LIBRARY 
 
 OF THE 
 
 University of California. 
 
 Class 
 
FAITH IN MAN 
 
By the Same Author 
 
 The Mind of Man: 
 
 Jl Tex^t Book ob^ PeYCHoiirOaY 
 By GUSTAV SPILLER 
 
 Demy Zvo.^ ys. 6d, 
 
 " The point of view from which this work is written, will, it is hoped, commend 
 itself to_ the lovers of science. To my mind, the amazing backwardness of psychology 
 is principally due to it having been almost exclusively cultivated by philosophers or 
 those philosophically inclined, i.e., by those who have settled doctrines to begin with, 
 instead of by men of Science who possess only the desire for truth as such. This 
 work will have fulfilled its author's purpose if it accentuates the need of, and assists 
 in establishing a psychology of a strictly scientific character."— £xiraci from 
 Pre/ace. 
 
 "All that Mr. Spiller says in support of Introspection as ' the method in chief,' 
 and this makes up a considerable portion of the book, deserves careful study. Almost 
 with the fervour of the old devotional writers, he lays stress on the importance of 
 cultivation of habits of correct observation, severe though the discipline be." — Daily 
 Chronicle. 
 
 " Mr. Spiller had a sound notion of method ; his general point of view is defensive 
 and he makes many acute observations. The method adopted he defines as 'ex- 
 perimental introspection.' Some of the author's most interesting observations, indeed, 
 are directed against all assertions of originality in individuals as distinguished from 
 persons. " — A thenaum. 
 
 " Some notes of distinction characterize this work. It shows not a little independ- 
 ence of thought. There is neither subservience to authority in matters of opinion, 
 nor reliance on tradition in methods of exposition. The headings of the chapters — 
 Systems as Distributed ; Systems as Organized; Systems as Need-satisfying, and 
 so forth, suggest a freshness of treatment which is in large degree realised in their 
 contents. Constant reference is made to the results of actual experience ; the author 
 has worked assiduously in the introspective laboratory of his own mind, and urges 
 his readers to adopt the same course." — School World. 
 
 " He has undoubtedly written one of the most original books on psychology that 
 has appeared in recent years. The volume is extremely suggestive throughout." — 
 Philosophical Review. 
 
 " Mr. Spiller deserves the thanks of students of psychology for the very able and 
 painstaking manner in which he has presented the various systems of the science." — 
 Liberty Review. 
 
FAITH IN MAN 
 
 ZU (E^%ion of tU Zmntkt^ C^ntutjf 
 
 The Essence of Religion — What is Art ? — Ethics and Science^ 
 The New Faith and Social Reform — The Relation 
 of the New Faith to Philosophy — The Test of 
 Progress — A Democratic Basis for Education — The 
 Ethical Movement. 
 
 GUSTAV SPILLER 
 
 (AUTHOR OF <*THE MIND OF MAN," ETC.) 
 
 LONDON 
 
 SWAN SONNENSCHEIN & Co., LiM. 
 
 25 High Street, Bloomsbury, W.C. 
 
 1908 
 
fif^f/ifli 
 
PREFACE 
 
 Not all revolutions are heralded and accompanied by 
 disorder and violence. 
 
 The revolution in thought which Socrates witnessed, 
 and the great French Kevolution were marked, the 
 first by moral confusion, and the second by social 
 anarchy. 
 
 A mightier revolution is taking place in our genera- 
 tion, — implying profounder readjustments in men's 
 beliefs and actions than the revolutions referred to, — 
 which proceeds with marvellous rapidity and yet 
 almost without protest. 
 
 The Conscience has eclipsed the Scriptures ; Science 
 has destroyed the belief in Divine Interposition; Demo- 
 cracy and Civism have shown men how to help 
 themselves, and the supreme test and interest of men 
 have become Ethical, and have ceased to be Super- 
 naturalistic. We are even assured that the creeds and 
 
 197735 
 
VI PREFACE 
 
 dogmas are practical moral helps whose truth is a 
 matter of indifference and that the supreme test of a 
 revival is the ethical result. 
 
 It is not that men are becoming indifferent. It is 
 rather that a new faith, the faith in moral endeavour, 
 is displacing the faith in supernatural hopes and fears. 
 
 With science and morality dominating men's lives, a 
 radical reconstruction of beliefs has become inevitable, 
 and the object of the present volume is to show the 
 positive and bracing faith in man and society which 
 has been silently emerging out of the bloodless 
 struggle of the last quarter of a century. 
 
 GUSTAV SPILLER 
 
 March, 1908. 
 
OF 
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 CHAP. PAGE 
 
 I. The Essence of Eeligion - - . 9 
 
 II. What is Akt ? 44 
 
 III. Ethics and Science - - - - 70 
 
 IV. The New Faith and Social Eeform - 95 
 V. The Relation of The New Faith to 
 
 Philosophy 115 
 
 VI. The Test of Progress - - - . I37 
 
 VII. A Democratic Basis for Education - 157 
 
 VIII. The Ethical Movement - - - - 180 
 
FAITH IN MAN 
 
 CHAPTEE I 
 
 THE ESSENCE OF RELIGION 
 I 
 
 The question of the relation between ethics and 
 religion is coming to be acutely felt, not only among 
 philosophers, but among the public at large. Modern 
 scientific advance has introduced the problem to an 
 ever-widening circle of thoughtful persons, and it has 
 thus opened up a field of inquiry in which the interest 
 is intensely personal, for with the majority of in- 
 dividuals a scientific ethics seems to remove the very 
 foundations of their deepest convictions. The problem, 
 however, cannot be shelved. The social tendency at 
 the present day is towards religious reinterpretation, 
 towards scientific explanations in every department of 
 life, and towards tolerance and humanitarianism 
 generally. As a result it is natural that works on 
 
 ethics should have multiplied during the last century 
 
 1 
 
10 FAITH IN MAN 
 
 and that the supposed necessary connexion between 
 ethics and religion should have been emphasised less 
 and less. At first, under these changed conditions, 
 the tendency was to find a general metaphysical basis 
 for ethics independent of special theologies; but the 
 prevailing humanitarianism and desire for scientific 
 treatment gradually shifted the centre of gravity 
 towards a scientific, civic, and non-metaphysical or 
 autonomous ethics. At the same time the public 
 interested itself in this problem and the cry went up, 
 on the one side, that ethics is in danger because of 
 tendencies which are leading to the dissolution of 
 religious sentiments, and, on the other, that because of 
 the inevitable weakening of religious faith it is im- 
 perative to free ethics from theology and make it 
 autonomous. 
 
 So soon as the autonomy of ethics had become a 
 much canvassed question, fresh developments were 
 unavoidable. Men began to argue that ethics is in 
 its very nature independent of theology or of God's will, 
 and that a dependent ethics ceases to be an ethics 
 altogether. Whether men believed in a deity or not, it 
 was contended, should make no difference to them 
 morally; for since ethics is independent, belief in a 
 deity can be of no consequence. We see here ethics, 
 as regards its foundations, altogether separated from 
 
THE ESSENCE OF EELIGION 11 
 
 theology. Once, however, men had advanced thus far, 
 they were not slow to draw further conclusions. 
 Religion, they said, satisfies certain mystical cravings 
 of human nature, and has nothing to do with ethics. 
 Eeligion stands for a personal, philosophical conception ; 
 it is purely speculative, and morality is not its concern. 
 Hence there is really neither an agreement nor a 
 conflict between religion and ethics — ethics goes one 
 way and religion another, and a man's religion and 
 ethics are shut up in cortical compartments which 
 do not communicate. On Sunday morning we go to 
 church and draw religious strength ; on Sunday even- 
 ing we go to a meeting of an ethical body and draw 
 ethical strength. Could there be a more beautiful 
 compromise? Yet in the minds of many of those 
 who pleaded for an autonomous ethics a final con- 
 clusion ripened. They were so overpowered by the 
 majesty and sublimity of the moral law that they 
 declared that it was the Highest, that ethics should, 
 therefore, be regarded as a religion, and that theology, 
 whether false or true, was a philosophical system and 
 had naught to do with religion pure and undefiled. 
 Finally, from this point it was but a step — the last one 
 possible along this line — to the declaration that 
 theologies are out-of-date working hypotheses, and 
 that a naturalistic, scientific, humanitarian and demo- 
 
12 FAITH IN MAN 
 
 cratic philosophy of life must underlie the new 
 ethics. 
 
 We have sketched the gradual enfranchisement of 
 ethics from religion, and we have seen the process 
 end, according to a certain school, in a re-afiEirmation 
 of religion, minus theology and plus certain modern 
 conceptions. Under the circumstances it is an indis- 
 pensable task to make a careful inquiry into the 
 nature of religion, more especially from the ethical 
 standpoint, so as to enable us to judge impartially of 
 the claims of the contending parties. The two extreme 
 views have come to agree to a certain extent, that is, 
 that ethics cannot be dissociated from religion ; but 
 they are wholly disagreed as to what religion consists 
 in. Which line of thought, then, is defensible ? Or 
 what is the truth in the matter ? And us to the 
 countless views which mediate between the extremes, 
 the hope for the present of a common understanding, 
 let alone of a common agreement, appears altogether 
 Utopian. Perhaps, therefore, if we analyse the contents 
 of the ordinary religious consciousness and allow fully 
 for changes due to individual and social peculiarities 
 and development, it may become possible to restrict 
 the number of plausible differences and to bring about a 
 closer and a better understanding. 
 
THE ESSENCE OF EELIGION" 13 
 
 II 
 
 In a thoroughly organised community men are at 
 home and do not feel lost. "When, however, as at 
 present, owing to rapid and incalculable social changes, 
 almost complete instability in the social relations 
 prevails, men seek for some anchor of the soul which 
 shall make them independent of the vicissitudes of 
 life. They are bewildered by uncertainty; they feel 
 like helpless prey ; they are not equal to struggling 
 with the world; hope and satisfaction seem to forsake 
 them. A child trusts his parents implicitly, and thus 
 his life is organised for him. Similarly by belief in 
 a providence, in a loving father, in a loving saviour, in 
 the essential rightness of things, in the law of compen- 
 sation, or in a happy final consummation, an adult may 
 achieve the same object. Stoicism, Epicureanism, 
 fidelity to a moral or artistic ideal, produce a similar 
 effect. Likewise, a feeling of our oneness with God, with 
 men, or with nature, will take us out of ourselves 
 and make us superior to circumstance. Ideals, of 
 course, vary in breadth; but only those ideals which 
 free life as such from dependence on circumstance are 
 called truly religious. These ideals are principally 
 determined by social conditions, and they only dis- 
 appear where a man knows his place and is allowed to 
 fill it; in other words, when circumstance has been 
 
14 FAITH IN MAN 
 
 shaped to agree with principle. In an ideal society we 
 are not at the mercy of oppression, of delusion, of 
 ignorance, of weakness, of loneliness, of hatred, of an 
 irrational world, and consequently life offers there 
 what otherwise only an overpowering belief in a very 
 remote or refined ideal could give. When men will 
 have made a unity of the world, they will naturally 
 be at one with themselves, their fellows and the world 
 generally. In the meantime the craving for an anchor 
 of the soul is a very real and a very insistent one ; yet 
 such an anchor is not everything, for it may be inimical 
 to self-reliance and to progress. Thus a child may 
 be happier through complete trust and obedience; 
 but when the period of childhood is past, it is wrong 
 and cowardly to seek happiness in the way children do, 
 and we are then bound to decline the assistance of our 
 parents or our superiors. Indeed, in some transitional 
 periods the sheerest hopelessness is right, while con- 
 tented trust is then criminal. Even to-day the eye 
 should be fixed on what requires improving in society 
 rather than on smugly reposing our faith in some 
 panacea. We may not have peace at any price, least of all 
 moral peace. However, many men yearn for calm and 
 peace and serenity, and where social anarchy prevails 
 which the individual cannot remove, religion secures 
 this to some extent by sending men into the desert, 
 
THE ESSENCE OF EELIGION 15 
 
 by building monasteries and convents, by laying the 
 stress on the inner life, and by picturing in glowing 
 colours another world as a balance to this. In our 
 day the thought that we are doing our best, and that 
 the best is sure to triumph, ought to lift us above 
 passing circumstance, and should yield a feeling of 
 security and satisfaction. 
 
 The desire for a reassuring conception of life appears 
 in religion because it appears in society generally. 
 On this account evolution is said to favour the right, 
 and for this reason the same thing is affirmed of the 
 constitution of the universe. Emerson and others never 
 weary of telling us of the law of compensation that 
 rules the world. Many are the voices which assure 
 us that only the good life satisfies ; that there exists 
 an avenging and rewarding conscience; that the 
 triumph of wrong is illusory ; that in the long run 
 justice gains the victory; that injustice and evil are 
 illusions ; that everything tends to a happy consumma- 
 tion ; that life is a mystery, a half-way house, a trial. 
 Modern hedonists inform us that the ethical life brings 
 the greatest pleasure. Epicureans, for the same reason, 
 led the simple and unselfish life. Stoics praise the 
 harmonious life — a consistent self living in a harmonised 
 society, which itself is part of a cosmos. The same end 
 of lending a unity to life is attained by optimistic, 
 
16 FAITH IN MAN 
 
 melioristic, socialistic, individualistic, anarchistic, and, 
 in a less degree, by radical, liberal and conservative 
 ideals; and similarly, a life of principle, of large 
 purposes, of universal sympathy, of reason, of worship 
 of the eternities, has been extolled above that of impulse 
 and that of trust in the momentary good. Again, hope 
 that our efforts are not vain, strength which we may 
 derive from companionship, assurance that help will be 
 forthcoming, belief that great wrongs can be prevented 
 or remedied, courage which comes from the feeling that 
 we do not stand alone, shame that some one who knows 
 us is possibly aware of a wrong that we are doing, 
 wisdom which we may gain from our superiors — all 
 these vitally influence the average moral life. If 
 these blessings can also be procured from a deity, why 
 in principle should they lose their propriety, value and 
 power ? To this the answer comes that just as earthly 
 fathers think it best for their sons to struggle independ- 
 ently of their parents' help, and as sons feel that they 
 must not be dependent, so men must reject, or all but 
 reject, the assistance of the deity if they are to grow 
 strong and manly. He who is no more a child and 
 yet relies on God as a child on his father, has signed his 
 moral death warrant. 
 
 Our conclusion concerning this subject is, then, that 
 when justice and desire are foiled^ men evolve or adopt 
 
THE ESSENCE OF EELIGION 17 
 
 some theory which tends to satisfy and to reinforce justice 
 and desire, and that these theories are frequently of a 
 non-supernaturalistic kind. 
 
 Compensation, — What shall we say to the religious 
 theory of Compensation? The good man, it is often 
 asserted, acts regardless of compensation. He only 
 wishes to satisfy his own conscience. As Marcus 
 Aurelius contends, the reward of a good deed lies in 
 the deed done, and it is therefore absurd to seek for a 
 second reward, an external one. Desire for compensa- 
 tion, according to Kant and others, would degrade 
 morality and reduce it to a system of selfishness. 
 Erom this point of view all that is said of compensation 
 by theologians is false and immoral. Yet two other points 
 of view are possible and have prevailed. In certain 
 ages men do not do the social deed willingly; they 
 have to be encouraged. And so decided is often the 
 unwillingness that a man, for doing his duty, is not only 
 rewarded but honoured. The hired soldier, policeman, 
 or fireman, is thus thought of highly besides being 
 rewarded. Eeasonably enough, then, the eighteenth 
 century encouraged far-sighted selfishness, and justifi- 
 ably enough, Thomas More defined morality as the (in 
 his time) rare power to deny oneself for the sake of a 
 superior future good. In other words, wherever good- 
 ness has been hard to practise and where the normal 
 
18 FAITH IN MAN 
 
 rewards of goodness were persecution and suffering as it 
 has been in some ages, there compensation for present 
 disadvantages was preached and believed in, in 
 theological circles and outside them. The wish that the 
 good man's life should not be cramped ; that the good 
 man, as the unfortunate Boethius felt, should not be 
 mocked ; that injustice should not appear to triumph ; 
 that happiness should not be the exclusive right of the 
 bad man ; or, on the other hand, the desire that men 
 should not give way to unlawful temptations, all 
 encouraged the belief that he who is good is, in some 
 way, recompensed. Whether the just man is conceived 
 of, with Plato, as incapable of losing anything valuable ; 
 whether he is regarded, with the Stoics, as indifferent 
 to pleasure and pain ; or whether he is paid in money 
 or consoled with a heaven, is theoretically the same. So 
 soon, however, as social conditions favour morality men's 
 views regarding compensation change until the attitude 
 favouring compensation is condemned altogether — on 
 the tacit assumption that tlie times have changed and 
 that morality is not an incessant struggling against 
 hopeless odds. To ignore all compensation, even the 
 satisfaction of having done our duty, leads to moral 
 fanaticism. 
 
 The second standpoint from which the compensation 
 theory is defended is a profounder one. We feel that 
 
THE ESSENCE OF RELIGION 19 
 
 we are in honour bound to pay for a service, even 
 though the service rendered was not due to a hope of 
 pay. It is the duty of him who serves, to delight in 
 the service done ; but it is also the duty of him who 
 is served, not to exploit his benefactor. Here there is 
 no mean view of human nature on either side, and yet 
 the feeling exists that we must not let another suffer 
 harm and that it is wrong to take without, if possible 
 and necessary, giving something in return. If he who 
 saves our life or our reputation loses in consequence 
 health or repute, we feel bound to do all in our power 
 to minimise his loss, even though gainer and loser scorn 
 the thought of being determined by the desire for com- 
 pensation. The benefactor may not, however, have any 
 need of our help, and accordingly he who wins the race 
 gets a laurel wreath or holds a silver cup ; the saviour 
 of his country is hurrahed as he passes through the 
 city, the rich philanthropist receives our utmost respect. 
 We still show in these cases our appreciation, but only 
 in a formal way ; and not to show appreciation would 
 appear mean to us. This point of view is strongly 
 emphasised when we put ourselves in the places of those 
 who should be appreciated. To serve our family, our 
 friends, our profession, our town, our country, our race, 
 without a word of cheer or appreciation when the service 
 is known, would be most discouraging. Our effort has 
 
20 FAITH IN MAN 
 
 been others' gain, and to have that effort accepted 
 deliberately and yet coldly, in a matter-of-fact way, 
 would imply callousness, for as social beings we owe 
 appreciation. As with the return of services, so 
 appreciation of what others do is a moral demand. 
 
 Gratitude. — We are grateful to our parents who 
 brought us into being and, in consequence, we feel 
 that we must do much for them and not disgrace them 
 by our conduct. Gratitude to our forefathers compels 
 us to wish to leave the world a little better than we 
 found it, and we consider it shameful to let the rights 
 hardly obtained to be lost without a determined struggle. 
 We feel debtors to Hampden and Cromwell, to John's 
 rebellious barons, to the men of the French Eevolution, 
 to modern reformers. We reason: Hampden did so 
 much for us ; shall we pay no acknowledgment by our 
 conduct ? Shall we not honour his memory ? Shall we 
 not follow in his steps ? If, then, as many believe, Jesus, 
 the man, laid down his life for us, suffered intense 
 agony and shameful disgrace for our sake, shall we do 
 nothing in return for him ? Yes, many say. We shall 
 be loyal to him ; we shall lead the life he expected us 
 to lead; we shall feel deeply grateful; we shall be 
 touched by his story ; we shall act as disciples of his. 
 Of course, too much may be made to depend on 
 gratitude; but the sense of solidarity suggests that 
 
THE ESSENCE OF RELIGION 21 
 
 gratitude is a natural virtue, while man's ingratitude 
 to man is one of the deepest stains on his character. 
 Shakespeare justly sang : — 
 
 " Blow, blow, tliou winter wind, 
 Thou art not so unkind 
 As man's ingratitude." 
 
 We think that if we were in the benefactor's 
 position, it would wound us to the heart that our work 
 was not appreciated, and we feel that gratitude, 
 active appreciation, is implied in our being social 
 beings and not self-contained individuals. Here, too, as 
 with rewards to good men, we must not do good 
 because men will be grateful ; but we may be cheered 
 by the hope that, where our good works are known, the 
 sense of solidarity will bring appreciation. We often 
 hear that, urged by gratefulness for some large benefit — 
 the saving of life, honour, or the like — men become 
 devoted to their benefactor, and their only concern 
 henceforth is to live for him. Christians are, therefore, 
 human, though not just, when they live for Jesus only, 
 or when they emphasise the gratitude and reverence 
 we owe to the creator of all things. Heie personal 
 gratefulness and attachment, leading as they do to the 
 suppression of the interest in self, produce indirectly 
 the cessation of all vices connected with self-assertion, 
 for by serving another we cease to serve ourselves 
 
22 FAITH IN MAN 
 
 Much of Christian morality is thus derived from 
 gratitude, although the gratitude we owe to the many 
 others besides Jesus and to former generations 
 generally, is enormously underrated by Christians. 
 One might say that morality at a certain social 
 stage was necessarily individualistic in temper and 
 made, instead of social reform, gratitude and consequent 
 self-obliteration the most sacred portion of morality: 
 we see this in -^sop's Fables, in Grimm's Fairy 
 Tales, and in folklore generally. This conception was 
 naturally transferred to theology, and hence the over- 
 insistence to-day in orthodox — that is out-of-date — 
 circles on gratitude and reverence as against the under- 
 insistence on improving social institutions. 
 " Superiority, — Many men show a profound respect for 
 superiority. If a person has unusual power, he is 
 supposed to have a right to exercise it, and others are 
 expected to wait his bidding. What he demands, 
 weaker vessels must yield as a matter of course, and his 
 doing a thing constitutes its rightness. Such a man is 
 his own law ; that is, the moral law is constituted by 
 his will, even if that will be a changing one. Should 
 he study the welfare of his inferiors, it becomes a case 
 of magnanimity, and we argue with Luther how kind 
 God is, considering that he could make a liell of every 
 hair on our head, or with one Jewish Prayer Book, that 
 
THE ESSENCE OF RELIGION 23 
 
 the permission to exercise the elementary processes of 
 life is a sign of God's generosity. A man's being strong 
 entitles him to what his strength can bring, and his 
 possessing considerable strength makes him an object 
 of admiration and worship. Logically the will of the 
 stronger dictates here what is right. Hence when 
 morality had not come of age, when external authority 
 determined what was right, when democracy was not 
 yet born, God Almighty could be said to act as He 
 pleased, and no one had a right to complain, or 
 to say that He was not justified in doing what He 
 pleased. He could demand obedience and service, and 
 it was wrong to disobey Him or not to serve Him. He 
 had a right, solely because he willed it, to send men to 
 heaven or hell, and it was wrong to call this right into 
 question. 
 
 Superiority even now claims some of these privileges. 
 A king may live in splendour while his subjects are 
 starving ; he may treat his courtiers and subjects in a 
 different way to that in which he treats himself and 
 his family ; his wish is, within limits, regarded as law ; 
 and he is favoured in many other ways. Could we get 
 a Questionnaire filled in by noblemen, rich men, men of 
 education, and those who do not belong to the poor and 
 crushed, we should probably be astonished to find how 
 strong is the feeling that superiority demands more or 
 
24 FAITH IN MAN 
 
 less unconditional and unquestioning service from in- 
 feriority. As with superior power, so with intellect 
 and every mark of superiority. According to the 
 degree of the predominance of any quality, men tend 
 to be a law to themselves, and to make that law the 
 law for those below them, while many inferiors readily 
 agree to the claim. Before the days of constitutional 
 government, in the heyday of despotism, there existed 
 no doubt on this subject. The conception of the deity 
 as arbitrary, as giving the moral law, as demanding 
 implicit obedience to all His dictates, as magnanimous 
 because limiting His power, is a faithful representation 
 of the times when despotism reigned unchallenged. 
 Such words as forgiveness, gratitude, generosity, 
 magnanimity, obedience, humility, service, propitiation, 
 praise, worship, prayer, acquired their peculiar 
 significance under those conditions, and lost their special 
 value with the rise of a self-respecting democracy. The 
 theological claim, therefore, that whatever is right 
 is what God wills, or whatever God wills is right, 
 is psychologically true for certain stages of moral 
 development. 
 
 Obedience to an outer authority and obedience to 
 an inner authority are the marks of different epochs 
 where, on the one side, despotism, and on the other, 
 equality, reign. It is only as the law of equality and 
 
THE ESSENCE OF RELIGION 25 
 
 democracy come to be generally recognised that the 
 ethical test begins to exclude the consideration whether 
 one man is superior to another. Aristotle spoke of some 
 men born to be slaves and others freemen, and some of the 
 slaves and many of the freemen no doubt agreed to his 
 dictum. To the farm labourer the squire is often a 
 person who should be honoured and obeyed because he 
 is the squire, and a child unquestioningly obeys and 
 honours his parents, as a dog or horse his master. In 
 Christianity and Judaism men are primarily regarded 
 as weak and wayward children, and as incapable 
 of free and intelligent action ; and as with children, 
 reliance on a superior, or obedience, is the greatest 
 commandment in those religions. Obedience and dis- 
 obedience, therefore, summarised what was called the 
 moral law, and the arbitrariness of the Father in 
 heaven was conceived of in necessary analogy to the 
 arbitrariness of the earthly father. And likewise the 
 Father in heaven, like the father on earth, was thought 
 of as despotic or tenderly loving, as arbitrary or self- 
 restrained, according to the stage of social development. 
 In an age of constitutional monarchy or democratic 
 republicanism, an age of humanitarianism and order, 
 an age when children have large rights and parents 
 many duties towards them, the deity is conceived of 
 
 differently than in times when monarchic despotism 
 
 2 
 
26 FAITH IN MAN 
 
 rules in the family and in the State, and when 
 callousness and anarchy distinguish a society. That is 
 to say, since in autocracies disobedience is regarded as 
 the severest of crimes, therefore disobedience to the 
 Almighty justly brought in its train eternal punishment; 
 and since the will of the autocrat was morally creative, 
 adoration, awe, forgiveness, mercy, pity, meekness, 
 atonement, were justified. Under such conditions 
 the inferior man is treated as a means, as nearly all 
 men treat domestic animals and animals used for food 
 as means. 
 
 Iminortality. — Consider now the destiny of the 
 individual. The phenomena of dreams and especially 
 of hallucinations, in connection with an undeveloped 
 intellect which was readily misled, suggested to primi- 
 tive men that man had an existence independent of the 
 bodily one, a perfectly valid conclusion under the circum- 
 stances. A double man and a double world, before 
 and after falling asleep and death, were accordingly 
 justifiable conceptions, and if the deductions from dreams 
 and hallucinations have proved fallacious, that left the 
 conceptions legitimate products of the human mind. 
 The double world was natural both as regards body and 
 ghost, and it would have been as illegitimate to call the 
 second world supernatural as any natural fact of an 
 organic or inorganic order. If, then, early religion had 
 
THE ESSENCE OF EELIGION 27 
 
 much to do with ghosts and their propitiation, this was 
 due to the accident of a misreading of facts. As in 
 Eome living emperors were looked upon as divine, and 
 more recently saints were worshipped, and as in the 
 theory of magic no two substances are necessary, so 
 religion might have existed without a belief in ghosts 
 and in a ghostly world. In other words, superiority, 
 power, the unknown, glory, or honour, might have 
 formed the kernel of religion, and thus the ghostly man 
 and the ghostly world, present and to come, might have 
 played no part in religious development. As it 
 happened, however, given the primitive mind and 
 primitive conditions, the ' double ' theory was obviously 
 the one more likely to arise. The constitution of the 
 ghostly man and of the ghostly world of the savage, 
 naturally formed a complete counterpart to the palpable 
 world, with all its absurdities and immoralities. The 
 ghosts were ghostly men, and the crudity of the early 
 religions argues the crudity of those times. Only as 
 hopes and fears and social integration gave a definite 
 complexion to the ghostly world, did it grow to be 
 gradually differentiated from the bodily one. More or 
 less powerful rulers came to have a more or less 
 powerful sway in the ghostly realm, and gradually from 
 being only a reflex of the material world, it came to be 
 transfigured into an underworld and into Elysian fields. 
 
28 FAITH IN MAN 
 
 In this form it served various races as a balance to the 
 ills and imperfections of the present world ; it rose to 
 the dignity of a philosophy of life ; it became a religion. 
 Only when we regard the speculative thinker do we 
 find that the deity and the other world become un- 
 substantial, indefinable, and without a clear reference 
 to life, with its joys and burdens; but that is again 
 because the speculative thinker is satisfied with such a 
 relatively unsubstantial and remote world. 
 
 The modern belief in immortality is based in 
 all but modern needs. Men rebel against being 
 surprised by death when they are young, or against 
 having the candle of their life snuffed out when they have 
 only lived a paltry eighty years. Yet when men begin, 
 as in this age, to consider themselves as part of nature, 
 and when they feel that they are precious moments in 
 the life of humanity, a new conception of immortality 
 and eternity rises on the horizon. To consider the 
 supernatural hopes as religious, and the other hopes as 
 non-religious, is to lay the importance on the means 
 instead of on the end; and to dissociate completely 
 supernatural from natural hopes is to forget that 
 social factors determined the development of both of 
 them. 
 
 Supernatural Aid, — Supernatural assistance occupies 
 a similar position. In the primitive, non-religious 
 
THE ESSENCE OF EELIGION 29 
 
 double world men called for help to their fellows. To 
 have turned towards their fellows in the body and not 
 to those out of the body would have been inconsequent 
 and stupid. When, then, the fallible ghost developed 
 into the infallible god, and men still believed in turning 
 to their fellows for aid when they might have acted 
 independently, they as naturally prayed also for divine 
 assistance. Not to have done so would have argued a 
 serious flaw in their mental organisation. Given, then, 
 that men believe in asking for help, and given that 
 they believe in a powerful deity who can help, it will 
 follow that if they are consistent in their thought, 
 they will turn in their need to the deity. In lower 
 stages, accordingly, we shall have recorded miracles such 
 as those of the five loaves, of turning the water into wine, 
 or of the haul of fish ; in higher stages, inspiration and 
 health will come to us from above, God will move 
 others to help us, and bad weather, epidemics or defeat 
 in war, may be sent as punishments. To ignore the 
 deity would be to ignore the most potent helper, 
 and no thoughtful person would do that. Prayer 
 is, therefore, natural for him who believes in its 
 ef3ficacy and who has no desire to be a moral personality. 
 In social stages of a despotic character prayer will, of 
 course, imply abject prostration, kneeling, folding the 
 hands, crying, calling out unceasingly " have mercy ! " 
 
30 FAITH IN MAN 
 
 ** spare us ! " ; in the higher, dignified trust and vague 
 aspiration. When, however, men rely on social effort, 
 and even refuse help, their deity will cease to be one 
 which helps ; and when they come to be aware that 
 miracles are impossible, or that mankind is sufficient 
 unto itself, the deity ceases to be appealed to or to be 
 approached in any way. As we, therefore, chance to 
 be socialists or individualists, hopeful of man or des- 
 pairing, so there will be tendencies leading away from 
 or leading to a belief in a deity, active or otherwise. 
 Belief in consistent individualism, in democracy, and in 
 divine assistance represent different stages in social 
 development. If, then, one man trust to Man and 
 another to God for personal or social salvation, they 
 should regard each other as equally religious. 
 
 A General View. — We have thus far considered a 
 few definite problems which we meet with in analysing 
 the contents of the ordinary religious consciousness. 
 If we take a more general view, the same class of facts 
 is encountered everywhere. We thank God for 
 preserving us in, and restoring us to, health ; life, 
 illness and death are divine dispensations ; misfortune 
 is sent to us as a punishment, and good fortune as a 
 reward ; good or bad harvests, a calm or a tempestuous 
 sea, rain or drought, success or failure in war, come 
 from above ; God preserves us as we enter the house, 
 
THE ESSENCE OF EELIGION 31 
 
 as we remain in it, and as we leave it; whether we 
 sleep or wake, God watches over us; the innocent 
 and the young are protected by him and the guilty 
 punished; he supplies us with our food; and in any 
 emergency we appeal to him for help. Moreover, God 
 created everything and rules everything. In short, 
 God is man's providence, and to pray for the common 
 good is the most beneficial social activity, for 
 God can change the hearts of bad rulers, of bad em- 
 ployers, and of bad men generally. However, with 
 general progress, this point of view alters, and what were 
 once glowing beliefs become glib phrases which we 
 write in fancy letters over our doors and over our beds, 
 but which no one is supposed to take literally or 
 seriously. On the negative side, through the influence 
 of scientific research, miracles — and therefore prayer — 
 come to be excluded and, on the positive side, there is 
 developed a belief in man's power and duty to protect 
 himself and to right wrongs. In the course of 
 evolution, divine providence is replaced by human 
 providence ; but belief in a providence remains 
 undisturbed. 
 
 Religions generally. — No matter what religion we 
 turn to, we meet with facts similar to those which we 
 analysed above. In Zoroastrianism the two gods who 
 stand respectively for the good and evil principle in 
 
32 FAITH IN MAN 
 
 the world ; the omnipresent watchwords ^'good thoughts, 
 good words, good deeds " ; and the care for certain 
 conduct — the treatment of dogs, the exposing of the 
 dead, the keeping pure of the water supply — all 
 point to the concrete interests of that religion. 
 Mohammedanism gives but a slightly different version 
 of the Hebrew providence. Hindooism is intensely 
 interested in cattle, in agriculture, in ceremonies, in 
 explanations of the world, and in social conduct. 
 Buddhism, with its attempt to deal with sorrow, 
 with death, and with the impermanence of things, by 
 suggesting the annihilation of evil desires and the 
 loving of all things living, proves to be a practical 
 religion. Confucianism is known for its social 
 tendency, and the religion of Japan — with all its early 
 superstitions — kept to the same religious model. In the 
 deists of the eighteenth century we come to be far 
 removed from the popular religions, since the demands 
 of the deists — who were educated men belonging to the 
 well-to-do classes, and were therefore generally free 
 from anxieties — were of a less exacting type ; but even 
 here an optimistic view of existence formed the 
 leading characteristic. Only as men come to be 
 interested in metaphysics as such, is there a tendency 
 to satisfy but two instincts, that of curiosity and that 
 of consistency ; but the interest here argues a certain 
 
THE ESSENCE OF RELIGION 33 
 
 favourable social development or social position which 
 alone makes that interest possess social significance. A 
 mysticism wholly unconnected with conduct is nowhere 
 traceable ; even the awe before the unseen, the all, the 
 unknown, the unknowable, the immensity of things, 
 while they occupy a certain place in some religions, 
 have a definite influence on conduct and represent a 
 mystic philosophy of life. 
 
 III. 
 
 Having supplied the material, we may proceed to 
 present some of the more important deductions which 
 the examination of that material suggests. 
 
 Belief in the supernatural is not identical with 
 religious belief. If we believe in devils, in a god of 
 theft as the ancient Greeks believed in, in innumer- 
 able deities as St. Augustine shows that the Eomans 
 believed in, if we have an unworthy idea of the deity, 
 or if our gods are capricious, we are said to be super- 
 stitious or irreligious. If we believe in Epicurean 
 gods, who do not care for man and for whom man 
 does not care, we cannot be said to be religious. If 
 we acknowledge the truth of the religion current 
 among our people, but are uninfluenced by it, we 
 are without a religion. A naturalistic spiritualism 
 
34 FAITH IN MAN 
 
 which ignores the existence of a deity, and which 
 accepts personal persistence after death as a simple 
 fact ; or a belief in fairies, elves, hobgoblins, or magic — 
 even of gods, according to Buddhism and according 
 to certain ethicists — all these are unrelated to religion. 
 The ghosts and the ghostly world of the primitive man, 
 when they were not yet connected with a philosophy 
 of life, possessed no religions significance. 
 
 Nor are we justified in saying that belief in the 
 supernatural is indispensable to religious belief. Our 
 analysis has plainly shown that the religious end is the 
 satisfaction of certain human desires, and that the 
 supernatural means are matched by countless natural 
 ones. "Wherever men have a philosophy of life, such 
 as the Confucian, the Buddhistic, the Epicurean, the 
 later Stoic, the Comtist, there a religion may be said 
 to exist even though supernaturalism play no part, and 
 though the sentiments differ considerably. We speak 
 of art, truth, health, patriotism, as a religion. That 
 idea which deeply colours and moves our being as a 
 whole and stands in its centre, is a religious idea and 
 quickly becomes the kernel of a philosophy of life. 
 Butler's definition that *' religion consists in submission 
 and resignation to the divine will" evidently refers to 
 a particular form of Christianity, and only indicates 
 certain means by which certain human ends and 
 
THE ESSENCE OF EELIGION 35 
 
 cravings may be satisfied. Lucretius who preached 
 trust in a natural universe and in a simple life and 
 who carried on war against contemporary religions 
 and against contemporary faith in pleasure, wealth and 
 glory because they lead to human misery and rest- 
 lessness, was emphatically attempting to substitute 
 one religion or philosophy of life for another ; he came 
 not to destroy, but to feed, man's deepest cravings. 
 
 If this be true, then not every philosophy of life is 
 religious, at least not in the stricter signification of the 
 word. He who is conventional, who follows others 
 unquestioningly, who accepts his philosophy as a 
 matter of fact, who does not preeminently connect 
 his views on life with life itself, or who has no 
 definite view of life, is thus far lukewarm and vague 
 in his religion. The speculative philosopher and the 
 scientist approach this non-religious type because they 
 have only a passing interest in a philosophy of life. 
 Moreover, since the philosophy of life, in order to 
 satisfy, must be a helpful one, pessimism, optimism, 
 fatalism, and all forms of religion where caprice plays 
 a leading part, are excluded except so far as strength 
 is drawn from them. Every complete religion, then, 
 represents a needed, a helpful^ and, usually, a reasoned 
 philosophy of life. 
 
 How, then, shall we define a philosophy of life? 
 
36 FAITH IN MAN 
 
 The preceding analysis of the religious consciousness 
 will throw light on this. Men wish to know the 
 general features of the world they live in so as to 
 orientate themselves, and they are anxious that their 
 philosophy of life shall be a helpful one. Hence many 
 philosophies of life have existed, and all of them — we 
 cannot even exclude the philosophies of Schopenhauer 
 and Hartmann, for these also preach salvation — were 
 helpful to those who believed in them, introducing as 
 they did order where chaos would otherwise have 
 existed. At the present day, when science has ruled 
 out miracles and God's help, when morality is es- 
 tablished independently of the will and the inspiration 
 of a deity, and when democratic progress is making 
 social conditions tolerable, is causing men to be self- 
 respecting, and is suggesting that nothing is impossible 
 to men's united will and intelligence, a deliberately 
 accepted philosophy of life appears superfluous because 
 we all believe in such a philosophy without being 
 conscious of the fact. A philosophy of life, therefore, 
 acquaints us with the trend for good or evil which 
 exists in the world and thus enables us to adjust and 
 attune ourselves to it. 
 
 We must, however, show also the relation which 
 obtains between a philosophy of life and a philosophy 
 of existence, for the two are by no means necessarily 
 
THE ESSENCE OF RELIGION 37 
 
 identical. Whether there be a noumenal or a 
 phenomenal world ; whether there be an Absolute or 
 an Unknowable; whether matter and spirit or only 
 either of these constitute reality ; whether we believe in 
 atoms, electrons or vortex rings ; whether the universe 
 was once a single atom and is slowly breaking np or 
 whether, on the contrary, the universe is gradually 
 consolidating until it will become a single compact 
 homogeneous mass; and innumerable other scientific 
 and philosophical solutions have no relation, or at 
 least no important or direct relation, to a helpful 
 philosophy of life. The Buddha explained this once to 
 his disciples. Being in a thickly wooded forest, he 
 stretched out his arm and plucked a handful of leaves. 
 Turning then to his disciples he asked them where 
 there were more leaves, in his hand or in the forest. 
 They naturally answered In the forest, whereupon he 
 told them that the knowledge necessary for salvation 
 compared with possible knowledge was in about the 
 same ratio as the leaves in his hand were to those on 
 the trees. A philosophy of life asks only certain 
 questions : is causality, chaos or a supernatural world, 
 the reason for what happens ? Are the forces of the 
 world favouring or opposing goodness and happiness, or 
 are they neutral? Can assistance be obtained from 
 non-human sources, or can assistance be obtained at all? 
 
38 FAITH IN MAN 
 
 Is man naturally evil, good or perfectible ? If these 
 and suchlike philosophical questions are satisfactorily 
 answered, the philosophy of life is complete, at all 
 events so far as it is definitely helpful and practical, 
 and so far as it does not attempt to rival an en- 
 cyclopaedia. Nor does it even cease to be a philosophy 
 of life when, with some of the Stoics, we entertain 
 the idea that we can expect no consolation from the 
 universe or from society, or, going further, when we 
 are bent on doing the right independently of every- 
 thing outside that right. 
 
 If we are, therefore, to speak of an ethical religion, 
 we must assume that the ethics is embodied in a philo- 
 sophy of life, for without such a philosophy an ethi- 
 cal religion would lack meaning. In the concrete, the 
 problems of effectuality and ineffectuality, of divine or 
 spirit help, of the sufficiency of man, of the interference 
 of occult and natural powers, of the needs and capacities 
 of man and of society, and much else, would meet us and 
 demand an answer, and that answer, however wavering, 
 would constitute our philosophy of life. Even that 
 ethics which recognises only one motive — respect for 
 the moral law, and which is contemptuous of con- 
 sequences, would be in a similar position, for if the 
 ethics is to result in action there must be a philosophy 
 of life to guide us in our actions. A consistent ethics, 
 
THE ESSENCE OF EELIGION" 39 
 
 independent of a philosophy of life or outside it, is 
 impossible, and an ethical religion, therefore, is a 
 helpful philosophy of life where ethics occupies the 
 central place, i.e.^ where belief in the efficacy and 
 grandeur of moral principles is substituted for the 
 belief in the efficacy and grandeur of a deity. It 
 is this absence of a definite philosophy of life in 
 Confucianism which has perpetuated ancestor worship 
 and which has opened the door to many superstitious 
 in China, and the same incompleteness has degraded 
 Buddhism almost everywhere. The mere fact of a 
 religion declaring itself to be primarily ethical — and 
 most religions do that to-day — would of itself decide 
 nothing as to the nature of the ethics and as to the 
 presence or absence of supernatural elements, e.g.^ the 
 whole empyrean machinery might remain very nearly 
 intact, obedience to an external authority might be 
 admitted, and the interest in this life and in society 
 might be infinitesimal. Finally, in a modern man's 
 religion the nature of the universe, unless it be 
 conceived of as ethical, will play a wholly subordinate 
 part, while the constitution of man and of society will 
 arouse the greatest and most intense interest. 
 
 Let us now take a quite general view of religion. 
 That it is not essentially bound up with supernaturalistic 
 facts, motives, means and ends ; that its chief interest 
 
40 FAITH IN MAN 
 
 does not necessarily rest in the All or in outward nature ; 
 that it changes with individual and social development ; 
 and that it is only partly related to general philosophy, 
 we have seen. We have also recognised that a satis- 
 factory religion expresses a hopeful philosophy of life. 
 However, one of the most persistent features of religion 
 we have not yet dwelt on. A priori we might say 
 that ethics has always been the kernel of religion ; but 
 when we study religion from the widest point of view, 
 that is, anthropologically, we find that at the beginning 
 of history, care for self — not excluding care for the tribe 
 as distinct from care for one's fellows — occupied the 
 central interest, and that while the ethical or social 
 element has gradually weakened self-interest, the latter 
 is still intimately bound up with religion. Men want 
 the world they dwell in to be a justifiable one and they 
 also want to be happy. Faith and hope are virtues 
 prized by every religion. Even an ethical religion, 
 therefore, will either have to interpret the word Ethical 
 liberally or else admit a non-ethical element. Eeligion 
 is a helpful philosophy of life and must satisfy the 
 whole man, and not only the man so far as he is ethical. 
 In the narrower sense an ethical religion is con- 
 sequently impossible for two reasons: it judges itself 
 to be a complete philosophy of life whereas it is only 
 part of one, and it overlooks all non-ethical elements ; 
 
THE ESSENCE OF KELIGION 41 
 
 but, interpreting the word Ethical generously and 
 allowing a natural foundation for it, a non-theological 
 ethical religion is possible. Conversely, a non-ethical 
 religion becomes possible only when we altogether 
 eliminate ethics from the individual and social life. 
 i,e., by destroying the individual and society, or by 
 going back to times of pure savagery. A religion 
 without ethics and an ethics without religion are 
 doomed to speedy deterioration and rapid extinction. 
 Unless, then, we have altogether incorrectly ana- 
 lysed and interpreted the nature of religion, the 
 answer with regard to the relation between ethics and 
 religion is now more or less evident. All religions, as 
 opposed to superstitions, have tended to be helpful 
 philosophies of life. For this reason, religion rightly 
 claims to-day that to cut out the ethical elements from 
 its being is to undo it or to make it fit only for 
 primitive peoples or for those mythical persons who 
 are instinctively good. Practical ethical work may be 
 done outside the Church ; but the inspiration and the 
 principles must come from within, at least if the 
 Church is to remain a Church. The Church is, then, 
 bound to resist the attempt to transform it into a non- 
 ethical organisation. For this reason, too, it eyes with 
 suspicion the development of a system of practical 
 pliilosophy outside its boundaries and is unsympathetic 
 
42 FAITH IN MAN 
 
 to the new morality, rurthermore, the Church is 
 probably right in trembling for an ethics which is not 
 connected with some reasoned philosophy of life. 
 
 For its part an autonomous ethics cannot help con- 
 tinuing to point out that the ethics of the Church is 
 centuries behind the times ; that ethics plays only a 
 subordinate part in the Church; that the Church does 
 not develop the larger part of the moral strength 
 latent in man and society, and that a theological ethics 
 — theological as to basis and theological as to hope, 
 inspiration and assistance — is no longer necessary or 
 defensible. The Church ethics must go willy-nilly. 
 Moreover, an autonomous ethics may claim that 
 religion is a social product and that its ends can be 
 attained to-day without supernatural explanations and 
 assistance, and that innumerable religions or helpful 
 solutions of a non-supernaturalistic character have 
 frequently been believed in. On the other hand, an 
 autonomous ethics must learn several lessons. A 
 completely autonomous ethics is an impracticable 
 abstraction, since every ethics must be a portion of a 
 philosophy of life, and therefore must be clear as to its 
 own motive, means and end. Autonomous it can only 
 be negatively, in the sense of being non-supernaturalistic 
 and democratic. Ethics must, then, be part of a 
 religion ; but how that religion is to be conceived of 
 
THE ESSENCE OF EELIGION 43 
 
 whether as embracing many points or few, or whether 
 it is to pass by the name of religion, is a secondary 
 matter. Accordingly, a religion, or system of life, 
 whose foundation shall be human solidarity, and whose 
 pillars, in accordance with modern thought, shall be 
 naturalism, science, humanitarianism and democracy, 
 is not out of the question to-day. When these pillars 
 will support the beliefs of all, we shall have a natural 
 and universal religion or philosophy of life. 
 
 Our answer, therefore, is — ethics and religion are 
 not unrelated ; they are related ; what is more, they 
 are interrelated. 
 
CHAPTEE 11. 
 
 WHAT IS AET ? 
 
 To US moderns it seems almost impossible to put our- 
 selves in Shakespeare's place when we think of his 
 conception of art. How enthusiastic he is when 
 minutely describing the picture of Troy in The Eape of 
 Lucrece ; how lovingly he dwells on the confusing like- 
 ness of the statue of Hermione in The Winter's Tale ; 
 or how, in Venus and Adonis, he insists on fidelity in 
 reproduction : 
 
 ** Look, when a painter would surpass the life, 
 In limning out a well-proportioned steed, 
 His art with nature's workmanship at strife. 
 As if the dead the living should exceed." 
 
 And how frequently Shakespeare returns to his thesis 
 that art is faithful representation, an exact copying of 
 nature ! With the greatest relish he enumerates, almost 
 like an auctioneer, the manifold details, and manifestly 
 implies that the distinction of the artist and the beauty 
 
WHAT IS AET ? 45 
 
 of the product of his art lie in photographic accuracy 
 and bewildering resemblance. One is reminded of the 
 classic stories of the painter who reproduced grapes 
 with such fidelity that the birds came and pecked at 
 them, and of his brother artist who imitated curtains so 
 faithfully that his fellow tried to push them aside. 
 Such reverence for fact — think of the minute accuracy 
 of a Van Eyck or a Memling — is probably to be explained 
 by social circumstances, for certainly the most striking 
 difference conceivable in art products is that between 
 the reproductions, such as those of the early middle 
 ages generally, which are as a rule — in drawing, in life, 
 in movement, in variety — so imperfect that they appear 
 almost like offensive caricatures of reality, and those 
 others which make one doubt whether the likeness is 
 not due to something like magically produced identity, 
 as in many of the portraits of the older masters. Possibly 
 Shakespeare only knew what art there was in England 
 in his day, and since that art must have been on the 
 whole of a very poor quality, he naturally bowed in 
 prostrate awe before those works which succeeded in 
 transferring and fixing on to the canvas scenes from 
 Hfe. 
 
 Further development has brought about a result 
 which only differs in a minor respect from that which 
 art, in its first stages, attained. No longer, it is true, 
 
46 FAITH IN MAN 
 
 are men unable to draw or to paint accurately; but 
 so much attention is sometimes paid to general effect 
 that Shakespeare's canon of richness of detail, the 
 canon which guided the pre-Eaphaelites — Italian, 
 Dutch and German — is wholly ignored. Moreover, 
 the details themselves suffer a sea-change and become 
 symbolic. Instead of a picture appearing more life-like 
 as we approach it, it resolves itself into chaotic patches, 
 and instead of delicate tracing and shading, bold 
 outlines and startling but unnatural colour contrasts 
 are often favoured. 
 
 In examining, therefore, the essential nature of art, 
 we must abstract all that is due to passing social 
 conditions and to aberrations. We must discover 
 whether art serves a purpose outside itself, whether it 
 is connected with life as a whole, or whether the art 
 realm is as strictly divided from the general life as the 
 sea is from some rocky coast, or whether, indeed, art 
 serves several purposes. 
 
 If one thing is said to be obvious to-day, it is that 
 faithful reproduction is not art, i.e.^ to represent nature 
 or man as a good photographic camera would, is to miss 
 the artistic end which aims at character and emotion. 
 One with this is the contention that art is impure, 
 is not true art, when it serves any master but itself ; 
 satisfaction to the artist, pleasure to the beholder are 
 
WHAT IS AET ? 47 
 
 its objects. The art product need not, therefore, be 
 faithful to nature; it may even deliberately falsify 
 nature. He who paints a wood has no intention of 
 pleasing or satisfying the woodman, the botanist, the 
 woodbuyer, the poacher, or the woodowner. He 
 ignores all these, and only remembers the artist within 
 himself. Hence art is also said to be independent of 
 morality. The artist is neither the declared servant of 
 morality, nor is he influenced by moral considerations. 
 Beauty not ethics, is his aim, and whether his produc- 
 tions please or displease, promote or hinder, morality, 
 is not his concern. In short, art satisfies our art nature 
 and that art nature refuses to be dictated to. Art 
 for art's sake ! 
 
 However, this theory is not without its difficulties 
 and obscurities. What, for instance, does faithful 
 representation mean ? No doubt, in man's first efforts, 
 when reproduction meets with almost insurmountable 
 obstacles, there will be little choice as to what aspect is 
 to be reproduced, and, therefore, there will be a 
 tendency to reproduce what is socially most desired — 
 pictures of saints or the portraits of patricians, for 
 instance, and to reproduce that in mechanical detail, 
 each line as the close observer of that line would 
 draw it and everything regardless of significance. 
 There is here almost no selection in landscapes, times 
 
48 FAITH IN MAN 
 
 of the day, states of the weather, or in seasons ; there is 
 here no decided individuality, no effective represent- 
 ation of movement and power, and no freedom. The 
 whole which the onlooker sees is made up of de- 
 tails, many of which the spectator did not or could 
 not see. The delicate shadings and the general 
 atmosphere of the landscape are ignored, even though 
 they deeply affect the beholder. The landscapes are 
 all of one type — no representations of spring or autumn 
 colours, of fine sunrises or sunsets — unlike the 
 landscapes which the lover of nature seeks and admires, 
 and sky effects are not aimed at, skies to the end of the 
 sixteenth century being practically without exception 
 gray at the horizon and blue at the zenith and only 
 coming closely to resemble the full reality towards 
 the end of the nineteenth century. 
 
 Yet to speak of this order of painting as faithful 
 reproduction is manifestly to strain the meaning of the 
 phrase. We can understand that in the earlier stages 
 of art, reproduction should have been painful and 
 unrefiective ; nevertheless it is difficult to see why no 
 higher stage along the same road should be reached* 
 or why the later stages should not be equally, and even 
 more so, regarded as dealing with faithful reproduction. 
 Take, for instance, landscapes. Why should the painter 
 not choose the richest and most varied landscapes ? 
 
UNIVEI^SI . 
 ^^njj^oBU^ WHAT IS AET? 49 
 
 "Why should he not limit himself to some little corner 
 of a field ? Why should he not select his time of the 
 day, of the season, and of the weather ? Why should 
 he make the spiritless camera, when exposed at 
 haphazard, which is so untrue to admiring observation, 
 his standard, instead of the manifold sentiments which 
 determine what shall fall within the focus ? Why 
 should he not attempt to reproduce indirectly certain 
 feelings by his picture rather than the object precisely 
 as observed by some one interested in details ? Why 
 should he not have his predilections, favouring cows 
 with Cuyper, animals generally with Landseers, 
 peculiar light effects with Turner, chiarusco with 
 Eembrandt, rich colouring with Correggio, Eaphael 
 and Eubens, battle scenes with David, special 
 landscapes with Hobbema, Corot, Eousseau and 
 Constable? Since the interest of the spectator is 
 limited, why need the artist pay equal attention to 
 the details in the picture which he gives us ? 
 
 So, too, with portraiture. Are soul, spirit, energy, 
 distinction, life, movement, not real ? And if they are, 
 why should they not be faithfully reproduced ? Why 
 should not the artist paint a man at his best, in some 
 interesting pose and situation? Why should he not 
 elect to paint those men who are in some way dis- 
 tinguished in appearance? Why even should he not 
 
50 FAITH IN MAN 
 
 emphasise in the portrait that which appeals to him 
 most, selecting position, dress, background, light, and 
 the like, and suppressing what he thinks is indifferent ? 
 
 Men speak of faithfulness of reproduction; but 
 faithfulness in reproducing what ? In the exact sense, 
 omitting allegorical and fanciful pictures, every artist 
 faithfully reproduces who reproduces what is to man 
 some aspect of a reality, and not only he whose mind is 
 too dull to see life in its fulness, whose point of view 
 is that of the phlegmatic camera and not of the 
 throbbing human heart. 
 
 We may, however, ask : Why do painters not pay 
 homage to the woodman, the poacher and the botanist ? 
 There aie many reasons for this, chief of which is, on 
 the negative side, that the majority of men do not 
 belong to those classes of human beings and could not, 
 therefore, produce or appreciate such works, and, on 
 the positive side, that the general interest is in the 
 exceptional, in fulness, in the typical, without any 
 distinct reference to needs and interests restricted to a 
 few classes of men. 
 
 The artist produces and reproduces for us what we 
 love or what he loves. We have here a clue to the 
 aim of art. Leaving aside certain exceptional aspects 
 which we shall consider later on, we see at once that 
 art is by no means unrelated to life as a whole ; that, 
 
WHAT IS AET ? 51 
 
 on the contrary, it is most closely connected with it. 
 If soul, spirit, energy, distinction, did not appeal to 
 men, they would neither reproduce them nor admire 
 them, and if nature, in its various moods, left us unin- 
 terested, landscapes would not be painted. If we loved, 
 say, certain characteristics and activities of an ethical 
 kind, these would be reproduced, and if we were gross 
 and sensual, we would understand and relish grossness 
 and sensuality and depict these. I'or the pious Eoman 
 Catholic artist to understand a Giordano Bruno, and to 
 picture him triumphant over his persecutors, or for a 
 serious-minded artist like Millet or Watts to spend his 
 days painting in the mincing French style of the 
 eighteenth century, would be impossible. He could 
 not enter into the spirit of his theme, and he would not 
 fix on the canvas what is foreign to his nature. To 
 this there may be a plausible reply to the effect that 
 an artist, by virtue of being an artist, is neither pious 
 nor serious-minded or frivolous, but that he is an artist 
 and nothing else. Granting for the moment this con- 
 tention, the question of the attitude of the public 
 remains. The general public certainly embraces many 
 who are serious-minded. These will, therefore, dislike 
 morally objectionable pictures, and favour others of an 
 ethical character. Thus, generally, the taste of the 
 public will appreciate what agrees with its general 
 
52 FAITH IN MAN 
 
 sentiments, whatever these sentiments may be at any 
 time. The rendering of landscapes, sea-pieces, sky-effects, 
 town, village, aristocratic, bourgeois or working-class 
 scenes, symbolic and religious presentations, battles, 
 love, persons, and much else, will vary with given 
 interests. When, for instance, the Church flourishes, 
 religious painting is the rule ; when industrial princes 
 reign, we have the non-religious pictures of the Dutch 
 school ; when life is gay, we have painters like Watteau 
 and Boucher ; when interest centres in nature, schools 
 of nature-painters flourish. Assuming that the public 
 interest is exclusive or nearly so, and the pictures 
 would in their turn almost exclusively treat of a theme 
 congenial to that interest. It is, therefore, not true — 
 or we will say not self-evident, not likely — that art is 
 wholly or even partly independent of life. 
 
 We must press the point further. If general 
 interests exist which determine the subject of the 
 pictures painted, we cannot easily admit that the artists 
 who paint these pictures are indifferent to the subjects 
 of their choice. It is startling already to assume that 
 some men should cut themselves off from the stream of 
 social tendency ; but it becomes incredible that such 
 men, who, by hypothesis, do not possess the feelings 
 common to humanity, should give "faithful" repre- 
 sentations of the deepest experiences of man, repre- 
 
WHATISAET? 53 
 
 sentations deeper than the majority of deep souls could 
 conceive unaided. A Christ on the cross, women 
 gleaning, Erasmus engaged in writing, or, on the other 
 hand, fantastic or gross love making, can only be 
 very inadequately portrayed by those to whom these 
 experiences are really foreign. We must assume 
 consequently, unless most exceptional evidence to the 
 contrary is brought forward, that, generally speaking, 
 artists are inspired by interests precisely as is the 
 general public ; that they feel what they paint and 
 paint what they feel. In other words, not pleasure 
 and an art instinct determine what is to be painted, 
 but, principally, men's chief interests. 
 
 An objection, which is too strong and too plausible 
 to be passed over, must be removed before we proceed. 
 It will be said that the facts are against the theory 
 which is here proposed. Do not painters paint to-day 
 all classes of subjects, and do not the generality of men 
 admire everything regardless of theme ? Have we not 
 picture galleries, public and private, permanent and 
 seasonal, where, in the same room, classic myths 
 and the story of Jesus, landscapes and sea-pieces, 
 scenes in sympathy with many conflicting causes, 
 pathos and mirth, jostle each other like boon-com- 
 panions? If the theory propounded above were 
 correct, would not that be plainly impossible ? The 
 
54 FAITH IN MAN 
 
 assertions which are presented in this counter-state- 
 ment are undeniable. Painters, at least many, do paint 
 all classes of pictures to-day; these various pictures 
 are found in the same rooms ; and the general public 
 suspects nothing unnatural in that. 
 
 Is it, then, true that deeply pious Christians and 
 robust Freethinkers, exclusive lovers of pathos or of 
 mirth, equally enjoy the various pictures in a gallery, 
 and that they detect no incongruity in those pictures 
 appearing all in the same set of rooms ? Emphatically 
 not. It merely argues, we would suggest, a general 
 decomposition and degeneration of strong and deep 
 interests; a dilettante conception of life; a weak 
 sympathy with everything, and a powerful sympathy 
 with nothing. It means that, in a feeble way, we seek 
 to imagine how one would feel if one strongly felt what 
 those feel whose views harmonise with the views pre- 
 sented. In a word, this magnanimous attitude 
 demonstrates the shallowness of our generation as well 
 as of so many artists, and not the independence and all- 
 comprehensiveness of art. 
 
 This judgment may be verified by a reference to 
 present-day art. 
 
 Never was there greater wealth in private and 
 in public coffers, never were there such splendid 
 opportunities for art study, for art production, and for 
 
WHAT IS AET? 55 
 
 exhibitiDg pictures; never perhaps were there more 
 painters ; but do we feel that our art is great or even 
 approaching greatness ? that the enormous sums paid 
 for portraits and pictures imply masterfulness in the 
 productions ? that there is a public demand or apprecia- 
 tion of what is beautiful? No; a Millet or a Watts 
 may paint from conviction, certain that they have a 
 message, and a goodly number may admire their work 
 and sympathise with it ; but the generality of painters 
 have no deep social convictions, and the public has no 
 commanding aims to which it pertinaceously clings, and 
 thus our art is second rate or scarcely that. Except 
 for this factor of indifference towards large purposes, 
 present-day art might be great in every respect, since 
 the conditions are otherwise favourable. Indifference, 
 superficial sympathy with everything, kills art, robs it 
 of its life and its meaning. Better for art general 
 poverty and want of opportunity, with sharply 
 defined beliefs, than apopleptic wealth and anaemic 
 sentiments. 
 
 The absence of depth of feeling produces spurious 
 art, and, as a necessity, there follows a spurious theory 
 of art. All styles, all subjects, and every kind of treat- 
 ment, are admired, and accordingly we hear the now 
 familiar cry of " Art for art's sake ! " The artist ceases 
 to be bound by any rules or any social considerations, 
 
56 FAITH IN MAN 
 
 and we get as a consequence, in theory at least, the 
 artistic or Nietzscheian temperament, which is almost 
 the synonym of a lawless temperament, a temperament 
 unsympathetic to religion, to morality, and even to 
 beauty, and in its bloom the incarnation of eccentricity. 
 The modern artist is the brother of the ancient sophist. 
 No wonder, then, that art misses its opportunity when 
 theories of art come to be hostile to what is essential to 
 great art. 
 
 As with the artists, so with their subjects. Since 
 interest in definite aims is discouraged, art becomes 
 more and more eccentric, until its very meaning is 
 gone and it has lost touch with art proper. 
 
 Yet shall we say that artists and the public ought 
 not to fraternise with all forms of experience, or that 
 picture galleries are a mistake ? That inevitably 
 follows. Large-heartedness which is general argues 
 general indifference, and that is ethically reprehensible. 
 Extensive interests may and should exist; but they 
 must be deep and not too extensive. Where an 
 interest is not ours, there we shall not lose ourselves in 
 it; we shall, on the contrary, give it a wide berth. 
 Similarly with picture galleries, especially public ones. 
 From the antiquarian point of view and from the point 
 of view of him who is eager to know and to study art 
 treasures, such galleries are commendable because it is 
 
WHAT IS AET ? 57 
 
 preferable to see pictures under very unsuitable 
 circumstances rather than not at all. As a compromise 
 there might be some classification, and widely 
 differing or discordant subjects might be housed in 
 separate apartments or buildings ; or better still they 
 might be placed appropriately in churches, town halls, 
 parliaments, concert halls, theatres, and like places. 
 In no case, however, could we admit, on our theory, 
 that painters should paint for picture galleries. A 
 gallery is scarcely more the place for pictures than a 
 pawn-shop ; rifles and furniture might as well be made 
 for museums instead of for defence and comfort. 
 Pictures should be found on the inner and outer 
 walls of public buildings, each picture according to 
 its theme in its appropriate position and frame, no 
 picture where it does not fit in harmoniously with 
 the spiritual surroundings. 
 
 If art is to produce and to reproduce faithfully what a 
 general ethical and human interest demands, does not 
 art cease to occupy a distinct niche ? Does it not lose 
 its independence ? Is it not degraded, and does it not 
 cease to be something extraordinary, exquisite and 
 great? Does not all admiration for the products of 
 art cease ? Do we not discontinue thinking of pictures 
 as beautiful, or as painted in order to yield, in the 
 painting and in the beholding, pleasure ? 
 
58 FAITH IN MAN" 
 
 These are weighty questions. If the point of view 
 proposed is correct, admiration of, and pleasure in, art 
 products may only enter indirectly. Thus also the 
 beauty of a picture falls away, except as an after- 
 thought. The gifted painter who is a civic enthusiast 
 will create images of patriotic objects and will 
 endeavour to the utmost of his capacity to do justice 
 to those images, and those images, deposited in civic 
 buildings, will serve to remind all citizens of what 
 those images purport to present. Similarly Christian 
 painters will vie with one another in representing 
 Mary as the spiritual and physical perfection they 
 believe her to have been, and to picture with surpassing 
 psychological truthfulness the life of Jesus and his 
 tragic end. Thus with the whole of art. What we call 
 the beautiful, the sense of admiration, the pleasure 
 derived from the contemplation of certain objects, 
 would be components of feelings which the picture 
 rouses in deeply responsive breasts. It must be 
 admitted that the differences in pictures of the same 
 class will suggest comparisons, and that the insight 
 and the workmanship of the painters will be some- 
 times discussed ; but it would be regarded as almost 
 perverse to look at the pictures merely from the point 
 of view of workmanship and to argue that the object 
 of the pictures — say those in churches — is not to rouse 
 
WHAT IS AET ? 59 
 
 and strengthen feelings and interests, but to proffer 
 scope to the brush of a master worker. 
 
 Having "degraded" art so far, we are bound to 
 " descend " a step further. Is art unrelated to life as a 
 whole? Is art, its existence or non-existence, in- 
 different to morality ? Should we be right in saying 
 that art is a luxury, a superfluity, without which 
 communities can very well prosper ? To answer these 
 questions affirmatively would be to agree with the 
 theory of art for art's sake which we have been thus 
 far criticising. We must march in the opposite 
 direction, and for that we have some justification. 
 
 In common life we emphasise only what is prominent 
 and pass lightly over what is customary ; accordingly 
 we find that art comes to be identified with exceptional 
 products which are not essential to the ordinary life. 
 The German philosopher Herbart must have been 
 misled by this common mistake, for he regarded art as 
 unnecessary to life. Art, we must say, is, in the 
 widest sense, synonymous with good work ; and, in an 
 exalted sense, with extremely good or perfect work. 
 If art, therefore, pleases, is admired, is loved, and is 
 regarded as beautiful and valuable, it is because perfect 
 work, work which completely achieves its end, creates 
 such feelings. Naturally, few men approach full 
 perfection, and, therefore, those men who come nearest 
 
60 FAITH IN MAN 
 
 to embodying it, will be highly revered. At the same 
 time, work which approaches absolute perfection is 
 extremely rare, while most work is not without some 
 merit. Whatever the occupation, then, approach to 
 perfection is a social demand. Of course, better all the 
 essentials of life in a very unsatisfactory form, than a 
 few essentials in a complete form; but measured by 
 the standard of a large and a full life we desire every 
 essential, and much beyond, in the completest shape. 
 For example, a miserable mud hut is better than no 
 shelter at all ; but if we are to be satisfied, we want 
 well-built houses with large and well-furnished rooms. 
 We may like bay-windows, balconies, towers, and 
 perhaps it is our wish to have the whole house 
 expressive of our ideal or profession. From person to 
 person the notion of the kind of house he prefers may 
 differ, and thus profuse variety in dwelling places may 
 exist in the end. What we have crudely said of 
 houses holds of everything, even to our thoughts, to 
 our lives, and to the social organisation of which we are a 
 part. Art, therefore, refers to every form of activity, as 
 would have been at once admitted in the middle ages, 
 and only accident, including machine production, has 
 transferred the emphasis to a few activities. Every 
 workman should be an artist and every life a work of 
 art, and it is deplorable whenever that is not the case, 
 
WHAT IS AET? 61 
 
 or rather when a low or restricted standard of per- 
 fection is current. The perfect workman, in accordance 
 with Euskin, would produce only what is perfect, and 
 every workman should aim at originality, at variety, 
 thoroughness, and, through it all, at usefulness in every 
 sense. Nor will the worker be conscious of anything 
 except the affirmation of his individuality and the 
 service of the commonwealth. Because of practical 
 considerations, then, the strikingly accomplished 
 worker would be honoured by a special name, that of 
 artist, and, forgetting the non-scientific character of the 
 distinction between artist and worker, there would be 
 a tendency to think of the artist as possessing a special 
 genius or faculty, whereas every man, however humble, 
 is to some extent an artist whose works should receive 
 proportionate honour. 
 
 For the sake of simplicity we have analysed only one 
 artistic calling, that of the painter ; but, on reflection, 
 it will be seen that what we have said of the art aspect 
 of painting holds good of every art. The cry " Art 
 for art's sake ! " is not only heard in connection with 
 painting, but in sculpture, architecture, poetry, oratory, 
 music, fiction, decoration, dress, furniture, the same cry is 
 also persistently uttered. Everywhere art is regarded as 
 independent and self-dependent, everywhere the choice 
 of subjects is looked upon with indifference, everywhere 
 
62 FAITH IN MAN 
 
 beauty and pleasure are said to be the ends, everywhere 
 the social interest is lukewarm, and everywhere, in spite 
 of many favouring circumstances, first-rate work is 
 most rare, and a danger exists that these various arts 
 should become eccentric, lose their character, and finally 
 become meaningless and cease. Manifestly, a serious 
 concern for life as a whole is necessary for the salvation 
 and rejuvenation of art. 
 
 We have seen what striking changes the art of paint- 
 ing would undergo if our standpoint, the standpoint of 
 the great eras of art, prevailed. No smaller would be 
 the transformations demanded in the other realms of 
 art. 
 
 Music would express, in the first instance, definite 
 feelings and would serve definite and manifold social 
 purposes. 
 
 Poetry would not be maudlin, private, morbid, and 
 anarchic; but would be primarily social in character 
 and promote ethical ends. 
 
 Architecture would be revolutionised and de- 
 veloped in the very opposite direction to that which 
 Schopenhauer favoured, the direction of disconnecting 
 it from life and usefulness in general. Meaningless 
 variety and meaningless decorations around windows 
 and between windows, which represent ordinary 
 architecture, would be replaced by what is useful and 
 
WHAT IS AET? 63 
 
 has meaning. Not novelty alone, but significant 
 novelty, or individuality, would be sought. There 
 would not be houses in the form of castles in which 
 peaceful and plain citizens dwell, and public buildings 
 could not be confused with private ones. When one 
 studies architecture in this light, one can see the 
 enormous advances which are possible here. Especially 
 could reform be inaugurated by authorities who desire 
 to express their special character in their buildings. 
 Schools, museums, town halls, business houses, factories, 
 railway stations, government buildings, and societies 
 could encourage an architecture which has a definite 
 meaning, and where the variety presented could not 
 be suspected of being taken out of a box of tricks. 
 Churches have already meaning to a considerable 
 extent, though the meaning is as yet too general, 
 and true art will multiply meaning indefinitely, until 
 the architectural world will be, without any artificial 
 effort at decoration or at variety, resplendent with 
 what is beautiful. With a few laudable exceptions 
 to-day, if we regard any *fine* row of houses in 
 London, Paris, or Berlin, the absence of meaning 
 and significance will be glaringly evident. The 
 development of individual taste and the break-down 
 of the current art theory which has led to a worship 
 of fantastic and unintelligihle variety, will make peo^ple 
 
64 FAITH IN" MAN 
 
 disbelieve in art, pleaswe, and heauty, and everything will 
 as a consequence become artistic, delightful and beautiful. 
 Style — Greek, Eoman, Norman, Gothic, Eenaissance or 
 'Modern' — will still serve as a basis for architecture, 
 but the individual building will have individual meaning 
 superadded. 
 
 Shall we not argue similarly concerning good prose ? 
 Hume and Gibbons studied the art of writing, and then 
 they applied what they learnt to serious purposes. To- 
 day men profess to make a similar study for the 
 purpose of writing well: the subject, the theme, the 
 thought, are, however, looked upon as being of no 
 importance so long as the phrases sparkle and fascinate. 
 It is now, in many cases, writing for writing sake, and 
 paradox and impressionist pictures are the goal of 
 literature, as some authors and their public conceive 
 that goal. Giant ideas have to be compressed into 
 dwarfish fancies, serious purposes have to be treated 
 as banter or at least rhetorically, and nothing which 
 has not style, in this sense of the word, is likely to be 
 read. Dignity, seriousness, truth, have to move about 
 with cap and bells, and life must be presented as a 
 Punch and Judy show, or at least as a stage play. 
 Consequently, beautiful prose, as a flawless art product, 
 so common in England in the seventeenth and 
 eighteenth centuries, exists perhaps nowhere to-day, 
 
WHAT IS ART? 65 
 
 its place being taken by some trick o' the pen, or 
 by casual brilliant passages in a sea of indifferent 
 material. \ 
 
 Fiction should also serve a definite and social purpose, 
 as many works of fiction already do. If the classic 
 theory of art were adopted, we would hear less of the 
 love element, less of the aristocracy, less of blinding 
 virtue, shocking villainy, and desperate exploits. In 
 fiction, fortunately, we have not yet sunk to the level 
 of 'beautiful' writing, although the one object of 
 novel reading is supposed to be the filling out of idle 
 hours. 
 
 The ancient tragedy, just like the Oberammergau 
 passion play, was not wholly written to amuse, to 
 display the beautiful, and to satisfy ravenous and 
 impartial curiosity. The ancient plays had a meaning 
 to the writers and their audiences, and it would be 
 scarcely accurate to regard them as fiction or to 
 look upon them as our age looks upon fiction. The 
 ancient tragedies were not composed to satisfy 
 exigent dramatic critics, and the subjects were not 
 indiscriminately chosen to gratify unbounding curiosity 
 and antiquarian interest. Men were moved by the 
 representations, and they expected as a matter of 
 course that they would be moved. In this direction 
 the modern stage must be reformed, in order that 
 
66 FAITH IN MAN 
 
 it may significantly express significant thoughts and 
 sentiments. Playwrights, actors and audience must 
 form a league and collaborate for the purpose of 
 achieving a certain social object. To judge plays 
 primarily from the point of view of whether they 
 agree with a certain canon of workmanship, or, 
 worse still, whether they offer opportunities for 
 certain actors, is to mistake wholly the means for 
 the end. 
 
 We need not labour the theory. In matters of 
 furniture, dress, and of every product of man, re- 
 volutions would equally result if the standpoint 
 adopted were that of classic art. 
 
 We have destroyed what goes now by the name of 
 art for the purpose of establishing true art as it was 
 understood in the great periods of art activity — in the 
 time of Pericles, in the days of the Gothic cathedrals 
 and in and about the period of Eaphael and Michael 
 Angelo. We have insisted that the form of the art 
 product must not tyrannise over, but be subject to, 
 the purpose of that product. We may become, on 
 reflecting, fully conscious of its beauty, or what is the 
 same thing, of the complete realisation of a significant 
 idea, and we may admit that its contemplation yields 
 pleasure ; but such beauty expresses the incarnation of 
 the loved thought, and such pleasure arises out of the 
 
WHAT IS ART? 67 
 
 reflection of seeing something which nearly approaches 
 the perfect. The central fact lies in the significance 
 of what is presented, and that must be invariably the 
 stimulus and the measure of art. To abstract the 
 purpose is to remove the canvas, to throw it on to the 
 dustheap as worthless rubbish, and to prize as of 
 supreme value the frame in which the canvas was 
 placed. It is to worship the statue of Jupiter and to 
 despise Jupiter himself. It means going back to the 
 days when there was no spirit, no energy, no life, no 
 movement in art; indeed, the persistence of the 
 current theory threatens the existence of art al- 
 together. Emphasis on the purpose of a product does 
 not imply, as we have seen, the death of art ; rather its 
 revival, its rejuvenation, its expansion, its growth and 
 its triumph. If, other things being equal, the classic 
 standard were applied, significant beauty, like an 
 omnipresent spirit, would pervade every product, every 
 action, and every thought of ours, and we should 
 conceive the world, so far as we possess control over 
 it, in the same radiant light. Art would not be an 
 idle amusement or a contrivance which relieves 
 monotony, but the most substantial part of life. 
 
 It has been rightly said that only that is beautiful 
 which offers variety within the form of unity. We 
 must, however, at once add that beauty in the abstract 
 
68 FAITH IN MAN 
 
 only involves smooth, easy, and therefore pleasant 
 activity, and that the standard for such smoothness 
 and ease — and that is the thing to bear in mind — is 
 the stage of intellectual and moral development of any 
 being or society. Dabs of colour may satisfy the 
 savage, regular flower beds and trees reduced to 
 definite shape the person on the next stage, con- 
 siderable complexity of an artificial kind, as the paint- 
 ing of nude figures, the individual on the following 
 stage; but the highest developed man will refuse to 
 satisfy the wants of his nature with what is at best the 
 equivalent of medicine and of gymnastic exercises. He 
 will demand that life itself should be lived on this 
 high plane where perfection rules, and that the 
 beautiful should not be something artificial or apart 
 from life, but should express individuality and a social 
 purpose. The separate cult of the beautiful is thus 
 bound to die out, and with it the artificial satisfaction 
 of that sense by occasional stimulation through pre- 
 sentations prepared for that specific object. As a 
 transitional stage such a separate cult and its 
 emphasis, have an end to serve and can be under- 
 stood; but with the ever closer welding together 
 of life, with the shunning of all that is only of 
 momentary or partial significance or value, with the 
 recognition that life can only be properly satisfied 
 
WHAT IS AET ? 69 
 
 when it is lived as a complete unity, the idea of art 
 
 or beauty as separate from the broad stream or basic 
 
 structure of life will be dismissed as an unbearable 
 incongruity. 
 
CHAPTEE III 
 
 ETHICS AND SCIENCE 
 
 It is often said that ethics deals with what ought to 
 be, whereas science deals with what is ; and from this 
 is sometimes inferred, though it is never put quite so 
 bluntly, that nothing of what is ought to be, and 
 nothing of what ought to be is. Yet an unfathomable 
 gulf between science and ethics cannot be supposed to 
 exist, for such a foe-like attitude would argue that 
 while we are bound with all the power and wit at our 
 disposal to realise the ought, we are still forced to fail 
 absolutely in the attempt. Morality would thus be 
 barren and meaningless, since it would spur us on to 
 do what, in the nature of things, we cannot possibly 
 achieve. 
 
 Plainly, the opposition between ethics and science is 
 of a different type. The science of ethics tells us what 
 is right or what ought to be; it draws a picture of 
 what the world would be if the moral ideal were 
 realised; it demands of men to reduce that ideal to 
 
ETHICS AND SCIENCE 71 
 
 fact; it holds that no fact ought to be permitted to 
 continue to exist if it does not agree with the ethical 
 pattern ; but it does not say that the ought has never 
 been realised, that all that is ought to be changed, or 
 that all that is is not good, and is not as it ought to be. 
 Ethics applies a particiclar standard ; whether men and 
 institutions agree with this standard or not is left to our 
 perception to decide. There need be no conflict 
 between ought and is ; they may be the same. 
 
 Science and ethics are not, therefore, unrelated or in 
 determined opposition. It is conceivable that human 
 effort shall so transform the world that posterity, like 
 the mythic Jahveh, may look upon the world and 
 pronounce it good. 
 
 There is a personal reason why moralists should not 
 seek to make themselves independent of science, and 
 that is because they might find themselves left behind 
 by the advancing tide of progress. Their audience 
 might come to consist only of plants and rocks, and 
 their power might cease altogether in the land. The 
 statesman will study political conditions, the hygienist 
 the problem of health, the physicist the control of 
 nature, the captain of industry a revolution in the 
 industrial system, the pedagogue the training of the 
 child, the lawyer the prevention of crime; and when 
 these and other specialists have completed their task 
 
72 FAITH IN MAN 
 
 there may be nothing left for the moralist to do. He 
 may isolate himself in his pride; but no one will 
 inquire after him, regret him, or remember him. 
 Moral advance will continue independently of him, 
 and at best he will be regarded as a curious fifth wheel 
 in the carriage of social life. Science, then, however 
 indirectly, is working out moral problems, and the 
 moralist must either co-operate with men of science, or 
 else he and his work will be consigned to oblivion. 
 The reign of abstractions, if not gone for ever, is 
 decidedly in abeyance to-day. 
 
 On all sides science is profoundly influencing moral 
 conceptions. It has revealed to us an ordered 
 universe, a rigidly closed world system which is 
 nowhere broken through by incalculable and foreign 
 forces, an All which is simple and homogeneous in its 
 texture and structure. Science has thus abolished 
 superstition, the enemy to all ordered and peaceful 
 living. No longer need we appease or flatter the gods, 
 or dread an underworld, as the ancient Greeks felt 
 bound to do. No longer need we be confused and 
 confounded by innumerable petty gods whose zig-zag 
 paths inspire terror instead of confidence, as with the 
 Eomans. And no longer do devils and witches fill 
 life with uncertainty and perplexity, and estrange man 
 from himself, from society, and from nature, as was the 
 
ETHICS AND SCIENCE 73 
 
 case in the Middle Ages. The modern conception of 
 
 the world offers to human effort a fair field and no 
 
 favour. With divine interference has gone divine 
 
 vengeance as well as divine assistance ; the divine 
 
 ruler of men has departed, and his place has been 
 
 taken by combined human effort, by beneficent 
 
 institutions, and by a theory of the universe which 
 
 inspires confidence and encourages self-respect, sfcrenu- 
 
 ousness and dignity. Unless ethics wishes to cross 
 
 swords with science, it is forced to exchange the old 
 
 theological view of morals — with its insistence on a 
 
 creator and omnipotent ruler, with its conception of 
 
 the supremacy of prayer, with its heaven and hell, 
 
 with its notions of obedience, gratitude and service to 
 
 God — for a non-theological view, with its emphasis on 
 
 democratic effort as able to save man from individual 
 
 and social sin and misery, on dignity and self-respect, 
 
 on love of others, on prevention and education rather 
 
 than on warning and punishment, and on respect 
 
 rather than on obedience. Science has shifted the 
 
 very centre of gravity of ethics from divine assistance 
 
 and dependence to mutual dependence and assistance, 
 
 and the central relation of man to God has changed 
 
 into the central relation of man to man. Prayer, the 
 
 force which was supposed to right every wrong and 
 
 misfortune, has been wholly discountenanced by 
 
 5 
 
74 FAITH IN MAN 
 
 science, and another force, that of social and individual 
 effort, has taken its place. 
 
 Believers in the old doctrines still exist; but their 
 number is rapidly dwindling. To-day theological 
 religion is chiefly symbolical and poetical, a sure sign 
 that the old is being insensibly and painlessly 
 superseded by the new. The theological or non- 
 scientific theory has still a hold ; but that is chiefly for 
 the sake of ' old lang syne,' and because the new has 
 not yet, as a theory, sufficiently impressed itself upon 
 the general mind. Besides, remnants of supernatural 
 beliefs still linger on, and lovers of * the religion of our 
 fathers ' are busily re-interpreting the old in terms of 
 the new, or retreating to those jungles which science 
 has not yet had time to penetrate. 
 
 In practice the old theory is surely dead. Sanitary 
 authorities cope with epidemics, meteorological 
 institutes warn the mariner of a coming storm, 
 agricultural chemists improve the soil, engineers invent 
 innumerable implements which lessen labour and 
 increase production, social evils are met by social 
 reforms, and education improves head, heart, hand 
 and muscles. Though the masses of the people are 
 almost profoundly ignorant of the results of scientific 
 research, research has so much influenced social activity 
 that the theological element in society has lost its 
 
ETHICS AND SCIENCE 75 
 
 virility, its warmth, and its dynamic power, without 
 men being clearly aware of the fact. People abstain 
 from going to church because the Church offers 
 little to-day, or else they go to church to satisfy 
 some vague or mystic desire, if we leave aside the 
 church as a pleasant and respectable Sunday resort. 
 In any case, owing to the advance of science, the 
 practical value of the Church has almost reached the 
 zero point, and naturalistic and social efforts, even 
 within the Church, have supplanted it. In the social 
 consciousness the theological element has been al- 
 together pushed back by the naturalistic and social 
 element. 
 
 Science has done much more than inspire confidence 
 and show the way to social salvation : it has definitely 
 suggested that we need not accept the facts in nature 
 as unalterable facts. The savage had to be content 
 with the world as it was, with its countless barriers 
 and dreaded adjustments; but to-day marshes have 
 been drained, forests cleared, mountains pierced, rivers 
 bridged, dangerous animals destroyed or domesticated, 
 and ships, railways, telephones, and telegraphs have 
 very nearly succeeded in annihilating distance. Not 
 prayer, not a Stoic attitude of indifference^ not fatalism^ 
 "hut control and change of nature^ science 'preaches. 
 For us moderns nature is neither holy nor unholy. 
 
76 FAITH IN MAN 
 
 We love it, and we adapt it to our uses. The earth is 
 not an inviolable creation which we must respect and 
 dread; it is our dwelling-place, and we change its 
 features at will until the real coincides with the ideal. 
 In other words, we have unconsciously taken over the 
 role of creators, and it is scarcely conceivable that 
 anything in nature shall prove so obdurate as to resist 
 our efforts to adapt it to ideal purposes. With the 
 help of science the moral ideal challenges everything 
 which opposes it, and philosophies which assume a 
 stable universe unrelated to moral ideals will find that 
 not a problem which they are dealing with as eternal is 
 safe from the interference of the moral ideal. If some 
 god created the world in the first instance, we shall 
 treat this world as clay which can be moulded to any 
 pattern man likes. The very idea of the Creator is 
 endangered by democratic moral idealism in league 
 with science, even more so than by the theory of 
 evolution. 
 
 From the more general influence of science on ethics 
 which determines the more general ethical outlines, we 
 come to those scientific factors which act more 
 directly by affecting most intimately the ethical con- 
 tent. Ethical matters were once supposed to be 
 the concern of the moralist, and ethical matters meant 
 nothing less than life as a whole, with its activities 
 
ETHICS AND SCIENCE 77 
 
 and reactions. Science has here produced almost 
 incredible changes. The old doctrines relied on 
 faith in imperatives. * Be healthy/ ' be strong/ * be 
 honest/ *be intelligent/ 'be joyous/ ran the com- 
 mands, and the implication was that imperturbable 
 individual efforts, which everybody could make, would 
 achieve the desired result. ' You ought, therefore you 
 can/ came like a blow to the struggling mortal. 
 Sciences, however, sprang up. Hygiene, personal and 
 communal, developed, and questions of cleanliness, of 
 warmth, of exercise, of diet, came to be scientifically 
 discussed and decided. Health was proved to be 
 neither a very simple matter nor entirely a personal 
 one. Commands and old saws were replaced by 
 scientific formulae and sanitary inspectors. Hygiene* 
 moreover, led to a study of physiology, and that to 
 questions of bodily constitution and heredity. No longer, 
 then, may moralists moralise about health on the basis 
 of what might be deduced from pure reason by pure 
 reason, for the world will not heed advice which omits 
 all references to hygienic discoveries and precepts. 
 Health has become a large subject of inquiry, and 
 matters of diet, of cleanliness, of exercise, and of 
 dwelling-places, are each entrusted to specialists. 
 
 * Be honest' has met with a similar fate at the hands 
 of science. Not so very long ago every man was ex- 
 
78 FAITH IN MAN 
 
 pected to be honest, no matter under what conditions he 
 developed or lived. Man's will was free, man's 
 conscience a wholly reliable vade mecum^ and man's 
 responsibility was undivided. Educators, without 
 thinking specially of moral theory, came, however, to 
 lay stress on a number of conditions which either act 
 beneficially or harmfully on the children entrusted to 
 their care. A healthy and supple body, manifold and 
 sweeping interests, a keen judgment and a strong will, 
 besides direct moral instruction, were cultivated in the 
 school. Bad school hygiene and discipline, insufficient 
 feeding, and an objectionable home atmosphere, were 
 all condemned. A child was to be educated morally 
 as well as otherwise, and moral education was held to 
 be essential. How different this sounds from the free- 
 will theories and the conjuring with a heaven and a 
 hell, where a man's particular constitution and his 
 nurture do not enter into the calculations ! On the 
 contrary, education was perhaps too much insisted on, 
 as some believers in heredity over-emphasised heredity. 
 However, as against the abstract moralist, the 
 educationist stood on firm ground, and gradually he 
 undermined the position of the moralist. Interested 
 more especially in the one aspect of human life — that 
 of early growth — the scientific specialist became an 
 expert in moral education, and his ethical interest was 
 
ETHICS AND SCIENCE 79 
 
 as intense as it was bounded. He claimed the child, 
 and dictated what was good for the young plant. The 
 moralist had here either to turn educator or to find 
 that his voice was unheeded. Men asked of him a 
 close acquaintanceship with child psychology and a 
 knowledge of the effects of various environmental con- 
 ditions on the young. Unless the moralist complied 
 with these conditions, his judgments were regarded as 
 null and void. 
 
 The command *Be honest' has been modified in 
 another direction. Owing to individual and social 
 imperfections many men become criminals: the old 
 method was to denounce the offender and avenge 
 the crime, or to soften his heart by moving appeals. 
 A certain social callousness led also to the adoption 
 of the theory of indeterminism. The chaos within the 
 soul and within society demanded drastic measures, and 
 the theory of indeterminism was, as a consequence, 
 applied to law. Crime argued perversity, and 
 perversity had to be atoned for. However, 
 with an increasing order in society and in man's 
 thoughts, and with a general softening of manners — 
 these two supporting each other — crime came to 
 be dealt with from a new point of view. The 
 criminologist, the student of crime, arose, and he 
 carefully examined the causes and effects of crime and 
 
80 FAITH m MAN 
 
 the results of punishments. Accordingly, with 
 Beccaria, Bentham, Quetelet, and Mill several points 
 came to be emphasised, ^.^., punishments should never be 
 brutal; excessive punishments brutalise the offender, 
 his judges, and the people ; punishments should be 
 adequate to the crime — that is, deter probable 
 ofifenders ; punishments must be such as not to 
 degrade the offender, for that would make of him a 
 permanent or a greater criminal ; and an ideal police 
 should prevent crime by making detection certain and 
 instantaneous. At the same time, crime must be 
 treated in new ways. We must seek to reform the 
 criminal, so that he may join the army of honest men ; 
 we must not allow children to be neglected, lest they 
 be handicapped to begin with ; we must change social 
 conditions which cause irregularity of employment or 
 life, and which press with tremendous force on certain 
 individuals ; and we must generally discourage 
 intemperance, luxury, ruthless competition and ex- 
 ploitation, and the causes which foster these and thus 
 indirectly further crime. As Quetelet says, general 
 increase in crime demands a social remedy rather than 
 a judicial one, and it argues social responsibility in 
 addition to individual responsibility. In short, instead 
 of the simple command * Be honest,* accompanied 
 with threats, with severe punishments, and with 
 
ETHICS AND SCIENCE 81 
 
 passionate pleadings, we have a science which promises 
 far more in the direction of encouraging right living 
 and discouraging crime — a science which scarcely pro- 
 fesses to be part of moral science and which yet cannot 
 possibly be ignored. The moralist must busy himself 
 with the results of criminology, or else he is a social 
 cypher in matters of this kind. Whether he is 
 interested in these new ways of thinking or not, 
 they challenge attention and enlighten mankind as to 
 the nature, the causes, the prevention, and the 
 treatment of crime and criminals. The old theory 
 comes to be displaced, not by a rival moralist, but by 
 a specialist on the study of the conditions of crime 
 who is scarcely thinking of himself as an ethical 
 reformer. 
 
 Both the educationist and the criminologist find their 
 efforts frequently frustrated by a bad environment. 
 Of what use is it, asks the first, to impart leanings 
 towards fine-feeling honesty and broad interests when, 
 at the risk of being economically ruined, there is no 
 chance of realising these in adult life, and when their 
 opposites have premiums placed upon them ? What 
 purpose does it serve, asks the second, when we know 
 what social conditions will dry up the sources of crime 
 when those conditions remain unrealised, and 
 conditions which form a recruiting-ground for vice and 
 
82 FAITH IN MAN 
 
 crime flourish ? Hence arises the social reformer. 
 The ideal man, when driven into a desperate situation, 
 may, indeed, defy the world, and that man is devoid 
 of character who, like a timid animal, shrinks from 
 every obstacle and from all pain. But the average 
 man is not an ideal man ; his powers of resistance 
 are limited ; and that situation is far from ideal 
 which throws a man back entirely on himself. The 
 social reformer, therefore, wishes to reconstitute society 
 to a certain extent at least, so as not to put an undue 
 strain on the individual will. He would remove from 
 industrialism that rivalry and desire for wealth 
 which proceeds regardless of the rightfulness and 
 humanity of the means employed. He would alto- 
 gether allay the industrial fever. He would encourage 
 co-operation rather than competition. At the same 
 time, through such changes, as well as through 
 education, he would foster temperance and abolish 
 gambling, betting, and too absorbing an interest in 
 sport. Vice he would attack in the same way. 
 
 Similarly with the State. He would agitate until 
 the State ceases to be the special protector of the rich 
 and the powerful, and becomes the promoter of the 
 new ethics. Strict justice shall prevail, class and sex 
 privileges shall be abolished, war shall give way to 
 law, education shall absorb much attention, and open 
 
ETHICS AND SCIENCE 83 
 
 spaces, concerts, plays, libraries, lectures, museums, 
 galleries, and travelling shall become readily accessible 
 to the democracy. Beautiful towns, where the good of 
 all is considered, and a national government having a 
 like end, are to be developed. Sanitary workshops, 
 sanitary dwellings, general sanitary arrangements, a 
 good water supply, and a hundred other demands 
 come from the social reformer. If we add to this that 
 the reformer is an enthusiast, that he seeks to 
 communicate his civic enthusiasm to his fellows, and 
 that he feels how essential universal civic enthusiasm is 
 for the continuous improvement of society, we have 
 something like a picture of the nature and the aims of 
 the social reformer. A State organised to serve the 
 good of the whole is his ideal, and the motive-power, in 
 accordance with the new faith, he places in a conscien- 
 tious, intelligent, and ever-active democracy. Instead 
 of ' Be honest,' the watch w^ord is, * Kevolutionise 
 society so as to promote honesty ; ' and the underlying 
 implication is that commanding and preaching are 
 almost altogether vain under adverse social conditions. 
 In our modern life the moralist must, therefore, like 
 every man, become a social reformer, or at least 
 acknowledge the far-reaching value of social reform. 
 
 The hygienist, educationist, criminologist, and social 
 reformer fully recognise that they supplement each 
 
84 FAITH IN MAN 
 
 other to a considerable degree. At first they are 
 strict specialists with no definite moral purpose ; so 
 soon as they obtain a clear insight into their de- 
 partment they acknowledge that it is indissolubly 
 connected with others, and that the common good 
 is the test of the value of their work. The old 
 abstract and all-embracing morality is, therefore, 
 breaking up into a host of moral sciences; and if it 
 is not to be altogether discredited as a useless survival 
 it must become the science of moral sciences, thus 
 allowing that science has produced profound changes 
 in the form and in the content of morality, and that 
 the age of bare moral commands and maxims is gone. 
 
 The science of anthropology exerts an even more 
 penetrating influence on ethics than the sciences we have 
 just passed in review, for these seem scarcely to affect 
 the moral standard, while anthropology presents us with 
 such startling changes in the moral standards that at 
 the first glance the unreality of right and wrong appears 
 demonstrated. 
 
 The problems of cannibalism, parenticide, infanticide, 
 slavery, polygamy, are only ethically perplexing in an 
 advanced state of civilisation. 
 
 The praise of shrewdness, of prudence, of obedience ; 
 the admiration of power; the division of men into 
 rulers and ruled, workers and idlers; the restriction 
 
ETHICS AND SCIENCE 85 
 
 of the moral ideal, now to the self, now to the 
 family, now to the tribe, and now to nearly-related 
 groups; the practice of torture and asceticism — all 
 these definitely show that morality (or shall we say 
 men's ideals ?) changes with individual constitutions 
 and temperaments, and with stages in social develop- 
 ment. The one unfolding ideal of universal solidarity 
 shines through all the historic haze, maze, and craze ; 
 but a morality which makes the same demands on 
 all men of all times is proved to be a fiction. 
 Anthropology shows us the difference between absolute 
 (or theoretical) morality, which seeks to do justice to 
 all moralities and ideals, and relative (or practical) 
 morality, which refers to some particular age with its 
 peculiar social and individual needs. 
 
 Anthropology, starting with a general interest in the 
 various races and their mode of life and thought, shows 
 us the way to a comparative ethics, and thence to a 
 science of ethics. The moralist can, therefore, no longer 
 assume that moral conceptions are never transformed, 
 never develop, and never progress. He comes to learn 
 that the duties, and the implications of those duties which 
 he wishes to enforce, change remarkably with the ages, 
 and that, if he does not recognise this, he will be regarded 
 at best as a preacher for his day, but one who fails to 
 understand the primal nature of morality. 
 
86 FAITH IN MAN 
 
 By insisting on the formation of a science of ethics, 
 science is thus threatening the profession of the moralist 
 who, until lately, was absorbed in Plato and Aristotle. 
 This science seeks to comprehend the essential 
 meaning of ethics and to co-ordinate the various ethical 
 sciences into an ordered whole. The speculative, or 
 unsystematic, method hitherto followed must be 
 abandoned. No longer may we trust to mechanical 
 psychic associations predetermined by prejudices and 
 beliefs, and no longer may we pick and choose our 
 instances. Scientific method demands systematic 
 observation and reasoning. Our observation of ethical 
 facts must be wide, exact, minute, and as nearly as pos- 
 sible exhaustive; unsystematic observation is unscientific 
 observation. Likewise with hypotheses : they pre- 
 suppose very considerable knowledge, and they must be 
 exhaustively verified if they are to deserve the epithet 
 of 'scientific' Wide observation will here mean the study 
 of different races, the study of man from infancy to 
 old age, the study of individual constitutions and 
 temperaments, the study of different social organisa- 
 tions and institutions, and the relation of all these 
 studies to one another. Furthermore, the connecting 
 links between ethics and selfishness, prudence, glory, 
 happiness, pleasure, and consistency will have to be 
 examined. This task will be lightened by the various 
 
ETHICS AND SCIENCE 87 
 
 moral sciences which are already in existence, and by 
 those which are yet to be established. It will be perhaps 
 found that the moral ought represents certain human 
 desires — certain forces in human nature — which seek to 
 realise themselves, and that the study of ethics is 
 principally concerned in understanding those desires 
 as well as the factors which promote or obstruct their 
 realisation. One of the most important tasks, for in- 
 stance, may be to show that neither mere wealth, nor a 
 life of pleasure or of idleness conduce to happiness. In 
 any case, ethics will have to descend from its fantastic 
 throne in the clouds and join the republic and the 
 brotherhood of the sciences. If it does not do that, it 
 will retain its throne, but its rule would pass to scientific 
 specialists who would do its work. The moralist will 
 then be what the astrologer and the alchemist are 
 to-day. 
 
 It is often disputed whether the scientific method 
 is fundamentally different from the method employed 
 in common thinking, and the general contention is 
 that such a difference does not exist. We may go 
 deeper still, and ask whether common thinking has 
 everywhere and always been the same. When we 
 see how, in the Odyssey y poor wit and clumsy deceitful- 
 ness are lauded as something extraordinary, how in 
 ^sop's Fables and Grimm's Fairy Tales shrewdness is 
 
88 FAITH IN MAN 
 
 admired, or how Lucretius, in proving his philosophy, 
 relies on hearsay and exceptional instances, we see 
 that the phrase 'common thinking' has had different 
 values at diff'erent times. In the loftiest example 
 among the ancients, in Aristotle, the process of 
 reasoning is highly developed; yet, though Aristotle 
 was the most eminent ancient scientist, the scientific 
 notion of observation and verification was far from 
 developed in him and by him. The ordinary child 
 generalises recklessly, and the ordinary man is not far 
 removed from the child in that respect. Occasionally, 
 of course, the practice of exactness and minuteness of 
 observation is observable in those who are untrained ; 
 but the systematic process of induction, as propounded 
 by Bacon and developed by science, is a historic and 
 scientific product. Yet, given that science has developed 
 a method, is not the moralist bound to insist on that 
 method becoming the common method which is to be 
 applied invariably in every department of life by every 
 man? The command, 'Be truthful,' must, therefore, 
 read: 'Be truthful by making the scientific method 
 your own.' The moralist must ask that to the 
 subjective desire of being truthful should be added the 
 objective capacity to distinguish between truth and 
 error. The scientific method must become the method 
 of ordinary life. Observation, hypothesis, verification 
 
ETHICS AND SCIENCE 89 
 
 and reasoning, when they are not systematic, must 
 be condemned until the method applied to the 
 common affairs of life is as systematised and as 
 conducive to correctness of statement and inference 
 as that applied in scientific inquiries. Unfortunately, 
 those who practise the scientific method have imbibed 
 it, as a whole, from others who were equally un- 
 aware of its essential nature, while those who seek 
 to communicate it as a system have not usually had 
 the opportunity of practising it systematically. This, 
 however, is only a historical accident. The time 
 must come when the scientific method is not only 
 employed in scientific research, but is fully understood 
 and deliberately taught ; and from that point it is but 
 a step to its being generally taught in schools until it 
 becomes the method of thought of the ordinary man. 
 The scientific method cannot, therefore, be passed over 
 by the moralist as something extra-moral ; that method 
 must be taught by him as the complement of the 
 virtue of truthfulness. 
 
 Moreover, science itself is the concern of the new 
 ethics. * Be truthful ! ' What does that mean ? 
 Is the command to be taken literally, or is it to 
 signify ' Be more or less truthful in a few things ? ' 
 If it means the former, then truth generally is the 
 
 concern of the truthful man. He must wish to know 
 
 6 
 
90 FAITH IN MAN 
 
 the truth about physical, chemical, biological, psycho- 
 logical, and moral phenomena. He cannot be 
 indifferent about what he believes concerning the 
 universe. The truth about art, the truth about 
 society, must be dear to him. He must sympathise 
 with the search for truth generally, and, what is more, 
 he is constrained to make the truth prevail in every 
 department of knowledge, as well as to recognise that 
 it is his duty to be the foe of shams.. The moralist 
 cannot stand, therefore, aside from scientific inquiries. 
 Truth is the object of pcience, and since truth is also 
 one of his objects, he must identify himself both with 
 scientific methods and with scientific aims. 
 
 The particular development of science has, neverthe- 
 less, brought with it certain difficulties, for, starting 
 with the investigation of physical phenomena, several 
 dangers arose. Physical facts were regarded as the 
 only things real and worthy of respect. Emotions, 
 ideas, and ideals were looked upon as fantastic, 
 fanciful, and unworthy of investigation. The glory of 
 man was to seek for physical truth, and to understand 
 the physical universe was man's highest ambition. 
 Truth itself was regarded not only as the supreme 
 virtue, but as the only virtue, and other human desires 
 were regarded as devoid of truth, as subjective and 
 as unreal. Science, in other words, was intellectualistic 
 
ETHICS AND SCIENCE 91 
 
 and materialistic. The first compromise, therefore, 
 between truth and needs took place on the physical 
 plane. Science came to be applied, and, as a result, 
 there followed innumerable improvements and dis- 
 coveries of an economic character. The whole of the 
 material life was revolutionised, and labour gained 
 tremendously in value. Greater material comfort and 
 greater material luxury (at least for a few) were the 
 result, and the notion spread that material science 
 would save man from every ill. Moral and similar 
 efiforts were more than ever discountenanced. Yet 
 while the incalculable value of the application of 
 science to industry cannot be doubted, it soon became 
 clear that physical science was unable, by itself, to save 
 man, for fabulous private wealth is consistent with 
 shocking general destitution, and moral turpitude and 
 neglect of health can very well limp side by side 
 with physical advance. What is more, by promoting 
 the production of fiendish instruments of warfare, 
 and by generally placing itself unreservedly at the 
 disposal of the rich — as in mines, in potteries, in 
 chemical works, in division of labour — science has 
 done a huge disservice to man. Applied science may 
 be made a curse as well as a blessing, and the lover of 
 his kind cannot help treating science as an enemy in 
 so far as it puts itself at the disposal of the enemies 
 
92 FAITH IN MAN 
 
 of peace and democratic good-will. Here alone the 
 new faith may justly censure the man of science. 
 
 The advance of science will, however, more than 
 neutralise what harm it has been doing. The 
 glorification of the physical sciences is in the 
 decline. We have passed biology already, and such 
 sciences as psychology, anthropology, education, 
 criminology, sociology, and ethics, are rapidly 
 developing. Once a strong and definite interest 
 in social and moral truth arises, and the scientific 
 pendulum will find its centre of gravity there 
 rather than in the physical sciences. Then, we 
 have every reason to believe, there will be the 
 same wonderful and almost incredible progress in 
 moral and social truth and their application as 
 there has been in physics and in material matters. 
 The scientific method, we must remember, is in no 
 way confined to any particular realm of truth, for 
 it may be applied anywhere and everywhere. The 
 moralist need not, therefore, fear that science is 
 concerned only with matter and material comforts; 
 the most refined and spiritual realms are also its 
 concern. 
 
 We may go further. Just as the scientific method 
 is nothing but the ethical method of research, so the 
 fundamental aims of science are moral aims in that 
 
ETHICS AND SCIENCE 93 
 
 they primarily tell us our place in nature and society, 
 and give us commanding truths which must ultimately 
 save and elevate mankind. 
 
 The result of our examination has been that ethics 
 must not and cannot regard science as either a stranger 
 or a foe. For ethics to ignore science is to reduce 
 itself to a phantom and to communicate its substance 
 to its adversary. The scientific conception of the 
 universe is being universally accepted and acted on; 
 insensibly a host of special moral sciences, such as 
 education and hygiene, are developing and are doing 
 the work that ethics used to do; anthropology and 
 sociology are also modifying the common view con- 
 cerning fundamental ethical conceptions; and, lastly, 
 if the moralist will not heed, specialists will come 
 forward who will snatch away the remnant of his 
 power. No conjuring with ought and is, no detection 
 of dialectic differences, no appeals to Plato and Aris- 
 totle, will do in this matter. Science is marching 
 forward, and with it humanity ; and every attempt of 
 the moralist to reinforce or to make plausible the 
 old pre-scientific position means so much time and 
 energy wasted, and so much ground lost. Let the 
 moralist love his subject more than some particular 
 view of it, let him enter into the spirit of the 
 new ethics, let him co-ordinate the moral sciences, 
 
94 FAITH IN MAN 
 
 and he will march abreast of science — if not, indeed, 
 ahead, as the rightful leader of the vanguard of pro- 
 gressive humanity. 
 
CHAPTEE IV 
 
 THE NEW FAITH AND SOCIAL KEFORM 
 
 Nothing seems more self-evident to-day than that 
 morality is inconceivable except as having a social 
 character, and yet nothing is less obvious if we regard 
 the matter historically. For us moderns to slight the 
 common good, or to look upon it as of secondary 
 importance, seems to challenge the very being and 
 meaning of ethics. For us, the good man is prim- 
 arily the good citizen and the good neighbour, 
 more especially the former, whose principal duty is 
 jealously and zealously to guard good social and 
 political institutions and to do his utmost to improve 
 whatever institutions flourish. Economic, legal and 
 political systems, absorb his attention. In his opinion 
 the good and the evil of mankind is distilled into 
 these, and these must, therefore, be dealt with in 
 the first instance. "We could imagine a man who 
 possessed such consummate ability that he could 
 achieve for himself what mankind has achieved for 
 
96 FAITH IN MAN 
 
 humanity ; but men as we know them have only the 
 faintest resemblance to such a man. Eather must 
 we think of mankind as a single individual, perhaps 
 millions of years old and having a single brain. 
 That Individual has developed with almost painful 
 slowness languages, tools, dwelling-places, laws, arts, a 
 common life and a social organism. The successive 
 pulses in the life of that Individual — the human beings 
 who were successively born — are not of necessity faith- 
 ful images of that Individual ; but through the work of 
 the generations being stored up in languages, in 
 traditions, in written laws and communications, in 
 political institutions and in customs, and through the 
 single human creature being nurtured in a social 
 organism where he makes a great part of this legacy 
 his own, the achievements of the past come to be 
 collected in minute selves whose greatest power it is to 
 be receptive to all that has been done, and to react on 
 it. Oral tradition and custom accomplish much in 
 primitive tribes, yet even here the general acquisitions 
 are stored in the tools, clothings, huts and habits. In 
 higher civilisations oral tradition can only play a small 
 part owing to the vastness of the legacy, and special 
 reservoirs are erected to prevent the waste of what the 
 past has accomplished: the common good is thus 
 treasured in institutions and can best be promoted by 
 
SOCIAL REFOEM 97 
 
 improving old institutions and introducing new ones of 
 a high character. 
 
 Conscious of these facts, modern ethics has small 
 hope of moral advance where every one builds a 
 wall around himself and, jealous of his individuality, 
 goes so far as to attempt to tear down the common 
 wall. To ignore or despise the past, to preach 
 independence of one's fellows, to profess a horror of 
 institutions, is to march with quick step into chaos 
 where freedom is buried in the same grave with 
 authority, a chaos which throws mankind back into 
 savagery and retards progress for thousands of years. 
 Absolute individualism means the renouncing of the 
 great legacy, even to the point of language, of 
 reasoning and of self-control. Not the individual has 
 genius and is able to do much, but Man. Ponder 
 the history of architecture from the cave dwelling 
 and the covering of branches to the modern palace 
 and church, or that of tools from the chipped stone 
 to the modern locomotive and printing machine, 
 and observe how slow has been the progress and 
 how little even the most gifted person contributes. 
 See the difference between the sagas and myths as 
 accounts of events and compare them with what we 
 conceive the writing of history to be to-day, with its 
 extensive research, its methodical sifting of facts, and 
 
98 FAITH IN MAN 
 
 its philosophical grasp. Note the development of 
 science and the scientific method out of a mass of 
 almost unintelligible superstitions, suspicions and 
 rumours. How small are men, compared to Man ! 
 
 It is chiefly the investigations of anthropologists 
 which have suggested the above view of men and 
 Man; but the democratic tendencies of the day 
 have led to a similar conclusion. Democracy, Demos, 
 these words have an unpleasant, almost a grating 
 sound. They remind the literary person of sweaty 
 caps, of coarse manners, of thick breaths, of an un- 
 bridled tongue, of brutality, of irredeemable ignorance 
 and stupidity, and of well-nigh total absence of self- 
 control. *Woe if the government of the country is 
 left to the rabble and the mob ! Woe if the destiny 
 of mankind is to be guided by the crowd! The 
 triumph of democracy is the triumph of confusion 
 and the crushing out of all that is great and refined^ 
 The people are born incapables; and they must have 
 assigned to them a place and be kept in that place 
 by their superiors. We may pity them as dumb, driven 
 cattle ; but cattle they are, and driving can do them 
 little harm, and us, the superior classes, much good. 
 Perhaps, too, that they are dumb because they know 
 their place and are satisfied with it.' 
 
 All the time that men reason like this, the people, 
 
SOCIAL EEFOEM 99 
 
 the democracy, are marching on, and marching on to 
 victory. Slavery, serfdom, and mastery have been 
 abolished, and thus innate inferiority is no longer 
 recognised. The law has, at least in theory, ceased to 
 make distinctions between men, though strangely 
 enough women have not yet received their legal and 
 political freedom. And manhood or adult suffrage is 
 all but a universally accomplished fact. No longer 
 may one man beat another with impunity on the pre- 
 text that that other is his possession ; no longer has the 
 baron to pay a small fine for an offence which would 
 cost the serf his life ; and no longer have the rich alone 
 the vote or more votes than the poor. The triumph of 
 democracy is apparently near at hand, and yet, behold ! 
 national and local politics are more progressive than 
 ever and freer than ever from corruption. Still, equal 
 freedom, equality before the law, and equal rights of 
 voting do not satisfy the democracy. Public schools, 
 public galleries, public concerts, public libraries, public 
 parks, are demanded and are being slowly granted, 
 with no ill effect. However, the essential plea is that 
 legislation should be concerned primarily with the 
 common welfare, with the welfare of the large masses, 
 rather than with the protection of the wealthy and the 
 titled — in other words, a revolution in politics is 
 insisted on. Furthermore, the present industrial and 
 
100 FAITH IN MAN 
 
 economic conditions are looked upon as anarchic and 
 disadvantageous for the workers, and thus a root-and- 
 branch reform of our industrial system is said to be 
 necessitated. Production and distribution are to be 
 democratised and socialised ; a secure, a healthy and a 
 dignified existence is to be assured to all. Here, too, 
 the army of democracy speaks with no uncertain voice 
 and#marches on to its goal with no halting step. 
 
 The democracy ! Doubtless all that has been said 
 against it has been mostly true at the time it was said. 
 Whether it is true to-day, and how far it will be true 
 to-morrow, is another matter. In the earlier periods 
 of history there is found only individual revolt; 
 it was a decided advance to meet with a rahhle. Later 
 still, comes the moh which possesses not a little 
 homogeneity and oneness of spirit. "When the C7vwd 
 appears, there are suggestions of firm self-control and 
 unity of purpose. A mass meeting, which indicates a 
 further step in the evolution of democracy, is already 
 an organised whole where common ends are clearly 
 recognised and centrally planned and carried out, and a 
 public meeting stands only lower than a meeting of 
 delegates or an elected assemlly^ in homogeneity and 
 intelligence of purpose and action. Individual revolt, 
 rahhle, moh, crowd, mass, people, elected assembly, here 
 we have recorded the growth of democracy, and it 
 
SOCIAL EEFOEM 101 
 
 is manifestly short-sighted to overlook this advance 
 from chaos to order, from the individual revolt of 
 spiritless slaves to the serried ranks of alert freemen 
 who are guided by ever more capable leaders, and are 
 ever more cajpaUe of dispensing with leaders. 
 
 Similarly with the habits of the people. Among a 
 certain large section of the poorer classes in London the 
 women have seldom their hair neatly done ; their dress 
 is frequently torn, soiled and untidy ; cleanliness of the 
 body is sometimes absent ; and the conduct is boister- 
 ous, the manners scarcely refined, and the language and 
 thought leave much to be desired. One need hardly 
 say that this picture also fits a great number of un- 
 skilled London labourers who belong to the stronger 
 sex. Yet we cannot reason from London to Paris and 
 Berlin, for in these latter two towns the men and 
 women of the corresponding classes are neat and clean, 
 and their conduct, manners, language, and thought are 
 not of a low order. Exceptions to this are rarely met 
 with. When one considers especially the number 
 of working men who visit the Universites Popidaires in 
 France or those who read serious scientific works in 
 Germany, the whole common or medieval conception of 
 democracy must be fundamentally revised, and with it 
 the whole meaning, hope and machinery of morality. 
 The average man is not horn to serve^ not horn to lahotcr 
 
102 FAITH IN MAN 
 
 for superiors, not compelled to imitate or to he dependent ; 
 he has the capacity for self-respect, for self-government, 
 for lofty ideaSj for culture, and for combination and 
 government. There is nothing necessarily low, mean 
 or stupid in him. He may assimilate the great 
 achievements of the past and of his age. Nor is 
 there reason to believe that he could not, if educated, 
 matriculate at a University or become a Bachelor of 
 Arts. Where is the social line between high and low 
 to be drawn ? 
 
 Under these circumstances a democratic conception 
 of morality is not only natural but inevitable. If the 
 people are capable of government and culture, they 
 must have and they will have both, and morally they 
 are bound to aim at becoming the rulers. Yet that 
 does not imply that all men are equal. We have 
 deduced from the facts of history that the most gifted 
 men are scarcely gifted at all when compared with 
 Man, and that the average man is a being able to 
 recognise the good, the true, and the beautiful, and to 
 do much to realise them. There are no statistics to 
 tell us the relative number of able men. Leaving aside 
 what is due to unfortunate social conditions, we are 
 perhaps justified in saying that the overwhelming 
 majority of men represent at least the average ability 
 above depicted, say, perhaps ninety in a hundred. 
 
SOCIAL EEFUEM 103 
 
 Of the remaining ten individuals, two or three may 
 be assumed to be decidedly dull and the others as 
 more or less approaching in ability the mass of men. 
 If, however, we allow for the enormous pressure of the 
 ninety on the ten, we shall see that the ten scarcely 
 offer a grave problem ; and if to that be added that men 
 will improve their environment and their way of living 
 and come more and more to select their partners in 
 marriage, the percentage of the wholly or almost wholly 
 unfit will markedly sink. On the other side, we must 
 recognise the large proportion of the gifted, the talented 
 and the great men. Of commanding and towering 
 individualities there are only very few, and to some 
 extent we make of them gods by ascribing to them 
 much of what is due to their age and what they have 
 legitimately appropriated from others. Thus Newton 
 is really Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, and half-a-dozen 
 stars of the first magnitude fused into one, leaving 
 aside countless orbs of lesser magnitudes which are 
 naturally devoured by the greater sun. The work of 
 the world is done by the average and by a large number 
 of talented persons who are not far removed from the 
 average and whose names, therefore, are not inscribed 
 on the tables of history. 
 
 If this total view as to human ability be approxim- 
 ately correct, then the rule of democracy, under 
 
104 FAITH IN MAN 
 
 appropriate social conditions, is justified as the only 
 defensible rule. A Plato, a Shakespeare, and a Darwin, 
 could be appreciated by the many, and therefore there 
 is no danger that the triumph of democracy will mean 
 the death of greatness. Philistinism and superstition 
 rather than democracy are the foes which greatness 
 need dread. At the same time almost infinitely more 
 may be expected from a highly enlightened and ethical 
 democracy than was bestowed on man by its quite 
 exceptional men, while one may justly reason that no 
 state of society will be so encouraging to genius as an 
 enlightened democratic State. 
 
 Passing dangers there are in the democratic con- 
 ception of morality, for just as the intellectual pursuits 
 of the philosophers tended to identify morality with 
 the worship of reason, so the industrial labours of the 
 many have suggested that the moral problem is a 
 purely economic one and that the solution of the 
 economic problem will leave nothing else to solve. 
 That a harsh and degrading economic system gives rise 
 to mountains of misery and evil cannot be easily dis- 
 puted ; yet it is not less evident that only a feeling of 
 solidarity could maintain a just economic system, while 
 economic freedom is far from being inconsistent with 
 general unhappiness and vice. On reflection we shall 
 find that life is one, and that nothing truly sound can 
 
SOCIAL EEFOEM 105 
 
 be effected in one direction without reforms in nearly 
 every other. Moreover, it is coming to be felt that the 
 motive power for reform and its stability depend not 
 so much on the preaching of class hatred and economic 
 enfranchisement as on the teaching of a general human 
 and democratic ideal, one of the demands of which 
 shall be to reform or replace the present competitive 
 industrial system. 
 
 A second difficulty is also due to passing social 
 conditions. Naturally the need at present is for 
 large, for mass reforms. The average man is dissatis- 
 fied, and his interest centres, therefore, around 
 removing common evils. The consequence is that just 
 as he is laying the emphasis on dealing with industrial 
 problems, so he urges mass legislation, as if men were 
 copies of one another like machine products. It is the 
 same as has been the case with science : to understand 
 the world as a whole is the first object of science ; 
 but once this end is approximately achieved, it comes 
 to be recognised that general statements do not exhaust 
 the individual object, and that we must individualise as 
 well as generalise. Once, then, the more comprehen- 
 sive needs of the community are satisfied, the more 
 individual needs will be studied. Not before! for it 
 is obvious that the majority of individuals will be better 
 satisfied by having many and those the most important 
 
106 FAITH IN MAN" 
 
 needs satisfied, than to have gratified a few needs of 
 comparatively few individuals. Individualisation must 
 come after generalisation. Still, a danger exists that 
 men may be pressed into one form, for we know that 
 much smoulders in individuals which is as easily 
 fanned into flame as smothered. As we saw in the 
 chapter " What is Art ? " we want that everybody 
 should produce what is original, varied, significant and 
 beautiful, and originality will be best encouraged when 
 we are just to the individual and nourish all the 
 healthy tendencies which are within him. No social 
 quality need thus be wasted and no life shorn of its 
 strength. On the whole this is recognised in the new 
 morality. Children are indulged in when they show 
 healthy peculiarities, parents and teachers try to 
 elicit what good is hidden in their charges, and 
 society recognises that it can only gain by diversity of 
 individual endowment and that it loses nothing by 
 individuals living a full, yet socially useful, life 
 according to their inclinations. 
 
 At the same time far too much may be made of 
 individualisation. Mere diversity, mere differences, 
 lead to an eccentric life which is neither good for the 
 individual nor for society. To look for the personality 
 of a man in his varying from others, is only reasonable 
 in an age when individuality has little chance, or when 
 
SOCIAL EEFOEM 107 
 
 social action is impossible to the individual. To 
 be an average man, a man of the street — ein 
 Durchschnittsmensch, ein Alltagsmensch — is only a 
 reproach when the social ideal is a mean one. An 
 average man of one society may very well stand far 
 higher and be far freer than the man of genius of 
 another period, Nor does subordination argue in- 
 feriority, for a man may freely join with others. After 
 all, better be a cell in the brain which works out 
 imposing problems than a huge boulder idly resting or 
 heavily tumbling. The love of complete independence 
 is an extreme phenomenon which passes away with 
 unreasonable social conditions. The mean is here 
 golden justice to the individual as a whole and justice 
 to what is original in him, not forgetting that the love 
 of being one with humanity should accompany the love 
 of living a full life. Only in this manner is stagnation 
 avoided and progress assured. 
 
 Paradoxical as it may appear, the greater danger lies 
 in the opposite direction, in the direction of the 
 democracy not doing justice to itself. A high average 
 is able to do most of the necessary social work, and 
 more and more could be done by the average citizen 
 until even the semblance of bureaucracy passed away. 
 Experts should not rule ; they should give their valu- 
 able advice. The attempt to centralise everything, 
 
108 FAITH IN MAN 
 
 especially on the ground that it is better to have a 
 little work well done than much work badly done, is a 
 living peril for democracy. In the Athenian 
 democracy — where the workers had no voice ! — the 
 tendency was for everything to be done by public 
 assemblies and for offices to be filled by rotation. Fear 
 of others was here the chief motive. In the new and 
 true democracy something resembling this scheme, 
 though probably not so drastic, will be adopted ; but 
 the motive will be a high one, that of the desire of 
 every individual serving the commonwealth. The new 
 ethics must steer between doing injustice to special and to 
 general talent, and the former must be respected while 
 encouraged to serve the latter. We must level up the 
 average and 'progress^ not enthrone the expert and court 
 social stagnation. 
 
 We have said that social reform is the very life 
 breath of modern morality, and men are so convinced 
 of that that they think it must have always been the 
 same. Naively we accept duty, right, morality, ethics, 
 goodness and virtue as so many simple and self-evident 
 moral terms. Yet they represent separate systems of 
 thought, systems which have perhaps only in common 
 the fact that they are human ideals. 
 
 Duty — what is due from us, what we owe — refers 
 primarily to obedience and to authoritative rule, and 
 
SOCIAL EEFOEM 109 
 
 such a rule has little to do with what we call morality 
 to-day. The serf had to obey the free man because the 
 latter was his superior, and what the free man dictated 
 was generally what furthered his own private purposes 
 independently of whether it served those of the 
 community. May a potter not do what he pleases 
 with his clay ? May the clay claim a voice and a 
 conscience ? May not the potter decide what pots he 
 will make ? Duty meant a dog's morality, doing what 
 one is told and serving one's master. Duty argued a 
 system highly pleasing to those who occupied privileged 
 social positions, and it had nothing in common with the 
 good of the body social, the solidarity of the individual 
 and the race, or the feeling on the part of him who 
 obeyed that he owed something to him who commanded. 
 In its present signification the term Duty is spiritual- 
 ised and moralised, and the reference is to a task and 
 not to persons. 
 
 Eight is what an individual claims as his own. 
 " The rights of man " do not imply what we call 
 to-day morality. Men claim the right to live, the 
 right to work, the right to travel, the right of free 
 speech, often with never a suspicion that these rights will 
 further the good of the common-weal or their fellows. 
 Men's aim is to establish securely the pillars of their 
 own life, and to achieve this end they unite and labour 
 
110 FAITH IN MAN 
 
 with others. Duty meant primarily obedience and a 
 relation of inferior to superior ; Eight signifies 
 fundamentally an individual seeking to be independent 
 of others and uniting with others to insure the inde- 
 pendence of each. What is dear to the lover of rights 
 is himself, and at bottom others are no concern of his. 
 Again, the Eight may be interpreted as law, and then 
 with Hobbes and others, the right comes to be decided 
 by an arbitrary tribunal. 
 
 Morality meant at one time custom or tribal custom. 
 In this sense the term was an extra-moral or general 
 one. Among the customs there might be moral 
 abominations and yet they would be regarded as 
 sacred and had to be followed. In primitive times 
 such an attitude was natural, since the life of the tribe 
 lay in its customs, and since life was yet too simple to 
 allow of a separate department for ethics. 
 
 Similarly, Ethics meant at one time character or 
 habit, and referred to what is stable in the individual, 
 regardless of moral demands. 
 
 Good meant always good for something, and thus the 
 meaning of goodness varied with what aims were 
 respected at any time. The term Good embraces far 
 more than what we call Moral to-day, and according to 
 circumstances and individuals it may be in direct 
 conflict with the common welfare. 
 
SOCIAL EEFOEM 111 
 
 Virtue signified originally manliness or superiority, 
 and that meaning does not cover exactly what is meant 
 by virtue to-day. A virtuous man may very well be 
 without virtue in the modern sense of the word. 
 
 If one takes into consideration differing social 
 circumstances, the democratic nature of present-day 
 morality is not difficult to understand. When the 
 political arena is open only to few, and when social 
 change and progress are scarcely suspected, individual 
 interest will only be secondarily social. Men will lay 
 the greatest stress, for example, on being above 
 circumstance and bearing with equanimity the 
 capricious blows and presents of fate. So, too, courage, 
 uprightness, love of knowledge, independence of 
 character, will be the ideals. Men will seek to order 
 their own life and make a melody of it, as we see in 
 the Stoics, including St. Paul, Thomas a Kempis and 
 Montaigne. They may even be benevolent, without 
 dreaming that everybody should be that. Honesty, 
 truthfulness and kindness, will not be generally 
 ignored ; but men will be honest, truthful and kind to 
 their 'neighbours,' and not seek to make society, 
 social institutions and the state honest, truthful and 
 kind. Only a democracy is equal to the task of to-day ; 
 that task was an impossible one in days when Faith in 
 Man was absent, and when the work of reform rested 
 
112 FAITH m MAN 
 
 on a few shoulders. When we speak, therefore, of the 
 various ideals which have been prevalent in the past, it 
 would be best not to consider them without qualification 
 as moral ideals, but preferably as ideals of superiority, or 
 generally as human ideals. The common good has been 
 furthered by most of these ideals, it is true ; yet only 
 indirectly, as has been the case with such an ideal as 
 that of art, where the furtherance of the common good 
 has often been regarded as irrelevant. 
 
 Different ages have been controlled by differing 
 ideals of conduct which have arisen out of special 
 circumstances. Loving one's 'neighbour,' obeying a 
 divine law, developing one's individuality, hardening 
 oneself against the stern fates, being upright out of 
 respect for self, were popular ideals in their time. 
 Consequently whe7i a democracy — the whole people — is 
 coming to ruhy and when men have learnt the value of 
 historic institutions, a definite human ideal of a certain 
 type emergeSy i.e.y an ethics which lays unparalleled stress 
 on social reform and on improving mankind through 
 improving social institutions hy means of democratic 
 effort. All other ideals no more fit our times than 
 snow storms fit the period of summer. 
 
 The implications of a democratic ethics are many. 
 We have already spoken of the central idea which must 
 govern politics, that of the good of all, each one 
 
SOCIAL EEFORM 113 
 
 counting for one and no one for more than one. We 
 have also singled out the demand for a co-operative 
 industry in the place of the present largely competitive 
 one. We must assume as a corollary that all sex and 
 religious privileges are to be abolished, while the form 
 of government must be a republic where the popular 
 will reigns supreme and where every adult is recognised 
 as an equal citizen. National and racial privileges 
 must fall, and with them that hoary monster war, the 
 most dreadful relic of primitive times. The abolition 
 of war will not signify, of course, the abolition of 
 nationalities, any more than that local government can 
 be said to have been done away with because villages, 
 towns and counties no longer carry on war with one 
 another. International amity and organisation will 
 form the complement to national amity and organis- 
 ation. In future parliaments the problem of education 
 will assume the importance hitherto attached to the 
 army and navy, since where all are to be responsible 
 for the proper management of the State there all must 
 be well educated. Democratic morality will not be blind 
 to the development of science and art. Lastly, a true 
 democracy is only reconcilable with sexual purity, with 
 love of a simple life, with strenuous living and labouring, 
 and with large individual and social purposes. 
 
 The social aspect — a democracy working out its own 
 
114 FAITH m MAK 
 
 salvation — is the most important aspect of the new 
 faith, beside which the interest in art, science, 
 philosophy and religion, great as it should be, pales 
 almost into insignificance. That aspect is the one 
 clear sign which distinguishes the new ethics from 
 other systems of ethics, and if the new ethics wavered 
 with regard to that bedrock principle, it would soon 
 crumble into pieces. The new ethics must encourage 
 individuality; it must insist on a high-purposed private, 
 family, professional and civic life; it must emphasise 
 respect and love for one's neighbour and for man ; it 
 must laud a character that stands square to the winds 
 of temptation and misfortune — all these qualities it is 
 bound to reverence; but the supreme object of care 
 must be the improving and the perfecting of the 
 political and social fabric. Through this latter process 
 only can the complete solidarity of the individual and 
 the race be assured. 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 THE RELATION OF THE NEW FAITH TO PHILOSOPHY 
 
 What are the most significant assertions of the new 
 faith ? They are as follows : We are to trust to social, 
 civic and democratic effort for the purpose of ensuring 
 human salvation ; no powers outside nature need either 
 be dreaded or appealed to ; nature itself is passive, if not 
 friendly, towards our endeavours and is to man, armed 
 with scientific insight, as the clay to the potter ; man 
 is a social and sociable being, dependent on and loving 
 society; man is a progressive being, growing historically 
 more intelligent, refined and capable of good ; moral 
 progress and moral perfection are essentially social 
 progress and social perfection, and hence to improve 
 social institutions, to play the part of the good citizen, 
 is the direct avenue leading to the ethical goal ; man's 
 moral interest is primarily social interest, and in 
 society he loves to be, to move, and to live ; the moral 
 ideal is to weld mankind into one being having one 
 single aim ; the conception of interest opens out from 
 interest in the moment, to selfishness, to prudence, to 
 
116 FAITH IN MAN 
 
 interest in one's kindred, one's people, one's race, and 
 lastly to mankind and thence to nature and the universe. 
 Human solidarity in motive and end is the goal of the 
 new faith. 
 
 The attitude of modern morality towards philosophy 
 is, therefore, well defined. The new point of view 
 forbids us to identify ethics with rational self-love, as 
 Bishop Butler did, for the emphasis on self is repugnant 
 to modern sentiment. Individual pleasure is even less 
 the aim, since man asks what will serve the common 
 good and since he is ready to sacrifice his life for that 
 good at a moment's notice. Happiness and misery are, 
 indeed, anxiously studied by the new morality ; but 
 only where happiness agrees with a consistent and 
 harmonious individual and social life. For the in- 
 dividual to interest himself in the common good 
 because of his own good, to hunt after pleasure as the 
 miser after wealth, would be a standpoint at variance 
 with a supremely social and racial interest. Egoistic 
 hedonism is thus obsolete to-day; and where that 
 hedonism takes the form of sacrificing the pleasures of 
 the present life on the understanding that in another 
 world the balance of pleasures will be restored, the 
 modern man equally turns away disapprovingly. Nor 
 are men to-day satisfied with universalistic hedonism, 
 with a belief of promoting the greatest happiness of the 
 
THE NEW PHILOSOPHY 117 
 
 greatest number, unless we supply a modern interpret- 
 ation to Bentham's formula. Pleasures cannot be 
 calculated — at least not as yet; and what is more 
 important, it is likely that the harmonious satisfaction 
 of the needs of our nature is normally unaccompanied 
 by either pleasure or pain, both of which mark perhaps 
 exceptional states. The moral aim is, therefore, to 
 know the human constitution (moral, intellectual, 
 aesthetic and physical) and to satisfy that as a 
 whole in self and others, rather than the attainment 
 of the greatest possible amount of pleasure which 
 is a subjective, indefinable, and probably incorrect 
 standard as applied to human thought and action. 
 Furthermore, just as happiness may well be interpreted 
 as satisfaction, and that as the satisfaction of man's 
 primary, periodic and other constitutional needs which 
 are readily determined objectively, so the notion of 
 utility, as the utilitarian school developed it, can be 
 reinterpreted to mean that which leads towards 
 complete human solidarity, that which is useful for 
 such an ideal purpose. Certainly, usefulness in the 
 sense of waiting on the pleasures of the senses or on 
 material comfort, is a notion which would be repudiated 
 by the moral sense of to-day. 
 
 All theories, therefore, which reduce morality to an 
 inter st in selfish pleasure or in pleasure as such, must 
 
118 FAITH IN MAN 
 
 be rejected, whether the theories refer to this world or 
 to another. He who does not love his neighbour ; he 
 who does not identify himself with his neighbour, is not 
 moral. The moral problem used to be : Can we act 
 otherwise than for our own happiness ? Can we take 
 interest in anything outside ourselves? And men 
 thought they were compelled to answer these questions 
 in the negative. Some heaven or hell, or some 
 metaphysical realm, was said to be necessary for the 
 solution of the riddle. Modern psychology is showing, 
 on the contrary, that the difficulty is created by an 
 incomplete analysis. Objective interests are possible, 
 even to the extent of hating oneself while loving another, 
 and pleasure, and above all selfish pleasure, is not a 
 normal motive in action. It is now seen that the 
 man eaten up with passions looks upon the self-control 
 necessary for ordinary selfishness as impossible and 
 unnatural, while the selfish man regards the consistently 
 prudent man as belonging to a fairy realm, and the 
 prudent man professes unbelief about the possibility of 
 a man living and dying for his fellows. 
 
 We may say, then, that all theories which reduce 
 morality to interest in self, are proved incorrect to-day 
 both by psychology and by the common moral practice. 
 Men sometimes insist that the 'natural' man, the 
 empirical man, as metaphysicians would say, is selfish, 
 
THE NEW PHILOSOPHY 119 
 
 and that only the supranatural or metaphysical 
 man can be unselfish. Who, however, is the empirical 
 man? The assumption that the natural man has a 
 certain nature which is alike in all men or even alike 
 at different times in the same man, is more than 
 questionable. The empirical man differs with the ages 
 and with education, and as in early times he was fierce 
 and passionate, so he will be, in time, wholly responsive 
 and attuned to the demands of solidarity. The soldier, 
 the citizen, the parent, the business-man, are often 
 actuated by prudence rather than by a sense of duty ; 
 but not infrequently these persons as naturally follow 
 the right unhesitatingly and would profess disgust and 
 be astonished when they heard of men who never 
 unhesitatingly obeyed moral imperatives. A lofty 
 character may be, alas ! uncommon to-day as a 
 prudent man was at one time a rarity ; but empirical 
 and natural both of them are and equally so. 
 
 Man's morality is almost unthinkable apart from the 
 process of reasoning, for the moral task, at least that of 
 the civilised man, including as it does many and 
 complicated issues, requires reasoning for its com- 
 prehension and accomplishment. How can we help the 
 man ? we ask ourselves, and perhaps for hours 
 together we seek in our minds for a satisfactory solu- 
 tion. The infant, with its appetites which demand 
 
120 FAITH IN MAN 
 
 instant attention, has no use for reasoning, nor has the 
 man of impulse ; but he who is thoughtful, who wishes 
 to help everybody and to hurt nobody, must often 
 think for a prolonged period before he acts. He who 
 reasons is a friendly community within himself where 
 the different needs seek to come to terms and aim to 
 attain their ends in a peaceful manner. The reason 
 represents the needs parleying with one another and 
 concluding treaties. A reason which is independent of 
 needs and does not represent needs in fiux and in touch 
 does not exist. Kant's pure reason, imposing moral 
 maxims which are wholly unconnected with sentiments 
 or interests, is accordingly inconceivable. We have 
 here again the problem of the natural man and the 
 metaphysical man, the former guided by the senses and 
 the passions and the latter by the reason. Modern 
 ethics rejects altogether this being whose only concern 
 — one concern he has — is not to contradict himself and 
 not to act inconsistently, and who has no compassion, 
 no tenderness, no love, and is never indignant, a 
 being who remains, like an insensible mechanism, 
 wholly unaffected by what happens in the world. 
 Love, solidarity, identification with our fellows, are the 
 key-note of the new morality. Nor does modern 
 psychology admit that the senses have no considerable 
 element of reason in them or that they are conceivable 
 
THE NEW PHILOSOPHY 121 
 
 otherwise than as a complex mental product, just as 
 
 psychology insists on the sense and appetite factor in 
 
 the process of reasoning; nay more, empirically it is 
 
 found that many men would consider invariable 
 
 consistency and non-contradiction unreasonable, thus 
 
 robbing the pure reason of its last stronghold. Much 
 
 may be said, of course, in favour of an objective 
 
 standard and against the dangers involved in being 
 
 guided by feelings, and in the final resort we must act 
 
 rightly even when no personal sympathy stirs within 
 
 us ; but morality loses its meaning and moral insight 
 
 ceases when there is no tenderness in the heart. 
 
 Unreasoning habits are good sometimes, and therefore 
 
 an unreasoning moral habit of grinding out a maxim as 
 
 a musical box grinds out a tune, may be of assistance 
 
 under certain conditions, yet he who loves the whole 
 
 world as a mother loves her only child is more likely to 
 
 do justice in a world full of complicated isssues than he 
 
 who applies unreflectingly an objective and formal 
 
 standard. For a philosopher it is natural to extol the 
 
 power of reasoning and the need for consistency : 
 
 thus we find that many, perhaps most, philosophers, 
 
 from before Aristotle who placed the highest value on 
 
 the contemplative state, down to Kant and his 
 
 successors, have lauded an intellectualistio morality 
 
 where the service of, and the obedience to, reason 
 
 8 
 
122 FAITH m MAN 
 
 played the most prominent part. The new ethics, as 
 we have seen, respects truth and lays stress on the 
 employment of reason ; but it insists also on deep and 
 broad-based sentiments. Nor does it place the reason 
 into an intelligible realm which is a stranger to the 
 world of the senses and of the feelings. For modern 
 ethics the mind is one, and the intellect has neither a 
 supramundane root nor has it a unique or superior 
 value when compared with the emotions or instincts, 
 Intellectualism, emotionalism, and voluntarism, are 
 each one-sided views, from this standpoint. The use of 
 the intellect cannot he too highly recommended in matters 
 moral, the emotions are indispensable and without them 
 the Mood freezes in our veins, and an altogether good will 
 cannot he too fervidly praised — all three are required in 
 the solution of modern problems. 
 
 The new ethics is supremely characterised by its 
 being democratic, everybody counting for one and no 
 one for more than one. Slavery and serfdom are not 
 recognised, and, at least in morals, no one is privileged 
 in any way. In other ages when the law admitted a 
 hierarchy of powers, authority and superiority 
 determined the moral law. It was the place of the 
 superior to rule, of the inferior to obey ; of the superior 
 to lay down the law, of the inferior to abide by that 
 law. One need not go back to Eoman times to find 
 
THE NEW PHILOSOPHY 123 
 
 fathers who regard themselves as the absolute head of 
 their house and whose will it is to be unquestioningly 
 obeyed, nor to discover lords and gentlemen who think 
 that superiority is above law because it creates the law. 
 Authority ruled in pre-democratic days and authority 
 took cognisance only of duties, of obeisance, in 
 inferiors. According to circumstances the despotism 
 might be benevolent, haughty, or malevolent, but 
 despotic the rule of authority remained. From those 
 days dates the notion that God is the law-giver, that he 
 has engraven on tables of stone or on the tables of the 
 heart the moral law, that his will is the basis of morals, 
 that morality losig3 its meaning when we do not derive 
 it from a divine law-giver. Those were undemocratic 
 times. To-day when one rule binds all and equally, 
 when in the presence of our rulers we do not prostrate 
 ourselves or kneel down nor even pray, it is considered 
 unwarrantable to found morality on authority. He 
 who does right because he is commanded to do so, does 
 not belong to this age ; he belongs to days when men 
 were graded, and when the majority were ruled over as 
 domestic animals are ruled over now. A man is only 
 respected to-day if he does his duty joyfully; if he 
 helps his neighbour because he delights in helpful acts. 
 The good feelings must bubble up from a good hearty 
 and morality must be derived from human nature 
 
124 FAITH IN MAN 
 
 itself. Modern ethics is, therefore, independent of 
 external human authority and independent of a law- 
 giver who rules over nature. 
 
 Nor does morality derive its sanction from the 
 nature of things. Men do not feel to-day that they 
 could not act rightly if the Universe itself did not 
 bear the hall mark * Warranted that morality shall 
 triumph.' On the contrary, the feeling appears to be 
 that such a point of view is strained, that morality 
 must take its chances, and that all depends on how 
 strenuous human efforts are. Each good deed done 
 is judged on its merits, and speculations as to the 
 ultimate victory of the good are relegated to hours of 
 leisure and amusement. The serious question is to 
 help morality triumph now and to promote perfection 
 to-day. The far-off future will take care of itself 
 much, and almost infinitely, better than we can take 
 care of ourselves. It is felt that no ultimate victory 
 could undo the degradation, the imperfection, the 
 waste of moral energy and the misery which has 
 ravaged the world ; that the past can never be undone ; 
 that morality becomes a mockery, a stage play, when 
 we imagine with Tennyson, 
 
 * ' That nothing walks with aimless feet ; 
 That not one life shall be destroyed, 
 Or cast as rubbish to the void, 
 When God hath made the pile complete." 
 
THE NEW PHILOSOPHY 125 
 
 In the Absolute, again, there is no evil ; but in the 
 Absolute the human standpoint is lost and the good 
 with it. Nor may we speak of the procession of life 
 as a beautiful picture where the shadings of evil are 
 necessary to the perfection of the whole, for if we 
 represented life to-day in a picture we should be 
 disgusted with the big black blotches and the chaos 
 presented. Some discord may be necessary to a 
 beautiful melody ; but a melody which would represent 
 the life of yesterday and to-day would be distinguished 
 by disharmonies so profound that we could scarcely 
 call it a melody at all. The good man will look 
 behind these similes, and the sight of one man given 
 over to lust or cruelly oppressed will make it im- 
 possible for him to believe in a moral universe. These 
 compromises are survivals from pre-democratic days 
 when morality was sadly discouraged; they do not 
 satisfy the modern conscience ; they appear grotesque 
 and uninteresting. Men want to be assured that the 
 path of morality is not that of the treadmill, and that 
 while all is not as we would like it to be, yet there is 
 no reason to despair. The scientific view of the world 
 is, therefore, sufficient for the purposes of moral action. 
 If the Universe as such positively inclines to favour 
 the right, so much the better, but our faith is nob 
 chained to such a proposition. 
 
126 FAITH IN MAN 
 
 The modern attitude deals in a similar way with 
 the conception of indeterminism or free will. The 
 moral interest in this question has almost faded. 
 Theology required this doctrine for its purposes, and 
 the law also found this conception useful for a time ; 
 but when the attempt to justify God and to relieve 
 society of its responsibility is dropped, that doctrine, 
 too, loses its significance. Absolute freedom is no 
 moral virtue. To feel oneself bound by nothing is 
 anarchy, not morality. As regards ethics, we moderns 
 ignore, therefore, the deity who gave man a free will, 
 the intelligible noumenal world where man stands 
 outside the general fact of cause and effect, and the 
 metaphysical realm where man is freed from the 
 physical world around. Modern ethics has no use 
 for the free will theory as thus understood. That 
 theory must go with the virtues and essences of the 
 scholastics. He who is devoted to the right, asks of 
 his will whether it is loving, not whether it is free. 
 
 However, there is an aspect in which the problem 
 of the freedom of the will interests us moderns, and 
 that aspect is a practical one. We would agree with 
 Kant that a man is not free who is soaked in sense 
 and passion ; that only he is free who can duly 
 deliberate before he acts; and that a man must be 
 his own lawgiver in the sense of acting from conviction. 
 
THE NEW PHILOSOPHY 127 
 
 So, too, we would hold with Herbart that that man is 
 free who is guided by the idea of a common good and 
 who is able to subordinate his life to such an idea. 
 With Schopenhauer we would say that he whose will 
 is unbending and he who does not act in ignorance 
 is free. Furthermore, freedom from exacting appetites 
 or fierce passions, a harmony of the soul, and a single 
 all-embracing life-purpose comprehending in its sweep 
 the good of mankind are additional marks of human 
 freedom. Needless to say that without outer freedom 
 inner freedom is a mere anodyne, a last refuge of him 
 who is in despair ; and that he who is politically and 
 economically in fetters ought not to be satisfied with 
 such inner freedom, but should strive until political 
 and economic freedom are assured to all. The free 
 man is the perfect man and the perfect man is the 
 free man, and neither freedom nor perfection is possible 
 until society and mankind are perfect and free. 
 Moreover, freedom means individuality, self-improve- 
 ment and originality, and, as a consequence, progress. 
 However, this doctrine must not be pushed too far. 
 To make ourselves independent of others, to cut 
 ourselves off or to stand aloof from others, to pride 
 ourselves that we do not resemble others, is moral 
 rebellion. Individuality and originality are precious; 
 but thej^ must be subordinated to the feeling that y(Q 
 
128 FAITH IN* MAN 
 
 are proud to be parts of a larger whole, for apart 
 from social interests, personality and originality argue 
 capricious and fanciful conceptions. Tliink of the 
 slow evolution of language, of law, of social organisa- 
 tions, of science, of art, and of industry, and it 
 will be evident that the individual who steps 
 outside society and relinquishes what he owes to it, 
 has signed his intellectual and moral death warrant. 
 Personality and spontaneity must have a social 
 tendency, and must be but aspects of the social 
 personality and spontaneity which should universally 
 predominate. 
 
 That kind of determinism which denies that the 
 individual has much power, even when he unites with 
 others, and which makes a fetish of the general fact of 
 cause and effect, is very nearly as unpsychological as 
 the indeterminism which is its sworn foe. Both 
 theories, determinism and indeterminism, are survivals, 
 and appeal no longer to modern men. If there is no 
 virtue in being absolutely free, there dwells no terror 
 nor importance in the notion that we are links in the 
 causal chain. The unfreedom we should dread is one 
 which may be removed ; and morality to-day says 
 accordingly to man ' You are not free ; you oicght to be 
 free ; begin at once, individually and collectively, the 
 yvQfk of striking off the chains which fetter paen/ 
 
THE NEW PHILOSOPHY 129 
 
 Intimately connected with the doctrine of free will, 
 historically speaking, is that of immortality, for both 
 were until recently supposed to be cardinal demands of 
 human nature. The new ethics scarcely knows what 
 to do with the latter doctrine. That he who is 
 passionately interested in himself should not care to 
 die and should wish to grow for ever in individual 
 perfection, is easy to understand ; but how can such a 
 conception flourish in times like ours where the 
 interest lies in carrying onwards towards perfection 
 the life of the society we are living in, and where the 
 individual feels that his life is but a moment in the 
 life of the race ? Can he put an independent value on 
 moment after moment of his own life as it passes? 
 Can he treat each of those moments as separate 
 individualities ? Can he wish each of these moments 
 to develop itself indefinitely, out of relation to the other 
 moments ? No ; we are social beings ; the only life 
 conceivable for us moderns is in the society in which 
 we live, and the only conceivable ideal is to develop 
 that society. Our whole dream lies in making full, 
 rich and precious the moment which we call our life, 
 and to regret, for the sake of society, that it is not 
 more precious, fuller and richer than it is. We do not 
 rejoice over personal death ; we accept it as one of a 
 thousaud limitatipns, Yet morality will do this in th^ 
 
130 ' FAITH IN MAN 
 
 future : if will all hut abolish death which is not due to 
 old age ; death, hut for the rarest exceptioUy shall come 
 when we are ripe for it and when everybody is jprejpared 
 for its coming ; death shall not stalk abroad as it does 
 to-day y cutting down the fairest blooms and the buds full 
 of promise ; it shall only take what we readily give. 
 
 The conception of immortality has lost its meaning 
 from the moral point of view, and yet the modern view 
 of life does offer a substitute. It kindles an objective 
 interest in nature, in science, in art, and in humanity, 
 till men appear to identify themselves with the 
 eternities. This view expands man's being through 
 expanding his knowledge and his interests, until a very 
 infinity is crowded together in his short span of life as 
 measured by the clock. Consistently, too, with its 
 boldness the new democratic ethics would meet the cry 
 of those who are unfortunately placed by insisting that 
 social conditions must be changed until there is 
 nobody who is compelled, by circumstance, to lead a 
 petty or an unhappy life. Another world is not 
 necessary to balance this ; the democracy will alter this 
 world so that it shall not need to be balanced. 
 The past we cannot profess to undo or to rehabilitate ; 
 but we can make such provision for the future that the 
 future shall contain nothing which requires to be 
 undone or to be rehabilitated. Glaucon's i^eal was a 
 
THE NEW PHILOSOPHY 131 
 
 man who remained good however bad the circumstances, 
 and most subsequent ideals were of the passive type, 
 now making a man indifferent to the environment, now 
 referring man to a world beyond, and now persuasively 
 maintaining that the world as we see it is an illusion. 
 It is reserved for an ethical faith, based on democracy 
 and science, to challenge the circumstances and to trans- 
 form the world in accordance with the moral ideal. 
 The question. Is life worth living ? we do not answer 
 with a simple negative or affirmative. We say rather, 
 'If life is not worth living to-day, we shall not rest 
 until we have made it worth living.' Only an en- 
 lightened democracy, a whole people become educated 
 and self-conscious, could speak thus. 
 
 The new ethics, we see, is much less concerned 
 with philosophy than the old was, and accordingly 
 every attempt to hitch ethics on to the car of 
 metaphysics or supernaturalism is bound to fail. A 
 social and a democratic ethics, an ethics which assumes 
 objective social interests, has no opening for philosophy. 
 It forms a closed system. We have already discussed 
 in another chapter the relation of ethics to religion, 
 which latter we have defined as a helpful philosophy 
 of life. Ethics cannot exist outside such a helpful 
 philosophy ; but the latter is supplied by the scientific 
 conception of the universe or, shortly, by a helief in 
 
132 FAITH m MAN 
 
 science, in democracy ^ in the perfectibility of many and in 
 social and civic effort. These form the presupposi- 
 tions of the new ethics, and these together with the 
 ethics constitute an ethical religion, a religion whose 
 principal interest is the solidarity of the human race, 
 individual and social. The supernaturalism of the 
 common type is thus necessarily excluded. 
 
 General philosophical problems have little interest 
 for the new ethics. Whether mind is a form of 
 matter, as the materialist maintains, or matter a 
 form of mind, as the idealist will have it; whether 
 mind and matter are aspects of one substance, as 
 Spinoza would say, or whether matter and mind are 
 both realities, as the realist would argue, does not 
 concern morality. With Buchner we may assume 
 matter and force to be the ultimate elements; with 
 Epicurus atoms ; with Ostwald energy ; or with some 
 thinkers four-dimensional space, or space and time — all 
 this leaves our morality unaffected. The universe may 
 be an idea, developing through thesis, antithesis and 
 synthesis, as Hegel asserts; it may be, according to 
 Mr. Bradley, an Absolute where every part closely fits 
 into a single whole; it may be an appearance or a 
 manifestation of a reality which, according to Kant and 
 Spencer, is unknowable ; it may be finite, according to 
 Mr, Schiller, or iufiuite with the theologians ; it may 
 
THE NEW PHILOSOPHY 133 
 
 be one with human experience; it may be a 
 larger self according to Fichte — yet modern ethics 
 remains unmodified. Only where the metaphysics is 
 connected with a particular morality, can there be a 
 clashing with the new ethics. To emphasise the 
 vastness or minuteness of what the telescope or 
 the microscope presents us with, to be overawed by 
 the mystery of the unknown or the unknowable or 
 heatedly to take sides for or against materialism or 
 idealism, only leads to rebukes from the new ethics. 
 Mere size or quantity cannot compare with quality and 
 especially with the quality of goodness, and good men 
 cannot be compared with molecules and mountains ; 
 mystery and ignorance stand far below knowledge in 
 the modern scale of values, and the good man's interest 
 lies in knowledge and not in mystery or ignorance; 
 and lastly, both materialism and idealism are con- 
 sistent mih the same high moral ideal. Each of 
 these views has a historic justification and refers to a 
 time when it was pregnant with meaning. When 
 science first revealed to man the vastness of the world, 
 men were naturally overpowered by the revelation; 
 when knowledge was yet minimal, the immensity of 
 our ignorance made us almost cower; and when 
 materialism meant both interest in science and in 
 material comfort, and idealism meant defending the 
 
134 FAITH IN MAN 
 
 ideal and living in the clouds, the two parties were 
 naturally much opposed. All is different now, and the 
 difference should be freely admitted. We are familiar 
 with the world's vastness; our knowledge has in- 
 creased by leaps and bounds; and materialists and 
 idealists are both found in the same ethical camp and 
 have both cast off and renounced the errors which 
 youth is heir to. 
 
 The tendency to-day is for each philosophy to 
 interpret its teachings in such a manner that it shall 
 substantially agree with the new ethics. Minor 
 differences, of course, remain, both due to theory and to 
 practice; but one may be pardoned for passing over 
 such differences in a broad survey. 
 
 It is worth while reflecting how far philosophy and 
 ethics have changed parts. Before the days of science 
 and democracy, ethics endeavoured to adapt itself to 
 the world as an inviolable fact, while philosophy formed 
 a system of consolations, — as expressed in the three 
 famous Kantian watchwords of Free-will, Immortality 
 and God, the secure establishment of which beliefs was 
 supposed to sum up the task of philosophy. Ethics 
 has now become militant, has changed and is changing 
 the world, and has made meaningless the consolations 
 and explanations of philosophy. Philosophy assumed 
 a stable world and interpreted that world on the sup- 
 
THE NEW PHILOSOPHY 135 
 
 position of a stationary human mind of a particular 
 type. We are now discovering that the world as it 
 appears to us is due to senses which are developed for 
 utilitarian purposes, and which determine the form and 
 the structure of our world ; that the influence of science, 
 under the guidance of practical needs, may enable us in 
 time to change even what appears most fundamental 
 to-day, so that the philosophical categories may prove 
 only relatively true and important; and that our 
 minds have changed, and will so change that the old 
 categories will become inadequate. There is no limit 
 to what a scientific and democratic morality will accom- 
 plish. Philosophy will perhaps in the future merely 
 register the changes produced by social efforts and will 
 cease even to pretend to deal with what is unchanging 
 and everlasting. Our mental grasp may become so 
 wide, our comprehension so swift, our insight so pierc- 
 ing, that the old philosophies will be perhaps treated as 
 fit only for barbarians. When will men cease bowing 
 in breathless admiration before the past, and thinking 
 that nothing astonishing is reserved for the future ? 
 
 In what way, however, can we justify to ourselves 
 the modern ethical conceptions ? Morality, we answer, 
 represents a double human need which has been slowly 
 evolving, a regulative need to order the individual and 
 the common life, and sympathy which is the main 
 
136 FAITH IN MAN 
 
 support of that principle, both with regard to the 
 individual and to the race. Morality, has thus a part 
 to play in the economy of human nature, and no 
 higher justification for it can be or need be found. 
 We are good, in the same way as we breathe, and to 
 demand a further reason for morality, is to go behind 
 instinct, which is impossible. The story of morality 
 is similarly explained. Through the co-operation and 
 the struggle among needs in the individual and between 
 individuals^ a tendency towards complete human solidarity 
 has historically developed, and the whole history of 
 mankind — from the hunting clan to the United States, 
 from private revenge to equal and international justice 
 — is an illustration of this tendency. The rise of the 
 democracy to power is the latest ethical fact in this 
 development, a fact which has utterly revolutionised 
 the whole conception of morality by opening up hither- 
 to undreamt-of possibilities. 
 
 Concerning the relation of modern ethics to 
 philosophy two things are, therefore, clear : ethics is 
 infinitely less dependent on philosophy to-day than it 
 used to be, and, on the other hand, philosophy promises 
 to be almost altogether dependent on ethics. 
 
CHAPTEE VI 
 
 THE TEST OF PROGRESS 
 
 There seem to be scarcely two historical facts more 
 in direct opposition to each other than that of resistless 
 progress, on the one side, and that of sworn resistance 
 to progress on the other. The paradox could hardly be 
 avoided in what we may call the second stage of civili- 
 sation, that of savagery, for unless that which was 
 socially inherited were to be squandered in a generation 
 almost, it was essential not to permit a hairbreadth's 
 deviation from current practice. Custom rules among 
 savages. Writing is as yet unknown, monuments 
 embodying institutions do not yet exist, and courses of 
 conduct are not yet reasoned out. Disregard or loose 
 interpretations of customs would soon put out the 
 sacred fire of civilisation. How, under the circum- 
 stances, does progress continue ? Through change 
 in conditions, through insensible transformations, or, 
 frequently, through some revolution which bursts the 
 walls of custom and then builds them a little farther 
 off. Progress is thus often very much retarded, 
 
 9 
 
138 FAITH IN MAN 
 
 although this retardation saves the results of progress 
 from being altogether scattered to the winds. 
 
 The same forces are at work at a somewhat higher 
 stage, that of barbaric civilisations, where writing is 
 not quite unknown, where some institutions exist, and 
 where a modicum of reasoning is not absent. The 
 scribe in Egypt, for instance, is then naturally the chief 
 representative of the past; the whole community is 
 divided into ranks, thus favouring military rule; and 
 change of any kind in more important matters is 
 dreaded. The religion, the laws, the castes, the social 
 arrangements are looked upon as existing from eternity 
 and lasting to eternity. The Hindoos thus preserved 
 the Vedic hymns and other precious historical matter 
 by inventing and developing an elaborate system of 
 oral tradition and transference which tended to insure 
 absolute fidelity in reproduction. Thus, too, the Jews 
 regarded their laws and customs as sacred, and the 
 same tale is told everywhere. 
 
 With further growth of civilisation a less excusable 
 factor in resisting progress enters on the scene. It is 
 no longer, or not so much, that the results of progress 
 are in danger; but that despots and those who possess 
 privileges are determined that the existing stage of pro- 
 gress shall be the last. This form of resistance need 
 not be altogether self-conscious as to its aim, since the 
 
THE TEST OF PEOGEESS 139 
 
 privileged classes would generally believe that the 
 arrangement under which they live and flourish is right, 
 and that anarchy and retrogression would follow if 
 freedom of utterance or action were allowed. More 
 probably, however, these factors co-exist and support 
 each other. Add to this that steady progress is 
 impossible under these circumstances and that many 
 men come, therefore, to hate order as such, and it will 
 be seen that there is a superficial reason, even in this 
 later historic stage, the age of printing, for stemming 
 the current of advance. 
 
 In our own day opposition to progress can scarcely 
 be defended. The art of printing insures the easy 
 storing of traditions; institutions embodying the progress 
 hitherto made abound ; and men can well comprehend 
 the civilisation in which they live. The past has, 
 therefore, justice done to it, and it is only a question of 
 being fair to the present and to the future. 
 
 We are not employing the word progress in an 
 abstract sense, nor do we mean by it a process which 
 has no relation to our ideals. The new ethics insists 
 on the complete solidarisation of the individual and 
 the race, and progress means consequently, for the new 
 faith, coming nearer to the realisation of the moral 
 ideal. So long as, instead of co-operation, strife exists 
 within the soul and between men, so long as mankind 
 
140 FAITH IN MAN 
 
 is not one in spirit and in fact, the ethical man is con- 
 strained to work for progress, and he respects progress 
 for no other reason. 
 
 The present order of society, as we have seen, is not 
 for us a meaningless something, an absolute starting 
 point, but rather the embodiment of past progress. 
 The new ethics, therefore, in teaching respect for 
 advance towards the ethical ideal generally, respects 
 the present order as a valuable instalment. Future 
 progress is no more precious in itself than past progress, 
 and to neglect or destroy the achievements of the past 
 is no less sacrilege than to rob the present and the 
 future of their opportunity to rise to loftier heights. 
 Eespect for the ideal of solidarity means respect for 
 past, present and future advance. The end of progress 
 is an ideal order, and that order is one which has been 
 slowly developing. /To despise the past and honour the 
 future is to despise the moral ideal itself, since we are 
 unjust to the advance already made and since we are 
 encouraging posterity to treat our present efforts with 
 contempt. ^^ 
 
 Tested in this wise by the advance already made, 
 it seems almost preposterous that the authorities in 
 many modern countries still conduct themselves as if 
 we lived in the savage state, before the days of writing 
 and printing, and of speedy communication. Take 
 
THE TEST OF PEOGEESS 141 
 
 Austria, for instance. Is every Austrian in himself 
 a harmonious whole, and is he at one with his 
 compatriots and those beyond the frontiers ? Exists 
 there in his country no misery and immorality ? Yet 
 while the economic and social conditions are far from 
 satisfactory, the liberty of teaching, of free speech, 
 of free publication, and of free combination, scarcely 
 exists. Can we, then, possibly say that nothing must 
 be criticised in that country because everything is 
 morally perfect there ? No ; an enlightened government 
 with ethical ends will not only tolerate freedom of 
 teaching, of speech, of publication, and of combination ; 
 but, and this is the new point of view, it will exercise 
 its utmost efforts to encourage these, so as to insure 
 unceasing reform and progress. Not only the liberty 
 of utterance, but the duty of everyone to think freely 
 and to utter his thoughts, should be preached by 
 governments. He who to-day is satisfied with the past 
 must be looked upon as a danger to the commonweal, 
 as a foe of the moral ideal. In former days it was 
 natural for men to ;plead for liberty of thought for 
 themselves; to-day we must go further and must 
 demand it as a duty of all. 
 
 We have singled out Austria for special criticism 
 because it is less reactionary than Eussia, and more 
 reactionary than some other countries. At the same 
 
142 FAITH IN MAN 
 
 time, the spirit of liberty has hardly as yet penetrated the 
 champions of liberty, England and America. Thought 
 is generally free in these countries so far as the law is 
 concerned; but the liberty of teaching is hampered, 
 and religious independence is punished with social, and 
 often with economic ostracism. Instead of men being 
 elected to professorial chairs solely because of their 
 fitness, unpopular opinions unreservedly expressed as to 
 politics, wealth and religion, are almost a certain bar to 
 such positions. As a result, the philosophical chairs in 
 England, for instance, are not always occupied by the 
 boldest thinkers, but by those who, whatever their views, 
 are ready, under great pressure, to make a compromise 
 and to blur a little the clear lines in the face of truth. 
 Similarly, most of the teachers in the English primary 
 schools have had to pass until quite recently through 
 theologically supervised training colleges, and they 
 must either profess the current religion and teach 
 it, or else suffer. Eespect for the past unjustly 
 outweighs here respect for the future. There is no 
 love of a commanding ideal; no suspicion that not 
 only should there be tolerance, but stimulation of 
 progress. Under these circumstances the timid 
 servant can scarcely be blamed for hiding, instead of 
 utilising, the one talent given to him. 
 
 The new ethics, we have said, teaches not only 
 
THE TEST OF PEOGEESS 143 
 
 tolerance for free thought, but the duty of it. Why, 
 however, should we so closely connect freedom of thought 
 with progress ? Let us at once admit that freedom of 
 thought as such need not lead to progress. Where men 
 insist on such freedom as an individual and inalienable 
 right, where their ambition is to be independent and to 
 differ from others, where they have respect neither for 
 the past nor for the future, there freedom of thought is 
 likely to lead to confusion, to chaos and back to 
 savagery ; it is almost certain to act as a dissolvent of 
 past achievements, and as a barrier to future ones. 
 Man is a social being, and any attempt at complete in- 
 dependence sets him adrift on a tempestuous ocean 
 where his frail boat must be shattered by the waves or 
 be dashed to pieces on the rocks. Freedom of thought 
 may, therefore, have its drawbacks. Nevertheless it is 
 an indispensable condition of progress ; nay more, it is 
 the sole preventative of retrogression. Where men do 
 not think and are not bound by rigid customs, they lose 
 the understanding for the progress attained, and 
 gradually slip back to lower levels. Progress is 
 swimming against the current, and if we decide not to 
 swim at all, we are swept back. 
 
 Let us now gain an idea of positive or social free- 
 thought. A man, we will say, wishes to approach 
 more nearly the ideal of the solidarity of the race. 
 
144 FAITH m MAN 
 
 He accordingly asks himself what that ideal is, and 
 as a consequence of his examination he may be obliged 
 to regard certain current views as erroneous, others as 
 correct, and to these latter he will very likely desire to 
 add new ones which are as yet unrecognised. As with 
 views, so with practices. Certain social practices he 
 will wish to reform, others he will agree with, and 
 others still he will suggest as a result of his inquiry. 
 Negative criticism is thus incidental and not essential to 
 free thought The man of science who, recognising no 
 absolute authority, examines the works and the views 
 of others, may yet admit that he finds nothing to alter 
 or to add ; he may even come to be convinced that his 
 new thought was false and the thought he opposed was 
 true. Present progress on the basis of, not on the 
 ruins of, past progress, robs free thought of censorious- 
 ness. Free thought cannot, of course, recognise an 
 absolute authority, for nothing is so sacred that it must 
 not be examined ; one may only plead that what men 
 consider to be sacred subjects should be reverentially 
 inquired into. So little do we know yet what is truest 
 and best that no axiom, no maxim, no doctrine, no 
 custom, may pass unchallenged. The ethical man is 
 no inquisitive mole; yet he is morally bound and 
 stimulated to make sure that his own views and those 
 of others are correct. Hence belief in relative 
 
-^_„THE TEST OF PEOGEESS 146 
 
 authority is not excluded. In science, for instance, we 
 may as a rule accept authorities, especially when 
 experts are generally agreed, since scientific formulae 
 are the result of scientific or free thought. Accordingly, 
 the sway of authority will grow larger as more and 
 more departments have been systematically and im- 
 partially examined on many occasions. Never, how- 
 ever, is a consensus of authorities absolutely decisive ; 
 and, indeed, respect for authority must have for its 
 condition freedom to examine its credentials. 
 
 Freedom of thought is the opposite of authoritative 
 thought, and has thus a negative character, yet while 
 authoritative thought is prevalent, nothing seems more 
 effective in challenging it than the demand for liberty 
 of thought and its free expression and teaching. 
 Given, however, the acceptance of the new ethics, and 
 * scientific thought ' would be a much more positive 
 expression than *free thought.' Perhaps 'progressive 
 thought' might be better still. * Ethical thought' 
 would not imply a distinct reference to progress. 
 
 Present progress has no privileges over past progress, 
 and consequently we must deal gently with the past. 
 If certain views are dear and precious to others, if they 
 are their guide and consolation, if habit at least for a 
 time has made these views indispensable to them, then 
 our criticism, however thorough, must be respectful. 
 
146 FAITH IN MAN 
 
 We must recognise the good in the past and admire it ; 
 though our duty also demands that we should do 
 justice to the future. We must make it as easy as 
 possible for others to accept the new views. We must 
 reason with our fellows and persuade them ; not regard 
 them as criminals who must be flogged into advancing. 
 Where the old is ingrained, we are also constrained to 
 allow fully for the difficulty of seeing, under the cir- 
 cumstances, the new point of view or assimilating it. 
 If free thinkers act in agreement with this method, 
 they will be fair to the past and to the future, and the 
 effect of their words will penetrate far. However, 
 nobody should be pathologically sensitive to criticism, 
 and everybody should frequently and sincerely entertain 
 the opinion that his views and his practices are possibly 
 and even probably incorrect or incomplete. Only a 
 non-social being can be indifferent as to whether he 
 wounds others, or as to whether he is doing justice to 
 others' opinions. 
 
 Eespect for the past holds almost doubly of progress 
 in social activities. On the false theory that, like a 
 stream, we must on and on for ever, and that no purpose 
 controls this flow, it is natural that man should labour for 
 progress irrespective of the common good. Granting 
 this principle, the introduction of machinery which 
 displaces men and causes incidentally the intensest 
 
THE TEST OF PEOGEESS 147 
 
 misery and degradation, as at the beginning of the 
 nineteenth century or as in the case of the Spitalfields 
 weavers, is by no means to be condemned. However, 
 the question may be put ' Is such callousness essential 
 or necessary ? Is there no other way of progressing ? ' 
 Here the new ethics does not agree with ruthless 
 advance. Once the democracy enters as a determining 
 factor in industry, there will be no marked clashing of 
 the new with the old improvements ; as in many govern- 
 ment departments, progress will not mean the throw- 
 ing out of many men who are used to a class of work 
 which is no longer required. It will involve slow re- 
 adjustments by which the individual will suffer nothing 
 or almost nothing. The new work will be done by the 
 old men, or other work will be gradually found for 
 them. Similarly with the notion of employing only 
 young men, clever men, men working at intense 
 pressure, and generally with the idea of robbing 
 individual existence of its equanimity and security. 
 The same end will be achieved in the new era but not 
 at the expense of ruining the nerves of generations. 
 
 Such a view calls for a re-interpretation of the notion 
 of progress, for progress may be bought at too great a 
 price. Eather make no advance, we say, than have it 
 accompanied by agonies. Eather stay on the lower 
 plane honestly and happily, than rise at the expense of 
 
148 FAITH m MAN 
 
 misery and degradation. Solidarity is no abstraction, 
 and if a higher degree of solidarity is to be attained for 
 a little while by nearly dissolving the bonds of 
 humanity, then the solidarity achieved is only a 
 pretence, since we have gone much more backward than 
 forward. The ideal of the new ethics involves steady 
 progress in solidarity and not progress in feverish fits 
 and starts. Besides, the progress made in industry 
 must be compared with any losses arising out of it, and 
 thus industrial progress of a certain type may certainly 
 mean general deterioration and retrogression. Every 
 hour of strife within ourselves and with our fellows 
 subtracts from the tale of progress. 
 
 There is another grave difficulty connected with the 
 conception of progress. Is swift progress possible ? 
 Do we not require periods of rest, or at least periods of 
 rest in certain departments of life ? Can we properly 
 assimilate what we have no time to digest ? Is progress 
 beneficial when it hurries along wildly ? May not such 
 progress lead to social revolutions which bury the 
 progress made or to individual deterioration which 
 nullifies that progress ? Slow and steady progress, with 
 no danger to the individual, can scarcely be harmful, 
 since it freely allows for readjustments. Even a short 
 spell of rapid advance, as in the period of Pericles or 
 Elizabeth, can only act as a stimulant. When, 
 
THE TEST OF PEOGEESS 149 
 
 however, progress is violent and breaks out in every 
 possible direction, like some explosion, it leads to 
 prostration, and what is given is absorbed without 
 being properly assimilated. Progress, as we at present 
 see it, even assuming much greater humaneness, is not 
 highly desirable. Better move by steady stages, 
 resting now and then, than rush along as if a fiend 
 were behind us, without being able to collect ourselves, 
 to take stock, or to breathe freely. Such progress as 
 ours is the complement of stagnation and retrogression. 
 It is essentially disastrous to some of the best 
 elements in human nature and society. Progress 
 should never be eruptive, and periods of general 
 progress should be followed by periods of general rest. 
 Such progress as ours is a flight forward, not a joyous 
 advance. It is keeping mankind in perpetual agonies 
 of childbirth. Psychologically, therefore, rapid pro- 
 gress is unjustifiable, while socially, the wheel of 
 progress must not be allowed to crush the mass of 
 mankind in its revolutions. Progress must take 
 account of all individuals and all institutions at every 
 moment of their existence. 
 
 The very nature of the progress hitherto made has 
 been questioned. Men have said that there is not only 
 a progress upward, but, to speak paradoxically, a 
 progress downward. If fine sympathies and common 
 
150 FAITH IN MAN 
 
 endeavour have grown, envy, malice, jealousy, fraud, 
 selfishness and all uncharitableness have equally 
 developed and form a substantial part of our 
 civilisation. It must be admitted, therefore, that 
 positive evil as well as positive good develops. Yet 
 the superiority of the positive good over the positive 
 evil is enormous, for the progress, as a whole, has been 
 from ignorance to knowledge, from superstition to 
 control of nature, from general warfare to general 
 federation, from the most primitive tools to the most 
 elaborate machinery, from cannibalism and slavery to 
 equal law, from general tribal considerations to general 
 humanitarian considerations. In comparison with this 
 positive advance the negative advance appears only as 
 a bye-product, as an epiphenomenon of infinitesimal 
 importance. Moreover, examination will probably 
 show that uncharitableness, as it is found to-day, is 
 almost wholly due to the anarchic condition of modern 
 wealth production and wealth distribution, and that 
 with its displacement by an industrial order, the 
 substance at least of that uncharitableness will go. It 
 is not to men's selfishness — of which little is seen in 
 well-regulated families and in savage tribes — but to 
 men's desperate efforts at social adaptation to which 
 the vices are chiefly due. Furthermore, those very 
 vices are often survivals from lower stages of culture, 
 
THE TEST OF PEOGEESS 151 
 
 and most of them presuppose a relatively high level of 
 development. We need not, therefore, doubt that the 
 moral level which mankind has reached is scarcely 
 atfected by the objections made, and we may readily 
 grant that progress has been generally accompanied by 
 aberration and degeneration. \ 
 
 Nor need we forsake our melioristid^standpoint when 
 it is contended that progress increases sensitiveness 
 and with that unhappiness. That such is the case 
 with certain individuals and even with certain sections 
 of society is probably correct. Broadly speaking, the 
 greater security, equality and liberty, and the greater 
 humanenness and development, show the assertion to 
 be without strong proof. The fact of adaptation to 
 pleasure and pain, and the difficulties involved in 
 subjective judgments, further weaken the indictment. 
 Much avoidable as well as unavoidable misery 
 exists to-day ; but the advance which mankind 
 has thus far made justifies our believing that 
 democratic effort and scientific insight will make 
 happiness abound in the future as material wealth 
 abounds to-day. Let life only be organised and let 
 the folly of luxury, of class distinctions, and of 
 the vanity of the pursuit of pleasure be exposed, and 
 at present unavoidable or misplaced over-sensitive- 
 ness will vanish. We exceed the lower animals in 
 
152 FAITH IN MAN 
 
 the possibilities of happiness as in the possibilities of 
 objective culture. 
 
 The criticism that progress is not wholly due to 
 moral effort may be granted without qualification. 
 Moral eff*ort would involve the conscious desire to 
 introduce harmony into the self and into society, and 
 such effort is rare ; yet the battle of life is essentially 
 a moral one, since it implies a co-operation and a 
 struggle within the self and in society which slowly, 
 but not the less certainly, lead to universal solidarity. 
 Ambition, desire for comfort, defence of privileges, 
 self-absorption, are only relatively low and circuitous 
 ways of achieving the desirable end, while the result 
 often aimed at — material prosperity — leads also to the 
 same goal. Only here, as everywhere, much delay is 
 caused by the indirectness of the methods employed, 
 and as a consequence the very notion of progress 
 comes to be regarded as devoid of moral implica- 
 tions. On the contrary, the new ethics challenges 
 industrial methods which disorganise the individual 
 and the social life, and it will hear of nothing in- 
 evitable which is not also moral. The employment 
 of only young men, over-intensity of application, irre- 
 sponsibility towards the workers, and minute sub- 
 division of labour, must go, however natural and 
 necessary they may seem from a standpoint which 
 
THE TEST OF PEOGEESS 153 
 
 iguores the full and harmonious development of every 
 single individual. 
 
 Nothing is so reasonable as a desire for freedom 
 of thought, and only he who dislikes the truth can be 
 its foe on principle. Even on the assumption that our 
 ideal has reference only to our country and is of an 
 aristocratic or exclusive type, or that our ideal is of 
 a religious character demanding implicit obedience, 
 there could be no objection, unless these ideals be 
 built on a lie, to making sure that they were justified. 
 Accordingly, the spirit of inquiry will only be shunned 
 where we suspect the truth of beliefs which we cherish, 
 where we are thoughtless, where we misdoubt the 
 ability of men to inquire, or where we question the 
 reverential nature of the inquiry. Freedom of 
 thought is a modern demand fitting into modern 
 conditions, for broadly speaking men are to-day able to 
 inquire and able to do justice to what they inquire 
 into. We are in direct contact with so many 
 civilisations, the stream of the past has brought down 
 to us so much diversity of opinions, our ideal stretches 
 so far beyond present achievements that it is an insult 
 to our intelligence to ask us to accept our philosophies 
 of life on authority. Why, we inquire, should we 
 follow this particular authority, why not some other ? 
 Why this religion or system of government, why not 
 
 10 
 
154 FAITH IN MAN" 
 
 that ? The diversity of existing beliefs has produced a 
 general doubt, and that has ended in a general demand 
 to let everything be settled by the spirit of inquiry. 
 That spirit has given rise to science and the scientific 
 method, to humanitarianism and democracy, and its 
 being pursued further can only produce further 
 blessings. When men were incapable of sane inquiry, 
 and when opportunities for conducting such an inquiry 
 intelligently were lacking, the discouragement of doubt 
 was natural as doubt might have led only to confusion ; 
 but to-day the censorship of the press, the check, 
 however subtle, on university and other teachers, the 
 ostracising of bold thinkers, the rule of the Koman 
 Catholic hierarchy, are almost wholly inexcusable. 
 In certain stages free thought might have been a public 
 danger and a public nuisance ; but to-day it would be 
 an almost unmixed blessing, for a host of educated 
 men who might be serving mankind are deterred 
 from doing so, or are proceeding along indirect paths, 
 while the laity generally are sufficiently educated to 
 derive advantage from scientific research. The coming 
 age will consist, indeed, only of free thinkers, since the 
 democracy is no friend of privilege and obscurity. 
 Absolute authority is only consistent with an 
 aristocracy or a despotism. If doubts still rise in the 
 minds of thoughtful men as to the fitness of the 
 
THE TEST OF PEOGKESS 155 
 
 democracy to inquire into and to settle for themselves 
 those vast problems which have agitated the souls of 
 the most eminent thinkers, those doubts will be 
 dispelled if we consider that if men are not to-day 
 quite fit to judge mighty issues^ we must make them 
 fit by improving general education so thoroughly that 
 no superficial or narroiv-minded thinker should remain 
 in the land, Man's imperfection must goad us on to 
 make man perfect. 
 
 We must distinguish progress from change, caprice 
 and eccentricity, as well as from the desire for self- 
 culture independently of the good of others. At this 
 point a considerable difficulty meets us; but humane 
 and self-respecting men will come to learn how to do 
 full justice to their fellows without being unjust to 
 themselves. Besides, when men have a magnificent 
 social ideal, there will be no fear that they will 
 personally desire to be eccentric or capricious. 
 
 It is very difficult to be fair to so large and 
 profound a theme in a very few pages. Indeed, there 
 is a danger of crowding too many thoughts together 
 and obscuring the issue. The fundamental principle 
 of progress, however, has been made clear, that is, 
 we are constrained to realise the ideal, and until 
 that ideal — the solidarity of the self and of the human 
 race — is attained, we must press onwards. The 
 
156 FAITH m MAN 
 
 present order we take, then, to embody the progress 
 hitherto made, while to improve that order is the duty 
 of the moral man. Past, present, and future progress 
 have for us, therefore, an equal value and must be 
 equally respected as representing parts of the ideal. 
 Progress as such has neither value nor meaning. It is 
 the ideal — in its moral, intellectual, aesthetic, and 
 physical aspects — which we must reverence, not a 
 process. 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 
 A DEMOCKATIC BASIS FOR EDUCATION 
 
 In the chapter on Social Eeform we endeavoured to 
 show that the democracy was not necessarily foul- 
 mouthed, unclean, coarse-grained, brutal, stupid, and 
 incapable of self-control or high aims. We saw that 
 democratic conditions, such as those of to-day, tended 
 to breed a type of average man and woman which had 
 none of those objectionable characteristics. The point 
 should be, therefore, clear that it is not an individual 
 worker here and there who has outgrown the type to 
 which he belongs ; but that his whole class, as a class, 
 has changed its marks. The people, as old German 
 drawings present them, or as Teniers or the Elizabethan 
 playwrights picture them, is rapidly ceasing to exist, 
 and a new people is beginning to arise, not without 
 dignity and self-respect, though far yet from perfection. 
 Democratic government has also been on its trial, 
 and has proved to be superior to any other rule. 
 Corruption, disorder and injustice have visibly, almost 
 startlingly declined, and that in direct proportion to the 
 
168 FAITH IN MAN 
 
 growth of democracy. Eecent history has made it 
 evident that general interest and fair intelligence is a 
 better ruler than privilege and considerable intelli- 
 gence. 
 
 Furthermore, we have taken account of the enormous 
 strides in advance which the democracy has made 
 historically. The whole development from slavery to 
 free citizenship, and from a soulless rabble to a people 
 having a clear and single purpose, proves how elastic 
 human nature is, or rather how readily it adapts itself 
 to changes in social conditions. Nor, in the absence of 
 specific evidence, can we say that the limit of develop- 
 ment has been reached. On the contrary, the lesson of 
 the past is unmistakable that culture, high endeavour 
 and refinement may yet be acquired by all. All men, 
 as we have said, may yet possess an education equal to 
 that implied in an ordinary University degree. 
 
 For a democracy that wishes to be effective there is 
 no more serious question than that of education. If 
 all are to take part in government, and if government is 
 to fulfil a high purpose, all should be well fitted for the 
 great task. The democracy must become an intellectual 
 and moral aristocracy, and what but education can 
 produce this result ? 
 
 In name the democracy rules now in several 
 countries, not so in complete fact. Manhood suffrage 
 
A BASIS FOE EDUCATION 159 
 
 exists in Germany, but the government is largely in the 
 hands of the Emperor, his chancellor, and his aristo- 
 cratic advisers, while the distribution of seats tends to 
 falsify the universality of the suffrage. In England 
 the suffrage is nearly complete, except for women being 
 excluded ; but there are severe drawbacks, chief of which 
 are the House of Lords and the difficulty of the poor 
 sending their representatives to the Commons. "With 
 an upper house which is an absolute barrier to every 
 forward movement, and which readily passes bills 
 that supports privilege, almost no sensible progress is 
 possible. The House of Lords illustrates the uselessness 
 and perniciousness of hereditary aristocracy, for while 
 in theory this House should propose and support 
 everything which is for the good of the country, and 
 check the passing into law of what falls short of the 
 ideal, it speaks with nearly a united voice in favour of 
 privilege, monopoly, and wealth, while it treats the 
 general population almost with contempt. The House of 
 Lords is an intolerable nuisance, and no real progress 
 is possible in England while that body exists. It is the 
 mainstay of all that is retrograde in politics to-day, and 
 with its abolition alone can there be substantial advance 
 in legislation. A second chamber is no more required 
 in national than in local government. There does not 
 seem to exist an * upper' house in the world which 
 
160 FAITH IN MAN 
 
 can compare, even distantly, in ability and progressive- 
 ness with the various ' lower ' houses. 
 
 A serious objection exists also to the present method 
 by which the people's representatives are selected. 
 Lack of wealth among the general population supports 
 a system of election by which those whose interests are 
 dififerent from, or antagonistic to, the interests of the 
 people, are sent to Parliament. With a House of Lords 
 discouraging and vetoing reform, with aristocrats and 
 plutocrats largely filling the ministerial posts, and 
 with the representatives of the people belonging in the 
 mass to the privileged classes, it is almost a mockery 
 to speak of complete democratic rule. 
 
 Even greater hindrances to democratic government 
 exist. Now that force cannot be employed against the 
 people, the same end is generally achieved by misleading 
 the electors. Adam Smith already drew attention to 
 these machinations of the privileged classes, and un- 
 fortunately the population as a whole still follows 
 readily suggestions made to it by selfish masters and 
 exploiters. Hence the people is induced by false 
 representations to do willingly to-day what in former 
 days it was compelled to do by force. 
 
 How are we, then, to meet the double demand of an 
 effective democracy and of a democracy which is not 
 hampered in expressing itself ? Only -through education ! 
 
A BASIS FOE EDUCATION 161 
 
 An educated democracy will find ways of abolishing 
 upper houses; it will not have aristocratic and 
 plutocratic nobodies filling the government positions; 
 it will have its representatives in full number in the 
 lower houses ; it will perfect the whole system of 
 elections; and it will not be hoodwinked by phrase- 
 makers. It will be able to rule itself, and it will do its 
 duty and assume the rule. 
 
 Only through education ! But through what sort of 
 education ? ' Up to the age of fourteen the three R*s, 
 history, geography, drawing, gymnastics, French, and a 
 little science, will be taught to the people in a dogmatic 
 way. Then we shall send the young democrats into 
 the secondary schools where they will be dogmatically 
 taught mostly about trades and what belongs to trades 
 in a scientific age. Then they will go to the university, 
 where they will acquire modern languages and all that 
 is necessary to become keen and inventive business- 
 men — chemists, commercial travellers, and the like. 
 Here is, then, a fully educated democrat who has passed 
 not only through the primary and secondary school, 
 but through the university.' Will such a completely 
 harnessed young democrat know his duty and do it ? 
 
 Plainly, the quality of the education given is of 
 crucial importance, and from the democratic standpoint 
 the present tendency to make technical schools of the 
 
162 FAITH m MAN 
 
 secondary schools and of the universities can receive 
 nothing but condemnation. Such technical schools 
 may be admirable for turning out business-men, not for 
 producing men and democrats. They may be the ideal 
 of manufacturers and landowners; but it is difficult to 
 see how they can assist general human progress. 
 Through them wealth may grow to extravagant 
 dimensions, though its wide distribution or a good use 
 made of that wealth would remain problems as little 
 solved as they are now. 
 
 Nor is the pre-technical ideal of education what we 
 want. Suppose a man matriculates at the London 
 University. He passes, let us say, in English, in 
 Elementary Mathematics, and perhaps in Latin, Greek 
 and Logic. He then passes the Intermediate Arts in 
 Latin, Greek, English Literature and History, Logic or 
 Pure Mathematics, and French or some other modern 
 tongue. He continues his studies and obtains the 
 Bachelor of ilrts degree by satisfying his examiners 
 in Latin, in Eoman and Greek History, in pure 
 Mathematics and in French. In a previous chapter we 
 said that the average man might obtain a B. A. degree ; 
 but what will this graduate know of science, of art, of 
 philosophy, of evolution in general and of human 
 evolution, of astronomy, of geology ? Will he know 
 his place in nature and society, and will he know 
 
A BASIS FOE EDUCATION 163 
 
 himself ? Will he have been trained to apply his 
 judgment freely and independently to serious issues 
 of every kind ? He will not ; and no wonder, then, 
 that a man may be a Master of Arts, a Doctor of 
 Literature or of Science, and yet not be democratically 
 or wisely educated. 
 
 Comenius, Pestalozzi, Herbart and Froebel have done 
 much to elaborate educational methods, although their 
 suggestions have been adopted in theory more than in 
 practice. The first of the great educational doctrines 
 is that we must hegin with the concrete^ and that step 
 after step we must make sure that we are not shooting 
 ahead of the child's experience. Only as the pupil 
 accumulates material may we depart in the opposite 
 direction and become abstract ; and for this reason also 
 the catechetical, or question and answer, method is 
 introduced in the school. The second great edu- 
 cational doctrine is that the child's comprehension is 
 much restricted, and that we must, therefore, legin 
 with what is free from all complications and only 
 gradually rise to speaking of what is complex, viz., of 
 the nature of society, of the solar system, or of 
 philosophy. These two points cover the psychogenetic 
 method (allowing here also for a third point, gradual 
 development of feelings), a method which allows for 
 the actual lines of development of the child. With 
 
164 FAITH IN MAN 
 
 this has been connected the historico-genetic method 
 which, repeating in the school the order of racial 
 ascent or development, seeks to do justice to the 
 interests of the developing child. Thus take history as 
 a subject. According to the historico-genetic method 
 we begin with fairy tales, we go on to Eobinson Crusoe, 
 we proceed to myths and sagas, we continue with 
 chronicles, and we end with history as conceived of 
 to-day. Also, in order to be concrete, the immediate 
 surroundings of the home and the school house, 
 allowing for school excursions farther afield, are 
 studied at the commencement, while later on every- 
 thing is related to the fatherland, references to other 
 countries being incidental. At the same time, for the 
 sake of unity, the different school hours in any 
 standard treat, as Jacotot already suggested, one subject 
 from different sides, while all standards are connected 
 by the central thought of an ethical end. Nor does this 
 exhaust the Herbartian scheme, as say presented by 
 Prof. Eein. The school work must he made interesting 
 and a permane7it interest in the subjects must be 
 created. Finally, the teaching is to become effective 
 by following certain * steps ' which make learning easy 
 and natural. 
 
 We will assume that this theory is psychologically 
 correct and is carried out. Will it in-and-of-itself 
 
A BASIS FOR EDUCATION 165 
 
 produce capable democrats ? Note the curriculum of 
 the common school referring to children from six to 
 fourteen, as drawn up by Prof. Eein: (1) Bible and 
 Church History, (2) Secular History, (3) Literature, 
 (4) Drawing, (5) Singing, (6) Modelling, (7) Mother 
 tongue, (8) Foreign Language, (9) Geography, (10) 
 Science, (11) Mathematics, (12) Gymnastics, (13) 
 Manual Labour. In the classical secondary school, not 
 designed for the people, in which the boy may remain 
 till about the age of eighteen to twenty, the curri- 
 culum is similar except for Latin and Greek History 
 and Language. 
 
 The new ethics can manifestly not be satisfied with 
 such a scheme. That scheme is mainly intellectualistic, 
 factual and dogmatic. It deals chiefly with one aspect of 
 education, the psychological one of approaching the 
 child with ease on the intellectual side. Its tendency 
 is also to lay all the stress on one's village and one's 
 country, and to be thus indifferent or hostile to 
 internationalism. Nor does the Herbartian plan ofifer 
 an adequate introduction to a comprehension of science. 
 Man's place in nature and society, as regards being and 
 doing, is to all intents and purposes ignored, and the 
 ethics is of a vague and dogmatic kind instead of 
 centering round social reform. Granting, then, a free 
 field and much favour to the Herbartian enthusiast, 
 
166 FAITH IN MAN 
 
 and still the results remain most unsatisfactory 
 from our standpoint. His system would turn out not 
 men, but Germans and Englishmen, as the case may 
 be; and not German and English Democrats but 
 Germans or Englishmen who will be fit to carry on the 
 present social system and perpetuate it. 
 
 The truth is that all education is governed hy a social 
 ideal. The primary school as it exists to-day is 
 supposed to turn out intelligent and docile workers, 
 the secondary school is to lead to the learned profes- 
 sions, and the technical school directly to business. A 
 * natural' curriculum is something meaningless, and 
 the Herbartian seems fully resigned, with his excellent 
 methods on the receptive side of teaching, to support 
 our present social system by his educational scheme. 
 Such a plan, however, is unsuited to democratic 
 conditions. A large view of life is essential to the 
 democrat, and hence a democratic education must aim 
 primarily at producing men and women who will love the 
 common good, who have for their ideal the solidarity of 
 the human race, a7id who are eager to serve loyally, 
 intelligently, manfully and collectively, the cause of social 
 and civic reform. The ethical end thus defined settles 
 other proportions of the educational scheme. The 
 democrat must know his place in nature and in society 
 (for he who is lost in the present and in wealth- 
 
A BASIS FOE EDUCATION 167 
 
 production will have no safe ideal to guide hira)^ 
 and consequently an understanding of astronomy, of 
 geology, of the development of species, of anthro- 
 pology, of evolution in general, together with a grasp 
 of scientific method, must be the second aim of 
 democratic education. How these things are to be 
 taught and to what extent, is another matter: what 
 is of importance is that the cardinal idea of human 
 and general evolution should be grasped by the scholar 
 both concretely and abstractly, and that idea, there is 
 reason to believe, is not difficult to assimilate. Other 
 subjects will, of course, find their place in the curri- 
 culum. This will imply teachers trained for a much 
 longer 'period^ arid school extended to the end of the 
 sixteenth year. 
 
 The most perfect educational methods are of little 
 value if we cannot agree to the educational end ; but 
 given that we can agree to the end, the question of 
 method becomes a profound one. Without good 
 methods the goal may never be attained or else it may be 
 attained imperfectly with an immense waste of energy^ 
 \ For this reason many years of schooling may no£ 
 equal to a few. It may even be set down as a general 
 truth that the proper educational end is to-day usually 
 achieved out of school — by couversation, by reading, by 
 discussion, and by observation; and that the end is 
 
 \ 
 
168 FAITH IN MAN 
 
 furthered only indirectly by the general school training. 
 On this account the children of cultured parents speak 
 their mother tongue well, reason intelligently and are 
 refined, independently of the schooling which they 
 receive. Given, therefore, some generations of 
 thorough and universal schooling along the line which 
 we have above indicated, and the home may become 
 the chief training ground for what is the democatric 
 educational end. Perhaps with time the schools will 
 be intended for the preparation of parents and for 
 the rooting of what the parents have taught their 
 children. However, both school and home must unite 
 in the educational effort to make the scholar love to 
 progress, love to know his place in nature and society, 
 love the common good and to be a social reformer, 
 and love to keep in contact with all that raises man- 
 hood and womanhood. Without the creation of that 
 love, education misses its purpose and represents the 
 manufacture of tools which are only fit for the lumber 
 room, because no one cares to use them. In these days 
 of cheap books one of the principal aims of education 
 must be that a man should be primarily educated to 
 educate himself, and that the school should be only the 
 vestibule of learning, an introduction, a help and a guide 
 to self -education. The scholar should be assisted to know 
 and appreciate the best sources whence he could derive 
 
A BASIS FOE EDUCATION 169 
 
 the most nourishing spiritual food. The meaning and 
 the story of the heavens, of the earth's crust, o^ 
 evolution, of human progress, and of history generally, 
 might be familiar to him from his private reading 
 and study. 
 
 Education has been hitherto chiefly reproductive, 
 everything being communicated in a digested form — 
 facts, ideas, judgments and ideals. | Democratic educa- 
 tion will encourage the liberal application of the 
 comparative method on the part of scholars and 
 teachers ; it will insist on undogmatic presentation 
 and on consulting the judgment of the pupils as well 
 as on allowing questions, doubts and remarks ; it 
 will give the pupils ever larger and larger tasks to 
 be carried out independently until the pupil can 
 proceed altogether without supervision and help; it 
 will encourage co-operation among the pupils ; and the 
 whole of the instruction will be ethical and be filled 
 with the idea of progress. Correctness and ease of 
 remembering, of understanding and of expression — 
 which constitute the present-day educational ideal — 
 will be judged as very important, but secondary to 
 the larger aim which affects the feelings and the will 
 of the scholars. Every subject in the curriculum — 
 from history teaching to manual training — will be 
 
 transformed into an ethical subject. 
 
 II 
 
FAITH IN MAN 
 
 If the books on logic contained the whole of what 
 may be known about processes of reasoning, then 
 little could be added to what the Herbartians state 
 concerning educational methods. We would simplify 
 matters to the utmost for the child ; we would be 
 guided by what the race has gone through ; we would 
 make things interesting; and we would depend on a 
 special didactics which makes educational progress 
 easy. Our method would be objective, based on the 
 observation of men's actions, and not introspective, 
 based on the observation of men's motives and ways 
 of thinking. Herbartianism seems to ignore the state 
 of the home, the social conditions, the reformation of 
 subjects, the possibilities of self-education, and the 
 problem of a high social end. It looks upon the 
 world as it is constituted to-day as an eternal, un- 
 changeable fact. It has no intention of remoulding 
 the world. It is psychological and conservative, taking 
 no norm as its guide. It is passive and without large 
 hopes. Only the inauguration of a logic which would 
 seek to trace and reform the present-day processes of 
 thinking by means of the scientific method, could usher 
 in a newer era in education when we shall actually 
 train the child to scientific methods and when we 
 shall change its manner of thinking directly, instead 
 of indirectly by mere ill-understood habituation. 
 
A BASIS FOE EDUCATION 171 
 
 The development of the scientific method indicates 
 that the old logic is being superseded, if not wholly, at 
 least in substance. We must, therefore, go farther 
 than Herbart and his followers. The new education 
 must exhaustively study the nature of the scientific 
 method and make it its own for the purpose of 
 imparting it to the children. The first rule of method, 
 for instance, learnt by all the pupils, must be that of 
 efificient observation, minute, wide, complete, systematic, 
 allowing for differing circumstances, and applied in all 
 departments of experience. All observation must be 
 scientific. Generalisation is to be equally guarded by 
 being based on effective observation. Eash reasoning 
 must become impossible. At the same time the aim 
 of education is positive : it is not ' Do not observe or 
 generalise incorrectly,' but lObsp.rXQ.. .and generalise 
 correctly.' _Mere scepticism and caution are scarcely 
 better than bad observation and bad generalisation. 
 If, then, the children, who are by nature inveterate 
 observers and generalisers, are taught how and on 
 what basis to form and to verify hypotheses, an 
 incalculable advance will have been made. A host of 
 problems, varying in difficulty according to age, would 
 be placed before the child until the power and the 
 practice of effective observation and generalisation have 
 been developed to the utmost. A student educated in 
 
172 FAITH IN MAN 
 
 this way might be superior to many thinkers who are 
 wonderfully agile in thought but who lose themselves 
 in a maze of subtleties because scientific observation 
 and generalisation are not theirs. Such a student 
 would have the advantage of being scientific or 
 effective all-round instead of, as is almost invariably 
 the case now, along some one or a few special lines. 
 
 Space forbids to add anything to the counsels 
 regarding observation, except that it should be, unless 
 unavoidable, direct, and not through models or illus- 
 trations. As to generalisation, recklessness must be 
 obviated by its being graded, that is, our general- 
 isations should not bound along but proceed step by 
 step, according to the general scheme of individuality, 
 variety, species, family, genus, sub-kingdom and 
 kingdom; while verification should be the constant 
 companion of generalisation. Eeasoning must be 
 equally tied to rules. The student would not only 
 seek to prove a case ; but endeavour to show that 
 the contention is only partly justifiable or not at all, 
 that the contrary is true altogether or partly, and that 
 the contention holds of other things as well. Thus 
 the selection of evidence, regardless of truth, which is 
 common to ordinary and gifted men and which is so 
 difficult to circumvent, would be avoided, and the 
 manufacture of an endless series of spurious theories 
 
A BASIS FOE EDUCATION 173 
 
 would cease. The psychical mechanism automatically 
 attracts what we are interested in, and repels and 
 keeps away what we are not concerned about, and 
 this mechanical psychic tendency towards error and 
 prejudice would cease to exist. In addition, the 
 student would learn in generalising to start from 
 a definite point (in observing matters economic, 
 anthropological, ethical, historical, psychological, etc., 
 a day-tO'day rule is of great advantage, that is, follow- 
 ing a normal event or life for a full twenty-four hours ; 
 living beings may be studied from hirth to death, and 
 from head to foot, or from root to hranches\ books, 
 eras, etc., from leginning to end', and in other cases 
 fixed standpoints are selected arbitrarily) ; and he 
 would choose the simplest possible case (as ^ + J^ 
 ^ — ^, lx}4i /^-T/^). Moreover, he would remove 
 hazy ideas by letting every idea fully develop, and he 
 would seek for likeness and difference as to fact and 
 action everywhere, always checking and generalising 
 his experience. There is scarcely a limit to fruitful 
 applications of the scientific method. The prevalent 
 notion that training in a particular subject means the 
 training of the whole mind, must be abandoned as a 
 most dangerous educational fallacy. 
 
 Granting, as given, the educational end — the 
 development of a man who knows and loves his place 
 
174 FAITH m MAN 
 
 in nature and society and labours for social perfection 
 — a method such as we hinted at becomes an invaluable 
 auxiliary. If our contention is justifiable, as we think 
 it is, that one may discover how men think at their 
 best and effectively utilise this discovery, education 
 would gain immensely in two directions. We could 
 teach correct thinking to all, and we need not trust to 
 indirect and tentative efforts which lead to the veriest 
 minimum of effective thinking ; and, secondly, such a 
 method would inconceivably simplify the teaching, 
 since the principal difficulty encountered by the 
 educator of to-day is to master his own ignorance of 
 the right method of thinking. Perhaps three times as 
 much might be taught, and the comprehension quick- 
 ened fivefold and more. Hence school life would be 
 neither so irksome nor proceed at so slow a speed as 
 to-day, and correct thinking could be taught from the 
 very beginning and be acquired early. Indirectly, in 
 this way, it would be much easier to inculcate a love of 
 learning and thus insure shorter years of school study 
 and longer years of study after leaving school. This 
 end would be also measurably furthered by a universal 
 language in which most books could be written, or 
 into which they could be translated ; and by funda- 
 mental reforms in sfpelling, in written characters^ in the 
 teaching of elementary mathematics, and in many 
 
A BASIS FOE EDUCATION 175 
 
 similar ways. Reliance on dictionaries, atlases, statistical 
 abstracts, and on encyclopedias, rather than on stored 
 memories, would also greatly assist in realising the 
 educational aim. 
 
 The possibilities which lie in the direction of 
 discovering how men think at their best, and making 
 by training this ' thinking-at-their-best ' the ordinary 
 thinking of the mass of men, are so great that it is almost 
 bewildering to think of them when realised, and yet 
 such possibilities must be definitely entertained by the 
 educator. So, also, if we think of the democracy as 
 thus educated, our many present fears will turn into 
 so many certain hopes. Inefficiency will flee, decep- 
 tions on the part of those who wish to maintain or seek 
 to procure privileges would become impossible, good 
 suggestions would be encouraged and recognised as 
 such when they are made, the need of an uncontrolled 
 bureaucracy would pass, and, what is not the least 
 advantage, a new and higher personal ideal would 
 emerge. Men would love to be strenuous in work and 
 thought ; they would desire to live a simple life ; they 
 would turn away from the pursuit of pleasures ; and 
 they would be controlled and guided by a single and 
 comprehensive individual, social and human ideal. 
 The new ethics would receive delicate interpretations 
 of which we do not as yet dream. 
 
176 FAITH IN MAN 
 
 At present England can afford some seventy million 
 pounds on supporting an unproductive army and 
 navy. Perhaps a million men are directly and in- 
 directly absorbed in this connexion, and limitless 
 thought and energy are spent on the military organ- 
 isation. Militarism must go; but its place must be 
 taken for some generations to come by an equally 
 important educational organisation which shall absorb 
 as much money, as much energy, and as much 
 inventiveness, as the militarism which it displaces. 
 University and secondary education for all will be 
 considered as solving nothing unless the new educa- 
 tional end is admitted and new educational methods 
 are found. To learn how men think, feel and do at their 
 best, and how to make that best the normal process in 
 the individual and in society, will be the chief anxiety 
 of a host of educational experts. 
 
 Philosophers speak of the empirical man and of the 
 crowd, as if these were something settled for ever and 
 ever. Already Montaigne had pointed out how 
 strikingly men differ, and in these days of sociological 
 research the very question of the nature of the psychiQ, 
 mechanism is thrown into the crucible. The world of 
 mental images and the orderly recollection of these* 
 are late mental products in natural history. Accord- 
 ingly, what we consider to-day the most rigorous and 
 
A BASIS FOE EDUCATION 177 
 
 sweeping thought, may yet become the property of 
 every educated ordinary human brain, and the 
 empirical man of the future may be superior to 
 all but the greatest thinkers of the past, and eveu. 
 superior to these last so far as clearness, swiftness and 
 exactness of thinking and research are concerned. It 
 is time that our imagination should do justice to the 
 future as research is doing justice to the past. Have 
 we advanced from the civilisation of the stone age to 
 that of steam and electricity, from the age of crude 
 signs to that of a philosophic language, from incessant 
 warfare to a prospective international federation ; and 
 shall we make the childish supposition that progress 
 has stopped or very nearly stopped, and that the 
 farthest ages of the future will be a faithful copy of 
 our own times? No; we are forced to assume that 
 advance will continue, and that distant future ages 
 will have outstripped us as we have outstripped the 
 distant ages of the past. It argues consequently inbred 
 scepticism to doubt that the way men think and feel 
 at their best now should not become the common way, 
 and that average men of the future should not surpass 
 average men of the present as the latter surpasg the 
 average man of the stone age. Yesterday the rabble, 
 now the mass, and to-morrow highly cultured men 
 and citizens. 
 
178 FAITH IN MAN 
 
 The chief end of the new faith is the perfecting 
 through social effort, of the State and of the leading 
 social institutions, and the principal means of creating 
 personalities who will effectively do this work is an 
 education that will teach men to know and to honour 
 their place in nature and society. Just because the 
 people is to rule, and just because the goal of govern- 
 ment is the common good and not the satisfaction of 
 a few persons, education and the solution of educa- 
 tional problems become of crucial importance. The 
 new ethics has no more faith in economic panaceas 
 than in religious ones. Through edzocation alone lies 
 ijie direct route to social and moral redemption, and 
 members of all churches, of all advanced political 
 parties, and of all shades of sober opinion, should, 
 therefore, make the solution of the educational problem 
 the very pivot of their endeavours. Faith in science, 
 independence of thought and action, ripeness of judgr. 
 ment, simplicity, purity, sobriety, sympathy, devotion 
 to a social ideal, will be attributes of the average man_ 
 only when that average man has been properly edu- 
 cated. Education is the one certain foe of superstition^ 
 and priest-craft, of the lust for wealth and power^of 
 licentiousness and all forms of self-indulgence, of idle- 
 ness and luxury ; and by educating the mass of men 
 all the evil spirits which dwell in man will be exor- 
 
A BASIS FOR EDUCATION 179 
 
 cised. Of social needs, therefore, the most important 
 and the most urgent to-day is that of a thorough 
 education for all. 
 
CHAPTEE VIII 
 
 THE ETHICAL MOVEMENT 
 
 The interest in social salvation is no longer restricted 
 to a few religious preachers or social reformers ; it is 
 almost literally universal. Parliament, the daily 
 papers, the periodicals, Idles lettres, essays, fiction, 
 and religious, philosophical, historical and economic 
 works, pay supreme homage to the ethical factor. 
 Archbishops and Bishops in the House of Lords, 
 or militant religious bodies like the Salvation Army 
 or the Wesleyans, not seldom discuss matters from 
 a purely social point of view and make the appeal 
 to the humanity of their hearers and readers without 
 reference to theology. What is more, protests come 
 from many religious sections that the ethical interest 
 is the supreme religious interest and that ethics is the 
 test of men and gods. After this it is only natural to 
 find that Parliament, the press and the public discuss 
 all serious matters from a moral point of view, and that 
 the perorations of orators as well as the last words of 
 leader writers appeal to the sentiment of humanity. 
 
THE ETHICAL MOVEMENT 181 
 
 In other days classical quotations were beloved in 
 Parliament, leader writers were party men and patriots 
 in the first instance, novelists were absorbed in personal 
 aspects, essayists made much of aesthetics as the 
 supreme concern of man, historians gathered facts, 
 political economists dealt with the proverbial economic 
 man, and moralists spoke of maxims and of an ethics 
 whose centre and circumference was the individual. A 
 charming and bewildering variety of opinions existed, 
 and the leading thought of to-day scarcely received 
 any attention; the suggestion of making it supreme 
 would have been scouted as absurd. 
 
 What has produced this startling change? Who 
 is the great man who turned men's thoughts in this new 
 direction? The genius theory fails here completely. 
 Scientific research lifted men out of the old theological 
 ruts, and the humanitarian and social trend — the new 
 optimism — is almost wholly due to democratic develop- 
 ment which chained men's attention on the common 
 good and relegated all other questions to a second and 
 subordinate place. Naturally, therefore, few men are 
 conscious of the change which is proceeding, and the 
 new and the old thought seem to be an inseparable 
 mixture. 
 
 Everywhere the old peeps through the new, and not 
 at all infrequently the new thought wears the old 
 
182 FAITH IN MAN 
 
 garments. Little of the old has been definitely and 
 consciously abandoned, and hence the new seldom 
 appears without bearing some witness of its predecessor. 
 Only the analytic mind, the mind examining the strata 
 of life, discovers the growing fissure which is rapidly 
 separating the new from the old. Consequently, before 
 men are aware, they have stigmatised as superstitious 
 what they once revered as sacred, and lauded as holy 
 what they once scorned as blasphemous. Owing to this 
 same unsuspected or unconscious factor there are those 
 whom the advance has not affected, who tarry in the 
 sidings oblivious of the trains which are rushing by them. 
 Of Spiritualists, Theosophists, Christian Scientists, the 
 Higher Thought people, and orthodox persons there 
 are yet many ; but few even of these are outside the 
 charmed circle, and in so far as they are outside, they 
 are supremely ineffectual. The new ethics is making 
 its way everywhere, unasked and irresistibly. 
 
 An ethical movement is observable in the whole of 
 our modern life. Manifestly, it is only a matter of 
 time when such a movement becomes self-conscious, 
 seeks to form a consistent whole, and definitely severs 
 its connection with the movement which preceded 
 it. He who is scientific in spirit will eliminate every 
 vestige of theology, and the enthusiastic democrat will 
 insist on the social and civic character of the new 
 
THE ETHICAL MOVEMENT 183 
 
 ethics. The philosopher will also come and show 
 indisputably that an ethics cannot stand by itself, and 
 that it must form a portion of a philosophy of life or 
 a religion. Finally, the men who are saturated with 
 the new ethics will cease to worship at the old shrines, 
 and they will take vigorous action to establish a new 
 religion which shall represent the new faith with its 
 philosophical, scientific and democratic basis. Then 
 only will the new thought exercise its full effect, and 
 such a consummation is inevitable. A great idea 
 cannot for long go about houseless and homeless and 
 depend on passing charity and on the favour of the 
 winds. Given time and it will build itself a temple, 
 unless indeed the old temples are being transformed 
 to harbour fitly the new spirit. 
 
 What we have stated to be an inevitable consumma- 
 tion is, as might be expected, already a fact. About 
 thirty-six years ago an American youth of twenty-one, 
 after a stay of three years in Germany, duly received 
 his summa, the highest honour, in philosophy, at 
 Heidelberg. His father, a well known rabbi of New 
 York, wished his son to be his successor. Dr. Felix 
 Adler returned from Germany, and he delivered before 
 a congregation of nearly two thousand people his 
 maiden sermon, which was most warmly received. 
 Here was a worthy successor, such was the universal 
 
184 FAITH m MAN 
 
 impression. All went smoothly until the sermon 
 appeared in print, when it was found by some that 
 this young aspirant to rabbiship had made in his 
 address no allusion to the deity. A shock of surprise, 
 and partly of horror, went through the congregation. 
 Nevertheless Dr. Adler was formally and officially 
 invited by a deputation to be his father's successor, 
 the only condition being that he acknowledged a 
 belief in a deity. He replied that he was not an 
 atheist, but that he preferred not to bind himself 
 by accepting the post. At the age of twenty- three 
 Dr. Adler became Professor of Oriental Languages 
 in Cornell University, and for two years he taught 
 there. During this period a number of those who 
 had been impressed with his non-theological sermon 
 and who sympathised with its spirit, appealed to 
 him at frequent intervals to found a new religious 
 body which should be free from theology. Professor 
 Adler gave way. A programme was issued and 
 circulated ; he delivered an address in May, 1876 ; 
 and the New York Society for Ethical Culture was 
 inaugurated with a little over a hundred members. 
 ^* Deed, not Creed," was the motto of the leader of the 
 Society. Soon Professor Adler attracted large congrega- 
 tions, and able men — Mr. W. M. Salter, Dr. Stanton 
 Coit, Mr. Burns Weston and Mr. W. Sheldon — ^joined 
 
THE ETHICAL MOVEMENT X85 
 
 the ranks of the propagandists. As a consequence, 
 ethical societies were established in Chicago, 
 Philadelphia and St. Louis. The idea of the Movement 
 found a quick echo in England, and the London Ethical 
 Society was started by a series of distinguished scholars, 
 including Sir Leslie Stephen, Professor B. Bosanquet, 
 Prof. J. H. Muirhead, Dr. Sophie Bryant, and others. 
 Then, some twenty years ago, Dr. Stanton Coit came to 
 England where he has remained, and where, largely 
 owing to his efforts, there are now in London and 
 the provinces nearly forty ethical societies. Soon, 
 too, the German Ethical Society, which has some 
 fifteen branches, was founded. It is a society which 
 has had as its leaders many able and distinguished 
 men, its President being Dr. Wilhelm Foerster, 
 Professor of Astronomy at Berlin University, and, 
 until his retirement. Director of the Berlin Observa- 
 tory. The Movement spread to Austria, Switzerland, 
 Italy, France, and the Colonies, and periodicals in 
 English, German, French and Italian have echoed 
 the new views. There exists also an International 
 Ethical Union, binding together the various national 
 groups.* 
 
 * International Union of Ethical Societies — Secretary, Mr. G* Spiller# 
 19 Buckingham Street, Strand, London, W.C. ; English Union 
 of Ethical Societies — Secretary, Mr. H. Snell, 19 Buckingham Street) 
 
 12 
 
186 FAITH m MAN 
 
 The influence of the Movement has been immensely 
 greater than one could infer by totalling up the number 
 of members. Hosts of men and women have read the 
 pamphlets, periodicals and books issued, or have 
 attended at Ethical Society meetings, and the 
 impression left has been generally a powerful and 
 indelible one. These persons felt, whether they 
 were clearly conscious of it or not, that here were 
 societies which embodied in great purity the modern 
 humanitarian spirit. They felt that the insistence 
 on an ethical test in every department of life was 
 an awe-inspiring doctrine. Thus churches, social 
 reformers, philosophers, the press and the public 
 have been considerably modified by contact, however 
 slight, with the Ethical Movement. 
 
 What does the Ethical Movement teach? The 
 answer cannot be given in a word, nor can we refer to 
 any book which gives a comprehensive and philosophical 
 exposition of the views of the Movement. Only an 
 
 Strand, London, W.C. ; American Ethical Union — Secretary, Mr. 
 J. Burns Weston, 1416 Locust Street, Philadelphia, U.S.A. ; 
 Deutsche Gesellschaft fiir Ethische Kultur — Secretary, Dr. R. Penzig, 
 Unter den Linden 16, Berlin. Oesterreichische Ethische Gesell- 
 schaft — Secretary, Wilhelra Borner, lll/g Obere Yiaduktgasse 82, 
 Vienna ; Union pour la V^rite — Director, M. Paul Desjardins, 
 6 Impasse Ronsin, Rue Vaugirard, Paris ; Ligue pour I'Action 
 Morale — Secretary, Prof. Pelet, Lausanne. General information 
 about the various centres will be gladly giren by the International 
 Secretary. 
 
THE ETHICAL MOVEMENT 187 
 
 indirect reply is possible. The ethical test is applied 
 in every relation of life and that test is regarded as 
 supreme over all other tests."* No belief in a deity, no 
 dogma, no authority, is, therefore, held superior to 
 living the ethical life. The supremacy of ethics is the 
 first doctrine taught. But the supremacy of what kind 
 of ethics? An ethics which appeals for inspiration, 
 help and justice to deities and spirits? An ethics 
 which asks the individual to develop all his powers 
 regardless of social consequences ? An ethics which 
 lays the stress on good intentions (with which the way 
 to hell is paved) or on virtue (which, like piety, forms 
 an excellent mask)? No, the ethics 'preached from 
 ethical platforms, startling as this may seem even to 
 very many members of ethical societies, is definitely 
 non-theological y social, democratic, co-operative, civic; 
 and almost everywhere, sometimes consciously and 
 sometimes unconsciously, ethics is held to be, or treated 
 as, a religion. In the first flush of enthusiasm it was 
 thought possible to unite in one organisation all who 
 strongly sympathised with the ethical life, and it was 
 believed that in ethics as such grave differences did not 
 
 * The general aim of the International Union of Ethical Societies 
 is : "To assert the supreme importance of the ethical factor in all 
 the relations of life, personal, social, national and international, 
 apart from all theological and metaphysical considerations," 
 
188 FAITH IN" MAN 
 
 exist. Accordingly, men of all and of no churches were 
 invited to join, and the ethical platform was regarded 
 as an open one. In practice, however, the preachers of 
 the new gospel believed in the new ethics, and those 
 who joined the ethical societies were, with few 
 exceptions, those who had emancipated themselves from 
 the older theological and non-democratic views. The 
 desired unity will only be attained on a higher plane 
 when men abandon or crucially modify the older views. 
 Professor Adler was a representative of the new 
 ethics, and consequently his view of morality coincided 
 with what we have called the new ethics, though 
 owing to the practical nature of the Movement the 
 spirit rather than the letter has been emphasised. It was 
 owing to the presence of that spirit that the Movement 
 spread so far and exerted so much influence. That, 
 too, explains how with scarcely any formulation, and 
 with no exercise of authority, the essential traits of 
 ethical societies, as regards preaching and not as regards 
 the formulated principles, came to be everywhere the 
 same. The time spirit rules in these societies. The 
 same fact makes it also clear why the Movement as a 
 movement has as yet no definite and deliberately con- 
 structed philosophy of its own, and why it has not yet 
 felt the necessity for such a philosophy. Nevertheless 
 the time is at hand when the implications of the 
 
THE ETHICAL MOVEMENT 189 
 
 cardinal tenet of the Movement must come boldly into 
 the foreground, and then ethical societies will cease to 
 believe that all who are interested in ethics — whatever 
 that ethics and its motives — are welcome as members. 
 *'Come and be converted!" not as now "Come and 
 join ! " will be the cry. The masses of civilised man- 
 kind are waiting to be invited, for the old religion is 
 vitally connected with the old morality, and men have 
 definitely broken with that morality. The altogether 
 new wine requires altogether new bottles. The Old 
 and the New Testaments are irreconcilable with the 
 new views of the Universe and of life, with science 
 and with democratic effort. The Ethical Movement 
 has suffered because it has not consciously identified 
 itself with the new ethics. 
 
 The object of this small book is to give a systematised 
 and clear exposition of the new ethics — of the ethical 
 movement outside the ethical societies and within 
 them — and its chief purpose is to assist in the establish- 
 ment of the new ethics as the new religion. Except 
 perhaps for the chapter on art, the volume professes to 
 expound what are the leading ethical implications in 
 modern life and in the ethical movement. 
 
 We have sketched the different and inseparable 
 aspects of the most famous of modern movements. 
 Eeligion, Art, Science, Social Eeform, Philosophy, 
 
190 FAITH IN MAN 
 
 Progress and Education, have been shown in their 
 intimate relation to morality, and especially in the 
 chapters on Philosophy and Social Eeform we saw 
 what definite characteristics modern morality possesses. 
 We have pointed to the fact that a new social synthesis 
 is proceeding which is perhaps more profound than any 
 that mankind has as yet undertaken. Men are turning 
 from theology to science, the rule of social castes is 
 being superseded by the rule of democracy, and men 
 generally feel that so great a power dwells in mutual 
 trust and combined effort that we are at the threshold 
 of the mightiest and most beneficent changes the world 
 has ever witnessed. A world-fact cannot remain for 
 ever hidden, unsuspected or confused with other facts. 
 It must become the centre of an organised movement 
 which shall consciously aim at the full realisation of the 
 ideal which inspires it. 
 
 The End 
 
 f ^^ THE \ 
 
 \ _ OF J 
 
 W. Jolly and Sons, Albany Press, Aberdeen. 
 
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