested by some poor suffering creature--perhaps dying of cancer on a pauper’s pallet--and the expression of revolt and despair used by a cultivated gentleman who is possessed of nearly every source of human enjoyment.