^M nh.^:iS 1:1.. W ::Vl.i:UM.A.JNi:i^M-* '^^^^H ^^m ^D'WA.RD H Gm.MD GRIGGS ■k ^H ^^^^^■K' ^^^^^H ^^^^^^^^^H^K: '^^^^^^^^K ^■j^ ■ ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^EiL__-_ii ■ ■It BOOKS BY EDWARD HOWARD GRIGGS THE NEW HUMANISM - - $1.50 net A BOOK OF MEDITATIONS - 1.50 net MORAL EDUCATION - - - THE USE OF THE MARGIN - HUMAN EQUIPMENT - - - HANDBOOKS TO COURSES OF LECTURES; cloth, each - The same in paper covers, each - 1.60 net .50 net .50 net .50 net .25 net To be obtained from booksellers or from the publisher B. W. HUEBSCH New York The New Humanism STUDIES IN PERSONAL AND SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT BY EDWARD HOWARD GRIGGS SEVENTH EDITION NEW YORK B. W. HUEBSCH 1913 Copyright 1899 by EDWARD HOWARD GRIGGS onur ■JRL U f '4 I 3 tu CONTENTS. I. The Scientific Study of The Higher Human Life, 6 II. The Evolution of Personality, - - 41 III. The Dynamic Character of Personal Ideals, 63 IV. The Content of the Ideal of Life, - - 83 V. Positive and Negative Ideals, - - - 101 VI. Greek and Christian Ideals in Modern Civilization, 119 VII. The Modern Change in Ideals of Womanhood, 143 VIII. The Ethics of Social Reconstruction, - 173 IX. The New Social Ideal, 199 X. The Religion of Humanity, - - - 226 I THE SCIENTIFIC STUDY OF THE HIGHER HUMAN LIFE THE intellectual vitality of an epoch is deter- mined less by the amount of accumulated knowledge than by the measure of activity and growth that is present. Certain periods, such as the Alexandrine, possessing an immense accum- ulation of learning, have had less intellectual life than others, like the Periclean age, when men had less erudition, but were more awakened to the hunger for truth. The possession of a vast appar- atus of culture may be the opposite of an inspira- tion to the intellect unless the creative spirit be present. Each epoch must be fertilized anew by some fresh movement of thought, if it is to hare the highest measure of intellectual life. It is less important what form this movement takes than that in some shape it be present. In the awakening of Asia through the teaching of Buddha it lay in religion, as it did in the rebirth of Europe through the spread of Christianity, and again in the amazing conquests, no less startling intellectually than materially, of Mohammedanism. Art was its sphere in the best period of Greece, for life itself was a fine art to the Greeks, and even philosophy was affiliated as closely to art as to science. In the Italian renaissance, which connects the modern with the ancient world, it centered 8 THE SCIENTIFIC STUDY OF again in art. Germany, in the same period, felt the impulse most strongly in the field of moral and religious reform. In the later French crisis it took shape in social and political revolution. A great struggle for national existence may help to awaken the productive energies of a period ; as did the contest with Persia for the Periclean age, the struggle with Spain in Elizabethan England, or the revolution in America. The dominant force may be associated with many others, but always some new awakening of the spirit lies behind any period of great creative vitality. The cosmopolitan character of our own time, and its dependence upon so great a variety of historical sources, makes the force behind its spiritual activ- ity singularly complex. But in its more particu- larly intellectual aspects, we are right in regarding our period as peculiarly the epoch of science. It is in the new hunger to know the objective truth of things, in the immense impetus given to the scien- tific spirit, in the fresh awakening to the inductive study of the real world, that the intellectual in- spiration of our epoch has centered. In one sense this period is specifically the nine- teenth century, in another it is the whole intellec- tual movement since the beginning of the renais- sance. For although the conscious application of inductive methods has been vastly more complete THE HIGHER HUMAN LIFE 9 and universal in our century than previously, the work of the last hundred years is only the fruition of the movement vrhich began in that marvelous rebirth of Europe at the close of the middle ages. Not that there was no science before the renais- sance : the notion that all inductive study of the world begins in the fifteenth century, or even later, is one of the most unwarranted superstitions com- monly accepted to-day. Not to speak of the re- markable development of Arabic science, which stands somewhat apart from the main trend of the culture of Europe, there are many proofs of the fallacy of this view. The reflection of the older philosophers was based on an immense amount of observation and experience. If their method of exposition was deductive rather than inductive, so is the characteristic method of exposition in modern science. When Aristotle studied the con- stitutions of a great number of Greek and barbarian states, before writing his political treatise, he was even consciously carrying on inductive study. His Poetics and his Ethics are simply an organic pre- sentation of results obtained by a keen analysis of the actual conditions of Greek art and life. And, most remarkable of all, portions of his History of Animals are unexcelled examples of direct induc- tive and comparative study of nature. The Alex- andrine school, with the critical tendencies that 10 THE SCIENTIFIC STUDY OF awaken in a cosmopolitan period, developed con- sciously scientific methods in many departments of study, and displayed a number of intellectual qualities that belong to our own time. Even the most speculative philosophers of the middle ages never entirely lost sight of the fact that it was the real world of man and nature they were to try to understand, and at some point they retained their hold upon observation and experience. And as the thinking of the ancient and mediaeval world was largely along the lines dealing with the con- scious human life, some portion of the facts to be investigated was given in the life and experience of the individual, as is impossible with the data of the sciences dealing with nature. The intellectual advance of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries lay really in the immense im- petus given to the scientific spirit, resulting in the vastly greater conscious application of inductive methods, and in the rapid accumulation of accur- rate and definite knowledge. The significance of the change was tremendous ; it justifies us in say- ing that in the period of the renaissance the sciences were born ; but the awakening consisted of the rebirth of elements which had been recur- ringly present in the antecedent history of thought, rather than in an altogether unprecedented atti- tude of mind or method of research. THE HIGHER HUMAN LIFE 11 The application of the new spirit and methods was not made at once to all fields of investigation. Although individual workers carried the new inspi- ration into widely different lines of study at much the same time, still it is possible to trace some- thing of an orderly succession in the modern devel- opment of the sciences. The first expression of the new spirit lay very naturally in the study of the mechanical principles in the inorganic world. In the middle ages the effort of scholastic thinking was to work out given doctrines with the most accurate and logical distinctions. Philosophy — scholastic science — was the "handmaid of religion" and its chief function was in developing and retin- iDg the dogmas of theology. Of all the sciences in any way connected with the natural world, mathematics, precisely because it deals deductively with logical abstractions from nature, is the earli- est developed, and the most logical and definite in its methods of thinking and in its conclusions. Thus Mathematics attained in some departments, as in Euclidian geometry, practically a finished development, when the inductive natural sciences existed only in germ ; and for the older philoso- phers mathematics always had a central import- ance. So when the mediaeval world passed over into the modern epoch, the awakening of the human intellect to the real world led it first to the accurate, 12 THE SCIENTIFIC STUDY OF logical distinctions of mathematics, in their appli- cation to astronomy and physics. And with the new consciousness of the vastness of the mate- rial universe, it was the world of the celestial bodies that first dominated the imagination of men. The stars, of all things in nature, are the one symbol of absolute immensity. The ocean is vast until we have crossed it, the earth is greater than our imagination until we have compassed it — then it shrinks in significance. But we cannot compass the stars. They stretch out beyond our widest imagination, and symbolize to us with ever new impressiveness the vastness of the universe. Every step of advance in our knowledge of the world of the stars extends the abyss between its limitless reach and the confines of our little earth. Furthermore, the superstition inevitably connected with awe in the presence of immensity, the notion that celestial forces stream down out of the stars and determine human destiny, stimulated to the highest degree the awakening human conscious- ness in its study of the heavens. Connected with the superstitions of astrology, and second only to them in importance, was the reverence for unknown and mysterious chemical forces ; and investiga- tion in the one field was paralleled, and, through the feverish search for the philosopher's stone, was sometimes excelled by that in the other. THE HIGHER HUMAN LIFE 13 Astrology is the step-mother of astronomy, as chemistry is the foster-child of alchemy. The reverence for the supposed influence of the stars led the mind to attempt the intelligent comprehen- sion of the laws of movement and change that regulate the heavens. Thus among the first signifi- cant investigations and generalizations of modern science were those in the sphere of astronomy ; and Copernicus and Galileo are early among the greater names in the long roll of the heroes of science. As the interest in the heavens depended upon their supposed infiuence over human destiny, so the study of the stars centered upon their relation to our earth, and discoveries in the field of geog- raphy accompanied and sometimes preceded those in astronomy. The moment the fact is rediscov- ered that the earth is not a fixed and central plane or sphere, but a planet moving together with others about a central sun, and regulated by the same laws as the other planets and stars, interest is deepened in its formation and history, and so physical geography and geology are born. The study of the history of the earth's surface leads to renewed curiosity concerning the strange forms in its crust, which are at once like and un- like living organisms. Various fruitless and even amusing speculations are thrown out concerning them, but the moment it is guessed that these 14 THE SCIENTIFIC STUDY OF fossils are the bones and shells of animals and plants that once lived, the possibility of a scientific study of the history of life is realized, and biology is born. The puzzling similarities between men and ani- mals, and the common application to both of many fundamental laws are early seen ; but it is long before even the most open investigators are willing to accept frankly the unity of the human and the animal world, and the identity of many aspects of man's life with that of the lower creation. Isolated investigators insist upon these principles, but it is only when it is conjectured, and affirmed with evi- dence that is perplexingly positive, that man is but one expression of the great stream of organic life, connected with all other present and extinct forms by laws of descent, that the scientific spirit is carried over with one splendid impulse into the study of humanity, and the humanistic sciences as such for the first time are born. They are not all born at once, and successive waves follow the first impulse, transforming one after another the different lines of study of the human world. As it is not possible to trace with absolute definiteness a successive development of the physical sciences, so is it in the human sphere ; but in the one case as in the other, some order is evident in the creation of the new lines of research. THE HIGHEB HUMAN LIFE 16 The general field of history, particularly in the study of political and economic institutions, was the first to feel strongly the new impulsion of life. The eighteenth century had speculated about social contracts, and had imagined primitive men to have ingenuously sat down together, and said, "Go to, let us make a state." From the point of view of modern history these theories seem curiosities from an antique world. The abstract speculation con- cerning human rights seems little less obsolete than the theory of the divine right of kings. In- stead of discussing how men might have made a state, the modern student of history investigates patiently all procurable data expressing early life, and tries to see how political institutions really did develop out of the undifferentiated conditions of primitive existence. Instead of attempting to write an interesting but uncritical story concerning some past phase of civilization, the modern histor- ian presents the actual facts of the period, with evidence taken from its immediate expressions, and draws slowly and soberly the seemingly just conclusions from these. As it was more especially in the field of institu- tional history that this movement was first felt, so the associated science of political economy very early received the regenerating influence. In that field abstract sx)eculation was particularly strong ; 16 THE SCIENTIFIC STUDY OF but to-day, although such speculation is seen to have an excellent clarifying value, the science has become inductive. The actual economic conditions of corporate life, past and present, are laboriously investigated, and generalizations inferred from these. Furthermore, the field of social history has seen the development of a new science, whose signifi- cance is as great as it is yet indefinite. Sociology, rapidly differentiated from the more special politi- cal sciences, has assumed the place of the larger study of society, both in its static and in its dyna- mic aspects ; and has at times claimed with some reason to be "the science of sciences." The unique place which it occupies at present is due in part to temporary causes. The reaction against philosophy, and the emphasis of the need of gath- ering facts, with a failure to appreciate the value of the reflection that interprets them, has checked the more natural expressions of the latter. At the same time, such reflection is more needed when a great mass of intellectual material is being gath- ered together than at any other time. Mere facts are the dead wood of the intellect, which the active spirit must build into the temple of truth. Some appreciation of the relations of the sciences, and of the universal bearing of the facts discovered in each, is necessary to the sanity, the value and the THE HIGHER HUMAN LIFE 17 order of research. That is, philosophy is indis- pensable to science, not as a detached metaphysics, but as the reflective study of the inter-relations of the different sciences, and of the facts discovered and accumulated in each of them. These universal problems should be approached only on the basis of the exhaustive study of at least one science. The present state of philosophy, and the fact that the philosopher too rarely brings a rigid scientific training to his reflection, has pushed sociology somewhat into the place of the science of sciences, a place which perhaps it is not fitted to occupy for any length of time. In other words, besides the inductive study of human society in its organic relations and development, there is to-day, under the general name of sociology, a large amount of reflective study of the more universal problems which are present at the bottom of all the sciences, and may be approached through any one of them. These lie, as Spencer shows in the chapter on Ulti- mate Scientific Ideas in his First Principles, as close to the physical sciences, as to those hitherto regarded as philosophical disciplines. Physics, chemistry and biology are avenues of approach to them as truly as psychology and ethics. Tlie dilem- ma of freedom and determinism is no more enig- matical than the problem of the divisibility of matter, and the conception of God is no more 18 THE SOIENTIFIO STtTDY OE paradoxical to the human intellect than the con- ception of an atom. In all lines of investigation we are proceeding on the basis of hypotheses and assumptions which iDvolve unsolved enigmas, and the conscious recognition of this is necessary to a right attitude. Nothing could prove more con- clusively the permanent necessity for philosophy than the present position of sociology. Those who protest most strongly against philosophy almost invariably have a metaphysics of their own, and in such a case, very naturally a cheap and unworthy one. Though there are organic relations between dif- ferent lines of investigation, these are continually being modified by progress in the development of science. There can be no such permanent classifi- cation of the sciences as Comte and others have attempted, for the law of evolution applies as fully to their development as to the physical world. New lines of study are continually being differentiated out of the old, and the inter-relations of all are being constantly changed. These perturbations are the necessary accompaniment of the great move- ment of the present, and they should not blind us to its meaning. The new spirit has been carried more slowly into other fields than institutional history, and in some is only beginning to be felt to-day ; but the same THE HIGHER HUMAN LIFE 19 principle applies everywhere. Anything that can be studied at all can be studied scientifically, and there is no reason for trying to take it up in any other way. For the method of science is simply rationalized common sense ; it consists in seeking quietly the ascertainable facts, and then soberly asking what they seem to mean. Thus every ex- pression of human life should be studied in the same spirit and with the same inductive methods as are applied to the investigation of nature. The moral conduct of men and the ideals inspir- ing it may be taken up in this way, and so give us a positive science of ethics, occupied with discov- ering the laws which actually do govern the life and development of the individual in relation to the universe. Instead of multiplying books of dry speculation concerning an imagined human nature, we can hope to come closer to the concrete circum- stances and problems with which men and women really struggle in the intricately tangled web of life. As biology depends upon the whole range of the phenomena of organic existence, so ethics in- cludes as its data the entire body of facts of the higher human life, studied from the point of view of the individual, and his life and growth in har- mony with the sum of things. Every fact of man's action, every work of art that embodies a dream of his spirit, every religious creed and observance. 20 THE SCIENTIFIC STUDY OF every institution lie has built around himself, throws some light on the fundamental laws of his life. These data are not all upon the same plane of importance, but none are insignificant in the effort to discover moral laws, which are merely- natural laws considered with reference to the wel- fare and development of humanity. In this manner all aspects of the psychical life of humanity, in the individual and in the race, may be studied. As we come to understand the devel- opment of the individual mind, we shall have a genetic psychology, no longer a vain discussion of definitions, but a working basis for education and all arts concerned with the development of the individual. Furthermore, every expression of mind, personal or collective, is a door through which it is possible to go back into the psychical life of humanity. The psychology of crowds, of great movements of reform and revolution, of the arts, of religion, will all be included in the future study of mind. So every sphere of human existence may be ap- proached. The data of the religious life, in the consciousness of the individual, and in the history of religious ideals, beliefs, rituals and institutions, may be openly and inductively investigated, and give us a science of religion. The data of the aesthetic life, the actual facts in the history of the THE HIGHER HUMAN LIFE 21 arts, and the relation of creations of beauty to tlie human consciousness, may be studied, and thus a science of aesthetics, whether called by that name ' or not, developed. The systematized theories of the world — one of the most refined and highly organ- ized results of the activity of every epoch — may be taken up in relation to the forces, social, personal and intellectual, which gave them birth. The his- tory of philosophy will then come to be one of the chief avenues through which the development of the human intellect mav be studied ; and instead of futile discussion in support or opposition to each system, we shall try to see its significance in the unfolding of thought. Without exhausting the list of the humanistic sciences in process of creation to-day, these examples may serve to illus- trate the principles involved in the whole move- ment. It will have been observed that in the list of positive sciences there are two main classes : the biological, and those dealing with the inorganic world. The former class in turn falls into two main divisions : the biological studies in the narrower sense, or those dealing with the purely physical aspects of organic life ; and the psychical sciences, or those considering the higher human life and its beginnings in lower organisms. This classifi- cation has no relation to a particular philosophy : 22 THE SCIENTIFIC STUD"? OF it holds as strictly on the basis of naturalistic materialism as from any other point of view. Thought, emotion and volition are facts as much as anything in the physical world ; and every ex- pression of them in the higher human life may be studied as inductively as fish or fossils. There are, therefore, three imperfectly separated classes of sciences ; and the order of their historic development is that of their simplicity, of the exactness of their methods, and of the accuracy and completeness of their conclusions. The sciences dealing primarily with the inorganic world, astron- omy, physics, chemistry, geography, geology, etc., were, with mathematics, the earliest developed, and occupied as they are with a statical or mechan- ically changing subject-matter, it is possible for them to be entirely accurate and exact in method and results. Biology, dealing with a dynamically changing subject matter, showing the mysterious forces of growth and reproduction, can never be absolutely exact in its work. The movement of a star may be accurately predicted, the exact character of the offspring of two organisms never can be. The resultant of two chemicals may be determined with absolute definiteness, but not so the interaction of the growing life with its environment. The same difference holds between the physical THE HIGHER HUMAN LIFE 23 and the humanistic sciences. The data of the latter are indefinitely more complex than in the former, and the unpredictable and even incalcu- lable elements are vastly greater. It is therefore impossible to have the exactness of method and result present in the physical sciences. But the same fundamental principles apply. Science is no mystery ; it is simply the effort to reduce facts to laws and laws to law: to pass from the bewildering variety on the circumference of the universe, to the possible unity at the center. Considered ob- jectively, in its more primary sense, it is the whole accumulation of organized and reasonably exact knowledge ; and its methods are fundamentally the same in all departments. A period of new experiment and rapid develop- ment is one when mistakes are easily made ; and the particular order in which the sciences have de- veloped, together with the fact that the humanistic studies are to-day in process of creation, leads to a number of current errors. When biology was be- ginning to develop, a large number of generaliza- tions had been worked out in the mechanical scien- ces dealing with the inorganic world. The result was an ignoring of the peculiarly biological laws, and an effort to reduce the phenomena of organic life back to the more universal mechanical prin- ciples. The views of Descartes concerning the 24 THE SCIENTIFIC STUDY OF automatical character of animal action, with the speculations of Spinoza and others in the same period, are excellent illustrations of this tendency. But the theoretical application of mechanical prin- ciples to biology was not science, and the new study of organic life developed exactly in propor- tion as men gave up the arbitrary transference of the conclusions of mathematics and physics to biology, and sought to study the world of organic existence independently, to discover its laws. The progress of biology in the present century has been so great that there is little danger of our repeating this mistake to-day. But in the relation of biology to the humanistic sciences a similar error is made. The application of the scientific spirit and method to the higher human life is still so recent that our results in that field are but slight. The relatively extended study of the physical world below man, and of the laws of biological de- velopment, and still more of the general mechanical principles that relate to both the organic and the inorganic worlds, over-balances the work done in the human field, and distorts the perspective in which the sciences and their respective contents are seen. In such a situation, the natural tendency is to take the generalizations from the sciences more extensively studied, and apply them in a loose way to those in which we have not advanced so far. THE HIGHEK HUMAN LIFE 25 As the similar mistake hampered the early de- velopment of biology, so this error limits seriously the progress of humanistic studies to-day. Such a procedure is anything but science, though the works displaying it are full of the phrases and formulae of particular sciences. On the contrary it is exactly parallel to the older theological dis- cussion of nature, which drew certain conclusions from the Bible and then applied these dogmatically to the natural world. Each of the higher classes of science includes the laws in the field or fields below it, together with those present only in its own sphere. And in any department the laws which are most important are precisely those which are revealed only by a study of the province itself, and which are not explicitly present in any lower range of facts. The mechanical principle of gravitation applies as fully to the organic as to the inorganic world ; it helps to determine the symmetry in the bodies of living organisms as truly as it holds the stars in their courses. But to attempt the explana- tion of the biological world by the application of this and similar mechanical principles to it, would be to fail entirely to see those laws of growth and reproduction, of heredity and variation, of the evolution of adaptations, which are in every re- spect the most significant in the biological field. If, similarly, we attempt to explain the world of 26 THE SCIENTIFIC STUDY OF higlier human activities by a mechanical applica- tion to it of the laws which are found in a study of the lower physical world, we fail to see the very laws which are most significant in the human sphere. The biologist of an earlier period was obliged to say to the physicist that, although fund- amental mechanical laws apply everywhere in the organic field, when we are dealing with the "act- ing and reacting self" that forms the subject- matter of biology, we have a material presenting activities involving new laws and principles, which are just those of greatest importance in the bio- logical field. So the student of the higher human life to-day must say to the biologist that, although the general laws of organic existence apply every- where to humanity, they are inadequate to the ex- planation of the spiritual world. If our study of human thought, emotion and will is to be truly scientific, we must take up independently the facts in the new sphere, with a full recognition of the truth that the most significant laws there will be those only dimly prophesied on a lower plane of evolution, and revealed in their full significance ouly in the world of the higher activities them- selves. Not only are we inclined, in taking up a new field of investigation, to carry over ready-made conclusions from other sciences, but the first gen- THE HIGHER HUMAN LIFE 27 eralizations in the new field are almost always hasty and ill-considered. The first result of the discovery that the facts can be reduced to law is a very narrow formulation of the laws. As this is inevitable and natural, so it need not be harmful if the limitations be consciously recognized. In that case the generalizations are made but tentatively, as a temporary classification of the field to furnish a basis for further investigation. The primary im- pulse to philosophy is the hunger for unity. That is, the main-spring of the intellectual life is the need to organize into a rational universe the count- less impressions which enter the spirit through all the doors and avenues of relation between it and the world. In so far as a conscious intellectual life is developed each must construct a philosophy for himself. As the universe he builds in his soul is never an exact and adequate copy of the universe, so his sytem of philosophy is never the absolute truth of things. It is necessary and right that he should build it, for it is a basis upon which he may live, a form in which the spirit may grow for a time. But every experience must change the aspect of the whole, as every step up a mountain widens the horizon in all directions ; and therefore if his system is not to crystallize, and become a limita- tion instead of an aid, it must be kept fiuid, and must change with his growth. As the chief value 28 THE SCIENTIFIC STUDY OF of formulating a creed is to pass beyond it, so the main significance in consciously organizing one's system of philosophy is to go beyond it to a larger view of the sum of things. Thus if the organized system be not only hasty, but be accepted as final, it becomes a hampering form, suppressing growth and destroying the quiet vision of the whole. If the necessary and eagerly desired unification of experience be attained at the expense of its vitality and range, the theory must soon seem barren and inadequate beside the life it was produced to interpret, and an early reaction against it is certain and necessary. So in a new depart- ment of science, when the principles first discovered are dogmatically assumed to be finally sufficient in the classification and explanation of the subject- matter, the result is to dwarf for a time our sense of its significance, and seriously to hamper the work of investigation. Further research is obliged to protest strongly against the assumed finality of the conclusions, and to show that deeper and more complex principles are required for an explanation of the facts. While such a period of hasty and rather dogmatic generalization occurs in the formative period of many sciences, it appears in an unusual degree in the early development of the studies dealing with human activities. When it was discovered that the THE HIGHER HUMAN LIFE 29 facts of human desire and action could be reduced to law, that vices varied with the seasons, and soil and climate influenced moral qualities of national character, it was supposed that mere conditions of natural environment were sufficient to explain all tendencies of human life. These physical condi- tions were selected as being the only stable and permanent causes, and hence it seemed that in the last analysis all other apparent causes must be reducible to them. In such a theory of civilization as Buckle and his followers developed, the hard egotism and narrow generalization of a science in its formative stages are expressed in the endeavor to explain all facts of human life, aesthetic, emo- tional, moral, by the more permanent factors — soil and climate. With the enunciation of this theory human life seemed to be struggling in a closed circle with no hope of escape. Many students can testify to the profound depression which their first acquaintance with these theories produced upon them. All the higher efforts and emotions seemed to be mere illu- sions, the reality behind them being the same blind forces of natural environment. It was a similar reaction upon the theories of the formative period of political economy which led Carlyle to speak of it as "the dismal science." A half truth always seems more impregnable than a many-sided view, 30 THE SCIENTIFIC STUDY OF ^ as a liberal is always at a disadvantage in a con- tention with a dogmatist. The mathematical exact- ness and logical order with which a narrow premise may be worked out gives the resultant theory an apparent completeness which seems to exclude all possible opposition. But it is the very limitations of the theory that give it this seeming finality ; and with a little further study a plane of vision is reached from which the closed circle of theory seems very artifi- ficial beside the varied world it was formed to interpret. To the basal factors of natural environ- ment it is seen must be added the interaction of man with his social surroundings. The peculiar organization of social relations in any place, how- ever much it may be due originally to physical conditions, becomes in its turn a determining cause, molding the character of all members of the society. As research goes on it becomes evident that still less calculable causes are present. The action of individuals under the influence of ideas is found to be dynamic behind all conditions and move- ments of society ; and it is seen that no understand- ing of history is possible without taking account of the subtle spiritual forces which find expression through personality. Because these higher forces have had low origins, it has been assumed that they were reduced in THE HIGHER HUMAN LIFE 31 significance to the level of the latter when these were discovered. Yet the slightest reflection should serve to show the fallacy of such a view. The fundamental conception of evolution is the continu- ous development of adaptations, through changes in function and structure due to reaction upon environment. The significance of a higher or more complicated adaptation is not reduced to the level of a lower or simpler one by showing that it has been evolved from the latter. The assumption that when we have shown moral sensibilities and ideas, religious faith, and all forms of spiritual life to have antecedent causes in determining conditions of physical and social environment, we have ex- plained away the meaning of the higher activities, and may entirely neglect them in our study of humanity, is quite as absurd as to argue that a specialized structure has no significance beyond that of the simpler basis from which it developed. If it be true that any fact is fully understood only when seen in the light of its origin and development, it is equally true that always it is the higher evolved form which throws light upon the significance of the lower. When we discover that the organ of sight has developed from sensi- tive pigment spots in the bodies of earlier organ- isms, this helps us to understand the history of the special organ and function ; but instead of reducing 32 THE SCIENTIFIC STUDY OF the highly specialized sense of sight to the level of the pigment spot in significance, it shows how marvelous and unpredictable were the potentiali- ties involved in the latter. Similarly, when we discover that human love, with all its moral and aesthetic refinement and spiritual consecration, has developed from certain low and simple physical tendencies and instincts present in the remote his- tory of life, instead of degrading love, or lowering its spiritual meaning, we have but shown how wonderful were the possibilities of development involved in the simple instincts of primitive life. No one from a study of acorns could ever predict or appreciate the majesty and beauty of an oak tree ; and no one by a study of the bases only, from which the higher human life has developed, can appreciate the meaning of its moral, aesthetic and intellectual activities. In whatever way these are the result of predetermining causes, they be- come in their turn profoundly important forces with reference to all subsequent facts and condi- tions in the human world. The same law that makes the simpler bases of life full of promise for the spiritual world, shows how vast are the possi- bilities of the latter for the development that is still to follow. There is a further mistake, inevitable while the scientific spirit is being carried over into the study THE HIGHER HUMAN LIFE 33 of the difficult data of human life. In the older philosophical reflection, beside much profound insight and many masterful summaries of experi- ence, was a large amount of very general specula- tion detached from the concrete facts of the real world. In the effort to avoid this error, and make their work exactly and carefully scientific, it was natural that early workers in the intricately re- lated data of human life should arbitrarily narrow the field of their work, especially where they were incapable of a large and organic view. Such a limitation of the field is very valuable in increas- ing the exactness and definiteness of the results ; and is harmful only when it becomes an authorita- tive tradition, accepted by subsequent investigators with superstitious reverence. This has happened in the case of several of the humanistic sciences to their long continued detriment. It is well illustrated in some phases of the new psychology. When the effort was made to study the infinitely difficult problems of mind in a care- ful and discriminating way, in harmony with the general movement of science, it was helpful to limit the investigation to the relatively simple (though in fact extremely difficult and complex) data of psycho-physics. But when this becomes an accepted tradition, and the enclosed field is dogmatically affirmed to be the only sphere of 34 THE SCIENTIFIC STUDY OF psychological science, and when those who call themselves scientists can look with aversion and contempt upon the effort to carry the inductive method into the study of the genetic development of the individual, and into the larger problems of social psychology, then such arrogant spirits are toiling aimlessly up a blind alley, and need to stop and climb up and over their self -erected enclosing walls, to readjust their perspective. In a similar way the study of literature was limited for a time to the use of it as a store-house of words for the science of philology. But while the latter will always hold its place, there is no reason why the scientific spirit should not be carried into the study of literature as the most universal of the arts, and therefore one of the highest and most interpretative expressions of humanity. Every literary creation is as revelatory of the man and the epoch that produced it as a shell is of the character of the organism it once contained ; and there is no reason why the one fact should not be studied in the same quiet inductive spirit as the other. And deeper than the temporary forces are the essentirJ elements of human experience, which form the basis of every masterpiece of art, and may be approached through the earnest study of it. So history has been narrowed to the specialized study of phases of institutional history. But while THE HIGHER HUMAN LIFE 85 political and social institutions are most valuable crystallizations about life, which we must always study if we are increasingly to understand the past, there is every need that the same spirit and method should be applied to the history of the arts, of religion, of conduct and ideals, in the effort to understand the whole of human experience and its development. When teachers of historical science can declare that children are incapable of studying history from the sources, because they cannot understand political documents, such as constitutions, treaties, etc., it is necessary to re- iterate the truth that every expression of humanity — a picture, a statue, a temple, a poem, an action, a creed, a song — is a fact, capable of being studied in the same scientific spirit, and by the same in- ductive methods as any other. Again, arbitrarily and permanently to narrow the fields of investigation not only limits the results obtained, but perverts our view of their significance. No fact can be understood alone ; each is meaningful in proportion as it is seen in relation to others. One of the first lessons to be learned in any science is that facts do not differ in importance according tO their mechanical size, but according to what they reveal. It is a small fact, and a very common one, that apples fall to the ground ; but when the intellect of a Newton is 36 THE SCIENTIFIC STUDY OF focused upon this it is seen to be one expression of the law that holds the stars in their places, and rounds the dewdrop on the petal of a flower. Tennyson was right in saying that if he could know the "little flower in the crannied wall" "root and all, and all in all" he would "know what God and man is " ; for the flower is bound absolutely to two worlds : by its physical structure and history to the material universe, and by its beauty and meaning to the world of the spirit. Every widening of the horizon of vision changes the relation of all the elements contained within it, and only "under the aspect of eternity" can the facts of time be understood. The more nearly we approach the universal point of view, the more closely may we approximate the true interpretation of the facts of life. The particular phases of his- tory can be understood only when they are regarded from the point of view of the larger history of civilization. The particular expressions on the circumference of life can be appreciated in true relation only when we see them from the common center from which they spring. The whole progress of science hitherto has made it easy for us to fail to see this truth ; for every step of the rapid advance in our knowledge of the external universe has temporarily diminished the apparent significance of the human spirit. The THE HIGHER HUMAN LIFE 37 universe was small to the man of ancient Greece or JudsBa. The earth was the center and man its lord; the sun and the stars existed to light his path. When modern astronomy showed us that our earth is relatively but an infinitesimal atom of matter, off in a corner of the universe, the immediate effect was to lessen immeasurably the sense of the im- portance of human life. One who looks through the telescope at the nebula of Orion, and attempts to imagine the solar systems upon systems which might be made from it, and then stops to think of the masses of such nebulae that fill vast spaces of the heavens, is overwhelmed with the sense of the relative insignificance of human life. To the ancients man had a brief history of a few thousand years, all of which might be known with reasonable accuracy ; and animal and plant life was but little if any older. Modern biology shows us that the period in which man has existed upon the earth reaches back from twenty thousand to one hundred thousand years ; and the countless ages of biological history extending behind this almost paralyze the imagination, and make us feel that the historical period of humanity is so brief that we may practically neglect it in considering the great laws of life. It is only when we return to the point of view of the human spirit, and consider the facts of man's 38 THE SCIENTIFIC STUDY OF life from within the forces that have produced them, that we realize again the infinite significance of humanity. Then we return to the anthropocen- tric, which is the religious, point of view, and see that the deepest of the mysteries is man. Vaster than the reach of suns and worlds in space is the mind that can conceive these as bound by one law; more worthy of wonder than the aeons of existence are the momentary expressions of love and justice from human hearts. Kant worthily said : ' ' Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing wonder and veneration, the more often and steadily we reflect upon them : The starry heaven above me and the moral law within 7?ze." And of the two, it is the spiritual within us to which we re- turn in the last resort of science and philosophy. The virility of the epoch of science is not yet ex- hausted; rather the carrying of its spirit and methods into the study of the higher human life promises vastly more than has been accomplished Mtherto. The "chief study of mankind" must always be "man." It is human life that is end- lessly interesting to us, — more so than anything else in the universe. Though particular conditions in the world of thought, such as have been present in this century, may make other sciences more fruitful than the study of humanity, and give them the place of leading and fertilizing the intellectual THE HIGHER HUMAN LIFE 39 life, still, when equal skill, openness and conse- cration are carried over into the study of the human spirit and its expressions, these must prove more vital to us than anything else. And then we may hope to see the facts of life in their broad relation, and appreciate the meaning of human experience as has never been done in the past. 11. THE EVOLUTION OF PERSONALITY IT is the unity of human experience that makes possible a progress in civilization as well as an understanding of history. Were mankind not gathered up anew in each individual, a particu- lar phase of life would develop and die, detached from the past and sterile for the future ; but in reality each is fundamentally united with all the rest. We can read Homer because the childhood of Europe is present in our hearts ; Aeschylus and Sophocles, Praxiteles and Phidias are intelligible to us because their creations are possibilities of our lives. All study of history tends to deepen our consciousness of the unity of the human spirit, as it enlarges us to a fuller comprehension of the world. Yet no single expression of human nature ever exhausts the whole. Its infinite possibilities may be imagined in God, but are never realized in any man, or any group of men. It is this that gives the exhaustless interest to life : each phase em- bodies some hitherto unexpressed potentiality, and its peculiar lesson is not adequately taught by any other. Human history is not unlike the external world, where a few simple elements have found expression in the measureless variety of forms in nature. Some epochs are lifted into the si:)lendid 44 THE EVOLUTION OF PERSONALITY isolation of mountain peaks, lofty, but bare and sterile for the future : others are like low and fertile valleys, unimposing in appearance, but re- ceiving the deposits of alluvial soil which nourishes the germs of a future civilization. Here are dark forests of doubt, infested with the beasts of sin ; and there the open sunlit plains of great achieve- ment. Here are black storms of unloosed hate, and the fitful lightning of revolution ; there is the quiet sunshine of faith, or the star-sown night of rest and peace. As the changes of nature display a certain order among the bewildering variety of individual forms, so is it with human progress. Wave movements of the spirit occur which cause some periods to resemble others in fundamental character, though different in concrete life. Through the succession of actions and reactions growth is discernible toward more inclusive and integrated expressions of life, as well as toward higher. As the conception of evolution has been primary among those dynamic ideas which have performed the masculine function of impregnating modern thought and causing it to give birth fruitfully, so all study of civilization to-day is dominated by some conception of progress. Without asking whether there is a true advance in history, it is taken for granted that certain phases of life are THE EVOLUTION OF PEESONALITY 45 higher than others. Yet from the point of view of the very biological science that has given us our notion of development, what right have we to use the terms higher and lower with reference to the objective facts of life? What is meant by a higher adaptation except one that is more highly special- ized and integrated ? What reason is there to regard a man as higher than a protozoan ? The latter in fact, as far as permanence of existence is concerned, has an adaptability that makes it prac- tically immortal, where the individual human being is destroyed by the failure of any one of a series ^f intricately developed activities and rela- tions. Yet arguments against the view that man is distinctly higher than the protozoan are invari- ably regarded as humorous and unworthy serious attention. We are content to assume the fact of an evolution from lower to higher forms, and to regard man as the highest. I^ we try to answer the question, why this assump- tion is so universally made, we are always carried back into man's consciousness, and are forced to confess that higher and lower are categories of the human spirit, which are taken from the subjective world and applied to nature. Nor does this invali- date them, any more than the discovery that the mind is no mere blank tablet, but is active in all the process of knowledge, invalidates science. The 46 THE EVOLUTION OF PEKSONALITY whole content of human experience depends upon the categories of the spirit ; in practice they are universally accepted ; and we must come to recog- nize this fact with its intellectual consequences. We know that the life of love, the hunger for truth, the devotion to ideals, the reverence for prin- ciples, are higher than anything in the physical world. Thus progress can be understood only from with- in the forces and tendencies of human life ; for it consists finally, not in an external advance which can be measured by material standards, but in the development of the individual soul. History shows a progressive evolution of personality, both in the conscious freedom of action, and in the depth and content of life. The attention of philosophers has been so ab- sorbed by the metaphysical question of freedom that usually they have failed to see the gradual development of practical freedom that can be traced historically. The action of the living organ- ism steadily increases in importance, as compared with the stimulus of environment, in all the up- ward progress of life. In the beginning organic existence is more or less passively and uncon- sciously determined by the action of external con- ditions; in the highest phases these are increasingly molded by the conscious and intelligent will. THE EVOLUTIOlsr OF PERSONALITY 47 In the inorganic world the laws determining structure and motion are merely mechanical and chemical. The formation of a crystal, the shape assumed by a cooling and hardening body of mat- ter, the path of revolution of a planet, are all determined by simple mechanical principles. Be- tween these and the modes of activity of the lowest organic life is an unbridged chasm. In the unicel- lular organism, swimming about in a drop of water, dimly sensitive to surrounding conditions, capable of dividing into two independent organisms to meet better the conditions of existence, uniting with another into a single new life when the pro- toplasmic hunger reaches a certain point of inten- sity — here the activity of the living being is of vast importance in determining the character of life. The theory propounded by Cope, that all vital functions, as digestion, respiration, the circulation of the blood, began in dimly conscious efforts of the organism, has much to support it. If true, this only gives us a new sense of the importance of con- sciousness among the forces determining physical structure and function. We know that conscious action is being continually transformed into un- conscious in the individual, thus leaving the mind free for higher and higher efforts. A baby spends months in the endeavor to control and use the muscles necessary to walking ; the man walks 48 THE EVOLUTION OF PERSONALITY automatically, and can spend his conscious mental power on other things. The growing freedom of the individual mind thus depends on continuously relegating to lower nerve-centers functions that be- come habitual. If a similar process has taken place in the history of the race, it is another ex- pression of the actual growth of practical freedom throughout the past. Each step in the progress of organic life is a new advance in the control of its environment by the organism. A better adaptation is always in some way a freer and more active use of surrounding conditions. The successive development of diges- tive system, muscular structure and nervous or- ganization, ending in the controlling and direct- ing brain, increases immeasurably in each step the significance of spontaneous action. An animal that can move about from place to place, seek its food and struggle against its enemies, has attained an extensive control of the conditions of existence ; and yet even savage humanity is far above this plane. Every invention is an instrument through which the human will reaches out toward the mastery of nature ; and indeed the use of tools is sufficient alone to account for the supremacy of man over other animals. Taking only the discovery and use of fire, and the invention of the bow and arrow : these make it possible for man to live on THE EVOLUTION OF PEKSONALITY 49 portions of the earth previously uninhabitable, to increase vastly the range and utility of his food, and to struggle against brute adversaries of much greater muscular strength. It is, however, through association with others, and the development of social organization, that the most wonderful advance in the freedom of the human will is evident. As soon as it becomes pos- sible for man to appreciate the pleasure or suffer- ing of another as in some degree his own, and to realize the interdependence of his life with others, social institutions begin to develop ; and these are the most powerful, as they are the most refined, of all tools through which the masterful human will is expressed. Tne control of brute forces in any civilized society is so comprehensive and universal that we take it for granted, and are not amazed by it except in some unusual step forward. It is strange what miracles we accept in the routine of our daily lives, with a pride in our power that makes us even forget that indeed they are miracles. Nearly all the material equipment of life is acces- sible in every center of civilization. We can pass rapidly and easily from place to place, and the events of all the world are told to us on the day in which they occur. The continents are bound together by cables under the sea, the iron fingers of the railway clasp the lands in one, the lace-work 50 THE EVOLUTION OF PERSONALITY of wires stretches across prairie and mountain, resting on the poles planted everywhere as the universal crucifix of science. Civilized man, by setting up social organization on a new portion of the earth's surface, is able in large measure to de- termine the character of his environment, and to bring to his home the production, not only material, but aesthetic and intellectual, of all the ages of human life. The extension of experience through the heritage of culture makes it possible to extend the relations of the personality in time as well as in space, and thus to share the thought of those who lived long ago, and by participating in the ideals of humanity even in a measure to anticipate the unborn future that is to be. When we pass from the purely mechanical laws governing in the inorganic world, to the intelligent and free activities of the higher human life, we have two extremes between which lies the process of organic existence. Freedom, spontaneity, the conscious control of environing conditions by the intelligent will, steadily increase, and promise to go on developing indefinitely. This process gives that progressive emancipation of the individual which is the most significant key to moral advance. From an entirely materialistic point of view Letourneau says : "If now, proceed- ing in the manner of the God of the metaphysicians, THE EVOLUTION OF PERSONALITY: 61 for whom all the past ages are but a moment, we attempt to sum up in a brief formula the slow progress accomplished by poor humanity in its long voyage in search of the better, we may say that the entire social evolution is nothing but a gradual emancipation of the individual, in his spirit and in his body." If such a statement can be made from the point of view of physical science, how much more significant is it when the intellectual and spiritual activities of humanity are considered from within. This emancipation of the individual is accom- panied by a deepening of the content of personal life. How spiritually barren is primitive exist- ence : the form of the personality is present, but its content is merely a few simple and blind in- stincts momentarily expressed or thwarted. And how marvelously this is deepened and enriched by the evolution of the spirit. The blind impulse of sex becomes the world of mysterious forces gathered up under the name of love. The brute reactions of egoism and the unconscious instincts of altruism become the maze of spiritual forces and ideals that move the intelligent will to moral action. The simple perception of material relations immediately bearing on physical existence becomes the strange and awe-inspiring reach of the mind and the im- agination, which gathers up the remotest star-dust 62 THE EVOLUTION OF PERSONALITY in the synthesis of law, and binds together the aeons of existence in one intelligible process. The inventions which free man from the control of environment serve equally to enrich the content of his life. Each step in the external mastery of nature means the taking up into his spirit of some added portion of the universe. In museums of sculpture and painting, and in the great archi- tectural creations of the ages is an immense store- house of forms expressing the dreams and aspira- tions of all the epochs of culture. Through contact with them the individual soul is inconceivably enriched and deepened. A few pages covered with hieroglyphics is the connecting link between some inspired artist of a past epoch and his inheritor to-day. And the latter can, by playing upon the human and other instruments which his genius may command, transform the pages of symbols into a swelling sea of music that sweeps the hearer out upon its flood-tide of emotion. Books, those strangest of all marvels, bridge the centuries and cross the chasms of space. Through the letters on the printed page we may look back into the life of the man who wrote it, and share in the spiritual activities of his time. Thus limitlessly the process of deepening the content of the inner life may go on, the progress being ever toward an inclusive humanity summed THE EVOLUTION OF PERSONALITY 53 up in the individual soul. The form of the person- ality remains much the same, apparently ; but the universe that is built into it, the content of the personal life, grows increasingly deeper and more intricate as it becomes more inclusive. Both aspects of the evolution of personality : the emancipation of the individual in thought and action, and the progressive deepening of his life, are expressed in all forms which embody the higher human experience. Painting, which once dealt wholly with religious or mythological subjects, to-day pictures for us common life, or the nature world in which we find our deepest rest and peace. Religion, which was once an institution of the state, in which a formal ritual was the most import- ant element, is becoming more and more the faith and ideal of the individual soul. Morality, which once depended upon hard and external standards, is growing to be an attitude of the spirit. In every sphere the sacredness of each human being, the importance of the individual life, is increasingly evident with all the forward progress of the world. Perhaps nowhere else is this so strongly and clearly expressed as in the universal art of litera- ture. If we go back to Aeschylus and Sophocles we find men mere puppets in the hands of a domin- ating destiny. Clytaimnestra and Agamemnon, Oedipus and Antigone, are beings ruled above their 64 THE EVOLUTION OF PERSONALITY own will and consciousness by forces whose begin- ning lies generations behind in their family or national history. The moral conflicts in which they find themselves involved, the terrible problems that confront them, the insoluble mysteries that overpower their reason and imagination — these are all due to the struggle of ethical forces for which the poor individuals are in no large way responsi- ble. The subjects with which these great drama- tists deal are not men and women, not the conscious and free acts of individual human beings, but the conflict of great ethical and theological forces, which work their way out through the human puppets — the mere expressions of their dominant power. Christianity brought a new reverence for indi- vidual human life, refined and deepened in every way the moral consciousness ; but still there was no immediate or complete emancipation of the individual. Mediaeval Christianity was a vast insti- tution in which the individual was a mere atom. Man, at least in many of his activities, lived for the church, instead of the church existing for him. Sin and virtue, and especially the negative virtues, were exaggerated in the consciousness of humanity, and men seemed in a new way to be ruled by forces of vast and mysterious power. The chance for eternal life was but a slight and perilous one for THE EVOLUTION OF PERSONALITY 55 the great mass of mankind. The culminating expression of this epoch of growth and striving, of moral struggle and aspiration — Dante in his Divine Comedy — pictures with marvelous power men and women ; yet the object of his study is not these characters, but rather the ethical forces of sin and virtue which work their way out in human lives. Pathetic, tender, beautiful, terrible as Dante' s characters are, and often as he loses himself in them, his avowed aim is to show the working out of isolated moral facts. It is this that explains some of the noblest paradoxes of his work, where the poet masters the philosopher, and his response to the tender beauty of humanity is more powerful than his didactic intention. The crowning illustra- tion of this is in that sublime canto glorified by the shining womanhood of Francesca da Rimini. It was long before I could explain the peculiar effect of this canto upon me. Dante's intention was un- doubtedly to show the ugliness of the sin, and frighten the reader from it ; yet the canto left one with such a sense of beauty, and of transfigured, tender, pitiful, passionate womanhood, that one wondered whether it were not better to be the lover of Francesca in the second circle of hell, than the humble recipient of the theological affection of Beatrice in the terrestrial paradise. It is partly inevitable, for women are better than angels, and 56 THE EVOLUTION OF PERSONALITY the human ' love under the changing skies of the green earth is the sweetest we can imagine ; but in the main it is because of the passionate, pulsating humanity of Dante. He taught a higher lesson than he himself understood ; for the whole charac- ter of Francesca has a larger meaning than the particular action Dante studied, and in portraying the woman he could almost forget the didactic les- son of the single deed. The final Divine Comedy, were it ever written, would deal, not with isolated moral facts of sin and virtue, but with the entire working out of individual souls, with the whole complex content of the experience of each, and in the maze of intricate circumstances and relations that make up life. This may be impossible, but Dante approaches it most nearly when he forgets mediaeval ethics, and creates universal, because concrete and personal men and women. It is here as well that Dante is most modern, not in the sense of what is accidental in our time, but in so far as this epoch is the culmination of the larger forces of progress. If we pass to the beginning of the modern world, we find what was paradoxical in Dante as the very warp and woof in Shakespeare's garment of life. His subjects are men and women ; and these are por- trayed, not on the background of a possible future world, but upon the great and changing screen of THE EVOLUTION OF PERSONALITY 67 time : and each of these human beings, from lago to Lear, from Lady Macbeth to Helena, from Ham- let to Othello, works out the tendencies of his own life, and is dominated by the fate of his own ac- tions, complicated by the environing conditions. The creed of Shakespeare is the creed of Nature : a recognition of the inexorable law that every mo- ment used, unused or misused, which slips away from us, enters into the Destiny of our yesterdays, the Fate of our own deeds, arching over us sombre or beneficent, to lift or blast us, according to the character of our lives. And again an enormous step has been taken when we pass from Shakesj^eare to Goethe, from the study of conspicuous types of human character in the relatively brief treatment of the drama, to the development of the single soul through all the storm and stress and play of circumstance, through the changing relations of personal life, through the activities of the larger world, as Goethe has pre- sented this in Faust and Wilhelm Meister. Here frankly the individual human soul is taken as the one supremely interesting thing in the world, the true microcosm in which are gathered up all the laws and principles and all the meaning of the great universe. Were it possible, this is still more completely shown in the last work of modern literature. 58 THE EVOLUTION OF PEKSONALITY Brv/wning, dramatic as is his genius, must write dramatic lyrics or lyrical dramas, so intensely per- sonal is his interest, and ours, in human life. And Tennyson's supreme work takes for its subject a passage in his own subjective experience, and studies the larger problems of faith and philosophy through the working out of his friendship and his own suffering. Have we not come to a relatively supreme emancii^ation of the individual, at least so far as the great literature of the world is an ex- pression of common life ? The place which the novel has come to occupy, and the fact that it is characteristically a modern creation is an added illastration. Dealing as it does primarily with individuals, in the complex play of circumstances through which the personal spirit may find expression in love and action, and treating all questions, philosophical, sociological, historical, from the point of view of the individual life, the novel is a natural vehicle for an epoch when the evolution of personality has advanced far. Our interest is everywhere in the distinctively personal. Even in the last century men felt com- pelled to apologize for writing about themselves ; and sought excuses when they did so in the con- nection of their lives with political and social movements. Contrasted with this, the interest in a large portion of modern literature is primarily THE EVOLUTION OF PERSONALITY 60 autobiographical. Men of all classes and con- ditions feel tliat no excuse is needed for them to write about themselves. They realize quite simply that the development of a human being is the most interesting thing in all the world ; and that if they can tell openly and clearly the story of their own lives, there are many who will find deep interest in this. Let anyone look over the list of books issued from month to month, and count the number of those which are in some way autobiographical, and he will realize the force of the argument. It all means simply a deepening consciousness of the absolute significance of the individual soul. Morever both aspects of the progressive evolu- tion of personality: the emancipation of the in- dividual from the control of external forces and the creations of his own spirit, with the constant deepening and widening of the content of his ex- perience, are processes without end. There is no point at which we can say of either phase of his de- velopment that it is now absolute ; for the human spirit is always finite in actual life, infinite in potentiality. Its freedom is simply the measure of spontaneous self-affirmation ; and this increases with every added increment of life. The universe builded in the single soul is finite, while there is no limit to its growth toward the infinite universe in the vitality of its content and the range of its comprehension . 60 THE EVOLUTION OF PEKSONALITY Furthermore, the life of the human personality depends upon its growth : life means growth in life. It is the new increment which is added, or rather multiplied into the old, which vitalizes the whole. We cannot be good by yesterday's action or wise by yesterday's thought alone. The good actions of the past are so much power to do good to-day, but if the capacity does not receive ever new expression it rapidly deteriorates. The ac- cumulated knowledge of the yesterdays is so much intellectual power, but unless vitalized by new thought and study it quickly becomes dead. The struggle for existence is not merely a battle between species and individuals : the harsher competition may end, but the struggle must continue. It may cease to be a fight against others, and become a struggle toward self-affirma- tion, but in some form it must remain. Truly — " He only earns his freedom and existence Who daily conquers them anew." — for they are his only while he is winning them ; and this is true of every good in life. One pos- sesses love only while one is winning it, thought while one is thinking it, virtue while one's will is finding expression in self-affirming and helpful action. It is significant that this view of life is coming to consciousness to-day, when the deepening and freeing of personal life is so great. Goethe makes THE EVOLUTION OF PEESONALITY 61 it the theme of Faust and Wilhelm Meister, as it was the inspiring principle of his own life. Brown- ing expresses it everywhere : Jt gives Rabbi Ben Ezra his exultant acceptance of old age with its new lesson, and his fearless facing of death. It is behind the optimism of Abt Vogler, and the ring- ing faith of David's song in Saul : " J will ?— the mere atoms despise me ! Why am I not loth To look that, even that in the face too ? Why is it I dare Think but lightly of suchimpuissance? What stops my despair ? This ; — 'tis not what man Does which exalts him, but what man Would do!" And in the Death in the Desert we are told : " God is, they (beasts) are, Man partly is and wholly hopes to be." There is at once depression and endless inspira- tion in this conception of life : depression to realize that no achievement is final, that no thing can satisfy us ; inspiration to feel that qnqvj point of attainment is a vantage ground from which we may go on to a loftier effort, to see the possibilities of life stretch out limitlessly beyond us and feel that they are ours. No statical heaven could permanently satisfy us; wearied, we might welcome it for a time ; but with 62 THE EVOLUTION OF PEESONALITY rest and renewed strength we should turn again to the green earth where — " Vague outlines of the Everlasting Thought Lie in the melting shadows as they pass," and where the ministry of Pain alternates with that of Joy in playing upon the vibrating strings of the human heart, as the seasons succeed each other, or the calm nights follow the majestic days. And our longing for this world would be deeper than that awakened by any heaven ever gilded by the imagination of man. Buddhism has been called "a religion of organized weariness," and certainly the value of its Nirvana would be as a temporary resting place for tired souls. It is life we crave, and the ever new affirmation of the spirit in unison with another, that is love ; the ever widening and deepening synthesis of the universe in one vision, that is thought ; the full expression of the forces of the spirit in growing action. Thus the life of the human spirit is a process of perpetual becoming, an unstable equilibrium, — it is life only while it is growth in life. And from the point of view of the spirit, the progress of his- tory is measured, not by the spread of material conquests or the accumulation of the equipment of civilization, but by the transformation of the uni- verse into the life of the spirit, by the progressive emancipation of the individual, and the deepening and widening of the content of his personal life. 111. THE DYNAMIC CHARACTER OF PERSONAL IDEALS BECAUSE of the progressive evolution of per- sonality, the forces of the spiritual world are increasingly present behind social con- ditions and social progress. Primitive races, living under the pressure of stern necessity, were slowly molded by a process of remorseless selection, which worked through a destruction of the least fit. With the increase in free and spontaneous action, the process is gradually transmuted into one where the primary force is the intelligent expression of the conscious spirit. Variation, as yet unexplained and unpredictable, is the material upon which natural selection may act, and it occurs only in individuals. There is no such thing as the variation of the species or race, except as the sum or resultant of variations in individuals. It is necessary to remember this fact, for the tendency to be cheated by abstractions and terms of classification is almost universal in the history of thought. It is easy to see the absurdi- ties of the older systems which display this fault, as in the Platonic theory of ideas, or the mediaeval speculations concerning nominalism and realism. Yet in different form the same error creeps into much of our own thinking. New abstractions and terms of classification are personified, and treated as 66 THE DYNAMIC CHARACTER OF if they possessed an independent reality. Church and state, race, species, humanity, are discussed as if they defined a reality quite different from the included individuals and their relations. Yet there is no life in the whole except what is in the unit parts. In the sensible world the only per- manent is the process of change itself. Race, species, genera, types, are not lasting, but evanes- cent, while only the succession of individuals with changing adaptations lasts. Humanity can mean nothing to us, unless it mean a number of present and future individuals. The spiritual forces of history find expression only through personality ; and it is this which makes them as incalculable as they are significant. Men act under the inspiration of ideas and emotions ; and the countless actions of the countless individ- uals that make up history can never be understood except from the point of view of the forces which are creative behind them. Thus the world is always resolvable into the units that compose it, and with the development of the freedom and content of personal life, the forces of history are more and more gathered up, not in abstract tendencies and principles, but in the individuals that form humanity. Each man is in a way the center of the universe, and is con- nected by countless organic filaments with all other PEESONAL IDEALS 67 individuals. As we look at such a tangled web it seems hopelessly impossible to isolate the frag- mentary thread of the single life, without tearing and destroying the web, or losing the connection of the thread with the whole garment of life. But we are mistaken in comparing the individual to such a fragment : he is not a mechanical element, performing certain functions, and different in es- sential nature and structure from all others, but rather such a unit part of the whole as a single cell, indeed a germ cell, is part of the living or- ganism. This is the significance in the idea of the microcosm. The key to the world must always be the individual ; only as we read the meaning of the whole through the part which each of us is can we understand anything of the greater universe. Institutions are often regarded as permanent in themselves ; but it is only the most external form that is slow to respond to spiritual forces. The real vitality of the institution depends upon the vibrating human heart. The entire spirit of a uni- versity may be transformed by changing three or four teachers. The whole meaning of national in- stitutions is altered by a sudden change in the temper of the people. The only force capable of giving any institution a permanent vitality is the constant presence of the same spirit that gave it birth. And when this is present it is working ever 68 THE DYNAMIC CHARACTER OF toward higher results, so that only while the form is growing better is it good. When any phase of life ceases to advance it begins to deteriorate. The supreme importance of the individual initia- tive is in the moral sphere. Every great moral teaching of history bears the name of some man : this means that the loftier ideal comes into the world as the higher consciousness of the one who stands upon the advancing margin of life. This dream of the highest man, if it be in the line of progress, becomes a force acting upon other indi- viduals, and by and by is taken up into the very structure of social life. vVere it not for the constantly uplifting in- fluence of the advancing margin, society would crystallize into purely statical conditions. Bacon expressed this when he said that — '' 111 hath a nat- ural motion strongest in continuance ; but Good a forced motion strongest at first." And he adds in the same essay that — "Time so moveth round that a froward retention of custom is as turbulent a thing as an innovation ; and they that reverence too much old times are but a scorn to the new." That is, left to itself, the world settles down into a mere crystallized condition, in which the pro- gress, and with it the life, intellectual and moral, ceases. To be kept sweet and sound the waters of life must be constantly stirred ; and this vitalizing PEESONAL IDEALS 69 element, this forced motion of the Good, enters into the whole structure of society through the advancing margin, that is, through the highest consciousness and the highest effort of those indi- viduals who are at the front. Institutions are garments of the spirit, indis- pensable to its expression ; but when these harden down into iron forms, as inevitably they tend to do, they become a menacing limitation to the spirit, and must be broken to give room and air to its growing life. Then new garments are woven by the Protean Arachne we call the Time- Spirit, and the process is repeated over and over again. If the clothes can be kept elastic, the forms fluid, growth is not menaced or hampered, and revolution is re- placed by evolution. But in the one case, as in the other, the impulsion of life which breaks dead forms and keeps living ones fluid is the reaflirma- tion of the personal will and ideal. Everywhere in human history is an element of the unexpected which comes in to thwart our cal- culations. The power of a great spirit to change the course of history can never be estimated before- hand. Just at the moment when the world seems to be settling into ennui and despair, Christ's teach- ing vitalizes it anew. When the church seems to be most secure in its rule of despotic selfishness the ringing words of a German monk shake it to 70 THE DYNAMIC CHARACTEE OF its foundations, and compel a reformation witMn as well as without its organization. When the oppression of the aristocracy seems most inevita- ble, France shakes it to pieces in the earthquake of revolution. It is the forces of the human spirit that come in to invalidate the calculations of selfishness and afiirm the perennial vitality of the heart of life. A few centuries ago the whole industrial system of the world rested upon slavery ; even the wisest men were incapable of imagining the possibility of a civilization that did not rest upon some form of servitude. To transform slave labor into free labor, however beneficial in the end, involved diflBlculties and waste so great that temporary expediency was inevitably and always opposed to it. Yet the world has seen that marvelous transformation, resulting from the immediate affirmation of moral ideals of human brotherhood and freedom. Can the industrial history of the world be understood without reference to spiritual forces ? As that which is beyond the average condition may be in harmony with the fundamental laws of life, but is inevitably out of harmony with its superficial environment, so always the leader in thought, and still more in moral life, receives some measure of persecution. Every great moral teacher in history has been a heretic, has been in advance PEKSONAL IDEALS 71 of the traditional and conventional standards of Ms time. From Isaiah to Socrates, from Christ to Giordano Bruno, from Saint Paul to Savonarola, each has suffered for the ideas he has advocated. We have learned to do away with forms of physical torture, but the rack of ridicule and contempt, and the lash of misunderstanding are almost as bitter for the advancing leader to endure as the earlier, cruder forms of persecution. The man of highest aims is willing to pay this price for the work he does in the world ; and this willingness is a partial proof that his ideals are of the advancing margin of life. This is the law of the vicarious sacrifice which must always be made by those who are at the front. The world is right in distrusting any variation that has not yet justified itself ; for the greater number of divergencies from the conventional type are below rather than above the average. But the world should give the variant what is so rarely acoorded, the opportunity to justify itself. A divergence may be in the line of progress, and yet be so extreme as to remain inutile for the time in which it occurs. A Giordano Bruno may be born three centuries too soon, and be comparatively ineffectual in his epoch. Yet the force is never entirely lost, and sooner or later its uplifting signif- icance must be evident. The erection of a statue 72 THE DYNAMIC CHARACTER OF to Bruno under the very eyes of the Vatican that condemned him, and the response of modern Italy and the world to his memory, shows that the force which was ineffective in the sixteenth century has found its application in the nineteenth. The voice of Socrates outlasted the sentence of his judges, and the words of Christ upon the cross have been more powerful than a thousand edicts of Caesar. The cry of a scourged slave or the wail of a child is a more mighty lever of human destiny than the arrogance of enthroned oppression. Christ warned his followers what they should expect from the world : "For so persecuted they the prophets which were before you." The world has usually crucified its saviors and killed its prophets ; but new martyrs have not hesitated to offer themselves, and the work of progress has gone on. Socrates said: "There is no danger of my being the last of them." As all moral systems bear the names of individual men, so do all philosophical systems. That is, the higher intellectual conception of life, like the nobler moral inspiration and ideal, enters the world through the highest individual. Thus the further we go in the upward progress of humanity the more absolute is the significance of the personal ideal in determining alike the statical conditions and the dynamic progress of society. One cannot read PERSONAL IDEALS 73 history and ignore the enthusiasms of the spirit. All great movements of the past consist in some transformation of the beliefs and ideals of men. The ideals of the highest individuals may be the dynamic force behind social progress because of the response to them on the part of other individuals. History is by no means simply the work of great men ; but the making of history is primarily de- pendent upon the dynamic force in all individuals that can be seen with striking clearness in the great man. The reaction against such a theory of history as found exalted expression in Carlyle's Heroes and Hero Worship was necessary and right; for the corollary of hero-worship is a contempt for common men. But the reaction against the all im- portance of the great man emphasized to an exag- gerated degree the harder forces of environment, and obscured the significance of the less calculable, but vastly significant force of individual action. Yet the influences of environment are relatively passive causes ; and the very condition of their reaction upon man is his activity with reference to them. It is the countless ideals and actions of the innumerable individuals, inextricably intermingled, that form the dynamic force of human history. As the individual is the active force in society, so within his life it is the ideal which is creative with reference to conduct. Everywhere the two 74 THE DYNAMIC CHARACTER OF are related as soul and body : the one the inspiring spirit, the other the imperfectly realized result. Plato's thought of the hardness of matter, and the slowness with which it yields to the impression of the idea, finds a real equivalent in the slow and in- complete way in which ideals work out into actual life. Yet the unrealized ideal has changed the worth of the man, if he has struggled up toward it. "What I aspired to be, And was not, comforts me," says Browning's Rabbi Ben Ezra, and it may well comfort anyone ; for the effort, though unsuccess- ful, has changed the value of the life to "God, whose wheel the pitcher shaped," and therefore to all whom the life touches. Thus the ideal is a creative force behind action, even when there is a failure to realize it in conduct. Carlyle was right in saying that "A man's re- ligion is the chief fact with regard to him:" but only if the religion be interpreted to mean, not only the fundamental belief, but the emotional activity that accompanies it. An ideal is the most practical thing in the world, for it is a force behind action that must be reckoned with by the frankest materialist. Belief and action continually modify each other: no one can believe permanently in spiritual realities, and live as if they did not exist; and no one can really doubt the fundamental worth PEKSONAL IDEALS 76 and meaning of life, who lives as if there were such at the heart. True, one may be tangled up in a chain of reasoning, and may feel compelled to accept an intellectual view opposed to the character of one's life ; but the fact is, one never does accept it at heart, though one may profess it intellectually. Thus his profession may be other than "the thing a man does practically lay to heart" concerning the universe and his relation to it. The worst materialism is not the theory that goes by that name, but the living as if there were no meaning in life beyond the capricious pleasures of the moment; and the true belief in spiritual realities is found only in the one who affirms in every action the eternity of the best things in human life. When Hamlet drifts with the tide of fate, failing to choose any action that might express himself and break the spell of circumstances, he inevitably believes in fate. Every important action which he does results from some sudden access of emotion, and so seems the result of forces behind him, rather than of his own will. Indignant that the king (as he supposes) would spy upon his con- fidence to his mother, he strikes through the arras and unexpectedly wounds Polonius. Drawing aside the curtain and discovering his victim, he merely says : "Thou wretched, rash, intruding fool, farewell! I took thee for thy better : take thy fortune ; Tbou fifid'it to b« too bufy is touuf dangei-/' 76 THE DYNAMIC CHAEACTER OF Then without a word of remorse he turns to his accusation of his mother. Later, he turns again to Polonius, saying quietly : "For this same lord, I do repent; but heaven hath pleas'd it so, To punish me with this and this with me, That I must be their scourge and minister." Again when he discovers the treachery of his college comrades, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, he quickly seals the letter that sends them to the fate for which he had been intended. When he relates the circumstances to Horatio, the man of action, the latter exclaims in horror : "So Guildenstern and Eosencrantz go to't." And Hamlet turns on him : " Why, man, they did make love to this employment; They are not near my conscience ; their defeat Does by their own insinuation grow. 'Tis dangerous when the baser nature comes Between the pass and fell incensed points Of mighty opposites." It is SO when he kills the king at the end : and just before that tragic outcome Hamlet gives a crowning expression of his attitude toward destiny: Horatio, " If your mind dislike anything, obey It. I will forestall their repair hither, and say you are not fit." PERSONAL IDEALS 77 Hamlet, " Not a whit ; we defy augury : there's a special providence In the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, 'tis not to come ; if it be not to come, it will be now ; if it be not now, yet it will come : the readiness is all. Since no man knows aught of what he leaves, what is't to leave betimes ? Let be." This is not the faith that trusts in the all-loving Father, who numbers the hairs of our head, and watches over the very fowls of the air. It is the sense of being dominated by a dark destiny, which is, if not blind, a power working toward ends and by means which we can in no wise understand. It is thus always that faith is influenced by action or the failure to act. When the Duke and his loved one in Browning's Statue and the Bust, fail either to renounce or afiirm their love, and drift from one caprice to another, they must inevitably come to regard their love as a dream : " But next day passed, and next day yet, With still fresh cause to wait one day more Ere each leaped over the parapet. And still, as love's brief morning wore, With a gentle start, half smile, half sigh, They found love not as it seemed before. They thought it would work infallibly, But not in despite of heaven and earth— The rose would blow when the storm passed by. 78 THE DYNAMIC CHARACTEE OF So weeks grew months, years — gleam by gleam The glory dropped from their youth and love, And both perceived they had dreamed a dream." When a human being comes to regard as foolish and misleading dreams those ideals which he has once sincerely reverenced, it is his own condem- nation. Had he lived ever toward them, their forms would have changed, but the spirit would have remained, the ideals of the man would have been the higher children of the ideals of the boy. And as life continually molds faith, so the latter is an inspiring cause behind action. An increase in the devotion to an ideal, or in the vision of what is the ideal, is a new inspiration in conduct, as a struggle to realize in action what one does see reacts upon one's vision, widening it and elevating it at every point. If a man is carrying a burden up a mountain the load may be lightened in two ways : by increasing the enthusiasm of his effort to reach the summit, or by decreasing the load. Dante gives a wonderful expression of this truth in a passage of the Purgatorio, where Virgil answers his question as to the value of prayer for those who are struggling upon the mountain of purification. The response is that although prayer in no way changes the law, the love that it repre- sents and expresses may be itself a fulfilment of the law ; and this is one of the simplest of all truths PERSONAL IDEALS 79 in the problems of daily life. Love that lifts up and helps him who is fallen is as truly a force in overcoming the inertia of his sin as is his own struggle. One's ideal is one's vision from the slope of the mountain of endeavor: each step of climbing widens the horizon, not in one only, but in all directions ; while the wider vision inspires renewed effort. Thus it is impossible to change either the ideal or the conduct of a man or an epoch of men, without changing both elements : but it is the ideal which is logically the cause, the conduct which is the effect ; and always the creative element in the dynamic progress of the world comes in through the elevation of the ideal, that is, through the higher vision of the men who are upon the advan- cing margin of life. Therefore it is, that if we look only at the exter- nal conduct of men, we can never fully appreciate the significance of their lives. To judge a man through his actions we need to know the entire series of these, and to organize them into a synthe- sis of the whole. But if we can receive, through the confidence of friendship or otherwise, a con- crete expression of the man's inner aspiration, of what he is at heart really striving after, we have a key to what is a dominating and creative cause in his life. His action to-day is only a passing shadow 80 THE DYNAMIC CHARACTER OF on the sun-dial of time; what he aspires to be is the creative cause in his life — what he forever is to be. It is therefore that love always idealizes the loved one, that is, sees and loves the ideal of the loved one, as well as its partial expression. Did love not see and worship the ideal, it would be external to the very heart of the life, and so would not involve that close interweaving of one person- ality with another which in the highest sense is love. It is true we do not understand the whole life if we know only the ideal, and do not see the measure of failure or success in attaining it which the life contains. To understand adequately human nature in any of its phases, it is necessary to know what it aspired to be and what it was ; and each of these lines of approach throws light upon the other. If we look upon the vast Egyptian statues, with their combination of human and animal forms, attempting to achieve greatness by mechanical size, the outline hard, with no effort to delineate the beautiful play of muscles, we can understand bet- ter the civilization of Egypt. The tyranny of a caste, the immersion in the material world, the trembling in the presence of the unknown, are all meaningful to us. And on the other hand, the con- ditions of Egyptian life explain the Sphinx and the statues of the gods. So the grotesque-crowned PERSONAL IDEALS 81 cathedral of Notre Dame, with its bewildering multitude of forms, and its Gothic arches, inter- prets and is explained by the strange chaos of opposing aspirations and institutions we call the middle ages. Yet of the two phases, we can generally come nearer the heart of the life and its larger signifi- cance if we understand the ideal rather than the con- duct. It was such a thought that moved Aristotle when he said: "Poetry, therefore, is a more philo- sophical and a higher thing than history : for poetry tends to express the universal, history the particular." Many times a Greek myth, or a canto of Homer, will give one a deeper understand- ing of the Greek spirit than a hundred pages of detailed history of political and military events. It is long since Spinoza reasoned that, "The knowledge of an effect depends upon and involves the knowledge of the cause." Certainly, adequate knowledge of human history must see it from the point of view of those ideals that have been creative forces in it. For as life is possible only with growth, it is only when we understand the forces of this growth that we appreciate life ; and in the individual and the race alike, it is the ever enlarg- ing, ever growing ideal that is the dynamic force, the primary moving power in the human spirit. IV. THE CONTENT OF THE IDEAL OF LIFE THE constant subject of discussion in ethical philosophy has been the question of the end or aim of human life. Of the four causes into which Aristotle analyzed the condition- ing principles of any existing thing, the final cause — the end sought in creating it — is the most important, for it determines the material, the form- giving idea, and moves the efiicient cause to action. Therefore, were it possible to lay down a final formula of the end of human action, this would certainly be of great assistance to us ; but the fact that life is a growth-process, in which the ideal and action advance together, precludes this possibility, unless the formula be a mere abstraction of uni- versal relations, omitting all concrete and changing principles, and therefore barren. The best pos- sible illustration of such an abstraction is given in the categorical imperative of Kant, to the rigorous universality of which all must agree, but which tells us nothing regarding the concrete content of action. Moreover, as it is the final cause that gives rationality to action, so all proximate ends which are sincerely sought have some measure of justifi- cation ; and to choose one among them as absolute, is to lose the significance of the rest. 86 THE CONTENT OF THE IDEAL OF LIFE But the chief reason why the discussion of ethics has been so futile, is because it has considered the formal statement of the aim, with little reference to the concrete interpretation of this in life. While the formal statement is important, its significance depends upon the actual content of the ideal of life which one holds up to oneself as worthy of imi- tation. Men who differ from each other most widely in their conduct and ideals may use the same terms in stating the end of life. Pleasure- seeking is to one an abandonment to the mere caprices of sensuality, while to another it is a seeking of the permanent sources of the most refined enjoyment. Between the creed of a sen- sualist and the ethical views of a Walter Pater is an unbridged chasm, and yet both might define the aim of human endeavor in the same terms. It is because of this that Epicurus himself has been so misunderstood, and his name used for low forms of egoistic indulgence. Indeed, in the last resort, Stoicism and Epicureanism meet : the one holding the highest duty to be an utter indifference to pains and pleasures, and the other regarding a divine "apathy" as the only worthy self-satisfaction. Self-realization may mean an obedience to the whims of selfishness, or an aflBrmation of the noblest life for oneself. Self-sacrifice may be a blind and immoral renunciation of the primary THE CONTENT OF THE IDEAL OF LIFE 87 obligation to live one's own life, or a seeking of the highest good of others, as against a lower selfish- ness. It is not the formal statement of the end of life, but the concrete ideal which the individual strives to attain, that is the final test of character and the determining principle of action. Into the making of this changing ideal enter many elements, rational and irrational. Its content is often implicit in the unconscious life of the individual, and is sharply defined only under the stress of critical circumstances. Its basis is always the body of inherited instinct which represents the gathered up life of the past. Whether these in- stincts are due in part to the inheritance of acquired characteristics, or wholly to the slower and more ruthless working of natural selection, they repre- sent the past of the race perpetuated in the indi- vidual. For the presence of these elements the individual is not responsible ; and yet they are the most tenacious of all that enter into the ideal of life. Their long biological history makes them more permanent and more powerful than those recently acquired. He is a rare man who does not fall more or less blindly under their dominance in the crises of his experience. In the main these instincts are in line with life ; but because they have been selected under the stress of earlier necessities, they are not entirely 88 THE CONTENT OF THE IDEAL OF LIFE in harmony with the needs of to-day. Among them are some that once were virtues, but with the progress of life have become wrong. Such, in the main, are the instincts of jealousy and revenge. Once these passions were necessary to the exist- ence and progress of the best life. In the primi- tive family, if the children of the strongest were to survive, it was essential that the passion of jealousy should be powerful enough in the male organism to permit the sacrifice even of life itself to keep and protect the females and offspring. Similarly, an intense instinct of revenge increased the chance for survival and perpetuation of the tribe in which it was present. Thus on the plane of primitive existence, jealousy and revenge were virtues of c^racter to be praised and imitated. But that plane of life is behind us ; and as crim- inals are often heroes born too late, the virtues of yesterday may be the crimes of to-day. Almost never to-day can circumstances arise where jeal- ousy and revenge are not wrong, that is, opposed to the best interests of all life. The integrity of the family and of all personal relations is depend- ent, not upon the brute passion of jealousy, but upon frankness and truth, and a willingness to find and do that which is best for all. The preservation of society is dependent, not upon revenge, but upon the calm and rational treatment of the THE CONTENT OF THE IDEAL OF LIFE 89 criminal as a diseased member of the social body, to be cured if possible, amputated if necessary to prevent the infection of the whole. And yet, what man, in a bitter crisis of his experience, does not find the instincts of jealousy and revenge rising up and taking possession of him, to the exclusion of the more rational elements in the content of his ideal of life ? He who in the bitter exigencies of suffered wrong does not give way to brute passion, is the rare man who has been able to " Move upward, working out the beast. And let the ape and tiger die." Correlative with the instincts of jealousy and revenge in men are those of blind self-submission in women. There was a time in the history of life when the only woman who could survive and per- petuate herself in offspring was the one who loved to be violently mastered ; and hence it was upon such an one that the premium was placed in the struggle for existence. Among the Australian savages, it is the female who can endure to be rav- ished from her tribe at the expense of her own physical suffering, and who can love only such a brute captor, who survives and perpetuates her in- stincts. While the woman too fine to endure violence, or too independent to suffer control, would inevitably be sacrificed in the struggle of life. Pain- ful as is this history, it is practically universal in 90 THE CONTENT OF THE IDEAL OF LIFE primitive times. Untold centuries of biological history have developed in women the instinct of blind self-submission and the love of being mas- tered. Yet though this instinct, in its refined ex- pression, adds some of the most sacred beauties to life, there are many times when the unreasoning affirmation of it is distinctly opposed to the best interests of all, and results in misery and destruc- tion. Still, the woman who, in a crisis of her experience, does not blindly abnegate herself, but rationally faces life and affirms what is best, is a rare heroic woman who has attained the difficult plane of rationality and freedom. The relatively blind instincts, good and bad, due to long ages of biological selection and inheritance, are not the only irrational elements in the ideal of life. The influence of social environment, so incon- ceivably great in the earliest years, and so power- ful through the whole of existence, is also largely irrational. We attempt to rationalize this influence through education, and are succeeding in a remark- able degree. The power to carry and use the equipment of civilization, which accumulates and develops with such startling rapidity, depends scarcely at all upon biological change, but almost entirely upon the influence of education. One of the best illustrations in history of the power of consciously applied culture to determine the THE CONTENT OF THE IDEAL OF LIFE 91 content of the ideal, is found in the development of a national spirit in America. The creation of the peculiarly American attitude in children of immi- grants from all the nations of Europe is a most startling proof of the power of consciously directed education to determine the content of the ideal of life. This influence is, however, but slightly and indirectly under the control of the individual. Whether the child is the victim of an evil educa- tion, or the blessed product of a good one, depends but little upon his own conscious choice; and with education works the tremendous power of the gen- eral social atmosphere, which colors subtly but in- delibly the whole view of life. Accidents of social convention come to have as great a significance in our consciousness as principles of morality. We are as ashamed of wearing an unconventional coat as of telling a lie; and departing from the particu- lar type of Sunday observance we have been taught, seems as wrong as positively injuring our neighbor. This power of social convention is strong even over individuals who have reached a considerable measure of independent reflection; and with un- thinking men it takes very largely the place of morality. Respect for certain kinds of work, and contempt for others, with the attitude of the indi- vidual toward his own vocation, are largely the 92 THE CONTENT OF THE IDEAL OF LIFE resnlt of tlie social atmosphere. In studying a series of papers, written by children of an English board school, answering the question, "What person would you like to resemble?". Professor Barnes discovered that nearly all wished to enter some mechanical trade, the army or navy, or domestic service. There is hardly a school in America where one-tenth of the children would spontaneously choose such vocations ; and yet all kinds of honest work are as generally respected in America as in England. The cause of the difference lies in the social atmosphere: children of certain classes in England naturally look to those vocations which are followed by members of their own class ; in America, where class lines are more obliter- ated, and where children of all classes are educated together, each looks toward any vocation which attracts him, and which he believes himself able to attain. If we think how fundamental in the ideal of life is the attitude toward the vocation, the power of social environment to determine the con- tent of the ideal will be evident. Relatively irrational as they are, the influences of social environment are only less absolute than the basis of inherited instinct in determining the ideal. The place occupied by the ideal of celibacy in the middle ages, opposed as it is to every inherited instinct and to all healthy and natural THE CONTENT OF THE IDEAL OF LIFE 93 tendencies of life, shows how the social atmos- phere may stamp itself upon successive genera- tions of individuals. Much of what is called mor- ality is simply an unreasoning conformity to the conventional type. Many individuals who pass from one environment to another, involving quite different moral standards, fall as unthinkingly into line with the latter, as they have previously con- formed blindly to the former. This explains in such cases the disintegration, not of character, for such people have none, but of the artificially cemented elements of life that seemed to be char- acter until their independent value was tested. If it is in the crises of experience that inherited instincts are most powerful in their control of as, it is in the dead areas of daily existence that elements derived from social environment are strongest in the content of our ideal of life. It is easy to defy conventions in a crisis where splendid enthusiasm takes possession of us ; it is hard not to accept social opinion, even in its judgment con- cerning ourselves, under the continuous pressure of its remorseless and authoritative assertion. To regard a man unjustly as an outlaw will often lead him, first to accept the judgment, and then to become what it implies. Many women who, from the highest moral motives, seek a divorce, come at length to regard their own action with some 94 THE CONTENT OF THE IDEAL OF LIFE measure of shame, so strong is the pressure of con- ventional opinion. Standards of honor and purity are hopelessly irrational ; and much of what the individual would afSrm as his own independently formed ideal of life, is a mere echo of the social environment in which he lives. Thus many of the elements forming the content of the ideal of life, which either in crises, or on the dead level of existence, are most powerful in determining action, are relatively irrational. It becomes then of the utmost importance to cultivate as far as possible those elements which may ration- alize the ideal. We owe this effort because we are responsible not only for obeying conscience, but for possessing as enlightened a conscience as pos- sible. Nature never forgives us for ignorance of the law ; and the neglect to use any possible chan- nel to right thinking makes us indirectly responsi- ble in mistaken action. It is an insufficient excuse to say we did the best we knew, unless we used every possible opportunity to know the best. One- half the evil of life depends upon following wrong ideals ; in exact measure with the dynamic power of an ideal to determine action is our obligation to rationalize it by every means in our reach. This can be accomplished in some measure by simple reflection upon the elements forming it, in the endeavor to bring order and unity among them. THE CONTENT OF THE IDEAL OP LIFE 95 A very little thinking will show us the difference between wearing an unconventional garment, and telling a lie ; between work that is honest but despised, and crime. With most men the elements are a chaotic mass ; now one, now another, domin- ates consciousness and leads to action. An instinct of revenge may struggle with a conventional respect for law or an acquired lesson of forbearance and forgiveness. The result is a disintegrated series of actions, where each must be referred for its ex- planation to separate elements of character, and where the predominance of good or evil in the whole of life is dependent upon irrational and accidental causes. The conscious effort to clarify and unify the ideal leads to a suppression of certain motives and an affirmation of others, so that action becomes increasingly reasonable and connected. This effort to give unity to the ideal leads us to ask what elements deserve prominence in it ; and this inevitably takes the individual outside the limits of his subjective experience, into a study of his life in relation to others. He is then brought face to face with the amazing complexity of the world, and the perplexing diversity of ideals among men. He has learned one great lesson if this leads him to "judge not". Burns had acquired the lesson through his own painful experience, when he said : 96 THE CONTENT OF THE IDEAL OF LIFE "Then gently scan your brother man, Still gentler sister woman ; Though they may gang a kennin' wrang, To step aside is human : One point must still be greatly dark, The moving Why they do It; And just as lamely can ye mark How far, perhaps, they rue it. Who made the heart, 'tis He alone Decidedly can try us ; He knows each chord — its various tone. Each spring — its various bias : Then at the balance let's be mute, We never can adjust it; What's done we partly may compute, But know not what's resisted." He will be led beyond this lesson : his effort to understand the ideals of others will take him within their personal lives ; he will see the world through their eyes, and come to appreciate the significance of elements which were wanting or suppressed in his own view of life. As the ideal of an individual is the circle of vision from the point of view that he has attained, it must always have a certain validity and justification. It is only the insincere man whose reaction upon life is un- instructive. Goethe tells us that very early he found there was only one class of people whom he could afford to neglect — the insincere. All others, no matter how eccentric or mistaken, had some- THE CONTENT OF THE IDEAL OF LIFE 97 thing to teach him. In reading Goethe's auto- biography I was early struck with the remarkably interesting people who were grouped about him, in every place in which he lived. For a long time it seemed to me simply that Goethe was unusually fortunate in the people he knew ; but afterwards I came to see that each group of his friends was so remarkably interesting because Goethe was the center. That is, it was because he possessed the power to call out what was strongest and best in every person with whom he was associated, and because he reveals these positive qualities to us, that his friends seem such gifted and original people. Were each of us a Goethe, our circle of friends would be almost if not quite as interesting as were Goethe's. Every earnest man can teach us some new lesson because his life means something. In a recorded saying of Buddha we read, "Earnestness is the path of immortality, thoughtlessness the path of death. Those who are in earnest do not die, those who are thoughtless are as if dead already." Sincerity is simply the foundation of life, and an earnest man often teaches us more in proportion as his life is different from ours. As the ideal of life grows steadily, not only in the individual, but in the race, so the generic ideals prevailing in our own time form but a moment in 98 THE CONTENT OF THE IDEAL OF LIFE the spiritual evolution of humanity. To stand truly upon the vantage ground of the centuries, and find the fuller possibilities of life that are at once our privilege and our duty, it is necessary to study the great historic ideals, that we may take up into ourselves whatever is best in the life of the past, and appreciate the dynamic unfolding of the human spirit. This is indeed the primary reason for the study of history. It is not to obtain rules and maxims for statesmanship : the world never returns exactly to the same point, and rules are hopelessly ineffective in meeting the changing con- ditions of ever new life. But to become human by realizing in ourselves the experience of the past, is to give to history a priceless vitality. Every earn- est expression of life has its own value and lesson. The more remote a particular phase is from our- selves the more complementary and instructive may it be, provided we enter into its positive spirit. Saint Francis has much to teach us, because his mistake is not ours, and his excellence is the one we fail to reach. We are in little danger of sprink- ling ashes on our food, or of spending nights in the snow in the battle with dreams of our imagination ; but the infinite sweetness and tenderness of Saint Francis, his spiritual insight, and his close sym- pathy with nature and humble life, we need to attain. The mediaeval world is instructive to us THE CONTENT OF THE IDEAL OF LIFE 99 precisely because it was strong where we are weak, as it was weak where we are strong. It is because of this that we can stultify ourselves by calling it the dark ages, and be blind to its light. Its spirit- ual aspiration, its consciousness of eternity, its unfailing perception that sin is death, are necessary to round out our lives ; while our intellectual view of sin as steps in a process, our conception of life as positive growth, our appreciation of the world of the senses and of action in each moment, will save us from the negations of its life. So the orient completes the Occident. The high spirituality of the one, its dazzling sweep of luxu- riant imagination, its immersion in the Over- Soul, supplements the positive science, the material pro- gress, the egotistic individuality of the other. History is appreciated, not when its phases are judged by the accidents of to-day, or condemned for their obvious failures, but when the positive significance of each aspect of life we study is trans- formed into the growing vitality of our own spirit. Viewed in one way, all education is but the ini- tiation of the individual into the experience of the race. Beginning as a detached fragment of human- ity, it is his opportunity and his obligation to become Man ; to say with Faust, in the higher and not in the lower spirit : •* All of life for all mankind created Shall be within mine inmost being tested." 100 THE CONTENT OF THE IDEAL OP LIFE To say this, not in the abandoned spirit of one who lives to follow the caprices of ever novel sensa- tions ; but in the spirit of Goethe himself, with the aim of uniting all the sound experience of humanity in one's own breast : to pass from the remote circumference of life to the center of the human spirit, and feel its tides pulsate through one's heart. It is possible to be a detached bit of wave-foam on the sand, or a single wave on the bosom of the great sea. To be the former is to be nothing ; to be the latter is to rise and fall with the swelling of the universal heart — to be a single expression of the bosom of immensity, and one with its remotest activity. To take up into our- selves the great ideals of history and make them our own, is to go far toward taking the point of view of the human spirit. The content of the ideal of life will then be no longer a disintegrated series of irrational elements, but a clarified and rational- ized unity, where the blind instincts shall be con- trolled by the aspirations of the spirit, and the influences of social convention shall be restrained or affirmed by the independent conception of life. V. POSITIVE AND NEGATIVE IDEALS WHEN we approach the study of historic ideals, we are at first confused by their bewildering variety. It seems as if there were no order or principle in their evolution, but as though each were an arbitrary accident, due to particular conventions and conditions. A very slight study serves to remove this impression and reveal definite laws. The principle of differentia- tion appears in the development of standards of life, as everywhere ; and behind the great diversity of historic ideals is the undifferentiated character and attitude of primitive races. Those which show the greatest negative perfection, that is, absence of faults, are usually at the beginning in the line of de- velopment. Such a people as the Wood-Yeddahs of Ceylon is strikingly free from the usual vices of civilization. Living in isolated family groups scattered through the forests, and with a primitive simplicity of life, they have no temptations toward the faults which appear when masses of men, with centuries of civilization behind them, and each with a vast range of desires, are heaped struggling together. Yet the negative goodness of the Veddahs is chiefly upon the non-moral plane of animal exist- ence, since they have not developed far enough to 104 POSITIVE AND NEGATIVE IDEALS be capable of moral or immoral action, and their existence lacks just that positive content which is the measure of life. No one but a reactionist like Rousseau would think of regarding them as ideal, and he only from within the artificial surroundings of his time. The noble savage seen in his native wilderness, appears very different than from the point of view of eighteenth century Paris. There are no sadder chapters than those in which ac- curate observers have recorded the degradation and waste of life among savage tribes. From the negative innocence of primitive races life has developed in countless ways: here one ele- ment of higher harmony with the universe has been realized, there another. In the whole process is in- creasing complication ; yet it does not end in the production of the greatest variety of moral types. In the evolution of the higher human life there is a third step of progress that is often ignored: growth is from a simple homogeneous unity at the beginning, through differentiation and specializa- tion, toward an inclusive unity on a higher plane. This can be shown in the evolution of society, of religion, and of moral ideas. It is indeed the higher expression of a principle universal in evolution: the process of specialization must be balanced at every step by one of integration. To develop a special organ of sight, without a nervous ori[?Mni/a- POSITIVE AND NEGATIVE IDEALS 105 tion refined and strong enough to take up and use the experience received through the eye, would be a distinct waste of force. The integration of the specialized function and structure with the whole life of the organism must be as great as the differ- entiation is wide. The most important expression of this principle is in the moral world. The higher we go in the evolution of any phase of life, the more unity we find. The many confusing and opposing moral standards, which mark the intervening periods of development, tend to pass into a common recognition of the underlying laws of nature, by harmony with which life and all good ends of life may be attained. In the evolution of religion, primitive awe in the presence of the unknown forces of life and nature passes into the bewildering variety of faiths and superstitions ; while these in turn are replaced by a common faith in the sanity of the universe, the ultimate worth and meaning of life, and the over- arching unity of Spirit behind. From the small tribe of closely related families the countless political institutions of history sprang. But through monarchies, oligarchies, aristocracies, democracies, we can discern progress toward a higher unity. Race ideals are slowly ^ving place to human ones. International law is 106 POSITIVE AND NEGATIVE IDEALS growing in importance. The form of the state is gradually approaching a type which shall serve best the interests of all the individuals composing it — which shall combine the most organic unity with the greatest possible freedom. Yet in the unfolding of the ideal of life, the natural development toward higher and more inclusive unity has from time to time been inter- rupted by a strong reaction, and the attempt has been made to realize a loftier life by the emphatic negation of certain positive tendencies of human nature. Among the Hindoos of the orient, in the Stoicism of the declining Greco-Roman world, and above all in mediaeval Christianity, is this emphasis of reactionary and negative ideals. This anomaly becomes interesting in proportion as the reasons for it are seen. The degeneration of character never begins by the deliberate choice of evil ; but by loving and seeking some good thing out of relation to the whole of life. In periods of great luxury and extravagance, certain tendencies, non- moral in themselves, develop out of proportion, and result in the decay of character. In the pressure of active life such a mistake is always easy, for we become so absorbed in the pursuit of proximate aims that we make final ends of them, forgetting that their value lies only in serving as a means to something beyond Thus money is POSITIVE AND NEGATIVE IDEALS 107 power and freedom, but to pursue it as an end destroys wholly its meaning, and causes a rapid decay of character. It is a good thing to enjoy the physical activities of one's life in a sound and healthy way, but to live to satisfy the senses is to degenerate into a brute. The line between a strong and healthy life of the body, which is made to serve the spirit, and the degenerate sensuality where one lives only to sat- isfy the caprices of the moment, is difficult to draw, and in any period of extravagant living is con- tinually being passed. It is then inevitable that noble spirits, wishing to free themselves and others from the slavery to the senses and to things, should seek freedom in a negation of those tendencies of life, the excessive affirmation of which had pro- duced the slavery. Thus the very extreme of sen- suality among the Hindoos produced the reaction of oriental asceticism ; and the abandonment to the pleasures of the moment in the declining ancient world caused the revolt of Stoicism, and deepened the ascetic tendencies of Christianity. But the balance of life is not restored by a nega- tion of the tendencies which have been affirmed out of relation. The ascetic life may be as selfish and destructive as that against which it reacts. Asceticism has its value as a means of education ; a strong self-control is necessary to the best life. 108 POSITIVE AND NEGATIVE IDEALS The common failure is in self-abandonment rather than in self -repression ; and with the myriad forces of the world perpetually inviting us to im- merse ourselves in the senses, a certain unnecessary heroism of denial is helpful in giving strength and balance to life. One should be constantly sure that one could, if necessary, do without the things that serve one's life ; and if one doubt one's abil- ity, one should test, and thereby strengthen it. A certain unnecessary reserve and repression accumu- lates the energies of life, as a wasteful expenditure must be paid by a subsidence of the creative power. Again and again in history a period of extrava- gant expenditure has so exhausted the life of a race that a long time of incubation has been neces- sary to accumulate the forces of the spirit, and make possible another period of creative expres- sion. This is to some extent natural, for the rhythmic alternation of action and rest seems to be a universal law of life ; but when the expend- iture is needlessly extravagant, the rest is an ex- hausted stupor where the forces of the spirit are at a low ebb. Thus the ancient world recklessly spent itself, and necessitated the incubation of the mid- dle ages. So, in addition to the splendid and legitimate expression of life, there was a useless waste of vitality in the Italian renaissance; and it is only in our own century that Italy is awakening POSITIVE AND NEGATIVE IDEALS 109 from the sleep into which she was compelled to pass. Certainly the price of life is paid for every creative expenditure of the spirit, and the punish- ment for wasted energy is full and relentless. But the use of a measure of ascetic self -discipline is a widely different thing from the belief that life is realized by negating great ranges of its activity. Such an attitude is pitiable, rather than blame- worthy, for it leads to such a useless waste of life, and yet is generally prompted by high motives. The lives of saint and celibate and ascetic, of monk and hermit, are an endless record of the effort to make life noble by wasting its opportunities and thwarting its normal tendencies. It is a hopeless process: for an exaggerated attainment in one direction, we pay the wealth of capacities for joy and wisdom and love and action that make us men. There is a pathetic story told of Saint Francis of Assisi, the most lovable of the saints of the middle ages. His temptations were rarely like those of an Antony, but were usually to the life that is sweet and human. It is said that one cold winter night he left his cell, and went barefoot out into the deep snow, clad only in the simple woolen robe of his order. He knelt in the snow, and prayed and wept bitterly for a long time. Then he arose and made a large mound of snow and a number of 110 ftJSITIVE AND NEGATIVE IDEALS little ones. The large one was for the wife that never had been, and the little ones for the children that could never be. Then Saint Francis returned to his cell, and was never tempted in that way by the devil again ! One who reads the exquisite story of the friend- ship of Saint Francis and Santa Clara, and realizes how much of the inspiration of each life was due to the sweet communion between them, must feel that the institution which made such a friendship all but impossible for them, and entirely so for their followers, and which abrogated all possibility of the full consummation of human love, hampered or did away with one of the most powerful forces making for strong and noble living. It is true, the great mystic sanctities of life must not be too hastily and carelessly accepted and enjoyed ; and a measure of even unnecessary renun- ciation may keep sacred what would not bear the unchecked light of the commonplace. To live the great revelation in the details of daily life is the problem ; but this is not accomplished by rudely unveiling it to the accidents of circumstance. The cheap familiarity of vulgarity and selfishness does indeed breed contempt, where the intimacy of the soul sanctifies and exalts. Yet as a theory of life asceticism is a noble but a foolish mistake: for the ends of the spirit are POSITIVE AND NEGATIVE IDEALS 111 attained, not by destroying, but by building up, by realizing positively as full a measure as may be of the possibilities of life which are ours. Goethe tells us in a noble passage of the "Dichtung und Wahrheit" that — "Not in so far as a man leaves something behind him, but in so far as he acts and enjoys, and awakens others to action and enjoy- ment, does he remain of significance." For this to be true, enjoyment must be interpreted as some- thing higher than pleasure, and action as more than mechanical movement. But if they be used to include the full life of the spirit, action and enjoy- ment may indeed test the worth of life. A slight study of the actual world shows us its great contradictions, but these should not blind us to the worth of each positive element. The worth of Tolstoi is not that of Gladstone ; the one has a relatively narrow embodiment of the possibilities of human experience, but these are carried far in their expression ; while the other was remarkably inclusive in the range of his relation to humanity, without reaching the loftiest possibilities in any direction. Or better, if we compare Saint Francis of Assisi and Goethe, we find an extremely narrow phase of life reaching transcendent expression in the one ; where the other astounds us by his myriad-mind- edness, while failing to satisfy our highest ideals. 112 POSITIVE AND NEGATIVE IDEALS To condemn Tolstoi because he lacks the breadth of Gladstone, or disregard Goethe because he fails of the spirituality of Saint Francis, is either way to miss the significance of life. Each of the innumer- able possible expressions of the human spirit must be accepted for what it is worth, and only after we appreciate what it is both in height and breadth is there any value in discovering its limitations. The more complete the development of the indi- vidual the more is it possible for him to sympathize with others. In other words, the highest develop- ment is also the most inclusive ; the man is in harmony with the universe on so many sides that he unites in himself the partial development of a myriad others. There may be many paths up the mountain, but the view from the summit commands them all. From this standpoint it is easy to under- stand at once the relativity and the substantial worth of any historical ideal : because it is rela- tive, it is absolute where it applies, since it is adapted to the actual life of the time. The ideal a man sees is the light shining upon his path ; it is binding upon him because he does see it, because it is light upon the path of ?ds life ; and so is it with the epoch. Virtue is not a barren mechanical mean between two extremes, but a whole in which the positive value of each opposing tendency is mysteriously POSITIVE AND NEGATIVE IDEALS 113 resolved. It is not half way between pride and tmmility, but includes positive self -reverence with a full recognition of the abyss between the ideal and what one has attained. Thus, to conquer any evil desire or tendency we need to cultivate a noble one. We bring light into a room, not by closing the blinds to the darkness, but by letting the light in. He who is consecrated to lofty aims, and is untiring in the pursuit of them, is little tempted by the painted dust and ashes of the apples of Sodom. The mere absence of opportunity to sin is of small consequence. It may save us from scars and stains, but it can give no positive elevation and holiness to life. Perhaps even a mingled life, involving some failure, is better than negative holi- ness ; for the latter means nothing, while the former may lead, through struggle and mistake, to some positive realization. On this "checker- board" of sins and virtues that is our life, the one great problem is to keep moving toward the king- row. Every move is a new starting point, and at each all that is beyond is possible. It is of less consequence what sins and virtues lie in the spaces we have passed, than that there be a steady pro- gress toward the best. There are two complementary truths, the full appreciation of which is but beginning to-day : 114 POSITIVE AND NEGATIVE IDEALS I. There is no forgiveness for sin which removes the fact of it. Forgiveness is a quality which belongs only to the spiritual world ; Nature knows nothing of it. When Shelley' s Prometheus after three thousand years of suffering has become human, he asks to have repeated the curse he uttered against Zeus. When it is told him, he says : " It doth repent me : woi'ds are quick and vain ; Grief for awhile is blind, and so was mine. I wish no living thing to suffer pain." Then the earth and the mountains and the sea cry out that he is fallen and vanquished ; for to Nature there can be no forgiveness. God and man may forgive ; but this means that forgiveness is only a love of the best for all, which knows no spirit of revenge. It does not mean that the fact of sin is removed from the life. True repentance changes the relation of the individual to his own past, and modifies its effect upon his spirit, but the fact remains unalterable and irrevocable : " The Moving Finger writes ; and, having writ, Moves on : nor all your Piety nor Wit Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line, Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it." Various forms of religious teaching have obscured this truth, and led men to believe that the past can be as if it were not. But for good or evil it arches over us, to lift or crush us, according to the charac- ter of our lives. POSITIVE AND NEGATIVE IDEALS 115 II. But the complement of this truth is that to-day is always a new beginning of life ; and the power of recovery of the human spirit exceeds everything that men have dreamed. No artist has ever been able, or has dared, to express it in litera- ture ; for if he did, men would exclaim that his work was untrue. It may be that a point is reached where a soul utterly dies, but we never dare to believe that such a point is reached, for ourselves or for another. It is true that the sin of yesterday will not down, that it meets us anew at every cross- road ; but it is equally true that every cross-road is a new turning point, that every end is a new beginning. Let us not forever return to dead battle-fields to fight the spectral hosts of the past. There are adversaries enough to be met to-day. After sin, remorse is necessary to teach one the measure of one's divergence from the path of life ; but that is its only value. Remorse is no atonement, though pain may expiate by ending the sin in oneself. The only atonement for sin is in helpful living to- day ; and the remorse that paralyzes the will, and makes it impossible for us to act, destroys the only atonement we may offer. There is no situation in human life where there is not a best thing to be done ; and to do that best thing is virtue. The one unpardonable sin is not 116 I^OSITIVI: AND NEGATIVE IDEALS to act. Nothing is irreparable except a paralyzed will and a heart without courage and faith, and that ceases to be irreparable the moment a new inspiration is borne in through love. Love is the everlasting worker of miracles. When all seems hopeless, and the soul is descending upon the road that has no turning, let it be awakened to love, and immediately all the forces of the spiritual world converge upon it to lift it toward God. Love is the savior, love is the perpetual wonder of life. God's sun shines over us ; the day is ours. Shake off the shadows of the night. Look at the dead yesterdays only to see their final meaning as they lie still in the pitiless white light of the irrevoca- ble. But then turn to to-day ; and make every sin and every agony an education, take the past up into the spirit, and offer the one atonement — consecrated living now. THE DAWN. The Dawn ! See the Dawn in the far eastern sky ! We welcome thee, welcome thee, Phoebus Apollo ; The roseate light ascendeth on high. We welcome thee, welcome thee, Phoebus Apollo. The birds that were silent awake with the morn, We welcome thee, welcome thee, Phoebus Apollo; In thy blessed light our hearts are new-born. We welcome thee, welcome thee, Phoebus Apollo. POSITIVE AND NEGATIVE IDEALS 117 Deep and more deep the intense-shining light, We welcome thee, welcome thee, Phoebus Apollo; Till multiplied day in its fulness is bright, We welcome thee, welcome thee, Phoebus Apollo. We battled with shadows that peopled the gloom. We welcome thee, welcome thee, Phoebus Apollo; Our hearts were oppressed with a dread sense of doom. We welcome thee, welcome thee, Phoebus Apollo. Whither have fled the grim specters of Fear ? We welcome thee, welcome thee, Phoebus Apollo; They have gone with the darkness so deep and so drear. We welcome thee, welcome thee, Phoebus Apollo. Gone and forgotten the fears of the night. We welcome thee, welcome thee. Phoebus Apollo; The darkness was there but to deepen the light. We welcome thee, welcome thee, Phoebus Apollo! VI. GREEK AND CHRISTIAN IDEALS IN MODERN CIVILIZATION THERE are two historic ideals which havo a peculiar signilicance for us, because of their intrinsic worth, because they are mutually complementary in a remarkable degree, and because they have ruled alternately, and in different degrees of union, in the civilization of Europe. They may be distinguished broadly as the Greek and the Christian ideal. They are not expressed in the same way, nor upon the same plane. The one is generic in the life of a race, the other is given directly through a few in- dividuals — a single teacher and his followers — and is but slowly embodied in civilization. The one is broad and human, the other mystical and spiritual; the one universal in range, the other transcendent in height ; the first is basal in European civilization, the second transfigures life, and gives it a higher meaning. The teaching of Christ expressed the earlier hopes and aspirations of the Jews ; it carried out and up the noblest part of the older Hebrew life; but es- sentially it was in strong reaction against the civi- lization of the world into which it came. Christ came not to destroy the law, but to fulfil it ; yet the fiillilnient was upon a different plane, in greater contrast than likeness with what had preceded it. 122 GREEK AND CHRISTIAN IDEALS The Hebrew hoped for a worldly kingdom and a Messiah who should rule in splendor an earthly- realm, reviving the magnificent traditions of David and Solomon ; Christ taught the Kingdom of Heaven. The Hebrew believed that virtue and obedience to the will of God brought children, wealth, and long life on the earth ; Christ taught that the reward of virtue is in the spirit, that the noblest on earth are persecuted by other men. Nearly every saying of Jesus is cast in the form of an implicit or explicit protest against the con- ventional thought of the Jews. The Beatitudes throughout are an illustration of this reaction, each of them implying a reproof of ordinary ideas. •'Blessed are," not the great, the magnanimous, but "the poor in spirit;" not those whose existence is filled with the joy of life, but "they that mourn;" not the proud, the rulers, the rich, but " the meek;" not those who seek honor and advancement, but "they which do hunger and thirst after righteous- ness;" not the strong, the successful, the cultured, but "the merciful," "the pure in heart," "the peace-makers;" not the victorious, the powerful, but "they which are persecuted for righteousness' sake." Throughout is a reaction against the old Hebrew teaching that external activity and success are the measure of the moral life ; and the emphasis is IN MODERN CIVILIZATION 123 placed on the higher morality of the spirit, which is not to be estimated by the standards of this world. The edicts of the old Jewish law are all concerning action : they are definite rules as to what must be done, and still more what must not be done. There are but slight suggestions of the con- ception that the spirit behind a deed determines its value. But in Christ's teaching the whole em- phasis is on the spirit : "Ye have heard that it was said by them of old time, Thou shalt not kill, * * * But I say unto you that whosoever is angry with his brother without a cause shall be in danger of the judgment." " Ye have heard that it was said by them of old time, Thou shalt not commit adul- tery : But I say unto you that whosoever looketh upon a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart." "Ye have heard that it hath been said, An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth : But I say unto you. That ye resist not evil ; but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also." The two supreme commandments contain all the law and the prophets, because obeyed they give the spirit from which noble action inevitably flows. The morality of the spirit is less definite in its pre- scripts than that of conduct ; but for that very reason it is nearer to life. For every moral situa- tion is a complex thing, and is not to be solved by 124 GREEK AND CHRISTIAN IDEALS the application of simple rules. The best rule we have is not a rule at all, but is simply the announce- ment of a principle: "Whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them." It does not tell us what to do, it merely indicates the right attitude of the spirit, and leaves us to choose the appropriate deed. This is true of all the pre- cepts in the teaching of Jesus ; the Christian mor- ality throughout is always the morality of the spirit. Yet Christ's teachings express in a large degree the doctrine of escape that marks Buddhistic ethics. The world is looked upon as evil, the whole physi- cal and aesthetic life is regarded as hindering rather than helping the soul, the pursuit of knowl- edge is not considered a worthy end of life. The emphasis is everywhere on self-abnegation, a complete disregard of ordinary affairs, and an all- absorbing interest in the spiritual. The actual human life in the things of this world is regarded as vanity : " Take no thought, saying. What shall we eat ? or, What shall we drink ? or, Where- withal shall we be clothed ? But seek ye first the kingdom of God and his righteousness." " Verily I say unto you. That a rich man shall hardly enter into the kingdom of heaven." "It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God," IN MODERN CIVILIZATION 125 There are many such sayings, while the ideal of the harmonious development of all the possibilities of human nature in a rounded life never appears once in the teachings of Christ and his immediate followers. One cannot imagine any one of them painting a picture, writing a dramatic poem or a scientihc treatise. They had no time for such ac- tivities, the interests of the kingdom of the sx^irir were so all-absorbing that they could not think of even the highest things that bring a more complete life here. All this is narrowness, yet a noble narrowness that saves the world. From time to time there comes a revival of pure Christianity, which is so overwhelmingly impressed with the all importance of the spiritual, that it cannot conceive anything else. This revival is found in Saint Francis, Thomas a Kempis, Tolstoi, and many others — men who see only the higher saving part. Such men are the literal followers of Christ, and in them the results of his teaching appear with less of the balancing elements which were present in the per- sonality of Jesus. Hence in them the limitations of Christian teaching may be seen more clearly than in the life of the founder. The same is true of the world immediately following Christ : there his teachings were carried out in their own peculiar line to the extreme. The broad humanity of Jesus 126 GREEK AND CHRISTIAN IDEALS and his universally noble spirit made him avoid dogma, and suggest many inspiring thoughts aside from the main tenor of his teaching. We have the story of the Cana wedding and the blessing of children. His sympathies were alive, he loved common life, he appreciated much that to him seemed of very secondary importance. But his central teachings were carried out by men of nar- rower sympathy and lesser insight. In them the humanity of Jesus is gradually lost in dogma ; the beauty of the spiritual life apart from the world is hardened into the monastic system ; the emphasis of the spiritual shows in a disregard for culture and science, an intolerance toward the growth into larger and larger truth. In all, it is evident that the dominant tendency of Christ's teaching was toward self-abnegation as opposed to self-realization, toward the spiritual alone as opposed to a harmony of sense and soul, toward the uplifting of a side rather than the broadening of the whole of human life. This teaching was singularly adapted to the world over which it spread. It was a world of hopelessness and despair ; everywhere were the evi- dences of decay ; oppression and poverty beneath ; debauchery and reckless abandonment to the senses above. Any reflecting man could see that to-mor- row would be worse than to-day. There was nothing IN MODERN CIVILIZATION 127 to incite to noble positive action ; there was no hope for the future ; everything whispered of de- cay and death. Here and there men reacted against it all: the Stoic taught a quiet endurance; the Epicu- rean preached the pleasures of the hour; but no gen- eral solution was given. Over such a world spread Christianity with its doctrine of self-abnegation and its gospel of the spirit. It accepted the world as a failure ; but taught that in the kingdom of the spirit is everlasting life. It accepted the fact of the vanity of all earthly endeavor, all worldly happiness ; but taught that in self-sacrifice and sel'f-forgetfulness, in the love of God and love of man, in the life of the spirit, lay a "peace that passeth understanding." Quickly in its teaching the opposition between this world and the next became definite. The sublime acceptance of the spiritual by Jesus was hardened into a dogma of immortality and heaven. More and more Christi- anity became a doctrine of escape. Its power and helpfulness can scarcely be under- stood to-day. To be sure, it did not affect imme- diately the upper classes. It was in profound opposition to the noblest principle of ancient life — the pursuit of culture and self-realization. It was natural that they should scorn this gospel of escape as ignoble, a superstition of the vulgar. But to the humble and oppressed it came with the precious 128 GREE«: AlfD CHRISTIAN IDEALS blessing of peace. They could not hope for culture and freedom, self-realization was out of the question for them. A compensation for the failure of life here was possible only by taking refuge in a life not of this world, not of intelligence, of pro- gress and culture, but a life purely of the spirit, and reaching its satisfaction only in the hereafter. Such was the relation of Christ' s teaching to the life of the early centuries of Christianity : in pro- found opposition to the principles of ancient civili- zation, it came as a refuge and consolation to the men who found that civilization decaying on every hand. It gave an iniinite sicrnificance to every humblest human being, because each was an im- mortal soul in the image of God. Its gospel of purity, of love, of human brotherhood was above anything of which the ancient world had dreamed. In supreme contrast with the ideals of the teach- ing of Jesus are those which appear in the old Greek world ; and the effect of these upon the life of humanity has been second only to those of Christ. The Greeks never attained a spiritual conception of life ; their highest thought was of the harmoni- ous development of mental and physical faculties. This is evident from the whole course of Greek education. Gymnastic and music were to form the *'sane mind in the sound body." The theoretic IN MODERN CIVILIZATION 12^ development of this idea in Plato's Republic was no more definite and complete than the actual prac- tice of education in all periods of Greek civiliza- tion. The devotion to science and art is an evidence of the desire to develop roundedly the individual life; for it is these that add beauty and depth to personal existence. The splendid men and women of ancient Greece, noble animals as they were, are still the wonder of the world ; and the statues embodying in idealized form their balanced harmony of mind and body are yet the unattained marvels of sculpture. The Sophocles of the Lateran is an admirable example of the type of manhood toward which the Greeks aspired. The figure is erect, beautifully projDor- tioned and gracefully draped. The head is noble, the face showing a union of power and self-control, together with a glad joy in life. There is no great aspiration, no profound spirituality in this statue, but that serene and balanced harmony of mind and body which was the highest ideal in ancient life. The Greeks united the natural freshness of child- hood with the grave wisdom of culture and the power of adult life. They were never over-self- conscious or morbidly reflective. They seem, to a self-torturing Christian civilization, gifted with everlasting youth ; and they were indeed anxious not to see or think of old age, which seemed to 130 GREEK AKD CHRISTIAN IDEALS them little less ugly and dreadful than death. Moral evil was regarded only from the aesthetic point of view, to be avoided as ugly. The Good was the Beautiful, to be sought because pleasant and harmonious to a normal sensibility. The chief virtue in Plato's system was justice, which, as he conceived it, was the harmony of activities in the individual, and of individuals in the social whole. It is the virtue which must be prominent in a healthy, active life in this world. The other cardinal virtues— temperance, prudence and fortitude — were all virtues of action. In Aristotle's system magnanimity occupies the supreme place. As he interprets it, this means that large-mindedness which should govern a pros- perous, well-developed man in his attitude toward others. Aristotle frankly states that a man cannot attain the highest virtue without wealth and * friends ; and the humility which became a central virtue in Christianity was to him a contemptible groveling upon the ground, as remote from the true mean of magnanimity as the opposite extreme of inordinate pride. It is significant that all Greek art was statuesque in character. Sculpture is the simplest of the arts ; it represents form directly and without any of the illusions of perspective which add so immeasarably to the range of plastic expression in painting. But IN MODERN CIVILIZATION" 131 because of its very limitations, sculpture is the most adequate of the arts in the representation of its subject-matter. Prevented from attempting unattainable ideals, narrowly limited in choice of subject and conditions of execution, it can attain a more perfect harmony of content and form than is possible to the other arts, dealing as they do with a subject-matter vastly wider and more complex. That sculpture is the typical art of Greece, toward whose aims and tendencies all other arts converge, is expressive of the fundamental character of Greek life. Painting with its world of illusions for the fancy, its sensuous wealth of color, em- bodies the spirit of Italy ; Germany finds artistic expression for her deep, vague, imaginative dreams and aspirations in music; England, with a practical, utilitarian interest in life and action, was most fully embodied in the drama ; but the form-loving Greek, seeking limited ideals, and valuing every- where harmony of content and execution, lived, wrote and sang with statuesque simplicity, reserve and harmony. His music was formal rather than melodic, with little of the emotional depth and complexity that makes modern music so intimate an interpreter of personal life. His architecture in its simjjlicity and beauty was thoroughly in har- mony with sculpture in aim and method. Painting was developed late, and in choice of subject and 132 GREEK AND CHRISTIAN IDEALS execution alike was statuesque in character. Greek poetry displayed idealized types, rather than actual men and women ; and these types were presented with the restraint and harmony and the perfection of form so characteristic of sculpture. Life-like as are the men and women of Homer, — Achilles, Nestor, Ulysses, Helen, Penelope, Nausicaa repeat the differentiated types of character expressed in the gods of Olympus, and the same idealized eleva- tion above the plane of ordinary life is evident. In the dramatists this tendency is carried further, with the exception of Euripides, who came late and is least characteristic of the fundamentally Greek genius. Even philosophy, in the poetic harmony and elevation of the Platonic dialogue, or the reserve and completeness of the Aristotelian analysis, showed the same statuesque quality. Transcendent ideals, which produce discontent and unavoidable struggle, are entirely absent from the Greek world, and so are the insanity and one- sidedness which result from them. Asceticism was never a normal phase of Greek life, though it crept in from Asia here and there. The chief vices were those of self-indulgence, the excesses of pleasure- seeking. In every phase of his activity the Greek sought a limited ideal, and attained it adequately. The serene perfection of rounded art is the charm at once of the Iliad and Antigone, of the sculptures IN MODERN CIVILIZATION 133 of the Greeks and of their wonderful temples: a limited ideal adequately realized. I shall not soon forget my first impression of the marvelous temple of Poseidon at Psestum. It stood there in the green, unpeopled plain, in the transcendent beauty of perfect simplicity, its stone mellowed by time, with the serene sky overhead, the blue sea at its feet, and the wonderful semi- circle of mountains in the background. To look upon it was perfect rest. There was no sense of the unattainable nor of the unattained. There was no sign of struggle, only the ease of perfect mas- tery and the serenity of complete achievement. The adequate realization of a limited ideal : it was this that the Greek attained in every phase of his activity, it was this he expressed in individual life. How different the Christian ideal perpetuated in stone in the mediaeval cathedral. When one first stands before a temple of the middle ages, one is overwhelmed by the myriad forms and the vastness of the structure. One goes about it from one point of view to another, finding it impossible to grasp the whole as a unity. Everywhere is careful and detailed decoration, hundreds of statues, grotesque or beautiful, terrible or transfigured. The spires, fit symbol of aspiration, reach up toward the sky. One enters, and is both depressed and exalted by the majesty of the interior. The forest of columns 134 GREEK AND CHRISTIAN IDEALS stretches away, the vaulted Gothic roof rises vastly above one, the mingled light from the stained windows gives depth and wonder to the great open spaces. One cries out with deeper feeling than the prophet of old, "What is man, that Thou art mindful of him !" As there is no touch of this vast complexity of deep impressions in Greek art, so there is nothing of the self-abasement in Greek life. Unaware of the heights of which the human spirit is capable, the Greek was unconscious of the possible depths of sin, and untroubled by the bitterness of failure. The serene beauty which characterizes everything in the Greek world is the charm of that perfect harmony of ideal and execution, of soul and form, which has never since been attained. The want in this noble ideal of culture, of self- development, which the Greek held, was the supreme truth of Christ's teaching, that the high- est self-realization may come in certain cases only by self-abnegation, that the crown of justice is love, that the loftiest spiritual life is the last perfection of the individual. This Christian thought carried with it an infinite ideal, and banished for- ever the satisfied completeness of the Greek. Henceforth aspiration and struggle, infinite thirst for unattained ends, were to be present in human life. The non-moral quality of the Greeks, char- ITT MODERIS- CIVILIZATION 135 acteristic of birds and flowers and children, passed away, and at one stroke the world of black failure and the world of transcendent spiritual attainment were opened to the ravished vision of man. The terrible moral dualism of the middle ages is but the inevitable result. It seemed that only through a war of different elements in man, the struggle of the human spirit with itself, was possible that deepening of the content of life which gives modern civilization its wealth of meaning, so want- ing in the Greek world. As the adult, without losing his wisdom and positive virtue, must attain the simple acceptance of life of a child, if he is to enter into the kingdom of the spirit ; so if the modern man can, without sacrificing the depth and content of his life, attain the fresh youthfulness and harmony of existence of the Greek, with the latter' s freedom from morbid introspection and over-self-consciousness, an ideal of life will be realized higher than the Greek or the Christian, because uniting the significance, and avoiding the limitations, of both. A blind, unreasoning love may easily result in fanaticism and folly ; it must be balanced by wisdom. On the other hand, knowl- edge without love ends in isolation and death. Both j)rinciples are needed ; of these the higher one of love is emphasized by Christ's teaching, the other finds characteristic expression in Greek life aud in phases oi modern teaching. 136 GREEK AND CHEISTIAN IDEALS In the middle ages we find these two ideals in conflict, and struggling at times up toward a higher union. The Christian ideal is usually dominant, but not always so. Beside the church, with its monastic life, is feudalism and chivalry. Beside the life of the spirit, which renounces the world and the flesh, is the life of love'and war and adven- ture. The hunger for knowledge, stigmatized sometimes as "the black art," struggled on beneath the surface, fought its way up in spite of persecu- tion even into the dogmas of the church, and com- pelled the acceptance of Aristotle side by side with the Christian fathers. Strangely enough, the opposing principles flnd an anomalous union in the Crusades — wars carried on for religious aims under the banner of the religion of peace. The opposition of which I speak can be traced in many things. Only with the renaissance does the Greek ideal assert itself for the time greatly above the other. In that splendid expansion of life was an inevitable reaffirmation of pagan ideals — the ideals of culture and self-realization. The renaissance was fundamentally non- Christian, yet strong Christian elements were present, even in the Italian phase of it. The dominant attitude was Greek, but the plane of life was altogether differ- ent from that of ancient civilization. Beside laugh- ing Fra Lippo Lippi is the saintly Fra Angelico. IN MODERN CIVILIZATION 137 At the very height of the pagan renaissance arises Savonarola, the great moral reformer, and attempts to check the stream of progress, as Moses forced back the waters of the Red Sea. The most mas- culine of all the artists of the period, unless we except Leonardo, Michael Angelo, is full of the sombre dualism of Dante, and from the ceiling of the Sistine chapel smites us into the dust w^ith the ethical spirit of the middle ages. From Italy the spirit of the renaissance was car- ried over Europe. In (xermany it entered, in the Reformation, even into the religious life itself. In France, later, it took political and social shape in the revolution. All subsequent periods have been waves of the renaissance ; and since the fifteenth century Greek and Christian ideals have found some measure of union in all European civilization. Both principles are necessary to the fullest life. To follow unreservedly the ethics of self-abnegation found in the teaching of Christ, would be to destroy a large part of what we hold most valuable in modern civilization. Not only all invention and discovery, but progress in science and art, the development of complex social institutions, the increase of wants and answers to them, the life of intelligence and culture, — all these are foreign to the spirit of Christian ethics. On the other hand 138 GREEK AND CHRISTIAN IDEALS the freeing of slaves, the emphasis of social purity, the raising of moral standards, the growth of humanity, the simplification and spiritual uplift- ing of life, — all these are the natural result of the ideal taught by Christ. The relation of the two ideals to our civilization is then evident : the Christian teaching is a force, a priceless one, but not the whole. It emphasizes the saving principle, without it the rest can end only in selfish excess ; but if unbalanced by other principles it would destroy much that we hold most valuable in modern life. Our study of its place only emphasizes the more strongly the great prin- ciple that the moral life is a harmony, in which the different positive elements of human nature are realized in a symmetrical whole. It also emphasizes that other fact that no human life at any time is an adequate expression of all sides of human nature, and that the problem before each of us is the realization of as rounded and complete a whole as possible, without the sacrifice of any part. Thus the basis of the best life possible to us is perhaps Greek rather than Christian. If the Christian ideal be the higher, the Greek is the larger and saner one. On a low plane these seem in conflict, on a high plane it is possible to in- tegrate them in the unity of the spirit. That a higher thing should never be sacrificed tp a Jower IN MODERN CIVILIZATION 139 is certain ; but in place of the shallowness and per- fidy of a degenerate Greek, and the ascetic narrow- ness and fanaticism of the negative Christian, let us seek the nobler humanity that is refined and cultured without being false, and that is capable of infinite self-sacrifice and a purity of spiritual life, without neglecting the realization of all the powers for rounded existence in this world that belong to men. This higher union of Greek and Christian ideals does not mean a mere eclecticism which seeks here a piece and there a piece for its patchwork of life. Rather it means that these two ideals may be fused into a higher union in the personality of the indi- vidual. This is as different from such eclecticism as a growing tree is different from a pile of boards. The wood may be brought from many directions, but heaped up together it is merely one large mass of rubbish ; the tree draws its nourishment from light and air and water and earth, but turns all that it receives into its own growing life. The tree is not an unsightly collection of disintegrated elements, it is one living whole. Similar is the ideal of the individual life. A man should be open to all the worlds of influence on every side, he should accept good from every direction, but he should turn all that he receives iuto his j^rowin^ life. He will seek Bot to be 140 GEEEK AND CHEISTIAN IDEALS merely an expression of some movement of action or reaction, but to make his life inclusive. His attitude toward others will be one of sympathetic appreciation. He will be open to truth from every direction, and will be opposed to nothing that is good. Not only will Greek and Christian ideals be united in him, but many others as well. We stand on the vantage-ground of the centuries ; all that the world has attained is so much possi- bility of life for us. From us is demanded vastly more than from the men of the past, for opportu- nity is responsibility. What the world has worked out as true is our heritage, and is the basis from which we must go on to higher truth. We may see to-day that, higher than the Greek or the Christian ideal, is the Greek ideal transfigured by the teaching of Christ : the ideal of rounded, har- monious self- development, of high culture, crowned by the noblest spiritual purity, the largest love, and a capacity for self-abnegation when that is th& path of life. Such an ideal is not easily attained : it demands a balance of many tendencies. It is easier to be ascetic than to be temperate ; it is easier to be fanatical than wise ; it is easier to be immorally self-sacrificing than to choose the best for all. The chief cause of this difficulty is that the path of the fullest life cannot be marked out by rules. For an IN MODERN CIVILIZATION 141 ascetic, a sensualist, a fanatic, rules suffice ; but when the ideal is the harmonious realization of con- flicting elements, every case is a special case, and the general laws we must follow only point the way, without solving the specific problem. Hence we are thrown back upon ourselves, and must choose upon the basis of our own insight and wis- dom. This means many errors, but it also means learning step by step the path and the meaning of life. Every natural tendency is good when in proper relation ; and each may be bad when devel- oped to the extreme. Emotion is the bond which unites men in love and sympathy, but apart and wrongly developed it is sentimentality and weak- ness. Intellect is our door to truth, it reveals the universe to us, but developed alone it ends in a cold and deadening isolation. So self-culture apart becomes selfishness, the service of others, when out of relation, becomes dissipating and im- moral self-sacrifice. Justice can be degraded into cruelty, love into weakness. The true life is a har- mony of diverse elements : it is at once intellect and emotion ; it involves both justice and love ; it realizes the noblest self-culture and the largest service of others. Every struggle onward of man or epoch enlarges the bounds of human life and makes a larger and larger attainment possible. The culture-seeking 142 GREEK AND CHRISTIAN IDEALS of the Greek, his love and creation of beauty, his harmonious development of sense life, are be- hind us, and must be included in the whole of our life. The spiritual purity of Christ, the all-embracing love for humanity, the living for others and for eternity rather than for time, this is behind us, and must enter into the whole of our life. The struggle of Buddha to find the way of life, his recognition of the eternity of every deed as a fate ruling us, his pity and his tenderness, these are behind us, and must enter into our life. The long centuries of struggle, of spiritual aspiration, of faith, these too have a meaning and a place for us. The human awakening of the renaissance, the rebirth of nature and the senses, the rediscovery of life in this world, of the sweet- ness of pleasure and the glory and the innocence of the sense-life, this too we must include in the largest moral ideal of existence. The impossible ideal of knowing all, of realizing the perfect love, of seeing and creating the eternal beauty, of serving all who touch oar lives, of ab- solute fidelity to our highest thought, — this impos- sible ideal is the goal toward which we must strive, and the higher and higher approximation to it alone gives worth and meaning to life. VII. THE MODERN CHANGE IN IDEALS OF WOMANHOOD IF one of the best tests of civilization be the meas- ure of freedom given to women, the nineteenth century has gone further in all the higher things of life than any preceding one. This is par- ticularly the epoch of women, and most startling changes have been taking place in all that concerns the problems of their lives. At the same time there is little clear thinking upon the questions involved ; and together with much that is valuable, a great amount of futile discussion has accumu- lated about the subject. The consideration has been carried on largely from two points of view. It has given birth in the first place to a mass of so-called scientific literature, which has suffered from the mistaken notion that any fact of the higher human life is reduced to the plane of its antecedent causes when these are discovered. This has led many to speak with contempt of the nobler human developments in all relations of the family and in everything concerning the higher activities of women. The importance of the earlier biological factors has seemed so great that all developments from this basis have been regarded as more or less illusory. Opposed to this body of literature is the large number of books written by people without scientific 146 THE MODERN CHANGE IN training, and with no consciousness of the vast biological history that antedates our present social conditions. These reformers have been excited by the wrongs of the present, and have never questioned the possibility of remolding human nature by some sudden scheme. It has seemed to them possible to accomplish at once social changes which would involve an entire revolution in funda- mental instincts, resulting from untold centuries of biological selection. The vagaries and fanati- cisms upon this side have hampered the clear understanding of the whole problem as much as the narrowness and dogmatism upon the other. It is not easy to escape these opposing difficulties. Every question concerning the life of women is intimately connected with all that is most fundamental in civilization. It is impossible to separate one element of the problem and treat it understandingly. The significance of every frag- ment is evident only when it is seen in the light of the larger history of the human spirit. The whole problem of human development includes, and re- solves into a unity, the questions concerning the progress of men and women. If various forms of selection have been working toward the production of highly differentiated sex types, opposed to these have been certain powerful effects of heredity, and as well the larger unity of the human spirit. IDEALS OF WOMANHOOD 147 That there are profound differences between men and women no one questions, but these are more or less resolved in the human being. Whenever a generalization is made, attempting to differentiate the two types, there are exceptions to it. Any tendency that is characteristic of women is found in high development in some men ; and whatever qualities of character are in men are present in some women. The fundamental differences go back to primitive sex differentiation, which is only one example of the great principle of division of labor. The aim is economy and adaptation. In primitive times women are domestic and industrial, men protective and military. That is, upon women falls the bur- den of the reproductive functions, and in addition, the simi)le industries of primitive life — the agri- cultural work, the preparing of food and clothing, in fact nearly all of the productive labor of early civilization. Men, on the other hand, are occupied with war, both aggressive and defensive, protecting their families from the attacks of other men or beasts, and taking, where possible, from others the fruits of their labor ; the chase — a calling warlike in character — being the only one at all industrial which is performed by men. The functions of the two sexes are comparatively equal in importance in very early conditions of life. 148 THE MODERN CHANGE IN This is in harmony with the general law of evolu- tion : the greatest specialization of function occurs, not in primitive, undifferentiated conditions, but far later on in the development of life. As society becomes more highly organized the military func- tions assume greater and greater importance. The one question is whether those who defend the tribe are capable of protecting it, and, if necessary, of taking the material of life from others. The loss of a single family is comparatively insignificant. If women are not in suflicient numbers in the tribe, and the warriors are superior to their neighbors, other women can be stolen from surrounding tribes. That is, if the military activities are strong and successful, it is possible to have the industrial and reproductive functions carried out ; whereas these latter, without the protection of the former, are in- capable of sustaining themselves. Thus it happens that in the intermediate conditions of human pro- gress, the industrial and reproductive functions are under the control of the military ones ; hence women are dominated by men. It may be said, in a word, that the whole history, sad and pitiful as it is, of women, is the long record of their slow emancipation from the control of men, as the in- dustrial functions have been slowly freed from the dominance of the military ones. In the present time those nations in which the military life is IDEALS OF WOMANHOOD 149 most important are those in which the advance- ment of women has been longest retarded, and where the military functions have become least significant, women have the greatest freedom and the largest sphere of action. The family, beginning thus as a reproductive and industrial institution, is a simple social unit. The basis of choice in primitive marriage is physio- logical attraction combined with economic utility. Almost any healthy organism of one sex is attrac- tive to almost any healthy organism of the other. In such a condition there is no problem of personal relation of any importance : it is purely a matter of sex and economic adjustment. Yet the intimate association of two individuals, even in primitive conditions of life, cannot fail to change somewhat the character of each; and when this change is accumulated through untold centuries of human history it modifies the entire character of the union out of which it sprang. The physiological and economic association becomes a personal one, where individual choice is of great importance. Thus marriage, which began as a reproductive and eco- nomic institution, becomes a spiritual and human one. The connection which was at first only on a physical basis becomes a union in the more perma- nent qualities of character. Although this change is slowly accomplished through ages of biological 150 THE MODERN CHANGE IN evolution, its main outlines are evident in the historical period of humanity, and its greater accomplishment comes very late. The opposing principles are seen struggling to- gether in the Periclean age of ancient Greece. In that epoch freemen lived a public life ; the politi- cal and military vocations alone were respected, and the free citizen expected to enter upon these. Women, on the other hand, were confined to a strictly domestic existence. They were uneducated, and were rarely the intellectual companions of their husbands. They were secluded almost as strictly after marriage as before : it was even con- sidered indecent for a wife to sit at table with her husband and one of his friends. Greek men were, however, developed to a point where they craved intellectual companionship, and were capable of relations founded in the more permanent qualities of character. The result was that friendships between men occupied a most remarkable place in the Greek world. And there is further that strange anomaly of Greek life, the position of the higher classes of the hetserse. A few of these women were the intellectual companions of cultivated men. When one remembers that the greatest statesman of Greece made one of them his wife, and when one considers the attitude of the noblest moral teacher of the ancient world toward the educated courtezan, IDEALS OF WOMANHOOD 151 one will realize the respect in which cultivated women of this class were sometimes held. But the freedom of the few Greek women who attained it was gained at the expense of much of what is best in human life ; and such a sacrifice ought to be avoided in any spiritual civilization. The limitations in the development of Greek women involved an inevitable dwarfing of the lives of men, for the highest development of one sex can never be attained without that of the other. Christianity brought a respect for womanhood which the ancient world had never known. The worship of the Virgin placed woman in altogether a new light. Yet the gain was not unmixed with evil. Woman in her human capacities was despised with almost a Mohammedan arrogance. Throughout the writings of mediaeval churchmen this contemptuous attitude is expressed ; and women are regarded as the source of all evil. In extreme opposition to the naive acceptance of all healthy functions of life by the ancient world is the mediaeval horror of them. The ideal wor- shipped was not the human wife and mother, but the negative and ascetic ideal of isolation from the world. The purity reverenced was not the purity of virtue, but of Innocence ; and marriage was regarded as a concession to the weakness of mankind. 162 THE MODERN CHANGE IN Thus the mediaeval world elevated a certain type of womanhood, but attached a new sense of degra- dation to the normal relations of human life. Be- side sainthood and romantic chivalry we find wide- spread corruption in many aspects of life. Though marriage was made a sacrament, it was regarded as evil. How few of the Madonna faces satisfy us with their negative innocence, even in the art of the renaissance which so greatly modified the mediaeval ideal. The noblest of them all, the Sistine Madonna of Raphael, attains its marvelous beauty by the transfiguration of human maiden- hood and motherhood. The mediaeval ideal of womanhood was obviously opposed to natural selection, and had inevitably to disappear. The woman capable of perpetuating herself in offspring was not the saint, but was still the one willing to lose herself entirely in the circle of family relations and domestic service. The fact that the negative ideal could prevail so long, and is still so strong, is a striking illustration of the power of convention and education to continue a type of life even against the clear tendencies of natural selection. The dawn of modern ideals of womanhood occurs In the renaissance, accompanying the general ex- pansion of life. Men turned to the more healthy conceptions of the ancient world, and loved the IDEALS OF WOMANHOOD 153 beauty of life and its realization in the present. No other epoch shows so marvelous and rich a development of individual life. The good and bad tendencies of character were alike given unre- strained play, and great depravity existed side by side with the sublimest heights of culture, art, science and action. Naturally, in such an epoch we find the greatest variety of conditions in the sphere of personal life. Vices of all kinds were prevalent, but here and there personal relations reached a plane far higher than had been attained anywhere in history. The noblest Avomen of the renaissance were worthy to be the companions of cultivated men in marriage or friendship. Such higher relations meant a greater development of life, and made it possible for the family to 1111 a larger place in the lives of men, and furnish a wider field for self-realization. There was still however no general emancipation of women, and the cases where ideal personal relations were attained were few in number. Since the time of the renaissance there has been great progress in extending the activities of women, and in our own time the movement has gone on with vastly increased rapidity. In this increase of freedom there are of course incidental evils. Friv- olous women imagine they may take the freedom without its accompanying responsibilities ; while 154 THE MODERN CHANGE IN every added opportunity is increased obligation. Women who take advantage of their freedom to live idle and frivolous lives, while their husbands and fathers are ceaselessly toiling in the treadmill of business to support them and gratify their vanity, are punished by their own degradation, and by the loss of the significance of their personal relations. Yet most women have accepted gladly the obli- gations which larger freedom inevitably involves. It is obvious that in modern civilization the home is still far from ideal. But the larger interests and activities of women, and the de- velopment of the higher qualities of character, have changed the meaning of marriage. It is no longer merely industrial and reproductive, but is spiritual and human. The evolution of higher and more permanent qualities of the spirit makes the union of great importance in the development of both individuals. Mere instinct gives place to spiritual love founded on the deeper elements of character. The fact that we believe such love ought always to be present, dignifying marriage and making it sacred, is an illustration of the spiritual and human meaning which has been developed in this relation. The family life has vastly greater possibilities of self-realization for each member of it, than when it represented a side interest in men's IDEALS OF WOMANHOOD 155 lives. The moral meaning of any institution lies in the help it is able to give to the development of all individuals influenced by it. The evolution of finer and more permanent qualities of character means a change in the plane of life, and gives all the personal relations newer and larger import. This means that the plane or basis of selection changes somewhat with every step of evolution. Formerly the selective value was placed entirely upon the woman who was willing to lose her own personality, and sink her life wholly in that of the family. Now, more and more, intelligent men find the best realization of their lives through women of independent strength of character, who are unwilling to lose entirely all wider interests of life in the domestic establishment. This means a great and increasing change in the selective prin- ciple, and is of profound importance. Intelligent women have more and more opportunity to per- petuate themselves. This in turn doubles the selec- tive value in the struggle for existence, for intelli- gent and voluntary motherhood means better born and better trained children. This change in the basis of selection is no strange anomaly, but is in perfect harmony with what takes place everywhere in the progress of life. When a higher adaptation appears it always ])()ssesses a greater selective value than a lower adaptation 166 THE MODERN CHANGE IN that, preceded it. During long ages of biological history the type of organism best fitted to survive was that which had developed a rudely specialized digestive system. This gave it superiority to the undifferentiated type which came before it. But later came the development of more highly special- ized muscular structure : this gave new functions with a selective value above that possessed by the antecedent type. This movement was followed by the evolution of a complicated nervous system, changing again the plane of selection, making the possession of unwieldy muscular structure as little an advantage in the battle of life as the use of mediaeval armor would be in warfare today. The higher adaptation consists not only in refining old structures and functions, but in acquiring new ones on a different plane of selection. This law can be seen everywhere in the evolution of the higher human life. The time when the premium in the struggle for existence was placed upon brute strength has long since passed. Intel- lectual and moral qualities have a higher selective value than physical ones in the battle of life. That is, spiritual and human qualities have an increasing importance as against brute ones. Darwin fought ill-health all his life, and Spencer has long been compelled to do so, yet who would contend that the selective value was not placed more upon them than IDEALS OF WOMANHOOD 157 upon the man of merely brute strength. Thus the fact that the premium in the struggle for existence was once placed on a certain type of womanhood, argues little in favor of the worth of that type to-day. And the presumption is always against the present fitness of a type which was perfectly adapted to conditions which are obsolete or passing. When marriage becomes a spiritual and human institution, making possible a union in the more permanent qualities of character, a union capable of profoundly influencing the development of each individual, then the higher significance is more im- portant, and none the less natural, than the lower one out of which it developed with the change in the plane of life. What is desirable is not that the greatest possible number of children should be born into the world, and that women should be a little higher order of domestic animals. The need is for more intelligent motherhood and fatherhood, and for better born and better educated children. When the human will and reason develop, they should more and more take the place of blind and irrational forces in the working out of life. It is a law of universal application in the organic world that the higher the species, the smaller is the number of offspring, and the larger the per- centage of these surviving and reaching adult life. Thus, even in the lower world, evolution proceeds 168 THE MODERN CHANGE IN not only by the destruction of the unfit, but by the production and development of those better pre- pared to live. The higher animals have not suf- fered beside the lower ones in the struggle of life, though the capacity for numerical reproduction is indefinitely greater in the latter. Applied to the higher human world, this means that progress shall be less and less attained by the blind destruction of the unfit, and more and more by the develop- ment of greater adaptation through conscious education, and by making it, as far as may be, impossible for the hopelessly unfit to be born to the misery of a life of inevitable failure. It is this progressive change in the plane of selec- tion that is so often ignored in the current discus- sion. Love and personal modesty are in no way less noble or less true when we view them as results of a long struggle up from a low physical plane. The fact that the whole meaning of marriage once lay in reproductive and industrial economy in no way detracts from its spiritual and human meaning on the plane of life humanity has reached. While these great changes are in process of accomplishment there must inevitably be much suf- fering and countless misadjustments. A transition period is always painful, because it is so hard to understand the conditions of life, and so difficult to pass out of ideas which once dominated us. IDEALS OF WOMANHOOD 159 When a man who is anxious for the strong, helpful meeting with another self-centered personality finds himself united to a woman who desires merely to submit herself to the control of another, and who has no wish for independent life, the result is tragedy. When a woman who craves a strong, self-affirming and growing life finds herself united to a man who demands that the home should be an adjunct in his existence, but should entirely satisfy the needs of his wife, the result is tragedy. But it is in the second case that the suffering is deepest, for men have compensating channels through which it is possible for them to attain some measure of self -development. But for a woman in such a case there is almost no escape. Every effort she makes to fulfil her life is misunderstood, and seems only to tighten the chains that bind her. Margaret, with the intuitive appreciation her awakening in- stincts gave her, understood the difference between her life and Faust's, when she said : " Denkt ihr an mich ein Augenblickchen nur, Ich werde Zeit genug an euch zu denken haben." The greatest obstacles, however, which women have to meet, do not lie in the opposition of indi- viduals. A woman who struggles out into more complete life is met by two difficulties. The greater of these is within herself in the shape of those instincts toward self -annulment, which we have 160 THE MODERN CHANGE IN seen are the result of countless centuries of bio- logical and historical selection. Other instincts are present in her which are due to comparatively- late progress in civilization, and which are increased rapidly by education, but these have not the same absolutely dominating force as those which depend upon so long a period of biological history. The second obstacle is the perpetuation in all the outer structure of civilization of the same tendencies which are within women as instinct. The preju- dice and misunderstanding which a woman who seeks to live a strong and independent life must meet, are hard to bear, especially as they drive her back upon herself, and give added strength to the instincts of which they are the outward social expression. The outer and inner demands unite, and make it extremely painful and difficult for a woman to go on in positive life. However, it is impossible to go back to the primi- tive plane. The need for a realization of life in action is becoming more and more widespread among women. If it is less dominating than the instincts which have a longer history, it is increased by the tendencies of modern civilization, and is strong enough to cause a growing restlessness in the lives of women. The opposing tendencies are in conflict in the most painful of all battles— that within the spirit itself. As the change in the IDEALS OF WOMANHOOD 161 plane of selection places the premium increasingly upon the woman in whom the later instincts are strong, the result is to increase the acuteness of the transition struggle. The cure for half-knowledge is larger truth, and the pain that comes in the transition is removed only by a fulfilment of the process. When women have awakened to dissatisfaction with the old con- ditions of life, they can never return permanently to them. It is possible to work on, through the period of transition in which we find ourselves, toward a stronger and a saner life : to go back to the undeveloped conditions of earlier existence is an absolute impossibility. To understand the significance of this struggle is to meet its difficulties more intelligently — to bring greater rationality into life. To shut our eyes to the results of many ages of biological selection is not to overcome them ; and a solution which ignores their presence and meaning is as futile as the con- servatism which would hold life to its primitive adjustments, and refuses to recognize the fact of advance. The biological selection which has so highly differentiated the type of manhood from that of womanhood, gives each its peculiar strength and its special weakness. The view so widely expressed that women are better than men, is uttered largely 162 THE MODERN CHANGE IN for purposes of flattery and has little justification. Equally" unwarranted is the opinion, held privately by so many — often by those who express the opposite — that women are inferior and to be de- spised. Each type has its own strength and its correlative weakness. To judge one by the stand- ard of the other is to see its faults out of relation, and fail to appreciate its positive significance. This problem finds a parallel in that differentiation of historic ideals found in Greek and Christian civilization. As it was necessary to see each from within to appreciate what of the whole possibility of the human spirit it really did embody, so is it in the case of the man and the woman. The peculiar greatness of women lies in the power to know the truth instinctively in the world of the personal relations, and to live it with unfaltering fidelity. This quality of the "eternal womanly" makes the splendid heroines of literature and life everywhere. Heloise and Desdemona, Pompilia, and Helena in All's Well that Ends Well, Margaret in the Cloister and the Hearth, never fail to know the best and affirm it unquestioningly. What men can be placed beside them? Browning's Capon- sacchi is a noteworthy exception ; but Abelard and Othello, Gerard, and Philip in the Manxman as compared with Kate, all fall sadJy short of the ideal. IDEALS OF WOMANHOOD 163 This power in women does not come from wordly knowledge ; it is perhaps oftenest present when there is little of the latter. It is an immediate quality of the soul. Women have more of the heroic imprudence which forms the highest point of virtue, beginning where prudent calculation commences to be low and criminal. More sensi- tive than men to the exigencies of society and the opinions of others, women are vastly more capable of a noble abandonment of convention for the sake of life, and can live unswervingly in obedience to their choice. Men try to intellectualize all their experiences, while the best things of personal life cannot be translated into terms of the understand- ing. It is rarely that they can give up the smaller calculations of prudence, so essential in all ordi- nary circumstances, and so distorting to the higher calls of the spirit. Men give way to lower influ- ences, allow insignificant elements to poison or replace the most sacred things of life, loosely accept a promiscuous adjustment. It is true, the superiority of women in literature is partly due to chivalry and the particular tradi- tions of art. And, indeed, even in the world of personal relations women have their special weak- ness ; for the same quality that ennobles the heroic type of womanhood, shows at times in less exalted women in the unreasoning adoration of unworthy 164 THE MODERN CHANGE IN men, in weakly giving way to passing emotions, or in foolishly idealizing a partial or imagined experi- ence, and so living to it at the expense of the positive opportunities of life. Yet it remains a fact that in the world of the personal relations men must look up to women, and reverence them with a consecrated worship, for indeed it is "the eternal womanly" that leads us ever "upward and on." On the other hand the weakness of men is but the necessary accompaniment of the peculiar strength developed in them by natural selection. In the long ages of the coarser struggle of life the lack of spiritual fineness among men, and their capacity for easy and promiscuous adjustment, have been distinct advantages. It has been well that the coarser passions were strong and master- ful in them. It is because of these qualities that they have been capable of a vigorous and consist- ent battle with the world. To them vocational activity is easy. They respond to great ambitions, and require an active realization of character. As literature ceases to be occupied so exclusively with love, and comes to deal more adequately with the problem of action, greater justice will be done to the heroic type of manhood. The growing import- ance of the problem of the vocation, and the broadening and the humanizing of art, must inevit- ably cause this ; and then the relations of men and IDEALS OF WOMANHOOD 166 women in all phases of life will be seen in clearer perspective. There are already hints of this in literature. Wilhelm Meister focuses in interest, not upon the wide array of rather dissipating per- sonal relations, but upon the realization of life through the vocation ; and in the modern novel the problem of action is becoming increasingly important. The sphere in which the special strength of man- hood lies is the place where the peculiar weakness of women is evident; a weakness dependent again upon the particular type of character selected, and existing as the necessary corollary to its strength. Consistent and independent action is difficult to women. They work readily under immediate direction, and inspired by personal appreciation; but alone, they often show alternate periods of brilliant accomplishment, and utter inability to act. It is but rarely they they can be depended upon for the steady and independent performance of undirected activities. The series of vocations upon which they have successfully entered makes this evident. The sphere of their easiest success has been that of personal service, from household labor to the call- ing of the nurse and the physician, where they work for individuals and to personal appreciation. Outside of this field they pass readily to teadiing, 166 THE MODERN CHANGE IN a profession again connected with the service of in- dividuals, and involving maternal functions. The next series of vocations in which their success has been remarkable is the field of the fine arts, where there is opportunity for immediate emotional and personal expression ; and their adaptation has proved greatest to those arts where personal direc- tion and appreciation is most immediate, as in painting, singing and acting. It is even true that women are more capable than men of needlessly abandoning their vocational activities, as indeed they are more tempted to do, and of sinking with less resistance into a life of frivolous vanity. On the other hand, they have a power to exalt the vocations upon which they enter, which is again expressive of their peculiar type. They are in- clined to seek ideal rather than utilitarian ends, and to follow the personal and human rather than the commercial results of action. Though not absolute or universal, in a large way this differentiation of capacity and activity holds ; and a frank recognition of it, and of its signifi- cance, is an indispensable step to a solution of the difficulties that must be met. The need is not to con- demn or praise either men or women, but to appre- ciate the peculiar strength and weakness of each. For either sex arrogantly to flatter itself with an unwarranted feeling of superiority, or to degrade IDEALS OF WOMANHOOD 167 itself with an unworthy attitude of inferiority, leads to a misjudgment of the conditions of life and of the individuals with whom we must live. The differences that exist between men and women are not to be overcome; indeed it would be the greatest evil were they to be removed. Nothing is uglier than masculine women and effeminate men. Superficial likeness between the sexes is the last thing to be desired. Copying details, perhaps merely accidental, in masculine dress and behavior, is not the path to wider life for women. Maternity will always cost more than fatherhood, physically and mentally ; the typical differences in mind and heart between men and women will continue to be present. Though the old instincts respectively of dominance and submission are changed in form, in transfigured shape they still survive, and make part of the charm and wonder of love. Yet there is a higher ideal than manhood or womanhood. Life always precedes its functions in importance; and fatherhood and motherhood, manhood and womanhood, are but expressions and relations of the human being. As the unity and potentiality of the human spirit are present in each individual, so the highest ideal we can con- ceive is not masculine or feminine, but Jiuman. The two Ideals tend to approach each other, or rather, with their expansion, the sphere of each 168 THE MODERN CHANGE IN overlaps and includes more of the other. We ask that men shall be, not alone strong and brave and true, but refined and gentle; and we ask that women shall be, not only sensitive and tender and loving, but strong and capable of some measure of independent life. Women are most womanly not when they are weakest in action, but when their personal insight is strengthened by active self- expression ; and men are strongest in vocational life when they are sensitive to love and inspired through the personal relations. Action depends for its inspiration and its elevation upon love, and love for its worth and permanence upon consecrated action. The personal relation which destroys or lessens the power to work earnestly and well, is an immoral self-indulgence unworthy the name of love, and sure in the end to dissipate the measure of love that may have been present. The voca- tional activity which absorbs the individual at the expense of his power to love is blind and selfish, devitalizing the action and destroying the worth of the life. When each attains the freest and fullest develop- ment marriage has highest possibilities. There can be no satisfying personal relations for intelli- gent human beings except upon a plane of entire equality. Herein lies the greatest significance of all widening of the spheres of interest and activity IDEALS OF WOMANHOOD 169 for women. The wider these are, the more satisfy- ing will be the possibilities of the personal rela- tions. Whatever tends to free women from any- external compulsion to marry, places marriage itself upon a nobler plane. It is for the benefit neither of the present nor of future generations that women should be forced into marriage by economic causes. It is a voluntary and intelligent mother- hood, based upon an uncompelled and loving union, that is capable of giving good citizens to the state and good men and women to the world. And in such a union alone can there be any true and permanent satisfaction for the constantly deepen- ing personal life. The joy of love lies in the perfect union where each gives and takes absolutely. The complete ab- sorption of each in the other is its highest bliss ; but it must be such a mutual union, and not the dragging of the one out of the orbit of his own life into that of the other. For it is a hard law of life that to be worthy of any deep relation one must be able to do without it. There is an inevitable insipidity in any intimate association where one individual is a mere echo of the other. The flattery of an imitator may please one's vanity, but cannot answer the needs of the soul. It is the power of love to complete human nature, by making it possible for us to live vicariously through the 170 THE MODERN CHANGE IN experience of another. If there be sufficient com- munity of life to bring a complete union, every difference between the two individuals is included in it, and serves only to deepen the life of each. That is why the love of a man and a woman has higher possibilities than any other. Every differ- ence, physical, mental, spiritual, adds to the blessedness of the union, if the likeness and com- munity of life be sufficient to hold the differences resolved in one. Then each can enter into the peculiar life of the other, and become completely human. The man can appreciate the delicacy, the tenderness, the spirituality and absolute insight of the woman. The woman may attain the stronger passion, the self-centered power, the independent strength and activity of the man. Thus love is the supreme test of life. Every ele- ment of character enters into the union ; and the power to love is simply the measure of actual and potential life in the individual. It is not strange that so few people can love supremely and sub- limely ; they are not worth such love, to give or to receive it. Their lives are not sufficiently conse- crated, they are not true enough, earnestly and consistently active enough, to give or awaken such love. One cannot deliberately choose to love ; but one may choose to live so as to be worthy of love if one be blessed with it. And if it come, it will prove IDEALS OF WOMANHOOD 171 to be the fire that will test every element of the spirit, the heat that will make fluid every hard and crystallized part of life, resolving the potential into the actual, and progressively completing in one the measure of humanity of which one is capable. One who reads the long story of the progress of humanity, and who sees the bitter suffering that marks every step of the way, is apt ac times to despair, and to wonder whether the achievements of the race have been worth their price. But what should amaze us is not the low origin of higher human things, nor the pain and suffering that marked the way, but the noble heights to which humanity has attained, and the yet higher dreams which lead us on. Out of it all we can see the new ideal of woman- hood emerging. It is not the purity of innocence we shall reverence, but the purity of virtue ; not the negative, mediaeval ideal, but the positive one of rounded and harmonious development. Unlike the artificial ideal of the middle ages, this is in line with natural selection, for more and more the selective value is placed upon it with the higher de- velopment of life. It is "the eternal womanly," but unhampered by artificial limitations and traditional slavery. It is woman loving, tender and sensitive, but strong, true and independent, capable of stand- ing alone, and so worthy of the highest union in the most intimate relations of human life. VIII. THE ETHICS OF SOCIAL RECONSTRUCTION THE period in which we live is more difficult for us to understand than any other, pre- cisely because it is our own. That which lies distant is seen in clear perspective, while nearer events crowd in upon us with no principle of selection. If we wish to see the configuration of a landscape we climb the highest mountain peak, and then the various features of the world about us fall into their true relation. The insignifi- cant hillocks, that seemed so high when we were below them in the plain, sink into their true posi- tion, and the larger outline of the distant mountain chain, which was lost when we stood near its foot, is seen in all its harmony. So history is sifted by time. The mere inequali- ties and accidents in the surface of to-day's life obscure the outline of the mountain chains of tendency. The unimportant fills our vision, while the essential is lost. But in the perspective of his- tory the past stands out in clear outline. The slight inequalities sink into the level of the plain. The peaks of great achievement stand out clearly, and the mountain chains of great tendencies are seen in their true majesty. When Shakespeare's Mark Antony said : " The evil that men do lives after them ; The good is oft interred with their bones," 176 THE ETHICS OF SOCIAL RECONSTRUCTION he stated a striking fallacy. The truth is, that while a startling crime may be remembered for a time, it is only the good that really lives long — that becomes a part of the life of mankind. It is a great man who is remembered after his century. The mass of unimportant events is forgotten, and dies like the rotting leaves that nourish the roots of this year's flowers. It is not hard for the slight- est student to understand the meaning of the great, historic movement of Christianity ; yet in the midst of it so wise and humane a man as Marcus Aurelius could be entirely deceived as to its signif- icance. Every school boy to-day knows the mean- ing of the struggle between Greece and Persia ; but that meaning was so far from evident when the struggle was on, that only two or three Greek cities understood it sufficiently to take an heroic part in it. In our effort to understand the life of to-day we are hampered by this lack of perspective. It is necessary to substitute for the wanting perspective of time and space a perspective of the soul. We must strive to get away in spirit from our own time, and see it from the vantage-ground of the great movements of the past. This is one of the supreme values of history. It gives no ready-made solutions to our problems ; but it can lift us away from the submerging stream of petty details which THE ETHICS OF SOCIAL RECONSTRUCTION 177 overwhelms us in the present, and enable us to look down upon the landscape of modern life from the mountain heights of the past. This is peculiarly- necessary in a time like our own, when the world is stirred by new ideals and menaced by unpre- cedented problems. We need to know which of the hopes put forward are illusions, and which are stars in the path of tendency to lead us to the world of to-morrow. Only by viewing our problems in the light of the larger experience of humanity can we hope to accomplish this. The facts of human history are woven together in seemingly inextricable fashion. Each event is related to what precedes it as eifect, and to what follows it as cause. It has been said that ' ' in nature the little causes produce the great results;" and this is supremely true of the moral world. Yet this vast array of causes can be reduced to certain fundamental classes. Social progress is accom- plished through (1) Changes in laws and institu- tions ; through (2) Progress in invention and dis- covery; and through (8) Changes in the ideal of life. In any vital period of history forces will be found in all three spheres, and mutually interacting. Behind such an epoch as the renaissance are vastly significant changes in social and political institutions. The towns along the coast of Europe grow in size and importance. The citizens of these 178 THE ETHICS OF SOCIAL RECONSTRUCTION towns gain power formerly held by petty nobles in the surrounding country. The wide cosmopolitan- ism of the middle ages, depending upon common religious faith and organization, gives way to modern national institutions. Feudalism and chivalry decline, and social and individual freedom begins to appear. If one is to understand the renaissance, to these institutional changes important scientific and in- dustrial inventions and discoveries must be added. The importance of such a social force, for instance, as the invention of printing can scarcely be exag- gerated. This made it possible for education to be the heritage of the common man. No other inven- tion of man has accomplished as much as printed books in annihilating the limitations of the phy- sical world. Books enable us to reach back over the centuries and share the thought of one who lived in another world than our own, and thus to make him our friend, far nearer than some whom we meet in the street. Thus our epoch may share in the life of others, and our civilization become increasingly cosmopolitan. The effect upon the mind of Europe of the dis- covery of America is scarcely intelligible to us to- day. Here was a new continent added to the world, and especially to its imagination, a continent that might contain the fountain of youth and untold THE ETHICS OP SOCIAL EECONSTRUCTION 179 Eldoradoes. It stimulated adventure and dis- covery, brought new elements into the life of Europe, and resulted in social and political changes of great importance. Yet behind these causes lay earlier and more fundamental ones. The real secret of the renais- sance is the gradual change in the view of life, which begins far back in the middle ages. It dawns in the songs of the trouvere and troubadour in France as early as the twelfth century, in the min- nesingers of Germany, in the love songs of the Italian poets preceding Dante. It consisted of a new love for life and nature, the increase to a dom- inant tone of what had been but a minor note in the mediasval world. Obviously this fundamental change in the at- titude tcward life is a resultant of many subtle causes ; but it gathers up under itself those which are both logically, and in time, primary in social progress. Indeed the greatest importance of changes in laws and institutions, and of progress in in- vention and discovery, is in the effect these changes have upon the personal ideal and attitude of the multitude of individuals. As the moral world is a world of persons, so its character is dependent upon that of the persons who make up its life. The general ideal which is the molding force in an epoch is but the sum or product of the personal 180 THE ETHICS OF SOCIAL RECONSTRUCTION ideals of the individuals who compose the world in the time. Public opinion is but the resultant combination of private opinions. To explain fully any social condition one must turn to the ideals which the men and women of the given society seek. It is significant that the great reforms of history have all been disappointing — when judged by the expectations of the reformer. Even such world movements as the reformation, or the French and American revolutions, have failed to realize the dreams of those who sought to bring them into being. We can scarcely imagine to day the hopes of the patriots of the world at the time of the American revolution. They believed that in the new world a nation with perfect liberty was being founded, giving equal opportunity and social justice to all. We who come after the e^^ent, who see the mismanagement of our cities, and the debauching of our political life, we can but wonder at the vain dreams of the reformers. The poets who preceded and accompanied the French revolution believed that through it the golden age would dawn for the human race. But an ocean of blood failed to wash clean the human spirit. Greed and selfishness asserted themselves in France as elsewhere ; and the condition of her people to-day is still far removed from the golden epoch. The French revolution is worth to the THE ETHICS OP* SOCIAL HEOONSTRUCTION 181 world all that it cost ; the value of its reaffirmation of nobler ideals cannot be overestimated ; but it was far from realizing the hopes of those who aided to bring it into being. Social progress is slow, and must always be so. The new condition is but a gradual modification of the old. A great forward leap is more apparent than real : it is possible only when force has been gathered up under the surface for a long period of time, and suddenly comes to light and changes external institutions. The reasons for this lie in the very nature of life itself. If the law of struggle does not hold en- tirely in the intellectual and spiritual world, it is nevertheless an undeniable fact everywhere in the physical realm. In the struggle for material ends, for one to have more does sometimes mean that an- other must have less. As long as there is progress the material conditions of life cannot be the same for all ; and however high we may raise those at the bottom of society, their condition must seem miserable when compared with the state of those above. Another fact which sentimental philanthropy habitually ignores, is the coexistence of types in the moral world. This is a fact parallel to that co- existence of organic types which biology makes clear to us. Though higher and higher forms have 182 THE ETHICS OF SOCIAL RECONSTEUCTION successively taken precedence in the struggle of evolution, this rarely means the complete disap- pearance of earlier types. Thus, on the earth to- day are examples of most of the typical forms of organic life, from the unicellular protozoan to the highest mammals. Similarly, in the moral world, any great city presents a coexistence of moral types from savagery to civilization. How all the world is gathered up in the space of a few square miles ! The degradation of the bushmen of South Africa, the voluptuous madness of Chaldsea, the wealth and social extravagance of decadent Rome, the hunger for knowledge of the philosophers, the aspirations of the mediaeval saints, — all these are in Paris or any great city of the world. Down the long boule- vards sweeps the endless stream of carriages, with liveried coachmen and gay or wearied occupants. Along the side- walk surges the human sea. Here a dreamer with the hope of to-morrow in his far- looking eyes ; there a beggar, deformed and degraded, holding out a repulsive hand. Here trips merrily a child, and next, a bold-staring wanton in gaudy clothes. Faces pinched and wan with hun- ger and despair, faces heavy and coarse with the self-given mark of Cain. The night approaches, and over it all rests the light of the evening like a benediction. With the night comes release to the tired toilers, the invitation THE ETHICS OF SOCIAL KECONSTEUCTION 183 to renewed merriment to those who seek gay dissipation ; but with the night are unloosed the human beasts of prey. The lights of the city shut out the stars of heaven with a nearer and cheaper glare. Under it flows the stream of women whom choice, or necessity, or social wrong, has made the repulsive harpies of the street. Down the dark alleys slink the thieves. Into the dives and concert halls wander the sailor, the ignorant, the parasites, to whom the painted hags offer the debris of what once was womanhood. The sea of life may surge into a madder storm, or sink into calm, but over it shine the stars of God, mysterious, silent, moving with a resistless flight so harmonious that it seems like rest. — It is not strange that philanthropy falls short of the human problem ! It is true, the modification may be much more rapid in the moral than in the jihysical world ; and it may be possible through education to change completely a type in one or two generations ; yet the divergences in moral type mean that the same stimuli cannot be used upon all. The appeal that moves one is lost upon another ; and every social reform is limited and hampered by the fact that the concrete stuff of human nature is not all equally plastic in the hands of the reformer. For these reasons, and because, as we have seen, the social structure is an outgrowth of personal 184 THE ETHICS OF SOCIAL RECOlSrSTRUCTION ideals, progress must be slow, and all schemes for suddenly bringing in the golden epoch must be in- effectual. It is the mistake of every reformer to exaggerate the importance of his own measure. He lifts the chain of social facts by a single link, and imagines that it all depends upon the one he holds in his hand. He fails to see that each link in the chain may be regarded in the same way, and that to change one is by no means to alter the whole. Thus in the past, pantisocracies, communes, repub- lics, democracies, altrurias, all schemes for regen- erating human nature suddenly, have proved unsuccessful. One of the most interesting minor experiments of this kind in America was the Brook Farm move- ment. This social experiment was organized by some of the noblest spirits our country has seen. When it is said that men and women like George William Curtis, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Margaret Fuller, were members, and that Emerson and Theodore Parker were constant visitors and friends of the undertaking, the character of those con- nected with it is evident. They were to live simpler and nobler lives, devoting certain hours each day to physical, certain to mental labor. Soon however the novelty of the experiment wore off, and misadjustments were evident. Hawthorne speaks with gentle irony of his performance of THE ETHICS OF SOCIAL EECOl^STRUCTION 186 various physical tasks, including the care of Margaret Fuller's "transcendental heifer," and adds emphatically : "It is my opinion that a man's soul may be buried and perish under a dung heap, just as well as under a pile of money." Others have expressed their disillusionment. A group of people came into the community who were in no way interested in its aims, but who sought selfishly the culture possible through association with nobler spirits ; and soon the enterprise was seen to be financially and practically a failure. It was, it is true, what the similar " New Harmony" experiment has been called — "a successful failure." Though it failed in every way to bring in a new social organization, and regenerate the institutional world, its reaffirmation of nobler social ideals is one of the forces deepening oar inner life. The most that has ever been accomplished by such schemes is a slight modification of social conditions, and a reaffirmation of ideals which deepen life, and make further progress possible. What has been accomplished by past schemes and reforms throws light upon what we should expect from those most widely heralded in the present. Of the reforms advocated to-day, prob- ably no other has the measure of significance which belongs to those gathered together under the general head of socialism. Whether one be in 186 THE ETHICS OF SOCIAL RECONSTRUCTION favor of these reforms or opposed to them, no one can read the literature of socialism without being impressed with the nobility of the ideals held by the leaders of this movement. Yet when we are told by socialists, that with certain institutional changes, such as placing the control of industries in the hands of the state, we shall have at once the golden epoch, that poverty and idleness will dis- appear, and all those who are now greedy and selfish will then be earnest and generous seekers of the public welfare, we may answer that history upon every page tells distinctly the contrary. However much or little might be the social amelior- ation resulting from these institutional changes, it would be but a slight step in the wide area that must be traversed by the human spirit before it attains more than a dream of the kingdom of heaven. What is true of so broad a movement as social- ism applies much more strongly to narrower efforts. With such a reform as prohibition we may be in sympathy, or we may regard it as a mistaken method of dealing with a recognized evil ; but, in either case, when a prohibitionist tells us that if we will only carry out his measure, all evils in the world will disappear ; that vice and crime will be eradicated, and all lazy people will be earnest and energetic, we may well answer again that history THE ETHICS OF SOCIAL RECONSTRUCTION 187 upon every page teaches us the contrary. Indeed the degeneration which expresses itself in drunken- ness finds an outlet in other coarsely exciting vices, such as gambling and licentiousness ; and, some- times, to stop arbitrarily one expression may even increase another. Woman's suffrage is one of the significant move- ments of the present, expressive as it is of the general progress in equalizing the relations of men and women which is one of the most hopeful aspects of modern civilization. When, however, woman suffragists assert that by carrying out their measure, municipal and national politics will be freed from all vitiating influences, vice and crime will disappear, social relations will be made ideal, we must answer again that human experience everywhere is diametrically opposed to such an expectation. Indeed the sudden admission of a body of people to a right or duty they have not previously exercised, however valuable may be its ultimate results, is sure to be accompanied by tem- porary evils and disturbances, which retard prog- ress while they last. The same principles apply to tax and currency reforms, and to all other schemes for the readjust- ment of social conditions and relations. The most that any reform is capable of accomplishing is an improvement of social conditions in certain limited 188 THE ETHICS OF SOCIAL RECONSTRUCTION" ways, and an education of the popular mind which changes its ideals, and hence leads to later progress in institutions. But human nature will remain much the same ; the law of struggle will still apply to the material world ; all efforts toward social reform must continue to deal with a variety of moral types ; and progress will always depend upon the relatively slow change in personal ideals. In all unfounded expectations of immediate social regeneration there are two errors : the mis- take of imagining that progress can be sudden; and the error of supposing that a condition of statical perfection is either possible or desirable in human society. Even Spencer makes this second mistake, which is a commonplace in most of the Utopias, from Plato's Republic, the earliest and noblest of them all, to Bellamy's Looking Back- ward, or whatever the latest may be. Plato's desire to construct a statically perfect state blinds him to the significance of the deeper elements of individual life, and distorts the perspective in which he sees personal and social relations. Hence he would banish the poets, believing that all finer sensitiveness in feeling is opposed to the perfect courage and hardihood of the warrior. He would destroy the family, because private affections may at times be opposed to public patriotism. He fails THE ETHICS OF SOCIAL RECONSTRUCTION 189 to see that by destroying tlie positive content of per- f:.onal life, the dynamic cause of all noble action is lost, and the very end sought is defeated ; for men, ceasing to be men, are not even efficient cog-wheels in the machine of the State. Men are not rendered heroic, as Plato imagined, by being made indiffer- ent to life and death, but by learning to love something even more than life. Such errors as these are present in Campanella's City of the Sun, Bacon's New Atlantis, More's Utopia, and all presentations of statically perfect societies. Life is always dynamic and progressive, and therefore is it ever incomplete and imperfect ; its weakness is but the corollary of its greatness. Social progress must always be slow, and is the outgrowth of changes in the personal ideal. Hence the ethical attitude toward the problem of social reconstruction is evident : I. We should welcome cordially every reform which we believe will be helpful, however slight seems the good which may result from it. For it is by such slight movements that the world grows on toward the kingdom of the spirit. Especially when a reform in which we believe is condemned, does it need our assistance. It is when " truth is on the scaffold " that it demands our consecration. To run with the crowd behind an already victorious standard is a cheap and ineffectual service of the 190 THE ETHICS OF SOCIAL RECONSTRUCTION world's need. We have abandoned the rack and the stake of mediaeval persecution ; but the pillory of the modern sensational newspaper, and the scaf- fold of public abuse are as bitter tortures as one may meet. II. With a cordial welcome and assistance for those movements in which we believe, we should recognize the limitations in the greatest reform. The sober lesson of history is that there can be no sudden dawning of the golden epoch. Fanatical support has done more harm to great movements than bitter opposition. It is true, the world could not spare its fanatics, but it might well spare their fanaticism. Their greatness was the greatness of their positive belief, not of its narrowness and lim- itations. Had they believed, not less in their par- ticular reform, but more in other and compensating truths, their service to the world might have been even greater, and a vast waste of destructive reac- tion might have been saved. Noble narrowness has often giv^en priceless service to the world — but be- cause it was noble, not because it was narrow ; and its results include deplorable tendencies beside those which are helpful. Evolution is more quiet and less startling then revolution, and narrow, destructive tendencies catch the eye more quickly than broad, constructive ones. But the narrow movements are as negatively wasteful as they are THE ETHICS OF SOCIAL RECONSTRUCTION 191 definite and clear in their positive value ; and broad, constructive movements are as unhampered in their helpfulness, as they are free from striking and costly reactions. III. We should try to elevate the individual ideal through education. This is the constant reform problem. But by education is meant, not school training alone : in the work of the education of the people unite countless forces. The stern necessities of nature, the exigencies of the struggle for exist- ence, are most important among these. They are constantly building up strength of character, and equipping men for the business of life. But aside from these fundamental forces, which we can only meet valiantly, but are powerless to change or abrogate, there are many, besides the school itself, which are partly within our control. If education be something more than the sharpening of the tools of the mind, if it be the uplifting of the popular view of life, the broadening of the general intelli- gence, the culture which gives each some power of sober and restrained judgment, and leads him to love and serve the common good, its accomplish- ment rests upon the school, supported and broad- ened by the countless forces of culture whose establishment and promotion depends to some extent upon our effort and consecration. Such education is constant reformation . It works steadily 192 THE ETHICS OF SOCIAL EECONSTEUCTION toward the elevation of the ideal of life — that creative force behind all social conditions and changes, to which in the last resort they must be referred. In our own time and country, among the various ideals which dominate our lives, that of material prosperity, of accumulating wealth, has certainly been prominent. The working out of this ideal shows in the extremes of poverty and wealth, in the grinding down of the lower classes, and the relentless sacrifice of culture and science. A vast material civilization has been built up, but greed and selfishness abound on every hand. Such social conditions are the natural outcome of a certain ideal of life ; and any effort at a reform of the social conditions which does not involve a radical change in the ideal, is at best but cutting off the tops of the weeds and leaving the roots to grow. Were we to attain a saner view of life, how inevitable would be a change in our social con- ditions. Were a higher value placed upon such learning as was feverishly sought in the renais- sance, or upon the negative spiritual life after which the mediaeval world aspired, how widely different would inevitably be the external con- ditions of society. Without returning to such standards, a change in our ideal which would lead us to desire more earnestly to realize the highest THE ETHICS OF SOCIAL RECONSTRUCTION 193 possibilities of our lives, would result in the most helpful changes in our social conditions. The struggle for mere wealth would grow less intense. Culture and science would seek smaller places, as we came to appreciate the value of a life of peace, and of close relation to nature. The over- crowding of the cities would be lessened. A greater social justice would be attained in our human relations. The education which can lead to such an uplift- ing of the popular ideal is priceless. Accomplished even in a few individuals its influence is incalcula- ble. It is impossible to estimate the worth of one man absolutely consecrated to a noble aim. Twelve men, under the leadership of another, once changed the aspect of the world ; and twelve men, equally consecrated to an equally noble aim, might do the same thing again at any time. Such education would bring no sudden dawning of the golden epoch ; but it would lead to growing improvements in social conditions, as it deepened and ennobled the significance of personal life. ly. We should seek to live in conduct the highest ideal we know, and to express it in har- mony with the lives of all. The fulfilment of personal duties in social relations is the crowning service of the world. " Nor knowest thou what argument Thy life to thy neighbor's creed ha» lent". 194 THE ETHICS OF SOCIAL RECONSTRUCTION The truest teaching is living; and the primary- philanthropy is to live a good life. It is difficult for people to whom life is easy to appreciate the conditions under which others are compelled to struggle. This is the curse of success. Class judgments are always wrong; for each class appreciates its own positive excellencies, and the limitations of others. The reason for this is that the one is known from within, the other from with- out. The capitalist sees the ignorance and folly of his workmen, the fanaticism of their wasteful strikes ; he does not appreciate the nobility and the bitterness of the struggle to find and keep the work and wages which mean life and the bread of life to loved ones. The workingman sees the external prosperity of the capitalist, the seeming selfishness of his life ; he does not know of the days of struggle and the sleepless nights of thought, which made possible the keeping in action of a great undertaking during "hard times." The aristocrat sees the rudeness of the man of the people, and fails to realize his simple earnestness and truth. The man of the people recognizes the artificial, insincere elements in the life of the other, but fails to appreciate his refinement and potential ability to rise in answer to a deep call of the spirit. In this and similar ways our view of life is largely determined by our immediate surroundings. THE ETHICS OF SOCIAL RECONSTRUCTION 196 We go to the country, and if the burden of existence does not rest heavily upon us, a little time of rest and quiet makes the world seem a beautiful and serene place. We go to a great city, and join in its rush, and face some of the darker phases of its life, and in a little time the world seems one endless and restless stream of toil and endeavor. It is thus easy to lose sight of all save the most recent experiences, and to see the world from the perspective of the last events in our lives. It is possible to make headway against this beset- ting error only by constant watchfulness, by seek- ing to study all phases of life and to take points of view other than our usual ones. Any partial view of life, if it be sincere, contains some measure of truth, and every partial view of life is limited and involves mistakes. We should seek first to un- derstand, instead of condemning, attitudes widely different from our own. When we meet one who has reacted bitterly against the world, and would overturn its institutions, we should ask what it is in the world that could bring one to such a pass. Anarchist and socialist, pessimist and optimist, social reformer and evolutionist, each has some true reaction upon the real world ; and to appreci- ate that is to broaden our relation to the whole truth of things. Aristocratic prejudices are the result, and in 196 THE ETHICS OF SOCIAL RECONSTRUCTION turn the cause, of artificial social conditions. There is in every society the danger of settling down into fixed forms. With few exceptions, the older a community, the greater is the measure of such artificiality present. Such artificial forms destroy life : they foster inefficiency at the top of the social structure, and hamper genius at the bottom. Hence there is need of continual protest. The personal will which is the moving power in history, is the one force capable of struggling effectively with the inevitable tendency toward crystallization in external conditions. It is the history of every great movement that it began as the idea and inspi- ration of one man, spread from him to others, and gradually took shape in institutional form. Then the life ceases by degrees to reside in the individ- uals, and is supposed, in some way, to belong to the institution itself. When this point is reached the movement has lost its vitality ; the institution becomes more and more a dead form ; and the pro- cess must be begun anew. Hence the need for the perpetual affirmation of the individual will and ideal. Thus the value of social unrest : with all its economic waste, it is the most hopeful sign in our country today ; for it proves that we are alive and not dead, that we are struggling with our problem. It is always wrong to judge social conditions from THE ETHICS OF SOCIAL EECONSTEUCTION 197 the point of view of our own private comfort ; for progress always involves some pain and disturb- ance, and the true human solidarity makes this affect each to some extent. We are all employers or employees in some aspect of our lives. Even minor problems, such as that of domestic service, express the princii)les of the entire social relation- ship. Present conditions in the household cause widespread discontent ; and the wish is often heard expressed that we had a ' ' servant class in America' ' , that our ho iiseholds might be conducted with greater ease. We should remember that nothing runs more smoothly for a time than slavery. Impudence is a low expression of an independent spirit, but it is better than none. To one who takes an ideal view of human life all honest work is ennobling ; but the most fall below that plane, and lose their self- respect in occupations popularly looked upon with contempt. As long as certain vocations are de- spised, let us be glad that our people refuse them. Snobbery and servility go together. The "place" of any man or woman is to be first of all a human being, and only second, if at all, a cog-wheel in the social machine. Social relations are countless and intricate, but the same principle applies everywhere. It is the sum of slight services and insignificant actions that makes up the social welfare. When Darwin 198 THE ETHICS OF SOCIAL RECONSTRUCTION showed that the soil is made by its elements being passed through the bodies of earth-worms, the scientific world was filled with a shock of surprise. It seemed impossible that such despised organisms could create the basis upon which all civilization rests. So in the human world, it is not the few striking actions which make up the happiness and progress of mankind, but rather the quickly for- gotten details which taken separately seem insig- nificant. In the effort to appreciate various forms of greatness, let us not underestimate the value of a simply good life. Just to be good : to keep life pure from degrading elements, to make it con- stantly helpful in little ways to those who are touched by it, to keep one's spirit always sweet, and avoid all manner of petty anger and irrita- bility — that is an ideal as noble as it is diflicult. It is not the size of the canvas that determines the value of the work of art ; it is not the mechanical extent of the action that gives it value and harmony in the artistic creation of a human life. To seek to be true to our best insight, to express in personal life the noblest ideal we know, is the highest pos- sible service in the problem of social reconstruction. IX. THE NEW SOCIAL IDEAL THE modern world stands on the brink ot the unknown. It is impossible to foresee adequately the developments of even a few decades, and changes of momentous import- ance are occurring in every direction. This must be true to some extent of all epochs, for each is modern to the men of it. They see the past com- pleted in the present ; but it is with difficulty that they can detect even a few of the organic filaments which are weaving the world of to-morrow. But in a singular way this is true of our own time. A new human ideal is taking possession of the world, the consequences of which will be limitless in significance. All past epochs of civilization found their justification in the few men who came to the surface and had some share in the ends of life. It was never dreamed that all men might have some part in these ends, and should have every oppor- tunity to seek them. Ancient democracies were not democratic in the modern sense. They were oligarchies, where within the ruling class some measure of democratic relations prevailed. But this class stood on the backs of the mass of the people. Even Aristotle, humane and far-seeing as he was, assumed frankly that civilization must always rest upon slavery. Throughout the middle 202 THE NEW SOCIAL IDEAL ages similar conditions prevailed. The vocations respected for themselves were, as in the ancient world, war and political life, with the addition of the priestly career. The fundamental activities of society, agricultural, commercial, industrial, were carried on by slaves, or men but little removed from the condition of serfs. In the art of the ancient and mediaeval world it is religion, the traditions of the ruling class, or war and chivalry that furnish the subject, never common humanity. In the literature of Europe in all centuries preceding the renaissance, there is but an occasional glimpse into the life of the people. Hesiod gives their despairing wail, and Langland an echo of their misery and their stubborn endur- ance, but these are isolated exceptions. Homer presents a rare Thersites only to make him an object of ridicule ; and Dante sublimely and arro- gantly ignores the existence of the untutored mass, whose destiny was not sufficiently interesting to him to Und treatment in either Hell or Heaven. But the era of humanity has arisen. Art is transformed in every department. The sailor at the pumps on a sinking vessel, the fisher's wife moaning alone in the grey dawn, the pnysician beside the bed of the child whose agonized parents stand beseechingly in the background — these fur- nish worthy subjects for modern painting. I THE NEW SOCIAL IDEAL 203 remember the impression of this thought which was made upon me by the modern gallery in the Academy at Florence. Weeks had been spent visiting the churches, monasteries and galleries, studying the exquisite remains of renaissance painting ; and on the last day of our stay in Flor- ence, chiefly from curiosity, we found our way into the collection of pictures by modern Italian artists. The result was unexpectedly startling. There were very few worthy paintings among these ; but those which did stand out possessed a meaning that is not found in the paintings of the renaissance. One represented the dying Raphael. At his feet knelt the woman he loved, tears streaming from her eyes ; at his side sat the old cardinal, perplexed and grave, anxious if possible to soothe the painter's last moments. There was nothing unusual in the scene ; it was but the common human tragedy ; yet such a subject is not found in all the paintings of the renaissance. Another canvas represented the painter Fra Lippo Lippi making love to the nun who served as his model. In the woman's face was depicted the awakened struggle between the life to which she had consecrated herself, the old ideal she had cherished, and the world of new desires surging up into consciousness ; not even Leonardo, of the painters before the nineteenth century, could have grasped and fixed that conflict. 204 THE NEW SOCIAL IDEAL The third and most powerful picture represented a group of wandering musicians lost in the snow, with the pitiless winter night coming on. The instruments of their craft were huddled on the ground. The man was half- kneeling, with hands raised to his head in an attitude of abject despair. In terror his little lad clung to him, while rigid and still on the ground lay a girlish woman figure just frozen to death. All about were the pathless snow fields with the ominous depth of the forest behind. It is only a common tragedy ; yet only a modern artist could have wrung our heart-strings with that human appeal. And art is learning to transfigure the humblest life with the divine significance that dwells at the heart of humanity, and is greater than the awe of a traditional religion or the splendor of an old mythology. Literature is fiooded with the surging sea of common life ; its old limits are swamped, and it is at once distorted and ennobled by the impulsion of new forces. The novel of real life, often sordid and bare, at times majestic and trans- figured, replaces the romance of heroes and the epic of kings. The struggle is but the birth-throes of a new ideal, an ideal of common humanity. It is not enough for us that here and there a rare saint or hero attains, it is not enough that the work of THE NEW SOCIAL IDEAL 206 civilization is accomplished in a few individuals. To stand upon the backs of a dumb multitude, or furnish our own shoulders for the feet of arrogant heroes, are conceptions equally repulsive and unendurable to us. We demand life for ourselves, and we demand it for every human being. Our entire society is being transformed by the desire to give every man and woman, together with our- selves, all opportunity and help in striving for life, happiness, culture, intelligence, helpfulness — all ends of life that are worth seeking. There is something thrilling in the unquestioning faith and enthusiasm with which the world is turn- ing toward this ideal. A breath fresh and strong, like that which blows through the sagas of the Norseland, and gives their endless attractiveness to its Thors and Odins, is felt in the new impetus of modern life. It is perhaps because we are uncon- scious of the implications of our ideal that we can champion it so unquestioningly. No moral effort of history, not even the Christianization of Europe, or the conversion of Asia to Buddhism, involved the difficulties and perils which are in the path of this supreme attempt of modern life. As children, if young enough, will try any task, so we with the enthusiasm of youth challenge the universe with our supreme ideal. And it is well that it is so, for a full consciousness of the significance and the 206 THE NEW SOCIAL IDEAL difficulty of the task we have set before ns might paralyze our effort and unnerve our hands. To carry every man and woman, not as dependents, but through the free and cooperative activity of each with all, on toward all the ends of life that are worth seeking, is inconceivably and appal- lingly difficult. Yet some measure of intelligent appreciation of the magnitude and meaning of our undertaking is necessary to successful action. An understand- ing of the immense difference between modern civilization and those epochs which have preceded it, is indispensible to even a partial achievement of our aim. In America the new ideal is more frankly taken as the object of civilization than anywhere else in the world, yet it is as well throughout Europe the creative force modifying all expressions of life. England stands to-day on the threshold of a new epoch. Her imperialism has pushed Anglo-Saxon speech and institutions all over the globe, and developed a pride of race and nation unequalled since Rome. But within herself is the ferment of a new life — if not the dissolution of the empire, at least the reorganization of all her institutions and activities. The English character is conservative and tenacious of old forms ; yet even it is incapable of resisting the forces of the new life. Since 1870 THE NEW SOCIAL IDEAL 207 England has seen the most astounding develop- ments in the education of her people. Before that time there was practically no distinctively state education in England ; since then board schools have been established all over the land, and suc- cessive parliaments have given increased grants for popular education. The result is the creation of a great democracy, growing increasingly discontented under the admirable oligarchic rule which satisfied its predecessors. Parallel with the educational movement has been the growth of ethical and industrial socialism, and the permeation over wider areas of the popular life of the new human ideal. Germany is suffering from the natural reaction against the splendid patriotism of the seventies. National unity being accomplished, the evils of imperialism become evident, and the deadly same- ness of institutions reacting toward medievalism chills the enthusiasm which local patriotism and the competition between small, rival states pro- duced. But the spirit of social democracy, hard and materialistic as it is in some aspects, steadily gains ground in Germany, and tends to supplant the cold arrogance of ritualistic religion and the pessimism that accompanies selfish industrialism with some measure of enthusiasm for humanity. The trail of the serpent of cynical unbelief is 208 THE NEW SOCIAL IDEAL over a part of French literature, Paris contains much that is degenerate, the alternate artificial effervescence and pale sombreness of decadence is present in much French art ; and the result of thirty- years' devotion to militarism by an impulsive peo- ple shows sadly in the insanity that supposes an "honor of the army," or of the people, can exist which is not based upon justice and truth. Yet the higher meaning of the French revolution is not forgotten ; and under the hard military beau- rocracy, and in spite of the extravagant reactions of anarchy, the new humanity slumbers in France and will waken one day, — here and there are echoes of its dreams. In the splendid protest of the "intellectuals" against the pitiless dominance of the mob, France has proved that her culture is not all decadence, and that she will have her place in the world of to-morrow. Spain is sunk under the corruption of her insti- tutions ; Italy starves beneath her unwarranted military equipment ; Austria is torn by race dissen- sions ; and Russia pushes her hard imperialism remorselessly onward. But in Tolstoi and Ada Negri, in Dostoievsky and Sienkiewicz, in Carducci and in the songs of the Bohemian peasants are there not prophecies for to-morrow ? The end of a century does mean a change in human affairs, only because men so regard it ; and THE NEW SOCIAL IDEAL 209 everywhere are prophecies that the twentieth cen- tury will differ profoundly from the nineteenth. The proposal for a peace congress, with universal disarmament as its aim, made by the one absolute despot in Europe, is no accident of selfish diplo- macy. Politically nationalistic, Europe is indus- trially cosmopolitan. Each nation is bound inti- mately with others through the exchange of indus- trial and artistic products. Russia attempted at one time to isolate herself from the rest of Europe, and develop without foreign capital and stimulus, and she has learned from sad experience how dis- astrous is such an attempt. It is not the Triple Alliance or the Franco-Russian understanding which holds Europe together, but mutual indus- trial dependence. The pressure of common inter- ests is a tremendous support to the new dream of the spirit in the work of civilization. The difficulty in carrying out the new ideal is vastly increased by the complication of modern life. This is true even of the most superficial aspects of our civilization. The mechanical inven- tion and discovery which furnishes the theme for every cheap eulogy of our epoch, changes in all aspects the conditions of our problem. The possi- bility which earlier periods possessed of working out a solution for a small fragment of humanity, isolated from the rest of mankind, has utterly 210 THE NEW SOCIAL IDEAL passed away. In the merest mechanical fashion the world has been closely unified, and the surface unity finds a deeper corollary in the spiritual life. The entire change in international principles and relations since the eighteenth century, and the dawn of an era of greater peace, accentuate the acuteness of the industrial problem. The movement from the country to the city, which is steadily going on all over the world, is a cause and a result of the increasing tension in the struggle for existence. Vast masses of human beings are heaped together in great cities. In one aspect such a collection of humanity as is London, seems to be an immense vortex, in which innumer- able lives are ceaselessly drawn down. Up and down the great thoroughfares surges the endless stream of men and women, each seeming to be merely a member of some vast organism, yet being an individual, with his own circle of life, and his own hopes and fears — like the vortex rings in the ether which some physicists have supposed to be the ultimate constituents of matter. The smoke from a thousand factories and a million chimneys hangs like a sombre pall over the immense monster. Day and night the ceaseless hum of the city goes on. It is not the roll of the myriad omnibuses on the thoroughfares ; it is not the harsh rattle of the underground trains ; it is not the murmur of THE NEW SOCIAL IDEAL 211 the million voices, harshly or tenderly speaking, madly or mockingly laughing ; it is not the roar of the machinery, or the echo of the innumerable feet. Deeper than any of these, inspiring at once terror, pity and love, it is the sound formed of many tones, containing the strident notes of evil laughter and the faint echo of tender sighs, v^rith an undertone of endless and measureless yearning, and a vs^ild note of joy and love : — it is the sound of humanity v^hich the Earth Spirit at the hum- ming loom of Time, forever is weaving, as the revealing yet concealing garment of God. In the day it is dominated by the noise of the nearer vehicles, in the night, in the hours just past the madder rush of the midnight, it sinks into the deep sombre hum, and then is almost still. Thrill- ing or menacing, it is a fit symbol of the exigency of the crisis that civilization must meet to-day. Were the tension less constant, did it rise and fall fitfully like the winds or the sea, it would seem less ominous. But this pressure always intense, this sound that sinks only to become more sombre — there is no mistaking the significance of this. Such changes as the creation of great cities and the transformation of industrial relations illustrate the vast increase in the intellectual problem of civilization. Man changes very slowly in biological structure, so slowly that it is difficult to discover 212 THE NEW SOCIAL IDEAL any increase in actual brain-power if we compare a man of to-day with a Greek in the age of Pericles. That is, in two thousand years there is not suffi- cient biological advance to be appreciable. Yet the accumulation of the material of civilization has been doubled more than once within a century. The progress of civilization consists chiefly in the accumulation of the material of life, and in the earlier and better initiation of the individual, through education, into the experience of the race, that he may take and use his inheritance from the past. The inherited equipment consists of mate- rial wealth, mechanical inventions and plants, vast organized institutions, cities and means of com- munications, libraries, museums, — in fact all the apparatus of civilization. The objective progress we are able to see in history lies almost entirely in the increase in this apparatus, and in the skill to use it effectively. Unused tools are always a burden ; and unless the inherited equipment of culture is a help to us, it will distinctly hamper our lives. Thoreau, in his half whimsical fashion, gives expression to the thought in Walden : "I see young men, my townsmen, whose misfortune it is to have inherited farms, houses, barns, cattle, and farming tools ; for these are more easily acquired than got rid of. Better if they had been born in the open pasture THE NEW SOCIAL IDEAL 213 and suckled by a wolf, that they might have seen with clearer eyes what field they were called to labor in. ******* How many a poor immortal soul have I met well nigh crushed and smothered under its load, creeping down the road of life, pushing before it a barn seventy-five feet by forty, its Augean stables never cleansed, and one hundred acres of land, tillage, mowing, pasture, and wood-lot ! The portionless who struggle with no such unnecessary inherited encumbrances, find it labor enough to subdue and cultivate a few cubic feet of flesh." The idea is not all a jest : "Was du ererbt von deinen Vfitern hast, Erwirb es, um es zu besitzen," we are told in Faust ; and the history of the sons of wealthy men is a sufficient illustration of the truth. To command and use the opportunities of civilization which we have inherited from the past we must win them anew. Thus the problem of education becomes increas- ingly more difficult. To be educated as well as the men of some past epoch is to be insufficiently trained for the needs of to-day. Better a return to barbarism than to be burdened with a vast institu- tional, material, and intellectual equipment of civ- ilization which we are unable to master and use. The question is, whether the biological basis of 214 THE NEW SOCIAL IDEAL human existence is a sufficient foundation for the vast superstructure of life, whether the brain is capable of grappling with the increasingly difficult problem of existence. The failure of a small farmer in England is connected with the opening up of vast wheat-raising tracts in Argentine Republic. The wages of a factory girl in a small town in Massachusetts are connected with the advance of Russia in northern China. The relations are becom- ing too intricate, the factors too highly complicated. The effort of legislation to deal with the problem is a kind of pitiful empirical tinkering not unlike the attempt to build a dam across a quickening torrent. Industrial distress is lightly attributed to the pre- dominance of a political party, or the accidents of particular legislation ; but the causes are as far- reaching as the intricate relations of modern life. It is obviously impossible to legislate ourselves into permanent prosperity, when the causes of dis- tress are much deeper than any legislation. The condition of modern civilization is only too much like that of Florence as Dante describes her : '• How oft, within the time of thy remembrance, Laws, moneys, ofQces and usages Hast thou remodelled, and renewed thy members ? And if thou mind thee well, and see the light. Thou shalt behold thyself like a sick woman, Who cannot find repose upon her down, But by her tossing wardeth off her pain." THE NEW SOCIAL IDEAL 215 As onr ideal and problem are unprecedented, so must be the answer. Old battle cries fail to meet new issues. The radicalism of yesterday is the conservatism of to-day, and the heresy of to-day is the orthodoxy of to-morrow. To imagine that a solution which met a past difficulty must be ade- quate to the new issue is to obscure the gravity of the problem. A particular principle of financial or industrial legislation, once championed as the standard of liberty, may become a mere shib- boleth, superstitious reverence for which hinders progress. The battle-cry of yesterday in the most advanced nations of the world was political democracy. The institutions which have been fought out along the line of progress hitherto have been in that sphere, and the significance of the movement is yet unex- hausted. But it is evident that the realization in any measure of the ideal that dominates the modern spirit cannot be achieved through political reforms alone. The storm center in the movement of the new democracy is increasingly in the sphere of social relations, and in the struggle toward greater industrial freedom. Is not, therefore, the insist- ence upon particular measures of political democ- racy as the cure for all our ills, a distinct injury, through obscuring the nature of the problem, and blinding us to the progress of events ? There was 216 THE NEW SOCIAL IDEAL a time when the extension of political suffrage was the movement of freedom. To-day we must recog- nize that political enfranchisement may co-exist with social and industrial slavery. To suppose that the extension of the ballot will cure all our diseases is to be lulled into a false sense of security, as if one should go to sleep over the crater of a live volcano. There was a time when the right of free speech was the cry of progress ; to-day it may be used as a shibboleth to permit the lawless use of power by irresponsible and criminal newspapers. To expect a single series of political movements to meet all the evils of society is to place oneself beside the ignorant prey of the quack, who trusts a single nostrum to cure all diseases. Increasing industrial freedom must follow the attainment of political freedom. The distribution of the measure- less production that results from modern methods and machinery, the bringing together of land and labor, tools and workmen, the relation of the dif- ferent factors in production and distribution, must not be left to chance and the blind action of natural causes. When a great country stagnates with "over-production," while people freeze and starve in the cities, something is wrong ; and the wrong is one that the human will and intellect can remedy, if it but consecrate itself to the task. It is sad to see how rare is a truly cosmopolitan THE NEW SOCIAL IDEAL 217 and human view of the problem. The spirit of competition, which has its place in the struggle of life, is in danger of becoming a virulent disease which blinds us to the unity of the spiritual world. The effort of one nation to aggrandise itself at the expense of others may give a superficial prosperity, but is opposed to the deeper interests of its life. The modern industrial problems are universal over the human world, and they are to be solved by one people only when they are answered to some extent for all. Were it possible to build a Chinese wall around one nation, and isolate it industrially from the rest, the result would be, not only a cowardly abdication of the leadership each owes the others, but an invitation to the dwarfing egotism and stag- nation of China — as though a great nation were to take the veil of monastic isolation. When we study the ancient Greek world we think with contempt of the narrowness of its pa- triotism. Each city sought to advance itself at the expense of its neighbors. Patriotic as far as his city was concerned, the Greek was unconscious of a larger unity of life. Only one man ever discov- ered the idea of a Greek nation ; and Pericles inevitably failed because he could lead only a few friends to understand his meaning. Greece went down because of the narrow selfishness of her cities. We realize that the true interest of any city cannot 218 THE NEW SOCIAL IDEAL be obtained by blindly struggling for itself against all others ; we have attained the national idea. But quite generally we fail to see that what was true of the relations of cities in ancient Greece is true of the relations of nations to-day. The patriotism that would advance one nation at the expense of others is only another form of sellishness, sure to meet the punishment its blindness deserves. Only a cosmopolitanism as broad as humanity is capable of realizing the modern ideal. The industrial questions rest back upon some- thing still more fundamental — the problem of social relations. While the modern ideal leads toward greater social integration, many new conditions of activity accentuate the difficulties in the path of its attainment. Modern industrial methods in- crease temporarily social segregation. Rich and poor, cultured and ignorant, tend to become more widely separated. In any large city residence dis- tricts are defined with increasing reference to class distinctions. The districts of wealth and culture are far removed from the quarters of poverty and ignorance. The rapid growth of the suburban system, depopulating the cities of the bstter middle class, leaves the wretches heaped together in tene- ment districts in undisturbed sordidness. Even the measure of social intercourse involved in the kindly offices of charity tends to pass away, as THE NEW SOCIAL IDEAL 219 social and personal helpfulness is more and more delegated to charity organizations ; with an im- mense increase in economy and justice it is true, but with a great loss of vital social relationship. Even in the religious life this social segregation is too evident to require discussion. This social problem lies behind the ferment in the modern industrial world, and there is no hope of permanently meeting the crisis in the latter sphere unless the needs in the former can be an- swered. The separation of classes in all phases of life is a curse to high and low alike. Tolstoi has always insisted that unjust extremes of poverty and wealth injure both rich and poor, and he is profoundly right. Nothing is more deadening to life than isolation in a highly differentiated class. In such a condition we are victims of that too great specialization which hampers the range of our adaptability, as evidenced in the plant and animal world, as well as in the human sphere. No great realization of life is possible which does not spring from the heart of common humanity. When liter- ature is cultivated by a narrow class, isolated from the broad life of the people, it is devitalized. It may present polished conceits, but it must lack the throbbing life that pulsates in all great master- pieces. When art of any kind does not embody the life and answer the need of the mass of the people 220 THE NEW SOCIAL IDEAL it is emasculated. Life is inevitably barren without a deep and wide social contact of different classes. At the same time there must be fearless and con- secrated leadership. It is said that democracy tends toward a dead level of the average ; and there is some justice in the accusation. There are two opposing principles which it seems difficult to reconcile. It is said, one must be in line with common humanity to achieve true greatness ; and again, that one must fearlessly follow one's own independent convictions unmoved by the caprices of the mob, and if one stoop to flatter it one is lost. These principles seem to be in hopeless opposition ; but the contradiction is resolved in a higher unity. What is the mob ? It surges through the streets from the chill dawn until the midnight ; ever chang- ing, yet the same. Grey with toil, gaudy with artificial adornments, black with lust and murder, it surges on, choking the streets and alleys, but with renewed pulsations of its vast heart sweeping them clear again. Many-headed, yet with one masterful heart ; stretching out its innumerable members in an inextricable maze of seemingly dis- torted actions, yet drawing them all into one unity of rest ; a chameleon monster with as many hues and aspects as the day and night, yet with one voice that mingles them together in one vast, strident, menacing, sombre roar — the Mob ! THE NEW SOCIAL IDEAL 221 Yet this Mob is Humanity. Each member of it is Man, potentially all that the rest have expressed. With earnest striving, with tears of pity and ring- ing laughter of childish joy, with a miracle of love and an eternal struggle after ideals that lift steadily toward the image of God, — the Mob is Humanity! It can be stirred to blind passion, or wakened to love ; degraded to madness, or transfigured to heroism. From it are made murderers and martyrs, slaves and saviors : the Moh is Humanity ! The difference lies in the line of appeal. When Shakespeare appealed to the London mob he trans- figured it into humanity ; when the modern sensa- tional newspaper appeals to humanity it degrades humanity into the mob. Men will respond to what is universally human, or yield to selfish passion. One can gain power with the mass by flattering its blind prejudice or by appealing to what is funda- mental in the common heart. "One touch of nature makes the whole world kin," whether it be the nature of the brute or of the spirit. Thus the social unity that is necessary is one consistent with independent courage and fearless devotion to truth. There must be no catering to the whims and caprices of the mob, but an appeal to that humanity which is implicit in each indi- vidual. Indeed, one of the two principles which seemed so opposed is impossible without the other. 222 THE NEW SOCIAL IDEAL There can be no true heroism, no independent greatness which does not spring from the heart of common humanity ; and there can be no true social union which does not depend upon the highest individuality, the most independent consecration to truth. The absence of the one quality is the measure of the decay of the other. Instead of true social union, and fearless and consecrated personality and leadership, we have too often the selfish and whimsical mob, and the flattering demagogue, the lawless and irresponsible use of power in the news- paper. Thus the evolution of social solidarity is the necessary complement of the development of per- sonal life. There is no true good for one that is not good for all. If I share my loaf of bread with my neighbor I have half a loaf left, but the love that prompted the division grows by the process. Every intellectual advance attained by one man is an added intellectual power to all others. The interests of the spiritual world are common, for life is possible to one only through the integration of his life with all. Intellectual realization of one's self consists in the widening of the relation of the individual to the universe. Emotional realization of life means the unity of each with all in love, through the medium of a union with other individuals. THE NEW SOCIAL IDEAL 223 Volitional realization of one's self lies in action that expresses character, and is helpful to all. Giordano Bruno understood it when he said : "Intelligence therefore is perfected, not in one, in another, or in many, but in all." And Goethe, the apostle of self-culture, knew that man is man only in union with humanity, for he could say sub- limely : "If now, during our own lifetime, we see that performed by others, to which we ourselves felt an earlier call, but which we had been obliged to give up, with much besides : then the beautiful feeling enters the mind, that only mankind together is the true man, and that the individual can be joy- ous and happy only when he has the courage to feel himself in the whole." Individual human beings are like members of a vast orchestra engaged in the creation of the sub- lime music of humanity. Each must express his own ideal through the instrument he has chosen. But unless the tones he produces are in unison with the rest, they are not music but discordant sounds : in harmony with the creative effort of all, they are indispensable elements in the symphony of life. X. THE RELIGION OF HUMANITY IF it be the type of life which we seek, and our social attitude as individuals, that are behind the difficulties upon the surface of our civiliza- tion, it is evident that our problem is fundamen- tally ethical and religious, widely as that fact is ignored. The need is for a great religious awaken- ing, comparable to that transformation of the world which Christianity accomplished in the decaying Greco-Roman epoch. Yet if the need is funda- mentally like that of the ancient world, the condi- tions to be met are widely different. Too much is often made of the similarities between that epoch and our own, for many of them are rather superficial than indicative of the essential character of life. Ancient institutions were ethnic in character, — based, each of them, upon a clearly developed race type. In the decline of the Greco- Roman world the virility of this basis was largely exhausted. Modern civilization rests back upon the most amazing union of different races which the world has seen ; and in our own land is repeated this heterogeneous intermingling of peoples, the most of which are still in their virile youth. The declining ancient world was filled with the despair of old age ; while the pessimism that prevails among ourselves is rather the picturesque pessimism 228 THE RELIGION OF HUMANITY of youth which finds sentimental satisfaction in its own melancholy. Our world is full of youth, energy and strength ; while the declining ancient world was filled with voluntary idleness, indul- gence and despair. At the same time it cannot be denied that with us, as with the decaying Roman empire, the old faith and inspiration of life has lost, not only its authority, but something of its vital hold upon us. As a result we see the selfishness, the opposition to social aims and human welfare, the industrial disturbances and social class isolation which fur- nish the surface parallels between our world and decaying Rome. The striking similarities, and still greater and deeper differences between the ancient world and our own, furnish the clue to the type of force needed in the regeneration of our life. The new birth is hardly to be expected from any mere rehabilitation of past authority and tradition. There is as little reason to expect the permanent answer to all needs of life in a particular religious creed or institution as in a specific political move- ment. The danger of obscuring new issues by reit- erating old battle cries is as great in the one sphere as in the other. The mere statement again of teachings which were born of the needs of a very different world from ours, and which answered THE RELIGION OF HUMANITY 229 its problems, while instructive and helpful, can hardly be regarded as adequate to our issues. If new truths are often merely a restatement of old truths in forms to meet the needs of a new world, it is important to recognize that the new form is what gives the old truth its vitality and useful- ness. Any gospel adequate to meet the issues of a new age must be born to meet those issues ; and the very characteristics which fitted primitive Christianity to answer supremely the needs of the old and dying Greco-Roman world, unfit the same form of teaching to meet, alone and without re- statement, the conditions of our young and different civilization. The doctrine of escape out of the failure of this world into the compensation of another, while in opposition to the gospel of culture and action which had ruled in the best period of ancient civili- zation, fitted Christianity singularly to meet the needs of the decaying Greco-Roman world. Spreading among the poor and oppressed with the precious benison of peace and consolation, it won its way steadily toward the surface with the decline of the ideals which had ruled in ancient life. But no particular type of teaching can be equally adapted to all epochs. If it were, it would be so generic and indefinite as to be of little value. Its 230 THE RELIGION OP HTTMANITT strength lies, not in certain vague universalities, but in the concrete gospel that springs in imme- diate answer to the needs of its specific audience. Thus the very qualities which give it timely strength determine its limitations ; and the need of a continual restatement of the eternal truths is evident. Many religious organizations of the present time, by their unceasing insistance upon authority and tradition have their faces turned toward the past, and must depend upon the reit- eration of unimportant generalities, or waste their energies in a useless effort to rehabilitate a partic- ular phase of historical tradition ; while the first condition of an adequate facing of the new issues consists in a recognition of the untried character of the problems with which we must deal. The over-ritualistic tendencies of great estab- lished churches are evident throughout the world. When men reach a certain state of wealth and ease they wish their religion performed for them vicariously as a kind of propitiation of the universe. Such so-called religion is powerless to meet, as it is to understand, the crisis of to-day. Indeed it is a powerful obstacle to that deeper human union which is the great need of our time. Not in great churchly establishments, not in the formal wor- ship detached from daily life, not in inherited creeds and formulae lies the ethical inspiration for THE RELIGION OF HUMANITY 231 to-morrow. The new gospel must be one of posi- tive culture and progress. The need is not merely to have faith in a possible future world, but to have our eyes unsealed to the infinite meaning of the world in which we live ; to replace the doctrine of asceticism and unreasoning self-sacrifice with a gospel of nobler self-realization in harmony with all others, of greater industrial justice and higher social unity. The new human brotherhood must be not only in the spiritual life, but in all the actions and interests of the daily world. In those splendid ideals, old as the inspirations of the heart, and new as the dew upon to-day's grass, lies the answer for to-day and the hope for tomorrow. The larger area of the history of religion is full of pathos. It has required a long time for man to take the creations of his own spirit back into the heart that gave them birth. How much of primi- tive life seems to have been filled with a shivering terror of the vague unknown. Fear is always con- nected with the unknown ; and a large degree of culture is necessary to lift man beyond it. There is a point in the development of the individual where one passes the limits within which fear is possible. It is when one has come to face steadily the blackest depths, so that there is no longer a worst that is unknown. Something comparable to this comes in the culture of the race. Primitive 232 THE RELIGION OF HUMANITY man was overpowered by creations of liis own im- agination. The unknown powers behind the activ- ities of nature, the menacing spirits of the dead, the vast man-like beings that had to be propitiated — all filled him with terror. He offered sacrifices to them, builded enormous statues to gratify them, and lived under the perpetual fear of their myster- ious power. There was less of this in the sunny Greek world. There men were content with the present, the gods were humanized into familiar companions, but little raised above the level of the earthly world. The intense occupation with pleasure and action made Hades — the unseen world — seem so unreal that it gave but a vague shudder as one occasionally thought of it. In the centuries of mediaeval Christianity arose again the pre-occupation with the invisible world. And although upon a plane far above that of prim- itive culture, and involving human love and ten- derness, religion still rested upon life like a vast gloom that made the figures and actions of the world seem phantoms moving in a white mist, the real world lying beyond. Over the doors of the great churches was carved hell or a terrible Judg- ment day. From every corner lowered hideous gargoyles and devils — grim figures to frighten men into paradise. The Divine seemed so vast and THE RELIGION OF HUMANITY 233 overpowering that one after another mediating powers were developed to propitiate the unknown. Between God and man was Christ ; but he became the terror-inspiring judge of the world, and Mary, the tender human mother of God, was prayed to intervene. In her character as queen of heaven she too became awe-inspiring, and her mediation must be obtained by the more human saints. And so the process went on, man trembling in terror be- fore the conceptions of his own spirit, invested with power and lifted to the skies. The great cathedrals of the middle ages express no more the aspirations of the spirit than they do the slavery and fear of the multitudes who could construct such temples while they lived in hovels of sordid misery. But the religion of fear is passing. Man is com- ing to realize that the heights and depths of the universe are within his own soul. There is no attribute which he has seen in God, and no black- ness of hell, which is not a possibility of his own spirit : " I sent ray Soul through the Invisible, Some letter of that After-life to spell ; And by and by my Soul return'd to me. And answer'd ' I myself am Heav'n and Heir : Heav'n but the Vision of fulflU'd Desire, And Hell the Shadow from a Soul on fire Cast on the Darkness into which Ourselves, So late emcrg'd fronj, shall so soon expire." 234 THE RELIGION OF HUMANITY Those who have faced the unknown tremble no more. In so far as man has mastered his own imaginings, in so far as he has taken up into him- self the creations of his spirit, he has recognized the absolute significance of his own life, he has humanized religion, and has realized that the o'er- brooding Power, in whom he "lives and moves and has his being," is one with the aspirations and love of his heart. THE PASSING OF ZEUS. The Egyptian chiselled out dumb, granite gods, Vague monsters, brute and human, whose vast size O'er-powered their maker, man, and cast him down In abject terror at their moveless feet. The Greek with free and cheerful hymn of praise Cai-ved human gods, wise, sweet and beautiful, The breathing images of earthly thought. Made with the calm restraint of perfect art, "Which knows that greatness is not in unformed. Colossal shapes, but in the clear portrayal Of dreams that touch man's heart with heavenly fire. Man carves no longer gods of speechless stone— The lesson of the ages has been learned : Veiled Isis, mighty Memnon, Horus, and Those fair Greek gods, eternal in their youth — Great Zeus, wise virgin Pallas, Aphrodite, Apollo golden-haired— these dwell unseen Within the temple of the human heart, — The temple of the ages, vast, mysterious. The shrine of all the gods to whom the prayers Of men in epochs numberless have risen. THE RELIGION OF HUMANITY 235 Man stands to-day serene and fearless, tree, No longer dominated by the forms That body forth his own imaginings, Knowing the meaning and the destiny Of all the ages lies within his souL Thns religion tends to become more intimatelv personal with every step of progress. And tliis process is paralleled by another : as the progressive evolution of the individual is accompanied by in- creasing social integration, so the development of religion rende""8 it Bt once more intimately personal and more broadly human. These two principles are present everywhere in the human world, and B^e increasingly resolved into a higher unity. That which is most intimately personal is most uni- versally human ; and the religion which consists in the inner faith and attitude of the individual is always that which unites one with all in pursuit of the high aims of life. A great man has said : "Of all the truths of the faith it is only the communion of the saints that is left. ' ' The one permanent basis of the spiritual life is that brotherhood of souls, each striving earnestly toward the largest life, and each in loving union with all. The religion of humanity is the religion of the individual soul. Life itself is becoming a religion to-day. We are learning that nothing is more sacred than a human being ; and that tlie most tragic, pathetic 236 THE RELIGION OF HUMANITY or exalted motives are those drawn from the universal, yet intimately personal phases of daily experience. Wordsworth felt the dim presence of the new inspiration, and stammered it haltingly in the most exquisite of his unequal works. Carlyle lived under its brooding presence, but incapable of voicing its positive message except in fragments, could only storm against its enemies. Shelley was the singer of its subtlety, Emerson the prophet of its exalted spirituality, Goethe the expression of its masterful self-affirmation, Browning the seer of its exultant love and joy. In spite of the night of superstition and the weight of obsolete rituals, in spite of the vain effort to rehabilitate past creeds and reinstate a traditional authority, the religion of humanity takes wider possession of the human spirit. Above the folly of narrow selfishness and the blind struggle for materialistic ends it lifts us steadily toward the larger life of to-morrow. The time is ripe for a new prophet, who shall call the world back to the simple realities of human life. The awaited teacher should found no order and establish no sect. It is not the multiplication of institutions that is needed, but the consecration of individuals. He must have the reserve of wis- dom ; he must forego authority and disclaim unusual election. He must find the ideal by transfiguring the commonplace ; he must see and THE EELIGION OF HUMANITY 237 teach the divinity of common things. He should live in the world, and yet maintain a perfect conse- cration to an ideal of simplicity, spirituality and personal helpfulness. He should call men away from the senseless rush for luxury, fashion, dissi- pation ; and turn them to the things of the spirit — personal love, tliought, beauty, immediate helpful- ness. It is not a new gospel that is needed, but the gospel anew. The shining of every star in the vast of heaven is brooded over with mystery. The growing of every blade of grass is instinct with miracle. The eternal sanctities are not in veiled shrines or hoarded relics, but in consecrated action, in the love of women and the hearts of children. We grope in the dark for Him, and "He is not far from every one of us." The religions of the ages are but the prophecy of the new humanity ; the burden of all the promises is the fresh revelation of life. The message of all the religions is at heart the same : the infinite and eternal meaning of human life. It rings in the noble hymns of the Aryas ; Zoroaster dreamed it in history's remote dawn. Pitying Buddha preached it to the despondent orient ; Christ uttered it upon the mountain and by the sea of Galilee ; Paul carried it to Greece and Rome. It was the meditation of Mohammed 238 THE RELIGION OF HUMANITY in the wilderness, the cry that Savonarola reiterated to the amazed Florentines. It brooded in the winged thought of Plato, and sang in the exultant Paradiso of Dante : the infinite significance of each human soul. Never has life been so worth the living as it is to-day. Its opportunities and its responsibilities are alike vaster than hitherto. A brave soul wel- comes one with the other. We should meet life with something of the splendid laughter that sounds in the voices of Wagner's Siegfrieds and Brynhilds. It is more constant, more daily conse- cration that we must have. The world draws us away, immediate necessities paralyze our vision and destroy our perspective : we must retire into the soul, and listen to the quiet voice that forever speaks the eternal lessons. To come back to the great realities of life, and live in their constant presence — this is genius. One rises in the dark before the morning, and goes down to the shore. One looks out upon the water with that grey chill upon the heart which makes the beginning of the day the most homeless hour of all. But in an instant the grey is warmed with a faint tinge of red. The rays of light, like the eternally fresh fingers of Aurora, stretch them- selves over the eastern sky. Behind, the mountain peak glows with rosy light, inconceivably beautiful. THE RELIGION OF HUMANITY 239 Steadily, moment by moment, li^ht deepens into light ; the rosy colors blend into gold ; and soon day in all its splendid fulness shines masterfully upon us. To some of us our epoch seems the dark stagna- tion of the night. But the very chill of the shadow is the prophecy of the day ; and to those who are awake the rosy light is unmistakable ; their work has begun, for a new day has dawned. ]V0 UC SOUTHERN REGIONAL LIBRARY FACILITY A A 000 260 070 8