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(titlepage)
BY
(dedication)
To H.G. WELLS
(contents)
It begins with the gradual suspicion, as we pass out of childish
tutelage, that the world is not at all the definite, arranged, mechanical
thing which the doctrine convenient to our elders and our own optimistic
egoism have led us to expect; that the causes and results of actions are by
no means so simple as we imagined, and that good and evil are not so
distinctly opposed as black and white. We guess, we slowly recognise with
difficulty and astonishment, that this well-regulated structure
called the universe or life is a sham constructed by human hands; that the
reality is a seething whirlpool of forces seemingly blind, mainly
disorderly and cruel, and, at the best, utterly indifferent; a chaos of
which we recognise, with humiliation turning into cynicism, that our poor
self is but a part and a sample.
Thus we feel. But if we feel long enough, and do
not get blunted in the process, we are brought gradually, by additional seeing and feeling, to a totally new view of things. The chaos becomes ordered, the void a firmament; and we recognise with joy and pride that the universe has made us, and that we, perceiving it, have made the universe in our turn; and that therefore "in la sua volontade è nostra pace."
The following notes display this process of destruction and
reconstruction in one particular type of mind; embody, for the benefit of
those who constitutionally tend to think alike, and still more of those who
are constitutionally bound to think otherwise, the silent discussions on
anarchy and law which have arisen in me as a result of other folks'
opinions and my own experience of life's complexities and
deadlocks.
"On the one hand, a revolt against any philosophical system of
unity, which many would call a revolt against all philosophy, genuine
scepticism. Then the denial that the feeling of obligation can be brought
to bear on any fixed point.... Morally, we must content ourselves with the
various injunctions of wisdom and with distinct, independent ideals.
Something beyond them is, indeed, recognised; but, whereas we were
accustomed to place it in the obligatory character of
certain prescriptions, we are now told to understand it as a perpetual warning against all dogmatism."1
This is, as I have said, the modern formula of scepticism and revolt.
But similar doubts must have arisen, most certainly, in all kinds of men at
all times, producing worldly wise cynicism in some and religious distress
in others. Such doubts as these have lurked, one suspects, at the bottom of
all transcendentalism. They are summed up in Emerson's disquieting
remark that saints are sad where philosophers are merely interested,
because the first see sin where the second see only cause and effect. They
are implied in a great deal of religious mysticism, habitually lurking in
esoteric depths of speculation, but penetrating occasionally, mysterious
subtle gases, to life's surface, and there igniting at contact with
the active impulses of men; whence the ambiguous ethics, the questionable
ways of many sects originally ascetic. Nay, it is quite conceivable that,
if there really existed the thing called the Secret of the
Church which Villiers de l'Isle Adam's gambling
abbé staked at cards against twenty louis-d'or, it
would be found to be, not that there is no purgatory, but
rather that there is no heaven and hell, no law and no sin.
Be this as it may, all dogmatic religions have forcibly repressed such
speculations, transcendental or practical, upon the ways of the universe
and of man. And it is only in our own day, with the habit of each
individual striking out his practice for himself, and with the scientific
recognition that the various religiously sanctioned codes embody a very
rough-and-ready practi-
___________________1 "Theories of Anarchy
and Law," p. 113.
Page 16
cability--it is only in our own day that people are beginning to question the perfection of established rules of conduct, to discuss the drawbacks of duty and self-sacrifice, and to speculate upon the possible futility of all ethical systems, nay, upon the possible vanity of all ideals and formulas whatever.
But the champions of moral anarchy and intellectual nihilism have made
up for lost time, and the books I intend discussing in the following notes
contain, systematically or by implication, what one might call the ethics,
the psychology, and the metaphysics of negation. These doctrines of the
school which denies all schools and all doctrines are, as I hope to show,
not of Mephistophelian origin. The spirit which denies has
arisen, in our days at least, neither from heartlessness nor from levity.
On the contrary, and little as the apostles of anarchy may suspect it, it
is from greater sensitiveness to the sufferings of others, and greater
respect for intellectual sincerity, that have resulted these doubts of the
methods hitherto devised for diminishing unhappiness and securing truth.
And for this reason, if no other, such subversive criticism ought to be of
the highest use to the very notions and tendencies which it attacks:
we want better laws, better formulas, better ideals; we want a wiser
attitude towards laws, formulas, and ideals in general; and this
better we shall get only by admitting that we have not already
got the best.
Leaving alone the epic feats of the old spirit of duty, the tragedies of
Jeanie Deans and Maggie Tulliver, the lesser, though not less astonishing,
heroism shown us in some of Mary Wilkins's New
England stories, we have all of us witnessed the action of that moral training which thwarted personal preferences and repugnances, and victoriously silenced their claims. We have all of us heard of women (particularly in the times of our mothers and grandmothers) refusing the man they loved and marrying the man of whom their parents approved; we still look on, every day, at lives dragged along in hated companionship; at talents--nay actual vocations--suppressed in deference to family prejudice or convenience: acts of spiritual mutilation so thorough as often to minimise their own suffering, changing the current of life, atrophying organic possibilities in such a way that the victim's subsequent existence was not actively unhappy, and not even obviously barren. Such things still go on all round us. The difference now is that the minor sacrifices are no longer taken for granted by all lookers-on; and the grand, heroic self-immolation no longer universally applauded. There has arisen (it began, not without silly accompaniments enough, and disgusting ones, in the eighteenth century) an active suspiciousness towards all systematic tampering with human nature. We have had to recognise all the mischief we have done by always knowing better than the mechanical and spiritual forces of the universe; we are getting to believe more and more in the organic, the constitutional, and the unconscious; and there is an American book (by the late Mr. Marsh) on the disastrous consequences of cutting down forests, draining lakes, and generally subverting natural arrangements in our greed for immediate advantages, which might be taken, every chapter of it, as an allegorical exhibition
of the views to which many people are tending on the subject of religious and social discipline.
We have had to recognise, moreover, that a great deal of all the
discipline and self-sacrifice hitherto so universally recommended
has been for the benefit of individuals, and even classes, who by no means
reciprocated towards their victims; and we cannot deny that there is a
grain of truth in Nietzsche's contempt for what he calls the
"Ethics of Slaves." And, finally, we see very plainly that the
reasonableness and facility of thorough-going self-sacrifice
is intimately connected with a belief that such self-sacrifice would
be amply compensated in another existence: it was rational to give up
the present for the future; it is not rational to prefer a future which is
problematic to a present which alone is quite certain. In this way have all
of us who think at all begun to think differently from our fathers; indeed,
we feel upon this point even more than we actually think. We warn people
not to give up their possibilities of activity and happiness in deference
to the wishes of others. We almost unconsciously collect instances of such
self-sacrifice as has entailed the damage of others, instances of
the tissues of the social fabric being insidiously rotted through the
destruction of one of its human cells; and these instances, alas! are
usually correct and to the point. We even invent, or applaud the invention
of, other instances which are decidedly far-fetched: for
instance, Mrs. Alving producing her son's hereditary malady by not
acquiescing more openly in his father's exuberant joy of
life; and Pastor Rosmer destroying, by his scruples, the resources
for happiness of the less scrupulous Rebecca.
I have chosen these examples on purpose, for they have enabled me to
give a name to these portions of the anarchical tendencies of our
day: we are, all of us who look a little around us and feel a little
for others, more or less infected with Ibsenism; conscious or
unconscious followers of the Ibsenite gospel which Mr. Bernard
Shaw1 preaches with jaunty
fanaticism. This seems, on the whole, a very good thing. Except, perhaps,
in the question of manners, of courtesy, particularly between the sexes
(æsthetic superfluities, but which help to make life liveable), I
feel persuaded that even the most rabid Ibsenism will be advantageous in
the long run. The more we let nature work for us, the more we employ our
instincts and tendencies, instead of thwarting them, the less will be the
waste, the greater the achievement. But in all similar reactions against
past exaggeration there is apt to be a drawback; alongside of a great gain,
a certain loss; and this we should do our utmost to minimise. The old
conception of duty was warped by the fearful error of thinking that human
nature is bad; or, as we moderns would express it, that the instincts of
the individual are hostile to the community. This was, calmly looked at,
monstrous. But are we not, perhaps, on the brink of a corresponding error,
less enormous of course, but large enough to grow a fine crop of misery?
The error, I mean, of taking for granted that human nature is already
entirely good; that the instincts, desires, nay, interests of the
individual are necessarily in accordance with the good
___________________1 "The Quintessence of
lbsenism"--and implicitly wherever else Ibsenism is not itself
being attacked by G.B.S.
Page 20
of the community. The Ibsenian theory is right in saying that there are lots of people, a majority, even, who had much better have had their own way. But is the Ibsenian theory right in supposing that certain other persons (and there may be strands of such in the best of us), persons like Captain Alving, or Rebecca West, or Hedda Gabler, or the Master Builder, would have become harmless and desirable if no one had interfered with their self-indulgence, their unscrupulousness, their inborn love of excitement, or their inborn ego-mania? Surely not. There is not the smallest reason why the removal of moral stigma and of self-criticising ideals should reduce these people's peculiar instincts (and these people, I repeat, are mere types of what is mixed up in most of us) to moderation.
Nor is moderation the remedy for all evils. There are in us tendencies
to feel and act which survive from times when the mere preservation of
individual and of race was desirable quite unconditionally; but which, in
our altered conditions, require not moderating, but actually replacing by
something more discriminating, less wasteful and mischievous. Vanity, for
instance, covetousness, ferocity, are surely destined to be evolved away,
the useful work they once accomplished being gradually performed by
instincts of more recent growth which spoil less in the process.
Improvement, in the moral life as in any other, is a matter of
transformation; if we are to use our instincts, our likings and dislikings,
to carry us from narrower circles of life to wider ones, we must work
unceasingly at reconstituting those likings and dislikings themselves. Now,
the evolution by which our ego has become
less
incompatible with its neighbours has taken place, largely, by the mechanism of ideals and duties, of attaching to certain acts an odium sufficient to counterbalance their attraction; till it has become more and more difficult to enjoy oneself thoroughly at other folks' cost. And this Ibsenites are apt to forget.
Ibsenites ask whether it was not horrible that Claudio should be put to
death because Isabella stickled about chastity; that an innocent Effie
Deans should be hanged because Jeanie had cut-and-dried ideas
of veracity; that Brutus's son should die because his father was so
rigidly law-abiding. But it would have been far more horrible for
the world at large if people had always been ready to sacrifice chastity,
veracity, or legality to family feelings; indeed, could such have been the
case, the world, or at least humankind, would probably have gone to pieces
before Claudio, or Effie, or the son of Brutus had been born.
Cut-and-dried notions of conduct are probably exactly
commensurate with moral slackness. We do not require to deter people from
what they do not want to do, nor to reward them for what they would do
unrewarded. The very difficulty of acting spontaneously in any given way
demands the formation of more or less unreasoning habits; the difficulty of
forming desirable habits demands the coercive force of public opinion; and
the insufficient power of mere opinion necessitates that appeal to brute
force which is involved in all application of the law. The oversight of
Ibsenian anarchists (whatever Ibsen's individual views on the
subject) is that of imagining that duties, ideals, laws can be judged by
examining their action in the
individual case; for their use, their evolutional raison d'être, is only for the general run.
The champions of the Will of the Ego, whether represented
by bluff Bernard Shaw or by ambiguous Maurice
Barrès,1 start from the
supposition that because the individual is a concrete existence, while the
species is obviously an abstraction, the will of the individual can alone
be a reality, and the will of the species must be a figment. They
completely forget that there is not one concrete individual, but an
infinite number of concrete individuals, and that what governs the world
is, therefore, the roughly averaged will of all these concrete individuals.
The single individual may will to live as hard as he can, will
to expand, assimilate, reproduce, cultivate his
moi, or anything else besides; but the
accomplishment of that Will of his--nay, the bare existence of himself
and his Will--depends entirely upon the Will of the species. Without
the permission of that abstract entity which he considers a figment, the
concrete and only really real individual would never have realised his
individual existence at all. This is not saying that his own will is not to
react against the will of the species; for the will of the species is
merely the averaged will of its component individuals, and as the
individual will alters, so must the averaged will differ. The opinions and
ideals and institutions of the present and the future are unconsciously,
and in some cases consciously, modified, however infinitesimally, by the
reactions of every living man and woman; and the
___________________1 "L'Ennemi des
Lois," "Le Jardin de Bérénice," "Un
Homme Libre."
Page 23
more universal this atomic individual modification, the higher the civilisation, the greater the bulk of happiness attained and attainable. Meanwhile ideals, commandments, institutions are, each for its own time, so many roads, high roads, if not royal roads, to the maximum of good behaviour possible in any given condition. Without them, people would have to carry their virtuous potentialities through bogs and briars, where most of them would remain sticking. Succeeding generations, knowing more of the soil and employing more accurate measurements, making, moreover, free use of blasting powder, may build shorter and easier roads, along which fewer persons will die; roads also in a greater variety of directions, that every one may get near his real destination. And the more each individual keeps his eyes open to the inconveniences and dangers of the existing roads to righteousness, and airs his criticisms thereof, the better: for the majority, which is as slow as the individual is quick, is not likely to destroy the old thoroughfares before having made itself new ones. The Ibsenite anarchists are right in reminding us that there is really nothing holy in such a road; for holiness is a quality, not of institutions, but of character, and a man can be equally holy along a new road as along an old one; alas! as holy along a wrong road as along a right one. But we, on the other hand, must remind the Ibsenites that new or old, right or wrong, such high roads are high roads to the advantage not always of the single individual at any given moment, but of the majority at most times, or, at least, of the majority composed of the most typical individuals.
Such doubts as these are by no means due to the growth of sympathy only,
to what is called, and sometimes really is, mere sentimental weakness.
Together with disbelief in a theologically appointed universe, we have
witnessed the growth of respect both for fact and for logic; and, as a
consequence, we no longer regard the infringement of a human law as the
rebellion to the will of God. We have replaced the notion of
sin by the notion of crime; and the particular
act which we happen to call a crime is no longer, in our eyes,
a detached and spontaneously generated fact in a single individual
character, but the result of a dozen converging causes, of which this
individual character may be only one, while the constitution of surrounding
society is sure to be another of the determinants. We recognise also that
while, on the one hand, the capacity for committing certain acts
intolerable to the majority does not imply utter worthlessness in many
other directions; on the other hand, the thorough-going perversity
which renders an individual criminal an unmitigated evil to his
fellow-creatures involves constitutional and irresistible tendencies
which are incompatible with any notion of responsibility. All this
comes to saying that the coercion and punishment of offenders has become a question not of morality, but of police; that it has ceased to be a sort of holy sacrifice to God, and grown to be a rough-and-ready way of getting rid of a nuisance. And this has altered our feelings from the self-complacency of a priest to the humiliation of an unwilling scavenger. We are getting a little ashamed of the power to imprison, bully, outlaw, destroy either life or life's possibilities, which constitutes the secular arm of all theoretic morality.
Is such a feeling mistaken? Surely only inasmuch as it would turn a
desirable possibility for the future into an unmanageable actuality in the
present. For, however much we may admit that bodily violence, and the kind
of discipline dependent thereupon, are necessary in the present, and will
be necessary for longer than we dare foresee in the future, we must open
our eyes to the fact that all progress represents a constant diminution
thereof. Similarly we must be careful that all our methods (even the
methods including authoritativeness and violence) shall tend to the
eventual disappearance of violence towards human beings and
authoritativeness towards adults; violence remaining our necessary method
with brutes and authoritativeness with children, but even in these
relations diminishing to the utmost. For violence, and the discipline
founded on violence (as distinguished from self-discipline sprung
from intelligence and adaptability) means not merely suffering, but
wastefulness worse than suffering, because it entails it: waste of
the possibilities of adaptation in him who exerts it, as well as of
constitutional improvement in him who suffers from it. Waste above
all of the Reality, the reality which must be slightly different in every individual case, reality containing the possibilities of new arrangements and new faculties; reality which we cruelly disregard whenever we treat individual cases as merely typical, whenever we act on the one half of a case containing similarity, and neglect the other half of the case containing difference. Such wastefulness of method is necessary just in proportion as we are deficient in the power of seeing, feeling, sympathising, discriminating; deficient in the power of selecting, preferring, and postponing. Violence over body and over mind; violence against the will of others; violence against fact: these represent the friction in the imperfect machinery of life; and progress is but the substitution of human mechanism more and more delicate and solid, through which the movement is ever greater, the friction ever less.
Meanwhile, do we possess a human mechanism as good as it might be?
Tolstoi, Ibsen, the author of the very suggestive dialogues on Anarchy and
Law, even egoistic decadents like Maurice Barrès, the whole
heterogeneous crusade of doubt and rebellion, are doing good work in
showing that we have not; in forcing us to consider what proportions of
subtlety and clumsiness, of movement and of friction, of utility and waste,
are represented by the system of coercion and punishment accepted in our
days. And such an examination will surely prove that in this matter we have
developed our ingenuity less (sometimes atrophied it), and proceeded with
far greater hurry and slovenliness than with any of the other products of
civilisation. Try and imagine where building, agriculture, manu-
facture, any of the most common crafts would be, had it been carried on throughout the centuries as we still carry on the moralisation of mankind; if stone, brick, soil, manure, raw material, let alone the physical and chemical laws, had been treated in the rough-and-ready manner in which we treat human thought and impulse! But the fact is that we have required food, clothing, and shelter so bitterly hitherto, that all our best intelligence and energy have gone to diminish wastefulness in their production; and no time has remained, no power of discrimination, for making the best of intellectual and moral qualities. Indeed, we have dealt, and we deal only, with the bad moral qualities of mankind; those that can be seen in spare five minutes and with a rushlight; nay, those which are stumbled over in the dark and kicked into corners. We may hope for improvement almost in proportion as we recognise that punishment is the expression not of responsibility towards heaven on the part of the malefactor, but of incapacity and hurry on the part of those whom the malefactor damages. For here even as in the question of duties and ideals, what we are suffering from is lack of discrimination, paucity of methods, insufficiency of formulas; and what we want is not less law, but more law: law which will suit the particular case which is a reality and has results, not merely the general run, which is an abstraction and takes care of itself.
a central core of doubt, to which the others can be logically reduced; the doubt, namely, whether the individuality is not cramped, enfeebled, rendered unfit for life, by obedience to any kind of abstraction, to anything save its own individual tendencies. Oddly enough, the psychological theory had in this matter preceded the thorough-going practical application; and the implicit principles of subsequent anarchical views were expressed by the earliest and least read of anarchist writers, Max Stirner (Kaspar Schmidt)1 , who died so long ago as 1856.
Max Stirner builds up his system--for his hatred of system is
expressed in elaborately systematic form--upon the notion that the
Geist, the intellect which forms conceptions,
is a colossal cheat for ever robbing the individual of its due, and marring
life by imaginary obstacles; a wicked sort of Archimago, whose
phantasmagoria, duty, ideal, vocation, aim, law, formula, can
be described only by the untranslatable German word
Spuk, a decidedly undignified haunting by
bogies. Against this kingdom of delusion the human individual
--der Einzige--has been, since the
beginning of time, slowly and painfully fighting his way; never attaining
to any kind of freedom, but merely exchanging one form of slavery for
another, slavery to the religious delusion for slavery to the metaphysic
delusion, slavery to divine right for slavery to civic liberty; slavery to
dogma, commandment, heaven and hell, for slavery to sentiment, humanity,
progress; all equally mere words, conceits, figments, by which the wretched
individual
___________________1 "Der Einzige und sein
Eigenthum."
Page 29
has allowed himself to be coerced and martyrised: the wretched individual who alone is a reality.
This is the darkest, if not the deepest, pit of anarchical thought; and
through its mazes Stirner drags us round and round for as long a time as
Kant requires for his Categories, or the Mediæval Monk for the
imitation of Christ--both of which, by the way, are good examples of
Spuk. But even as Dante clambered out of hell
by continuing the way he had come down, so we also can emerge from
Stirner's negations by pursuing the arguments which had led into
them. And, having got to the individual as the only and original reality,
we can work our way back to those subsidiary and contingent realities, the
individual's duties, ideals, and institutions.
There is nothing real, says Stirner, but the various conditions of the
individual; the rest is delusion, Spuk. But
if only the ego is real, how can anything
else interfere with it? If such abstractions and figments as God,
State, Family, Morality (or whatever the name of the particular
bogy), can cramp, cabin, maim our individuality; then, since our
individuality alone has reality, these various delusions must be a part of
our individuality. Free yourselves, says Stirner, from your own ideas. But
our ideas, whether
spontaneously generated in ourselves or assimilated from others, must, in
order to have real powers such as we attribute to them, be a part of
ourself: and if we sacrifice any other part of ourself to those
ideas, it is a proof that they, and not the sacrificed part, must be, at
that particular conjunction of circumstances, the dominant part of our
ego. Stirner's psychology
admits love for individuals as a determinant of action; and similarly regard for the reciprocity of self-interest. But is not love for mankind, however vague the mankind, and regard for principle, however abstract the principle, quite as much a real active power of our nature? If Stirner is made uncomfortable, as he says, by the frown on the face of his beloved, and "kisses the frown away"--to rid himself of his discomfort; why, so are other egos--less numerous, but not less real--made uncomfortable by the look of pain in men and women whom they do not care for, nay, by the mere knowledge that men and women, even animals, whom they have never seen, are suffering, or are likely to suffer: and, in certain egos--rarest, but most efficaciously real--there will arise an impulse--yes, something so irresistibly real as a constitutional impulse--to sacrifice everything for the sake of diminishing that unseen, that possible suffering: suffering present in hospitals, in factories, in slums, in prisons, or future suffering in hell.
And similarly there are egos which are
made as wretched by the neglect of some civic or religious duty as Stirner
could possibly be by skipping a meal or losing a night's sleep. It is
quite a different question whether such ideas as these, ideas whose
coercive power reveals them an integral part of the
ego, happen or not to coincide with the
courses most desirable for the total welfare either of one single
ego or of a great number of
egos. The point at issue is whether or not
such active factors in life can be treated as separate from life itself; it
is a different question similarly whether any more egoistic preference, say
for alcohol or gambling,
happens in the long run to tally with the ego's advantage. Stirner, indeed, entrenches himself behind notion that wherever there exists any kind of over-mastering desire, need, or idea, the ego ceases to exist. But, as a psychological fact, at any given moment of reality, some desire, need, or idea, or group of desires, needs, or ideas, must inevitably be having the mastery, otherwise impulse would disappear and action of all kinds cease. For the ego which refuses to be dominated by any particular idea or any particular desire, be it externalised as humanity, duty, or merely tobacco or bottle, is an ego dominated by some other idea or desire, by the idea or desire that it ought to be free from such domination in particular, or from all conscious domination in general. But as to an ego which, at any given moment, is otherwise than dominated by some feeling, impulse, or thought, that kind of ego is, oddly enough, exactly the thing which Stirner is waging war against--an abstraction, a nonentity, a figment of logic, of which we have no practical experience. Yes, indeed, nothing but the ego is efficient; since, to be efficient, everything else must have been absorbed into or must impinge upon it.
This anarchical psychology of Stirner's (and something similar,
however unformulated, exists in the mind also of Maurice Barrès and
of Bernard Shaw) brings home to me how much we stand in need of a new
science of will, thought, and emotion; or, rather, of the practical
application of such a science of the soul as recent years have already
given us. It would put us equally above the new-fangled theories of
freeing the ego by abolishing ideals and
habits, and above the old-
fashioned notions of thwarting the ego in the name of morality. For it would show that the ego is not the separate momentary impulse, but the organic hierarchy of united and graduated impulses; a unity which being evolved by contact with similar unities, can be made as harmonious with them as the mere separate impulses, referring to mere partial and momentary relations, are likely to be the reverse. This being understood, we shall seek less for the outer discipline, the constraining of the individual by society, than for the inner discipline, the subordination of the individual's lesser and also less durable motives to the greater and more durable. We shall, once we have really conceived this organic unity of the individual, desist from our wasteful and cruel attempts to reduce all men to one pattern, to extract from all the same kind of service. But in such healthy development of the ego, in such organic, inner discipline, the conscious reference to standards, the conscious desire for harmony, will be an indispensable means. Duties and ideals will again be valued above all things; not, indeed, as intellectual formulas, but as factors of habitual emotional conditions. For the chief value of duty or ideal is the capacity fostered thereby of being dutiful, of acting in accordance with an ideal. Among the great gifts for which we must thank the theological systems of the past, the Puritan element in every creed, the most valuable are not the tables of permissions and prohibitions, always variable, and still very rough and ready. The splendid work of Puritanism is the training, nay, the conception, of a real individuality, the habit of self-dominion, of postponing, foregoing the immediate, momentary and
temporal for the sake of a distant, permanent, and, inasmuch as intellectually recognised, spiritual something. The moral value of Jeanie Deans is not in her conviction that under no circumstances must a lie be told (although her conviction was correct in 999 cases out of 1,000), but in her incapacity of telling a lie so long as she was convinced against it. Puritanism is psychologically right in its implicit recognition of the superiority of the habitual condition of feeling over the transient impulse. For what I habitually wish to be represents, or ought to represent, the bulk of my nature and organisation more really than what at a given moment I actually am. If individualism is to triumph, if any good is to come (and it doubtless will) out of contemporary anarchic theories of the ego, it will be by an increase rather than a diminution of the healthy Puritan element. It is, after all, the Puritans in temper who have done all successful rebellion against items of Puritan codes; whereas the egoist of the modern type is, nine times out of ten, the sort of person who tolerates evil for want of the self-discipline and consistency necessary to stop it.
even suggests the making of new gods, the creation of a strange metaphorical Olympus. Like all other theology, it is esoteric and exoteric; it has its treatises of highest metaphysical subtlety; and its little popular catechisms, quite full of explicit absurdities. Such a catechism as this was made up by the late J.A. Symonds out of the opinions, or what he took to be the opinions, of Walt Whitman. It is the declaration of the equal rights and equal dignity of all the parts of man's nature; and implicity therefore of the foolishness of all the hierarchies which various creeds and various systems of ethics have set up in the soul and the life of mankind. It is characteristically different in tone from the anarchical utterances of the egotistic decadent Barrès and the metaphysical Nihilist Stirner; it is eminently Anglo--Saxon in a sort of unconscious optimistic cant. Its subversiveness consists in an attempt to set things right; but it does so, not by pleading that nothing is evil, but rather by insisting. that everything is good. The democratic view, as it is called, of Whitman, as expounded by Symonds, consists in asserting that all things are equally divine.
Now if you start with identifying divine with
divinely ordained, and identify the Divinity with the bare
fact of existence, then all things are certainly portions of the Divinity,
and, in so far, divine. But if all things are in this sense
divine, then divine ceases to be a quality which evokes any
sense of preference; then divine is no longer an expression
commensurate with esteem, still less legitimately productive of emotional
satisfaction; if all things are divine, why then some may be divine and
honourable and others
divine and dishonourable. There is something akin in this anarchic theology to the juggling with the word value of Karl Marx and his followers. It is the acceptance of the emotional quality of a word after emptying out the meaning which had produced it. Good, noble, divine; a hierarchy of words denoting such qualities as we think especially desirable; denoting fuller possession of that which we esteem most in ourselves, be it strength or beauty, moral or intellectual helpfulness; words which awaken in our mind the sense of approval, of respect, and finally of reverence and wonder. Perform a little sleight-of-hand, and shuffle divinity with God, God with Nature, Nature with Being, and you contrive to awaken that emotion of rareness, superiority, wonderfulness, in connection with... with what? O irony of self-delusion! with everything equally.
This subversion of all appreciation is the furthest possible from being,
as Whitman seems to have imagined, and as Symonds reiterates, a highly
scientific thought. For science teaches us that all life, and especially
the life we human beings call progress, is not a mere
affirmation, so to speak, of mere passive being, of "what
is--is"--but a selection and rejection, the perpetual
assertion of fitness against unfitness, a constant making of inequality. To
our feelings, and to our mind (unless it become a word without intellectual
and emotional meaning) the divine is the supremely desirable.
According to our condition that desirable has inevitably shifted quarters,
but it has always been, and must always be, the exceptional, the
exceptional which becomes, perhaps, by dint of our
seeking it, the rule; our desires being set free to seek something new, some other rare thing which we would fain make common. And in this way our spiritual progress has consisted, most probably, in the gradual relegation to the obscure, half-conscious, automatic side of our nature of instincts and functions which have once been uppermost; in the gradual raising of the level of the desirable, the contemplated, above the necessities of the moment and the body, above the interest of the ego. There is no place for democracy à la Whitman in the soul; its law is coordination, subordination, hierarchy.
The "Theories of Anarchy and Law," of Mr. H.B. Brewster, is
unknown to the public just in proportion, I should say, to its merits. It
takes no ordinary reader to appreciate its subtlety of analysis and
boldness of hypothesis. And the marvellous impartiality which sees every
side of every argument equally, and refrains from all judgment, is
positively distressing even to the most admiring reader, who seeks in vain
for something to attack or to espouse, who gropes, blinded by excess of
light, for the unclutchable personality of the author. Behind which of the
speakers of these dialogues shall we look for him? At which moment does he
shift from the one side to the other? Is Mr. Brewster on the whole for or
against intellectual and ethical Nihilism? Be this as it may, the book is
on the whole a perfect gospel of anarchy, because, in the first place, the
anarchical opinions, although they represent only one quarter of the
doctrines represented, are those we are least accustomed to and
consequently most impressed by; and because, in the second place,
the very impartiality, the refusal to decide, to commend and condemn, leaves an impression of the utter vanity of all formula and all system.
It is, therefore, only as an expression of anarchic tendencies that I
wish, in this connection, to mention the book. And principally because it
affords, in the most remarkable form, the key-note of what I should
call the transcendental theology of anarchy. I use the word theology once
more advisedly. For Mr. Brewster has separated from the various practical
and speculative items which held it in solution, and distilled into the
subtlest essence, a transcendental principle which lurks, however
unperceived, in all anarchic writings, a transcendental equivalent of the
old Persian and Manichean dualism. At the end of all the doubts, doubts
about ideals, duties, institutions, formulas, whether they are good or
evil, arises the final doubt: have we a right to prefer good to evil?
Does the universe live only in the being of God; does the universe not live
equally in the being of Satan? The pessimistic philosophers of our century
have accustomed us to conceive of forces in creation which are
irreconcileable with benevolence. The later Darwinism is training us to
perceive that in the process of evolution there is, alongside of the
selection of the fittest, the rendering even unfitter of the initially
unfit, degenerative tendencies as well as tendencies to adaptation. We have
had to admit that destruction is a factor in all construction. The doubt
arises, may not destruction be just as great a power as construction? Not
as its servant, but as its rival, its equal. Are we not Pharisees in
condemning
all persons and instincts unsuitable, forsooth, to the purposes of our race and civilisation, when those persons and instincts are as much realities as any others? Are we not Philistines in condemning all views of life which do not square with our particular intellectual organisation? Is not what we call evil a reality, and does chaos perhaps not exist as truly as order? Shall we not recognise the great dualism?
By no means. We are so constituted that evil cannot please nor chaos
satisfy us; and our constitution must be, for us, the law of the universe.
For we conceive the universe only in terms of our own existence, and the
qualities we attribute to it are only modes of our own feeling. All we can
be sure of about good and evil, chaos and order, is that they are
conceptions of ours. Are they conceptions, and it so, to what extent
corresponding, of anything else? We cannot tell. What we call forces of
destruction and disorder are such to us; nay, they are forces perhaps only
to us; it is only through our own aversion that we know of destruction and
disorder at all. The origin of all such doubts, and their solution also,
lies in the nature of the doubter. In the little world which our faculties,
our spiritual and practical needs, as well as our bodily senses, have
created for us out of the infinite unknown universe, it is our human
instincts which decide, as they have determined, everything. And among the
ideas they have set on foot they decide for good against evil, for order
against chaos.
These discussions on anarchy and law, these
struggles between what we have and what we want, should give a result more practically important than even the most important application in practice; for, in our life, a habit of feeling and thinking, an attitude, is of wider influence than a rule of conduct. The attempt to verify our moral compass, the deliberate readiness to do so, might result in the safest kind of spiritual peace. For, to be able to see in all that we call bad, wrong, false, the cause and effect, the immense naturalness and inevitableness, its place in the universe as distinguished from its place in our own liking or convenience; to be able to face fact as fact, as something transcending all momentary convenience or pleasantness; yet at the same time to preserve our human preferences, to exercise our human selection all the more rigidly because we know that it is our selection, reality offering more, but we accepting only what we choose; such a double attitude would surely be the best. It would be the only attitude thoroughly true, just, kind, and really practical, giving us peace and dignity and energy for struggle without hoodwinking or arrogance. It would be more respectful both to our own nature, and to the nature which transcends ours, to recognise that what mankind wants it wants because it is mankind; and to leave off claiming from the universe conformity to human ideals and methods.
The sense of this (however vague) has been furthered by occasional
fortunate conditions of civilisation, and it is, most probably,
constitutional in certain happily balanced natures. It is what gives the
high serenity to men of the stamp of Plato and
Goethe and Browning; they can touch everything, discuss everything, understand the reason of everything, yet remain with preferences unaltered. Perhaps we may all some day attain, by employing equally our tendencies to doubt and our tendencies to believe, to such a fearless, yet modest, recognition of what is, and also of what we wish it to be.
The relation I should wish to set forth is that between Emerson's
writings, and one of their readers--myself. For the relation between
writer and reader, where such really exists, implies the originating of
ideas and states of feeling such as did not exist in either reader or
writer taken singly, the latent peculiarities of the one being vitalised
and altered by the fruitful contact of the other. The thought, the feeling
thus generated may be far from uncommon, and may be shortlived and
comparatively barren; but it is an organic particle of that vast,
fluctuating mass of spiritual life whence all thought and all feeling
arise, and with-
out which the most creative minds could not create, or, could they create, would be creative to no purpose.
This action and reaction, give and take, between reader and writer is
worthy of attention quite apart from the value of the ideas which it may
have brought forth. It would afford another demonstration of the
relativeness of all judgment, of the incompleteness of all definite views,
and it would constitute an additional lesson, very wholesome for our
conceit and impatience, on the poverty and faultiness of each
individual's contribution to truth, as compared with the excellence
of the unindividual mass of thought made up of such contributions.
As regards Emerson, I am aware of his exceptional influence in maturing
my thought. And it is my impression that in return for the partial change
he has thus effected--since only partial changes are valuable,
implying by their partiality the presence of some original
tendencies--I have been able to alter some of his main ideas in a way
such as to render them more fruitful: clearing them of certain
sterilising excrescences, and grafting them on to the living thought of our
days. My reader, in his turn, will alter and prune and graft my
alterations, or cast them aside as useless, or useless at least to
himself.
But be this as it may, my notes will be valuable in showing one of the
ways in which reader and writer unite to form a something new. For it will
be visible in them that Emerson helped me first by arousing considerable
antagonism, and that the reaction against his antagonistic peculiarities so
helped to clear my own ideas, that I grew eventually able to approach him
with impartiality, to separate deliberately what disfigured him in my eyes; and, having put aside these disfiguring portions, to enter his presence in a mood worthy of making me receive the inestimable gifts of his soul.
He openly deprecates any attempts at consecutiveness, he warns mankind
against wanting to do that which cannot be done without the wanting,
against wishing to be or to have what they are not or have not already. He
is the apostle of spontaneity; in his consuming passion for reality he
confounds the deliberate with the artificial, and the artificial with the
futile. The benefit of Emerson's advice on this head depends on the
recognition that there are some things we can never do, some things we can
never have or be--namely, all those of whose nature there is not in
ourselves already a germ, a possibility. The danger of Emerson's
advice consists in making us believe that the actual is the potential, that
what we are not we cannot become, that
what we have not yet got we may never obtain. There will be a distinct gain in spontaneity, which spontaneity means success, and a diminution of the kind of effort which means only failure, despair, or, worst of all, the wasting, the spoiling of what is valuable. There will be a much smaller number of shams, and a greater proportion of satisfactory products; which means an increase of happiness and what conduces thereto. But, on the other hand, there will be a waste of potentialities, of the things that might have been; and therewith a great loss in completeness, thoroughness, balance, and in all things intellectual, of lucidity and efficacy for application to practice. The world will not be in thorough working order, since working order implies co-ordination, co-operation, compromise. Things will be comparatively spasmodic, and, in a measure, sterile. This absence of lucidity, this sporadic, sterile tendency, is visible in Emerson himself; it is the drawback of his doctrine, of his practice of spontaneity.
Yet it is doubtful whether it is not better thus--better that the
exaggerations and shortcomings should be corrected by Emerson's
readers than forestalled by Emerson himself. It is possible that with men
of this mystic-symbolical temper the greater lucidity and practical
applicability (since practice is based on reality, and reality can be
attained only by being lucid) might fail to compensate for the diminution
in suggestiveness and directness. The prophetically enounced thought works
its way deeper, perhaps, into the mind of the hearer, when it is such as
does not graze off the surface. It sets the mind a-thinking (when
itself thinkable)
more than the carefully argued thesis. So it is well worth while to let the prophet babble occasional nonsense, talk, like the earliest Christians and the Irvingites, in gibberish tongues, for the sake of the great words of inspiration which drop, ever and anon, from his superhuman lips.
But connection in our ideas, the quality of being thought
out, is valuable for more than itself. The act of bringing our ideas
into mutual dependence shows us also which of them are worthless: the
union of a fallacy with a truth, even if it produce no immediate jar, can
produce but a vicious consequence. We begin to doubt of our premiss on
seeing its untenable conclusions or side-issues. Here, then, comes
in the danger of the intellectual methods of Emerson, of all prophetic,
clairvoyant, as distinguished from prosaically logical, thinkers. These men
can throw out a falsehood or mere faulty approximation to truth, without
being warned of what they are doing. Nay, worse, they can hit upon a truth
without that truth destroying its corresponding error. In this system (or
absence thereof) of isolating ideas, everything is safe--the good and
the bad can rest at peace; the good does not inconvenience the bad, nor the
bad inconvenience the good. The thinker is never called upon to make a
choice among his thoughts, he may keep them all. Hence it is that these
clairvoyant thinkers give us so much of truth swimming in so much of
falsehood, or vice versâ. Hence, worst
of all, that they will be so serenely unconscious of the practical dangers
of their teachings. The metaphysical Schoolmen of the Middle Ages kept up
the standard
of thinking and living; while the mystics, their superiors in mind and in feeling, very frequently debased it exceedingly.
And, moreover, this resting satisfied with one's spontaneous
intentions, as distinguished from all attempts to connect and correct them,
this habit of never comparing one's conceptions of things with each
other must result in a virtual refusal to examine either facts or other
men's views. No sense of intellectual responsibility can be generated
by modes of thought so casual and disconnected. The thinker keeps his ideas
apart, so they never clash; he keeps them separate also from their own
consequences, from the thought of others, from the inconvenient testimony
of reality. He clears all around him; and soon comes to be the only mind,
the only thought in the universe: the universe becomes the image of
his views of it; and all save the intellect ceases to exist.
It is most curious to observe how Emerson, whose exquisite moral and
æsthetic sensibility is revealed in a thousand fragmentary
utterances, uproots all human sympathies and preferences in laying out his
stony garden of the intellect, but leaves them everywhere about, to bloom
delightfully--little unnoticed heaps of earth's weeds in those
fine concentric paths and beds of intellectual spar and gravel. Thus, in
the famous essay on "Friendship," that most extraordinary
revelation of a passionate personality, he affects to consider the friend
as a mere intellectual excitement (all is over, he tells us, once curiosity
is satisfied); and even in placing his austere bounds to such intellectual
voluptuousness, he speaks only of his own self-respect,
his own spiritual temperance, and the results of indulgence, or refraining upon his own soul, with never a reference to the feelings, the poor soft heart of the other party. Learn to check your fancies in friendship, to refrain from your friend, to do without; learn to expect no reciprocity. Why? Lest in your hurry you may engage another's permanent affection where you cannot give your own?--lest in your habit of constant spiritual union you become selfish, exacting, or, in your desire for reciprocation, you grow unable to give save where you receive? For not one of these reasons. No; merely because of the risk to your intellectual independence, your intellectual integrity and security. One would think, were it not for the evidence of a hundred scattered utterances of most delicate lovingkindness, that Emerson was a fierce intellectual egoist like Abelard, writing just such letters to Heloise, answering her prayer for one gentle word with chapters of theology, in the suppressed savageness of a mediæval ascetic, who sees with disgust something that has once inflamed his senses but never touched his heart.
And similarly he mentions pain, not as a horror whose existence all
around we must for ever struggle against--a horror the thought of
which, as existing in others, is almost as bad as its reality in
ourselves--but as a possible factor in producing the man of pure
intellect--the justum et tenacem propositi
virum.
For Emerson is perpetually repeating that all life is in the
intellect--nay, all reality. Hence a possibility of interest only in
cause and effect--in the why things are, not the
how things should be. Hence all matters
being referable only to Intellect, Intellect--or rather, an intellect corresponding to his own--is evidently God. And hence a perpetual worship, sometimes slightly savouring of Moloch's, of a Godhead which, in its apparent indifference to evil and suffering, is indeed but the mist-magnified shadow of Emerson's own Olympian mind.
All things, therefore, are the symbol of Divinity, the forms in which
the Creative force chooses, Proteus-like, to mask. And for this
reason nature, all that is and can be, is noble.
But Emerson is meanwhile the sport of a delusion: he conceives
that what is taking place within himself is happening also without. He is
watching his own mind, shadowed on the outer world, passing from object to
object; and he fancies that this vague and magnified himself must be God.
Thus the divinity--for Emerson the divinity passing into and through
all things--is not the power by virtue of which things are, but in
reality the power by virtue of which he perceives their existence. For
Emerson, though often insisting on the part played by the perceiving mind
in all matters of perception, refuses to consider that in the same way as
the structure of the eye, which makes a straight stick seem crooked in the
water, so also the quality and condition of the mind which perceives
nature, is a fact inside nature, and not outside it. If
Emerson had any habits of systematic thought, he could not avoid taking
notice of this fact; he would be obliged, once having suspected their
nature, to examine methodically his own mental operations. But being
unhampered by any system, he can afford to look
away from any fact which might disturb him; and so, at the convenient moment, when it would have become clear that thought cannot--any more than the senses can--handle absolute reality, he looks away from himself, and looks in the direction of what he calls God. Here, by no metaphysical sleight of hand, but by merely dropping the subject and picking it up elsewhere, he has momentarily got rid of the identity between the universal mind and his own. This intellect, self-created and all-creating, is now no longer the mind of Emerson, moulding matter into so many disguises for itself: it is the mind of the world. And who could deny that the mind of the world, in so far as mind of the world, might sport with matter, or call it up as a mere phantom out of nothingness? The purely intellectual man, impatient of all that is not intellect, revolting from the thought that anything save intellect can have reality, does thus attribute his own temper to the Godhead--the Godhead with whom he fancies that, in following any chain of cause and effect, he must be united and identified.
Therefore [attempting to systematise what Emerson has thrown out in
separate statements] the divinity, inasmuch as the mere magnified reflexion
of the individual intellect, is necessarily what that individual interest
happens to be: that which makes or perceives all cause and effect.
And so it comes to pass that cause and effect, being made by the mind
identical with God, and hence by God Himself, become the Godlike; and the
Godlike, Emerson has been accustomed to think, is the same as the holy, the
virtuous. In short, all that is is right, not as Pope
imagined, because it was
necessarily made to be right, but merely because to be right is the same as to be, because something else has been before and conditioned it. "It is dislocation and detachment from the life of God," we read in the Essay on the poet, "that makes things ugly; and the poet who reattaches things to nature and the whole--reattaching even artificial things and revelations of nature to nature by a deeper insight--disposes very easily of disagreeable facts." This, extended into less pithy language, means merely that all is right so long as it is understood; and that the scientific thinker, whom Emerson misnames Poet, being able to demonstrate that even such things as most shock our constitution are yet the inevitable results of certain other things, can give us the satisfaction of seeing cause and effect and thereby set our minds at rest about such "disagreeable facts" as it foolishly feels annoyed at. Whatever is, being cause and effect, is an emanation of the divinity, who is also cause and effect. And, as Emerson has been brought up to connect morality with what other men call God (meaning thereby any of a variety of things, but not cause and effect), Emerson perceives that cause and effect must be moral. "Since everything in nature," he says, "answers to a moral power, if any phenomenon remains brute and dark, it is because the corresponding faculty in the observer is not yet active"--that is to say that the "brute and dark" phenomenon is not yet disposed of as cause and effect. Thus to the connecting, reasoning mind, cause and effect having become divine, came actually to mean morality. The evil fact is comfortably settled once we have recognised its origin, and pain and death, disease
and degradation, may link hands with whatever is fair and noble here below, and revolve mystically round the Divinity and the divine human being in a rhythm of causation and logic, making soul-music of is and was!
Nay, further--for it is easier sometimes for the intellect to
endure evil than that which, being the reverse of intellect, is more
antagonistic to it--Emerson formulates what has been blunderingly put
into practice by Whitman, and condenses into a few mystical words what
Whitman extends into grotesque rhapsodies of mixed beauty and dirt.
"All the facts of the animal economy," says Emerson,
"sex, nutriment, gestation, birth, growth, are symbols of the passage
of the world into the soul of man."
But the soul of man, not being, as Emerson takes for granted,
exclusively devoted to logic, will not receive into itself with equanimity
some of the symbolical items. The soul of man protests against the contact
of foulness and baseness, injustice and pain, however much legitimated by
logic. The soul will not be satisfied with a divinity that governs mere
cause and effect--it requires a moral, an æsthetic rule.
In this fashion does the most cunning reader of the mind's
strange palimpsest forget for the time being some of the mind's most
striking rubrics. This delicate expert in exquisite nature leaves out of
his reckoning some of nature's most essential qualities. He overlooks
in his main philosophy what is the burden of all his detail
teaching--namely, that we require for our spiritual satisfaction much
more than the mere
apprehension of cause and effect; that, besides the wish to understand why things are, there is in us the more imperious want to make things as they should be. He puts aside what elsewhere he perpetually postulates, that, even as we have physical senses which are disgusted by certain tastes and smells, despite all explanations of their chemical reasons, so likewise we have spiritual instincts which, despite all possible explanations of how and why, will always be revolted by whatever is unjust, cruel, ugly, or gross. There is in us the logical faculty which reduces all things to cause and effect, making them all equally important or unimportant, according as the mind which perceives is keen or languid. But there are also the æsthetic and moral faculties which are essentially selecting, preferring, and which arrange all things in a long scale whose bottom means abhorrence or contempt, and whose top the fervidest love and admiration. These and these only are qualifying activities; the mere logical intellect can only recognise and connect, it cannot judge. It is not, thanks to the intellect, that anything, that "sex, gestation, nutriment," &c., can be made high or low according as it is, or is not, viewed in connection with the scheme of creation; since the intellect knows neither high nor low. If a subject can seem now gross and now pure, now trivial and now dignified, it is because our qualifying functions, moral or æsthetic, recognise the superior desirableness or rareness of the intellectual perception as distinguished from the bodily one; because they have decided that if there is enough and too much of the contemplation of some matters by the brute, there is not enough of this
contemplation by the scientific man or the moralist. And who tells us that the man of science or the moralist is nobler than the brute? Not the instinct of mere causal relation, but the instinct which says: "I want more of this, less of that"; the instinct which brings things into relation, not with what Emerson worships as God, but with what Emerson is for ever overlooking--Man.
The fact is that Emerson, in his process of forgetting everything that
is not mind, has forgotten human nature; in his supposed union with God he
has left Man in the lurch. His grave optimism is founded on a disregard for
man's existence; when he is talking about man, with the marvellous
intuition so oddly at variance with his theoretic onesidedness, he is often
pessimistic enough.
Having perceived that all things proceed with logical correctness, and
having identified his own perception of cause and effect with the creative
act, Emerson has judged that all that is, is right. Thus in the universe
where God and Emerson--strange mystic dualism!--sit alone,
willing and understanding, understanding and willing. But introduce into
this universe man, and the aspect of matters changes. Those
things which affect Emerson and God as right--that is to say, as
being--affect man sometimes as agreeable, sometimes as
disagreeable; sometimes as beautiful, sometimes as atrocious. The current
of intelligent approbation between the Universal Mind and the Mind of
Emerson is interrupted now and then by a sudden movement of this new agent,
man, standing, as it were, half-way--movements meaning
joy, admiration, pain, horror, despair. Why so? Simply because this new agent, man, perceives things according to a new standard, the standard of his own preservation and happiness. Right and wrong mean no longer intelligible and unintelligible; they mean that which makes for man's interests or against them. An æsthetic and ethical standard evolves, by which it is quite impossible to continue considering all things as equal, merely because they are equally willed by God; that is to say, speaking objectively and without mystical metaphor, because they can be equally understood by Emerson. Instead of the cause, man asks after the effect; and that things are and must be merely results, in certain cases, in rendering things more odious in his eyes. Hence, with the appearance of man, the scheme of pure optimism falls to the ground; and Emerson, systematic in one matter, and obeying an unerring instinct, does all he can to keep man out of the way; Man, be it understood, in so far as he is more than a mere fragment of the Universal Mind, a mere molecule of causal perception. We hear, therefore, of pain and sorrow only as we might hear of hot or cold; and of justice and injustice rather as intellectual questions--virtually openness, or the reverse, to conviction. Attempts at reform--that is to say, at diminishing or equalising the human burden of woes--are treated as intellectual experiments, movements interesting in their symmetrical equilibrium with other movements. All is quite regular and lucid, hence right and noble; and thus a great lid of intellectual optimism descends to silence the unrest and dissatisfaction of man.
earth after making himself an abstract creature, and finding that all things elude his clutch:
"What opium is instilled into all disaster! It shows formidable as
we approach it, but there is at last no rough and rasping friction, but the
most slippery, sliding surfaces. We fall soft on a thought.... There are
moods in which we court suffering, in the hope that there, at least, we
shall find reality, strange peaks and edges of truth. But it turns out to
be scene-painting and counterfeit. The only thing grief has taught
me is to know how shallow it is. That, like all the rest, plays about the
surface, and never introduces me into the reality, for contact with which
we would even pay the costly price of sons and lovers."
Such a sense of unreality must come to all of us at certain times of our
spiritual life, particularly during the years when we slowly replace with
the experience of ourselves the borrowed or ready-made notions of
life which had to do duty in our youth. But it is a phase; and in learning
that all things are evanescent, a healthy human being learns also that this
condition of soul is the most evanescent itself: a state of trance
from which the least rough shock or warm breath will rouse us. But Emerson
would have us think that this condition of semi-paralysis in all
save the logical faculty is the normal and permanent matter; probably
because he is taking for granted the possibility of extirpating from our
natures everything besides this merely logical perception. It is grotesque,
and in a measure pathetic, to read after this Emerson's denunciation
of the fatalism involved in a materialistic explanation of the mind's
peculiarities--" given such an embryo, such a history must follow. On this platform one lives in a sty of sensualism and would soon come to suicide." Yet what suicide could be compared to the courting of pain and loss of the beloved for the sake of the rough and rasping friction of reality? And in another passage we are led to question whether, as in the case of Quietism, the transcendental platform might not easily be transformed into a sty of sensualism as bad as any which Emerson could attribute to materialistic influence. "Saints are sad, because they behold sin (even when they speculate) from the point of view of the conscience, and not of the intellect--a confusion of thought. Sin, seen from the thought, is a diminution or loss; seen from the conscience or will, it is pravity or bad. The intellect names it shade, absence of light, and no essence. The conscience must feel it as essence, essential evil ...." For whence should come conscience, this odd Puritan interloper, in a world which is full, every nook and cranny, of the universal creative essence, of the Supreme Cause and Effect, knowing neither good nor evil--in a world full of what Emerson calls God, and void, utterly void, of the sentient and suffering individual, concrete man? But Emerson is, fortunately, no real systematic thinker, and is, essentially, a Puritan, full of the sound morality of Mosaic law, and morality formulating as God's will the practical interests of man. So we hear no more about the reasons which allow philosophers to differ from saints in not looking sadly at evil. And, on the contrary, among all the qualities metamorphosed into essences, and all the adjectives transfigured and enthroned
as metaphysical entities, each with its crown of stars or of city walls, its attributes in hand and under foot--we find, foremost truthfulness, chastity and justice. Nay, by one of those bold but adorable contradictions which save the soul of transcendentalists and mystics from the hell of indifference--we are especially informed, in the curious essay called the Over Soul, that the soul of man, that inlet of the universal mind, is filled with the tide of the universe's divine life more particularly when it perceives justice or conceives heroism.
This mysticism, this determination to reduce all things to intellect,
this violent clutching at the cause behind phenomena, gives Emerson, like
Ruskin, a certain mediæval character, not usually to be met nowadays,
save among theological writers: he is related to the Abbot Joachim,
to Abelard, to the compilers of herbals and bestiaries; he has a quaint
look, quaint and delightful, of being a belated brother of Sir Thomas
Browne or Burton of the Anatomy. Montaigne (the man he so
ardently admires) might as well never have existed for him; and the other
masters of inductive thought--Locke, Voltaire, Hume, the eighteenth
century with its strong level vision, its materialisation of Nature, its
enthroning of man--have passed without affecting him. Modern science
he distinctly turns away from; he has a hankering after visionaries and
allegorical expounders, even the trashiest. The names of Jacob Boehm and of
Swedenborg are perpetually returning to him; he believes Jesus to have been
a mortal man, but he might easily grant some transcendant quality to
Apollonius of Tyana. He tends to find a symbol in everything, a
mysterious "Open, sesame!" He cannot be satisfied with a thing meaning only its poor self, serving its obvious purpose. Every analogy is to him an actual causal connection, every metaphor which his fancy perceives a sort of sign-manual of God. He has, to the highest degree, the symbolic superstition. For him the world exists by virtue of certain formulas, which are not so much shorthand generalisations of man as actual creative spells of God: system, dualism, the principle of opposites and compensation, and sex. There must be a mysterious equilibrium everywhere--an evil for every good, a good for every evil, an answer for every question, a satisfaction for every craving, a loss for every gain, a bitter for every sweet, a female for every male. And do what you will you cannot alter things, since, by such a mysterious law, as matter displaced on one side must reappear on the other, so also the happiness given to Tom must be taken from Harry. That the nature of one thing or case being different from that of another there will be a corresponding difference of rule and action, never occurs to Emerson. He strips all things into a sort of unqualified, non-existent nakedness, and then calls it unity and identity.
And yet, despite all this, Emerson remains one of the thinkers who can
do most for us moderns; whose teachings, if put into practice, could carry
us through the greatest number of temptations and dangers. It is with
Emerson's writings as with the sacred books of ancient times:
we must separate what is due to imperfect knowledge, to superstitious
habits of mind, and consequently mischievous, or worthless and deci-
duous, from that which is due to some great intuition of truth, some special energy of soul, such as is given to exceptional races, or moments or individuals--immortal gifts whose usefulness will never suffer a change. And, as we find in all such writings, bibles of all nations, sacred and profane, so also in Emerson this worthless, changing, deciduous part has received its excessive importance from the very vital and immortal part which it has served to deface; thus in Plato and St. Paul, the "Imitation of Christ;" and, among the prophets of to-day, in Ruskin and Tolstoi.
The vital, vitalising intuition in Emerson is a dualism, closely
connected: the intuition of the worthlessness of unreality for our
happiness and progress; and the intuition of the supreme power, for our
happiness and progress, of that portion which we call soul. Such intuitions
are rarely new. Antiquity knew these of Emerson, as India knew those of
Christ and his mediæval followers; but they are born afresh, as it
were, with new vigour and efficacy, in a new mind; and, at each new
incarnation they are obliged, alas, to assume the foolish costume and
habits--nay, the very maladies--which belong to thought at the
moment of the new birth. In the case of Emerson, the intuition of the
supreme value of reality, and of the soul's most marvellous powers of
expansion and adaptation, of its unique capacity for embracing all things
in the acts of comprehension, imagination, and sympathy--these vital
thoughts were defined, hampered and compressed, by a cheap
transcendentalism: the metaphysics of Germany adulterated by the
shoddy science, the cheap mysticism of America. And
the divine strength of his mind may seem, at first sight, to have been employed merely in carrying the weight, in filling up the forms, of the threadbare garments of Dr. Faust, and the tinsel garments of some less philosophic wizard. Let us strip them off; and we shall see the Titan beneath.
We have seen how Emerson has got himself a pocket religion by making the
human soul consubstantial and co-extensive with God, and the life
of the soul identical with the perception of cause and effect, so that,
while Jehovah says, "I Am," Emerson fulfils his spiritual
duties by repeating, in various forms of words, "Thou art."
Also, how, in his dread of materialism and hedonism, he has attempted to
measure phenomena of sensation, emotion, and æsthetic perception by a
mechanism for registering cause and effect which is as unfit to register
their quality as a pair of scales is unfit to measure the degree of heat,
or a barometer the intensity of the colour blue. Similarly, we shall find
that the same spiritualistic bias has led Emerson to repeat, very often,
the stale Stoical sayings of the self-sufficingness of the mind, the
unimportance of circumstance, the indifference to momentary pain and
pleasure.
The soul, indeed, can be trained to considerable indifference: it
can be rendered obtuse to pain and pleasure, to impressions and affections;
religious asceticism has always boasted, in the words of
Molière's Orgon: "Et je verrais mourir
frère, enfans, mère et femme, que je m'en soucierais
tout comme de cela!"
But such indifference means, not uniting ourself closer with Nature and
the Infinite, but cutting loose
from them on one whole side. The human creature, no longer enjoying, no longer sympathising, no longer loving, would hold on to the universe only by his reason. The wind would blow, trees rustle, waters murmur, hills be blue and fields green, and people around be beautiful, brilliant or kind, sorrowing or clinging, without his being any the wiser. Nay, the wiser, if it be wisdom merely to know the necessities and sequences of things without knowing the things themselves; but neither the happier nor the more conducive to others' happiness. It would be good practice for dying, as, indeed, Roman Stoicism was the school where men learned to escape from tyranny by suicide of body and soul. Such Stoicism is the folly of philosophers, the cowardice of heroes, the blasphemy of those who, believing in gods, reject their good gifts for fear of their bad; it is afraid of the universe, and tries to look at it, as Perseus at the head of Medusa, only in the reflected image. This excess of intellectualism, thinking to limit all wants to those of the logical intellect, would defeat its own end; for what should the intellect contemplate and discuss, if all were reduced to abstractions, if things existed only as ideas, if the moment, the individual, the sensation, the emotion, ceased to be?
Atonement and eternal Hell could be the rational foundation for the religion of mercy and love of Francis of Assisi. There is, fortunately for the world, a higher logic, guessing at the relations between dogmas and facts, which works divine havoc in the smaller logic connecting one theory with another; the soul frees itself from the tyranny of lies by stealthy self-contradiction. The logical consequences of Emerson's intellectual pantheism would be to deny (what man, according to the Hebrews, never learned from the great I Am) the distinction of good and evil; to accept only the bare fact of existence, of emanation from the All-powerful. Why, therefore, preach heroism and the search for truth? Why struggle against unreality, hypocrisy, appearances? Why denounce the waste of effort, the dealing in words, supineness, vanity, and all the tissues of wine and of dreams?
In reality because, however unconsciously to himself, Emerson was
judging them worthless by the purely human instinct of affinity for certain
qualities, and repulsion for certain others, by the purely utilitarian
intuition of what is desirable or undesirable for man and man's race.
And because the main energy of his mind, his originality and inspiration,
consisted in an instinctive craving, despite the mere intellectual
satisfaction in cause and effect, after a life more large, more varied,
more transferable from object to object, from mind to mind: a true
life of the soul, which includes the life of the sensations and emotions,
which is based on realities, and which implies happiness.
For it is this which renders Emerson's writings so efficacious in
one's life, so charged with vital principle;
this which, entering into our torpid thought, fertilises it, makes it expand, alter, and bear fruit. No writer can have a greater influence in certain lives, yet no writer, surely, was ever more chary of criticisms and rules of conduct, of what, in most cases, makes the moralist. Indeed you might sometimes think he had never lived, never felt, made choice, acted, nay existed among real individuals (for all the passionate hints of the chapters on love and on friendship) but only among such abstractions of mankind as his own representative men; among ideals of human beings not to be touched, but to be criticised. The human efficacy of Emerson's teachings lies in his constant insistence upon the necessity of widening existence by increased contact with reality on all sides, and of such reality being apprehended by the mind, the sympathies, the imagination, as well as by the senses. For the narrowest life is the one into which there enter the fewest ideas--the animal's, the child's, the savage's life of the mere sensation, the mere moment; and the next narrowest is the base man's life of the mere ego, the appetites of to-day projected into to-morrow, the appetites of others employed to gratify his own. Unselfishness is a widening of ourselves by giving equal rank to the pleasures and rights of others--that is to say, to what is after all an intellectual conception, an idea to us, not a thing we can taste or touch. Justice, mercy, truth-those great abstractions covering the greater happiness of the greater number, and to which nobler men and women must sacrifice good for themselves and their neighbours--justice, mercy, truth, are more than ever intellectual existences, transcending our sensation and
experience. And the logical, the æsthetic appreciations which unite us to the world beyond man, which add to our own the life we understand in all phenomena, the life which we love in some of them, are still more obviously an enlarging of ourselves through the enlarging of our mind. For the mind embraces all, while the body can hold but little. Hence a constant regard for our possibilities from the intellectual standpoint, a constant preference of the life of the soul, life in all times and places, over the life, limited by moment and place, of the body; an insistence upon the life which unites us to all things instead of enclosing us within ourselves. Such a view of existence must be to the highest degree vitalising and fruitful. This would not be the case were Emerson the mere ordinary intellectual man, submitting to the intellect only the things which are obviously of the intellect, and leaving to the appetites, to the emotions, to the vanities all the rest. For Emerson gives unto Cæsar only the copper penny, and claims for God the kingdom of the earth. Emerson asks not what the mind can make of books, art, and its other notorious belongings; but what the mind can make of life as a whole: of love, friendship, practical efforts, political struggles, domestic arrangements--of everything. To him the real life is that of the soul: the life, so to speak, at headquarters, to which all other subordinate lives do but bring their necessary tribute of well-being, of experience, of sensation, of facts. He knows that there is in the noblest creatures a sort of uppermost consciousness to which all lower ones lead; which is as homogeneous as they are heterogeneous, as persistent as they are fleet-
ing; in which our sensations, actions, affections are multiplied tenfold by those of other men, of other times and places; and where, in an endless chain of pattern, everything is connected with something else, everything transmuted into something different. Therefore all the things which constitute our ordinary daily consciousness, Emerson examines; asking of what use they may be in this great uppermost consciousness or existence; accepting and rejecting in accordance with this standard. Hence he is characterised and takes rank of nobility, mainly by a constant scrutinising, unflinching elimination of unrealities, of activities and habits which bring only wear and tear and produce neither truth nor good nor beauty. A great part of his philosophy consists in the separation of futile efforts from fruitful; another, in showing how much more we may gain by letting things act for us than by squirming our souls out in unnecessary action. He teaches that it is not by the books which we read, the men whom we speak to, the stones and tree-trunks which we pull about, that we are increasing our life, still less by the money we amass or the complications we establish; but only by as much of the books as we understand, of the men as we love, of the talk as we wisely consider, of the materialities we combine to give us health, more peace, and more power of being realities. In fact, it is only by as much as is vital and fertilised in our life that our life is improved. This great purveyor of realities wherewith to nourish our highest life is for ever warning us against the adulteration of things intellectual and moral, teaching us to separate the stones from the bread, to
throw away the husks and the rind. He is no hater of tradition, even of convention; because he recognises that both of them may contain a portion of life. But once that life has left the tradition and convention he has no patience but sweeps them away, be they called by the solemnest names of virtue and honour. Hence his deep sympathy, idealist and transcendentalist as he is, despiser of the gross and lover of the spiritual, with the terre à terre scepticism of Montaigne; for that scepticism is one of the most potent agents for the removal of rubbishy spurious fact and spurious thought. Hence his admiration also for the coarse practicality of Napoleon, because that also means reality, real energy, sweeping away the unreal, the inert.
Those who should deliberately follow Emerson's counsels, omitting
from their lives not merely what he directly advises should be omitted, but
also what his whole system logically leads us to reject, would be surprised
to find how much space they had left themselves, how much energy for the
real life, the life of enjoyment and utility. For half of our life is
spent, if not in struggling with trash, with the unreality others have
burdened us with, as education, so called, religion, sociabilities, false
necessities and ideals; then in actually doing the unreal: reading
books we do not understand, seeing people we do not like, doing acts which
lead to nothing, or to the reverse of their intention. All great teaching,
of the sort which is, so to say, prophetic and sacred, helps us to a wider
life in other men, other fields and times. Half of it helps us to do so by
trying to understand and love others; the other half, and Emerson's
teaching is among it, by
bidding us understand and reduce to reasonableness ourselves. This vital energy in Emerson's teaching is, I think, given free play only if we liberate it from notions which belonged not to Emerson's mind, but to his intellectual surroundings. His transcendentalism, horrified at science and despising utility, arises, in great measure, from the old metaphysical and theological habit of regarding the soul as a ready-made, separate entity, come, Heaven knows whence, utterly unconnected with the things among which it alights, and struggling perpetually to be rid of them and return somehow to its unknown place of origin. Had Emerson suspected, as we have reason to suspect, that the soul is born of the soil, its fibre the fibre of every plant and animal, its breath the breath of every wind, its shape the space left vacant by other shapes, he would not have been obliged to arrange a purely intellectual transcendental habitation for this supposed exile from another sphere. And his intuition of a possible universal life would have been strengthened, not damaged, by the knowledge that our soul is moulded into its form--nay, takes its very quality, from surrounding circumstances; and the probability, therefore, that between the soul and its surroundings there will be a growing relation and harmony, as of product and producer, concave and convex.
As regards myself, I find that Nordau's book has inspired me with
a salutary terror, not merely of De-
generacy (though he is right in teaching us to be afraid of that), but of the deterioration of the soul's faculties and habits, which is the inevitable result of all intellectual injustice. And it is because Nordau himself is so striking an example of such deterioration, that I am anxious to discuss the chief facts and conclusions of his book, and to suggest certain other facts and conclusions, which, taken together, may make us appreciate the dangers we all run, if not of mental and moral degeneracy, at all events of mental and moral debasement.
with disease, immaturity or barbarism; and that, contrary to the picturesque views of decadent poets and of the readers of police reports, there is nothing either refined or heroic, or in fact anything save excessively vulgar, in uncleanness and bloodthirstiness. It is very good for all of us, especially in our salad days, to learn that as regards evil, rarity does not constitute distinction; that perverted instincts are universal among gaol-birds and maniacs; that insensibility to the feelings of others is a frequent forerunner of imbecility, and excessive egotism a common result of visceral disturbances. Such coincidences, even where merely coincidences, are due to a great practical truth, which the school of moral pathology has put in the clearest light, to wit: that all instincts or forms of instinct detrimental to the social good, are, in a sense, deciduous and sterile; that the world is perfectly right in considering weakness of will, unchastity of thought and word, egotism and vanity as a contagious danger to the community; that religion and philosophy have been clairvoyant in announcing that human liberty can be attained only by controlling desire and enlarging sympathy; that, in short, the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth will be the Kingdom of the Spirit.
This much has been formulated, made clear through analysis and example,
by the new science of the soul's death and disease; the sober works
of Maudsley, of Ribot, Richer, and of Janet, the extravagant though
sometimes luminous books of Lombroso, particularly the two volumes of
Nordau, are full of invaluable practical suggestiveness. Unluckily the
general usefulness
of the science has been diminished, it seems to me, by the tendency of the more sober among mental pathologists to limit their observations and theories to cases of thorough-paced madness, perversity, imbecility, or criminality; and the practical lessons have been largely neutralised by the eccentric hypothesis of Lombroso and Nordau, who have separated spiritual degeneracy from spiritual deterioration, and confined it to well-defined categories of individuals. For Professor Lombroso, as everyone is aware, has developed into an elaborate system the notion of some of the earlier students of mental pathology, that special abilities are due to a disturbance of the normal psychic balance, and are therefore accompanied by intellectual or moral unsoundness; in other words that talent is a morbid production like madness or criminality, accompanied invariably by some of their stigmata, and different from either only by the accident of being, on the whole, more useful than detrimental to the community. And Professor Nordau, while explicitly rejecting Lombroso's theory of the affinity between talent, madness, and criminality, has yet put forward the notion, and illustrated it by endless example and analysis, that during the last forty years there has been degeneracy invariably manifested among literary, artistic, and philosophic workers; while, during this period, intellectual and moral health has become the exclusive property of men of science and of mediocrities.
These theories, whether, as with Lombroso, they accept the man of talent
as a fortunate nuisance; or, as with Nordau, reject him (when a
contemporary) as a dangerous attraction, these theories are not
merely scientifically questionable, but also (and this is what I wish to deal with) practically dangerous, because they seem to limit spiritual degeneracy to exceptionally inferior or exceptionally superior categories of individuals, and to reassure, quite unreasonably, the mediocre mass of mankind. According to them the immense majority need never take any thought for its psychic healthiness; all it need do is to follow its instincts, and either to profit as much (according to Lombroso) or to suffer as little (according to Nordau) as it possibly can by the useful or noxious peculiarities of degenerates. Such are the practical conclusions derivable from the too exclusive attention given by even the soberer mental pathologists to criminals and lunatics; still more from the identification by Lombroso and Nordau, of genius and degeneracy.
But fortunately these one-sided views, these eccentric
hypotheses, have been illustrated by an enormous array of facts, and these
facts, whether brought forward by Lombroso or Nordau, whether exhibited in
great scientific handbooks like those of Maudsley and Ribot, or huddled
together in shilling dreadfuls like Cuiller's
Frontières de la Folie, these facts carry
their own suggestion, to wit, that the stigmata of spiritual degeneracy are
confined neither to criminals, lunatics, nor persons of unusual ability;
and that the average man, the dull and decent Philistine, is equally in
danger of becoming an obstacle to human improvement, a centre of moral and
intellectual deterioration.
Apart from the suspicion that celebrities may have been assimilated to
criminals and lunatics, because like them they have become public property,
and, therefore,
the corpus vile for pathological examination and demonstration--the study of the facts accumulated by mental pathologists, even the facts brought forward to prove the very reverse by Lombroso and Nordau, must suggest very strange thoughts to any honest and intelligent, although obscure and respectable, reader. The anecdotes snipped out of biographical dictionaries by Lombroso, and the analysis of symptoms implacably carried out by Nordau, must remind the honest Philistine of other biographical details, of other strings of peculiarities, with which he has not become acquainted in books; they must become connected and compared in his memory with stories, words, gestures, expressions of face, states of feeling, which have never fallen, which can never fall, into the hands of men of science. Little by little, many things which, on the printed page, expressed in those barbarous technical terms, had affected the reader only as so much far-fetched specialism, assume an uncomfortable air of familiarity; until at last, if he have courage to put two and two together, he must be startled, perhaps overcome, by the recognition that his neighbours, friends, family, himself, resemble Lombroso's and Nordau's degenerates in other things than genius.
I cast no doubts on the existence of thorough-paced degenerates,
some in prisons, some in asylums, some walking abroad, with or without
talents, and more often without than with; all scientific evidence proves
that they are common, and that many of them are hopelessly incurable and
through and through diseased. But when scientific evidence is accumulated
in even greater bulk, is put before us irrespective of any
special hypothesis like Lombroso's or Nordau's, and when it is, moreover, brought into relation with our previous experience of life and of men, we should learn, I think, that it is dangerous to draw a hard-and-fast line between ourselves and any of our fellow creatures, even when we may be obliged, for sheer self-defence, to shut some of them up and chastise them. To make such a crude distinction does as much harm to us, who account ourselves sane, as to these whom we brand and pen up together as degenerate. For it not only vitiates our sense of likeness and unlikeness, diminishes our sympathy and justice, and wastes all that is sane and profitable, even in unsound and noxious creatures; but it makes light of that knowledge of our present imperfection, of our possible deterioration and possible improvement, which should result from all study of the soul and the soul's diseases and dangers.
and arduous adaptation of mankind to its surroundings, there is, apparently, something which stands to the gradual improvement as the friction of a machine stands to its movements: the machinery is constantly being repaired, the friction is constantly being diminished, but so far it exists, and it still represents, though in ever smaller degree, an impediment and a partial destruction. This kind of friction is what specialists call degeneracy. It is a form of imperfection; it is the result of imperfection, and it results in imperfection. We may roughly divide it into two kinds, sociological and biological; the first is left unconsidered by Lombroso and Nordau; the second is limited, or apparently limited, to separate categories of persons. In this disregard of sociological deterioration, in this limitation of biological deterioration, lies to my mind the fundamental mistake of both Lombroso and Nordau, a mistake which is rectified by the very facts adduced in support of their one-sided views.
The kind of deterioration which I have called sociological may be
illustrated presently by an analysis of some of Nordau's own
failings, their probable cause and their possible results. The other, the
biological, by which I mean the deterioration accompanied by physical
causes or co-results, forms the subject of Nordau's two
volumes, and requires, I think, to be recognised as obtaining, not merely
in the individuals stigmatised as degenerates, but in the whole of mankind
of which they are, after all, but a production.
For the whole of mankind may be partially unsound, although the average
of mankind may be
absolutely sound. The average or abstract totality of mankind is probably sound, because the imperfections of adaptation, the inability to meet the requirements of life, the hereditary, individual, or acquired biological taints are undoubtedly slight in most individuals (otherwise the individual, let alone the race, would not be there), and because the unsound portion of one individual is worked for and protected by the sound portions of other individuals; nay, because in every individual, save the lunatic, the incurable or the criminal, the sound qualities supply the deficiencies of the unsound. But the individuals composing mankind are probably all, or nearly all, imperfect or liable to become imperfect in some detail, infinitesimal, or perceptible, of their organism; were this not the case the existence of thorough-paced degeneracy, as of downright physical disease, would scarcely be conceivable; and the contagion of degeneracy, as well as the contagion of disease, would constitute no danger. Why should this be? The reason seems to me very simple: So far as we know the world's history or present condition, we cannot be certain of any human creature living in circumstances, material or social, to which he was, or is, perfectly adjusted; nay, leading a life which was not, in one way or another, too difficult for his organism, what we call, either on the bodily or the spiritual plane, unwholesome; and this imperfection of relations between the individual and his mode of existence would necessarily prevent his leaving behind him physical or spiritual off-spring, human bodies, souls, habits, notions, which were otherwise than
imperfect also; imperfection dwindling for ever, but present always, and always liable to momentary increase. There is probably no one who inherits an absolutely flawless bodily constitution, or who leads a perfectly healthy bodily life; but the soul is as delicate as the body, and the soul's life as difficult to adjust;nay, the soul's health has more chances against it, since it depends in the first instance on the health of the body. Yet there are very few persons who are as thoughtful for their soul and its organs, as for their teeth, hair, eyes, lungs, or digestion; and most of us move recklessly among contagions, and submit to strains in the spiritual order, such as few of us would expose ourselves to in the bodily. Meanwhile the spiritual reacts on the bodily and the bodily on the spiritual. Our thoughts and feelings are vitiated by the imperfection of our bodily functions; but this imperfection of our bodily functions is nine times out of ten the result of some spiritual imperfection, some lack of forethought, self-control, or comprehension in ourselves or our parents. Thus, even with regard to material well-being, there is no fact more important than that of our constant danger of intellectual and moral deterioration.
fault of Nordau's book (for who cares for his literary and artistic criticisms?) that his mania for limiting degeneracy to the second half of the nineteenth century and to the writers, artists and non-scientific thinkers thereof, confines the causes of degeneracy to merely physiological disturbances, and diverts the attention from what I should call sociological causes of deterioration, namely, the undue pressure on the individual of social habits, routines, and institutions. Such sociological straining and warping of the soul has, of course, always existed, and presumably more in the barbarous Past than in the only semibarbarous Present. Now, as Professor Nordau wishes to persuade us that the spiritual degeneracy of our age is unique and unprecedented, he has not only to close his eyes to all the unwholesomeness which previous centuries displayed in their literature, or hid or half-hid in their religious and social habits; but also to refuse to discuss any causes of unwholesomeness which other centuries have evidently shared with our own. Since, however, we have fortunately no theory to blind us, we may leave Professor Nordau to expatiate on the detrimental effects on nineteenth-century nerves of railways and newspapers, telegraphs and telephones, large towns and colossal discoveries, rapid amassing of fortunes and rapid altering of beliefs; and let us look at a few of the totally different sort of causes which must always have tended, apart from all physiological degeneracy, to deteriorate a certain proportion of individual souls.
The individual soul, perhaps owing to its dependence on the individual
body, is rarely congenitally sound
in every part; and, even where no rudimentary morbidness can be detected, it is never gifted with the very highest powers of every description; so that it is forced, inevitably, to supply its deficiencies from the abundance of other individual souls, from that stored-up abundance of all times and countries which we call civilisation. Apart from this common fund, accumulated by the united efforts of all men, by the special efforts of special men, and by the almost mechanical action of the great principle of "Compound for sins you have a mind to by damning those you're not inclined to"--apart from civilisation, there is not much logic, patience, self-restraint, gentleness or purity in the isolated individual; certainly not enough to make him endurable, let alone useful. Separate the individual, even the individual having no spiritual taint analogous to consumption or gout, isolate him from the social surroundings, the principles and prejudices, the fortunate compromises due to the rivalry of so much barbarism and wrongheadedness, set him opposite something quite new, or something about which he may talk or act quite freely; and note the brute's acts and words! Nay, note the man when he has a class or nation to back him; and listen, for instance, to the logic, the humane speech of the individual considered as Conservative, or Socialist, or Protestant, or Catholic, or Atheist! Egotism, megalomania? Why they are kept down in the normal individual only by the tendency to egotism and megalomania of his neighbours; if small children are egotists and megalomaniacs, it is because they have been protected, so far, from other children. For the
rest, egotism and megalomania are perpetually bursting out on all sides. Listen to the ordinary, intelligent, educated man, to the superior professional man even, when off his profession. Is not his cocksureness about things outside his own walk, his contempt of arts and modes of life unlike his own, his interest in his house, his wine, his horse, his business, very nearly maniacal? Listen, on the other hand, to nations (for nations are unrestrained by shame before each other, and consider such restraint as mean-spirited) are they not maniacs? and is not the respective national pride of the Englishman, Frenchman, German, Italian, the purest megalomania in guise of patriotism? Is not every nation, in its hopes and claims, its boasting and blustering, no better than King Picrochole awaiting the Coming of the Coqcigrues?
If, then, classes, professions, nationalities, lose their attributes of
logic, justice, and gentleness, nay, of crassest good sense, whenever they
are isolated from other professions, classes, nationalities, or set up in
mere hostility opposite to them, how much more will not be lost by the poor
individual, when, by some new or faulty adjustment, he is isolated from his
fellow individuals, set up as their enemy or their leader? These things may
be largely inevitable, but they are atrociously sad, and we may well stop
to consider some instances thereof. Has neither Lombroso nor Nordau, glibly
analysing the degeneracy of men of talent, ever considered what men
not of talent would become if subjected to years of neglect,
injustice, outrage, and then, perhaps, to years of most fulsome adulation?
For, after all, that is what it comes to:
a process, not deliberate certainly, and for the time being quite inevitable, by which mankind calls forth all the worst qualities in those who are its benefactors, fosters their arrogance, injustice, violence, and folly; turns them into fanatics (I had first written lunatics) who tear and trample everything, and help the world in the making of fresh fanatics. Who is most responsible for Wagner's pamphlets, for Zola's Mes Haines, for all that most degenerate literature, the literature of blind self-assertion? Nay, is not the most marvellous production since Renaissance humanistic warfare, Whistler's Gentle Art of Making Enemies due to the astonishing criticisms of another man of genius, of Ruskin, himself the victim of the absurd attacks on Turner and pre-Raphaelitism? Alas, of the energies which we poor human beings can so little afford to spare, how much do we not, by the fatality of stupidity and injustice, waste in the detestable self-assertion and self-defence of genius, in the production of more injustice and exaggeration, itself fruitful of exaggeration and injustice!
But wrong adjustment between the individual and the mass, need not
attain the pitch of actual ill-treatment, in order to produce very
decided deterioration, what Nordau sees as degeneracy, of soul. All mental
productivity, like all material, tends to encumber us with obsolete plant
and rubbish. There is no system, no routine, no facilitation to learning or
doing any particular thing, which does not become more or less of a
nuisance, a mechanism for the spoiling of something. All trades,
professions, administrations--nay, schools of thought--show it
us daily: a man
loses much of his elasticity of mind by such means, although that loss is more than compensated, most often, by the storage of results and the saving of time. But a man, as Emerson says, is himself a method; every individual must pay for the advantage of being one. And this becomes the case more and more markedly as the man's method is more complex, more special, more different from the method of other men. As a mere question of time and opportunity, every special study tends to exclude external influence and correction, to diminish the healthy reaction and readjustment of all things, that is to say, to make the specialist unconscious of the fine proportion between the world and his work, his fellow-men and himself. Nay, all self-expression creates a facility which easily turns to exaggeration, absurdity, self-caricature. Men cannot perceive all facts and think all thoughts at once; developing their own ideas, those ideas cease to be duly controlled by the thousand million other ideas in the universe; one explanation covers everything, one fact answers all questions, one kind of physic cures all ills; and we get very near the region of fads and idées fixes. This tendency is very much increased by the result of another insufficiency of human nature: mankind is extremely limited, as yet, not merely in its power of doing, and thinking, but in its power of sympathising. The desire for prominence, for recognition, very often unjustly refused, pits men against each other, while the inability or unwillingness to share material or social advantages forces every member of the same profession into rivalry with the other: hence a tendency, which pure
devotion to truth or beauty can overcome only very slowly, a tendency to regard one's own contribution to science or art, as supplanting those of one's predecessors or neighbours; and a consequent loss of the faculty of comparing facts and theories, of selecting and correcting, of judging attainment impersonally and equitably; a very notable diminution in the efficiency of the individual soul.
This phenomenon becomes most obvious when it is accentuated by that
neglect or persecution of which I have spoken as producing and reproducing
such a fine crop of apparent monomaniacs. The consciousness of exceptional
talents, especially when those talents are unnoticed or disputed by others,
carries combative natures out of the domain of good sense and decorum, the
almost automatic good sense and decorum of those who are comfortable; and a
man of parts requires to be an unusually good keeper of himself, since he
soon ceases to be the ward of the majority. The sense of being able to do
what most others cannot, needs to be corrected by an appreciation of what
has to be done and can be done only by others, such as is very rare as yet
in our half-grown humanity; and when there is no such corrective,
the ego becomes isolated in his own eyes, and
assumes to himself an importance utterly out of proportion to the reality.
Hence suspicion, irreverence, animosity towards others; and that refusal to
unite one's thoughts with the thoughts of other men, that refusal of
what might be called (most literally and worthily) the marriage of
true minds, which dooms so much of the world's best talent to
sterility.