CIVILISATION: ITS CAUSE /ND CURE
EDWARD CARPENTER
I EX
CIVILISATION: ITS
CAUSE AND CURE
AND OTHER ESSAYS
(NEW AND ENLARGED EDITION)
By
EDWARD CARPENTER
AUTHOR OF "ENGLAND'S IDEAL," "TOWARDS DEMOCRACY,'
" MY DAYS AND DREAMS," ETC.
LONDON : GEORGE ALLEN & UNWIN LTD.
NEW YORK: CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
All rights reserved
First Edition, June 1889; Second Edition, December 1890
Third Edition, November 1893 ; Fourth Edition, July 1895
Fifth Edition, September 1897; Sixth Edition, October 1900
Seventh Edition, July 1902; Eighth Edition, March 1903
Ninth Edition, January 1906 ; Tenth Edition, January 1908
Eleventh Edition, October 1910 ; Twelfth Edition, Dec. 1912
Thirteenth Edition, Aug. 1914 ; Fourteenth Edition, June 1916.
\\\ \
101
CONTENTS.
PAGE
CIVILISATION : ITS CAUSE AND CURE, i
MODERN SCIENCE: A CRITICISM, 51
THE SCIENCE OF THE FUTURE : A FORECAST, 82
DEFENCE OF CRIMINALS: A CRITICISM OF MORALITY,... 100
EXFOLIATION : LAMARCK versus DARWIN, 129
CUSTOM, 148
A RATIONAL AND HUMANE SCIENCE, 157
CIVILISATION:
ITS CAUSE AND CURE.
The friendly and flowing savage, who is he? Is he waiting for
civilisation, or is he past it, and mastering it ? WHITMAN.
WE find ourselves to-day in the midst of a somewhat peculiar
state of society, which we call Civilisation, but which even to
the most optimistic among us does not seem altogether desir-
able. Some of us, indeed, are inclined to think that it is a kind
of disease which the various races of man have to pass through
as children pass through measles or whooping cough ; but if it
is a disease, there is this serious consideration to be made, that
while History tells us of many nations that have been attacked
by it, of many that have succumbed to it, and of some that are
still in the throes of it, we know of no single case in which a
nation has fairly recovered from and passed through it to a
more normal and healthy condition. In other words the
development of human society has never yet (that we know of)
passed beyond a certain definite and apparently final stage in
the process we call Civilisation ; at that stage it has alwayi
succumbed or been arrested.
A
* CIVILISATION: ITS CAUSE AND CURB.
Of course it may at first sound extravagant to use the word
disease in connection with Civilisation at all, but a little
thought should show that the association is not ill-grounded.
To take the matter on its physical side first, I find that in
MullhalPs Dictionary of Statistics the number of accredited
doctors and surgeons in the United Kingdom is put at over
23,000. If the extent of the national sickness is such that we
require 23,000 medical men to attend to us, it must surely be
rather serious ! And they do not cure us. Wherever we
look to-day, in mansion or in slum, we see the features and hear
the complaints of ill-health ; the difficulty is really to find a
healthy person. The state of the modern civilised man in this
respect our coughs, colds, mufflers, dread of a waft of chill air,
<fec. is anything but creditable, and it seems to be the fact
that, notwithstanding all our libraries of medical science, our
knowledges, arts, and appliances of life, we are actually less
capable of taking care of ourselves than the animals are.
Indeed, talking of animals, we are as Shelley I think points
out fast depraving the domestic breeds. The cow, the horse,
the sheep, and even the confiding pussy-cat, are becoming ever
more and more subject to disease, and are liable to ills which
Mi their wilder state they knew not of. And finally the savage
races of the earth do not escape the baneful influence.
Wherever Civilisation touches them, they die like flies from
the small-pox, drink, and worse evils it brings along with it ;
and often its mere contact is sufficient to destroy whole races.
But the word Disease is applicable to our social as well as to
our physical condition. For as in the body disease arises
from the loss of the physical unity which constitutes Health,
and so takes the form of warfare or discord between the various
parts, or of the abnormal development of individual organs, or
the consumption of the system by predatory germs and growths ;
so in our modern life we find the unity gone which constitutes
CIVILISATION.
true society, and in its place warfare of classes and Individuals,
abnormal development of some to the detriment of others, and
consumption of the organism by masses of social parasites. If
the word disease is applicable anywhere, I should say it is-
both In its direct and its derived sense to the civilised
societies of to-day.
Again, mentally, Is not our condition anything but satis
factory \ I am not alluding to the number and importance of
the lunatic asylums which cover our land, nor to the fact that
maladies of the brain and nervous system are now so com-
mon ; but to the strange sense of mental unrest which marks
our populations, and which amply justifies Ruskin's cutting
epigram : that our two objects in life are, " Whatever we
have to get more ; and wherever we are to go somewhere
else." This sense of unrest , of disease, penetrates down even
Into the deepest regions of man's being into his moral nature
disclosing itself there, as it has done in all nations notably
at the time of their full civilisation, as the sense of Sin. All
down the Christian centuries we find this strange sense of
inward strife and discord developed, In marked contrast to the
naive insouciance of the pagan and primitive world ; and, what
is strangest, we even find people glorying in this consciousness
which, while it may be the harbinger of better things to
come, is and can be in itself only the evidence of loss of unity
and therefore of ill-health, in the very centre of human life.
Of course we are aware with regard to Civilisation that the
word is sometimes used in a kind of ideal sense, as to indicate
a state of future culture towards which we are tending the
implied assumption being that a sufficiently long course of top
hats and telephones will in the end bring us to this ideal con-
dition ; while any little drawbacks in the process, such as we
have just pointed out, are explained as being merely accidental
and temporary. Men sometimes speak of civilising and
CIVILISATION: ITS CAUSE AND CURE.
ennobling influences as if the two terms were interchangeable,
and of course if they like to use the word Civilisation in thia
sense they have a right to ; but whether the actual tendencies
of modern life taken in the mass are ennobling (except in a
quite indirect way hereafter to be dwelt upon) is to say the
least a doubtful question. Any one who would get an idea of
the glorious being that is as a matter of fact being turned out
by the present process should read Mr. Kay Robinson's article
in the Nineteenth Century for May, 1883, in which he pro-
phesies (quite solemnly and in the name of science) that the
human being of the future will be a toothless, bald, toeless
creature with flaccid muscles and limbs almost incapable of
locomotion !
Perhaps it Is safer on the whole not to use the word
Civilisation in such ideal sense, but to limit its use (as is done
to-day by all writers on primitive society) to a definite
historical stage through which the various nations pass, and
in which we actually find ourselves at the present time.
Though there is of course a difficulty in marking the com-
mencement of any period of historical evolution very definitely,
yet all students of this subject agree that the growth of
property and the ideas and institutions flowing from it did at
a certain point bring about such a change in the structure of
human society that the new stage might fairly be distinguished
from the earlier stages of Savagery and Barbarism by a
separate term. The growth of wealth, it is shown, and with
it the conception of private property, brought on certain very
definite new forms of social life ; it destroyed the ancient
system of society based upon the gens, that is, a society of
equals founded upon blood-relationship, and introduced a
society of classes founded upon differences of material posses-
sion ; it destroyed the ancient system of mother-right and
Inheritance through the female line, and turned the woman
CIVILISATION.
Into the property of the man; it brought with it private
ownership of land, and so created a class of landless aliens,
and a whole system of rent, mortgage, interest, <fec. ; it intro-
duced slavery, serfdom and wage-labor, which are only
various forms of the dominance of one class over another ; and
to rivet these authorities it created the State and the police-
man. Every race that we know, that has become what we
call civilised, has passed thro' these changes ; and though the
details may vary and have varied a little, the main order of
change has been practically the same in all cases. We are
justified therefore in calling Civilisation a historical stage,
whose commencement dates roughly from the division of
lociety into classes founded on property, and the adoption of
^lass-government. Lewis Morgan in his Ancient Society adds
the invention of writing and the consequent adoption of
written History and written Law ; Engels in his Ursprung der
Familic, det Privat-cigenthums und des Stoat* points out the
importance of the appearance of the Merchant, even in his
most primitive form, as a mark of the civilisation-period ;
while the French writers of the last century made a good
point in inventing the term nations policies (policemanised
nations) as a substitute for civilioed nations ; for perhaps there
is no better or more universal mark of the period we are con-
sidering, and of its social degradation, than the appearance of
the crawling phenomenon in question. [Imagine the rage of
any decent North American Indians if they had been told they
required policemen to keep them in order !]
If we take this historical definition of Civilisation, we shall
see that our English Civilisation began hardly more than a
thousand years ago, and even so the remains of the more
primitive society lasted long after that. In the case of
Rome if we reckon from the later times of the early kings
down to the fall of Rome we have again about a thousand
6 CIVILISATION: ITS CAUSE AND CURE.
years. The Jewish civilisation from David and Solomon
downwards lasted with breaks somewhat over a thousand
fears ; the Greek civilisation less ; the Egyptian considerably
more ; but the important points to see are, first, that the
process has been quite similar in character in these various
(and numerous other) cases, 1 quite as similar in fact as the
course of the same disease in various persons ; and secondly
that in no case, as said before, has any nation come through
and passed beyond this stage ; but that in most cases it has
succumbed soon after the main symptoms had been developed.
But it will be said, It may be true that civilisation regarded
as a stage of human history presents some features of disease ;
but is there any reason for supposing that disease in some form
or other was any less present in the previous stage that of
Barbarism 1 To which I reply, I think there is good reason.
Without committing ourselves to the unlikely theory that the
M noble savage " was an ideal human being physically or in any
other respect, and while certain that in many points he was
decidedly inferior to the civilised man, I think we must allow
him the superiority in some directions ; and one of these was
his comparative freedom from disease. Lewis Morgan, who
grew up among the Iroquoia Indians, and who probably knew
the North American natives as well as any white man has ever
done, says (in his Ancient Society, p. 45), " Barbarism ends
with the production of grand Barbarians." And though there
are no native races on the earth to-day who are actually in the
latest and most advanced stage of Barbarism 2 ; yet if we take
the most advanced tribes that we know of such as the said
Iroquois Indians of twenty or thirty years ago, some of the
Kaffir tribes round Lake Nyassa in Africa, now (and possibly
for a few years more) comparatively untouched by civilisation,
1 For proof I must refer the reader to Eugels, or to his own studies
of history.
1 Say like the Homeric Greek*, or the Spartan* of the Lycurgus period.
CIVILISATION.
or the tribes along the river Uaupes, 30 or 40 years back, of
Wallace's Travels on the Amazon all tribes in what Morgan
would call the middle stage of Barbarism we undoubtedly in
each case discover a fine and (which is our point here) healthy
people. Captain Cook in his first Voyage says of the natives
of Otaheite, " We saw no critical disease during our stay upon
the island, and but few instances of sickness, which were
accidental fits of the colic ; " and, later on, of the New Zeal-
anders, " They enjoy perfect and uninterrupted health. In all
our visits to their towns, where young and old, men and
women, crowded about us .... we never saw a single person
who appeared to have any bodily complaint, nor among the
numbers we have seen naked did we once perceive the slight-
est eruption upon the skin, or any marks that an eruption had
left behind." These are pretty strong words. Of course
diseases exist among such peoples, even where they have
never been in contact with civilisation, but I think we may
say that among the higher types of savages they are rarer, and
nothing like so various and so prevalent as they are in our
modern life ; while the power of recovery from wounds (whi^h
are of course the most frequent form of disablement) is gen-
erally admitted to be something astonishing. Speaking of the
Kaffirs, J. G. Wood says, " Their state of health enables them
to survive injuries which would be almost instantly fatal to any
civilised European." Mr. Frank Gates in his Diary 1 mentions
the case of a man who was condemned to death by the king.
He was hacked down with axes, and left for dead. " What
must have been intended for the coup de grace was a cut in
the back of the head, which bad chipped a large piece out of
the skull, and must have been meant to cut the spinal cord
where it joins the brain. It had however been made a little
higher than this, but had left such a wound as I should have
i Matabeb Land and the Victoria Falls, p. 209.
8 CIVILISATION: ITS CAUSE AND CURE.
thought that no one could have survived . . . when I held the
lanthorn to investigate the wound I started back in amaze-
ment to see a hole at the base of the skull, perhaps two inches
long and an inch and a half wide, and I will not venture to
say how deep, but the depth too must have been an affair of
inches. Of course this hole penetrated into the substance of
the brain, and probably for some distance. I dare say a
mouse could have sat in it." Yet the man was not so much
disconcerted. Like Old King Cole, "He asked for a pipe
and a drink of brandy," and ultimately made a perfect re-
covery ! Of course it might be said that such a story only
proves the lowness of organisation of the brains of savages ;
but to the Kaffirs at any rate this would not apply ; they are
a quick-witted race, with large brains, and exceedingly acute
in argument, as Colenso found to his cost. Another point
which indicates superabundant health is the amazing animal
spirits of these native races ! The shouting, singing, dancing
kept up nights long among the Kaffirs are exhausting merely
to witness, while the graver North American Indian exhibits
a corresponding power of life in his eagerness for battle or his
stoic resistance of pain. 1
Similarly when we come to consider the social life of the
wilder races however rudimentary and undeveloped it may
be the almost universal testimony of students and travelers
is that within its limits it is more harmonious and compact
than that of the civilised nations. The members of the tribe
are not organically at warfare with each other ; society is not
divided into classes which prey upon each other ; nor it it
1 A similar physical health and power of life are also developed among
Europeans who have lived for long periods in more native conditions.
It is not to our race, which is probably superior to any in capacity,
but to the state in which we lire that we must ascribe our defect ia
this particular matter.
CIVILISA TION.
consumed by parasites. There is more true social unity, less
of disease. Though the customs of each tribe are rigid, ab-
surd, and often frightfully cruel, 1 and though all outsiders
are liable to be regarded as enemies, yet within those limit*
the members live peacefully together their pursuits, their
work, are undertaken in common, thieving and violence are
rare, social feeling and community of interest are strong. " In
their own bands Indians are perfectly honest. In all my in-
tercourse with them I have heard of not over half-a-dozen
cases of such theft. But this wonderfully exceptional honesty
extends no further than to the members of his immediate
band. To all outside of it, the Indian is not only one of the
most arrant thieves in the world, but this quality or faculty is
held in the highest estimation." (Dodge, p. 64.) If a man
set out on a journey (this among the Kaffirs) " he need not
trouble himself about provisions, for he is sure to fall in with
some hut, or perhaps a village, and is equally sure of obtain-
ing both food and shelter." 3 "I have lived," says A. R.
Wallace in his Malay Archipelago (vol. II. p. 460), " with
communities in South America and the East, who have no
laws or law courts, but the public opinion of the village . . .
yet each man scrupulously respects the rights of his fellows,
and any infraction of those rights rarely takes place. In such
a community all are nearly equal. There are none of those
wide distinctions of education and ignorance, wealth and
poverty, master and servant, which are the product of out
civilisation." Indeed this community of life in the early
societies, this absence of division into classes, and of the con-
trast between rich and poor, is now admitted on all sides as
a marked feature of difference between the conditions of the
primitive and of civilised man. 8
1 See Col. Dodge's Our Wild Indians.
Wood's Natural History of Man. 3 See Appendix.
I CIVILISATION: ITS CAUSE AND CURB.
Lastly, with regard to the mental condition of the Barbarian,
probably no one will be found to dispute the contention that
he is more easy minded and that his consciousness of Sm is less
developed than in his civilised brother. Our unrest is the
penalty we pay for our wider life. The missionary retires
routed from the savage in whom he can awake no sense of
his supreme wickedness. An American lady had a servant,
a negro-woman, who on one occasion asked leave of absence
for the next morning, saying she wished to attend the
Holy Communion? "I have no objection," said the mis-
tress, " to grant you leave ; but do you think you ought
to attend Communion ? You know you have never said
you were sorry about that goose you stole last week."
" Lor* missus," replied the woman, " do ye think I'd let
an old goose stand betwixt me and my Blessed Lord and
Master ? " But joking apart, and however necessary for man's
ultimate evolution may be the temporary development of this
consciousness of Sin, we cannot help seeing that the condition
of the mind in which it is absent is the most distinctively
healthy ; nor can it be concealed that some of the greatest
works of Art have been produced by people like the earlier
Greeks, in whom it was absent ; and could not possibly have
been produced where it was strongly developed.
Though as already said, the latest stage of Barbarism, i.e.,
that just preceding Civilisation, is unrepresented on the earth
to-day, yet we have hi the Homeric and other dawn-literature
of the various nations indirect records of this stage ; and these
records assure us of a condition of man very similar to,
though somewhat more developed than, the condition of the
existing races I have mentioned above. Besides this, we have
in the numerous traditions of the Golden Age, 1 legends of the
Fall, <kc., a curious fact which suggests to us that a great
uumber of races in advancing towards Civilisation were con-
1 Se Appendix.
CIVILISATION. II
scious at some point or other of having lost a primitive con-
dition of ease and contentment, and that they embodied this
consciousness, with poetical adornment and licence, in im-
aginative legends of the earlier Paradise. Some people in-
deed, seeing the universality of these stories, and the remark-
able fragments of wisdom embedded in them and other
extremely ancient myths and writings, have supposed that
there really was a general prehistoric Eden-garden or Atlantis ;
but the necessities of the case hardly seem to compel this
supposition. That each human soul however bears within it-
self some kind of reminiscence of a more harmonious and
perfect state of being, which it has at some time experienced,
seems to me a conclusion difficult to avoid ; and this by itself
might give rise to manifold traditions and myths.
HOWEVER all this may be, the question Immediately before us
having established the more healthy, though more limited,
condition of the pre-civilisation peoples is, why this lapse or
fall 1 What is the meaning of this manifold and intensified
manifestation of Disease physical, social, intellectual, and
moral f what is its place and part in the great whole of human
evolution t
And this involves us in a digression, which must occupy a
few pages, on the nature of Health.
When we come to analyse the conception of Disease, physical
or mental, in society or in the individual, it evidently means,
as already hinted once or twice, loss of unity. Health, there-
fore, should mean unity, and it is curious that the history of
the word entirely corroborates this idea. As is well known,
the words health, whole, holy, are from the same stock ; an<f
they indicate to us the fact that fax back in the past those who
12 CIVILISATION: ITS CAUSE AND CURE.
created this group of words had a conception of the meaning
of Health very different from ours, and which they embodied
unconsciously in the word itself and its strange relatives.
These are, for instance, and among others : heal, hallow, hale,
holy, whole, wholesome ; German heilig, Heiland (the Saviour) j
Latin salus (as in salutation, salvation) ; Greek kalos ; also
compare hail ! a salutation, and, less certainly connected, the
root hal, to breathe, as in inhale, exhale French haleine
Italian and French alma and ame (the soul) ; compare the
Latin spiritus, spirit or breath, and Sanskrit atman, breath or
soul.
Wholeness, holiness ..." if thine eye be single, thy whole
body shall be full of light." ..." thy faith hath made thee
whole. 11
The idea seems to be a positive one a condition of the body
In which it is an entirety, a unity a central force maintaining
that condition ; and disease being the break-up or break-down
of that entirety into multiplicity.
The peculiarity about our modern conception of Health is
that it seems to be a purely negative one. So impressed are
we by the myriad presence of Disease so numerous its
dangers, so sudden and unforetellable its attacks that we
have come to look upon health as the mere absence of the
same. As a solitary spy picks his way through a hostile camp
at night, sees the enemy sitting round his fires, and trembles
at the crackling of a twig beneath his feet so the traveled
thro' this world, comforter in one hand and physic-bottle in the
other, must pick his way, fearful lest at any time he disturb
the sleeping legions of death thrice blessed if by any means,
steering now to the right and now to the left, and thinking
only of his personal safety, he pass by without discovery to the
other side.
Health with us is a negative thing. It is a neutralisation of
CIVILISATION. 13
opposing dangers. It is to be neither rheumatic nor gouty,
consumptive nor bilious, to be untroubled by head-ache, back-
ache, heart-ache or any of the " thousand natural shocks that
flesh is heir to." These are the realities. Health is the mere
negation of them.
The modern notion, and which has evidently in a very
subtle way penetrated the whole thought of to-day, is that the
essential fact of life is the existence of innumerable external
forces, which, by a very delicate balance and difficult to main-
tain, concur to produce Man who in consequence may at any
moment be destroyed again by the non-concurrence of those
forces. The older notion apparently is that the essential fact
of life is Man himself ; and that the external forces, so-called,
are in some way subsidiary to this fact that they may aid his
expression or manifestation, or that they may hinder it, but
that they can neither create nor annihilate the Man. Probably
both ways of looking at the subject are important ; there is a
man that can be destroyed, and there is a man that cannot be
destroyed. The old words soul and body indicate this contrast ;
but like all words they are subject to the defect that they are
an attempt to draw a line where no line can ultimately be
drawn ; they mark a contrast where, in fact, there is only
continuity for between the little mortal man who dwells here
and now, and the divine and universal Man who also forms a
part of our consciousness, is there not a perfect gradation of
being, and where (if anywhere) is there a gulf fixed ? Together
they form a unit, and each is necessary to the other : the first
cannot do without the second, and the second cannot get along
at all without the first. To use the words of Angelus Silesiua
(quoted by Schopenhauer), "Ich weiss das ohne mich Gott nicht
ein Nu kann leben."
According then to the elder conception, and perhaps
according to an elder experience, man to be really healthy must
14 CIVILISATION: ITS CAUSE AND CURE.
be a unit, an entirety his more external and momentary self
standing in some kind of filial relation to his more universal
and incorruptible part so that not only the remotest and
outermost regions of the body, and all the assimilative secretive
and other processes belonging thereto, but even the thoughts
and passions of the mind itself, stand in direct and clear
relationship to it, the final and absolute transparency of the
mortal creature. And thus this divinity in each creature,
being that which constitutes it and causes it to cohere
together, was conceived of as that creature's saviour, healer
healer of wounds of body and wounds of heart the Man within
the man, whom it was not only possible to know, but whom to
know and be united with was the alone salvation. This, I take
It, was the law of health and of holiness as accepted at some
elder time of human history, and by us seen as thro' a glass
darkly.
And the condition of disease, and of sin, under the same
view, was the reverse of this. Enfeeblement, obscuration,
duplicity the central radiation blocked ; lesser and insubord-
inate centres establishing and asserting themselves as against
it ; division, discord, possession by devils.
Thus in the body, the establishment of an insubordinate
centre a boil, a tumor, the introduction and spread of a germ
with innumerable progeny throughout the system, the enlarge-
ment out of all reason of an existing organ means disease. In
the mind, disease begins when any passion asserts itself as an
independent centre of thought and action. The condition of
health in the mind is loyalty to the divine Man within it. 1
But if loyalty to money become an independent centre of life,
or greed of knowledge, or of fame, or of drink ; jealousy, lust,
1 No words or theory even of morality can express or formulate this
no enthronement of any virtue can take its place ; for all virtue
enthroned before our humanity becomes vice, and worse than vice.
CIVILISATION,
the love of approbation ; or mere following aftei any so-called
virtue for itself purity, humility, consistency, or what not
these may grow to seriously endanger the other. They are,
or should be, subordinates; and though over a long period
their insubordination may be a necessary condition of human
progress, yet during all such time they are at war with each
other and with the central Will ; the man is torn and tormented,
and is not happy.
And when I speak thus separately of the mind and body, it
must be remembered, as already said, that there is no strict
line between them ; but probably every affection or passion of
the mind has its correlative in the condition of the body
though this latter may or may not be easily observable.
Gluttony is a fever of the digestive apparatus. What is a taint
in the mind is also a taint in the body. The stomach has
started the original idea of becoming itself the centre of the
human system. The sexual organs may start a similar Idea.
Here are distinct threats, menaces made against the central
authority against the Man himself. For the man must rule
or disappear ; it is impossible to imagine a man presided over
by a Stomach a walking Stomach, using hands, feet, and all
other members merely to carry it from place to place, and serve
its assimilative mania. We call such an one, a Hog. [And thus
in the theory of Evolution we see the place of the hog, and all
other animals, as fore-runners or off-shoots of special faculties in
Man, and why the true man, and rightly, has authority over
all animals, and can alone give them their place in creation.]
So of the Brain, or any other organ ; for the Man is no
organ, resides in no organ, but is the central life ruling and
radiating among all organs, and assigning them their parts tc
play.
Disease then, in body or mind, Is from this point of view
the break-up of its unity, its entirety, into multiplicity. It is
16 CIVILISATION: ITS CAUSE AND CURE.
the abeyance of a central power, and the growth of insubordi-
nate centres life in each creature being conceived of as a
continual exercise of energy or conquest, by which external or
antagonistic forces (and organisms) are brought into subjec-
tion and compelled into the service of the creature, or are
thrown off as harmful to it. Thus by way of illustration, we
find that plants or animals, when in good health, have a re-
markable power of throwing off the attacks of any parasites
which incline to infest them ; while those that are weakly are
very soon eaten up by the same. A rose-tree, for instance,
brought indoors, will soon fall a prey to the aphis though
when hardened out of doors the pest makes next to no impres-
sion on it. In dry seasons when the young turnip plants in
the fields are weakly from want of water the entire crop is
sometimes destroyed by the turnip fly, which then multiplies
enormously ; but if a shower or two of rain come before much
damage is done the plant will then grow vigorously, its tissues
become more robust and resist the attacks of the fly, which in
its turn dies. Late investigations seem to show that one of
the functions of the white corpuscles in the blood is to devour
disease-germs and bacteria present in the circulation thus
absorbing these organisms into subjection to the central life of
the body and that with this object they congregate in
numbers toward any part of the body which is wounded or
diseased. Or to take an example from society, it is clear
enough that if our social life were really vivid and healthy,
such parasitic products as the idle shareholder and the police-
man above-mentioned would simply be impossible. The
material on which they prey would not exist, and they would
either perish or be transmuted into useful forms. It seems
obvious in fact that life in any organism can only be main-
tained by some such processes as these by which parasitic
or infesting organisms are either thrown off or absorbed into
CIVILISATION. 17
subjection. To define the nature of the power which thus
works towards and creates the distinctive unity of each organism
may be difficult, is probably at present impossible, but that
some such power exists we can hardly refuse to admit.
Probably it is more a subject of the growth of our con-
sciousness, than an object of external scientific investiga-
tion.
In this view, Death is simply the loosening and termination
of the action of this power over certain regions of the
organism ; a process by which, when these superficial parts
become hardened and osseous, as in old age, or irreparably
damaged, as in cases of accident, the inward being sloughs
them off, and passes into other spheres. In the case of man
there may be noble and there may be ignoble death, as there
may be noble and ignoble life. The inward self, unable to
maintain authority over the forces committed to its charge,
declining from its high prerogative, swarmed over by parasites,
and fallen partially into the clutch of obscene foes, may at
last with shame and torment be driven forth from the temple
in which it ought to have been supreme. Or, having fulfilled
a holy and wholesome time, having radiated divine life and
love through all the channels of body and mind, and as a
perfect workman uses his tools, so having with perfect mastery
and nonchalance used all the materials committed to It, it may
quietly and peacefully lay these down, and unchanged
(absolutely unchanged to all but material eyes) pass on to
other spheres appointed.
And now a few words on the medical aspect of the subject.
If we accept any theory (even remotely similar to that just
indicated) to the effect that Health is a positive thing, and not
a mere negation of disease, it becomes pretty clear that no
mere investigation of the latter will enable us to find out what
the former is, or bring us nearer to it. You might as well
i8 CIVILISATION: ITS CAUSE AND CURE.
try to create the ebb and flow of the tides by an organised
system of mops.
Turn your back upon the Sun and go forth Into the wilder-
nesses of space till you come to those limits where the rays of
light, faint with distance, fall dim upon the confines of eternal
darkness and phantoms and shadows in the half-light are the
product of the wavering conflict betwixt day and night
investigate these shadows, describe them, classify them, record
the changes which takes place hi them, erect in vast libraries
these records into a monument of human industry and
research ; so shall you be at the end as near to a knowledge
and understanding of the sun itself which all this time you
have left behind you, and on which you have turned your
back as the investigators of disease are to a knowledge and
understanding of what health is. The solar rays illumine the
outer world and give to it its unity and entirety ; so in the
inner world of each individual possibly is there another Sun,
which illumines and gives unity to the man, and whose
warmth and light would permeate his system. Wait upou
the shining forth of this inward sun, give free access and
welcome to its rays of love, and free passage for them into the
common world around you, and it may be you will get to
know more about health than all the books of medicine con-
tain, or can tell you.
Or to take the former simile : it is the central force of the
Moon which acting on the great ocean makes all its waters
one, and causes them to rise and fall in timely consent. But
take your moon away ; hey ! now the tide is flowing too far
down this estuary ! Station your thousands with mops ; but
it breaks through in channel and runlet ! Block it here, but
it overflows in a neighboring bay ! Appoint an army of
awabs there, but to what end 1 The infinitest care along the
fringe of this great sea can never do, with all imaginable dirt
CIVILISATION.
and confusion, what the central power does easily, and with
unerring grace and providence.
And so of the great (the vast and wonderful) ocean which
ebbs and flows within a man take away the central guide-
and not 20,000 doctors, each with 20,000 books to consult
and 20,000 phials of different contents to administer, could
meet the myriad cases of disease which would ensue, or bolster
up into " wholeness " the being from whom the single radiant
unity had departed.
Probably there has never been an age, nor any country
(except Yankee-land ?) in which disease has been so generally
prevalent as in England to-day ; and certainly there has never
(with the same exception) been an age or country in which
doctors have so swarmed, or in which medical science has been
o powerful, in apparatus, in learning, in authority, and in
actual organisation and number of adherents. How reconcile
this contradiction if indeed a contradiction it be 1
But the fact is that medical science does not contradict
disease any more than laws abolish crime. Medical science
and doubtless for very good reasons makes a fetish of disease,
and dances around it. It is (as a rule) only seen where disease
is ; it writes enormous tomes on disease ; it induces disease in
animals (and even men) for the purpose of studying it ; it
knows, to a marvelous extent, the symptoms of disease, its
nature, its causes, its goings out and its comings in ; its eyes
are perpetually fixed on disease, till disease (for it) becomes the
main fact of the world and the main object of its worship.
Even what is so gracefully called Hygiene does not get beyond
this negative attitude. And the world still waits for its
Healer, who shall tell us diseased and suffering as we are
what health is, where it is to be found, whence it flows ; and
who having touched this wonderful power within himself shall
not rest till he has proclaimed and imparted it to men.
20 CIVILISATION: ITS CAUSE AND CURE.
No, medical science does not, in the main, contradict disease.
The same cause (infidelity and decay of the central life in men)
which creates disease and makes men liable to it, creates
students and a science of the subject. The Moon 1 having
gone from over the waters, the good people rush forth with
their mops ; and the untimely inundations, and the mops and
the mess and the pother, are all due to the same cause.
As to the lodgment of disease, it is clear that this would
take place easily in a disorganised system just as a seditious
adventurer would easily effect a landing, and would find insub-
ordinate materials ready at hand for his use, in a land where
the central government was weak. And as to the treatment of
a disease so introduced there are obviously two methods : one
is to reinforce the central power till it is sufficiently strong ol
itself to eject the insubordinate elements and restore order \ the
other is to attack the malady from outside and if possible
destroy it (as by doses and decoctions) independently of the
inner vitality, and leaving that as it was before. The first
method would seem the best, most durable and effective ; but
it is difficult and slow. It consists in the adoption of a healthy
life, bodily and mental, and will be spoken of later on. The
second may be characterised as the medical method, and is
valuable, or rather I should be inclined to say, will be valu-
able, when it has found its place, which is to be subsidiary to
the first. It is too often however regarded as superior in
importance, and in this way, though easy of application, has
come perhaps to be productive of more harm than good. The
disease may be broken down for the time being, but the roots
of it not being destroyed it soon springs up again in the same
or a new form, and the patient is as badly off as ever.
The great positive force of Health, and the power which It
1 It is curious that this word seems to have the same root as the word
Man, the original idea apparently being Order, or Measure.
CIVILISATION. 21
has to expel disease from its neighborhood is a thing realised
I believe by few persons. But it has been realised on earth,
and will be realised again when the more squalid elements of
our present-day civilisation have passed away.
tB.
THE result then of our digression is to show that Health in
body or mind means unity, integration as opposed to dis-
integration. In the animals we find this physical unity exist-
ing to a remarkable degree. An almost unerring instinct and
selective power rules their actions and organisation. Thus a
cat before it has fallen (say before it has become a very wheezy
fireside pussy !) is in a sense perfect. The wonderful consent
of its limbs as it runs or leaps, the adaptation of its muscles,
the exactness and inevitableness of its instincts, physical and
affectional ; its senses of sight and smell, its cleanliness, nicety
as to food, motherly tact, the expression of its whole body
when enraged, or when watching for prey all these things are
so to speak absolute and instantaneous and fill one with
admiration. The creature is " whole " or in one piece : there
fs no mentionable conflict or division within it. 1
Similarly with the other animals, and even with the early
man himself. And so it would appear returning to our
subject that, if we accept the doctrine of Evolution, there is
a progression of animated beings which , though not perfect,
possess in the main the attribute of Health from the lowest
forms up to a healthy and instinctive though certainly limited
man. During all this stage the central law is in the ascendant,
1 And with regard to disease, though it is not maintained that
among the animals there is anything like immunity from it since
diseases of a more or less parasitic character are common in all tribes oi
plants and animals still they seem to be rarer, and the organic
instinct of health greater, than in the civilised man.
22 CIVILISATION: ITS CAUSE AND CURE.
and the physical frame of each creature is the fairly clean
vehicle of its expression varying of course in complexity and
degree according to the point of unfoldment which has been
reached. And when thus in the long process of development the
inner Man (which has lain hidden or dormant within the
animal) at last appears, and the creature consequently takes on
the outer frame and faculties of the human being, which are
only as they are because of the inner man which they represent ;
when it has passed through stage after stage of animal life,
throwing out tentative types and likenesses of what is to come,
and going through innumerable preliminary exercises in special
forms and faculties, till at last it begins to be able to wear the
full majesty of manhood itself then it would seem that that long
process of development is drawing to a close, and that the
goal of creation must be within measurable distance.
But then, at that very moment, and when the goal is, so to
speak, in sight, occurs this failure of " wholeness " of which we
have spoken, this partial break-up of the unity of human
mature and man, instead of going forward any longer in the
same line as before, to all appearance falls.
What is the meaning of this loss of unity t What is the
cause and purpose of this fall and centuries-long exile from the
earlier Paradise 1
There can be but one answer. It is self-knowledge (which
involves in a sense the abandonment of self). Man has to be-
come conscious of his destiny to lay hold of and realise hia
own freedom and blessedness to transfer his consciousness
from the outer and mortal part of him to the inner and undy-
ing.
The cat cannot do this. Though perfect in Its degree, Ite
Interior unfoldment is yet incomplete. The human soul within
it has not yet come forward and declared itself; some sheath-
ing leaves have yet to open before the divine flower-bud can
CIVILISATION. 23
be clearly seen. And when at last (speaking as a fool) the
cat becomes a man when the human soul within the creat-
ure has climbed itself forward and found expression, transform-
ing the outer frame in the process into that of humanity
(which is the meaning I suppose of the evolution theory)
then the creature, though perfect and radiant in the form of
Man, still lacks one thing. It lacks the knowledge of itself ;
it lacks its own identity, and the realisation of the manhood to
which as a fact it has attained.
In the animals consciousness has never returned upon itself.
It radiates easily outwards ; and the creature obeys without
let or hesitation, and with little if any ^/-consciousness, the
law of its being. And when man first appears on the earth,
and even up to the threshold of what we call civilisation, there
is much to show that he should in this respect still be classed
with the animals. Though vastly superior to them in attain-
ments, physical and mental, in power over nature, capacity of
progress, and adaptability, he still in these earlier stages was
like an animal in the unconscious instinctive nature of his
action; and on the other hand, though his moral and in-
tellectual structures were far less complete than those of the
modern man as was a necessary result of the absence of self-
knowledge he actually lived more in harmony with himself
and with nature, 1 than does his descendant ; his impulses,
1 As to the unity of these wild races with Nature, that is a matter
seemingly beyond dispute ; their keenness of sense, sensitive to atmos-
pheric changes, knowledge of properties of plants and habits of animals,
etc. , have been the subject of frequent remark ; but beyond this, their
strong feeling of union with the universal spirit, probably only dimly
elf conscious, but expressing itself very markedly and clearly in their
customs, is most strange and pregnant of meaning. The dances of the
Andaman Islanders on the sands at night, the wild festival of the new
moon among the Fans and other African tribes, the processions through
theforests the chants and dull thudding of drums the t<,rture-daiices of
24 CIVILISATION: ITS CAUSE AND CURB.
both physical and social, were clearer and more unhesitating ;
and his unconsciousness of inner discord and sin a great con-
trast to our modern condition of everlasting strife and per-
plexity.
If then to this stage belongs some degree of human per-
fection and felicity, yet there remains a much vaster height to
be scaled. The human soul which has wandered darkling for
so many thousand of years, from its tiny spark-like germ in
some low form of life to its full splendor and dignity in man,
has yet to come to the knowledge of its wonderful heritage, has
yet to become finally individualised and free, to know itself
immortal, to resume and interpret all its past lives, and to
enter in triumph into the kingdom which it has won.
It has in fact to face the frightful struggle of self-conscious-
ness, or the disentanglement of the true self from the fleeting
and perishable self. The animals and man, unfallen, are
healthy and free from care, but unaware of what they are ; to
attain self-knowledge man must fall; he must become less
than his true self ; he must endue imperfection ; division and
strife must enter his nature. To realise the perfect Life, to
know what, how wonderful it is to understand that all
blessedness and freedom consists in its possession he must
for the moment suffer divorce from it ; the unity, the repose
of his nature must be broken up, crime, disease and unrest
must enter in, and by contrast he must attain to knowledge.
Curious that at the very dawn of the Greek and with it the
European civilisation we have the mystic words " Know Thy-
the young Red Indian bravos in the burning beat of the sun ; the
Dionysiac festivals among the early Greeks ; and indeed the sacrificial
nature-rites and carnivals and extraordinary powers of second -sight found
among all primitive peoples ; all these things indicate clearly a faculty
which, though it had hardly become self-conscious enough to be what
we call religion, was yet in truth the foundation element of religion,
and the germ of some human powers which wait yet to be developed.
CIVILISATION. 2J
self " Inscribed en the temple of the Delphic Apollo ; and that
first among the legends of the Semitic race stands that of
Adam and Eve eating of the tree of the Knowledge of good
and evil ! To the animal there is no such knowledge, to the
early man there was no such knowledge, and to the perfected
man of the future there will be no such knowledge. It is a
temporary perversion, indicating the disunion of the present-
day man the disunion of the outer self from the inner the
horrible dual self-consciousness which is the means ultimately
of a more perfect and conscious union than could ever have
been realised without it the death that is swallowed up in
victory. " For the first man is of the earth, earthy ; but the
second man is the Lord from heaven."
In order then, at this point in his Evolution, to advance any
farther, Man must first fall ; in order to know, he must lose.
In order to realise what Health is, how splendid and glorious a
possession, he must go through all the long negative experience
of Disease ; in order to know the perfect social life, to under-
stand what power and happiness to mankind are involved in
their true relation to each other, he must learn the misery and
suffering which come from mere individualism and greed ; and
In order to find his true Manhood, to discover what a wonderful
power it is, he must first lose it he must become a prey and a
slave to his own passions and desires whirled away like
Phaethon by the horses which he cannot control.
This moment of divorce, then, this parenthesis in human
progress, covers the ground of all History ; and the whole of
Civilisation, and all crime and disease, are only the materials of
its immense purpose themselves destined to pass away as they
arose but to leave their fruits eternal.
Accordingly we find that it has been the work of Civilisation
founded as we have seen on Property in every way to
disintegrate and corrupt man literally to corrupt to break up
26 CIVILISATION: ITS CAUSE AND CURE.
the unity of his nature. It begins with the abandonment of the
primitive life and the growth of the sense of shame (as in the
myth of Adam and Eve.) From this follows the disownment
of the sacredness of sex. Sexual acts cease to be a part of
religious worship; love and desire the inner and the outer
love hitherto undifferentiated, now become two separate things.
(This no doubt a necessary stage in order for the development
of the consciousness of love, but in itself only painful and
abnormal.) It culminates and comes to an end, as to-day, in a
complete divorce between the spiritual reality and the bodily
fulfilment in a vast system of commercial love, bought and
sold, in the brothel and in the palace. It begins with the for-
saking of the hardy nature-life, and it ends with a society
broken down and prostrate, hardly recognisable as human,
amid every form of luxury, poverty and disease. He who had
been the free child of Nature denies his sonship ; he disowns
the very breasts that suckled him. He deliberately turns his
back upon the light of the sun, and hides himself away in
boxes with breathing holes (which he calls houses), living ever
more and more in darkness and asphyxia, and only coming
forth perhaps once a day to blink at the bright god, or to run
back again at the first breath of the free wind for fear of
catching cold ! He muffles himself in the cast-off furs of the
beasts, every century swathing himself in more and more
layers, more and more fearfully and wonderfully fashioned, till
he ceases to be recognisable as the Man that was once the
crown of the animals, and presents a more ludicrous spectacle
than the monkey that sits on his own barrel organ. He ceases
to a great extent to use his muscles, his feet become partially
degenerate, his teeth wholly, his digestion so enervated that he
has to cook his food and make pulps of all his victuals, and his
whole system so obviously on the decline that at last in the
end of time a Kay Robinson arises and prophesies as aforesaid,
CIVILISATION. 27
that lie will before long become wholly toothless, bald and toe-
less.
And so with this denial of Nature comes every form of
disease ; first delicatesse, daintiness, luxury ; then unbalance,
enervation, huge susceptibility to pain. With the shutting of
himself away from the all-healing Power, man inevitably
weakens his whole manhood ; the central bond is loosened, and
he falls a prey to his own organs. He who before was unaware
of the existence of these latter, now becomes only too conscious
of them (and this is it not the very object of the process ?) ;
the stomach, the liver and the spleen start out into painful dis-
tinctness before him, the heart loses its equable beat, the lungs
their continuity with the universal air, and the brain becomes
hot and fevered ; each organ in turn asserts itself abnormally
and becomes a seat of disorder, every corner and cranny of the
body becomes the scene and symbol of disease, and Man gazea
aghast at his own kingdom whose extent he had never
suspected before now all ablaze in wild revolt against him.
And then all going with this period of his development
sweep vast epidemic trains over the face of the earth, plagues
and fevers and lunacies and world-wide festering sores, followed
by armies, ever growing, of doctors they too with their
retinues of books and bottles, vaccinations and vivisections,
and grinning death's-heads in the rear a mad crew, knowing
not what they do, yet all unconsciously, doubtless, fulfilling the
great age-long destiny of humanity.
In all this the influence of Property is apparent enough.
It is evident that the growth of property through the increase
of man's powers of production reacts on the man in three
ways ; to draw him away namely, (1) from Nature, (2) from
his true Self, (3) from his Fellows. In the first place it draws
him away from Nature. That is, that as man's power over
materials increases he creates for himself a sphere and an
28 CIVILISATION: ITS CAUSE AND CURE.
environment of his own, in some sense apart and different from
the great elemental world of the winds and the waves, the
woods and the mountains, in which he has hitherto lived.
He creates what we call the artificial life, of houses and cities,
and shutting himself up in these shuts Nature out. As a
growing boy at a certain point, and partly in order to assert
his independence, wrests himself away from the tender care of
his mother, and even displays just for the time being a
spirit of opposition to her, so the growing Man finding out his
own powers uses them for the time even to do despite to
Nature, and to create himself a world in which she shall have
no part. In the second place the growth of property draws
man away from his true Self. This is clear enough. As his
power over materials and his possessions increases, man finds
the means of gratifying his senses at will. Instead of being
guided any longer by that continent and " whole " instinct
which characterises the animals, his chief motive is now to use
his powers to gratify this or that sense or desire. These
become abnormally magnified, and the man soon places his
main good in their satisfaction ; and abandons his true Self for
his organs, the whole for the parts. Property draws the man
outwards, stimulating the external part of his being, and for a
time mastering him, overpowers the central Will, and brings
about his disintegration and corruption. Lastly Property by
thus stimulating the external and selfish nature in Man, draws
him away from his Fellows. In the anxiety to possess things
for himself, in order to gratify his own bumps, he is necessarily
brought into conflict with his neighbor and comes to regard
him as an enemy. For the true Self of man consists in his
organic relation with the whole body of his fellows ; and
when the man abandons his true Self he abandons also his
true relation to his fellows. The mass-Man must rule in each
unit-man, else the unit-man will drop off and die. But when
CIVILISATION. 29
the outer man tries to separate himself from the inner, the
unit-man from the mass-Man, then the reign of individuality
begins a false and impossible individuality of course, but the
only means of coming to the consciousness of the true in-
dividuality. With the advent of a Civilisation then founded
on Property the unity of the old tribal society is broken up.
The ties of blood relationship which were the foundation of the
jentile system and the guarantees of the old fraternity and
equality become dissolved in favor of powers and authorities
founded on mere possession. The growth of Wealth dis-
integrates the ancient Society ; the temptations of power, of
possession, <fec., which accompany it, wrench the individual
from his moorings; personal greed rules; "each man for
himself " becomes the universal motto ; the hand of every man
is raised against his brother ; and at last society itself becomes
an organisation by which the rich fatten upon the vitals of the
poor, the strong upon the murder of the weak. [It is in-
teresting in this connection to find that Lewis Morgan makes
the invention of a written alphabet and the growth of the
conception of private property the main characteristics of the
civilisation-period as distinguished from the periods of savagery
and barbarism which preceded it ; for the invention of writing
marks perhaps better than anything else could do the period
when Man becomes self-conscious when he records his own
doings and thoughts, and so commences History proper ; and
the growth of private property marks the period when he
begins to sunder himself from his fellows, when therefore the
conception of sin (or separation) first enters in, and with it all
the long period of moral perplexity, and the denial of that
community of life between himself and his fellows which is
really of the essence of man's being.]
And then arises the institution of Government.
Hitherto this had not existed except in a quite rudimentary
30 CIVILISATION: ITS CAUSE AND CURE.
form. The early communities troubled themselves little about
Individual ownership, and what government they had was for
the most part essentially democratic as being merely a choice
of leaders among blood-relations and social equals. But when
the delusion that man can exist for himself alone his outer
and as it were accidental self apart from the great inner and
cosmical self by which he is one with his fellows when this
delusion takes possession of him, it is not long before it finds
expression in some system of private property. The old
community of life and enjoyment passes away, and each man
tries to grab the utmost he can, and to retire into his own lair
for its consumption. Private accumulations arise ; the natural
flow of the bounties of life is dammed back, and artificial
barriers of Law have to be constructed in order to preserve the
unequal levels. Outrage and Fraud follow in the wake of the
desire of possession ; force has to be used by the possessors in
order to maintain the law -barriers against the non-possessors ;
classes are formed ; and finally the formal Government arises,
mainly as the expression of such force ; and preserves itself,
as best it can, until such time as the inequalities which it up-
holds become too glaring, and the pent social waters gathering
head burst through once more and regain their natural levels.
Thus Morgan in his " Ancient Society " points out over and
over again that the civilised state rests upon territorial and
property marks and qualifications, and not upon a personal
basis as did the ancient gens, or the tribe ; and that the
civilised government correspondingly takes on quite a different
character and function from the simple organisation of the
gens. He says (p. 124), "Monarchy is incompatible with
gentilism." Also with regard to the relation of Property to
Civilisation and Government he makes the following pregnant
remarks (p. 505) : " It is impossible to over-estimate the
influence of property in the civilisation of mankind. It was
CIVILISATION. 31
the power that brought the Aryan and Semitic nations out ol
barbarism into civilisation. The growth of the idea of property
in the human mind commenced in feebleness and ended in
becoming its master passion. Governments and Laws are
Instituted with primary reference to its creation, protection
and enjoyment. It introduced human slavery as an instru-
ment in its production ; and after the experience of several
thousand years it caused the abolition of slavery upon the
discovery that a freeman was a better property-making machine."
And in another passage on the same subject, " The dissolution
of society bids fair to become the termination of a career of
which property is the end and aim ; because such a career
contains the elements of self-destruction. Democracy is the
next higher plane. It will be a revival in a higher form of the
liberty, equality and fraternity of the ancient gentes."
The institution of Government is in fact the evidence in
social life that man has lost his inner and central control, and
therefore must resort to an outward one. Losing touch with
the inward Man who is his true guide he declines upon an
external law, which must always be false. If each man
remained in organic adhesion to the general body of his fellows
no serious dis-harmony could occur ; but it is when this vital'
unity of the body politic becomes weak that it has to be pre-
served by artificial means, and thus it is that with the decay of
the primitive and instinctive social life there springs up a form
of government which is no longer the democratic expression
of the life of the whole people ; but a kind of outside authority
and compulsion thrust upon them by a ruling class or caste.
Perhaps the sincerest, and often though not always the
earliest, form of Government is Monarchy. The sentiment of
human unity having been already partly but not quite lost,
the people choose in order to hold society together a man to
rule over them who has this sentiment in a high degree. He
32 CIVILISATION: ITS CAUSE AND CURE.
represents the true Man and therefore the people. This ie
often a time of extensive warfare and the formation of nations.
And it is interesting in this connection to note that the quite
early "Kings" or leaders of each nation just prior to tha
civilisation period were generally associated with the highest
religious functions, as in the case of the Roman rex, the Greek
basileus, the early Egyptian Kings, Moses among the Israelites,
the Druid leaders of the Britons, and so on.
Later, and as the central authority gets more and more
shadowy in each man, and the external attraction of Property
greater, so it does in Society. The temporal and spiritual
powers part company. The king who at first represented the
Divine Spirit or soul of society, recedes into the background,
and his nobles of high degree (who may be compared to the
nobler, more generous, qualities of the mind) begin to take
his place. This is the Aristocracy and the Feudal Age the
Timocracy of Plato ; and is marked by the appearance of large
private tenures of land, and the growth of slavery and
serfdom the slavery thus outwardly appearing in society
being the symbol of the inward enslavement of the man.
Then comes the Commercial Age the Oligarchy or Pluto-
cracy of Plato. Honor quite gives place to material wealth ;
the rulers rule not by personal or hereditary, but by property
qualifications. Parliaments and Constitutions and general
Palaver are the order of the day. Wage-slavery, usury, mort-
gages, and other abominations, indicate the advance of the
mortal process. In the individual man gain is the end of ex-
istence; industry and scientific cunning are his topmost
virtues.
Last of all the break-up is complete. The individual loses
all memory and tradition of his heavenly guide and counter-
part ; his nobler passions fail for want of a leader to whom to
dedicate themselves ; his industry and his intellect serve but
CIVILISATION. 33
to minister to his little swarming desires. This is the era of
anarchy the democracy of Carlyle ; the rule of the rabble,
and mob-law ; caucuses and cackle, competition and universal
greed, breaking out in cancerous tyrannies and plutocracies
a mere chaos and confusion of society. For just as we saw
In the human body, when the inner and positive force of
Health has departed from it, that it falls a prey to parasites
which overspread and devour it ; so when the central inspira-
tion departs out of social life does it writhe with the mere
maggots of individual greed, and at length fall under the
dominion of the most monstrous egotist who has been bred
from its corruption.
Thus we have briefly sketched the progress of the symptoms
of the " disease," which, as said before, runs much (though
not quite) the same course in the various nations which it
attacks. And if this last stage were really the end of all, and
the true Democracy, there were indeed little left to hope for.
No words of Carlyle could blast that black enough. But this
is no true Democracy. Here in this " each for himself " is no
rule of the Demos in every man, nor anything resembling it.
Here is no solidarity such as existed in the ancient tribes and
primaeval society, but only disintegration and a dust-heap.
The true Democracy has yet to come. Here in this present
stage is only the final denial of all outward and class govern
ment, in preparation for the restoration of the inner and true
authority. Here in this stage the task of civilisation comes
to an end ; the purport and object of all these centuries is
fulfilled ; the bitter experience that mankind had to pass
through is completed ; and out of this Death and all the
torture and unrest which accompanies it, comes at last the
Resurrection. Man has sounded the depths of alienation from
his own divine spirit, he has drunk the dregs of the cup of
suffering, he has literally descended into Hell ; henceforth ha
34 CIVILISATION: ITS CAUSE AND CURE.
turns, both in the individual and in society, and mounts de-
liberately and consciously back again towards the unity which
he has lost. 1
And the false democracy parts aside for the disclosure of
the true Democracy which has been formed beneath it which
is not an external government at all, but an inward rule the
rale of the mass-Man in each unit-man. For no outward
government can be anything but a make-shift a temporary
hard chrysalis-sheath to hold the grub together while the new
life is forming inside a device of the civilisation-period.
Farther than this it cannot go, since no true life can rely upon
an external support, and when the true life of society comes
all its forms will be fluid and spontaneous and volun-
tary.
1 There ia another point worth noting as characteristic of the civilisa-
tion-period. This is the abnormal development of the abstract in-
tellect in comparison with the physical senses on the one hand, and the
moral sense on the other. Such a result might be expected, seeing
that abstraction from reality is naturally the great engine of that false
individuality or apartness, which it ia the object of Civilisation to pro-
duce. As it is, during this period man builds himself an intellectual
world apart from the great actual universe around him ; the " ghosts
of things " are studied in books ; the student lives indoors, he cannot
face the open air his theories " may prove very well in lecture-rooms,
yet not prove at all under the spacious clouds, and along the landscape
and flowing currents ; " children are ' ' educated " afar from actual
life ; huge phantom-temples of philosophy and science are reared upon
the most slender foundations ; and in these he lives defended from
actual fact. For as a drop of water when it comes in contact with
red-hot iron wraps itself in a cloud of vapor, and is saved from de-
struction, so the little mind of man, lest it should touch the burning
truth of Nature and God and be consumed, evolves at each point of
contact a veil of insubstantial thought which allows it for a time tO
exist apart, and becomes the nurse of iU self -consciousness.
CIVILISATION. 35
IV
Atn> now, by way of a glimpse into the future after this long
digression what is the route that man will take 1
This is a subject that I hardly dare tackle. " The morning
wind ever blows," says Thoreau, " the poem of creation is ua
interrupted but few are the ears that hear it." And how
can we, gulfed as we are in this present whirlpool, conceive
rightly the glory which awaits ust No limits that our
present knowledge puts need alarm us ; the impossibilities
will yield very easily when the time comes ; and the anato-
mical difficulty as to how and where the wings are to grow
will vanish when they are felt sprouting !
It can hardly be doubted that the tendency will be in-
deed is already showing itself towards a return to nature and
community of human life. This is the way back to the lost
Eden, or rather forward to the new Eden, of which the old
was only a figure. Man has to undo the wrappings and the
mummydom of centuries, by which he has shut himself from
the light of the sun and lain in seeming death, preparing
silently his glorious resurrection for all the world like the
funny old chrysalis that he is. He has to emerge from houses
and all his other hiding places wherein so long ago ashamed (as
at the voice of God in the garden) he concealed himself and
Nature must once more become his home, as it is the home of
the animals and the angels.
As it is written in the old magical formula : " Man clothes
himself to descend, unclothes himself to ascend." Over his
spiritual or wind-like body he puts on a material or earthy
body ; over his earth-body he puts on the skins of animals and
other garments ; then he hides this body in a house behind
curtains and stone walla which become to it as secondary
36 CIVILISATION: ITS CAUSE AND CURE.
skins and prolongations of itself. So that between the man
and his true life there grows a dense and impenetrable hedge ;
and what with the cares and anxieties connected with his
earth-body and all its skins, he soon loses the knowledge
that he is a Man at all, his true self slumbers in a deep and
agelong swoon.
But the instinct of all who desire to deliver the divine im-
ago within them is, in something more than the literal sense,
towards unclothing. And the process of evolution or exfolia-
tion itself is nothing but a continual unclothing of Nature, by
which the perfect human Form which is at the root of it comes
nearer and nearer to its manifestion.
Thus, in order to restore the Health which he has lost,
man has In the future to tend in this direction. Life in-
doors and in houses has to become a fraction only, instead of
the principal part of existence as it is now. Garments
similarly have to be simplified. How far this process may ga
it is not necessary now to enquire. It is sufficiently obvious
that our domestic life and clothing may be at once greatly re-
duced in complexity, and with the greatest advantage made
subsidiary instead of erected into the fetishes which they are.
And everyone may feel assured that each gain in this direc-
tion is a gain in true life whether it be the head that goes
uncovered to the air of heaven, or the feet that press bare the
magnetic earth, or the elementary raiment that allows thro*
its meshes the light itself to reach the vital organs. The life
of the open air, familiarity with the winds and waves, clean
and pure food, the companionship of the animals the very
wrestling with the great Mother for his food all these things
will tend to restore that relationship which man has so long
Jisowned ; and the consequent instreaming of energy into his
system will carry him to perfections of health and radiance
of being at present unsuspected
CIVILISATION. 37
Of course, it will be said that many of these things are
difficult to realise in our country, that an indoor life, with all
its concomitants, is forced upon us by the climate. But if this
la to some small though very small extent true, it forms no
reason why we should not still take advantage of every oppor-
tunity to push in the direction indicated. It must be remem-
bered, too, that our climate is greatly of our own creation.
If the atmosphere of many of our great towns and of the lands
for miles in their neighborhood is devitalised and deadly so
that in cold weather it grants to the poor mortal no com-
pensating power of resistance, but compels him at peril of his
life to swathe himself in great-coats and mufflers the blame is
none but ours. It is we who have covered the lands with a
pall of smoke, and are walking to our own funerals under it.
That this climate, however, at its best may not be suited to
the highest developments of human life is quite possible. Be-
cause Britain has been the scene of some of the greatest
episodes of Civilisation, it does not follow that she will keep the
lead in the period that is to follow ; and the Higher Communi-
ties of the future will perhaps take their rise in warmer lands,
where life is richer and fuller, more spontaneous and more
generous, than it can be here.
Another point in this connection is the food question.
For the restoration of the central vigor when lost or degenerate,
a diet consisting mainly of fruits and grains is most adapted
Animal food often gives for the time being a lot of nervous
energy and may be useful for special purposes ; but the energy
is of a spasmodic feverish kind ; the food has a tendency to
inflame the subsidiary centres, and so to diminish the central
control. Those who live mainly on animal food are specially
liable to disease and not only physically ; for their minds also
fall more easily a prey to desires and sorrows. In time* there-
fore of grief or mental trouble of any kind, aa well as in times
)8 CIVILISATION: ITS CAUSE AND CURB.
of bodily sickness, immediate recourse should be had to the
more elementary diet. The body under this diet endures
work with less fatigue, is less susceptible to pain, and to cold ;
and heals its wounds with extraordinary celerity ; all of which
facts point in the same direction. It may be noted, too, that
foods of the seed kind by which I mean all manner of fruits,
nuts, tubers, grains, eggs, etc. (and I may include milk in its
various forms of butter, cheese, curds, and so forth), not only
contain by their nature the elements of life in their most con-
densed forms, but have the additional advantage that they can
be appropriated without injury to any living creature for
even the cabbage may inaudibly scream when torn up by the
roots and boiled, but the strawberry plant asks us to take of its
fruit, and paints it red expressly that we may see and devour
it ! Both of which considerations must convince us that this
kind of food is most fitted to develop the kernel of man's life.
Which all means cleanness. The unity of our nature
being restored, the instinct of bodily cleanness, both within
and without, which is such a marked characteristic of the
animals, will again characterise mankind only now instead
of a blind instinct it will be a conscious, joyous one ; dirt being
only disorder and obstruction. And thus the whole human
being, mind and body, becoming clean and radiant from its
inmost centre to its farthest circumference "transfigured"
the distinction between the words spiritual and material
disappears. In the words of Whitman, " objects gross and the
unseen soul are one."
But this return to Nature, and identification in some sort
with the great cosmos, does not involve a denial or deprecia-
tion of human life and interests. It is not uncommonly sup-
posed that there is some kind of antagonism between Man and
Nature, and that to recommend a life closer to the latter
means mere asceticism and eremitiam ; and unfortunately thii
CIVILISATION. 39
antagonism does exist to-day, though it certainly will not exist
for ever. To-day it is unfortunately perfectly true that Man
is the only animal who, instead of adorning and beautifying,
makes Nature hideous by his presence. The fox and the
squirrel may make their homes in the wood and add to its
beauty in so doing ; but when Alderman Smith plants his villa
there, the gods pack up their trunks and depart ; they can bear
ft no longer. The Bushmen can hide themselves and become
indistinguishable on a slope of bare rock ; they twine their
naked little yellow bodies together, and look like a heap of dead
sticks ; but when the chimney-pot hat and frock-coat appears,
the birds fly screaming from the trees. This was the great
glory of the Greeks that they accepted and perfected Nature ; as
the Parthenon sprang out of the limestone terraces of the
Acropolis, carrying the natural lines of the rock by gradations
scarce perceptible into the finished and human beauty of frieze
and pediment, and as, above, it was open for the blue air of
heaven to descend into it for a habitation ; so throughout in
all their best work and life did they stand in this close relation to
the earth and the sky and to all instinctive and elemental things,
admitting no gulf between themselves and them, but only per-
fecting their expressiveness and beauty. And some day we shall
again understand this which, in the very sunrise of true Art,
the Greeks so well understood. Possibly some day we shall
again build our houses or dwelling places BO simple and
elemental in character that they will fit in the nooks of the
hills or along the banks of the streams or by the edges of the
woods without disturbing the harmony of the landscape or the
songs of the birds. Then the great temples, beautiful on every
height, or by the shores of the rivers and the lakes, will be the
storehouses of all precious and lovely things. There men, women
and children will come to share in the great and wonderful com-
mon life, the gardens around will be sacred to the unharmed
40 CIVILISATION: ITS CAUSE AND CUR&.
and welcome animals ; there all store and all facilities of books
and music and art for every one, there a meeting place for
social life and intercourse, there dances and games and feasts.
Every village, every little settlement, will have such hall or
halls. No need for private accumulations. Gladly will each
man, and more gladly still each woman, take his or her
treasures, except what are immediately or necessarily in use,
to the common centre, where their value will be increased a
hundred and a thousand fold by the greater number of those
who can enjoy them, and where far more perfectly and with
far less toil they can be tended than if scattered abroad in
private hands. At one stroke half the labor and all the
anxiety of domestic caretaking will be annihilated. The private
dwelling places, no longer costly and labyrinthine in proportion
to the value and number of the treasures they contain, will
need no longer to have doors and windows jealously closed
against fellow man or mother nature. The sun and
air will have access to them, the indwellers will have un-
fettered egress. Neither man nor woman will be tied in
slavery to the lodge which they inhabit; and in becoming
once more a part of nature, the human habitation will at length
cease to be what it is now for at least half the human race a
prison.
Men often ask about the new Architecture what, and of what
sort, it is going to be. But to such a question there can be no
answer till a new understanding of life has entered into
people's minds, and then the answer will be clear enough.
For as the Greek Temples and the Gothic Cathedrals were
built by people who themselves lived but frugally as we should
think, and were ready to dedicate their best work and chief
treasure to the gods and the common life ; and as to-day when
we must needs have for ourselves spacious and luxurious
villas, we seem to be unable to design a decent church or
CIVILISA TION. 41
public building ; so it will not be till we once more find oui
main interest and life in the life of the community aud the
gods that a new spirit will inspire our architecture. Then
when our Temples and Common Halls are not designed to glorify
an individual architect or patron, but are built for the use of free
men and women, to front the sky and the sea and the sun, to
spring out of the earth, companionable with the trees and the
rocks, not alien in spirit from the sunlit globe itself or the depth
of the starry night then I say their form and structure will
quickly determine themselves, and men will have no difficulty in
making them beautiful. And similarly with the homes or
dwelling places of the people. Various as these may be for
the various wants of men, whether for a single individual or
for a family, or for groups of individuals or families, whether to
the last degree simple, or whether more or less ornate and
complex, still the new conception, the new needs of life, will
necessarily dominate them and give them form by a law
unfolding from within.
In such new human life then its fields, its farms, its
workshops, its cities always the work of man perfecting and
beautifying the lands, aiding the efforts of the sun and soil,
giving voice to the desire of the mute earth in such new
communal life near to nature, BO far from any asceticism or
inhospitality, we are fain to see far more humanity and
sociability than ever before : an infinite helpfulness and sym-
pathy, as between the children of a common mother. Mutual
help and combination will then have become spontaneous and
instinctive : each man contributing to the service of his
neighbor as inevitably and naturally as the right hand goes
to help the left in the human body and for precisely the
same reason. Every man think of it! will do the work
which he Likes, which he desires to do, which is obviously
before him to do, and which he knows will b useful without
42 CIVILISATION: ITS CAUSE AND CURB.
bhought of wages or reward ; and the reward will come to him
as inevitably and naturally as in the human body the blood
flows to the member which is exerting itself. All the endless
burden of the adjustments of labor and wages, of the war of
duty and distaste, of want and weariness, will be thrown
aside all the huge waste of work done against the grain will
be avoided ; out of the endless variety of human nature will
spring a perfectly natural and infinite variety of occupations,
all mutually contributive ; Society at last will be free and the
human being after long ages will have attained to deliverance.
This is the Communism which Civilisation has always hated,
as it hated Christ. Yet it is inevitable ; for the cosmical man,
the instinctive elemental man accepting and crowning nature,
necessarily fulfils the universal law of nature. As to External
Government and Law, they will disappear ; for they are only
the travesties and transitory substitutes of Inward Government
and Order. Society in its final state is neither a Monarchy,
nor an Aristocracy, nor a Democracy, nor an Anarchy, and yet
in another sense it is all of these. It is an Anarchy because
there is no outward rule, but only an inward and invisible
spirit of life ; it is a Democracy because it is the rule of the
Mass-man, or Demos, in each unit man ; it is an Aristocracy
because there are degrees and ranks of such inward power in
all men ; and it is a Monarchy because all these ranks and
powers merge in a perfect unity and central control at last.
And so it appears that the outer forms of government which
belong to the Civilisation-period are only the expression in
separate external symbols of the facts of the true inner life of
society.
And just as thus the various external forms of government
during the Civilisation-period find their justification and inter-
pretation in the ensuing period, so will it be with the
mechanical and other products of the present time ; they will
CIVILISATION. 43
be taken up, and find their proper place and use in the time to
dome. They will not be refused ; but they will have to be
brought into subjection. Our locomotives, machinery, tele-
graphic and postal systems ; our houses, furniture, clothes,
books ; our fearful and wonderful cookery, strong drinks, teas,
tobaccos ; our medical and surgical appliances ; high-faluting
sciences and philosophies, and all other engines hitherto
of human bewilderment, have simply to be reduced to abject
subjection to the real man. All these appliances, and a
thousand others such as we hardly dream of, will come hi to
perfect his power and increase his freedom ; but they will not
be the objects of a mere fetish-worship as now. Man will
use them, instead of their using him. His real life will
lie in a region far beyond them. But in thus for a moment
denying and " mastering " the products of Civilisation,
will he for the first time discover their true value, and
reap from them an enjoyment unknown before.
The same with the moral powers. As said before,
the knowledge of good and evil at a certain point passes
away, or becomes absorbed into a higher knowledge.
The perception of Sin goes with a certain weakness in the
man. As long as there is conflict and division within
him, BO long does he seem to perceive conflicting and
opposing principles in the world without. As long as
the objects of the outer world excite emotions in him which
pass beyond his control, so long do those objects stand
as the signals of evil of disorder and sin. Not that the
objects are bad in themselves, or even the emotions which they
excite, but that all through this period these things serve to
the man as indications of hit weakness. But when the
central power is restored in man and all things are reduced to
his service, it is impossible for him to see badness in anything.
The bodily is no longer antagonistic to the spiritual love, but
44 CIVILISATION: ITS CAUSE AND CURE.
is absorbed into It. All his passions take their places perfectly
naturally, and become when the occasions arise the vehicles of
bis expression. Vices under existing conditions are vices
simply because of the inordinate and disturbing influence they
exercise, but will cease again to be vices when the man
regains his proper command. Thus Socrates having a clean
soul in a clean body could drink his boon companions under
the table and then go out himself to take the morning air
what was a blemish and defect in them being simply an added
power of enjoyment to himself!
The point of difference throughout (being the transference of
the centre of gravity of life and consciousness from the partial
to the universal man), is symbolized by the gradual resumption
of more universal conditions. That is to say that during the
civilisation-period, the body being systematically wrapped in
clothes, the head alone represents man the little finnikin,
intellectual, self-conscious man in centra-distinction to the
cosmical man represented by the entirety of the bodily organs.
The body has to be delivered from its swathings in order that
the cosmical consciousness may once more reside in the human
breast. We have to become " all face " again as the savage
said of himself. 1
Where the cosmic self is, there is no more self-consciousness.
The body and what is ordinarily called the self are felt to be
only parts of the true self, and the ordinary distinctions of
inner and outer, egotism and altruism, etc., lose a good deal of
their value. Thought no longer returns upon the local self as
the chief object of regard, but consciousness is continually
radiant from it, filling the body and overflowing upon external
Nature. Thus the Sun in the physical world is the allegory ol
'See Alonso di Ovalle's Account of the Kingdom of Chile in Churchill's
Collection of Voyages and TravtU, 1724.
CIVILISATION. 45
the true self. The worshipper must adore the Sun, he must
saturate himself with sunlight, and take the physical Sun into
himself. Those who live by fire and candle-light are filled with
phantoms ; their thoughts are Will-o'-th'-wisp-like images
of themselves, and they are tormented by a horrible self-
consciousness.
And when the Civilisation-period has passed away, the old
Nature-religion perhaps greatly grown will come back.
This immense stream of religious life which beginning far
beyond the horizon of earliest history has been deflected into
various metaphysical and other channels of Judaism,
Christianity, Buddhism, and the like during the historical
period, will once more gather itself together to float on its
bosom all the arks and sacred vessels of human progress.
Man will once more feel his unity with his fellows, he will
feel his unity with the animals, with the mountains and the
streams, with the earth itself and the slow lapse of the
constellations, not as an abstract dogma of Science or Theology,
but as a living and ever-present fact. Ages back this has
been understood better than now. Our Christian ceremonial
is saturated with sexual and astronomical symbols ; and long
before Christianity existed, the sexual and astronomical were
the main forms of religion. That is to*say, men instinctively
felt and worshipped the great life coming to them through
Sex, the great life coming to them from the deeps of Heaven.
They deified both. They placed their gods their own human
forms hi sex, they placed them in the sky. And not only
so, but wherever they felt this kindred human life in the
animals, in the ibis, the bull, the lamb, the snake, the
crocodile ; hi the trees and flowers, the oak, the ash, the
laurel, the hyacinth ; in the streams and water-falls, on the
mountainsides or in the depths of the sea they placed them.
The whole universe was full of a life which, tho' not always
46 CIVILISATION: ITS CAUSE AND CURE.
friendly, was human and kindred to their own, fdt by them,
not reasoned about, but simply perceived. To the early man
the notion of his having a separate individuality could only
with difficulty occur ; hence he troubled himself not with the
suicidal questionings concerning the whence and whither
which now vex the modern mind. 1 For what causes these
questions to be asked is simply the wretched feeling of
isolation, actual or prospective, which man necessarily has
when he contemplates himself as a separate atom in this
immense universe the gulf which lies below seemingly ready
to swallow him, and the anxiety to find some mode of escape.
But when he feels once more that he, that he himself, is
absolutely mdivisibly and indestructibly a part of this great
whole why then there is no gulf into which he can possibly
fall ; when he is sensible of the fact, why then the how of its
realisation, tho' losing none of its interest, becomes a matter
for whose solution he can wait and work in faith and con-
tentment of mind. The Sun or Sol, visible image of his very
Soul, closest and most vital to him of all mortal things,
occupying the illimitable heaven, feeding all with its life ; the
Moon, emblem and nurse of his own reflective thought, the
conscious Man, measurer of Time, mirror of the Sun; the
planetary passions wandering to and fro, yet within bounds ;
the starry destinies ; the changes of the earth, and the seasons ;
the upward growth and unfoldment of all organic life; the
emergence of the perfect Man, towards whose birth all creation
groans and travails all these things will return to become
realities, and to be the frame or setting of his supra-mundane
life. The meaning of the old religions will come back to him.
On the high tops once more gathering he will celebrate
with naked dances the glory of the human form ard the great
iSa* Appendix, p. 50.
CIVILISATION,
processions of the stars, or greet the bright horn of the young
moon which now after a hundred centuries comes back laden
with such wondrous associations all the yearnings and the
dreams and the wonderment of the generations of mankind
the worship of Astarte and of Diana, of Isis or the Virgin
Mary ; once more in sacred groves will he reunite the passion
and the delight of human love with his deepest feelings of the
sanctity and beauty of Nature ; or in the open, standing un-
covered to the Sun, will adore the emblem of the everlasting
splendor which shines within. The same sense of vital
perfection and exaltation which can be traced in the early
and pre-civilisation peoples only a thousand times intensified,
defined, illustrated and purified will return to irradiate the
redeemed and delivered Man.
In suggesting thus the part which Civilisation has played in
history, I am aware that the word itself is difficult to define
is at best only one of those phantom-generalisations which the
mind is forced to employ ; also that the account I have given
of it is sadly imperfect, leaning perhaps too much to the
merely negative and destructive aspect of this thousand-year
long lapse of human evolution. I would also remind the
reader that though it is perfectly true that under the dis-
solving influence of civilisation empire after empire has gone
under and disappeared, and the current of human progress
time after time has only been restored again by a fresh influx
of savagery, yet its corruptive tendency has never had a quite
unlimited fling ; but that all down the ages of its dominance
over the earth we can trace the tradition of a healing and
redeeming power at work in the human breast and an anticipa-
tion of the second advent of the son of man. Certain institu-
tions, too, such as Art and the Family (though it seems not
48 CIVILISATION: ITS CAUSE AND CURE.
unlikely that both of these will greatly change when the
special conditions of their present existence have disappeared),
have served to keep the sacred flame alive; the latter pre-
serving in island-miniatures, as it were, the ancient communal
humanity when the seas of individualism and greed covered
the general face of the earth ; the former keeping up, so to
speak, a navel-cord of contact with Nature, and a means of
utterance of primal emotions else unsatisfiable in the world
around.
And if it seem extravagant to suppose that Society will ever
emerge from the chaotic condition of strife and perplexity in
which we find it all down the lapse of historical time, or to
hope that the civilisation-process which has terminated fatally
so Invariably in the past will ever eventuate in the establish-
ment of a higher and more perfect health-condition, we may
for our consolation remember that to-day there are features in
the problem which have never been present before. In the
first place, to-day Civilisation is no longer isolated, as in the
ancient world, in surrounding floods of savagery and barbarism,
but it practically covers the globe, and the outlying savagery
is so feeble as not possibly to be a menace to it. This may at
first appear a drawback, for (it will be said) if Civilisation
be not renovated by the influx of external Savagery its own
Inherent flaws will destroy society all the sooner. And there
would be some truth in this if it were not for the following
consideration: Namely, that while for the first time in His-
tory Civilisation is now practically continuous over the globe,
now also for the first time can we descry forming in continuous
line within its very structure the forces which are destined to
destroy it and to bring about the new order. While hitherto
isolated communisms, as suggested, have existed here and
there and from time to time, now for the first time in History
both the masses and the thinkers of all the advanced nations
CIVILISATION. 49
of the world are consciously feeling their way towards the
establishment of a socialistic and communal life on a vast scale.
The present competitive society is more and more rapidly be-
coming a mere dead formula and husk within which the out-
lines of the new and human society are already discernible.
Simultaneously and as if to match this growth, a move towards
Nature and Savagery is for the first time taking place from
within, instead of being forced upon society from without.
The nature-movement begun years ago in literature and art ig
now among the more advanced sections of the civilised world
rapidly realising itself in actual life, going so far even as a
denial, among some, of machinery and the complex products of
Civilisation, and developing among others into a gospel of
salvation by sandals and sunbaths 1 It is in these two move-
ments towards a complex human Communism and towards,
individual freedom and Savagery in some sort balancing and
correcting each other, and both visibly growing up within
tho' utterly foreign to our present-day Civilisation, that we
have fair grounds I think for looking forward to its cure.
APPENDIX.
l8EE p. 9] The following remarks by Mr. H. B. Cotterill on the natives
around Lake Nyassa, among whom he lived at a time, 1876-8, when
the region was almost unvisited, may be of interest. " In regard of
merely ' animal ' development and well-being, that is in the delicate
perfection of bodily faculties (perceptive), the African savage is as a
rule incomparably superior to us. One feels like a child, utterly de-
pendent on them, when traveling or hunting with them. It is true
that many may be found (especially amongst the weaker tribes that
have been slave-hunted or driven into barren corners) who are half-
starved and wizened, hat as a rule they are splendid animals. In
character there is a great want of that strength which in the educated
civilised man is secured by the roots striking out into the Past and
Future and in spite of their immense perceptive superiority they feel
and acknowledge the superior force of character in the white man.
D
50 CIVILISATION: ITS CAUSE AND CURE.
They are the very converse of the Stoic self -sufficient sage like children
in their ' admiration ' and worship of the Unknown. Hence their absolute
want of Conceit, though they possess self-command and dignity.
They are, to those they love and respect, faithful and devoted
their faithfulness and truthfulness are dictated by no ' categorical
imperative,' but by personal affection. Towards an enemy they
can be, without any conscientious scruples, treacherous and in-
humanly cruel. I should say that there is scarcely any possible idea
that is so foreign to the savage African mind as that of general
philanthropy or enemy-love."
"In endurance the African savage beats us hollow (except trained
athletes). On one occasion my men rowed my boat with 10 foot oars
against the wind in a choppy sea for 25 hours at one go, across Kuwirwe
Bay, about 60 miles. They never once stopped or left their seats
just handed round a handful of rice now and then. I was at the helm
all the time and had enough of it ! ... They carry 80 Ibs on their
heads for 10 hours through swamps and jungles. Four of my men
carried a sick man weighing 14 stones in a hammock for 200 miles,
right across the dreaded M alikata Swamp. But for sudden emergencies,
equalls, etc, they are nowhere."
[See p. 10] " So lovely a scene made easily credible the suggestion,
otherwise highly probable, that the Golden Age was no mere fancy of
the poets, but a reminiscence of the facts of social life in its primitive
organisation of village and house-communities." (J. S. Stuart-Glennie'a
Europe, and Asia, ch. I., Servia.)
[See p. 46] "It was only on the up-break of the primitive socialisms
that the passionate d<esire of, and therefore belief in, individual Im-
mortality arose. With an intense feeling, not of an independent
individual life, but of a dependent common life, there is no passionate
desire of, though there may be more or less of belief in, a continuance
after death of individual existence." (Ibid, p. 161.)
MODERN SCIENCE:
A CRITICISM.
iravrl \6y<p Xoyos wros avriKemu.
TT is one of the difficulties which meet anyone who suggests
that modern science is not wholly satisfactory, that it is
immediately assumed that the writer is covertly defending
what Ingersoll calls the " rib-story," or that he wishes to restore
belief in the literal inspiration of the Bible. But, religious
controversy apart, and while admitting that Science has done a
great work in cleaning away the kitchen-middens of super-
stition and opening the path to clearer and saner views of
the world, it is possible and there is already a growing feeling
that way that her positive contributions to our comprehension
of the order of the universe have in late times been
disappointing, and that even her methods are only of limited
applicability. After a glorious burst of perhaps fifty years,
amid great acclamations and good hopes that the crafty old
universe was going to be caught in her careful net, Science, it
must be confessed, now finds herself in almost every direction
in the most hopeless quandaries ; and, whether the rib-story be
true or not, has at any rate provided no very satisfactory
substitute for it. And the reason of this failure is very
obvious. It goes with a certain defect in the human mind,
which, as we have pointed out (note, p. 34), necessarily belongs
to the Civilisation-period the tendency, namely, to separate the
5 CIVILISATION: ITS CAUSE AND CURB.
logical and intellectual part of man from the emotional and in-
stinctive, and to give it a locus standi of its own. Science has
failed because she has attempted to carry out the investigation
of nature from the intellectual side alone neglecting the other
constituents necessarily involved in the problem. She has
failed because she has attempted an impossible task ; for the
discovery of a permanently valid and purely intellectual
representation of the universe is simply impossible. Such a
thing does not exist.
The various theories and views of nature which we hold are
merely the fugitive envelopes of the successive stages of
human growth each set of theories and views belonging
organically to the moral and emotional stage which has been
reached, and being in some sort the expression of it ; so that
the attempt at any given time to set up an explanation ol
phenomena which shall be valid in itself and without reference to
the mental condition of those who set it up, necessarily ends in
failure ; and the present state of confusion and contradiction
in which modern Science finds itself is merely the result of such
attempt.
Of course this limitation of the validity of Science has been
recognised by most of those who have thought about the
matter ; * but it is so commonly overlooked, and latterly the
notion has so far gained ground that the " laws " of science are
immutable facts and eternal statements of verity, that it may
be worth while to treat the subject a little more in detail.
The method of Science is the method of all mundane
knowledge; it is that of limitation or actual ignorance.
Placed in face of the great uncontained unity of Nature we
can only deal with it in thought by selecting certain details
and isolating those (either wilfully or unconsciously) from the
rest. That is right enough. But hi doing so in isolating
auch and such details we practically beg the question we are
* SM not*, p. U
MODERN SCIENCE: A CRITICISM
In search of ; and, moreover, in supposing such isolation we
suppose what is false, and therefore vitiate our conclusion.
From these two radical defects of all intellectual inquiry we
cannot escape. The views of Science are like the views of a
mountain ; each is only possible as long as you limit yourself
to a certain stand-point. Move your position, and the view is
changed.
Perhaps the word "species" will illustrate our meaning as
well as any word ; and, in a sense, the word is typical of the
method of Science. I see a dog for the first time. It is a fox-
hound. Then I see a second fox-hound, and a third and a
fourth. Presently I form from these few instances a general
conception of " dog." But after a time I see a grey-hound and
a terrier and a mastiff, and my old conception is destroyed. A
new one has to be formed, and then a new one and a new one.
Now I overlook the whole race of civilised dogs and am
satisfied with my wisdom ; but presently I come upon some
wild dogs, and study the habits of the wolf and the fox.
Geology turns me up some links, and my conception of dog
melts away like a lump of ice into surrounding water. My
species exists no more. As long as I knew a few of the facts I
could talk very wise about them; or if I limited myself
arbitrarily, as we will say, to a study only of animals in
England at the present day, I could classify them ; but widen
the bounds of my knowledge, the area of observation, and all
my work has to be done over again. My species is not a valid
fact of Nature, but a fiction arising out of my own ignorance
or arbitrary isolation of the objects observed.
Or to take an instance from Astronomy. We are accustomed
to say that the path of the moon is an ellipse. But this is a
very loose statement. On enquiry we find that, owing to
perturbations supposed to be produced by the sun, the path
deviates considerably from an ellipse. In fact in strict
54 CIVILISATION: ITS CAUSE AND CURE.
calculations it is taken as being a certain ellipse only for an
instant the next instant it is supposed to be a portion of
another ellipse. We might then call the path an irregular
curve somewhat resembling an ellipse. This is a new view.
But on further enquiry it appears that, while the moon is going
round the earth, the earth itself is speeding on through space
about the sun in consequence of which the actual path of the
moon does not in the least resemble an ellipse ! Finally the
sun itself is in motion with regard to the fixed stars, and they
are in movement too. What then is the path of the moon f
No one knows ; we have not the faintest idea the word itself
ceases to have any assignable meaning. It is true that if we
agree to ignore the perturbations produced by the sun as in fact
we do ignore perturbations produced by the planets and other
bodies and if we agree to ignore the motion of the earth, and
the flight of the solar system through space, and even the
movement of any centre round which that may be speeding,
we may then say that the moon moves in an ellipse. But this
has obviously nothing to do with actual facts. The moon doet
not move in an ellipse not even " relatively to the earth "
and probably never has done and never will do so. It may be
a convenient view or fiction to say that it would do so under
such and such circumstances but it is still only a fiction. To
attempt to isolate a small portion of the phenomena from the
rest in a universe of which the unity is one of Science's most
cherished convictions, is obviously self-stultifying and useless.
But you say it can be proved by mathematics that the ellipse
would be the path under these conditions ; to which I reply
that the mathematical proof, though no doubt cogent to the
human mind (as at present constituted in most people), is
open to the same objection that it does not deal with actual
facts. It deals with a mental supposition, i.e., that there are
only two bodies acting on each other a case which never hag
MODERN SCIENCE: A CRITICISM 55
occurred and never can occur and then, assuming the law of
gravitation (which is just the thing which has to be proved),
it arrives at a mental formula, the ellipse. But to argue from
this process that the ellipse is really a thing in Nature, and
that the heavenly bodies do move or even tend to move in
ellipses, is obviously a most unwarrantable leap in the dark.
Finally you argue that the leap is warranted because, by
assuming that the moon and planets move in ellipses, you
can actually foretell things that happen, as for instance the
occurrence of eclipses ; and in reply to that I can only say
that Tycho Brahe" foretold eclipses almost as well by assuming
that the heavenly bodies moved in epicycles, and that modern
astronomers actually do apply the epicycle theory in their
mathematical formulae. The epicycles were an assumption
made for a certain purpose, and the ellipses are an assumption
made for the same purpose. In some respects the ellipse is a
more convenient fiction than the epicycle, but it is no less a
fiction.
In other words with regard to this " path of the moon "
(as with regard to any other phenomenon of Nature) our
knowledge of it must be either absolute or relative. But we
cannot know the absolute path ; and as to the relative, why
all we can say is that it does not exist (any more than species
exists) we cannot break up Nature so ; it is not a thing in
Nature but in our own minds it is a view and a fiction.
Again, let us take an example from Physics Boyle's law of
the compressibility of gases. This law states that, the
temperature remaining constant, the volume of a given
quantity of gas is inveisely proportional to its pressure. It is
a law which has been made a good deal of, and at one time
was thought to be true, i.e., it was thought to be a statement
of fact. A more extended and careful observation, however,
shows that it is only true under so many limitations, that, like
$6 CIVILISATION: ITS CAUSE AND CURE.
the ellipse in Astronomy, it must be regarded as a convenient
fiction and nothing more. It appears that air follows the
supposed law pretty well, but not by any means exactly except
within very narrow limits of pressure ; other gases, such as
carbonic acid and hydrogen, deviate from it very considerably
some more than others, and some in one direction and some
in the opposite. It was found, among other things, that the
nearer a gas was to its liquefying point, the greater was the
deviation from the supposed law, and the conclusion was
jumped at that the law was true for perfect gases only. This
idea of a perfect gas of course involved the assumption that
gases, as they get farther and farther removed from their
liquefying point, reach at last a fixed and stable condition,
when no further change in their qualities takes place at any
rate for a very long time and Boyle's law was supposed to
apply to this condition. Since then, however, it has been
discovered that there is an ultra-gaseous state of matter, and
on all sides it is becoming abundantly clear that the change in
the condition of matter from the liquid state to the ultra-
gaseous state is perfectly continuous through all modifications
of liquidity and condensation and every degree of perfection
and imperfection of gassiness to the utmost rarity of the
fourth state. At what point, then, does Boyle's law really
apply ? Obviously it applies exactly at only one point in this
long ascending scale at one metaphysical point and at
every other point it is incorrect. But no gas in Nature
remains or can be maintained just at one point in the scale of
its innumerable changes. Consequently all we can say is that
out of the innumerable different states that gases are capable
of, and the innumerable different laws of compressibility which
they therefore follow, we could theoretically find one state to
which would correspond the law of compressibility called
Boyle's law ; and that if we could preserve a gas in that state
MODERN SCIENCE: A CRITICISM. 57
(which we can't) Boyle's law really would be true just for that
case. la other words, the law is metaphysical. It has no
real existence. It is a convenient view or fiction, arising in
the first place out of ignorance, and only tenable as long as
further observation is limited or wilfully ignored.
This then is the Method of Science. It consists in forming
a law or statement by only looking at a small portion of the
facts ; then when the other facts come in the law or statement
gradually fades away again. Conrad Gessner and other early
zoologists began by classifying animals according to the
number of their horns ! Political Economy begins by classify-
ing social action under a law of Supply and Demand. When
people believed that the earth was flat they generalised the
facts connected with the fall of heavy bodies into a conception
of "up and down." These were two opposite directions in
space. Heavy bodies took the " downward ; " it was their
nature. But in time, and as fresh facts came in, it became
impossible to group animals any longer by their horns ; " up
and down " ceased to have a meaning when it was known that
the earth was round. Then fresh laws and statements had to
be formed. In the last-mentioned case it being conceived
that the earth was the centre of the universe the new law
supposed was that all heavy bodies tended to the centre of the
earth as such. This was all right and satisfactory for a while ;
but presently it appeared that the earth was not the centre of
the universe, and that some heavy bodies such as the
satellites of Jupiter did not in fact tend to the centre of the
earth at all. Another lump of ignorance (which had enabled
the old generalisation to exist) was removed, and a new
generalisation, that of universal gravitation, was after a time
formed. But it is probable that this law is only conceived of
as true thro' our ignorance ; nay it is certain that belief in
its truth presents the gravest difficulties.
$8 CIVILISATION: ITS CAUSE AND CURE.
In fact here we come upon an important point. It IB
sometimes said that, granting the above arguments and the
partiality and defectivenees of the laws of Science, still they
are approximations to the truth, and as each fresh fact is intro-
duced the consequent modification of the old law brings us
nearer and nearer to a limit of rigorous exactness which we
shall reach at last if we only have patience enough. But is
this so? What kind of rigorous statement shall we reach
when we have got all the facts int Remembering that
Nature is one, and that if we try to get a rigorous statement
for one set of phenomena (as say the lunar theory) by isolating
them from the rest, we are thereby condemning ourselves
beforehand to a false conclusion, is it not evident that our
limit is at all times infinitely far off? If one knew all the
facts relating to a given inquiry except two or three, one
might reasonably suppose that one was near a limit of exact-
ness in one's knowledge ; but seeing that in our investigation
of Nature we only know two or three, so to speak, out of a
million, it is obvious that at any moment the fresh law arising
from increased experience may completely upset our former
calculations. There is a difference between approximating to
a wall and approximating to the North Star. In the one case
you are tending to a speedy conclusion of your labors, in th
other case you are only going in a certain direction. The
theories of Science generally belong under the second head.
They mark the direction which the human mind is taking at
ihe moment in question, but they mark no limits. At each
point the appearance of a limit is introduced which becomes,
like a mirage in the desert, an object of keen pursuit ; but the
limit is not really there it is only an effect of the standpoint,
and disappears again after a time as the observer moves. In
the case of gravitation there is for the moment an appearance
of finality in the law of the inverse square of the distance,
MODERN SCIENCE: A CRITICISM. 59
but this arises probably from the fact that the law is derived
from a limited area of observation only, namely the move-
ments (at great distances from each other) of some of the
heavenly bodies. * The Cavendish and Schehallien experiments
do not show more than that the law at ordinary distances on
the earth's surface does not vary very much from the above ;
while the so-called molecular forces compel us (unless we make
the very artificial assumption that a variety of attractions and
repulsions coexist in matter alongside of, and yet totally dis-
tinct from, the attraction of gravitation) to suppose very great
modifications of the law for small distances. In fact, as we
saw of Boyle's law before the Newtonian law is probably
metaphysical true under certain limited conditions and the
appearance of finality has been given to it by the fact that our
observations have been made under such or similar conditions.
When we extend our observation into quite other regions of
space, the law of the inverse square ceases to appear as even
an approximation to the truth as, for instance, the law of the
inverse fifth power has been thought to be nearer the mark
for small molecular distances.
And indeed the state of the great theories of Science in the
present day the confusion in which the Atomic theory of
physics finds itself, the dismal insufficiency of the Darwin
theory of the survival of the fittest ; the collapse in late times
1 It is not generally realised how feeble a force gravitation is. It is
calculated (Encycl. Brit., Art. Gravitation) that two masses, each weigh-
ing 415,000 tons, and placed a mile apart, would exert on each other
an attractive force of only one pound. If one, therefore, was as far
from the other as the moon is from the earth, their attraction would
only amount to 57^0 j|oo oooth ^ a P oun< l. This is a small force to govern
the movement of a body weighing 415,000 tons 1 and it is easy to see
that a slight variation in the law of the force might for a long period
pass undetected, though in the course of hundreds of centuries it might
become of the greatest importance
60 CIVILISATION: ITS CAUSE AND CURE.
of one of the fundamental theories of Astronomy, namely that
of the stability of the lunar and planetary orbits ; the cata-
clysms and convulsions which Geology seems just now to be
undergoing; the appalling and indeed insurmountable difficulties
which attach to the Undulatory theory of Light; the final
wreck and abandonment of the Value-theory, the foundation-
theory of Political Economy all these things do not seem to
point to very near limits of rigorous exactness ! An im-
pregnable theory, or one nearing the limit of impregnability, is
in fact as great an absurdity as an impregnable armor-plate.
Certainly, given the cannon-balls, you can generally find an
armor-plate which will be proof against them ; but given the
armor-plate, you can always find cannon-balls which will
smash it up.
The method of Science, as being a method of artificial limi-
tation or actual ignorance, is curiously illustrated by a con-
lideration of its various branches. I have taken some examples
from Astronomy, which is considered the most exact of the
physical sciences. Now does it not seem curious that Astronomy
the study of the heavenly bodies, which are the most distant
from us of all bodies, and most difficult to observe should yet
be the most perfect of the sciences 1 Yet the reason is obvious.
Astronomy is the most perfect science because we know least about
it because our ignorance of the actual phenomena is most
profound. Situated in fact as we are, on a speck in space,
with our observations limited to periods of time which, com-
pared with the stupendous flights of the stars, are merely
momentary and evanescent, we are in somewhat the position
of a mole surveying a railway track and the flight of locomo-
tives. And as a man seeing a very small arc of a very vast
circle easily mistakes it for a straight line, so we are easily
satisfied with cheap deductions and solutions in Astronomy,
which a more extended experience would cause us to reject.
MODERN SCIENCE: A CRITICISM. 61
The man may have a long way to go along his " straight line "
before he discovers that it is a curve; he may have much
farther to go along his curve before he discovers that it is not
a circle; and much farther still to go before he finds out
whether it is an ellipse or a spiral or a parabola, or none of
these ; yet what curve it is will make an enormous difference
in his ultimate destination. So with the astronomer ;
and yet Astronomy is allowed to pass as an exact
science ! l
Well then, as in Astronomy we get an " exact science " be-
cause the facts and phenomena are on such a tremendous
scale that we only see a minute portion of them just a few
details so to speak and our ignorance therefore allows us to
1 As another instance of the same thing, let me quote a passage from
Maxwell's " Theory of Heat," p. 31 ; the italics are mine : " In our de-
scription of the physical properties of bodies as related to heat we hav
begun with solid bodies, as those which we can most easily handle, and
have gone on to liquids, which we can keep in open vessels, and have
now come to gases, which will escape from open vessels, and which are
generally invisible. This is the order which is most natural in our
first study of these different states. But as soon as we have been
made familiar with the most prominent features of these different
conditions of matter, the most scientific course of study is in the reverse
order, beginning with gases, on account of the greater simplicity of
their laws, then advancing to liquids, the more complex laws of which
are much more imperfectly known, and concluding with the little that
has been hitherto discovered about the constitution of solid bodies."
That is to say that Science finds it easier to work among gases which
are invisible and which we can know little about than among solids,
which we are familiar with and which we can easily handle ! This
seems a strange conclusion, but it will be found to represent a common
procedure of Science the truth probably being that the laws of gases
are not one whit simpler than the laws of liquids and solids, but that
on account of our knowing so much less about gaaes it is easier for us
to feign laws in their case than in *iie case of solids, and leas easy for
our errors to be detected.
62 CIVILISATION: ITS CAUSE AND CURE.
iogmatlse ; so at the other end of the scale in Chemistry and
Physics we get quasi-exact sciences, because the facts and
phenomena are on such a minute scale that we overlook all the
details and see only certain general effects here and there.
When a solution of cupric sulphate is treated with ammonia a
mass of flocculent green precipitate is formed. No one has the
faintest notion of all the various movements and combinations of
the molecules of these two fluids which accompany the appearance
of the precipitate. They are no doubt very complex. But among
all the changes that are taking place, one change has the advant-
age of being visible to the eye, and the chemist singles that out as
the main phenomenon. So chemistry at large consists in a few,
very few, facts taken at random as it were (or because they
happen to be of such a nature as to be observable) out of the
enormous mass of facts really concerned : and because of their
fewness the chemist is able to arrange them as he thinks in
some order, that is, to generalise about them. But it is certain
as can be that he only has to extend the number of his facts,
or his powers of observation, to get all his generalisations
upset. The same may be said of magnetism, light, heat, and
the other physical sciences but it Is not necessary to prove
in detail what is sufficiently obvious.
But now, roughly speaking, there is a third region of human
observation a region which does not, like Astronomy (and
Geology), lie so far beyond and above us that we only see a
very small portion of it ; nor, like Chemistry and Physics, so
far below us and under such minute conditions of space and
time that we can only catch its general effects ; but which
lies more on a level with man himself the so-called organic
world the study of man, as an individual and in society, his
history, his development, the study of the animals, the planta
even, and the laws of life the sciences of Biology, Sociology,
History, Psychology, and the rest. Now this region is ob-
MODERN SCIENCE : A CRITICISM, 63
viously that which man knows most of. I don't say that he
generalises most about it but he knows the facts best. For
one observation that he makes of the habits and behavior of
the stars, or of chemical solutions for one observation in the
remote regions of Astronomy or Chemistry he makes thou-
sands and millions of the habits and behavior of his fellow-
men, and hundreds and thousands of those of the animals and
plants. Is it not curious then that in this region he is least
sure, least dogmatic, most doubtful whether there be a law or
no ? Or, rather, is it not quite in accord with our contention,
namely that Science, like an uninformed boy, is most definite
and dogmatic just where actual knowledge is least.
It will however be replied that the phenomena of living
beings are far more complex than the phenomena of Astronomy
or Physics and that is the reason why exact science makes so
little way with them. Though man knows many million times
more about the habits of his fellow-men than about the habits
of the stars, yet the former subject is so many million times
more complicated than the latter that all his additional know-
ledge does not avail him. This is the plea. Yet it does not
hold water. It is an entire assumption to say that the
phenomena of Astronomy are less complicated than the
phenomena of vitality. A moment's thought will show
that the phenomena of Astronomy are in reality infinitely
complex. Take the movement of the moon : even with our
present acquaintance with that subject we know that it has
some relation to the position and mass of the earth, including
its ocean tides ; also to the position and mass of the sun ; also
to the position and mass of every one of the planets ; also of
the comets, numerous and unknown as they are; also the
meteoric rings ; and finally of all the stars 1 The problem, as
everyone knows, is absolutely insoluble even for the shortest
period ; but when the element of Time enters in> and we coo-
<?4 CIVILISATION; ITS CAUSE AND CURE.
aider that to do anything like justice to the problem in an
astronomical sense we should have to solve it for at least a
million years during which interval the earth, sun, and other
bodies concerned would themselves have been changing their
relative positions, it becomes obvious that the whole question
is infinitely complex and yet this is only a small fragment of
Astronomy. To debate, therefore, whether the infinite com-
plexity of the movements of the stars is greater or less than
the infinite complexity of the phenomena of life, is like debat-
ing the precedence of the three persons of the Trinity, or
whether the Holy Ghost was begotten or proceeding : we are
talking about things which we do not understand.
Nature is one ; she is not, we may guess, less profound and
wonderful in one department than another ; but from the fact
that we live under certain conditions and limitations we see
most deeply into that portion which is, as it were, on the same
level with us. In humanity we look her in the face ; there
our glance pierces, and we see that she is profound and wonder-
ful beyond all imagination ; what we learn there is the most
valuable that we can learn. In the regions where Science
rejoices to disport itself we see only the skirts of her garments,
so to speak, and though we measure them never so precisely,
we still see them and nothing more.
There is another point, however, of which much is often
made as a plea for the substantial accuracy of the scientific
laws and generalisations, namely that they enable us to predict
events. But this need not detain us long. J. S. Mill in his
" Logic " has pointed out and a little thought makes it
obvious that the success of a prediction does not prove the
truth of the theory on which it is founded. It only proves
the theory was good enough for that prediction.
There was a time when the sun was a god going forth in hia
chariot every morning, and there was a time when the earth
MODERN SCIENCE: A CRITICISM. 65
waa the centre of the universe, and the sun a ball of fire re-
volving round it. In those times men could predict with
certainty that the sun would rise next morning, and aould even
name the hour of its appearance ; but we do not therefore
think that their theories were true. When Adams and Leverrier
foretold the appearance of Neptune in a certain part of tho
sky, they made a brief prediction to an unknown planet from
the observed relations of the movements of the known planets ;
that does not show however that the grand generalisation of
these movements, called the " law of gravitation," is correct.
It merely shows that it did well enough for this very brief
step brief indeed compared with the real problems of As-
tronomy, for which latter it is probably quite inadequate.
Tycho Brahe, excellent astronomer as he was, kept as we
saw to the epicycle theory. He imagined that the moon's
path round the earth was a fixed combination of cycle and
epicycle. Kepler introduced the conception of the ellipse.
Later on the motion of the perigee and other deviations com-
pelled the abandonment of the ellipse and the supposition of
an endless curve, similar to an ellipse at any one point, and
maintaining a fixed mean distance from the earth, but never
returning on itself or making a definite closed figure of any
kind. Finally the researches of Mr. George Darwin have
destroyed the conception of the fixed mean distance, and intro-
duced that of a continually enlarging spiral. Certainly no
four theories could well be more distinct from each other than
these ; yet if an eclipse had to be calculated for next year it
would scarcely matter which theory was used. The truth is
that the actual problem is so vast that a prediction of a few
years in advance only touches the fringe of it so to speak ; yet
if the fulfilment of the prediction were taken as a proof of the
theory in each of these different cases, it would lead in the end
to the moat hopelessly contradictory results.
66 CIVILISATION: ITS CAUSE AND CURE.
The success of a prediction therefore only shows that the
theory on which it is founded has had practical value so far as
a working hypothesis. As working hypotheses, and as long as
they are kept down to brief steps which can be verified, the
scientific theories are very valuable indeed we could not do
without them ; but when they are treated as objective facts
when, for instance, the " law of gravitation " derived as it Is
from a brief study of the heavenly bodies has a universal
truth ascribed to it, and is made to apply to phenomena ex-
tending over millions of years, and to warrant un verifiable
prophecies about the planetary orbits, or statements about the
age of the earth and the duration of the solar system all one
can say is that those who argue so are flying off at a tangent
from actual facts. For as the tangent represents the direction
of a curve over a small arc, so these theories represent the
bearing of facts well enough over a small region of observation ;
but as following the tangent we soon lose the curve, so following
these theories for any distance beyond the region of actual
observation we speedily part company with facts. 1
To proceed with a few more words about the general
method of Science. Science passes from phenomena to laws,
from individual details which can be seen and felt to large
generalisations of an intangible and phantom-like character.
1 All our thoughts, theories, " laws," &c., may perhaps be said to
touch Nature as the tangent touches the curve at a point. They
give a direction and are true at that point. But make the slightest
move, and they all have to be reconstructed. The tangents
are infinite in number, but the curve is one. This may not only
Illustrate the relation of Nature to Science, but also of Art to the
materials it uses. The poet radiates thoughts : but he sets no store by
them. He knows his thoughts are not true in themselves, but they
touch the Truth. His lines are the envelope of the curve which it
his poem.
MODERN SCIENCE: A CRITICISM. 67
That is to say, that for convenience of thought we classify
objects. How is this classification effected? It is effected
through the perception of identity amid difference. Among a
lot of objects I perceive certain attributes in common ; this
group of common attributes serves, so to speak, as a band to
tie these objects together with into a bundle convenient for
thought. I give a name to the band, and that serves to denote
any unit of the buudle by. Thus perceiving common attributes
among a lot of dogs as in an example already given I give
the name foxhound to this group of attributes, and thenceforth
use the name foxhound to connect these objects by in my
mind ; again perceiving other common attributes among othei
similar objects, I invent the word greyhound to denote these
latter by. The concept foxhound differs from the objectb
which it denotes, in this respect that these latter are (as we
say) real dogs with thousands and thousands of attributes
each : one of them has a broken tooth, another is nearly all
white, another answers to the name " Sally," and so on ; while
the concept is only an imaginary form in my mind, with only
a few attributes and no individual peculiarities a kind of tiny
G.C.M. arising from the contemplation of a long row of big
figures.
Now having created these concepts "foxhound," "grey-
hound," and a lot of other similar ones, I find that they in their
turn have a few attributes in common and thus give rise to a
new concept "dog." Of course this "dog" is more of an
abstraction than ever, the concept of a concept. In fact the
peculiarity of this whole process is that, as sometimes stated,
the broader the generalisation becomes the less is its depth ; or in
other words and obviously, that as the number of objects
compared increases, the number of attributes common to them
all decreases. Ultimately as we saw at the beginning, when
a sufficient number of objects are taken in, the concept (" dog "
68 CIVILISATION: ITS CAUSE AND CURE.
or whatever it may be) fades away and ceases to have any
meaning. This therefore is the dilemma of Science and
indeed of all human knowledge, that in carrying out the process
which is peculiar to it, it necessarily leaves the dry ground of
reality for the watery region of abstractions, which abstractions
become ever more tenuous and ungraspable the farther it goes,
and ultimately fade into mere ghosts. Nevertheless the
process is a quite necessary one, for only by it can the mind
deal with things.
To dwell for a moment over this last point : it is clear that
every object has relation to every other object exists in fact
only in virtue of such relation to other objects ; it has there-
fore an infinite number of attributes, the mind consequently is
powerless to deal with such object it cannot by any possibility
think it. In order to deal with it, the mind is forced to single
out a few of its attributes (the method of ignorance or abstraction
already alluded to) that is a few of its relations to other
objects, and to think them first. The others it will think
afterwards all in good time. In thus stripping or abstracting
the great mass of its attributes from our object, and leaving
only a few, which it combines into a concept, the mind
practically abandons the real article and takes up with a
shadow ; but in return for this it gets something which it can
handle, which is light to carry about, and which like paper-
money, for the time and under certain conditions does really
represent value. The only danger is lest it the mind
carried away by the extensive applicability of the partial
concept which it has thus formed, should credit it with an
actual value should project it on the background of the
external world and ascribe to it that reality which belongs
only to objects themselves, i.e., to things embodying an infinite
range of attributes.
The peculiar method of Science la now clear to us, and can
MODERN SCIENCE: A CRITICISM. 69
be abundantly illustrated from modern results. Our experience
consists in sensations, we feel the weight of heavy bodies, we
see them fall when let go, we have sensations of heat and cold,
light and darkness, and so forth. But these sensations are
more or less local and variable from man to man, and we
naturally seek to find some common measure of them, by which
we can talk about and describe them exactly, and independently
of the peculiarities of individual observers. Thus we seek to
find some common phenomenon which underlies (as we say) the
sensation?, of heat and cold, or of light and darkness, or some-
thing which explains (i.e. is always present in) the case of
falling bodies and to do this we adopt the method of
generalisation above described, '.., we observe a great number
of individual cases and then see what qualities or attributes
they have in common. So far good. But it is just here that
the fallacy of the ordinary scientific procedure comes in ; for,
forgetting that these common qualities are mere abstractions
from the real phenomena we credit them with a real existence,
and regard the actual phenomena as secondary results, " effects "
or what-not of these "causes." This in plain language is
putting the cart before the horse or rather the shadow before
the man. Thus finding that a vast number of variously
shaped and colored bodies tend to fall towards the earth, we
erect this common attribute of falling into an independent
existence which we call " attraction " or " gravitation " and
ultimately posit a universal gravitation acting on all bodies in
Nature ! or finding that a number of different substances, such
as water, air, wood, <fec., convey to us the sensation we call
sound, and that in all these cases the common element ia
vibration, we detach the attribute vibration, credit it with a
separate existence, and speak of it as the cause of sound. But
though we may thus think of the shadow as separate from the
mau, the shadow c&uuot ot separate from the man ; and tho' we
70 CIVILISATION: ITS CAUSE AND CURE.
may try to think of the falling or the vibration as separate
from the wood or the stone, such falling and vibration cannot
exist apart from these and other such materials, and the effort
to speak of it as so existing ends in mere nonsense. More
strange still is the fatuity, when, as in the case of the
undulatory Theory of light or the Atomic theory of physics,
the concepts thus erected into actualities are composed of
purely imaginary attributes of which no one has had any
experience an undulatory ether in the one case, a hard and
perfectly elastic atom in the other. The total result is of
course just what we see Science landing itself in pure
absurdities in every direction. Beginning by detaching the
attribute of falling from the bodies that fall beginning that
is by an abstraction, which of course is also a falsity it
generalises and generalises this abstraction till at last it
reaches a perfectly generalised absurdity and thing without
any meaning the law of gravitation. The statement that
14 every particle in the universe attracts every other particle
with a force proportional to the mass of the attracting particle
and inversely proportional to the square of the distance
between the two " is devoid of meaning the human mind can
give no definite meanings to the words " mass," " attract," and
" force," which do not stultify each other. The law in every
way baffles intelligence. Newton, who invented it, declared
that no philosophic mind would suppose that bodies could thus
act on one another " without the mediation of anything else by
and through which their action might be conveyed ; " scientific
men to-day are fain to see that a material mediation of this
kind would only make the law still more unintelligible than it
is, while, on the other hand, an immaterial mediation or a
fourth-dimensional mediation, such as some propose, would
imply remove the problem out of the regions of scientific
analysis. Again the form of the law is declared to be the
MODERN SCIENCE: A CRITICISM. 71
Inverse square of the distance; but this is the law by the
nature of space iteelf of any perfect radiation, and if true of
gravitation involves the conclusion that that radiation of force
(whatever its nature may be) takes place without loss or dissi-
pation of any kind. This would make gravitation absolutely
unique among phenomena. More than this, its propagation is
supposed to be instantaneous over the most enormous distances
of space, and to take place always unhindered and unretarded
whatever be the number or the nature of the bodies between !
What can be more clear than that the law is simply meta.
physical a projection into a monstrous universality and
abstraction, of partially understood phenomena in a particular
region of observation a Brocken-shadow on the background of
Nature of the observer's own momentary attitude of thought f
Again, the undulatory theory of Light. Studying the
phenomena of a vast number of colored and bright bodies,
Science finds that it can think about these phenomena can
generalise and tie them into bundles best by awuming that the
bodies are all in a state of vibration ; a vibration so minute
that (unlike the vibrations connected with Sound) it cannot be
directly perceived. So far good. There is no harm in the
assumption of vibration as long as it is understood to be a mere
assumption for a temporary convenience of thought. But now
Science goes farther than this, and not only supposes a common
attribute to all visible bodies, but credits this common attribute
with a real existence independent of the visible bodies in which
it was supposed to inhere and makes this the cause of their
visibility ! Obviously now a common and universal medium is
required for this common and universal assumed vibration (just
as Newton required a medium for his universal " falling ")
and so, hey presto ! we have the Undulatory Ether. And
having got it we find that to fulfil our requirements it
must have a pressure of 17 million million pounds on the
72 CIVILISATION: ITS CAUSE AND CURE.
square inch, and yet be so rare and tenuous as not to hinder
the lightest breath of air ; that while it is thus rare enough to
surpass all our powers of direct scrutiny, its vibrations must yet
be capable of agitating and breaking up the solidest bodies ;
that it must pass freely through some dense and close
structures like glass, and yet be excluded by some light and
porous, like cork, and so on and on ! In fact we find that it IB
unthinkable. Against this adamantine, impalpable Ether, as
against this instantaneous, untrauslateable gravitation, Science
bangs its devoted head in vain. Having created these
absurdities by the method of " personification of abstractions " *
or the " reification of concepts," * it seriously and in all good
faith tries to understand them ; having dressed up its own
Mumbo Jumbo (which it once jeered at religion for doing) it
piously shuts its eyes and endeavors to believe in it.
The Atomic Theory * affords a good example of the
" method of ignorance." When we try to think about material
objects generally to generalise about them that is, to find
some attribute or attributes common to them, we are at first
puzzled. They present such an immense variety. But after
a time, by dint of stripping off or abstracting all such attri-
butes or qualities as we think we perceive in one body and not
in another as for example, redness, blueness, warmth, salt-
ness, life, intelligence, or what not we find an attribute left,
namely resistance to touch, which is common to all material
bodies. This quality in the body we call " mass," and since
it is only known by motion, mass and motion become cor-
relative attributes which we find useful to class bodies by, not
because they represent the various bodies particularly well,
but because they are found in all bodies ; just as you might
class people by their boots not because boots are a very
J. S. Mill. 'Stallo.
J See Stallo'a excellent Concept* of Modern Physici.
MODERN SCIENCE: A CRITICISM. 73
valuable method of classification, but simply because every one
ivears boots of one kind or another. So far there is no great
harm done. But now having by the method of ignorance
thought away all the qualities of bodies, except the two cor-
relatives of mass and motion, we set about to explain the
phenomena of Nature generally by these two " thinks " that
are left. We credit these " thinks " (mass and motion) with
an independent existence and proceed to derive the rest of
phenomena from them. The proceeding of course is absurd,
and ends by exposing its own absurdity. Thinking of mass
and motion as existing in the various bodies apart from
color, smell, and so forth which of course is not the case
we combine the two attributes into one concept, the atom,
which we thus assume to exist in all bodies. The atom has
neither color, smell, warmth, taste, life or intelligence; it
has only mass and motion ; for it came by the method of
divesting our thought of everything but mass and motion. It
is a projection of a " think " upon the background of nature.
And it is an absurdity. No such thing exists in all the wide
universe as mass and motion divested from color, smell,
warmth, life and intelligence. The atom is unthinkable. It ia
perfectly hard and it is perfectly elastic which is the same
as saying that it bends and it doesn't bend at the same time ;
it has form, and it hasn't form ; it has affinities and yet is
perfectly indifferent To justify to men the ways of their
Mumbo Jumbo has sorely exercised the votaries of the Atom.
One philosopher says that it is mere matter, passive, exercising
no force but resistance ; another says that it is a centre of
force, without matter ; a third suggests that it is not itself
matter, but only a vortex in other matter ! All agree that it
is not an object of sense, and there remains no conclusion but
that it is nonsense ! 1
Se, for instance, the last new thing in this style the Helmholti
74 CIVILISATION: ITS CAUSE AND CURB.
And so on in all directions. Human thought flying off" at
its tangents from Nature lands itself in infinite nothings afar
off, poor ghostly skeletons and abstractions from Nature
which indeed is all right, for human thought as yet can only
see ghosts and not realities ; but let there be no mistake, let
these ghosts not be mistaken for realities for they are not
even compatible with each other. The Atom that suits the
physicist doer not suit the chemist. The Ether that 4oes for
the vehicle of Light will not do for the vehicle of universal
Gravitation.
It would be hardly worth while entering into these criti-
cisms, were it not evident that Science in modern times, either
tacitly or explicitly, has been seeking, as I said at the begin-
ning, to enounce facts independent of Man, the observer.
Seeing that the ordinary statements of daily life are obviously
inexact and relative to the observer charged with human
sensation in fact Science has naturally tried to produce
something which should be exact and independent of human
sensation ; but here it has of course condemned itself before-
hand to failure; for no statement of isolated phenomena or
groups of phenomena can be exact except by the method of
ignorance aforesaid, and no statement obviously can be really
independent of human sensation. When a man says ft it
cold, his statement, it mupt be confessed, is deplorably human and
vague. It what is that 1 Is do you mean it 1 or do you
molecule as improved upon by Sir William Thomson ; it is described
as follows ; " A heavy mass connected by massless springs with a
massless enclosing shell ; or there may be several shells enclosing each
other connected by springs with a dense mass in the centre (far more
dense than the ether)." It is not, of course, seriously maintained that
this nonsensical creation exists but that if it did exist it would
account for certain unexplained phenomena in the dispersion of
light, 4c.
MODERN SCIENCE: A CRITICISM. 75
mean feels, appears f Cold in what sense ! Cold to your-
self, or to other people, or to polar bears, or by the ther-
mometer? And so on. Science therefore steps in with an
air of authority and sets him right. It says the temperature
M 30 Fahrenheit, as if to settle the matter. But does this
really settle the matter t Temperature who knows what
that is t What is the scientific definition of it ! I find
(Clerk-Maxwell's Theory of Heat, p. 2.) " the temperature of a
body is a quantity which indicates how hot or how cold the
body is." This sounds very much like saying, " the color of
a body is a quantity which indicates how blue, red, or yellow
the body is." It does not bring us much farther on our way.
But in the next paragraph Maxwell shows the object of his
definition (which of course is only preliminary) by saying,
" By the use, therefore, of the word temperature, we fix in our
minds the conviction that it is possible not only to feel, but
to measure, how hot a body is." That is to say he clearly
maintains that it is possible to find an absolute standard of
hotness or coldness or rather of the unknown thing called
temperature outside of ourselves and independent of human
sensation. When the man said he was cold he was probably
just describing his own sensations, but here Science indicates
that it is in search of something which has an independent
existence of its own, and which therefore when found we can
measure exactly and once for all. What then is that thing 1
What is temperature t say, what is it ?
We cudgel our brains in vain. Perhaps the remainder of
the sentence will help us. "The temperature is 30
Fahrenheit." " The unknown thing is thirty degrees."
What then is a degree ? That is the next question. When
the Theory of Heat went out from sensation and left it be-
hind, one of its first landing places was in the expansion of
liquids as in thermometer tubes. Here for some time was
76 CIVILISATION: ITS CAUSE AND CURE.
thought to be a satisfactory register of " temperature." But
before long it became apparent that the degree Fahrenheit,
Reaumur, or what-not was an entirely arbitrary thing, also
that it was not the same 1 thing at one end of the scale as the
other, and finally that the scale itself had no starting point !
This was awkward, so a move was made to the air thermome-
ter, and there was some talk about an absolute zero and
absolute temperatures; it was thought that the Unknown
thing showed itself most clearly and simply in the expansion
of air and other gases, and that the " degree " might fairly be
measured hi terms of this expansion. But in a little time this
kind of thermometer chiefly because no gas turned out to be
"theoretically perfect" broke down, absolute zero and all,
and another step had to be made namely, to the dynamical
theory. It was announced that the Unknown thing might be
measured in terms of mechanical energy, and Joule at
Manchester proclaimed that the work done by any quantity of
water falling there a distance of 772 feet is capable of raising
that water one degree Fahrenheit. 8 Here seemed something
definite. To measure temperature by mass and velocity, to
measure a degree by the flight of a stone, or the heat in the
human body by the fall of a factory chimney if rather round-
about and elusive of the main question seemed at any rate
promising of exact results ! Unfortunately the difficulty waa
to pass from the theory to its application. The complicated
nature of the problem, the " imperfection " of the gases and
other bodies under consideration, the latent and specific heats
to be allowed for, the elusive nature of heat in experiment,
1 The very fact alone that the degrees on a thermometer are equal
space divisions shows that they must bear a varying relation to the
total volume of liquid as that expands from one end of the tube to the
other.
* A statement obviously applying from what has been already said
at only one point in the scale.
MODERN SCIENCE : A CRITICISM. 77
and the variable value of the degree itself all render the
conclusions on this subject most precarious ; and the general
equations connecting the Fahrenheit or other temperatures
with a thermo-dynamic scale while they become so unwieldy
as to be practically useless are themselves after all only
approximate.
Finally, to give a last form to the mechanical theory of
heat, the conception of flying atoms or molecules was intro-
duced, and a number of neat generalisations were deduced
from dynamical considerations. Of course it was inevitable,
having once started with a mechanical theory, that one should
arrive at the Atom some time or other and (from what has
already been said) it was also inevitable that the result should
be unsatisfactory. It is sufficient to say that the molecular
theory of heat is not in accordance with facts. Such things as
the law of Charles and the law of Boyle, which according to it
should be strictly accurate and of general application, are
known to be true only over a most limited range. This
failure of the theory may be said to arise partly from its be
ing pursued by the statistical method ; but if, on the other
hand, we were to try and follow out the individual movement
of each molecule we should be landed in a problem far exceed
ing in complexity the wildest flights of Astronomy and should
have exchanged for the original difficulty about " temperature "
a difficulty far greater.
The result of all this has been that notwithstanding the
talk about energy and atoms, Science has sadly to confess that
it can still give no valid meaning to the word temperature :
the unknown thing is still unknown, the independent existence
round the corner still escapes us. By the very effort to
arrive at something independent of human sensation, Science
has, in a roundabout way, arrived at an absurdity. When the
man said he was cold, his statement deplorably vague as it
78 CIVILISATION: ITS CAUSE AND CURE.
was had some meaning : he was describing his feelings, or
possibly he had seen some snow or some ice on the road ; but
when, in the endeavor to leave out the human and to say
something absolute, Science declared that the temperature
was thirty degrees, it committed itself to a remark which
possibly was exact in form, but to which it has never given and
never can give any meaning. 1
Similarly with other generalities of Science : the " law " of
he Conservation of Energy, the " law " of the Survival of the
Fittest the more you think about them the less possible
is it to give any really intelligible sense to them. The
very word Fittest really begs the question which is under
consideration, and the whole Conservation law is merely
an attenuation of the already much attenuated "law" of
Gravitation. The Chemical Elements themselves are nothing
but the projection on the external world of concepts consisting
of three or four attributes each : they are not more real, but
very much less real than the individual objects which they are
supposed to account for ; and their " elementary " character is
merely fictional. It probably is in fact as absurd to speak of
pure carbon or pure gold, as of a pure monkey or a pure dog.
There are no such things, except as they may be arrived at by
arbitrary definition and the method of ignorance.
In the search for exactness then Science has been continu-
ally led on to discard the human and personal elements in pheno-
mena, in the hope of finding some residuum as it were behind
them which should not be personal and human but absolute
1 1 am not, of course, here arguing against the use of thermometers
or other instruments for practical purposes. This is certainly the
legitimate field of Science. But, as in the case of prediction before
mentioned, the exactness of certain practical results obtained is a very
different matter from the truth of the generalities which are supposed
to underlie these results. In using a thermometer you need not even
mention the word " temperature."
MODERN SCIENCE : A CRITICISM. 79
and invariable. And the tendency has been (hitherto) in all
the sciences to get rid of such terms as blue, red, light, heavy,
hot, cold, concord, discord, health, vitality, right, wrong, <fec.,
and to rely on any less human elements discoverable in each
case ; as for instance in Sound, to deal less and less with the
judgments and sensations of the ear, and to rely more and
more on measurements of lengths of strings, numbers of vibra-
tions, <&o. Each science has been (as far as possible) reduced
to its lowest terms. Ethics has been made a question of utility
and inherited experience. Political Economy has been ex-
hausted of all conceptions of justice between man and man, of
charity, affection, and the instinct of solidarity ; and has been
founded on its lowest discoverable factor, namely self-interest.
Biology has been denuded of the force of personality in plants,
animals, and men; the " self" here has been set aside, and the
attempt made to reduce the science to a question of chemical
and cellular affinities, protoplasm, and the laws of osmose.
Chemical affinities, again, and all the wonderful phenomena of
Physics are emptied down into a flight of atoms ; and the
flight of atoms (and of astronomic orbs as well) is reduced to
the laws of dynamics which the student sitting in his cham-
ber may write down on a piece of paper. Thus the idea,
formulated by Comte, of a great scale of sciences arising from
the simplest to the most complex, has tacitly underlain modern
scientific work. It Science has sought to " explain " each
stage by reference to a lower stage " blueness" by vibrations,
and vibrations by flying atoms the human always by the
sub-human. Going out from humanity dissatisfied, it has
wandered through the animal and vegetable kingdoms, through
the regions of Chemistry and Physics, into that of Mechanics.
" Here at last, in Mechanics, is something outside humanity,
something exact in itself, something substantial," it has said,
" Let us build again on this as on a foundation, and in time
So CIVILISATION: ITS CAUSE AND CURE.
we shall find out what humanity is." This I say has been the
dream of Modern Science ; yet the fallacy of it is obvious.
We have not got outside the human, but only to the outer-
most verge of it. Mass and motion, which in this process are
taken to be real entities and the first progenitors of all pheno-
mena, are simply the last abstractions of sensible experience,
and our emptiest concepts. The material explanation of the
universe is simply an attempt to account for phenomena by
those attributes which appear to us to be common to them all
which is, as said before, like accounting for men by their
boots ; it may be possible to get an exact formula this way,
but its contents have little or no meaning.
The whole process of Science and the Comtian classification
of its branches regarded thus as an attempt to explain Man
by Mechanics is a huge vicious circle. It professes to start
with something simple, exact, and invariable, and from thia
point to mount step by step till it comes to Man himself ; but
indeed it starts with Man. It plants itself on sensations low
down (mass, motion, <fec.), and endeavors by means of them to
explain sensations high up, which reminds one of nothing so
much as that process vulgarly described as " climbing up a
ladder to comb your hair." In truth Science has never left
the great world, or cosmos, of Man, nor ever really found a
locut standi without it ; but during the last two or three cen-
turies it has gone in this direction, outwards, continually.
Leaving the central basis and facts of humanity as too vast
and unmanageable, and also as apparently variable from man
to man and therefore affording no certain consent to work
upon, it has wandered gradually outwards, seeking something
of more definite and universal application. Discarding thus
one by one the interior phases of sensation as the sense of per-
sonal relationship, the sense of justice, duty, fitness in things
or what-not (as too uncertain, or perhaps developed to an uu-
MODERN SCIENCE: A CRITICISM. 81
equal degree in different persons, embryonic in one and
matured in another), drifting past the more specialised bodily
senses, of color, sound, taste, smell, <kc., as for similar reasons
unavailable Science at last in the primitive consciousness of
muscular contraction and its abstraction "mass" or "matter"
comes to a pause. Here in this last sense, common probably
to man and the lowest animals, it finds its widest, most uni-
versal ground its farthest limit from the Centre. It haa
reached the outermost shell, as it were, of the great Man-
cosmos. Even this shell is partially human ; it is not entirely
osseous, and so far not entirely exact and invariable ; but
Science can go no farther and there, for the present, it may
remain !
Some day perhaps, when all this showy vesture of scientific
theory (which has this peculiarity that only the learned can
tee it) has been quasi-completed, and Humanity is expected to
walk solemnly forth in its new garment for all the world to
admire as in Anderssen's story of the Emperor's New Clothes
some little child standing on a door-step will cry out : " But
he has got nothing on at all," and amid some confusion it will
be seen that the child is right.
NOTE.
" I fear I have very imperfectly succeeded in expressing my strong
conviction that, before a rigorous logical scrutiny, the Reign of Law
will prove to be an unverified hypothesis, the Uniformity of Nature an
ambiguous expression, the certainty of our scientific inferences to a
great extent a delusion." (Stanley Jevons. Principles of Science, p. iz.)
THE SCIENCE OF THE FUTURE:
A FORECAST.
Once let that [the human ideal] slip oat of the thought, and science
is of no more use than the invocations in the Egyptian papiri.
RICHARD JEFFERIKS.
IT would appear then, from the preceding paper, that in some
sense a mistake has been made in the method of modern
scientific work ; not that the vast amount of labor expended
in it has been altogether wasted, for in return for this there is
a mass of practical results and detailed observations to show ;
but that in attempting to solve the problem of science by the
intellect alone, a radical mistake has been made which could
only land us in absurdity, and that this mistake has for the
time being also vitiated the results that have been attained.
For in reference to this last point the divorce of the intel-
lectual from the emotional has caused a great portion of our
scientific observations to become merely pedantic and trifling ;
while it has turned the practical results as industrial and
military machinery, <fec. into engines of evil as often as into
engines of good.
Science in searching for a permanently valid and purely
intellectual representation of the universe has, as already said,
been searching for a thing which does not exist. The very
facts of Nature, as we call them, are at least half feeling. If
THE SCIENCE OF THE FUTURE : A FORECAST. 83
we try to clean the feeling out of a fact and to produce a
statement which shall be devoid of the human or sense
element, it simply amounts to cleaning the meaning out ; and
though our resulting statement may be exact it is nugatory
and of no value. We might as well try to take the clay out
of a brick. It must never be forgotten that the logical pro-
cesses important as they are cannot stand by themselves,
have no standing ground of their own. They presuppose
assumptions and are the expression of things that are un-
reasoning, perhaps illogical. The strictest logic is a mere
hooking together of links in a chain, and the last link is of no
use you can put no stress on it unless the first is secured
somewhere. The strength of the intellectual chain is no
greater than that of the staple from which it hangs and that
is a human feeling. The strength of Euclid Is no greater
than that of the axioms and they are feelings ; they are
unreasoning statements of which all that we can say is, " I feel
like that." In fact, all the propositions of Geometry are
nothing but the analysis and elaborate expression, so to speak,
of these primary convictions and the Geometry-structure
stands and falls with them. There is no such thing as intel-
lectual truth that Is, I mean, a truth which can be stated as
existing apart from feeling. If, for instance, a proposition in
Geometry can be really shown to be based on the axioms, it is
true, not intellectually or absolutely, but as an expression of
my primary Geometrical sense ; and if my giving a few pence
to a crossing sweeper is based not on a mere impression of
duty, or an anxiety to appear charitable, or wish to escape hit
importunity, but on genuine regard for the man, then it is
true, not in any absolute signification, but just as an expres-
sion of what it professes to represent namely my primary
sense of humanity. Indeed the truest truth is that which is
the expression of the deepest feelirut and if there ia an absolute
84 CIVILISATION: ITS CAUSE AND CURE.
truth it can only be known and expressed by him who has the
absolute feeling or Being within himself.
This being so and the nature of the Intellectual processes
being, like the links in a chain, transitional it becomes
obvious that the intellectual results may figure as a meant
but never as an end in themselves. To hang any weight of
reliance on them in the latter sense is like the Chinese Trick
described by Marco Polo of throwing a rope's end up hi the
air and then climbing up the rope. Hence it appears that our
scientific theories are perfectly legitimate as long as they are
formed as a means towards practical applications. In that
sense they are transitional; they are formed not as substantial
truths but merely as links in a chain towards some definite
practical result. For this purpose we may form whatever
theories are convenient : if we are calculating the strength of
bridges, we may adopt what generalisations we like concerning
mechanical structure, as long as they give us actual and prac-
tical results j if we are predicting eclipses, we may make use
of any theory that will do. The theory does not matter as
long as it hauls the practical result after it, just as it does not
matter whether your cable is of iron or hemp or silk as long
as you can get your ship into dock with it. In this sense our
Modern Science is, I conceive, admirable. For practical
results and brief predictions it affords a quantity of useful
generalisations shorthand notes and conventional symbols
and pocket summaries of phenomena which bear about the
same relation to the actual world that a map does to the
country it is supposed to represent. It cannot be said to have
any resemblance to the real thing but when you understand
the principle on which it is formed it is exceedingly useful for
finding your way about. As long as Science therefore keeps
the practical end in view, and starting from sense seeks to
return to sense again, its intermediate theorising is perfectly
THE SCIENCE OF THE FUTURE : A FORECAST. 85
legitimate ; but the moment it credits its theory with a posi-
tive and authoritative existence, as an actual representation of
facts and endeavors to pass by means of it into unverifiable
and abstract regions, as of invisible germs or atoms, or far
distances of space, or the remote past or future it is simply
throwing its rope's end into the sky and trying to climb up !
That "the wish is father to the thought" is in its wide
sense profoundly true. In the individual, feeling precedes
thinking as the body precedes the clothes. In history, the
Rousseau precedes the Voltaire. There is, I believe, a physio-
logical parallel ; for behind the brain and determining its
action stands the great sympathetic nerve the organ of the
emotions. In fact here the brain appears as distinctly tran-
sitional. It stands between the nerves of sense on the one
hand and the great sympathetic on the other.
Change the feeling in an individual, and his whole method
of thinking will be revolutionised ; change the axiom or
primary sensation in a science, and the whole structure will
have to be re-created. The current Political Economy is
founded on the axiom of individual greed; but let a new
axiomatic emotion spring up (as of justice or fair play instead
of unlimited grab), and the base of the science will be altered,
and will necessitate a new construction.
So when people argue (on politics, morality, art, <kc.) it will
generally be found that they differ at the base ; they go out,
perhaps quite unconsciously, from different axioms and hence
they cannot agree. Occasionally of course a strict examination
will show that, while agreeing at the base, one of them has
made a false step in deduction ; in that case his thought does
not represent his primary feeling, and when this is pointed out
he is forced to alter it. But more often it is found that the
difference lies deep down at a point beyond the reach of
reason ; and they disagree to the end. In this case neither is
86 CIVILISATION: ITS CAUSE AND CURE.
right and neither is wrong. They simply feel differently;
they are different persons.
The Thought then is the expression, the outgrowth, the
covering, of underlying Feeling. And in the great life of
Man as a whole, as in the lesser life of the individual, his con-
tinual new birth and inward growth causes his thought-systems
also continually to change and be replaced by new ones. Like
the bud-sheaths and husks in a growing plant or tree they
give form for a time to the life within ; then they fall off and
are replaced. The husk prepares the bud underneath which
is to throw it off. The thought prepares and protects the feeling
underneath which growing will inevitably reject it ; and when a
thought has been formed it is already false, i.e., ready to fall.
We are now, then, in a position to come back to the question
of a genuine Science, truly so-called.
As there is no invariable and absolute datum on the fringe
of Humanity no definable flying atom on which we can found
our reasonings and as Modern Science, considered as an
actual representation of the universe, falls miserably to pieces
in consequence is it possible that we have made a mistake in
the direction in which we have sought for our datum ; and
may it be that we should look for that in the very Centre of
Humanity instead of in its remotest circumference? In that
direction evidently, if we could penetrate, we should expect
to find, not a shadowy intellectual generalisation, but the very
opposite of that an intense immutable feeling or state, an
axiomatic condition of Being. Is it possible that here, blazing
like a sun (if we could only see it and the sun is its allegory
in the physical world), there exists within us absolutely such
a thing the one fact in the universe of which all else are
shadows, to which everything has relation, and round which,
itself unanalysable, all thought circles and all phenomena
stand as indirect modes of expression I
THE SCIENCE OF THE FUTURE : A FORECAST. 87
Is It possible 1 That is the question the question which
each one of us has to solve. At any rate, let us throw this
out as a suggestion. Let us suggest that as we have got
nothing satisfactory by cleaning the sense-element out of
phenomena, we should take the opposite course and put as
much sense into them as we can !
" Facts " are, at least, half feelings. Let us acknowledge this
and not empty the feeling out of them, but deepen and enlarge
that which we already have in them. Who knows whether we
have ever seen the blue sky 1 Who knows whether we have
ever seen each other 1 Is it not a commonplace to say that
one man sees in the common objects of Nature what another
is wholly unconscious of t " The primrose on the river's brim
a yellow primrose is to him and nothing more." To what
extent may the facts of Nature thus be deepened and made
more substantial to us and whither will this process lead us 1
Do we not want to feel more, not less, in the presence of
phenomena to enter into a living relation with the blue sky,
and the incense-laden air, aud the plants and the animals
nay, even with poisonous and hurtful things to have a keenei 1
sense of their burtfulness ? Is it not a strange kind of science,
that which wakes the mind to pursue the shadows of things,
but dulls the senses to the reality of them which causes a
man to try to bottle the pure atmosphere of heaven and then
to shut himself in a gas-reeking, ill-ventilated laboratory while
he analyses it ; or allows him to vivisect a dog, unconscious
that he is blaspheming the pure and holy relation between
man and the animals in doing so ? Surely the man of Science
(in its higher sense, that is) should be lynx-eyed as an Indian,
keen-scented as a hound with all senses and feelings trained
by constant use and a pure and healthy life in close contact
with Nature, and with a heart beating in sympathy with every
creature. Such a man would have at command, so to speak,
88 CIVILISATION: ITS CAUSE AND CURE.
the key-board of the universe ; but the mechanical, unhealthy,
indoor-living student is he not really ignorant of the faet$ 1
Certainly, since he has not felt them, he is.
The process of the true Science consists first in the naming
and denning of phenomena (i.e., the facts of human conscious-
ness), and secondly, in the discovery of the true relation of
these phenomena to each other ; and since the definitions of
phenomena and their relations keep varying with the stand-
point of the observer, the process evidently involves all experi-
ence, and ultimately the discovery of that last fact of experi-
ence to which and through which all the other facts are re-
lated. It is therefore an age-long process, and has to do with
the emotional and moral part of man as well as with the
logical and intellectual. It is in fact the discovery of the
nature of Man himself, and of the true order of his being.
Modern Science though seeking for a unity in Nature
fails to find it, because, from the nature of the case, any large
body of knowledge in which all people will agree is limited to
certain small regions of human experience regions in which
very likely no unity is discoverable. It takes the emerald,
and breaks it up ; treats of its color and light-refracting
qualities on the one hand ; of its crystalline structure and
hardness on the other ; of its weight and density ; and of its
chemical properties ; all separately, and producing long strings
of generalisation from each aspect of the subject. But how
all these qualities are conjoined together, what their relation
is which constitutes the emerald yea, even the smallest bit of
emerald dust it (wisely) does not attempt to say. It takes
the man and dissects him ; treats of his blood, his nerves, his
bones, his brain ; of his senses of sight, of touch, of hearing ;
but of that which binds these together into a unity, of their
true relation to each other in the man, it is silent.
Tet the man knows of himself that he is a unity ; he know*
THE SCIENCE OF THE FUTURE : A FORECAST. 89
that all parts of his body have relation to him, and to each
other ; he knows that his senses of sight and hearing and
touch and taste and smell are conjoined in the foous of his in-
dividual life, in his "I am ; " he knows that all his faculties
and powers, however much they may belong to different
planes, spiritual or material, or may come under the inquisi-
tion of different Sciences, have an order of their own among
each other that there it an ultimate Science of them even
though he be not yet wholly versed in it. And he knows
moreover that in a grain of dust, or hi an emerald, or hi an
orange, or in any object of Nature, the different attributes of
the object which the Sciences thus treat of separately are
only the reflexion of his different senses ; so that the problem
of the conjunction of different attributes in a body comes back
to the same problem of the union of various senses and powers
In himself each individual object being only a case, exter-
nalised as it were, and made a matter of consciousness, of the
general relation to each other of his own sensations and feel-
ings. Knowing all this I say he sees that the understand-
ing of Nature in general and of the laws or relations which he
thinks he perceives among external things, must always de-
pend on the relations and laws which he tacitly assumes, or
which he is directly conscious of, as existing between the
various parts of his own being ; and that the ultimate truth
which Science the divine Science is really in search of is a
moral Truth an understanding of what man is, and the dis-
covery of the true relation to each other of all his faculties
involving all experience, and an exercise of every faculty,
physical, intellectual, emotional and spiritual, instead of one set
of faculties only.
Not till we know the law of ourselves, in fact, shall we know
the law of the emerald and the orange, or of Nature generally ;
and the law of ourselves is not learnt, except subordinate^,
go CIVILISATION: ITS CAUSE AND CURE.
by intellectual investigation ; it is mainly learnt by life. The
relation of gravity to vitality is learnt not so much by outer
experiment in a laboratory as by long experience within our-
selves from the day when as infants we cannot lift ourselves
above the floor, through the years of the proud strength of
manhood scaling the loftiest mountains, to the hour when our
disengaged spirits finally overcome and pass beyond the at-,
traction of the earth ; and just as the sense of weight which
first appears as a quite external sensation is thus at last
found to stand in most pregnant relation with our deepest
selves, so of the other senses which feed the individual life
the senses of light, of warmth, of taste, of sound, of smell.
Taste, which begins as it were on the tip of the tongue, be-
comes ultimately, if normally developed, a sense which identi-
fies itself with the health and well-being of the whole body ;
the pleasure of taste becomes vastly more than a mere surface
pleasure, and its discrimination of food more than a mere re-
gard for the nutrition of the ordinary corporeal functions.
The sense of Light, which begins in the material eye, grows
and deepens inwardly till the consciousness of it pervades the
whole body and mind with a kind of inward illumination or
divine Reason, showing the places of all things and enfolding
the sense of beauty in itself. The sense of Warmth in the
same manner is related to and leads up to Love ; and Sound,
in the voices of our friends or the divine chords of music, has
passed away from being an external phenomenon and haa
established itself as the language of our most tender and
intimate emotions.
All the senses thus as they develop and deepen are found to
unite in the very focus of individual life. Slowly, and through
long experience, their relation to each other, their very mean-
ing unfolds, or will unfold ; and as this process takes place
the man knows himself one, a unity, of which the various
THE SCIENCE OF THE FUTURE : A FORECAST. 91
faculties are the different manifestations. Then further
through his less localised feelings or more glorified senses the
individual finds his relation to other individuals. Through
his loves and hatreds, through his senses of attraction, re-
pulsion, cohesion, solidarity, order, justice, charity, right,
wrong and the rest these feelings, each like the others deep-
ening back more and more as time goes on he gradually
discovers his true and abiding relationship to other individuals,
and to the divine society of which they all form a part and
go at last, if we may venture to say so, his relationship to the
absolute and universal. At present, since our most important
relation to each other is conceived of as one of rivalry and
Competition, we of course think of the objects of Nature as
being chiefly engaged in a Struggle for Existence with each
other ; but when we become aware of all our senses and feel-
ings, and of ourselves as individuals, as having relation to the
Absolute and universal, proceeding from it, as the branches
and twigs of a tree from the trunk then we shall become
aware of a Divine or absolute science in Nature ; we shall at
last understand that all objects have a permanent and indis-
soluble relation to each other, and shall see their true mean-
ing though not till then.
Is it possible then that Science, having hitherto and we
shall see in time that this process has been really most valuable
and important gone outwards from the centre towards the
very fringe of Humanity emptying facts as far as possible aa
it went of all feeling, and reducing itself at last to the most
shadowy generalisations on the very verge of sense and non-
sense is it possible, I say, that it will now return, and first
filling up facts with feeling as far as practicable (that is, by
direct and the most living contact with Nature in every form,
learning to enter into direct personal sense-relationship with
every phenomenon and phase), will so gradually ascend to the
9* CIVILISATION: ITS CAUSE AND CURE,
great central fact and feeling, and then at last and for the
first time become fully conscious of a vast organisation abso-
lutely perfect and intimately knit from its centre to its utmost
circumference (the true cosmos of Man the conceptions of
man and god combined) existing inchoate or embryonic in
every individual man, animal, plant, or other creature the
object of all life, experience, suffering, and toil the ground
of all sensation, and the hidden yet proper theme of all
thought and study ?
For this is it possible that Science will, speaking broadly,
have to leave the laboratory and become one with Life ; or
that the great currents of human life will have to be turned
on into these often Augean stables of intellectual pruriency t
the investigation of Nature no longer a matter of the intel-
lect alone, but of patient listening and the quiet eye, and of love
and faith, and of all deep human experience, bearing not super-
ciliously its weight towards the interpretation of the least
phenomenon every " fact " thus deepened to its utmost all
experience (rather than experiment) courted, and filial walking
with Nature, rather than tearing of veils aside the life of the
open air, and on the land and the waters, the companionship
of the animals and the trees and the stars, the knowledge of
their habits at first hand and through Individual relationship
to them, the recognition of their voices and languages, and
listening well what they themselves have to say ; the keenest
education of the senses towards the physical powers and ele-
ments, and the acceptance of all human experience, without
exception till Science become a reality.
Is it possible that in some sense, instead of reducing each
branch of Science to its lowest terms, we shall have to read it
in the light of its highest factors, and " take it up " mto
the Science above that we shall have to take up the mechanical
sciences into the physical, the physical into the vital, the vital
THE SCIENCE OF THE FUTURE : A FORECAST. 93
into the social and ethical, and BO forth, before we can under-
stand them t Is it possible that the phenomena of Chemistry
only find their due place and importance in their relation to
living beings and processes ; that the phenomena of Vitality
and the laws of Biology and Zoology Evolution included
can only be " explained " by their dependence on self-hood
both in plants and animals ; that Political Economy and the
Social Sciences (which deal with men as individual selves)
must, to be understood aright, be studied in the light of those
great ethical principles and enthusiasms, which to a certain
extent override the individual self; and that, finally, Ethics
or the study of moral problems is only comprehensible when
the student has become aware of a region beyond Ethics, into
which questions of morality and immorality, of right and wrong,
do not and cannot enter t
Of this reversal of the ordinary scientific method Ruskin haa
given a great and signal instance in his treatment of Political
Economy ; it remains, perhaps, for others to follow his example
in the other branches of Science. 1
With regard to the absolute datum question we have seen
that Science has two alternatives before it either to be merely
intellectual and to seek for its start-point in some quite external
(and imaginary) thing like the Atom, or to be divine and to
1 Thus the study of Geometry would be primarily an education of the
eye, and the mind's eye, to the perception of geometrical forms and
facts, the judgment of angles, &c. and secondarily only a process of
deductive reasoning a body of empirical knowledge strengthened and
tied together by bands of logic ; the study of Natural History would
be primarily an affectionate intimacy with the habits of animals and
plants, and classification would be treated as a secondary matter and
as a help to the former ; Physiology would be studied in the first place
by the method of Health the pure body becoming gradually trans-
parent with all its organ* to the eye of the mind and dissection would
be used to corroborate and correct the results thus attained ; and BO on.
94 CIVILISATION: ITS CAUSE AND CURE.
seek for its absolute in the innermost recesses of humanity.
We have two similar alternatives in the doctrine of Evolution,
which looks either to one end of the scale or the other for its
interpretation either to the amoeba or to the man to some-
thing it knows next to nothing of, or to that which it knows
most of. Goethe, when gazing at a fan-palm at Padua, con-
ceived the idea of leaf metamorphosis, which he afterwards
ennunciated in the now accepted doctrine that all parts of a
plant seed-vessel, pistil, stamens, petals, sepals, stalk, &c.
may be regarded as modifications of a leaf or leaves. In this
view the distinctions between the parts are effaced, and we
have only one part instead of many but the question is
" what is that part t " It is of course arbitrary to call it a leaf,
for since it is continually varying it is at one time a leaf, and
at another a stalk, and then a petal or a sepal, and so forth.
What then is it t For the moment we are baffled.
So with the doctrine of Evolution as applied to the whole
organic kingdom up to man. Like the doctrine of leaf-
metamorphosis it obliterates distinctions. Geoffrey St. Hilaire
proposed to show the French Academy that a Cephalopod
could be assimilated to a Vertebrate by supposing the latter
bent backwards and walking on its hands and feet. There is
a continuous variation from the mollusc to the man all the
lines of distinction run and waver classes and species cease to
exist and Science instead of many sees only one thing. What
then is that one thing 1 Is it a mollusc, or is it a man, or
what is it 1 Are we to say that man may be looked upon as
a variation of a mollusc or an amoeba, or that the amoeba
may be looked on as a variation of manf Here are two
directions of thought ; which shall we choose f But the plain
truth is, the Intellect can give no satisfactory answer.
Whichever, or whatever, it chooses, the choice is quite
arbitrary just M much BO as the choice of the |f leaf " in the
THE SCIENCE OF THE FUTURE : A FORECAST. 95
other case. There is no answer to be given. And thus it is
that the appearance of the doctrine of Evolution is the signal of
the destruction of Science (in the ordinary acceptation of the
word). For Evolution is the successive obliteration of the
arbitrary distinctions and landmarks which by their existence
constitute Science, and as soon as Evolution covers the whole
ground of Nature inorganic and organic (as before long it
will do) the whole of Nature runs and wavers before the eye
of Science, the latter recognises that its distinctions are
arbitrary, and turns upon and destroys itself. This has
happened before, I believe ages back in the history of the
human race and probably will happen again.
The only conceivable answer to the question, " What is that
which is now a mollusc and now a man and now an inorganic
atom ? "* is given by man himself and his answer is, I fear,
not " scientific." It is " I Am." " I am that which varies."
And the force of his answer depends on what he means by the
word "I." And so also the only conceivable answer to the
absolute datum question is to be found in the meaning of the
word " I " in the deepening back of consciousness itself
Man is the measure of all things. If we are to use Science at
a minister to the most external part of man to provide him
with cheap boots and shoes, <fec. then we do right to seek
our absolute datum in his external part, and to take his/oo
as our first measure. We found a science on feet and pounds,
and it serves its purpose well enough. But if we want to find
a garment for his inner being or, rather, one that shall fit the
whole man to wear which will be a delight to him and as it
were a very interpretation of himself it seems obvious that
we must not take our measure from outside, but from his
very most central principle. The whole question is, whether
i Compare the Sphinx-riddle : What is that which goes on four
Ugs, &c.
$6 CIVILISATION: ITS CAUSE AND CURE.
there is any absolute datum in this direction or not. There
have been men through all ages of history (and from before)
who have declared that there is. They have perhaps been
conscious of it in themselves. On the other hand there have
been men who, starting from their feet, declared that con-
sciousness itself was a mere incident of the human machine
as the whistle of the engine and thus the matter stands. On
the whole, at the present day, the feet have it, and (notwith-
standing their variety in size and boot-induced conformation)
are generally accepted as the best absolute datum available.
Under the foot regime the universe is generally conceived of
as a medley of objects and forces, more or less orderly and
distinct from man, in the midst of which man is placed the pur-
pose and tendency of his life being " adaptation to his environ-
ment." To understand this we may imagine Mrs. Brown in
the middle of Oxford Street. 'Buses and cabs are running in
different directions, carts and drays are rattling on all sides of
her. This is her environment, and she has to adapt herself
to it. She has to learn the laws of the vehicles and their
movements, to stand on this side or on that, to run here and
stop there, conceivably to jump into one at a favorable
moment, to make use of the law of its movement, and so get
carried to her destination as comfortably as may be. A long
course of this sort of thing " adapts " Mrs. Brown considerably,
and she becomes more active, both in mind and body, than
before. That is all very well. But Mrs. Brown has a destin-
ation. (Indeed how would she ever have got into the middle
of Oxford Street at all if she had not had one ? and if she did
get there with no destination at all, but merely to skip about,
would there be any Mrs. Brown left hi a short time t) The
question is, " What is the destination of Man ? "
About this last question unfortunately we hear little. The
theory is (I hope I am not doing it injustice) that by studying
THE SCIENCE OF THE FUTURE : A FORECAST. 97
your environment sufficiently you will find out that is, that
by investigating Astronomy, Biology, Physics, Ethics, <kc.,
you will discover the destiny of man. But this seems to me
the same as saying that by studying the laws of cabs
and Ttmses sufficiently you will find out where you are
going to. These are ways and means. Study them
by all means, that is right enough ; but do not think
they will tell you where to go. You have to use them, not
they you.
In order therefore for the environment to act, there
must be a destination. This I suppose is expressed hi
the biological dictum, "organism is made by function as
well as environment." What then is the function of Man 1
And here we come back again to the meaning of the word
ii j
Notwithstanding then the prevalence of the foot regime,
and that the heathen so furiously rage together in their belief
in it, let us suggest that there is in man a divine consciousness
as well as a foot-consciousness. For as we saw that the sense
of taste may pass from being a mere local thing on the tip of
the tongue to pervading and becoming synonymous with the
health of the whole body ; or as the blue of the sky may be to
one person a mere superficial impression of color, and to
another the inspiration of a poem or picture, and to a third
as to the " god-intoxicated " Arab of the desert a living
presence like the ancient Dyaus or Zeus ; so may not the
whole of human consciousness gradually lift itself from a mere
local and temporary consciousness to a divine and universal ?
There is in every man a local consciousness connected with his
quite external body ; that we know. Are there not also in
every man the makings of a universal consciousness ? That
there are in us phases of consciousness which transcend the
limit of the bodily senses is a matter of daily experience ; that
G
98 CIVILISATION: ITS CAUSE AND CURE.
we perceive and know things which are not conveyed to us by
our bodily eyes or heard by our bodily ears is certain ; that
there rise in us waves of consciousness from those around us,
from the people, the race, to which we belong, is also certain ;
may there not then be in us the makings of a perception and
knowledge which shall not be relative to this body which is
here and now, but which shall be good for all time and every-
where ? Does there not exist in truth as we have already
hinted an inner Illumination of which what we call light in
the outer world is the partial expression and manifestation
by which we can ultimately see things as they are, beholding
all creation, the animals, the angels, the plants, the figures of
our friends and all the ranks and races of human kind, in
their true being and order not by any local act of perception
but by a cosmical intuition and presence, identifying ourselves
with what we see ? Does there not exist a perfected sense of
Hearing as of the morning-stars singing together an under-
standing of the words that are spoken all through the universe,
the hidden meaning of all things, the word which is creation
itself a profound and far pervading sense, of which our
ordinary sense of sound is only the first novitiate and initia-
tion? Do we not become aware of an inner sense of Health and
of holiness the translation and final outcome of the external
sense of taste which has power to determine for us absolutely
and without any ado, without argument and without denial,
what is good and appropriate to be done or suffered in every
case that can arise ?
And so on ; it is not necessary to say more. If there are
such powers in man, then there is indeed an exact science
possible. Short of it there is only a temporary and phantom
science. " Whatever is known to us by (direct) consciousness,"
says Stuart Mill in his System of Logic, "is known to us
beyond possibility of question;" what is known by our local and
THE SCIENCE OF THE FUTURE: A FORECAST. 99
temporary consciousness is known /or the moment beyond
possibility of question ; what is known by our permanent and
universal consciousness is permanently known beyond possi-
bility of question,
DEFENCE OF CRIMINALS:
A CRITICISM OF MORALITY.
The State is the actually existing realised moral life. For it is the
unity of the universal essential Will with that of the individual, and
this i ' Morality."
A CRIMINAL is literally a person accused accused, and in the
modern sense of the word convicted, of being harmful to
Society. But is he there in the dock, the patch-coated brawler
or burglar, really harmful to Society t is he more harmful than
the mild old gentleman in the wig who pronounces sentence
upon him 1 That is the question. Certainly he has infringed
the law : and the law is in a sense the consolidated publio
opinion of Society : but if no one were to break the law, public
opinion would ossify, and society would die. As a matter of
fact Society keeps changing its opinion. How then are we to
know when it is right and when it is wrong ? The Outcast of
one age is the Hero of another. In execration they nailed
Roger Bacon's manuscripts out in the sun and rain, to rot
crucified upon planks his bones lie in an unknown and un-
honored grave yet to-day he is regarded as a pioneer of human
thought. The hated Christian holding his ill-famed love-feasts
in the darkness of the catacombs has climbed on to the throne
of S. Peter and the world. The Jew money-lender whom
Front-de-Boeuf could torture with impunity is become a Roths-
child guest of princes and instigator of commercial wars; and
DEFENCE OF CRIMINALS. 101
Shylock is now a highly respectable Kailway Bondholder.
And the Accepted of one age is the Criminal of the next. All
the glories of Alexander do not condone in our eyes for hia
cruelty in crucifying the brave defenders of Tyre by thousands
along the sea-shore ; and if Solomon with his thousand wives
and concubines were to appear in London to-morrow, even our
most frivolous circles would be shocked, and Brigham Young
by contrast seem a domestic model. The judge pronounces
sentence on the prisoner now, but Society in its turn and in
the lapse of years pronounces sentence on the judge. It holds
in its hand a new canon, a new code of morals, and consigns
its former representative and the law which he administered
to a limbo of contempt
It seems as if Society, as it progresses from point to point,
forms ideals just as the individual does. At any moment
each person, consciously or unconsciously, has an ideal in his
mind toward which he is working (hence the importance of
literature). Similarly Society has an ideal in its mind. These
ideals are tangents or vanishing points of the direction in
which Society is moving at the time. It does not reach its
ideal, but it goes in that direction then, after a time, the
direction of its movement changes, and it has a new ideal.
When the ideal of Society is material gain or possession, as
it is largely to-day, the object of its special condemnation is
the thief not the rich thief, for he is already in possession
and therefore respectable, but the poor thief. There is nothing
to show that the poor thief is really more immoral or unsocial
than the respectable money-grubber ; but it is very clear that
the money-grubber has been floating with the great current of
Society, while the poor man has been swimming against it, and
so has been worsted. Or when, as to-day, Society rests on
private property in land, its counter-ideal is the poacher. If
you go in the company of the comity squire-archy and listen
102 CIVILISATION: ITS CAUSE AND CURB.
to the after-dinner talk you will soon think the poacher a com-
bination of all human and diabolic vices ; yet I have known a
good many poachers, and either have been very lucky in my
specimens or singularly prejudiced in their favor, for I have
generally found them very good fellows but with just this one
blemish that they invariably regard a landlord as an emissary
of the evil one ! The poacher is as much hi the right, pro-
bably, as the landlord, but he is not right for the time. He is
asserting a right (and an instinct) belonging to a past time
when for hunting purposes all land was held in common or
to a time in the future when such or similar rights shall be
restored. Csesar says of the Suevi that they tilled the ground
in common, and had no private lands, and there is abundant
evidence that all early human communities before they entered
on the stage of modern civilisation were communistic in char-
acter. Some of the Pacific Islanders to-day are in the same
condition. In those times private property was theft. Obvi-
ously the man who attempted to retain for himself land or
goods, or who fenced off a portion of the common ground and
like the modern landlord would allow no one to till it who
did not pay him a tax was a criminal of the deepest dye.
Nevertheless the criminals pushed their way to the front, and
have become the respectables of modern Society. And it is
quite probable that in like manner the criminals of to-day will
push to the front and become the respectables of a later age.
The ascetic and monastic ideal of early Christian and
mediaeval ages is now regarded as foolish, if not wicked ; and
poverty, which in many times and places has been held in
honor as the only garb of honesty, is condemned as criminal
and indecent. Nomadism if accompanied by poverty ia
criminal in modern Society. To-day the gipsy and the tramp
are hunted down. To have no settled habitation, or worse
still, no place to lay your head, are suspicious matters. We
DEFENCE OF CRIMINALS 103
close even our outhouses and barns against the son of man,
and so to us the son of man comes not. And yet at one time
and in one stage of human progress the nomadic state is the
rule ; and the settler is then the criminal. His crops are fired
and his cattle driven off. What right has he to lay a limit to
the hunting grounds, or to spoil the wild free life of the plains
with his dirty agriculture ?
As to the marriage relation and its attendant moralities, the
forms are numerous and notorious enough. Public opinion
seems to have varied through all phases and ideals, and yet
there is no indication of finality. Modern investigations show
that in primitive human societies the affinities admitted or
barred in marriage are most various the relation of brother
and sister being even in cases allowed ; in the present day
such a bond as the last-mentioned would be considered
inhuman and monstrous. 1 Polyandry prevails among one
people or at one time, polygyny prevails among another
people or at another time. In Central Africa to-day the chief
offers you his wife as a mark of hospitality, in India the native
Prince keeps her hidden even from his most intimate guest.
Among the Japanese, public opinion holds young women
even of good birth singularly free in their intercourse with
men, till they are maivied ; at Paris they are free after. In
the Greek and Roman antiquity marriage seems with some
brilliant exceptions to have been a prosaic affair mostly a
matter of convenience and housekeeping the woman an
underling little of the ideal attaching to the relationship of
1 Yet there is no doubt that lasting and passionate love may
exist between two persons thus nearly related. The danger to
the health of the offspring from occasional in-breeding of the
kind appears to arise chiefly from the accentuation of infirmities
common to the two parents. In a state of society free from the
diseases of the civilisation-period, such a danger would be greatly
reduced.
104 CIVILISATION. ITS CAUSE AND CURE.
man and wife. The romance of love went elsewhere. The
better class of free women or Hetairai were those who gave a
spiritual charm to the passion. They were an educated and
recognised body, and possibly in their best times exercised a
healthy and discriminating influence upon the male youth.
The respectful treatment of Theodota by Socrates, and the ad-
vice which he gives her concerning her lovers : to keep the
insolent from her door, and to rejoice greatly when the ac-
cepted succeed in anything honorable, indicates this. That
their influence was at times immense the mere name of Aspasia
is sufficient to show ; and if Plato in the Symposium reports
correctly the words of Diotima, her teaching on the subject of
human and divine love was prol ably of the noblest and pro-
foundest that hag ever been given to the world.
With the influx of the North-men over Europe came a new
ideal of the sexual relation, and the wife mounted more into
equality with her husband than before. The romance of love,
however, still went mainly outside marriage, and may I believe
be traced in two chief forms that of Chivalry, as an ideal de-
votion to pure Womanhood; and that of Minstrelsy, which
took quite a different hue, individual and sentimental the
lover and his mistress (she in most cases the wife of another),
the serenade, secret amour, <feo. both of which forms of
Chivalry and Minstrelsy contain in themselves something new
and not quite familiar to antiquity.
Finally in modern times the monogamio union has risen to
pre-eminence the splendid ideal of an equal and life-long
attachment between man and wife, fruitful of children in this
life, and hopeful of continuance beyond and has become the
great theme of romantic literature, and the climax of a thou-
sand novels and poems. Yet it is just here and to-day, when
this ideal after centuries of struggle has established itself, and
among the nations that are in the van of civilisation that we
DEFENCE OF CRIMINALS 105
find the doctrine of perfect liberty in the marriage relationship
being most successfully preached, and that the communaliza-
tion of social life in the future seems likely to weaken the
family bond and to relax the obligation of the marriage tie.
If the Greek age, splendid as it was in itself and in its fruits
to human progress, did not hold marriage very high, it was
partly because the ideal passion of that period, and one which
more than all else inspired it, was that of comradeship, or
male friendship carried over into the region of love. The two
figures of Harmodius and Aristogitoa stand at the entrance of
Greek history as the type of this passion, bearing its fruit (aa
Plato throughout maintains is its nature) in united self-devo-
tion to the country's good. The heroic Theban legion, the
" sacred band," into which no man might enter without his
lover and which was said to have remained unvanquished till
It was annihilated at the battle of Chaeronaea proves to us
how publicly this passion and its place in society were recog-
nised ; while its universality and the depth to which it had
stirred the Greek mind are indicated by the fact that whole
treatises on love, in its spiritual aspect, exist, in which no
other form of the sentiment seems to be contemplated ; and by
the magnificent panorama of Greek statuary, which was ob-
viously to a large extent inspired by it In fact the most
remarkable Society known to history, and its greatest men,
can not be properly considered or understood apart from this
passion ; yet the modern world scarcely recognises it, or if it
recognises, does so chiefly to condemn it. 1
1 Modern writers fixing their regard on the physical side of this love
(necessary no doubt here, as elsewhere, to define and corroborate the
spiritual) have entered their protest as against the mere obscenity into
which the thing fell for instance in the days of Martial but have
missed the profound significance of the heroic attachment itself. It is,
however, with the ideals that we are just now concerned and not with
their disintegration.
io6 CIVILISATION: ITS CAUSE AND CURE.
Other instances might be quoted to show how differently
moral questions are regarded in one age and another as in the
case of Usury, Magic, Suicide, Infanticide, <kc. On the whole
we pride ourselves (and justly I believe) on the general advance
in humanity ; yet we know that to-day the merest savages can
only shudder at a civilisation whose public opinion allows as
amongst us the rich to wallow in their wealth while the poor
are systematically starving ; and it is certain that the vivi-
section of animals which on the whole is approved by our
educated classes (though not by the healthier sentiment of the
uneducated) would have been stigmatised as one of the most
abominable crimes by the ancient Egyptians if, that is, they
could have conceived such a practice possible at all.
But not only do the moral judgments of mankind thus vary
from age to age and from race to rae, but what is equally
remarkable they vary to an extraordinary degree from class
to class of the same society. If the landlord class regards the
poacher as a criminal, the poacher as already hinted looks upon
the landlord as a selfish ruffian who has the police on his side ;
if the respectable shareholder, politely and respectably sub-
sisting on dividends, dismisses navvies and the frequenters of
public-houses as disorderly persons ; the navvy in return
despises the shareholder as a sneaking thief. And it is not
easy to see, after all, which is in the right. It is useless to
dismiss these discrepancies by supposing that one class in the
nation possesses a monopoly of morality and that the other
classes simply rail at the virtue they cannot attain to, for this
is obviously not the case. It is almost a commonplace, and
certainly a fact that cannot be contested, that every class
however sinful or outcast in the eyes of others contains within
its ranks a large proportion of generous, noble, self-sacrificing
characters ; so that the public opinion of one such class, how-
ever different from that of others, cannot at least be invalidated
DEFENCE OF CRIMINALS. 107
on the above ground. There are plenty of clergymen at this
moment who are models of pastors true shepherds of the
people though a large and increasing section of society persist
In regarding priests as a kind of wolves in sheep's clothing. It
is not uncommon to meet with professional thieves who are
generous and open-handed to the last degree, and ready to part
with their last penny to help a comrade in distress ; with
women living outside the bounds of conventional morality who
are strongly religious in sentiment, and who regard atheists as
really wicked people; with aristocrats who have as stern
material in them as quarry-men ; and even with bondholders
and drawing-room loungers who are as capable of bravery and
self-sacrifice as many a pitman or ironworker. Yet all these
classes mentioned have their codes of morality, differing in
greater or lesser degree from each other ; and again the question
forces itself upon us : Which of them all is the true and abiding
codet
It may be said, with regard to this variation of codes within
the same society, that though various codes may exist at tha
same time, one only is really valid, namely that which has
embodied itself in the law that the others have been rejected
because they were unworthy. But when we come to look into
this matter of law we see that the plea can hardly be main-
tained. Law represents from age to age the code of the
dominant or ruling class, slowly accumulated, no doubt, and
slowly modified, but always added to and always administered
by the ruling class. To-day the code of the dominant class
may perhaps best be denoted by the word Respectability and
if we ask why this code has to a great extent overwhelmed the
codes of the other classes and got the law on its side (so far
that in the main it characterises those classes who do not con-
form to it as the criminal classes), the answer can only be :
Because it u the code of the classes who are in power.
ro8 CIVILISATION: ITS CAUSE AND CURB.
Respectability is the code of those who have the wealth and the
command, and as these have also the fluent pens and tongues,
it is the standard of modern literature and the press. It is not
necessarily a better standard than others, but it is the one that
happens to be in the ascendant ; it is the code of the classes
that chiefly represent modern society ; it is the code of the
Bourgeoisie. It is different from the Feudal code of the past,
of the knightly classes, and of Chivalry ; it is different from
the Democratic code of the future of brotherhood and of
equality; it is the code of the Commercial age and ita
distinctive watchword is property.
The respectability of to-day is the respectability of property.
There is nothing so respectable as being well-off. The Law
confirms this : everything is on the side of the rich ; justice is
too expensive a thing for the poor man. Offences against the
person hardly count for so much as those against property.
You may beat your wife within an inch of her life and only
get three months ; but if you steal a rabbit, you may be
"sent" for years. So again gambling by thousands on
Change is respectable enough, but pitch and toss for half-
pence in the streets is low, and must be dealt with by the
police ; while it is a mere commonplace to say that the high-
class swindler is " received " in society from which a more
honest but patch-coated brother would infallibly be rejected.
As Walt Whitman has it " There is plenty of glamour about
the most damnable crimes and hoggish meannesses, special
and general, of the feudal and dynastic world over there, with
its personnel of lords and queens and courts, so well-dressed
and handsome. But the people are ungrammatical, untidy,
and their sins gaunt and ill-bred."
Thus we see that though there are for instance in the
England of to-day a variety of classes, and a variety of corres-
ponding codes of public opinion and morality, one of these
DEFENCE OF CRIMINALS. 109
codes, namely that of the ruling class whose watchword Is
property, is strongly in the ascendant. And we may fairly
suppose that in any nation from the time when it first becomes
divided into well-marked classes this is or has been the case.
In one age the commercial age the code of the commercial
or money-loving class is dominant ; in another the military
the code of the warrior class is dominant ; in another the
religious the code of the priestly class ; and so on. And
even before any question of division into classes arises, while
races are yet in a rudimentary and tribal state, the utmost
diversity of custom and public opinion marks the one from the
other.
What, then, are we to conclude from all these variations
(and the far greater number which \ have not mentioned) of
the respect or stigma attaching to the same actions, not only
among different societies in different ages or parts of the
world, but even at any one time among different classes of
the same society ? Must we conclude that there is no such
thing as a permanent moral code valid for all time ; or must
we still suppose that there is such a thing though society
has hitherto sought for it in vain t
I think it is obvious that there is no such thing as a
permanent moral code at any rate as applying to action*.
Probably the respect or stigma attaching to particular classes
of actions arose from the fact that these classes of actions
were or were thought to be beneficial or injurious to the
society of the time ; but it is also clear that this good or bad
name once created clings to the action long after the action
has ceased in the course of social progress to be beneficial in
the one case, or injurious in the other ; and indeed long after
the thinkers of the race have discovered the discrepancy.
And so in a short time arises a great confusion in the pocvJar
mind between what is realty good or evil for the race and
HO CIVILISATION: ITS CAUSE AND CURE.
what is reputed to be so the bolder spirits who try to
separate the two having to atone for this confusion by their
own martyrdom. It is also pretty clear that the actions
which are beneficial or injurious to the race must by the
nature of the case vary almost indefinitely with the changing
conditions of the life of the race what is beneficial in one age
or under one set of conditions being injurious in another age or
under other circumstances so that a permanent or ever-
valid code of moral action is not a thing to be expected, at any
rate by those who regard morality as a result of social ex-
perience, and as a matter of fact is not a thing that we find
existing. And, indeed, of those who regard morals as
intuitive, there are few who have thought about the matter
who would be inclined to say that any act in itself can be
either right or wrong. Though there is a superficial judg-
ment of this kind, yet when the matter comes to be looked
into, the more general consent seems to be that the rightness
or wrongness is in the motive. To kill (it is said) is not
wrong, but to do so with murderous intent is ; to take money
out of another person's purse is in itself neither moral nor
immoral all depends upon whether permission has been
given, or on what the relations between the two persons are ;
and so on. Obviously there is no mere act which under given
conditions may not be justified, and equally obviously there is
no mere act which under given conditions may not become
unjustifiable. To talk, therefore, about virtues and vices as
permanent and distinct classes of actions is illusory : there is
no such distinction, except so far as a superficial and transient
public opinion creates it. The theatre of morality is in the
passions, and there are (it is said) virtuous and vicious
passions eternally distinct from each other.
nere, then, we have abandoned the search for a permanent
moral code among the actions ; on the understanding that we
DEFENCE OF CRIMINALS. ill
are more likely to find such a thing among the passions.
And I think it would be generally admitted that this Is a move
in the right direction. There are difficulties however here,
and the matter is not one which renders itself up at once,
Though, vaguely speaking, some passions seem nobler and
more dignified than others, we find it very difficult, in fact
impossible, to draw any strict line which shall separate one
class, the virtuous, from the other class, the vicious. On the
whole we place Prudence, Generosity, Chastity, Reverence,
Courage, among the virtues and their opposites, as Rashness,
Miserliness, Incontinence, Arrogance, Timidity, among the
vices ; yet we do not seem able to say that Prudence is always
better than Rashness, Chastity than Incontinence, or Reverence
than Arrogance. There are situations in which the less
honored quality is the most in place ; and if the extreme of
this is undesirable, the extreme of its opposite is undesirable
too. Courage, it is commonly said, must not be carried over
into foolhardiness ; Chastity must not go so far as the monks
of the early Church took it ; there is a limit to the indulgence
of the instinct of Reverence. In fact the less dignified passions
are necessary sometimes as a counterbalance and set-off to the
more dignified, and a character devoid of them would be very
insipid ; just as among the members of the body, the less
honored have their place as well as the more honored, and
could not well be discarded.
Hence a number of writers, abandoning the attempt to draw
a fixed line between virtuous and vicious passions, have boldly
maintained that vices have their place as well as virtues, and
that the true salvation lies in the golden mean. The en-ifiKfta
and tr<o<f>poo-uvrj of the Greeks seems to have pointed to the idea
of a blend or harmonious adjustment of all the powers as the
perfection of character. Plutarch says (Essay on Moral
Virtue), "This, then, is the function of practical reason
112 CIVILISATION. ITS CAUSE AND CURE.
following nature, to prevent our passions either going too
far or too short. . . . Thus setting bound to the emotional
currents, it creates in the unreasoning part of the soul moral
habits which are the mean between excess and deficiency."
The English word "gentleman" seems to have once con.
veyed a similar idea. And Emerson, among others, maintains
chat each vice is only the " excess or acridity of a virtue," and
says " the first lesson of history is the good of evil."
According to this view rightness or wrongness cannot be
predicated of the passions themselves, but should rather be ap-
plied to the use of them, and to the way they are proportioned
to each other and to circumstances. As, farther back, we left
the region of actions to look for morality in the passions that
lie behind action, so now we leave the region of the passions
to look for it in the power that lies behind the passions and
gives them their place. This is a farther move in the same
direction as before, and possibly will bring us to a more satis-
factory conclusion. There are still difficulties, however the
chief ones lying in the want of definiteness which necessarily
attaches to our dealings with these remoter tracts of human
nature ; and in our own defective knowledge of these tracts.
For these reasons, and as the subject is a complex and diffi-
cult one, I would ask the reader to dwell for a few minutes
longer on the considerations which show that it is really as
impossible to draw a fixed line between moral and immoral
passions as it is between moral and immoral actions, and which
therefore force us if we are to find any ground of morality at
1L to look for it in some further region of our nature.
Plato in his allegory of the soul in the Phsedrus though he
apparently divides the passions which draw the human chariot
into two classes, the heavenward and the earthward figured
by fvhe white horse and the black horse respectively does not
recommend that the black horse should be destroyed or dia-
DEFENCE OF CRIMINALS, 113
missed, but only that he (as well as the white horse) should be
kept under due control by the charioteer. By which he seems
to intend that there is a power in man which stands above and
behind the passions, and under whose control alone the human
being can safely move. In fact if the fiercer and so-called
more earthly passions were removed, half the driving force
would be gone from the chariot of the human soul. Hatred
may be devilish at times but after all the true value of it
depends on what you hate, on the use to which the passion is
put. Anger though inhuman at one time is magnificent at
another. Obstinacy may be out of place in a drawing-room,
but it is the latest virtue on a battle-field when an important
position has to be held against the full brunt of the enemy.
And Lust, though maniacal and monstrous in its aberrations,
cannot in the last resort be separated from its divine com-
panion, Love. To let the more amiable passions have entire
sway notoriously does not do : to turn your cheek, too literally,
to the smiter, is (pace Tolstoi) only to encourage smiting ; and
when society becomes so altruistic that everybody runs to
fetch the coal-scuttle we feel sure that something has gone
wrong. The white-washed heroes of our biographies with their
many virtues and no faults do not please us. We have an
Impression that the man without faults is, to say the least, a
vague, uninteresting being a picture without light and shade
and the conventional semi-pious classification of char-
acter into good and bad qualities (as if the good might be kept
and the bad thrown away) seems both inadequate and false.
What the student of human nature rather has to do is not
to divide the virtues (so-called) from the vices (so-called), not
to separate the black horse and the white horse, but to find
out what is the relation of the one to the other to see the
character as a whole, and the mutual interdependence of its
different parts to find out what that power is which constt
H
114 CIVILISATION: ITS CAUSE AND CURE.
tutes It a unity, whose presence and control makes the man
and all his actions "right," and in whose absence (if it is really
possible for it to be entirely absent) the man and his actions
must be " wrong."
What we call vices, faults, defects, appear often as a kind of
limitation : cruelty, for instance, as a limitation of human sym-
pathy, prejudice as a blindness, a want of discernment ; but it
is just these limitations in one form or another which are
the necessary conditions of the appearance of a human being
in the world. If we are to act or live at all we must act and
live under limits. There must be channels along which the
stream is forced to run, else It will spread and lose itself aim-
lessly in all directions and turn no mill-wheels. One man is
disagreeable and unconciliatory the directions in which his
sympathy goes out to others are few and limited yet there
are situations in life (and everyone must know them) when a
man who is able and tattling to make himself disagreeable is
invaluable : when a Carlyle is worth any number of Balaams.
Sometimes again vices, <fcc., appear as a kind of raw material
from which the other qualities have to be formed, and without
which, in a sense, they could not exist. Sensuality, for in-
stance, underlies all art and the higher emotions. Timidity la
the defect of the sensitive imaginative temperament. Blunt-
ness, stupid candor, and want of tact are indispensable in the
formation of certain types of Reformers. But what would you
have ? Would you have a rabbit with the horns of a cow, or
a donkey with the disposition of a spaniel ? The reformer has
not to extirpate his brusqueness and aggressiveness, but to see
that he makes good use of these qualities ; and the man has
not to abolish his sensuality, but to humanise it.
And so on. Lecky, in his " History of Morals," shows how
In society certain defects necessarily accompany certain excel-
lencies of character. " Had the Irish peasants been less chaste
DEFENCE OF CRIMINALS. 115
they would have been more prosperous," is his blunt assertion,
which he supports by the contention that their early marriages
(which render the said virtue possible) "are the most con-
spicuous proofs of the national improvidence, and one of the
most fatal obstacles to industrial prosperity." Similarly he
says that the gambling table fosters a moral nerve and calm-
ness "scarcely exhibited in equal perfection in any other
sphere " a fact which Bret Harte has finely illustrated in his
character of Mr. John Oakhurst in the "Outcasts of Poker
Flat ; " also that " the promotion of industrial veracity is pro-
bably the single form in which the growth of manufactures
exercises a favorable influence upon morals;" while, on the
other hand, " Trust in Providence, content and resignation in
extreme poverty and suffering, the most genuine amiability,
and the most sincere readiness to assist their brethren, an
adherence to their religious opinions which no persecutions and
no bribes can shake, a capacity for heroic, transcendent, and
prolonged self-sacrifice, may be found in some nations, in men
who are habitual liars and habitual cheats." Again he points
out that thriftiness and forethought which, in an industrial
civilisation like ours, are looked upon as duties "of the very
highest order " have at other times (when the teaching was
" take no thought for the morrow ") been regarded as quite the
reverse, and concludes with the general remark that as society
advances there is some loss for every gain that is made, and
with the special indictment against " civilisation " that it is not
favorable to the production of "self-sacrifice, enthusiasm,
reverence, or chastity."
The point of all which is that the so-called vices and defects
whether we regard them as limitations or whether we regard
them as raw materials of character, whether we regard them
in the individual solely or whether we regard them hi their
relation to society are necessary elements of human life, ele-
nfi CIVILISATION: ITS CAUSE AND CURE.
menta without which the so-called virtues could not exist ; and
that therefore it is quite impossible to separate vices and
virtues into distinct classes with the latent idea involved that
one class may be retained and the other in course of time got
rid of. Defects and bad qualities will not be treated so they
clamor for their rights and will not be denied ; they effect a
lodgment in us, and we have to put up with them. Like the
grain of sand in the oyster, we are forced to make pearls of them.
These are the precipices and chasms which give form to the
mountain. Who wants a mountain sprawling indifferently out
on all sides, without angle or break, like the oceanic tide-wave
of which one cannot say whether it is a hill or a plain ? And
if you want to grow a lily, chastely white and filling the air
with its fragrance, will you not bury the bulb of it deep in the
dirt to begin with 1
Acknowledging, then, that it is impossible to hold permanently
to any line of distinction between good and bad passions, there
remains nothing for it but to accept both, and to make use of
them redeeming them, both good and bad, from their narrow-
ness and limitation by so doing to make use of them in the
service of humanity. For as dirt is only matter in the wrong
place, so evil hi man consists only in actions or passions which
are uncontrolled by the human within him, and undedicated to
its service. The evil consists not in the actions or passions
themselves, but in the fact that they are inhumanly used. The
most unblemished virtue erected into a barrier between one-
self and a suffering brother or sister the whitest marble
image, howsoever lovely, set up in the Holy Place of the
temple of Man, where the spirit alone should dwell becomes
blasphemy and a pollution.
Wherein exactly this human service consists is another
question. It may be, and, as the reader would gather, pro-
bably is, a matter which at the last eludes definition. But
DEFENCE OF CRIMINALS. 1 17
though It may elude exact statement, that is no reason why
approximations should not be made to the statement of it ; nor
is its ultimate elusiveness of intellectual definition any proof
that it may not become a real and vital force within the man,
and underlying inspiration of his actions. To take the two
considerations in order. In the first place, as we saw from the
beginning, the experience of society is continually leading it to
classify actions into beneficial and harmful, good and bad ; and
thus moral codes are formed which eat their way from the
outside into the individual man and become part of him.
These codes may be looked upon as approximations in each age
to a statement of human service ; but, as we have seen, they
are by the nature of the case very imperfect ; and since the
very conditions of the problem are continually changing, it
seems obvious that a final and absolute solution of it by this
method is impossible. The second way in which man works
towards a solution is by the expansion and growth of his own
consciousness, and is ultimately by far the most important
though the two methods have doubtless continually to be cor-
rected by each other. In fact, as man actually forms a part of
society externally, so he comes to know and feel himself a part
of society through his inner nature. Gradually, and in the
lapse of ages, through the development of his sympathetic re-
lation with his fellows, the individual man enters into a wider
and wider circle of life the joys and sorrows, the experiences,
of his fellows become his own joys and sorrows, his own experi-
ences he passes into a life which is larger than his own in-
dividual life forces flow in upon him which determine his
actions, not for results which return to him directly, but
for results which can only return to him indirectly and
through others ; at last the ground of humanity, as it were,
reveals itself within him, the region of human equality and
his actions come to flow directly from the very game source
ii8 CIVILISATION: ITS CAUSE AND CURE.
which regulates and Inspires the whole movement of society.
At this point the problem is solved. The growth has taken
place from within ; it is not of the nature of an external com-
pulsion, but of an inward compunction. By actual conscious
ness the man has taken on an ever-enlarging life, and at last
the life of humanity, which has no fixed form, no ever-valid
code ; but is itself the true life, surpassing definition, yet in-
spiring all actions and passions, all codes and forms, and deter*
mining at last their place.
It is the gradual growth of this supreme life in each in-
dividual which is the great and indeed the only hope of
Society it is that for which Society exists : a life which so far
from dwarfing individuality enhances immensely its power,
causing the individual to move with the weight of the universe
behind him and exalting what were once his little peculiaritie
and defects into the splendid manifestations of his humanity.
To return then for a moment to the practical bearing ol
this on the question before us, we see that so soon as we have
abandoned all codes of morals there remains nothing for us but
to put all our qualities and defects to human use, and to redeem
them so by doing. Our defects are our entrances into life,
and the gateway of all our dealings with others. Think what
it is to be plain and homely. The very word suggests an
endearment, and a liberty of access denied to the faultlessly
handsome. Our very evil passions, so called, are not things
to be ashamed of, but things to look straight in the face and
to see what they are good for for a use can be found for
them, that \& certain. The man should see that he is worthy
of his passion, as the mountain should rear its crest conformable
to the height of the precipice which bounds it. Is it women 1
let him see that he is a magnanimous lover. Is it ambition 1
let him take care that it be a grand one. Is it laziness ? let it
redeem him from the folly of unrest, to become heaven-reflect-
DEFENCE OF CRIMINALS. 119
Ing, like a lake among the hills. Is it closefistedness ? let it
become the nurse of a true economy.
The more complicated, pronounced, or awkward the defect is
the finer will be the result when it has been thoroughly worked
up. Love of approbation is difficult to deal with. Through
sloughs of duplicity, of concealment, of vanity, it leads its
victim. It sucks his sturdy self-life, and leaves him flattened
and bloodless. Yet once mastered, once fairly torn out, cud-
geled, and left bleeding on the road (for this probably has to
be done with every vice or virtue some tune or other), it will
rise up and follow you, carrying a magic key round its neck,
meek and serviceable now, instead of dangerous and demoniac
as before.
Deceit is difficult to deal with. In some sense it is the
worst fault that can be. It seems to disorganise and ul-
timately to destroy the character. Yet I am bold to say that
this defect has its uses. Severely examined perhaps it will be
found that no one can live a day free from it. And beyond
that is not " a noble dissimulation " part and parcel of the
very greatest characters : like Socrates, " the white soul in a
satyr forml" When the divine has descended among men has
it not always like Moses worn a veil before its face ? and what
is Nature herself but one long and organised system of decep-
tion!
Veracity has an opposite effect. It knits all the elements of
a man's character rendering him solid rather than fluid ; yet
carried out too literally and pragmatically it condenses and
solidifies the character overmuch, making the man woodeny
and angular. And even of that essential Truth (truth to the
inward and ideal perfection) which more than anything else
perhaps constitutes a man it is to be remembered that even
here there must be a limitation. No man can in act or exter
ternally be quite true to the ideal though in spirit he may
120 CIVILISATION: ITS CAUSE AND CURE.
be. If he is to live in this world and be mortal, it must be by
virtue of some partiality, some defect.
And so again since there is an analogy between the Indlvi
dual and Society may we not conclude that as the individual
has ultimately to recognise his so-called evil passions and find
a place and a use for them, society also has to recognise its so-
called criminals and discern their place and use 1 The artist
does not omit shadows from his canvas ; and the wise states-
man will not try to abolish the criminal from society lest
haply he be found to have abolished the driving force from hla
social machine. 1
From what has now been said it is quite clear that in general
we call a man a criminal, not because he violates any eternal code
of morality for there exists no such thing but because he
violates the ruling code of his time, and this depends largely on
the ideal of the time. The Spartans appear to have permitted
theft because they thought that thieving habits in the com-
munity fostered military dexterity and discouraged the
accumulation of private wealth. They looked upon the latter
as a great evil. But to-day the accumulation of private wealth
is our great good and the thief is looked upon as the evil.
When however we find, as the historians of to-day teach us,
that society is now probably passing through a parenthetical
stage of private property from a stage of communism in the
past to a stage of more highly developed communism in the
future, it becomes clear that the thief (and the poacher before-
mentioned) is that person who is protesting against the too-
exclusive domination of a passing ideal Whatever should we
do without him 1 He is keeping open for us, as Hinton I think
expresses it, the path to a regenerate society, and is more use*
1 The derivation of the word " wicked " seems uncertain. May it be
suggested that it is connected with ''wick" or "quick" meaning
alive?
DEFENCE OF CRIMINALS. \2\
fuJ io that end than many a platform orator. He it is that
makes Care to sit upon the Crupper of Wealth, and so, in
course of time, causes the burden and bother of private pro-
perty to become so intolerable that society gladly casts it
down on common ground. Vast as is the machinery of Law,
and multifarious the ways in which it seeks to crush the thief,
it has signally failed, and fails ever more and more. The thief
will win. He will get what he wants, but (as usual in human
life !) in a way and in a form very different from what he ex-
pected.
And when we regard the thief in himself, we cannot say that
we find him less human than other classes of society. The
sentiment of large bodies of thieves is highly communistic
among themselves ; and if they thus represent a survival from
an earlier age, they might also be looked upon as the precur-
sors of a better age in the future. They have their pals in
every town, with runs and refuges always open, and are lavish
and generous to a degree to their own kind. And if they look
upon the rich as their natural enemies and fair prey, a view
which it might be difficult to gainsay, many of them at any
rate are animated by a good deal of the Robin Hood spirit,
and are really helpful to the poor.
I need not I think quote that famous passage from Lecky
in which he shows how the prostitute, through centuries of
suffering and ill-fame, has borne the curse and contempt of
Society in order that her more fortunate sister might rejoice in
the achievement of a pure marriage. The ideal of a monogamic
union has been established in a sense directly by the slur cast
upon the free woman. If, however, as many people think, a
certain latitude in sexual relations is not only admissible but
in the long run, and within bounds, desirable, it becomes clear
that the prostitute is that person who against heavy odds, and
at the cost of a real degradation to herself, has clung to a
122 CIVILISA flON: ITS CAUSE AND CURE.
tradition which, in itself good, might otherwise have perished
in the face of our devotion to the splendid ideal of the exclu-
sive marriage. There has been a time in history when the
prostitute (if the word can properly be used in this connection)
has been glorified, consecrated to the temple-service and
honored of men and gods (the hierodouloi of the Greeks, the
kodeshoth and kodeshim of the Bible, <ko.) There has also
been a time when she has been scouted and reviled. In the
future there will come a time when, as free companion, really
free from the curse of modern commercialism, and sacred and
respected once more, she will again be accepted by society and
take her place with the rest.
And so with other cases. On looking back into history we
find that almost every human impulse has at some age been
held in esteem and allowed full play ; thus man came to re-
cognise its beauty and value. But then lest it should come
(as it surely would) to tyrannise over the rest, it has been de-
throned, and so in a later age the same quality is scouted and
banned. Last of all it has to find its perfect human use and
to take its place with the rest. Up to the age of Civilisation
(according to writers on primitive Society) the early tribes
of mankind, though limited each in their habits, were
essentially democratical hi structure. In fact nothing
had occurred to make them otherwise. Each member stood
on a footing of equality with the rest ; individual men had
not in their hands an arbitrary power over others ; and
the tribal life and standard ruled supreme. And when, in
the future and on a much higher plane, the true Demo-
cracy comes, this equality which has so long been in abeyance
will be restored, not only among men but also, In a
sense, among all the passions and qualities of manhood : none
will be allowed to tyrannise over others, but all will have to
be subject to the supreme life of humanity. The chariot of
DEFENCE OF CRIMINALS. 123
Man instead of two horses will have a thousand ; but they will
all be under control of the charioteer. Meanwhile it may not
be extravagant to suppose that all through the Civilisation-
period the so-called criminals are keeping open the possibility
of a return to this state of society. They are preserving, in a
rough and unattractive husk it may be, the precious seed of a
life which is to come in the future ; and are as necessary and
integral a part of society in the long run as the most respected
and most honored of its members at present.
The upshot then of it all is that " morals " as a code of
action have to be discarded. There exists no such code, at
any rate for permanent use. One age, one race, one class, one
family, may have a code which the users of it consider valid,
but only they consider it valid, and they only for a time.
The Decalogue may have been a rough and useful ready-
reckoner for the Israelites ; but to us it admits of so many ex-
ceptions and interpretations that it is practically worthless.
11 Thou shalt not steal." Exactly j but who is to decide, as
we saw at the outset, in what " stealing " consists ? The
question is too complicated to admit of an answer. And when
we have caught our half-starved tramp " snaking " a loaf, and
are ready to condemn him, lo ! Lycurgus pats him on the
back, and the modern philosopher tells him that he is keeping
open the path to a regenerate society ! If the tramp had also
been a philosopher he would perhaps have done the same act
not merely for his own benefit but for that of society, he would
have committed a crime in order to save mankind.
There is nothing left but Humanity. Since there Is no
ever-valid code of morals we must sadly confess that there is
no means of proving ourselves right and our neighbors wrong.
In fact the very act of thinking whether we are right (which
implies a sundering of ourselves, even in thought, from others)
itself introduces the element of wronguess ; and if we are ever
124 CIVILISATION: ITS CAUSE AND CURB.
to be " right " at all, it must be at some moment when we fail
to notice it when we have forgotten our apartness from
others and have entered into the great region of human
equality. Equality in that region all human defects are re-
deemed ; they all find their place. To love your neighbor
as yourself is the whole law and the prophets ; to feel that
you are " equal " with others, that their lives are as your life,
that your life is as theirs even in what trifling degree we
may experience such things is to enter into another life
which includes both sides ; it is to pass beyond the sphere of
moral distinctions, and to trouble oneself no more with them.
Between lovers there are no duties and no rights ; and in the
life of humanity, there is only an instinctive mutual service
expressing itself in whatever way may be best at the time.
Nothing is forbidden, there is nothing which may not serve.
The law of Equality is perfectly flexible, is adaptable to all
times and places, finds a place for all the elements of character,
justifies and redeems them all without exception ; and to live
by it is perfect freedom. Yet not a law : but rather as said,
a new life, transcending the individual life, working through
it from within, lifting the self into another sphere, beyond
corruption, far over the world of Sorrow.
The effort to make a distinction between acting for self and
acting for one's neighbor is the basis of " morals." As loug as a
man feels an ultimate antagonism between himself and society,
as long as he tries to hold his own life as a thing apart from
that of others, so long must the question arise whether he will
act for self or for those others. Hence flow a long array of
terms distinctions of right and wrong, duty, selfishness, self-
renunciation, altruism, etc. But when he discovers that there
is no ultimate antagonism between himself and society ; when
he finds that the gratification of every desire which he has or
can have may be rendered social, or beneficial to his fellows,
DEFENCE OF CRIMINALS. 125
by being used at the right time and place, and on the other
hand that every demand made upon him by society will and
must gratify some portion of his nature, some desire of his
heart why, all the distinctions collapse again; they do not
hold water any more. A larger life descends upon him, which
includes both sides, and prompts actions in accordance with an
unwritten and unimagined law. Such actions will sometimes
be accounted " selfish " by the world ; sometimes they will be
be accounted " unselfish " j but they are neither, or if you
like both ; and he who does them concerns himself not with
the names that may be given to them. The law of Equality
includes all the moral codes, and is the stand-point which they
cannot reach, but which they all aim at.
Judged by this final standard then, it may doubtless fairly
be said since we all fall short of it that we are all criminals,
and deserve a good hiding ; and even that some of us are
greater criminals than others. Only of this real criminality
the actual moral and legal codes afford but ineffectual tests. I
may be a far worse or more self-included (" idiotic " or brutal)
man than you, but the mere fact that I have violated the laws
and been clapped into prison does not prove it. There may
be, probably is, a real and eternal difference represented by
the words Right and Wrong, but no statement that we can
make will ever quite avail to define it. One use, however, of
all these laws and codes in the past, imperfect though they
were, may have been to gradually excite the consciousness in
the individual of his opposition to society, and so prepare the
way for a true reconcilement. As Paul says "I had not
known sin, but by the law," and if we had not been cudgeled
and bruised for centuries by this rough bludgeon of social
convention we should not now be so sensitive as we are to the
effect of our actions upon our neighbors, nor so ready for a
social life in the future which shall be superior to law.
126 CIVILISATION: ITS CAUSE AND CURE.
Of course the ultimate reconcilement of the individual with
society of the unit Man with the mass-Man involves the
subordination of the desires, their subjection to the true self.
And this is a most important point. It is no easy lapse that
is here suggested, from morality into a mere jungle of human
passion ; but a toilsome and long ascent involving for a time
at any rate a determined self-control into ascendancy over
the passions ; it involves the complete mastery, one by one, of
them all ; and the recognition and allowance of them only
because they are mastered. And it is just this training and
subjection of the passions as of winged horses which are to
draw the human chariot which necessarily forms such a long
and painful process of human evolution. The old moral codes
are a part of this process ; but they go on the plan of eitin-
guishing some of the passions seeing that it is sometimes
easier to shoot a restive horse than to ride him. We however
do not want to be lords of dead carrion but of living powers ;
and every steed that we can add to our chariot makes our
progress through creation so much the more splendid, providing
Phoebus indeed hold the reins, and not the incapable Phaeton.
And by becoming thus one with the social self, the in-
dividual instead of being crushed is made far vaster, far grander
than before. The renunciation (if it must be so called) which
he has to accept in abandoning merely individual ends is
immediately compensated by the far more vivid life he now
enters into. For every force of his nature can now be utilised.
Planting himself out by contrast he stands all the firmer be-
cause he has a left foot as well as a right, and when he acts,
he acts not half-heartedly as one afraid, but, as it were, with the
whole weight of Humanity behind him. In abandoning his
exclusive individuality he becomes for the first time a real and
living individual ; and in accepting as his own the life of
others he becomes aware of a life in himself that has no limit
DEFENCE OF CRIMINALS. 127
and no end. That the self of any one man is capable of as
infinite gradation from the most petty and exclusive existence
to the most magnificent and inclusive seems almost a truism.
The one extreme is disease and death, the other is life ever-
lasting. When the tongue for example which is a member
of the body regards itself as a purely separate existence for
itself alone, it makes a mistake, it suffers an illusion, and
descends into its pettiest life. What is the consequence 1
Thinking that it exists apart from the other members, it selects
food just such as shall gratify its most local self, it endeavors
just to titillate its own sense of taste ; and living and acting
thus, ere long it ruins that very sense of taste, poisons the
system with improper food, and brings about disease and death.
Yet if healthy how does the tongue act ? Why, it does not run
counter to its own sense of taste, or stultify itself. It does
not talk about sacrificing its own inclinations for the good of
the body and the other members ; but it just acts as being
one in interest with them and they with it. For the tongue
it a muscle, and therefore what feeds it feeds all the other
muscles ; and the membrane of the tongue is a prolongation
of the membrane of the stomach, and that is how the tongue
knows what the stomach will like ; and the tongue it nerves
and blood, and so the tongue may act for nerves and blood all
over the body, and so on. Therefore the tongue may enter
into a wider life than that represented by the mere local sense
of taste, and experiences more pleasure often hi the drinking
of a glass of water which the whole body wants, than in the
daintiest sweetmeat which is for itself alone.
Exactly so man in a healthy state dees not act for himself
alone, practically cannot do so. Nor does he talk cant about
" serving his neighbors," <fec. But he simply acts for them as
well as for himself, because they are part and parcel of his
life bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh ; and in doing so
128 CIVILISATION: ITS CAUSE AND CURE.
he enters into a wider life, finds a more perfect pleasure, and
becomes more really a man than ever before. Every man
contains in himself the elements of all the rest of humanity.
They lie in the back-ground ; but they are there. In the front he
has his own special faculty developed his individual facade,
with its projects, plans and purposes : but behind sleeps the
Demos-life with far vaster projects and purposes. Some time
or other to every man must come the consciousness of this
vaster life.
The true Democracy, wherein this larger life will rule
society from within obviating the need of an external govern-
ment and in which all characters and qualities will b
recognised and have their freedom, waits (a hidden but
necessary result of evolution) in the constitution of human
nature itself. In the pre-Civilisation period these vexed
questions of " morals " practically did not exist ; simply be-
cause in that period the individual was one with his tribe and
moved (unconsciously) by the larger life of his tribe. And in
the post-Civilisation period, when the true Democracy is
realised, they will not exist, because then the man will know
himself a part of humanity at large, and will be consciously
moved by forces belonging to these vaster regions of his being.
The moral codes and questionings belong to Civilisation, they
are part of the forward effort, the struggle, the suffering, and the
temporary alienation %>m true life, which that term implies.
EXFOLIATION.
"Creation's incessant unrest, exfoliation."
WHITMAH.
I THINK It may perhaps be agreed, once for all, that the human
mind is incapable of really defining even the smallest fact of
nature. The simplest thing, or event, baffles us at the last.
It is like trying to look at the front and back of a mirror at
the same time. The utmost squinting avails not. The ego
and the non-ego dance eluding through creation. To catch
them both in any mortal object and pin them there, surpasses
our powers. And yet they are there. Montaigne quotes
somewhere the words of S. Augustine : modus, quo corporibus
adhaerent spiritus . . . omnino mirut est, nee comprehendi ab
homing potest ; et hoc ipte homo est. " The manner whereby
spirits adhere to bodies Is altogether wonderful, and cannot be
conceived of by men ; and yet this is man." Man himself con-
tains, or rather is, the reconcilement of this and numberless-
other contradictions. We actually every day perform and
exhibit miracles which the mental part of us is utterly power-
less to grapple with. Yet the solution, the intelligent solution
and understanding of them it In us ; only it involves a higher
order of consciousness than we usually deal with a conscious-
ness possibly which includes and transcends the ego and the
non-ego, and so can envisage both at the same time and equally
I
130 CIVILISATION: ITS CAUSE AND CURE.
a fourth-dimensional consciousness to whose gaze the interiors
of solid bodies are exposed like mere surfaces a consciousness
to whose perception some usual antitheses like cause and effect,
matter and spirit, past and future, simply do not exist. I say
these higher orders of consciousness are in us waiting for their
evolution ; and, until they evolve, we are powerless really to
understand anything of the world around us.
Meanwhile, since we must have formulse and generalisations
to think by, we are fain to accept our local views, and look on
the world from this side or from that. Sometimes we are
idealists, sometimes we are materialists ; sometimes we believe
in mechanics, sometimes in human or spiritual forces. The
science of the last fifty years has, as pointed out in a preceding
paper, looked at things more from the mechanical than the
distinctively human side from the point of view of the non-
ego, rather than of the ego. Reacting from an extreme
tendency towards a subjective view of phenomena, which
characterised the older speculations, and fearing to be swayed
by a kind of partiality towards himself, the modern scientist
h&s endeavored to remove the human and conscious element
from his observations of Nature. And he has done valuable
work in this way but of course has been betrayed into a
corresponding narrowness.
In fact the main scientific doctrine of the day, Evolution, is
obviously suffering from this treatment, and the following
remarks are merely a few notes by way of suggestion of some
things which may be said on its more specially human side.
For since each man is a part of nature, and in that sense a part
also of the evolution-process, his own subjective experience
ought at least to throw some light on the conditions under
which evolution takes place, and to contribute something
towards an understanding of the problem.
If the question is \ What is the cause of Variation among
EXFOLIATION. 131
animals ? some approximation towards an answer ought to be got
by each person asking himself, " Why do I vary \ " Why he
might say ami a different person from what I was ten years ago,
or when I was a boy t Why have I varied in one direction and my
brothers and sisters from the same nest in other directions 1
Though my individual consciousness only covers the small
ground of my own life, and does not extend back to that of my
father or forward to that of my son, still the intimate knowledge
that I have of the forces acting on me during that short period
may help me to an understanding of the forces that bring
about the modification of men and animals at large, and the
discovery of some laws of my own growth may reveal to me the
laws also of race-growth.
In answer to such a question, it would speedily appear that
there were two general causes determining direction of change
or growth in the individual, which might be conveniently
distinguished from each other an external and an internal.
In the first place the supposed person might say, " External
conditions forced me along these lines. My father was a town
artisan, but he apprenticed me to a farmer. I grew up a
farmer's boy, and became an agricultural type as you see. I
did not particularly care for farming, sometimes indeed I would
have been glad to be out of it ; but practically I succumbed to
circumstances, and here I am." But in the second place he
might answer thus : " My father was himself a farmer ; I was
early used to the craft, and should no doubt have grown up in
it, had I not hated it like poison. I loved music, broke away
from home, joined a band, got on the musical staff of a small
theatre, and am now a professional musician. My frame is
comparatively slight, and my hands are of the nervous type, as
you see. Of course I have some of the old agricultural stock
left in me, but I feel that that is dying out." The one cause
would be a change of external conditions, forcing the man to
132 CIVILISATION: ITS CAUSE AND CUKE.
accommodate himself to them ; the other would be a change of
Internal conditions, an inward growth, expressing itself first in
the form of an intense desire, and compelling the man to
change himself and probably also his environment in obedience
to it. Two such general sets of causes, I say, could be roughly
distinguished from each other ; and probably indeed are
recognised less or more distinctly by everyone as acting to
modify his life. Nor can the life of a man at any time be said
to be ruled by one of these forces alone. No man is modified
by external conditions alone, without any play or reaction of
inner needs and desires and growth from within ; nor is any
man transformed in obedience to an inner expansion without
sundry lets and hindrances from without. The two forces are
in constant play upon one another ; but in some ways that
would appear to be the more important which proceeds from
the Man (or creature) himself, since this is obviously vital and
organic to him, and therefore the most consistent and reliable
factor in his modification, while the external force arising from
various and remote causes must rather be regarded as discon-
tinuous and accidental.
I propose, therefore, in these few pages to consider especially
this inner force producing modification in man and animals to
try and find out of what nature it is, what is the law, and what
are the limits of its action premising always, as already
suggested, that this distinction between " inner " and " outer,"
which is convenient and easy to handle on certain planes of
thought, may ultimately, and in the last resort, prove very
difficult or even impossible to maintain.
It ia often said by Biologists that function precedes organisa-
tion that is, man fights with his fellows before he makes
weapons to fight with ; the rudimentary animal digests food
(as in the case of the amoeba) before it acquires a stomach or
organ of digestion ; it sees or is sensitive to light before it
EXPO LI A TION. 133
grows an eye ; in society letters are carried by private hands
before an organised postal system is created. Such facts
properly considered are of vital importance. They show us,
as it were by a sign-post, the direction of creation. They
show how any new thing or modification of an old thing may
come into being. They may be supplemented by a second
statement namely that desire precedes function. That is,
man desires to injure his fellow before he actually fights with
him ; he experiences the wish to communicate with distant
friends before ever he thinks of sending such a thing as a
letter ; the amoeba craves for food first, and circumvents its
prey afterwards. Desire, or inward change, comes first, action
follows, and organisation or outward structure is the result.
In man this " order of creation," if it may so be called, i.e.,
from within outwards, is very marked. Whenever a man
creates anything new he pursues it ; when he builds a house
for instance, or composes a poem or piece of music, or designs
an Alpine tunnel, or whatever it may be. The order seems to
be : first, a feeling a dim want or desire ; then the feeling
becomes conscious of itself, takes shape in thought ; the
thought becomes more defined and issues in a distinct plan ;
the plan is committed to paper, models are made, <fec. ; and
finally the actual work is begun and completed. The process
appears as a movement from within outwards the earliest
and most authentic discernible source of the movement being
a feeling (though there may He something behind that).
Even in ordinary action the same order is manifest ; for
though of course every action is not preceded by desire
since we know that actions soon become habitual and more or
less unconscious still a vast number of them are immediately
so preceded ; and in the case of any action that is new, either
to the individual or to the race, its inception is generally
accompanied by effort so painful that it would not be exerted
134 CIVILISATION: ITS CAUSE AND CURE.
unless the desire were very strong. The difficulty which a
man experiences in learning any new art, and the records of
the many failures, struggles, oppositions, persecutions, <fcc.,
which have attended every new invention or innovation of any
kind in human history afford plenty of evidence of this last
point. Certainly the effort that accompanies a new action ie
not always faced so much from sheer desire of the new thing
itself as from fear perhaps of something else as it may be
contended that monkeys did not take to climbing trees
because they loved trees, but because they feared the beasts
below, or that the giraffe did not stretch its neck because it
particularly desired to feed on leaves, as because it could not
get food any other way but still, even in these cases the
desire may be said to exist, though it is secondary being
founded upon another and more elementary desire the
desire namely of escaping pain or obtaining food. In either
case a desire of some kind is a precedent condition of the new
action. And so as we know of no case of a new action coming
Into play without being preceded by desire, we seem to be
justified in supposing that all our actions when they were first
initiated (in our forefathers if not in ourselves) were BO pre-
ceded. If this is so, then since function is always preceded
by desire, and organisation is preceded by function, organisa-
tion must necessarily be preceded by desire. And if this is
the order of creation in man, should we not reasonably look in
this direction for the key to the variation of animals and the
order of creation in general ? *
If a farmer's son is occasionally born who hates farming
and loves music, and who ultimately through the force of his
1 This does not of course preclude the action of external conditions, or
imply that organisation is determined by desire alone. In fact organi-
sation may be regarded as the expression of desire acting under con-
dition* as in the cases of the monkey and giraffe above.
EXFOLIATION. 135
desire (driving him into oppositions and difficulties and
penurious struggles) transforms himself into a musician, is it
not also likely that occasionally an animal is born who hates
the customs of his tribe, and at last (also through struggles)
transforms himself into something else ? Even if he does not
nucceed (the animal) in entirely transforming himself, he
likely transmits the desire in some degree to his descendants,
and the transformation is thus carried on and completed later.
For everywhere among the animals there it desire, of some
kind or another, obviously acting ; and if in man, by our own
experience, desire is the precursor and first expression of
growth, is there any reason why it should not also be so
among animals t Lamarck gives the instance among others
of a gasteropod ; how the need or desire of touching bodies in
front of it as it crawled along would result in the formation of
tentacles. The gasteropod, he says, would keep making efforts
to feel with the front of its head, and the determination of
consciousness that way would be accompanied by a supply of
nervous and other fluids, which would nourish the part and
cause growth there the form of the growth continuing in
the same way to be determined by need till at last two or
more tentacles would appear. True, the inward determina-
tions of consciousness may not be so vivid and varied in
animals as they are in men ; but they are persistent, and by
the very cumulative force of habit which is so strong in animals,
must at length penetrate down through function into organi-
sation and external form. Who shall say that the lark, by the
mere love of soaring and singing in the face of the sun, has
not altered the shape of its wings, or that the forms of the
shark or of the gazelle are not the long-stored results of
character leaning always in certain directions, as much as the
forms of the miser or the libertine are among men t
Such modification as this is very different from the " sur-
130 CIVILISATION: ITS CAUSE AND CURB..
vival of the fittest " of the Darwinian evolution-theory. We
may fairly suppose that both kinds of modification take place ;
but the latter is a sort of easy success won by an external
accident of birth a success of the kind that would readily be
lost again ; while the former is the uphill fight of a nature
that has grown inwardly and wins expression for itself in spite
of external obstacles an expression which therefore is likely
to be permanent. If the progenitors of man took to going up-
right on two legs instead of on all fours, merely because a few
of them by chance, were born with a talent for that position,
which enabled them to escape the fanged and pursuing beasts,
then when this danger was removed they might have plumped
down again into the old attitude ; but if the change was part
and parcel of a true evolution a true unfolding of a higher
form latent within an organic growth of the creature itself,
then, though the moment of the evolution of this particular
faculty might be determined by the fanged beasts, the fact of
such evolution could not be determined by them. Besides are
we to suppose that Man, the lord and ruler of the animals,
came merely by way of escape from the animals ? Do lords
and rulers generally come BO ? Was it fear that made him a
man ? Were it not likelier that in that case he would have
turned into a worm ? He would have escaped better perhaps
that way. Is it not rather probable that it was some nob-
ler power that worked transforming some dim desire and
prevision of a more perfect form, the desire itself being the
first consciousness of the urge of growth in that direction
that prompted him to push in the one direction rather than
the other when he had to hold his own against the tigers ? In
fact is it not thus to-day, when a man has to meet danger, that
the ideal which he has within him determines how he shall
meet that danger, and others like it, and so ultimately deter-
mines the whole attitude and carriage of his body !
EXFOLIATION. 137
On the whole then, judging from man himself (and it seems
most cautious and scientific to derive our main evidence from
the being that we are best acquainted with), it certainly seems
to me that though the external conditions are a very
Important factor in Variation, the central explanation of this
phenomenon should be sought in an inner law of Growth a
law of expansion more or less common to all animate nature.
Partly because, as said before, the unfolding of the creature
from its own needs and inward nature is an organic process,
and likely to be persistent, while its modification by external
causes must be more or less fortuitous and accidental and
sometimes in one direction and sometimes in another ; partly
also because the movement from within outwards seems to be
most like the law of creation in general. Under this view the
external conditions would be considered a secondary though
important cause of modification ; and regarded rather as the
influences that give form and detail to the great primal im-
pulse of growth from within ; while the creature's own ingen-
uity and good luck would occupy the ground between the two
as the means whereby the external conditions in each indi-
vidual case would be turned to account to satisfy the inner
needs, or the inner life would be accommodated to the external
conditions.
If we take the external view of Variation which is the one
most favored by modern science modification or race-growth
appears as an unconscious or accretive process similar to the
formation of a coral reef. There is no line of growth native in
the race itself, but at any moment it is supposed to have an
equal tendency to vary in any direction. Surrounding con-
ditions act selectively ; and by a process of weeding out certain
types survive ; small successive modifications are thus accumu-
lated ; and gradually and in the lapse of ages a more pliable
and differentiated creature, and more adaptable to a variety of
138 CIVILISATION: ITS CAUSE AND CURE.
conditions, is produced in whom however mind is incidental,
and has played but small part in the creature's evolution,
This in the main is the Darwinian-evolution theory.
If we take the internal view, growth is from the first emin-
ently conscious. Every change begins in the mental region
is felt first as a desire gradually taking form into thought,
passes down into the bodily region, expresses itself in action
(more or less dependent on conditions), and finally solidifies
itself in organisation and structure. The process is not ac-
cretive but exfoliatory a continual movement from within out-
wards. When the desire or mental condition which at first
was painfully conscious, has overcome opposition and estab-
lished itself in altered bodily structure, it has done its work,
and becomes unconscious the bodily function continuing for
a long period to act automatically, till finally it is thrown off
to make room for some later development. Thus race-growth
or Variation is a process by which change begins in the mental
region, passes into the bodily region where it becomes organised,
and finally is thrown off like a husk. This may be called the
theory of Exfoliation.
To illustrate our meaning. Let us take the development of
an eye. In the amoeba there is a dim pervasive sensitiveness to
light over the whole body, but there is no eye, nothing that
we should call vision. Still this vague sensitiveness is of use
to the amoeba. The shadow of its prey falling upon the
creature and exciting a sensation hardly yet differentiated from
toxich helps to guide its movements. On this dim sensation it
relies to some extent; its attention is directed towards it.
Gradually, and in some descendant form, there comes to be a
point on the body on which this attention is most specially
concentrated. The faculty is localised ; and from that moment
a change is effected there, a differentiation and a special
structure ; everything that favors sensitiveness is encouraged
EXFOLIATION. 139
at that place, everything that dulls it is removed ; and before
long there is a rudimentary eye. To-day we use our perfected
eyes, and are hardly conscious that we are doing so ; but every
power of vision that we have was thus won for us by some
lowlier creature, step by step, with effort and with concen-
tration. Or to take an illustration from society. To-day
society is ill at ease ; a dim feeling of discontent pervades all
ranks and ol isses. A new sense of justice, of fraternity, has
descended among us, which is not satisfied with mere chatter
of demand and supply. For a long time this new sentiment
or desire remains vague and unformed, but at last it resolves it-
self into shape ; it takes intellectual form, books are written,
plans formed ; then after a time definite new organisations,
for the distinct purpose of expressing these ideas, begin to
exist in the body of the old society ; and before so very long
the whole outer structure of society will have been reorganised
by them. After a few centuries the ideas for whose realisation
we now fight and struggle with an intense consciousness will
have become commonplace accepted institutions, more or less
effete and ready to succumb before fresh mental births taking
place from within.
The modern evolution theory would maintain that among
many amoebas and descendant forms, one would at last by
chance be born having the usual sensitiveness localised in a
particular spot, and, surviving by force of this advantage,
would transmit this " eye " to its posterity ; or that in the
progress of society, new economic conditions having arisen,
that people would prosper best which most effectually and
rapidly adapted itself to them. But though there is doubtless
truth in this view, yet it seems when all has been said to be
inadequate and even feeble ; it omits at least one half of the
problem. If we look at ourselves, as already pointed out, we
bee the two forces the inner and the outer acting and re-
140 CIVILISATION: ITS CAUSE AND CURE.
acting on each other. May it not be so in animals t Lamarck,
poorly off, blind, derided, was a true poet. "Animals vary
from low and primitive types chiefly by dint of wishing" and
the world laughed and still laughs. But it was his deep
sympathy even with the worms and insects (which he studied
till he could discern them with his mortal eyes no longer) that
led Lamarck to see the human nature and the human laws
that moved within them ; and as his outward sight grew dim
there arose before Him the inward vision of the true relation-
ship which binds together all living creatures which was
indeed a vision of divine things, and as different from the mere
mechanism-theory of the survival of the fittest as the sight of
the starry heavens is different from a governess's lesson on the
use of the globes.
On the theory of Exfoliation, which was practically Lamarck's
theory, there is a force at work throughout creation, ever
urging each type onward into new and newer forms. This
force appears first in consciousness in the form of desire.
Within each shape of life sleep wants without number, from
the lowest and simplest to the most complex and ideal. As
each new desire or ideal is evolved, it brings the creature into
conflict with its surroundings, then gaming its satisfaction
externalises itself in the structure of the creature, and leaves
the way open for the birth of a new ideal. If then we would
find a key to the understanding of the expansion and growth
of all animate creation, such a key may exist in the nature of
desire itself and the comprehension of its real meaning. It is
not certain that it can be found here ; but it may be.
What then is desire in Man ^ Here we come back again, as
suggested at the outset, to Man himself. Though we see
pretty clearly that desire is at work in the animals, and that
it is the same in kind as exists in man, still among the animals
it is but dim and inchoate while in man it ia developed and
EXFOLIATION. 141
luminous ; in ourselves too we know it immediately, while in
the animals only by inference. For both reasons therefore if
we want to know the nature of desire even to know its
nature among animals we should study it in Man. What
then is desire what is its culmination and completion in
Man ? Practically it is love. Lore is the sum and the solu
tion of all desires in Man that in which they converge ; the
interpretation of them ; for which they all exist, and without
which they would be considered useless. The more you look
into this matter, the plainer it becomes. The other desires
the self-preservation desires hunger, thirst, the desire of
power exist, but when they are satisfied they empty them-
selves into this one ; they find their interpretation in it. The
other desires are nothing by themselves the most absorbing,
avarice, ambition, desire of knowledge, taken alone, stultify
themselves but love perpetuates itself : it is a flame which
uses all the rest as its fuel. And what is Love ? It appears
to us as a worship of and desire for the human form. In our
bodies it is a desire for the bodily human form ; in our interior
selves it is a perception and worship of an ideal human form,
it is the revelation of a Splendor dwelling in others, which
clouded and dimmed as it inevitably may come to be re-
mains after all one of the most real, perhaps the most real, of
the facts of existence. Desire, therefore as it exists in man
look at it how you will as it unfolds and its ultimate aim be-
comes clearer and clearer to itself, is seen to be the desire and
longing for the perfect human Form. May it not, must it not,
be the same thing in animals and all thro' creation 1 Begin-
ning in the most elementary and dim shapes, does it not grow
through all the stages of organic life clearer and more and more
powerful, till at last it attains to self-consciousness in humanity
and becomes avowedly the leading factor in our development.
The desire which runs through creation is one desire. Rudi-
14* CIVILISATION: ITS CAUSE AND CURE.
mentary at first and hardly conscious of itself, throwing out a
tentacle here, a foot there, developing an eye, a claw, a nostril,
a wing, it seeks in innumerable shapes and with ever partial
success to realise the image it has dimly conceived. The
animal kingdom is the gymnasium, the school, the ante-
chamber, of humanity ; to walk thro' a zoological garden is to
see the inchoate types of man, perched on branches, or brows-
ing grass, or boring holes in the ground ; it is to witness a
grand rehearsal of some stupendous part, whose character we
do not even yet fully see or understand. From such half-
conscious beginnings the desire grows, its aim becomes clearer,
till in the higher animals the horse, the dog, the elephant,
the bird, and many others it becomes a marked and unmis-
takeable force drawing them close to man, uniting them to
him in a kind of acknowledged kinship, and as obviously at
work modifying their structure as can be. Finally in man
himself it becomes an absorbing power ; love becomes a con-
scious worship of the divine form; generation itself is the
means whereby, in time, the supreme object of desire is realised.
When at last the perfect Man appears, the key to all nature is
found, every creature falls into its place and finds its Inter-
preter, and the purpose of creation is at last made mani-
fest.
The Theory of Exfoliation then differs from that very speci-
alised form of Evolution which has been adopted by modern
science, in this particular among others : that it fixes the at-
tention on that which appears last in order of Time, as the
most important in order of causation, rather than on that
which appears first ; and recalls to us the fact that often in
any succession of phenomena, that which is first in order of
precedence and importance is the last to be externalised
Thus in the growth of a plant we find leaf after leaf appearing,
petal within petal a continual exfoliation of husks, sepals,
EXFOLIATION. 143
petals, stamens and what-not ; but the object of all this
movement, and that which in a sense sets it all in motion,
namely the seed, is the very last thing of all to be manifested.
Or when a volcano breaks out first of all we have a
cracking and upheaval of superficial layers of ground, then
of layers below these, then ttife outflow of lava, and last
of all the uprush of the inner fires and forces which
set it all agoing. What appears first in time, or in the outer
world is in the case o; f >he building of a house, the making
of bricks ; in the case of the flower, the outermost bracts ; in
the case of a volcano, the stirring of the surface of the ground ;
and in the case of Life on the Earth, the appearance of pro-
toplasms and primordial cells. The bricks are not the cause
of the house (if indeed the word " cause " should be used here
at all) but rather the house or the conception of the house
is the cause of the bricks ; and the cells are not the origin of
Man, but Man is the original of the cells. The rationale of
sea-anemones and mud-fish and flying foxes and elephants has
to be looked for in man : ';<> alone underlies them. And man
is not a vertebrate because his ancestors were vertebrate ; but
the animals are vertebrate, because or in SD far as they are
fore-runners and offshoots of Man.
It has been frequently said that great material changes are
succeeded by intellectual and finally by moral revolutions
as the conquests of Alexander passed on into the literary
expansion of the Alexandrian schools and thence into the
establishment of Christiaaity, or as the mechanical develop-
ments of our own time have been followed by immense literary
and scientific activities, and are obviously passing over now
into a great social regeneration ; but a reconsideration of the
matter might, I take it, lead us not so much to look on the
later changes as caused by the earlier, as to look on the earlier
as the indications and first outward and visible signs of the
144 CIVILISATION: ITS CAUSE AND CURE.
coming of the later. When a man feels in himself the up-
heaval of a new moral fact he sees plainly enough that that
fact cannot come into the actual world all at once not
without first a destruction of the existing order of society
such a destruction as makes him feel satanic ; then an intel-
lectual revolution ; and lastly only, a new order embodying
the new impulse. When this new impulse has thoroughly
materialised itself, then after a time will come another
inward birth, and similar changes will be passed through
again. So it might be said that the work of each age is not to
build on the past, but to rise out of the past and throw it off ;
only of course in such matters where all forms of thought are
inadequate it is hard to say that one way of looking at the
subject is truer than another. As before, we should endeavor
to look at the thing from different sides.
We are obliged to use images to think by t.g. the opening
of a flower or the accretive growth of a coral reef and
possibly it would save a good deal of trouble if we did not
disguise by long words the truth that all our theories in
science and philosophy are simply metaphors of this kind
but the/art still lies behind and below them.
Perhaps if we are to use the word Cause at all we should do
well to use it in the old sense in which the final cause and the
efficient cause are one (the eidos of Aristotle) to use it not so
much to link phenomena or externals to each other as to link
each phenomenon in a group to the thought or feeling which
underlies that group. The notes in the Dead March in Saul,
for instance. We cannot say that one note is the cause of
another, but we might say that each note stands in a causal
subordination to the feeling which inspired the piece which
is the origin of the piece and the result of its performance
the alpha and omega of it. Similarly the ground floor in a
house is not the cause of the first floor, nor the first floor of
EX FOLIA TION. i 45
the second floor, nor that of the roof ; but these actualities
and the whole house itself stand in strict relationship to a
mental something which ia not in the same plane with them
at all, nor an actuality in the same sense.
According to this view the notion that one configuration of
atoms or bodies determines the next configuration turns out
to be illusive. Both configurations are determined by a third
something which does not belong to quite the same order of
existence as the said atoms or bodies. Chance " laws " of
succession may doubtless be found among physical events, and
are valuable for practical purposes, but at any moment
owing to their superficiality they may fail. Thus an insect
observing the expansion of the petals of a chrysanthemum
might frame a law of their order of succession in size and
color, which would be valid for a time, but would fail
entirely when the stamens appeared. Or, to take another
illustration, physical science acts like a man trying to find
direct causal relations between the various leaves of a tree,
without first finding the relations of these to the branches and
trunk and so solving the problem indirectly. It deals only
with the surface of the world of Man.
In thinking about such matters, Music, as Schopenhauer
shows, ia wonderfully illustrative ; because in creating music
man recognises that he is creating a world of his own apart
from and not to be confused with that other world of Nature
(in which he does not recognise any of his handiwork).
Supposing a non-musical person were to examine and analyse
the score of a Beethoven symphony, he would be hi the same
position as a man examining and analysing Nature by purely
scientific or intellectual methods. He would discover the
recurrence of certain groups among the notes, he would
establish laws of their sequences, would make all kinds of
curious generalisations about them, and point out some
JK
146 CIVILISATION: ITS CAUSE AND CURE.
remarkable exceptions, would even very likely be able tc
predict a bar or two over the page ; his treatise would be very
learned, and from a certain point of view interesting also, but
how far would he be from any real understanding of his
subject 1 Let him change his method : let him train his ear,
let him hear the symphony performed, over and over, till he
understands its meaning and knows it by heart ; and then he
will know at any rate something of why each note is there, he
will see its fitness and feel in himself the "law" of its
occurrence, and possibly in some new case will be able to
predict several bars over the page ! The symphony is not
understood by examination and comparison of the notes alone,
but by experience of their relation to deepest feelings; and
Nature is not explained by laws, but by its becoming or
rather being felt to be the body of Man ; marvellous in-
terpreter and symbol of his inward being.
There is a kind of knowledge or consciousness in us as of
our bodily parts, or affections, or deep-seated mental beliefs
which forms the base of our more obvious and self-conscious
thought. This systemic knowledge grows even while the brain
sleeps. It is not by any means absolute or infallible, but it
affords, at any moment in man's history, the axiomatic ground
on which his thought-structures, scientific and other, are built.
Thus the axioms of Euclid are part of our present systemic
knowledge, and afford the ground of all our geometry structures.
But as the systemic consciousness grows,the ground shifts and
the structures reared upon it fall. All our modern science, for
instance, is founded on the acceptation of mechanical cause and
effect as a basic fact of consciousness ; but when that base gives
way the entire structure will cave in, and a new edifice will
have to be reared. Similarly, when the human form becomes
distinctly visible to us in the animals as an unavoidable part
of our consciousness this consciousness will form a new base
EXFOLIATION. 147
or axiom for all our thought on the subject, and the theory of
evolution, as hitherto conceived by science, will be entirely
transformed.
Thus, although the experimental investigatory coral-reef
accretion method of modern science Is very valuable within its
range, it must not be forgotten that the human mind does not
progress more than temporarily by this method that its
progression is a matter of growth from within, and involves a
continual breaking away of the bases of all thought-structures ;
so that while this latter i.e., the progression of the systemic
consciousness of man is necessary and continuous, the rise
and fall of his thought-systems is accidental, so to speak, and
discontinuous.
It is then finally in Man in our own deepest and most vital
experience that we have to look for the key and explanation
of the changes that we see going on around us in external
Nature, as we call it ; and our understanding of the latter, and
of History, must ever depend from point to point on the
exfoliation of new facts in the individual consciousness.
Round the ultimate disclosure of the ideal Man, all creation
(hitherto groaning and travailing towards that perfect birth)
ranges itself, as it were like some vast flower, hi concentric
cycles ; rank beyond rank ; first all social life and history, then
the animal kingdom, then the vegetable and mineral worlds.
And if the outer circles have been the first in fact to show
themselves, it is by this last disclosure that light is ultimately
thrown on the whole plan ; and, as in the myth of the Eden-
garden, with the appearance of the perfected human form that
the work of creation definitely completes itself.
CUSTOM.
" Whatever IB off the hinges of custom Is believed to be also off th
hinges of reason ; though how unreasonably, for the most part, God
knows."
MONTAIGNE.
EVERY human being grows up inside a sheath of custom, which
enfolds it as the swathing clothes enfold the infant. The sacred
customs of its early home, how fixed and immutable they
appear to the child ! It surely thinks that all the world in
all times has proceeded on the same lines which bound its tiny
life. It regards a breach of these rules (some of them at least)
as a wild step in the dark, leading to unknown dangers.
Nevertheless its mental eyes have hardly opened ere it per-
ceives, not without a shock, that whereas in the family dining--
room the meat always precedes the pudding, below-stairs and in
the cottage the pudding has a way of coming before the meat ;
that whereas its father puts the manure on the top of his seed-
potatos in spring, his neighbor invariably places his potatos
on top of the manure. All its confidence in the sanctity of its
home life and the truth of things is upset. Surely there must
be a right and a wrong way of eating one's dinner or of setting
potatos, and surely, if any one, " father " or " mother " must
know what is right. The elders have always said (and indeed
it seems only reasonable) that by this time of day everything
CUSTOM. 149
has been so thoroughly worked over that the best methods of
ordering our life food, dress, domestic practices, social habits,
<kc., have long ago been determined. If so, why these
divergencies in the simplest and most obvious matters t
And then other things give way. The sacred seeming-
universal customs in which we were bred turn out to be only
the practices of a small and narrow class or caste ; or they
prove to be confined to a very limited locality, and must be left
behind when we set out on our travels ; or they belong to the
tenets of a feeble religious sect ; or they are just the products
of one age in history and no other. And the question forces
itself upon us, Are there really no natural boundaries ? has not
our life anywhere been founded on reason and necessity, but
only on arbitrary habit ? What is more important than food,
yet in what human matter is there more unaccountable
divergence of practice \ The Highlander flourishes on oatmeal,
which the Sheffield ironworker would rather starve than eat ;
the fat snail which the Roman country gentleman once so
prized now crawls unmolested in the Gloucestershire peasant's
garden ; rabbits are taboo in Germany ; frogs are unspeakable
in England ; sauer-kraut is detested in France ; many races
and gangs of people are quite certain they would die if deprived
of meat, others think spirits of some kind a necessity, while to
others again both these things are an abomination. Every
country district has its local practices in food, and the peasants
look with the greatest suspicion on any new dish, and can rarely
be induced to adopt it. Though it has been abundantly proved
that many of the British fungi are excellent eating, such is the
force of custom that the mushroom alone is ever publicly
recognised, while curiously enough it is said that in some other
countries where the claims of other agarics are allowed the
mushroom itself is not used ! Finally, I feel myself (and the
gentle reader probably feels the same) that I would rather die
150 CIVILISATION: ITS CAUSE AND CURE.
than subsist on insects, such is the deep-seated disgust we
experience towards this class of food. Yet it is notorious that
many races of respectable people adopt a diet of this sort, and
only lately a book has been published giving details of the
excellent provender of the kind that we habitually overlook-
tasty morsels of caterpillars and beetles, and so forth J And
indeed, when one comes to think of it, what can it be but
prejudice which causes one to eat the periwinkle and reject the
land-snail, or to prize the lively prawn and proscribe the
cheerful grasshopper ?
It is useless to say that these local and other divergencies are
rooted in the necessities of the localities and times in which
they occur. They are nothing of the kind. For the most
part they are mere customs, perhaps grown originally out of
some necessity, but now perpetuated from simple habit and
inherent human laziness. This can perhaps best be illustrated
by going below the human to the kingdom of the animals. If
customs are strong among men they are far stronger among
animals. The sheep lives on grass, the cat lives on mice and
.other animal food. And it is generally assumed that the
respective diets are the most "natural " in each case, and those
on which the animals in question will readiest thrive, and
indeed that they could not well live on any other. But nothing
of the kind. For cats can be bred up to live on oatmeal and milk
with next to no meat; and a sheep has been known to get on very
comfortably on a diet of port wine and mutton chops ! Dogs,
whose " natural " food in the wild state is of the animal kind,
are undoubtedly much healthier (at any rate in the domestic
state) when kept on farinaceous substances with little or no
meat, and indeed they take so kindly to a vegetable diet that
they sometimes become perfect nuisances in a garden eating
strawberries, gooseberries, peas, &c. freely off the beds when
they have once learned the habit. Any one in fact who baa
CUSTOM. 151
kept many pets knows what an astonishing variety of food they
may be made to adopt, though each animal in the wild state
has the most intensely narrow prejudices on the subject, and
jrill perish rather than overstep the customs of its tribe. Thus
pheasants will eat fern-roots in winter when snow covers the
ground, but the grouse " don't eat fern-roots," and die in con-
sequence. A wolf of an inquiring turn of mind would probably
find strawberries and peas as good food as a dog does, but it
Is practically certain that any ordinary member of the genus
would perish in a garden full of the same if deprived of his
customary bones.
All this seems to Indicate what an immensely imjx>rtant
part mere custom plays in the life of men and animals. The
main part of the power which man acquires over the animals
depends upon his establishing habits in them which once
established they never think of violating : and the almost in-
superable nature of this force in animals throws back light on
the part it plays in human life.
Of course, I am not contending in the above remarks upon
food that there is no physiological difference between a dog and
a sheep in the matter of their digestive organs, and that the
one is not by the nature of its body more fitted for one kind
of food than the other ; but rather that we should not neglect
the importance of mere habit in such matters. Custom
changed first ; the change of physiological structure followed
slowly after. What happened was probably something like
this. Some time in the far back past a group of animals, driven
perhaps by necessity, took to hunting in packs in the woods ;
it developed a modified physical structure in consequence, and
special habits which in the course of time became deeply fixed
in the race. Another group saved its life by taking to graz
ing. Grass is poor food; but it was the only chance this
group had, and in time it got so accustomed to eating grass
15* CIVILISATION; ITS CAUSE AND CURE.
that it could not imagine any other form of diet, and at first
would refuse even oysters when placed In its way ! Another
group saw an opening in trees ; it developed a long neck and
became the giraffe. But the fact that the giraffe lives on
leaves, and the sheep on grass, and the wolf on animal matter,
and that custom is in each so strong that at first the creature
will refuse any other kind of diet, does not of itself prove that
that diet is the best or most physiologically suitable for it. In
other words, it is an assumption to suppose that " adaptation
to environment " is the sole or even the main factor in the con-
stitution of well-marked varieties or genera ; for this is to
neglect (among other things) the force of mere use or wont,
which has about the same import in race-growth that
momentum has hi dynamics ; and causes the race, once started
in any direction, to maintain its line of movement and often
in despite of its environment even for thousands of years.
Returning to man we see him enveloped in a myriad
customs local customs, class customs, race customs, family
customs, religious customs ; customs in food, customs in cloth-
ing, customs in furniture, form of habitation, industrial pro-
duction, art, social and municipal and national life, <fcc. ; and
the question arises, Where is the grain of necessity which
underlies it all f How much hi each case is due to a real
fitness in nature, and how much to mere otiose habit ! The
first thing that meets my eye in glancing out of the window is
a tile on a neighboring roof. Why are tiles made S-shaped
in some localities and fiat in others t Surely the conditions of
wind and rain are much the same in all places. Perhaps far
back there was a reason, but now nothing remains butcustom.
Why do we sit on chairs instead of the floor, as the Japanese
do, or on cushions like the Turk t It is a custom, and perhaps
it suits with our other customs. The more we look into our
life and consider the immense variety of habit in every depart*
CUSTOM. 153
ment of it even under conditions to all appearances exactly
similar the more are we impressed by the absence of any
very serious necessity in the forms we ourselves are accustomed
to. Each race, each class, each section of the population, each
unit even, vaunts its own habits of life as superior to the
rest, as the only true and legitimate forms ; and peoples and
classes will go to war with each other in assertion of their own
special beliefs and practices ; but the question that rather
presses upon the ingenuous and inquiring mind is, whether
any of us have got hold of much true life at all ? whether we
are not rather mere multitudinous varieties of caddis-worms
shuffled up in the cast-off skins and clothes and debris of those
who have gone before us, with very little vitality of our own
perceptible within f How many times a day do we perform an
action that is authentic and not a mere mechanical piece of
repetition 1 Indeed, if our various actions and practices were
authentic and flowing from the true necessity, perhaps we
shouldn't quarrel with each other over them so often as we do.
And then to come to the subject of morals. These also are
customs divergent to the last degree among different races,
at different times, or in different localities ; customs for which
it is often difficult to find any ground in reason or the " fitness
of things." Thieving is supposed to be discountenanced among
us, yet our present-day trade-morality sanctions it in a thou-
sand different forms; and the respectable usurer (who can
hardly be said to be other than a thief) takes a high place at
the table of life. To hunt the earth for game has from time
immemorial been considered the natural birthright and priv-
ilege of man, until the landlord class (whom wicked Socialists
now denounce !) invented the crime of poaching and hanged
men for it. As to marriage customs, in different times and
among different peoples, they have been simply innumerable.
And here the sense of inviolability in each case is most power-
154 CIVILISATION: ITS CAUSE AND CURE.
fill. The severest penalties, the most stringent public opinion,
biting deep down into the individual conscience, enforce the
various codes of various times and places ; yet they all contra-
dict each other. Polygamy in one country, polyandry in the
next ; brother and sister marriage allowed at one time, mar-
riage with your mother's cousin forbidden at another; prostitution
sacred in the temples of antiquity, trampled under foot in the
gutters of our great cities of to-day ; monogamy respectable in
one land, a mark of class-inferiority in another ; celibacy
scorned by some sections of people, accepted as the highest state
by others ; and so on.
What are we to conclude from all this ? Is it possible, once
we have fairly faced the immense variety of human life in
every department of arts, manners, and morals a variety, too,
existing in a vast number of cases under conditions to all in-
tents and purposes quite similar is it possible ever again to
suppose that the particular practices which we are accustomed
to are very much better (or, indeed, very much worse) than
the particular practices which others are accustomed to ? We
have been born, as I said at first, into a sheath of custom which
enfolds us with our swaddling-clothes. When we begin to
grow to manhood we see what sort of a thing it is which sur-
rounds us. It is an old husk now. It does not bear looking
into ; it is rotten, it is inconsistent, it is thoroughly indefen-
sible ; yet very likely we have to accept it. The caddis-worm
has grown to its tube and cannot leave it. A little spark of
vitality amid a heap of dead matter, all it can do is to make
its dwelling a little more convenient in shape for itself, or (like
the coral insect) to prolong its growth in the most favorable
direction for those that come after. The class, the caste, the
locality, the age in which we were born has determined our
form of life, and in that form very likely we must remain. But
a change has come over our minds. The vauntings of earlier
CUSTOM. 155
days we abandon. We, at any rate, are no better than any-
body else, and at best, alas ! are only half alive.
If these, then, are our conclusions, is it not with justice that
children and early races keep so rigidly to the narrow path
that custom has made for them ? Have they not an instinc-
tive feeling that to forsake custom would be to launch out on
a trackless sea where life would cease to have any special pur-
pose or direction, and morality would be utterly gulfed 1 Cus-
tom for them is the line of their growth ; it is the coral-branch
from the end of which the next insect builds ; it Is the harden-
ing bark of the tree-twig which determines the direction of the
growing shoot. It may be merely arbitrary, this custom, but
that they do not know ; its appearance of finality and necessity
may be quite illusive ; but the illusion is necessary for life,
and the arbitrariness is just what makes one life different
from another. Till he grows to manhood, the human being, he
sannot do without it.
And when he grows to manhood, what then ? Why he dies,
and so becomes alive. The caddis-fly leaves his tube behind
and soars into the upper air ; the creature abandons its bar-
nacle existence on the rock and swims at large in the sea. For
it is just when we die to custom that, for the first time, we
rise into the true life of humanity ; it is just when we abandon
all prejudice of our own superiority over others, and become
convinced of our entire indefensibleness, that the world opens
out with comrade faces in all directions ; and when we perceive
how entirely arbitrary is the setting of our own life, that the
whole structure collapses on which our apartness from others
rests, and we pass easily and at orvce into the great ocean of
freedom and equality.
This is, as it were, a new departure for man, for which even
to-day the old world, overlaid with myriad customs now
brought into obvious and open conflict with each other, if
156 CIVILISATION: ITS CAUSE AND CURE.
evidently preparing. The period of human infancy in coming
to an end. Now comes the time of manhood and true
vitality.
Possibly this is a law of history, that when man has run
through every variety of custom a time comes for him to be
freed from it that is, he uses it indifferently according to
his requirements, and is no longer a slave to it; all human
practices find their use, and none are forbidden. At this
point, whenever reached, " morals " come to an end and
humanity takes its place that is to say, there is no longer
any code of action, but the one object of all action is the
deliverance of the human being and the establishment of
equality between oneself and another, the entry into a new
life, which new life when entered into is glad and perfect,
because there is no more any effort or strain in it ; but it is
the recognition of oneself in others, eternally.
Far as custom has carried man from man, yet when at last
in the ever-branching series the complete human being is
produced, it knows at once its kinship with all the other
forms. " I have passed my spirit in determination and
compassion round the whole earth, and found only equals and
lovers." More, it knows its khiship with the animals. It sees
that it is only habit, an illusion of difference, that divides ; and
it perceives after all that it is the same human creature that
flies in the air, and swims in the sea, or walks biped upon the
land.
THE NEED OF A RATIONAL AND
HUMANE SCIENCE. 1
IN bringing before you this subject of a Rational and Humane
Science you will perhaps forgive me if I dwell for a few
moments on some points of personal history in relation to it.
After reading mathematics for some four years at Cambridge,
it happened to me for the next ten years or so to be engaged
in the study of the physical sciences, and in lectures on these
subjects. Naturally, during the earlier part of this period I
accepted the current methods and conclusions without any
question. But as time went on I became aware of a certain
dissatisfaction; I felt that many of the laws of Science,
enounced as universal truths, were of very limited application
only, that many of the conclusions, so strongly insisted on,
were of quite doubtful validity ; and at last this increasing
dissatisfaction culminated in a rather violent attack or criticism
of Modern Science which I wrote and published about the
year 1884. 2
Now, looking back, at this interval of time, though I admit
that my attack was somewhat hasty and crude in detail, I feel
i Being a reprint of an address given before the Humanitarian
League.
2 Afterwards reprinted in a modified form, as "Modern Science a
Criticism," in the first edition (1889) of the present book.
158 CIVILISATION: ITS CAUSE AND CURE.
that in its main contention it was thoroughly justified, and I
do not feel the least inclined to withdraw it.
What was that main contention] It was as follows.
Modern Science is an attempt (and no doubt it would accept
this definition of itself) to survey and classify the phenomena
of the world in the pure dry light of the intellect, uncoloured
by feeling ; and so far is an effort to separate the intellectual
in man from the merely perceptive, the emotional, the moral,
and so forth. It was in this very fact that my criticism lay ;
for I contended that such a separation was in the long run
quite impossible.
But before proceeding to defend this position, let me admit
at once that this attempt of Modern Science to get rid of
human feeling and to look at everything in the dry light of
the intellect was in some respects a very grand one. When
you consider what the Old-time Science was, with its fancies
and prejudices, its dragons pasturing upon the sun and moon
in eclipses, its immolations of hundreds of human beings to
appease some god of pestilence or earthquake, its panics, its
superstitions, and its incapability of regarding anything except
from the point of view of that thing's influence on man's own
comfort and his little hopes and fears, it was indeed a grand
advance to try and see facts, uncoloured and for themselves
alone. It was an effort of Man as it were to rise above himself,
to which I accord the fullest credit and honour.
And yet, during the time spoken of, it kept growing on me :
first, that the attempt was an impossible one ; secondly, that
the Science so-called was not a true Science ; and thirdly,
that in its pretence to an intellectual exactitude which it did
not really possess, this Modern Science was leading to a
narrow-mindedness and a dogmatism as bad as the old.
There is in fact (so I think) a fallacy in the attempt. But
how shall I describe it ? Our relations to the world may, quite
A RATIONAL AND HUMANE SCIENCE. 159
roughly speaking, be divided into three groups those that are
sensuous and perceptional, those that are purely intellectual,
and those that are of an emotional and moral order. Take any
object of Nature a bird, for instance. We may look upon the
bird as an object of sense-perceptions its form, its colour, its
song, and so forth. Some people attain to extraordinary skill
and quickness in this department, recognising in a moment the
note or even the flight of a songster. Then again we may
look upon the bird from the intellectual side we may study it
in relation to its surroundings the form of its wings, the
length of its leg, the character of its beak, and their adaptation
to its habits, to its locality, to its food, and so forth. Thus
we may get a whole series of purely intellectual results
relations of the bird to the world in which it lives. This is
the special field of the present-day Science. But, again, we
may regard the bird in its emotional and moral relations to s.
One man at the sight of it may be affected with admiration of
its beauty, with tenderness towards it, or sympathy ; another
may be stimulated to wonder whether he can kill it, or whether
it is good to eat ! Modern Science is indifferent to what this
last set of relations may be ; it does not concern itself much
with the first; but it takes the middle term, the purely
intellectual, and seeks to abstract that from the others, to
study the bird, or whatever the object may be, in the one
aspect only. But can that really be done ? The answer is, of
course, No.
To show my general meaning, and why I consider the claim
an impossible one, let us imagine a little cell one of the
myriads which constitute the human body professing in the
same sort of way to stand outside the body and explain the
laws of the other cells and the body at large. It is obvious
that the little cell, swept along in the currents of the body
and swayed by its emotions, in close proximity and contact
I6o CIVILISATION: ITS CAUSE AND CURB.
with some portions of the organism, and far remote from
others, cannot possibly pretend to any such impartial judg-
ment. It is obvious not only that it would not have all the
clues of the problem at its command, but that its own needs
and experiences would prejudice it frightfully in the inter-
pretation of such clues as it had. Yet man is such a little
cell in the body of Nature, or, if you like, in the body of
the Society of which he forms a part.
There is however one way, it seems to me, in which a cell
in the human body might come to an adequate understanding
of the body ; and that would be rather through experience
than through direct reasoning. It is conceivable that there
might be some cell in the body which through the nerves,
etc., was in actual touch and sympathetic relationship with
every other cell. Then it certainly would have the materials
of the required solution. Every change in other parts of the
body would register itself in this particular cell ; and its little
brain (if it had one), without exactly making any great effort,
would reflect sympathetically the structure of the whole body
would become, in faot, a mirror of it. This will perhaps give
you the key to my notion of what a true Science might be.
But before proceeding to that, I want to go a little more
in detail into the fallacy of the absolute intellectual view of
Science. I say, first, that a complete summary of any object
or process in Nature is impossible; secondly, that such
summary as we do make is, and must inevitably and
necessarily be, coloured by the underlying feeling with which
we approach that phase of Nature.
To take the first point. You say, Why is a complete
summary not possible? A watch or other machine may be
completely described and defined; why should not (with a
little more knowledge) a fir-tree, or the human eye, or the
solar system, be completely described and defined?
A RATIONAL AND HUMANE SCIENCE. 161
And this brings us to what may be called the Machine-view
of Science. It is curious (and yet I think it will presently be
seen that it is quite what might have been expected) that
during this last century or so, in which Machinery has played
such an important part in our daily and social life, mechanical
ideas have come to colour all our conceptions of Science and
the Universe. Modern Science holds it as a kind of ideal
(even though finding it at times difficult to realise) to reduce
everything to mechanical action, and to show each process of
Nature intelligible in the same sense as a Machine is intel-
ligible. Yet this conception, this ideal, involves a complete
fallacy. For the moment you come to think of it, you see
that no part of Nature really even resembles a machine.
What is a machine in the ordinary sense 1 It is an aggre-
gation of parts put together to fulfil certain definite actions
and no others. A sewing-machine fulfils the purpose of
sewing, a watch fulfils that of keeping time, and they fulfil
those purposes only. All their parts subserve those actions,
and in that sense may be completely described as far as just
their mechanical action is concerned the same by a thousand
mechanicians. But I make bold to say that no object in
Nature fulfils just one action, or series of actions, and no
others. On the contrary, every object fulfils an endless series
of actions.
Let us take the Human Eye. And I choose this as an
instance most adverse to my position, for there is no doubt
that the Human Eye is one of the most highly specialised
objects in creation. Helmholtz, as you know, is said to have
remarked concerning it that if an Optician had sent him an
instrument so defective he should have returned it with his
compliments. Helmholtz was a great man, and I will not do
him the injustice to suppose that he did not know what he
was saying. He knew that, regarded as a machine for
L
1 62 CIVILISATION: ITS CAUSE AND CURE.
focussing rays of light, the eye was decidedly defective ; but
then he knew well enough, doubtless, why it was defective
namely, because it is by no means merely such a machine,
but a great deal more.
The Eye, in fact, not only fulfils the action of focussiug
rays of light like an Opera Glass or a Telescope but it
might be compared to another instrument, a Photographic
Camera, in respect of the fact that it forms a picture of the
outer world which it throws on a sensitive plate at the back
the Retina. But then, again, it is unlike any of these
"machines," in the fact that it was never made by any
Optician, human or divine, for any one definite purpose. On
the contrary, as we know, it has grown, it has evolved ; it
has come down to us over the centuries, and over thousands
and thousands of centuries, from dim beginnings in the
lowliest organisms who first conceived the faculty of Sight,
continually modified, continually shapen by small increments
in various directions, in accordance with the myriad needs of
a myriad creatures, living, some of them in water, some of
them in air, requiring some of them to see at close quarters,
some at great distances, some by one kind of light, some by
another, and so forth. So that to-day it not only contains a
great range of inherited, yet latent, faculties, but it is actually,
in its complex structure, an epitome and partial record of its
own extraordinary history.
As an instance of this last point, let me remind you that
Sight was originally a differentiation of Touch. The light,
the shadows, falling on the sensitive general surface of a
primitive organism provoke a tactile irritation. In the course
of evolution this sense specialises itself at some point of the
surface into what we call Sight. Now, to-day, when the little
picture formed by the fore-part of the Human Eye falls upon
the Retina at the back, it falls upon a screen formed by the
A RATIONAL AND HUMANE SCIENCE. 163
myriad congregated finger-tips, so to speak, of the optic nerve
the rods and cones, so-called which cover like a mosaic
the whole ground of the Retina, and feel with their sensitive
points the images of the objects in the outer world. And so
Sight is still Touch it is the power of feeling or touching at
a distance as one sometimes in fact becomes aware in looking
at things.
But then again on and bejond all these things beyond the
focussing and photographing of rays, beyond the latent adapta-
tions to the needs of innumerable creatures, and the epito-
mising of ages of evolution the Human Eye has faculties
even more far - reaching perhaps and wonderful. It is the
marvellous organ of human Expression. By the dilatations
and contractions of the iris, by the altering [convexities of
the lens and the eyeball, and in a hundred other ways, it
manages somehow to convey intelligence of Command,,
Control, Power, of Pity, Love, Sympathy, and all those
myriad emotions which flit through the human mind an
endless series a perfect encyclopaedia. It is difficult even
to imagine the eye without this power of language. And
what other functions it may have it is not necessary to
inquire. Highly specialised though it is, it is already
obvious enough that to call it a Machine for focussing
rays of light is monstrously and ludicrously inadequate
even as it would be to call the Heart (the very centre of
emotion and life, and the symbol of human love and courage)
a common Pump.
Nature is an infinitude, and can at no point be circum-
scribed by the human intellect. Nor obviously is there any
sense in taking one little portion of Nature and isolating it
from the rest, and then describing it exhaustively as if it
really were so isolated. A thousand mechanicians will agree,
as I have said, in their description of a machine, because in
164 CIVILISATION: ITS CAUSE AND CURE.
fact they will agree to view the machine just in the one
aspect of its particular action ; but ask a thousand people to
describe one and the same face or, better still, get a thousand
portrait-painters, skilled in their art, to paint portraits of the
same face and you know perfectly well that all the likenesses
will be different. And why will they be different 1 Simply
because every face, however rude, has infinite sides, infinite
aspects, and each painter selects what he paints from his own
point of view. And the same is true of every object and
process in Nature.
Then if these things are true (you ask again) how is it that
scientific men do arrive at definite conclusions, and do agree
with each other so far as they do ?
It is, and obviously must be, by the method of isolation ;
by the method of selecting certain aspects of the problems
presented to them, and ignoring others. For since all the
relations of any phenomenon of Nature cannot possibly be
compassed, the only way must be to ignore some and concen-
trate attention on others ; and when there is a kind of tacit
agreement as to which aspects shall be passed over and which
considered, there is naturally an agreement in the results.
Thus by this method, waiving all other aspects of the
problem, the Eye may be described and defined as an
optical instrument, the Heart as a common Pump, and
the Solar System as a neat illustration of certain mechanical
laws discovered by Galileo and Newton.
On the subject of the Solar System and Astronomy I wilt
dwell for a few moments, as here in this great example of
the perfection of Modern Science we have again a case
apparently most adverse to my contention. The generalis-
ations by which Newton established the nature of the
planetary orbits have been a wonder to succeeding gener-
ations ; the positions of the planets can be foretold, eclipses
A RATIONAL AND HUMANE SCIENCE. 165
can be calculated with amazing accuracy. Yet every tyro in
Mathematics knows that the equations which give these
results can only be solved by what is called "neglecting
small quantities " that is, the problems cannot be solved
in their entirety, but by leaving out certain terms and
elements, which do not appear important, a solution can
be approached. And naturally it has been an important
point to show that these small quantities may be safely
neglected. In the case, for instance, of the orbits of the
planets round the sun, and of the moon round the earth,
it was for a long time taken as proved that the small
variations in the shape and position of each elliptic orbit
would never be accompanied by any permanent increase or
diminution in its size that is, that the mean distances of the
planets from the sun, and of the moon from the earth, would
always remain within certain limits. Of late years however
Professor George Darwin, taking up one of these poor little
neglected quantities in the theory of the moon, found that it
indicated after all very vast and very permanent, though of
course very slow, changes in her mean distance from the
earth ; so that now it appears probable that the Moon's true
orbit, instead of being a limited ellipse, is a continually
though gradually enlarging Spiral, which may some day carry
the Moon to a great distance from the earth. If an eclipse
were calculated for twenty years in advance on the Elliptic
theory or the Spiral theory, it would probably so slow would
be the divergence make no perceptible difference ; but in a
hundred centuries the two theories would lead to results
utterly different.
Thus the certitude of Astronomy as a Science arises largely
from the fact that our times are so brief compared with
Celestial periods. The proper periods of Celestial changes
are to be reckoned by thousands, perhaps millions, of years ;
166 CIVILISATION: ITS CAUSE AND CURE.
but we, ignoring that aspect of the problem, fix our observa-
tions ou one little point of time, and are quite satisfied with
the result !
As another illustration of my meaning, consider the Fixed
Stars, so-called. These stars in their groups and clusters,
which we know so well by sight, have remained apparently
in the very same, or nearly the same, relative positions during
all the 2,000 or 3,000 years that we have any record of the
shapes of the Constellations. Yet now by minute telescopic
and spectroscopic examination we know that they are moving,
and have been moving all the time, in various differing
directions with great velocities, amounting to miles per
second. Nevertheless, so great are the spaces concerned,
so great the times, that all this long period has not sufficed
to bring them into any greatly changed attitude with regard
to each other ! What would you think of an intelligent
foreigner who, coming to England to study the game of
cricket, remained on the cricket field for a quarter of a
minute during which time the players would have hardly
changed their positions and having noted a few points, went
away and wrote a volume on the laws of the game? And
what are we to think of poor little Man who, having noted the
stars for a few centuries, is so sure that he understands their
movements, and that he is versed in all the " ordinances of
heaven."
Thus it would appear that every Nature-problem is so
enormously complex that it can only be got at by what may
be called the Method of Ignorance. Let us take a practical
Science problem like that of Vaccination. The question here,
put in its simplest terms, seems to be, Whether Vaccination,
with calf or human lymph, prevents or alleviates Smallpox ;
and if it does, whether it does so without engendering other
evils at least as great. At first sight this may appear to you
A RATIONAL AND HUMANE SCIENCE. 167
a very simple question, and easy to solve ; but the moment
you come to think about it, you see its extreme complexity.
In the first place, it is obvious that in a question like this,
individual cases afford no test. It is obvious that the fact that
A. is vaccinated and has not taken small-pox proves nothing,
for there is nothing to show that he would have taken it if he
had not been vaccinated. And when you have got people
vaccinated by the hundred and the thousand, you still are
not certain ; for these people may belong to a certain class, or
a certain locality, or may have certain habits and conditions
of life, which may account for their comparative immunity,
and these causes must be eliminated before any definite con-
clusion can be reached. Thus it is not till the great mass
of the population is vaccinated that we can expect reliable
statistics. But the introduction of a practice of this kind on
so great a scale necessarily takes a long period of years, and
meanwhile changes are taking place in the habits of the
people, Sanitation is being improved, customs of Diet are
altering, possibly (as so often happens in the history of an
epidemic) the disease, having run its course, is beginning
spontaneously to decline. And thus another series of possible
causes has to be discussed.
Then, supposing the question, notwithstanding all these
difficulties, to be so far settled in favour of the present system
there still arises that whole other series of difficulties with
regard to the possibility of the spread of other diseases by the
practice, and with regard to the extent of such spread, before
we can arrive at any finale. This series of questions is almost
as complex as the other ; and it includes that great element of
uncertainty the question what interval of time may elapse
between inoculation with a disease and its actual appearance.
For if in several cases children break out with erysipelas
immediately after vaccination, of course there is a certain
1 68 CIVILISATION: ITS CAUSE AND CURE.
presumption that vaccination has been the cause ; but if
the erysipelas only appears some years after, its connec-
tion with the operation may, though real, be impossible to
trace.
The matter standing thus, it seems to us almost a mystery
how it was that the medical authorities of the early days of
Jennerism were so cocksure of their conclusions until we
remember that in arriving at those conclusions they practically
ignored all these other points that I have mentioned, like
changes of Sanitation, spontaneous decline of Small-pox, the
spread of other diseases, etc., and simply limited themselves
to one small aspect of the problem. But now, after this
interval of time, when the neglected facts and aspects have
mean while forced themselves on our attention, how remarkable
is the change of attitude as evidenced by the finding of the late
Royal Commission ! [1896.]
From all this do not understand me to deride Science for
I have no intention of doing that ; on the contrary, I think
the debt we owe to modern investigation quite incalculable ;
but I only wish to warn you how complex all these problems
are, how impossible that notion of settling even one of them
by a cut-and-dried intellectual formula.
But you will ask (for this is the second point I mentioned
some little time back) how people's emotions and feelings come
in to colour their scientific conclusions ? And the auswer is
very simply, namely, by directing their choice as to what
aspects of the problem they will ignore and what aspects they
will envisage ; by determining their point of view, in fact*
To return to that illustration of several portrait-painters
painting the same face ; just as each painter is led by his
feeling, his sympathies, his general temperament, to select
certain points in the face and to pass over others, so each
group of scientific men in each generation is led by its
A RATIONAL AND HUMANE SCIENCE. 169
sympathies, its idiosyncrasies, to envisage certain aspects of the
problems of the day and to ignore others.
The whole history of Science illustrates this. We are all
familiar with the way in which the predilections of religious
feeling in the time of Copernicus and Galileo retarded the
progress of astronomical Science. As long as people believed
that a divine drama of redemption had been enacted on this
earth alone, they naturally concluded that this earth was the
centre of the universe, and refused to look at facts which
contradicted their conclusion. When Galileo turned his
newly-made telescope on Jupiter and saw it circled by its
satellites, he saw in this an image of the Copernican system
and of the planets circling round the central Sun ; but when
he asked others to share his observation and his inference,
they would not. ' ' 0, my dear Kepler," he writes in a letter
to his fellow astronomer, "how I wish we could have one
hearty laugh together. Here at Padua is the principal
Professor of Philosophy, whom I have repeatedly and urgently
requested to look at the moon and planets through my glass ;
but he pertinaciously refuses to do so. What shouts of
laughter we should have at this glorious folly ! "
And though we laugh at the folly of those before us, we do
the same things ourselves to-day. Take the science of
Political Economy. A revolution has taken place in ihat,
almost comparable to the change from the geocentric to the
heliocentric view in Astronomy. During the distinctively
commercial period of the last 100 years, the leading students
of social science, being themselves filled with the spirit of the
time, have been fain to look upon the acquisition of private
wealth as the one absorbing motive of human nature ; and so
it has come about that the economists, from Adam Smith to
John Stuart Mill, have founded their science on self-seeking and
competition, as the base of their analysis. To-day another
170 CIVILISATION: ITS CAUSE AND CURE.
series of economists coming to the front their minda pre-
occupied with the great facts of Community of life and
Co-operation have discovered that Society is in the main an
illustration of these latter principles, and have evolved a quite
new phase of the science. It is not that Society has changed
so much during this period, as that the altered point of view
of the students of Society has caused them simply to fix their
attention on a different aspect of the problem and a different
range of facts.
I have alluded already to the way in which the prevalent
use of Machinery in practical life has affected our mental
outlook on the world. It is curious that during this mechani-
cal age of the last 100 years or so, we have not only come to
regard Society in a mechanical light, as a concourse of separate
individuals bound together by a mere cash-nexus, but have
extended the same idea to the universe at large, which we
look upon as a concourse of separate atoms, associated together
by gravitation, or possibly by mere mutual impact. Yet it is
certain that both these views are false, since the individuals
who compose Society are not separate from each other; and
the theory that the universe, in its ultimate analysis, is
composed of a vast number of discrete atoms is simply
unthinkable.
When we come to a practical and modern question like
Medicine, the influence of the spirit in which it is approached
on the course of the science is very easy to see. For if the
science of Medicine is approached (as it perhaps mostly is
to-day) in a spirit of combined Fear and Self-indulgence fear
for one's own personal safety, combined with a kind of anxiety
to continue living in the indulgence of habits known to be
unhealthy if it is approached in this uncomfortable and
contradictory state of mind, it is pretty obvious that its
course will be similarly uncomfortable ; that it will consist for
A RATIONAL AND HUMANE SCIENCE. 171
the most part in a search for drugs which shall, without effort
on our part, palliate the effects of our misconduct ; in the
discovery, as in a kind of nightmare, that the air round us
is full of billions of microbes ; in a terrified study of these
messengers of disease, and in a frantic effort to ward them
off by inoculations, vaccinations, vivisections, and so forth,
without end.
If, on the other hand, the science is approached from quite
a different side from that of the love of Health, and the
desire to make life lovely, beautiful and pure ; if the student
is filled not only with this, but with a great belief in the
essential power of Man, and his command in creation, to
control not only all these little microbes whose name is
Legion, but through his mind all the processes of his body ;
then it is obvious enough that a whole series of different facts
will arise before his eyes and become the subject of his study
facts of sanitation, of the laws of cleanly life, diet, clothing
and so forth, methods of control, and the details and practice
of the influence of the mental upon the physical part of man
facts quite equally real with the others, equally important,
equally numerous perhaps and complex, but forming a totally
different range of science.
In conclusion, you begin to see doubtless that I do not
believe in a science of mere Formulas, which can be poured
from one brain to another like water in a pot. I believe in
something more organic to Humanity which shall combine
Sense, Intellect and Soul ; which shall include the keenest
training of the Senses, the exactest use of the Brain, and the
subordination of both of these to the finest and most generous
attitude of Man towards Nature.
To come to quite practical aspects, I think that Physical
Science, and for that matter Natural History too, ought to be
founded on the closest observation and actual intimacy with
I7 CIVILISATION: ITS CAUSE AND CURB.
Nature. It is notorious that in many respects the percep-
tions, the Nature-intuitious, of savage races far outdo those of
civilised man. We have let that side go slack, and too often
the man of science when he comes out of his study is a mere
baby in the external world. I look back with a kind of shame
when I think that I studied the mathematical side of Astro-
nomy for three or four years at Cambridge and absolutely at
the time hardly knew one star from another in the sky. But
such are the methods of teaching that have been in use. They
ought however to be reversed, and practical acquaintance
with the facts should come a long way first, and then be
succeeded by inductive and deductive reasoning when the
difficulties of the subject have forced themselves on the
student's mind.
Then in Natural History and Botany I think that we have
hitherto not only neglected the perceptive side, bub also what
may be called the intuitive and emotional aspects. If any one
will attend to the subject, I believe they will perceive that
there are dormant in the mind the finest intuitions and
instincts of relationship to the various animals and plants
intuitions which have played a far more important part in the
life of barbaric races than they do to-day. 1 Primitive peoples
have a remarkable instinct of the medicinal and dietetic uses
of herbs and plants an instinct which we also find well
developed among animals and I believe that this kind of
knowledge would grow largely if, so to speak, it were given
a chance. The formal classification of animals and plants
which now forms the main part of these sciences would then
come in simply as an aid and an auxiliary to the more direct
and human study.
i Elisee Eeclus, in his remarkable paper, La Grande. Famille, points
out the wide-reaching Friendship, and free alliance for various purposes,
of primitive man with the animals, existing long before the so-called
" domestication " of the latter. See Humane Review, Jan., 1906.
A RATIONAL AND HUMANE SCIENCE. 173
Again, let us take the science of Physiology. At present
this is maiuly carried on by means of Dissection or Vivisection.
But both these methods are unsatisfactory. Dissection, be-
cause it amounts to studying the organisation of a living
creature by the examination of its dead carcase; and Vivi-
section, because it is not only open to a similar objection, but
because it necessarily violates the highest relation of man to
the animal he is studying. There is, I believe, another
method a method which has been known in the East for
centuries, though little regarded in the West which may
perhaps be called the method of Health. It consists in
rendering the body, by proper habits of life, pure and healthy,
till it becomes, as it were, transparent to the inner eye, and
then projecting the consciousness inward so as to become
almost as sensible of the structure and function of the various
internal organs, as it usually is of the outer surface of the
body. Of course this is a process which cannot be effectuated
at once, and which may need help and corroboration by
external methods of study, but I believe it is one which will
lead to considerable results. There is no doubt that many of
the Yogis of India attain to great skill in it.
Similarly, from what we have already said about Political
Economy, it is obvious that satisfactory results in that science
must depend immensely on the high degree of social instinct
and feeling with which the student approaches it, and on the
thoroughness of his acquaintance with the actual life of a
people ; and that the development of these factors is fully
as important a part of the science as that which consists
in the logical ordering and arrangement of the material
obtained.
I need not, I think, go any further into detail of new
methods in each Science. You remember what I said at the
beginning about the Cell studying the Body of which it formed
174 CIVILISATION: ITS CAUSE AND CURE.
a part. We may imagine, if we like, three stages in this
process. In the first stage the Cell regards the other cells and
the Body simply from the point of view of how they affect it,
and its comfort and safety. This might be taken to correspond
to the Old-time Science. In the second stage the Cell, with
its tiny experience of the other cells and the small part of the
body in which it is placed, becomes highly intellectual, and
professes to lay down the laws of the structure of the body
generally. This corresponds to the attitude of Modern Science.
In the third stage the Cell, growing and evolving, and coming
daily into closer sympathetic relationship with all parts of the
body, begins to find its true relation to the other cells, not to
use them, but to fulfil its part in the whole. Gradually draw-
ing all the threads together and coming more and more, so
to say, into a central position, it at last in its little brain
spontaneously and inevitably reflects the whole, and becomes
the mirror of it. This would answer to what we have called a
really rational and humane Science.
Man has to find and to feel his true relation to other
creatures and to the whole of which he is a part, and has to
use his brain to further this. Science is, as we all know, the
search for Unity. That is its ideal. It unites innumerable
phenomena under one law ; and then it unites many lawa
under one higher ; always seeking for the ultimate complete
integration. But (is it not obvious ?) Man cannot find that
unity of the Whole until he feels his unity with the Whole.
To found a Science of one-ness on the murderous Warfare and
insane Competition of men with each other, and on the
Slaughter and Vivisection of animals the search for unity on
the practice of disunity is an absurdity, which can only in
the long run reveal itself as such.
I do not know whether It seems obvious to you, but it does
to me, that Man will never find in theory the unity of outer
A RATIONAL AND HUMANE SCIENCE. 175
Nature till he reaches in practice the unity of his own. When
he has learnt to harmonise in himself all his powers, bodily
and mental, his desires, faculties, needs, and bring them into
perfect co-operation when he has found the true hierarchy of
himself then somehow I think that Nature round him will
reflect this order, and range itself in clear and intelligible
harmony about him.
But I can say no more. I have dragged you by the neck.
as it were, through a recondite and difficult subject ; and even
so I do not feel that I have by any means done justice to it.
But it is possible, perhaps, that I have cast the germ of an
idea among you, which, if you think over it at leisure, may
develop into something of value.
THB BUD.
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