THE LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LOS ANGELES ORGANIC TO HUMAN: PSYCHOLOGICAL AND SOCIOLOGICAL MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED LONDON BOMBAY . CALCUTTA MELBOURNE THE MACMILLAN COMPANY NEW YORK BOSTON CHICAGO DALLAS SAN FRANCISCO THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, LTD. TORONTO ORGANIC TO HUMAN PSYCHOLOGICAL AND SOCIOLOGICAL BY HENRY MAUDSLEY, M.D. MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED ST. MARTIN'S STREET, LONDON 1916 3 \\S* 01011 COPYRIGHT CONTENTS PART I ORGANIC TO HUMAN: PSYCHOLOGICAL AND SOCIOLOGICAL CHAP. PAGE I. MENTAL ORGANIZATION ...... 3 II. REPRODUCTIVE CONSIDERATIONS . . . .21 III. CONSCIOUSNESS AND CONTINUITY .... 39 IV. REASON, FEELING AND WILL 66 V. MENTAL CAPITALIZATION ..... 84 VI. SCIENCE AND SOCIAL ADVANCE .... 106 VII. CONDITIONS OF CIVILIZATION . . . . .130 VIII. FUNDAMENTAL INSTINCTS AND SOCIAL ATONEMENT . 149 IX. THE MICROBE AND MAN . . . . . .167 PART II ORGANIC TO HUMAN : PSYCHOLOGICAL AND SOCIAL I. THE CURRENT OF SOCIAL FEELING . . . .189 II. THE SOCIAL TRANSFORMATION OF HUMAN NATURE . 211 III. SOCIAL TRANSFORMATION (continued) . . . 233 IV. EDUCATION AND SOCIALIZATION . . . .256 vi MENTAL ORGANIZATION CHAP. PAGE V. PRACTICAL MORALITY OF A NATION . . .276 VI. PERFECTIBILITY AND PRACTICABILITY . . . 293 VII. NATURAL COMMUNION 316 VIII. MORALIZATION OF THE REPRODUCTIVE INSTINCT . 342 IX. MIND AND THE UNIVERSE ..... 364 PREFACE IN his Essay on Physiognomy Montaigne, dilating on the unfitness of old age for the business of writing or for any other business, says : " He who commits his decrepit age to the press is a fool if he thinks to squeeze out anything thence that does not represent him deformed with dotage and stupidity. Our understandings grow costive and thick as they grow old." As this book was written to employ the writer in work which might occupy the time and ease the burden of the dreary decline from three to fourscore years it necessarily incurs Montaigne's censure ; for it represents the writer's activity during a period when, being decrepit, he had better have been inactive or only privately active. But is not Montaigne's dictum perhaps too absolute ? Disillusioned old age, albeit failing energy unfits it for prompt decision and vigorous execution, has a set-off of some value in its store of experience, in its aloofness from affairs, in a cool judgment of them unbiassed by personal interest. Having experimentally proved and therefore vitally felt the vanity of vanities of mortal things (which full life repeats by rote but never really wishes or wills to feel), it may, as spectator of and no longer actor in them, judge sometimes more justly than younger life eagerly interested in its active doings and deeply impressed with their and its importance. How can understanding move freely and clearly amongst desires, cares, ambitions, rivalries, fears and hopes without being affected unduly or infected by them ? As indeed it often sees and owns viii MENTAL ORGANIZATION when it looks back calmly after it has endured their commotions and suffered its inevitable disillusionments. Granting this truth, it may be said at the same time that old age is in worse case ; for as it cannot participate in the active movement of things its judgment of their evolutional value must necessarily reflect its measure of decrepitude. Bereft of proper vital feeling, its detached intellect cannot help being lamed and hurt by the morbid feeling of its own decline, however loth it is to think it. But why call the feeling morbid in a bad sense, when it is just as natural to life to die as to live, the morbid as natural as the growing process ? Which then is the juster view, not of life (for that will always value itself accord- ing to its existing state) but of the human life-drama seen truly as a whole in the general and the particular throughout its transition from the imbecility of infancy to the inevitable decadence of old age ? That of waxing life joying in its energy, aspirations and achievements, or that of waning individual life looking back with impartial eye on its vanished illusions and once prized performances, lost in amazement perhaps that it ever took itself and them so seriously ? In spite of the exultant energy of vigorous life a senile disvaluation of life on earth can always summon in justification of its pessimistic view of the human drama the support of religion, which has implicitly held or explicitly said that without immortal life mortal life would be of no value, a tale " full of sound and fury signifying nothing." It is right to add that the book was ready for the press some time before the outbreak of the war of 1914 when exultant self-admiration was at its height, an event which cannot fail to produce changes in the old order of things and greatly modify present estimates of values. A sentence here and there only has been added or altered. PART I ORGANIC TO HUMAN : PSYCHOLOGICAL AND SOCIOLOGICAL CHAPTER I MENTAL ORGANIZATION Increase of population and trade, Human and Providential design. Imperfect organisms. Design a structural! zed experience. Structural- ized ratio or reason. Mind and acquired cerebral organization. Analogy between idea and movement. Motor reactions essential constituents of mind. Bodily unity and personal identity. Action and reaction between organism and environment. Dissociation of mental tracts. Anthropomorphism and mystical anthroposentiencism. Delirious rapture and horror. The unity of disunities. Quasi- convulsive mental rapture. Design and destructive calamities. The dynamic flux of nature. Human self-estimate and self -adulation. Ascent from inanimate to animate, from animal to mental life. THE command laid upon mankind to increase and multiply has been faithfully obeyed. In parts of the earth the multiplication has sometimes gone beyond the means of subsistence, and the unoccupied places suitable for human habitation become scarcer, although there are yet vast areas of undeveloped land in the South American Continent Nevertheless the race continues to multiply without regard to the possible risk that it may some day outgrow its means of subsistence ; increase of population and trade being the course which it is thought right to pursue in order to promote the health, wealth and prosperity of the nation in particular and of the race in general. The more babies that are born and reared in a country, the more bargains that are made in it, the more wants and their gratifications are multiplied, the sounder is held to be its strength and the brighter its outlook, although it is not unimaginable that fewer children, fewer wants, fewer bargains might sometimes 3 4 MENTAL ORGANIZATION PT. i produce more health, more virtue, more stability, more progress in the particular nation. That, however, is an unbecoming suspicion to harbour, for it is unworthy the trust which it behoves a right-thinking mind to put in the scheme of the universe and its ordained workings for human ends. Impotent to comprehend its mystery, foolish to expect it, fatuous to bewail his inability to get behind the veil which would be to get absolutely out of his relative self man is yet persuaded that the universe was created and works for him and his perfect- ing, and in that happy faith counts an unlimited pro- creation in gratification of natural lust his proper and pleasant duty. Imbued with the lofty sense of his supreme worth and immortal destiny, he doubts not that the small fraction of the universe on which he plays his predomi- nant part is typical of the whole and his intelligence a true sample of one Supreme intelligence ; for, being one himself, how can he choose but think ONE intelligence, if he thinks it at all ? Wondrous strange it would be if he, thinking necessarily in terms of an individual self, had not made the inference and believed it sound. Not that he profanely imagines his mind to be the measure of the universe, although necessarily the measure of the particular universe which each mind creates for itself or, more properly speaking, is created for and by it out of the interaction between its organism and the outer world ; all that he ventures to assert is that his mind is derived from, of the same nature with, a section of the universal mind. Because he designedly constructs a watch, an engine, a battleship and other ingenious mechanisms by a series of patient and toilsome adaptations of means to ends, he is sure that the universe was constructed after the comprehensive design of an universal mind content to work like him by mechanical processes of patient adaptation ; only in that large case without the neces- sary forethought and deliberate contrivance which his progressive adaptations cost him. Thus to fashion an CH. i MENTAL ORGANIZATION 5 universal designing mind after the pattern of his mind, yet in the same breath to excise the forethought and deliberate toils, experiments and adaptations by which this has got itself painfully constructed, is to go far to spoil and invalidate the inference. Is it not withal presumptuous, if not preposterous, to transform his labouring foresight into a Divine labour of foreseeing and thus to degrade Omniscience into Providence ? Evidently it is more easy and agreeable to put the man into God than the God into man. Besides, it is not easily thinkable that a Supreme omniscient and omnipotent mind should ever be so cramped and lamed in its sectional human and animal embodiments as to lose all but the merest fraction of its power and intelligence there, and to go about to make a succession of tentative and many times abortive travails to attain an often imperfect success. For many organisms, judged by human understanding of means and ends, fall short of ideal perfection when they are not, as they sometimes are, grotesque structures clumsily fitted for their laboured functions. If adaptation to the environ- ment be the law of organic development, they must have had odd environments or have been forced to adapt themselves oddly to them. In their ungainly, contorted or otherwise ungraceful bodies the organic flux, like a much-winding river, plainly went round about along the line of least resistance when it was hindered from going directly forwards, making that natural election in the absence of a more propitious natural selection. Even the human eye, notwithstanding the long process of its elaborate formation, is said not to be the perfect organ of sight it might have been, and the human body is notably subject to incommodities which detract from its excellence as a perfect machine. Be that as it may, the human mind could no more in the first instance have designed the construction of a watch or an engine by any premeditated contrivance than it could have constructed an universe. It was MENTAL ORGANIZATION PT. I obliged first itself to undergo a gradual construction, evoking and organizing in the process the requisite conscious adaptations of a mental fabric, which was then the consolidate embodiment of many tentative and partial designs ; after which, by virtue of the accomplished effect, the perfected design built in fit plexus of mental structure by the inductions of experience, it was able deductively to apply this to foresee and produce similar effects and thus properly to test and verify its value. By adaptive working experience and its consequent physical structuralization in the brain the literal in- struction or in-formation, that is, of cerebral plexuses of structure and function were the incorporation of memories and the required skill gained ; without such fitly organized plexuses the mental function which they embody and discharge never was, nor is, nor probably ever shall be performed on earth. When these are erased in the individual brain its registered memories of the past are effaced and consciousness with its contents disappears : in all its various kinds and degrees, as sensation, taste, touch, emotion, will, consciousness is the dependent phenomenon or so-called epiphenomenon which then vanishes into nothingness or the void. In dreams and in delirium it obviously does not precede or direct or effect the mental creation ; it then dances a servile attendance on the brain's vivid and fantastic fictions. A truth which, rightly apprehended, might serve to clarify thought is that ideas, like purposive movements, must always be learnt gradually by steps of patient performance. Then the ratio which is rational or rightly proportioned adaptation in structure is dis- charged consciously in function as reason. Without such previously constructed ratio or reason incorporate in structure through the adaptive interactions of the individual organism and its medium no idea could be formed and performed, and there could be no conscious reason. To make reason the full-blown attribute or faculty of a separate mental entity is to overlook the CH. i MENTAL ORGANIZATION 7 entire process of its gradual formation and growing function in every mental organization. In the finely complex and condensed structure of a fly's small body is concentrated more exquisitely implicit reason than conscious thought is likely for a long time, if ever, to find out and equally structuralize. Whence comes its structuralized reason or so-called instinct if not from fitly proportioned or rational adaptations of experience through bygone measureless time ? In the diversities of the pro- creative act which no animal species learnt from another, nor the human species from any other, there is instinct a fund of latent intelligence which, had the performance to commence now for the first time, it would need much conscious contrivance to accomplish. Intelligent adapta- tion in a presumably intelligently constructed universe is manifestly not confined to its human embodiments and conscious manifestations ; it is performed silently and constantly throughout animate nature without the exulta- tion which a self-conscious and self-worshipping being can never extol enough when he functions more or less intelligently. In no case then is the conception of an idea done by a separate entity in the body which is called the mind any more than a purposive movement actuated by an imagined spirit of motion, or the function of any bodily organ by its special animal spirit, as was once supposed. And not quite absurdly, since the notion of its special animal spirit was an obscure but just recognition of the part's quasi-intelligent concert and co-operation in the complex unison which the whole organism is or ought to be. Be that as it may, the idea is not performed by a separate mind ; it is mind, not only in but of it, and performed well or ill by the individual self who is an essential and indivisible unity, discharging mental as he does motor function directly in fact by the fitly con- structed nervous organization in whose complex fabric and function every organ and function of the whole body is represented. Into the composition of every idea, of 8 MENTAL ORGANIZATION FT. i every mood, of every act, of every reflection, every organ and every gland of the body has entered essentially ; the minutely different structures and physico-chemical changes and exchanges of the parts in different persons producing different temperaments, and the signally special organs of male and female bodies different mental qualities sanely requiring their special directions of development and function. To deride the notion of mechanism as anywise applicable to life and life in mind is the natural error of him who, ignorant of the exquisitely subtile physical and chemical processes at work in the simplest vital substance, thinks grossly only of inert matter and its mechanism as exemplified in the structure of a wheelbarrow or a steam-engine. When the mind is said, then, to pursue trains or tracts of thought, what is really implied is that particular tracts of a mental organization are in action and that conscious mental function is concomitant or sequent ; not otherwise than as in the riot of delirium when there is, literally speaking, dis-tracted function, which is function off the normal tracts. Just indeed as the proper nervous plexus actuates the definite movements of motor apprehension in the purposive grasp of an object, the specific mental motion in the higher layers of brain preceding the specific muscular action, so its proper nervous plexus in the highest layers actuates the definite mental apprehension ; both functions in the dejection of disease and the decline of old age becoming weaker and more sluggish in performance ; for senile decay, as it passes wearily to second childhood, lingers, staggers and stumbles in mental as in motor apprehension until both end fitly at last. It might be a gain to mental science if those who write vaguely of mind in the abstract were to descend from generalities to a clear and distinct idea of a concrete mental organization and, having done so, always to substitute in thinking the positive definition for the word. Thus condescending to the concrete, they might impart life and substance to expatiations which are apt to CH. i MENTAL ORGANIZATION 9 become pale, barren and lifeless abstractions ; for they could hardly then fail to realize that mind imports life in mind and conduct, to perceive too that the study of it and its adaptive relations apart from organic life is bereft of positive basis. Formal logic and ingenious logic-chopping, it is true, might suffer, for assuredly life is not nor probably ever will be logic, nor will the logic of thought ever measure the logic of life. Helpful too in the matter it might be were more thought given to the close analogy between idea and movement. In grasping a small object where a nice adaptation of finger and thumb suffices and is graceful, the ungainly use of the whole hand, or perhaps at first of the whole arm and shoulder, is ugly, for it is disproportionate, unapt, therefore essentially irrational. In like manner, a nicely adapted act of the trained right hand becomes irrationa\ when attempted by the untrained left hand, being then quite disproportionate, uncertain and ungraceful. Now an exactly similar want of relation and ratio is oft notable in mental apprehension. An untaught mind is as clumsy and ungainly in grasping and performing an idea as an untaught hand in the nice grasp and use of a small instrument. For the idea is a definite grasp or appre- hension on the higher mental plane of the supreme cerebral tracts of motor intuition, and never could be thus grasped save by the co-operation of the more abstract or, so to speak, sublimated sensory and motor factors of the lower nervous tracts represented in them. It is in fact a mental synthesis on its higher plane, which all reflection is in its rising scale of mental development. As right vision is an exact apprehension of the image of an object impressed on the retina, so the clear and distinct idea is the exact apprehension of the precedent sensori-motor. adaptations of the image, so to speak. That all positive intelligence is sense-evolved, though true, is not then the whole truth : motor reactions contribute as essentially as sensory impressions to the construction of a mental organization and fitly respond io MENTAL ORGANIZATION PT . i to them in the complex compositions of ideas and judgments. The exquisitely subtile reactions acquired are then potentially implicit in the supreme cerebral area, ready to be discharged explicitly on the right occasion by its fit reflex action in outward function, which is their appropriate and useful end. When the expert batsman in a game of cricket watches with concentrated attention the flight, pace and pitch of the ball which the bowler sends him in their respective combat of wits, and tensely combines and uses all the proper muscles of his body to perform the right stroke to play it, the matter is not one of apparently simple perception, but of a joint perceptive and motor intuition in the higher synthetic tracts of mental organization ; the right composite judgment for each stroke having been formed gradually by frequent practice in correcting the wrong and applying the right muscular action. He does not then merely see the ball and make a random stroke, as the novice does ; he minds what he sees and intuitively or, as it were, instinctively judges and performs the proper skilled act, which he could not do if he had not organized the proper mental plexuses by diligent practice. When, again, a person plays a tune with exquisite skill on the violin he produces the fine notes of the melody by the most delicate sensibilities and fit motions of the finely trained muscles of his fingers ; they in their intricate combinations and fit successions being the acquired constituents of his intuitive judgment. Were the exquisitely delicate motions as visible as they are made audible they might indeed give as much pleasing harmony to the eye as the sounds into which they are transmuted do to the ear. The old saying, Nihil in intellects quod non prius in sensu, might indeed be fitly supplemented, not by the witty nisi ipse intellectus of Leibnitz but by the et in motu. That the whole body enters into the constitution of every mood, thought and feeling is nowise the extrava- gant statement which it looks on the face of it. Man is essentially a unity, not the disunity which the union of CH. i MENTAL ORGANIZATION n two separate unities, mix and join or fuse them as he may, would really be : his self-conscious yet ever-changing personality the emergent conscious quintessence of the registered experiences of the underlying bodily self; whence his deep basic assurance of a personal identity beneath its changing phases. The introspective Ego, be it ever so acute, expert and free, is tied down by material bonds ; for without memory there would be no mind and without body no memory. To the upholder of an immaterial mental entity nowise affected in its essential nature by changing bodily conditions, and therefore free to see and judge independently, it seems absurd to say that the consciousness of personal identity can proceed from a constantly changing material body every particle of which has been renewed over and over again in the natural course of its life ; absolutely necessary therefore to assume a purely mental identity. But seeing that every new particle of every organ was an exact repetition in form, structure, composition and place of that which it replaced in the same ambient medium in fact a self- reproduction and incorporate memory of it and its relations the wonder would be if the whole body in which every part is represented, united and unified, had no memory of itself and no sense of personal identity. The truth is that the subtile physico-chemical sympathies and synergies of motions and rhythms are constantly at work in the bodily unison beneath consciousness ; it is not it which excites them but they which excite it when consciousness supervenes. To receive from without through sense and to react by fit movement is the structural basis of mental life ; it is to grow in continuity and unity with nature by mutual union and interaction. Plants are fixed in the soil, being able to obtain their nourishment directly from it ; they therefore lack the organized experience of either in- stinctive or voluntary movements, although the particular plant in the direction of its growth registers and remembers its experience of the outer impressions to which it has been 12 MENTAL ORGANIZATION PT . i constantly subjected. Animals on the other hand, with few exceptions, being obliged to move to capture their food, must needs vary their movements in adaptive response to multiplicity and variety of impressions, whence in them the various ensuing sensori-motor structures which embody their organized experiences and become the basis of such mental syntheses as on higher cerebral levels they proportionately exhibit. If animals did not need to move in order to feed they would be as mindless as plants or those humble creatures which live a stationary life. The progressive mental organization of man con- sequent to the number, variety and refinements of the actions and reactions between his organism and its environment in the case of speech, for example, so wondrously fine, many and various, where out of twenty- four letters of the alphabet such a multitude of words in different languages are formed marks the persistent energy of the vital plasm in him ; its impulse inciting his aspiration and endeavour to apprehend and comprehend, which is to grasp and assimilate ever more and more of the ultimately inapprehensible and incomprehensible. Being an organized federation of many nervous plexuses or so-called complexes which may act separately and, movement-like, often act automatically in mental function, as well as through the complex intramental associations which issue in concepts, judgments and rational actions, mind, like body, acts usually in parts, seldom, if ever, as a vital whole. 1 Notably do special tracts of it sometimes reach such a height of exaggerated and almost exclusive activity as to absorb or inhibit other mental function, as happens in deep absence of 1 The largest part of mind is usually quiescent in its habitual functioning and a large part of its mentality always undeveloped. Consider how easily a person who has been taught and trained to speak three or four languages can speak them without suffering any apparent deduction from his proper mentality, which may after all be only ordinary ; and, again, how readily one who has learnt long passages of poetry by heart as a child can, once they are well started, repeat them by rote in old age without the least thought or effort. How many, then, the unused mental tracts in most minds on which no register of function is ever made, and how few the tracts which CH. i MENTAL ORGANIZATION 13 mind when, in fact, a great part of mind is practically absent ; in the ecstasy or .transport of horror or panic, the intensely strained part of it being then functionally rapt out of it ; in the fascinated bird which is fabled perhaps to drop paralyzed into the cat's or serpent's mouth, and in the terror-stricken rabbit which crouches in motionless and probably insensible collapse until the pursuing stoat seizes it ; in the hypnotized, person who is servile to the silliest suggestions ; in the distraction of passionate fury when reason is in complete abeyance ; all which extremes are but extraordinary and abnormal instances of ordinary and normal mental processes. A person truly eminent in one department of knowledge to which he has applied his mind diligently and system- atically (mathematicians especially) is notably sometimes extremely credulous almost as it were hypnotized in relation to matters of which he has not been wont to think, or not taught himself to think seriously. That is the reason too why in a more chronic way persons who have been educated in the practice and have sedulously culti- vated the habit of dissociating a special compartment of mind are able to keep it reason-tight, as a reserved and sacredly tabooed department in which they can honestly believe by faith that which is incredible to reason that is, to a whole mind rationally constructed and fully exercised ; the reason too why the primitive savage amazes the missionary, stone-blind to his own unreason, by his utter impermeability to the plainest evidence which flatly contradicts the hereditary totemic beliefs and customs of his mental structure. Until psychology comes down from its misty heights and abstractions to the positive study of biology, and lays its foundations solidly in a science of life not separated by any restrictive or ever function as they might do in them ! It is not so much more mind that is wanted in the majority of mankind, who for the most part do not reason, not having the least notion that reason, like speech, needs to be learnt, as more use of the uncultivated mental tracts which are left derelict. However much is put into a mind, there is commonly room for more when the contents are rightly packed. 14 MENTAL ORGANIZATION n . i obstructive barriers from other sciences, it cannot do what it may hope to do when it adds to its introspective study of mental functions a positive study of their basic origin and growth, and thus aids the construction of a scientific psychogeuy and psychonomy. Such positive study of the genesis and development of mind in a process of organic evolution must tend not only to instruct more correct notions of its relative nature, but might serve usefully to lower its soaring flights of fancy beyond the reach of thought. Anthropomentally to transfer to universal mind as absolute cause and beginning of things, itself needing neither cause nor beginning, attributes of designing, fashioning, loving and hating, resenting and avenging, which are strictly relative and limited functions of mental organizations which begin and end, implies a sheer abolition of all the definite qualities of mind and conditions of its operation as known positively : it is abstractly to translate that which is the last product and apparent crown of evolution the formed product into a creative cause of itself and at the same time to deprive it of all by which it is known in reality. Thus to wipe the real mind clean out and then to bring it to abstract life in the absolute may be, after all, nothing else than the flattering apotheosis of human self-adoration which, rightly or wrongly, is well- nigh unlimited. Besides being illogical, is it not a sort of impiety to profess to know and speak of that which in the same breath is declared to be incomprehensible and ineffable in fact, to convert modest ignorance into positive and definite knowledge? No doubt eternal and infinite mind, if imagined humanly as primal reality which is absurd seeing that it is avowedly ultra-human must be interpreted in terms of human thought and fashioned into some sort of idealized personality divested of its limitations, so far as possible. Not now as the once grotesque image of a magnified man, for the Gods of men change from age to age more than men themselves, who, as Montaigne says, madly create Gods when they CH. i MENTAL ORGANIZATION 15 cannot create a flea, 1 but refined and volatilized into a luminous spiritual haze undefinable in thought, sensible only to fine spiritual ecstasy of feeling ; this liable then, unless wisely ruled, to become mystical and debilitating debauch of personal feeling. Not indeed, strictly speak- ing, anthropomorphism (for it has no form), but rather anthropospiritualism. 2 Its thrilling delight withal is in no case proof of value, as fondly assumed by the rapt subject, for no delight equals the occasional rapture of a pleasing delirium, as no imaginable hell equals the real hell of a horrible delirium. Was any sane person ever so gloriously happy as the fatuously jubilant general paralytic, or so wildly exultant as the acute maniac? Strange, yet true and not uninstructive in regard to the value of feeling, it is to think that the delight of madness and the horror of delirium should be more intense and vividly affecting than any delight or horror of sane life. Charles Lamb, after his recovery from a brief attack of acute mania, wrote to Coleridge : " While it lasted I had many hours of pure happiness. Dream not, Coleridge, of having tasted all the grandeur and wildness of fancy till you have gone mad." Eloquent writers, like Jeremy Taylor, have exhausted all the resources of imagination and language to depict in lurid colours the burning torments of hell and the terrors of the day of judgment, but their 1 " Man is certainly stark mad ; he cannot make a flea yet Gods by dozens." English translation (7th ed., 1759). 2 For purposes of worship a personalization of some kind is inevitable. How pray and praise otherwise ? Hence such expressions as " Our Father," "King of Kings," "Lord of Lords," "Almighty Wings," and the like symbols of an ultimate reality. What would become of the spiritual feeling and melody of some of the Psalms, and of the fervent curses of others of them, if they were not addressed to a personal Being? Many devotional hymns in common use, if understood literally, would grossly shock feeling by their crudities of expression and utter absence of real poetry, were it not for the hallowed associations of custom and place of worship, and for the moving melody of the familiar tunes by which is uttered in song what cannot be expressed in words. The deepest and inmost utterances of nature are in cries and songs of discharged feeling, not in definite articulations of words, which are specific motor adaptations of expression : the deep feelings of religion and love therefore exclamations of feeling inexpressible in words, ineffable. 16 MENTAL ORGANIZATION FT. i flaring pictures were in the end unfelt fantasies whose rhetoric pleased the preacher and did not seriously horrify his hearers, rather perhaps tickled their fancies ; not, as in torturing delirium, unspeakable horrors of feeling from which death is a blest release. Such nevertheless are the ineffable delights and horrors created by a distracted nervous organization felt in and by a freely hovering and independent mind whose essentially separate nature, as the dualist holds, owes nothing to the body which thus delights or dejects it by some mysterious interaction. The hallowed mystery of the unity of disunities is embraced and hugged as positively certifying the breach of evolutional continuity and the irruption of a special creation ; just as the un- discovered origin of life is still revered as a special crea- tion by those most assured of that which they are most ignorant of. Why such postulated gap in nature, seeing that in a divinely governed universe all things must be divine, body no less than mind, non-living than living matter? The human mind creates its beliefs, as it needs must in the onward motion of its life. Static rest in something for the time being it will have. It is natural to it therefore to create a special symbol or fiction for the occasion suiting its stage of thought, even though it quietly abandon it as unsuitable at the next stage of thought at which it arrives. To be out of date is then properly to be out of use. The truth is that ecstasy, though it exalt and delight personally, is not sound and wholesome mental function ; it denotes more or less distortion or deformity of mind, being a quasi -convulsive or delirious rapture of special tracts of thought and feeling inhibiting all life of relation ; with the thereupon flattering notion that spasm of thought, when dignified as intuition, and spasm of feeling, when spiritualized as faith, are mystically divine. Yet in no case is mental any more than bodily convulsion strength. A dose of opium or like acting drug will produce a like mental beatification in fitly sensitive brains, gloriously CH. i MENTAL ORGANIZATION 17 lengthening time into eternity, expanding space into infinity, melting individuality into universality ; the transport rivalling or surpassing that which the dis- equilibrated mystic feels when he, or more commonly she, passes " beyond humanity." In no case is it proved that such flattering flight from the finite is ever really the absorption into the infinite which is assumed. It is a temporary negation of mind as the infinite is of thought. When the several parts of the cerebral confederation work together in close compact and harmonious union they sustain and strengthen one another ; when a federated part is in excessive and unruly action it weakens or inhibits other parts and so far lames or disables the whole. Then it denotes a functional and promotes a fixed dis- integration. To keep a special compartment of mind reason-proof cannot fail, therefore, to impair its intellectual integrity and to endanger a sound moral integrity. For, when all is said, a complete division never is practicable ; subtile undercurrents and eddies of thought and feeling, latent but not quite inactive, run deeply beneath the conscious creed and stir lurking doubt or suspicion. The person is driven to do his utmost intellectually to ignore or suppress the haunting doubts which he feels and feels at heart that he ought to face frankly, thus to foster an unwitting self-deception and to prejudice his whole in- tellectual and moral nature. Human notions of Providence and Providential design being at bottom the transferences of a relative being's experiences, as he thinks purposively in time and space, to absolute, eternal, infinite Being in relation to which it is absurd to speak of prevision, purpose, time and space, it is no marvel that many events on earth mightily perplex and trouble him. He finds it hard to discover the designs of them and is forced to bend his quaking reason to the adoration of an inscrutable mystery the design, for example, of the natural and necessary earth- quake, which destroys a whole city and cityful of busy people can then only patiently suffer and piously C i8 MENTAL ORGANIZATION FT. i revere it as an Act of God and bow down in humble resignation to and adoration of his Glorious Majesty; 1 or wholeheartedly to admire the tiger's fearful symmetry and the exquisite designs of innumerable other animal structures framed fitly for the destruction of innumerable weaker creatures framed equally fitly to suffer destruction. He vainly vexes himself with trying to fathom the design of evil in the world, although good could not be without evil any more than cold without heat or light without darkness either of the correlate words being meaningless without the other and it is he who self-makes evil and so names that which pains or hurts him. Were he to abolish evil, as he prays to be delivered from it, he might gravely disturb the settled equilibrium of things on earth. It is an individual prayer therefore which " the wise powers deny us for our good." As mankind necessarily make divisions of sciences for their purposes of apprehension and action, setting divisions in thought between that which is not divided in nature, so they form separate and static intellectual concepts, severing that which is continuity of motion and perplexing themselves thereafter with the divisions and oppositions which they make and then treat as fixed realities. How could individual mind, being more or less separate during its temporary but nowise wholly detached existence, think otherwise, yet, not being wholly detached, at the same time help feeling an instinctive continuity and unity ? Nevertheless as a true scientific philosophy must bring the separate and self- regarding sciences, now for the most part speaking different and reciprocally unintelligible languages, into intelligent concatenation and co-operation, so a true psychology must be founded on a clear and distinct recognition of the essential continuity and constant flux of things in which all so-called causes are effects and all so-called effects causes : mind be conceived in thought as a part of the nature which its organization is in fact. 1 " Quand Dieu veut faire qu'un ouvrage est tout de sa main, il reduit tout a 1'impuissance et au desespoir, puis il s'agit." BOSSUET. CH. i MENTAL ORGANIZATION 19 Continuity of motion without end, the perpetual flux of things which such old Greek philosophers as Democritus, Heraclitus and Epicurus insisted on and Lucretius poetic- ally expounded, that is the fundamental fact : the world never the same for an instant, nor two minds ever the same, nor any mind ever the same for a single hour. As separations and oppositions of thought are static concepts, like hours and years, months and centuries, miles and millimetres, artificially dividing and parcelling that which is continuous, they so far falsify the dynamic flux of nature wherein all things mingle into each other's being, good springing from evil and evil linked to good, and good being evil and evil good according to circum- stances ; the individual inconsistencies of thought and con- duct which astonish or offend often therefore necessary and proper consequences. It is better for one who is hurt, though he thinks his hurt an evil and wails accordingly, to break his leg or his neck when he falls carelessly or clumsily than it would be for the universe to be wrecked by a suspension of the law of gravitation for an instant in his interest, as his self-conservative instinct might blindly demand. His personality, which is a small and passing thing, suffers rightly in the interest of the whole, which is a great and continuing thing. To think otherwise is to take himself too seriously and to over-prize his being and doings in the universe, as it is the habit of the species to do, being its own self-valuer with no super- vising check on its self- valuation. After all is said, it is possible that the universe was not created and set going wholly and solely for its benefit, as tacitly assumed or openly asserted, and the final audit of human accounts on earth, summing up the mortalium rerum ludibria, may not tally with the human appraisement. Surprising, indeed, it would be if the human species were exempt from the bias of self and able to judge itself impartially, seeing how mighty a self-glorification, self-adulation, self- worship its self-estimate urges and imposes. Reflecting coolly and sincerely on the order of the 20 MENTAL ORGANIZATION PT . i universe, not from fixed points of causes and effects, but as a continuity of motion without end, a perpetual flux of the mighty tide of being and becoming through count- less multifarious channels ; and, furthermore, taking due account of the succession and varieties of living creatures ranging from the Amoeba to man and his racial varieties, it is not difficult to picture in mind a gradual transition from the most simple to the most complex, from inani- mate to animate matter, from nascent sensibility to the most exquisite sense, from reflex nervous organization to the mental organization and function which is reflex action at its highest remove through many fine and circuitous intramental channels the present crown, at any rate, and the possible consummation of organic evolution. Fulfilling its natural instinct to increase and multiply and replenish the earth, the human species has engrossed the largest share, if not all, the productive force of evolution, and attained its dominant position in the nature of which it is part ; with that evolutional ascent a progressive development of cerebral organization has gone along (not necessarily of size of brain but in com- plexity of labyrinthine structure and perhaps in quality) as the indispensable basis of advancing mental function. Therefore it is that the present culmination of such mental organization, having taken effect by natural laws in the process of organic evolution, is a proper subject of scientific study by the positive methods of investigation which have been profitably employed in other depart- ments of natural science. 1 1 The word evolution strictly signifies etymological ly the evolving of that which is involved, the unfolding of what is infolded. If applied in that strict sense it would be misused, for mind is an undeniable addition to that which before existed, a higher natural product of progressive development : not something merely unfolded, but, so to speak, newly created naturally in fact an epigenesis. CHAPTER II REPRODUCTIVE CONSIDERATIONS Propagation and destruction of life. Limitation of progeny. Infanticide. Is limitation of family an evil ? Conflict of instincts. Degeneracy dogs development. The realities of human nature. A possible physiological diminution of fertility. Individual self-regard and the interests of the species. Lust without motherhood. Disruption of the family. The marriage bond and family feeling. The Christian socialist and the family. Quantity and quality of offspring. Value of individual life. Per- version of the parental instinct. Death as purposive and natural as life. Purposive destruction. The moral and physical betterment of nature. Strange surprises of nature. THE fundamental instinct of procreation, bent on its sole gratification, has wrought well to maintain and increase population. Yet peoples have not always been so pleased with the results as to welcome and preserve them. They have had frequent resort to infanticide to unburden them- selves of the encumbrances and impediments which children were in the hard conditions of a struggle for existence. The survival of the fittest is not perhaps the quite sufficing principle which it has usually been thought to be in the maintenance of the balance of life ; for the young of many species, fit and unfit, are destroyed in numbers before they have any chance of surviving to compete in some species even by their male parents when the mother does not effectually guard them. Civil- ized nations, it is true, do not practise the systematic slaughter of infants which of old was a custom of different peoples and still is of some barbarous tribes, but among them sporadic infanticide prevails. The laws of the State, it is true, mete out criminal punishment for the 22 MENTAL ORGANIZATION PT . i destruction of the embryo even when it is hardly distin- guishable from that of a lower animal ; yet the law is constantly broken, the fear being not of doing wrong but of the wrong being found out. More and more common also grows the practice, openly blamed yet tacitly sanctioned, of limiting the number of children in a family by artificial means em- ployed to prevent conception. To limit progeny is an object approved by many right-thinking persons, though it would be a breach of good taste to enquire too curiously concerning the means employed, which is conventionally assumed to be self-denying continence. On the one hand is the opinion that the increase of population and the diminution of infant mortality are the welcome signs of a vigorous and thriving nation ; on the other hand is the practice of purposely limiting population in the most advanced nations. The opposing forces must obviously come into graver conflict if brotherly love or self-regarding interest puts an end to wars between nations, while medical science at the same time does away with many diseases which have hitherto been a check to over- population. Inquests, again, on the bodies of new-born infants who have been overlain in bed, or found drowned, or hidden in some dust-hole, are such ordinary events in London that the newspapers, unable to concoct a sensational story out of the squalid circumstances, deem them unworthy of notice as of no public interest save when an indignant coroner makes a momentary stir by denunciation of the annual slaughter of innocents. When an unfortunate young woman, after giving secret birth to an illegitimate child, cuts its throat with a pair of scissors, or smashes .its skull with a poker, or stifles it with a stocking, or strangles it with a garter, or otherwise in her desperate strait delivers it from the evil to come were it allowed to live, she is pretty sure to be acquitted of murder and not un- likely to be acquitted entirely on one pretext or another. 1 1 Here the law puts an obstacle in the way of conviction, for it exacts as proof of live birth evidence that the child has breathed. Now as a child CH. ii REPRODUCTIVE CONSIDERATIONS 23 A tacit consent, despite open reprobation, admits the fierce exigencies of the occasion to be such as immensely to extenuate the crime : its name denounced but the act almost excused. In some quarters, indeed, the claim has been openly made that the offence should be treated pitifully as a misdemeanour not mercilessly as a murder. That is practically what is done, although custom, which formerly choked pity, has now so far loosed its hold as to exact only a solemn sentence of death, without the least intention of carrying it into effect. It is thought right to keep up the dread ceremonial while tacitly allowing it to be a farce. Thereby convention claims and obtains its due homage. Conventions are not of course always or wholly bad ; they represent useful habits of social experi- ence, economizing and smoothing labours of adaptative intercourse, and are in due course rightly superseded by more suitable conventions in a progressing people. When they multiply and get fixed they are then signs of a weak vital hold on realities and a waste of vital energy in upholding their artificial structures. Certain it is, when enquiry is sincerely made into that which goes on beneath the conventional surface of things, that in one way or another, criminal or not, a deep silent propensity to limit reproduction operates steadily in civilized nations. Is the frustrating practice then useful and right, or is it, as usually supposed, a present evil and a menace to national welfare? Is it perchance a bad symptom in a nation which, having reached its maturity, has begun to decline, or is it a good symptom in one which is pursuing its growth and development ; the former process as natural as the latter, for a nation does not any more than a tree grow up to heaven? Reproduction being the chief characteristic distinguishing living from so-called dead matter, it is strange to think that it thus voluntarily cancels itself in the highest living matter. may have breathed before it was completely born, it would be wrong to say that it was born alive because it breathed. It may have breathed and died before it was fully born, and may again be born alive before it has breathed. 24 MENTAL ORGANIZATION PT . i And not strange only in thought but perhaps sometimes detrimental in practice, for if, as falls out now and then, one child of a large family turns out to possess eminent talent or genius, it is evident that the curtailments of the family may be a loss to the family and the nation. Rightly or wrongly, however, self- regard ing reason holds that the multiplication of human life on earth is not the sacred duty which it was once enjoined to be, and adopts mild means to check it. The conflict between social duty to beget and protect offspring in the interest of the species and the personal propensity to prevent or destroy it on the part of the individual is at bottom a conflict between the two primary instincts from which all native passions and secondary social emotions are evolved namely, the reproductive instinct urged by sexual lust and the instinct of self-con- servation urging the preservation of self: the one the instinct of full life to give off something of itself altruistic- ally by efflux, the other the egoistic instinct of life to maintain and increase itself by influx the diffusion and the infusion of the vital flux. What else is the sexual transport of passionate love but nature's momentary fusion of two persons into its creative life ; on the lowest plane the most keenly sensational pleasure of touch common to all creatures which the emotional ecstasy of spiritual love is on the highest plane in the human sphere ? 1 When the continuance of the species, which is nature's chief concern, and the continuance of the indi- vidual, which is his particular concern, come into conflict, the latter naturally dislikes to be sacrificed. Evidently the two forces cannot well be at peace save where there is no need for them to be at war. The one or the other, therefore, has predominated according to circumstances. The means of subsistence being ample and children no 1 " But if the sense of touch, whereby mankind Is propagated, seem such dear delight Beyond all other, think the same vouchsafed To cattle and each beast." Paradise Lost, Bk. viii. 11. 579-582. CH. ii REPRODUCTIVE CONSIDERATIONS 25 encumbrances in the struggle of life, the reproductive impulse had free play and full fruition ; when the people multiplied so fast that they were too thick on the ground and lacked food, the self-conservative instinct came into action. Not to speak of savage tribes which were and perhaps still are in the habit of killing and eating their children, or of the inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego who when Darwin visited them used to kill and eat their use- less old women, experience has several times proved that the love of life can in the last resort prevail over the love of kind even in civilized persons. Starving men have killed and eaten one another, and distracted mothers in peril have sacrificed their children to save their own lives. That indeed is what falls out now when unlucky mothers murder their babes to save themselves and their livelihood. Such disagreeable incidents, although exceptions gladly ignored and soon forgotten, yet have their scientific import in a true survey and appreciation of the realities of human nature. In the long and laborious process of converting man into a social creature the distinct and positive pro- hibitions the " thou shalt not " of eight of the ten commandments were absolutely necessary to curb his individual anti -social impulses: their vesture so slowly put on through the ages, yet oftentimes so quickly put off. To put out of mind by putting out of sight an ugly human instance as exceptional, still less justifiably as inhuman when it is actually human, is not to get rid of it nor of the duty to understand it. The displeasing event, how deplorable soever, is not made unnatural by being called so, albeit that to call it so brands it as odious to right feeling and thought. The Papuan savage who delights to eat human flesh and preferably in festal com- munion the flesh of his sacrificed enemy, which he believes to fortify and hearten him by a mysterious transubstantia- tion, is still a human being who, although he may not cherish immortal longings, must have the same final destiny as the civilized person who has the sure and certain hope of a life everlasting. To him his feast is 26 MENTAL ORGANIZATION PT . i withal something more than a mere ceremony of festive gluttony ; it is a service of communion which has a sort of symbolic value. He has the right, therefore, to be reckoned with in the human account, although he is an exception. Moreover, as the exception which is said to prove the rule proves it not by verifying it but really by trying and, thus testing, sometimes disproving it, the right use of the excep- tion is to correct the wrong opinion of its scientific validity and to incite a search for the true rule or law which shall include the opposing instance and be verified by all the instances. 1 Degeneracy has its lawful course in nature and in human nature as well as the development which it constantly and closely dogs. When it is tritely said that human nature does not change, that it is and has been essentially the same everywhere, that however violently thrust out it is sure to come back, it is neither logical nor legitimate to go on forthwith to think and speak as if it had changed fundamentally and manifest exceptions did not matter. The present, though it may forget cannot divorce itself from the past nor justly imagine a divorced future. That which has been every- where is that which possibly shall be again somewhere. Organic degeneracy being the sequel of organic develop- ment, no social organization can feel surely exempt from the law of growth and decay ; for which reason each nation may have its specific period and multiplying endemic or sporadic degeneracies be symptoms of its decline. Haply it may come to pass that measures taken on purpose artificially to restrict population shall be rendered unnecessary by virtue of the operation of some obscure physiological law by which the productivity of a people 1 That is to say in case of a known law of nature ; for in the complex case of a human rule or law it is always necessary to reckon with the many unfore- seen contingencies and unseen links of causation which may modify it. Then the rare exception may be said not to affect the strong probability of the general statement which yet falls short of certainty. When all is said human conduct is necessarily based on probability more or less strong. CH. a REPRODUCTIVE CONSIDERATIONS 27 and the viability of infants decrease naturally as its means and habits of subsistence change and decrease. That is apparently what happened after vast and devastating slaughters to the long train of vanished tribes and nations which it has been the triumph of civilization to extinguish ; as also perhaps to the successions of vanished civilizations in the world -drama which triumphant barbarism over- whelmed. In the more complex and luxurious conditions of present civilized life, which for the most part mean greater physical comforts and conveniences, less patient endurance and self-denial, more desires and indulgences, keener sensibilities, sentimental self-pity, fixed conventions of thought and conduct, a sanctification of every private conscience in utter disregard of the consequent damage to the common weal, much restless waste and small reserve of force, it is not improbable that fertility shall decrease naturally, as there is some reason to think it does. When it is repugnant to the collective spirit of a society to have many children, its purposive contrivances to prevent the undesired events are the conscious outcome and evidence of obscure physiological conditions which operate uncon- sciously. The decline of the birthrate and the increase of luxury, which were signal features of a decadent Roman civilization, were probably symptoms rather than the causes which they are sometimes alleged to have been ; evidence, in fact, of the declining values of individual characters in a venal democracy degenerating under much base tyranny. In one way or another, if not by physiological then by pathological process, nature fails not to keep up its proper balance of life ; for in no case is the balance actually kept up other than right, however it may look to present human eyes, or perhaps continue to be in its lowest forms when there are no human eyes to look on it. Meanwhile, as matters are in civilized countries, a great deal more is craved than fair conditions of decent livelihood. Existence does not mean simple subsistence by useful labour in moderate circumstances but life in such conditions of ease and comfort as agree not with the 28 MENTAL ORGANIZATION PT . i cares, anxieties, forethought, thrift and self-denials which large families involve. The self-conservative instinct tends to become more and more self- gratifying. Thus the fundamental impulse of vital matter to reproduce itself is socially checked by considerations of personal comfort ; by the frequent desire, too, of parents to raise the few children they have to a higher and easier position in the social scale than they themselves occupy. Despite doubts of its righteousness, the individual self-regard which thus prevails selfishly over the interests of the species to increase and multiply is not perhaps unlikely to prevail more and more as women seek new outlets and wider spheres of activity, physical and mental, than the home. Craving other interests and pleasures which they imagine to be superior, they may become less willing to endure the comparatively dull routine and wearing anxieties of domestic drudgery, and to suffer the inconveniences, hindrances, sicknesses, disfigurements, pains and perils of gestation, parturition and lactation. The wonder might be perhaps that they have endured them so long and so patiently. Fortunately for the continuance of the race a motive force deeper and stronger than consideration of self has impelled woman to the complete fulfilment of her being in the crown and consummation of motherhood ; love and motherhood yielding the fullest expression of the best qualities of her nature, and, were she quietly to observe and think, work too which, unlike much dull and monotonous routine in office or in business, might be a pleasing duty, a living source of constant gratification, an ever-changing interest, a quiet joy in her work instead of a feverish quest of pleasure outside it. Even the anxieties and self- sacrifices which children occasion are useful to keep the mind morally and intellectually alert, active, sympathetic and soundly social. The woman who disdains mother- hood out of self-regarding interests, and the wife who, cultivating barrenness, is satisfied to be the mistress of her husband, frustrate their natural function and full being. CH. ii REPRODUCTIVE CONSIDERATIONS 29 Nevertheless it is certain that in spite of instinctive nature there is a growing disinclination from the ties of marriage, and that the practice spreads among all classes, except the lowest (which reflects the least and propagates most), of limiting artificially the number of children. The symbol of Virgin and Child, a symbol of Divine motherhood without lust, once a sacred object of adoration, is being selfishly discarded in favour of lust without motherhood. 1 A grave question is whether the disruption of the family with its affectionate ties, its interfused interests and obligations, its reciprocal duties and services, which have hitherto been such a powerful factor and strong cement of social evolution, is to be the result of an advancing social or positively socialistic development. Notable is the growing tendency to put the burden of supporting the children of the poorer classes on the State, in stolid disregard of the sapping of parental self-reliance and of the possible peril to the family and injury to society which may be the consequence. To call the practice social reform is held to be its sufficient justification, so great is the power of words, well used, to shut out the substance of things. Yet, when all is said in favour of such devolution, the fact remains that the roots of parental responsibility and the close ties of family affection and dependence are damaged or destroyed thereby, and that the State is not a self-replenishing and inexhaustible source of wealth to be drawn on perpetually ; being in the sum only an 1 Among Roman Catholics in England, whose religion counts marriage a sacrament, family life sacred as the real social unit by which society has been built up, and sanctifies the worship of motherhood, it is noteworthy that neither a decrease of offspring nor an increase of suicide takes place. By that religion, too, perjury in the Divorce Court is absolutely forbidden to its members as a heinous sin. Whatever may be said in deprecation or con- demnation of its hostility to science, it must be acknowledged that Roman Catholicism imbues its members with a sense of solidarity, and exerts a moral hold on their lives which no Protestant sect does equally. That is the consequence of a supreme and infallible authority in the domain of revelation and faith to which reason has no right of entry and no value if it does enter. In the abandonment of dogmas and its various slides towards rationalism or so-called neochristianity by individuals and sects, a fluent Protestantism is liable to put intellectual and moral sincerity on a slippery and perilous descent. 30 MENTAL ORGANIZATION n . i aggregate of toiling individuals acting in a corporate char- acter whose particular self-denials and industries sustain and maintain it. The shifted burden falls at last on the particular persons many of whom are sorely tried to gain a precarious living. Yet the lazy, the imprudent, the vicious or otherwise socially inefficient person who unconcernedly relegates his children to the care of the State, which deems it its compassionate duty to feed, clothe and teach them, does not consider in the least, and is not taught, that he lays the burden of them on particular persons who are industrious and efficient, nor cares what hurt his own character suffers from the loss of self-reliance, the mean shirking of parental responsibilities, the servile position in the social system which he placidly accepts. He does in fact much as the cuckoo does when it puts its eggs into another bird's nest and the foster parents then hatch, fatuously feeding the alien, without foreseeing that when this grows it will surely shoulder the rightful young ones out of the nest to perish on the ground ; a result which could hardly be in the interest of the human species and certainly is not in the evident interest of the defrauded bird's species. Here the socialist perceives and pushes his advan- tage ; for he can promptly and plausibly argue that no injustice will be done in his rightly constituted society when all persons alike put the burden of themselves and their children on the State. Besides, he firmly persuades himself that selfish family feeling shall then expand into universal social affection. Servilely to rivet the units in a social body or even sentimentally to solder them is, he says, a very imperfect measure ; the right thing to do is organically to weld them into a complete solidarity by the gentle fusion of love, which is that which eventually shall be : egoism be subordinated to altruism, as in the intellectual sphere analysis to synthesis and in the sphere of action progress to order. For as the exclusive pursuit of a personal salvation,, once approved in the religious sphere, has now been abandoned in favour of a service of CH. ii REPRODUCTIVE CONSIDERATIONS 31 social salvation, so shall the individual pursuit and use of wealth be abandoned in favour of a righteous socialism. It is curious to surmise how far existing social senti- ment will go in its stealthy but steady advance towards complete socialism. If the fundamental reason of marriage be not legal enactment, nor social convention, nor religious sacrament, nor even bond of affection, but only the organic union of two persons to produce off- spring for the continuance and service of the species, the sanctity of marriage and the strength of its tie may be much weakened even though it be not legally abolished. For the perfect service of mankind the family may be thought to be a too selfish or even anti-social union of interests. In which connection it is not uninstructive to notice by the way how utterly wanting in sound and wholesome social feeling sometimes are the members of an insane family who, alienated by their insane temperaments and incapable of seeing themselves in any just propor- tions and relations to others oftentimes too wrangling, quarrelling, righting among themselves yet exhibit an intense, narrow, exclusive feeling of family kinship coupled with an implicit assurance of its superior merit and interests over all the rest of the world. Family feeling, in fact, like individual feeling, can be so keenly self-regarding as to be anti-social. The stoat, notably a most ferocious creature, combines its ferocity with a heroic affection for its young. Plato, whose incomparable style has cast such a bewitching glamour over his barren speculations and fanciful theories that he is called divine, although these are mostly repudiated as undivine, deemed the existence of the family incompatible with the superior race of soldiers and citizens whom he desired to have bred and trained in his ideal republic. " Behold thy mother and thy brother " was also an inopportune reminder of family kinship which was of no account in comparison with the larger kinship of humanity. 1 1 "If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple." Luke xiv. 26. 32 MENTAL ORGANIZATION PT . i Those who look on the opinion of the sacredness of marriage and the family as a necessarily fading supersti- tion in the progress of socialization to higher planes of development can contemplate with equanimity the dis- appearance of that which, though necessary and useful to the development of mankind in the past, they deem an obstacle to its progress now. The Christian socialist, indeed, discerning in socialism the true spirit of Christ in which he aspires to live and have live in him, may acknow- ledge that a person can rightly sometimes leave father and mother, wife and child, privilege and property to follow the righteous way of social humanization. He cannot indeed choose, if he is a sincere Christian, but be a socialist in theory, however difficult he might find the task in practice. If he shrink from joining whole- heartedly in the socialist's plans, economic as well as social, for bringing the millennium to pass, he may still cherish the aspiration as a pleasing emotion which he takes prudent care to restrain from imprudent function, that which was fitting in Galilee being unfitting in London or Paris. The ideal or illusion which cannot be put in early or remote practice is not wholly useless provided that it be not utterly unrealizable and then become the habitual pro- tective cover of unideal realities, windy words and sys- tematized hypocrisies of conduct. Then it is not merely useless but pernicious. An artificial restriction of population, with or without marriage, need not lack specious arguments to support it nor be deemed offhand proof of a lowered racial vitality. Setting aside the possible social and economic advantages of a smaller population on a given area where everybody shall have room and means to live decently and grow mentally, it can be argued that the quality' of the species will be improved by a better breed of fewer children who will be better fed, better housed, better cultured. Quantity in that case will be wisely sacrificed to quality. Now it is the sanguine hope of eugenics by promotion of good and elimination of bad breeding to make every woman CH. ii REPRODUCTIVE CONSIDERATIONS 33 beautiful, every man strong, and to raise every man and woman to a proper intellectual and moral height, when presumably there shall be no more risk of the deteriora- tion of so perfect a product of human manufacture. To be fruitful and multiply was good advice when an empty earth was in want of population and an empty heaven was expecting inhabitants, but it is not so now when heaven is no longer a house of many unoccupied mansions, and when in over-populated places labour cannot find employ- ment and rules of selective breeding are seriously pro- pounded. As thought inclines and matters tend, it is even possible that systematic measures to prevent conception and to destroy the embryo may be tacitly condoned as excusable, though not perhaps openly sanctioned. The fact will not hurt provided that the saving show be kept up. The canons of the Roman Catholic Church, framed formerly out of a tender regard to the interests of the immortal soul, which somewhence at some time entered into the embryo at a critical but never exactly defined moment of its growth, are not likely to keep their hold in a socialistic community where personal immortality is derided and denied as a once useful but now outworn fable, to be superseded by the blessed hope of everlasting life in the continuing life of the species. The sacrifice of individual to social life being the cardinal principle, why punish the prudent sacrifice of the potential individual, it may be asked ? Every moment myriads of human germs perish for one that actually matures, why then treat with tender sanctity the one which has the lucky chance to survive ? If the perfect socialism which its thoroughgoing advo- cates desire and expect be accompanied by an esti- mate of the intrinsic values of the social units reckoned in terms of time not of eternity, it may be a lower valua- tion than human self-idolatry is wont to put on them. Whether such shrunken value of individual life shall then conduce to human progress is, to say the least, question- able. Will the higher value of a social species then be D 34 MENTAL ORGANIZATION PT . i a sufficient compensation for the countless ages and horrors of its perfecting? When men cease to believe in the multiplication and immortal value of their mortal lives they may possibly leave off craving and striving to raise them to a heavenly height. Then a decreasing birth- rate and an increasing infant mortality might be natural features of a stagnant and decomposing civilization. An odd thing to behold in animal nature less odd perhaps were closer observation made of the ways of wild animals is that the passion of parental love, so strongly instinctive in general, is now and then supplanted by a ferocious impulse to kill the offspring. As a rule in animals the mother's love is so engrossing that even a weak and timid creature in face of danger to its young is sometimes rapt into a frenzy of self-sacrifice to do futile battle with an enemy which, transported by fear, it would instantly flee from on any other occasion. A delirium of maternal passion, absorbing all its energies, infuriates and ecstasizes it : special strands of its nervous organization strained to a quasi-convulsive activity inhibit or exhaust all other strands, as they do in the mystical ecstasies of a higher nervous organization. Yet, anomalous as it seems, occasional instances occur of animal parents which kill and even eat their offspring, and some females find it necessary to protect their young from destruction by the male parent. And this when nature provides so lavishly and surely for the destruction of one species by creatures of another species ! As the seemingly unnatural event comes to pass by natural law it has its sufficient reason ; natural and unnatural being only static human concepts of the dynamic flux of nature in which the " What is " always imports the " Whence " and the " Whither." Things morbid are just as natural as things not morbid, though life is loth to think it ; to die as natural as to live, and life no more possible without death than death with- out life : the perpetual building up and breaking down of the complex proteid molecule, the continuous integration and disintegration of its colloid matter, the fixed law of CH. ii REPRODUCTIVE CONSIDERATIONS 35 the vital flux. Although human thought avowedly can- not discover any purpose in nature as a whole except when it proudly assumes the evolution of itself to be a sufficient purpose, its conceit thereof swelling with its increase of knowledge it is more than probable that nature's work, purposive or not, is not to interpret itself in terms of human thought but to interpret human life at last in terms of itself. To say that " the last enemy is death," the Prince of Terrors, is an egotistic illustration of human egoism. In conformity to the cycle of life man dies and turns again to the earth whence he came : death the natural return of spent life into the general life : vita janua mortis as true as mors janua vitae. Not that the deplored dead die wholly as they seem to do ; they not only live spiritually, so to speak, in the memories of the living to whom they were dear, but also concretely and endlessly in the work, good or bad, which they did while they were alive. Which constant expenditure of energy in their doings from the immaturity of childhood through the vigour of manhood to the decay of old age is the obvious answer to the allegation that the ending of mind at death is incompatible with the law of conservation of energy. When a mind has energized all its life until its energy is clean spent, how can there be any individual energy left to conserve ? In the constitution of Western thought and civilization there is sure and abiding testimony to the still working energies of the great minds, long since individually spent, of ancient Greece and Rome. Nay, to carry recollection further back, in the Christian reverence for the Biblical story of creation which the Jews took from Babylon and Christianity took from the Jews, there is evidence that Babylon the Great is not yet quite extinct. Adequate reflection might perhaps show that the usual notion of the beginning and never ending of an individual mind is more inconsistent with the now accepted law of the conservation of energy. To its post -existent con- tinuation a pre- existent life would seem to be pre- requisite. 36 MENTAL ORGANIZATION FT. i Forasmuch as life in nature grows by consuming life, and higher life again by consumption of lower life in successive vital advances from plant to protozoon and protozoon to man who consumes most life, planting, breeding, nurturing and killing it wherever he is on purpose to feed on it, there need be no surprise that the general law of destruction crops up sometimes to over- ride the natural parental instinct in particular cases. The Hindu God or Goddess of destruction may not constantly do fierce and regular work but occasionally strike wildly at random here and there. Anyhow, the animal's per- verted instinct to kill its offspring is at one with the similar psychical impulse in man ; not probably with dis- tinctly conscious motive, though it is somewhat gratuitous to assume that it is never in the least conscious what it does and why it does it. For when all is said consciousness does not make doing, but doing makes consciousness. Unceasing destruction, being a necessary process to counteract the prodigal production of life on earth, has plainly its proper part in the procession of all life, including life in mind. To affirm that the destructive impulse of the animal which kills its young is owing to the creature being out of sorts physically under the artificial conditions of its domesticity is not an adequate explanation ; for, first, the practice takes effect in wild animals, and, secondly, there is still the need to explain why the impulse springs up and gratifies itself in the domestic animal. The domestic life which man has bred and trained it to live is not really unnatural ; man being its natural environment acting on it by natural selection and his work a product, mended or worsened, of nature through him : his arts, his institutions, his inventions, his melodies of music and poetry, a self- perfecting of nature through interaction of its related parts, the nature-made means by which nature is made better. His proud part being to effect a moral betterment of nature, as he has bettered and embellished much wild physical nature, all that he does in conformity or seeming CH. ii REPRODUCTIVE CONSIDERATIONS 37 opposition to external nature is a contribution to its final fulfilment ; his joyful participation as part, by flattering his vanity, naturally mitigating his humiliating sense of insignificance in the immensity of the whole. So much so indeed that he can hardly help harbouring the secret persuasion that things might have gone better in the past if he had been called on sooner to give his advice and do his work in the betterment of nature. Nature certainly exhibits strange surprises and discon- certing purposes which, so far from conforming to human notions of what should be its uniform and proper course, mightily amaze his intelligence and shock his sentiment. Optimism, though it cannot explain them, is sure they are ordained to work well in the mysterious scheme of which man is the perfect product, a scheme which would other- wise be meaningless. Think with what vigilant circum- spection and alert activity the small male spider proceeds to achieve the nuptial embrace of the big female and with what agile haste it instantly scurries away afterwards to escape being killed and eaten by her ; and, again, how the lucky or unlucky male which wins in the competition to impregnate the queen bee is sometimes eviscerated by the exploit. True, too, it is that in the human sphere the brilliant inspirations and aspirations of youth are often likewise sadly marred by marriage : so victorious the general reproductive over the single life. The Languedocian scorpions present another signal instance of nature's odd ways : after a loving stroll claw in claw they remain face to face day after day in apparent ecstasy, then bring their foreheads and mouths together, and finally join in nuptial union, after which the male is transfixed by the mortal sting of the spouse who then crunches and eats him. Love withal the ruling principle of the universe ! Yes, it may be said, for in that tragedy love lasted and thrilled pleasantly for days while the destruction was instant and painless. The Mantis reltgiosa, the so-called Praying Insect, is even more rapturously voracious ; for she sometimes devours one after another seven or eight 38 MENTAL ORGANIZATION PT. i males who press to her embrace. 1 Nor is the strange seem- ing incongruous association of a monstrous voracity of erotic of lust (the normal spasmodic grasp of the orgasm's rhythmical interfusion of motions almost ferocious in its passionate intensity) with the lust to bite, torture or kill foreign to debased human nature ; for the odious annals of human debauchery record hideous instances of viciously inflamed lust and atrocious cruelty. The productive im- pulse of nature at its lowest depth of rational degradation appears to be sometimes viciously tainted, as at its most spiritual height it is sometimes finely tinctured, with a sort of protest and revolt against itself; which is a puzzling problem the solution of which might perhaps deserve more thought than it has yet received. 1 Souvenirs Entomologiqties, J. H. Fabre. A suspicion or doubt may perhaps justly arise whether this diligent observer and vividly descriptive writer was not prone sometimes to endow with conscious human feeling the creatures whose lives he so patiently watched. This indeed is a constant danger in the attempted interpretation of the conduct of animal life, especially of its lower forms. Consciousness is applied as an abstract constant in entire disregard of its concrete variations from nascent gleam to full light. CHAPTER III CONSCIOUSNESS AND CONTINUITY Purpose in mind and nature in the spider and the chicken. Gradational ascents of consciousness. Its metaphysical severance from realities. Design in nature and consciousness. Supreme cerebral energy and consciousness. A functionless exquisitely-framed organization ? Uni- versal mind or subtilized ether. The soul not a simple thing. Parental affection. The hallucination of sexual passion. Its unreflecting personal gratification. Ascent from lust to love. The authority and value of mystical ecstasy. Love and hate. Purpose in nature an emotional craving. Optimism and pessimism. Apotheosis of mystical feeling. No virtue without vice, nor good without evil. Public punishments. Simplicity of true social instruction. Attractions and repulsions. Nature's ways and human wishes. Changes of feeling with changing seasons and conditions of life. Morbid melancholy and bodily disorder. Reason and feeling. Is the destructive impulse exhibited by some animals in so signal a manner when they kill their offspring as undesigned always as it is thought to be ? May it not contain dimly more or less conscious purpose ? Being a form of human thought, purpose is made much of by the pure psychologist. He counts it the distinctive attribute of his independent, immortal, immaterial mind (animal mind being openly declared or tacitly assumed to be corporeal and mortal) and then tacitly uses the assump- tion explicitly to validate the existence of such a mind. Yet, when all is said, purpose is essentially present in animal instinct, in the unconsciously adaptive reflex act, in every organic function of a harmonious vital whole. Yes, even in the transformation of the carbon of coal into the crystal of the diamond, and in the special morpho- logical processes of molecular constructions and composi- 39 40 MENTAL ORGANIZATION PT. i tions. Does the spider not purpose with admirable craft and skill when it designs and constructs its ingenious web and then, quick-darting from its lair, adroitly entangles its struggling prey ? And the chick in the egg when at the proper time it breaks a hole in the shell to get out of its prison into the world ? How could such admirably purposive action of the chick at the proper time be merely mechanical ? How could it fail to be so, is the answer? Considering how fast and firmly the chick is contained within the closed shell, the ever acting forces of its bodily growth, when they have nearly exhausted the store of nutrient matter and cannot continue the proper bodily expansion owing to contact with the unyielding shell, must needs divert and concentrate themselves on the pliable mechanism of the head and neck. Their innumerable condensed rhythms of motion must naturally then produce a series of rhyth- mical motions in the chick's head and bill to break the shell, and even when it is not perhaps quite free stir it by the stimulus of a new impression on the eye to peck at the first grain or mayhap not so suitable object which it sees. There are gathering forces enough within the shell insistent on discharge by the line of least resistance to do the necessary work ; just as there are forces enough acting in the bud which thrusts back its enveloping sheath, or in the tender shoot of a tree which, insinuating itself into a crack of a wall, grows quietly until it shatters the wall. It would be as futile, if not absurd, to ask what the chick is thinking when it breaks a hole in its shell as to ask what a man is thinking when he performs automatically and unconsciously an act which he has done many hundred times since he acquired the instinct organization. Instinct is properly an adjective not a substantive. Man's superlative conceit is loth to grant mind to animals, or at any rate minds possessing anything of the designing faculty which he admires and vaunts in himself, for all the world as if he had invented it or it was CH. in CONSCIOUSNESS AND CONTINUITY 41 specially invented for him. Adequate consideration of what his conscious mind owes to its unconscious physio- logical gestation might serve to show that its own best designs are actually formed in subconscious depths, up- rising thence to be illumined by conscious flash of reflec- tion. When he gazes in admiring wonder on the ingenious structure of the spider's web or the bee's honeycomb, following so skilfully his lines of thought, he cannot com- prehend whence such wisdom and skill not learnt from him were derived. It is a mystery, which is a soothing word to excuse ignorance and sanctify wonder ; whereas the right wonder would be if his more complex cerebral organization, embodying the cumulative acquisitions of immemorial adaptive experience from age to age, were not more reflective, and he therefore could not do a great deal better in ingenuity and skill of adaptation to his environment, and as a natural consequence invent and perform more errors, more vices, more follies as well as more truths, more reason and more virtues. By the habit of thought which severs consciousness absolutely from other natural processes its gradational ascents from the feeblest sensible glimmer in low organisms to its full brightness in the highest organism are practi- cally ignored. Yet they may be rigorously traced from leaf-cells said to be specially sensitive to rays of light to the perfect organ of vision in the highest animals, and from the various special irritabilities or nascent sensi- bilities of tissues which are unconsciously absorbed into and together constitute the consense or consciousness of the whole organism. Thus thinking a detached con- sciousness as an abstract constant or entity, and limiting it virtually to its human manifestations, it is no longer an outcome of the orderly evolution of nature but a mysterious supraphysical something from somewhere which, not being amenable to study by scientific methods, must be reserved and revered apart in a humble spirit of adoration, or at most studied only by introspection of itself; which is a singular psychical performance on its 42 MENTAL ORGANIZATION PT . i part. An impassable gulf is put between phenomena which are continuous and inseparable in fact. All which the materialist holds to be the pure assumption of old prejudice obstinately shirking a direct and sincere observa- tion of facts and a rational inference from them. To him it appears to be the traditional doctrine of a prescientific past kept in artificial life now by endowed chairs of philosophy instituted for its special culture at a time when the subtile realities and processes of life in mind were not known or even dreamt of. The natural and necessary consequence is that a body of teachers thus fenced in and paid to perform a prescribed function employ themselves in repeating, commenting on, criticiz- ing, and commending or amending one another's abstract expatiations. Joying in the intellectual exercise, they thus move in a circle without ever making an advance. For a positive enquirer to intrude into the high conceptual realm from below is an ignorant and presumptuous violation of the sanctuary. There is obviously plenty of seemingly conscious work in animal nature outside human nature, though not of course so complexly reflective intramentally. Yet not therefore perhaps entirely unreflective. When the wild horse on the prairie bites, worries and harasses the mare until it forces her at last, despite her strong maternal instinct, to desert the foal which cannot travel the required distance, it shows not only a triumph of the self-conserva- tive over the parental instinct but an apparent conscious- ness of what it does and of the need of doing it. Not otherwise than as other creatures do when, having brought up their young with tender care and anxious solicitude, they rigorously drive them away when these are grown so mature as to be competitors in the struggle to live. It is fundamentally a case not of consciousness but of vital matter acting conformably to its self-conservative and energizing nature. 1 1 The self-conservative instinct seldom fails in the last resort to assert itself. The hunter who captures wild animals for menageries succeeds mostly CH. in CONSCIOUSNESS AND CONTINUITY 43 As there is not in the lower animals the full reflective consciousness which exists in man they do not exhibit the deliberate design which he exhibits. The multiplex fine and intricate labyrinthine tracts of physical reflection (or perhaps some subtiler quasi-electric induction) which are the essential pre-requisites of the higher consciousness are not present in their less complex brains, not even to the same extent in those animals which are nearest akin to and most closely resemble him in structure. Yet the frequent instances of skilful adaptations of means to ends by lower organisms are of the same nature as those ex- hibited in the conscious designs of the highest organism, which, when all is said, generates them in its subconscious before they emerge in its conscious function. If the spider's web be not the accumulate design of past success- ive structural adaptations time out of mind, whence in a natural world of causes and effects has the achieved design come ? Whence every animal instinct if it be not fitly proportioned or rational adaptation of the self and not- self now fixed in structure the incorporate memory in the individual of ancestral experiences through the ages ? Far from thinking that design in animal conduct must, if it exist, be formulated in clear and distinct outline, the just inference is that, however named, it existed before it was consciously reflected in man, and exists now with- out such conscious reflection. Is it absurd thus to call design that which is not self-conscious, even when it is exhibited unconsciously in the minds and lives of low savages ? Be it so, then it is no less unwarrantable to assert that the organic process which is glorified as design in human consciousness does not exist in animal nature but is the exclusive prerogative of a human organism. The simple truth is that it exists there in such perfection by capturing young ones which are deserted by their parents in the wild flight from the eager pursuit of the superior animal for whose entertainment in captivity and sport in pursuit they apparently are unaware that they have been providentially created. Old animals for the most part are so seriously hurt in their capture, or are so unwilling or unable to adapt themselves to the cramping conditions of life in captivity as not to survive. 44 MENTAL ORGANIZATION PT . i as to be unconscious of itself, as it notably does in many perfected human acts. However the sacred word be limited in application, the fundamental fact of the under- lying vital process is the same. If man must construe nature in terms of himself it behoves him also to construe himself in terms of nature, which in the end will interpret him in terms of itself. That which is undeniable at the end of all verbal dis- putation and preconceived notions of human prerogative is that an exquisitely fine physical reflection along the nervous tracts in the cerebral plexuses is the substratum and pre-essential condition of every conscious reflection, which varies therefore demonstrably in degree and con- tents according to the complexity of the process and is always lamed or lost, experimentally or pathologically, in exact accordance with the mutilations or destructions of its delicate machinery. For when all is said there is no such thing as an abstract and constant consciousness overlooking the reality, only a general name converted into an abstract entity. There are actually so many and various particular consciousnesses, the same external stimulus being notably able sometimes to excite its special consciousness, which is the concrete reality, in each special sense. May consciousness be derived from con-scio, to know together, which is to cut and then join, to analyze and then synthetize? And does not such a con-sciousness or knowing together imply a reflection or induction of the finest motion from one nervous tract or set of tracts in the supreme cerebral layer on to another tract or set of tracts ; these when grouped and fixed functionally in relation to a particular object or set of circumstances being able then to function automatically without consciousness : thought, memory and will so perfect as to be uncon- scious ? Such a habit of function is notably hindered rather than helped by any so-called intervention of con- sciousness, which then signifies a hindrance to and dis- traction of the fitly adapted motion. In the social sphere, CH. m CONSCIOUSNESS AND CONTINUITY 45 again, to know and act together to consent which is to feel together in reciprocal service is for the separate correlative units to develop a special collective conscious- ness and a subsequent fitting conscience ; the purified universality of which is the aspiration of a progressive socialization and humanization, and may come to pass when man is the perfect social being which he fondly expects some day to be. Those who hold that mind is not the function of an underlying exquisitely fine and complex structure but an immaterial concomitant energy functioning parallel to or in concert with it in some mysterious independent union nowise organically tied to it ought to explain what becomes of the energy of the specially organized cerebral structure which is left with no apparent function to per- form ; for it is an exquisitely fine structure not necessary to maintain the mere process of living, which can go on very well without it, but necessary to all conscious mental function which confessedly never can go on without it. What then becomes of its discharged energy if it is not translated into conscious function? Or how does the immaterial flash of consciousness which has no continuity of being with the material discharge take immediate effect in a reversed physical action ? Having made an absolute gap in nature's continuity, the spiritualist's injunction is to stand or kneel before it in wondering reverence of an inscrutable mystery and to blame anybody who does not behave likewise : a procedure which after all may be quite as profitable as to hide the gap under a cloud of magniloquent and meaningless words and to call the self- intoxicating verbiage an explanation. A legitimate and not unreasonable hypothesis, it may be argued, is that an universal mind more subtile than the universal ether, spiritual in its quintessential refine- ment, enters into the individual brain to act directly on it and through it on every organ of the body. That is presumably the reason why, as the telepathist alleges, two living brains which have been in intimate associations of 46 MENTAL ORGANIZATION PT. i reception and reaction, or are finely attuned by similar nature can by subtilest transmission of thought affect each other when they are a thousand miles apart, without any co-operation of the special senses. A natural regret of the person in case of such imprisoned fraction of the postulated universal mind is that it does not retain so much sense of its original virtue as to leave his cerebral machinery at rest during sleep, but oftentimes lets the body which it should rule play on it wantonly at random to produce grossly absurd and painfully distressing dreams : dreams moreover which attest the direct influence of the particular organ and, though evanescent, sometimes leave behind them such a ground-swell of perturbed feeling as disagreeably impedes its own comfortable action on the following day. Worse still is the case when it insists on performing frantically and furiously to beget the horrors of delirium where at least, having ceased to direct and govern as an immaterial and independent Psyche, it might forbear to take part in the material muddle of the machinery. Strange anyhow to think that if consciousness directs and exerts power, as the psychologist implies or says, it should follow a bad cerebral suit so servilely, itself then exactly reflected like a face in a mirror. The simple fact, its import stubbornly ignored, is that mind was not invented by man nor specially for him, and that mind is life in mind, even when, raised to its highest power, it is christened spirit, soul or Psyche. Although mind invented tools and morals, it did not invent itself. Every function of the metaphysical entity into which the word has been translated exists in animal germ or rudi- ment and sometimes in explicit function. Man's distinction is to combine in his mind qualities which are variously scattered rudimentally in the lower animals and to be more conscious directly of their superior workings in himself and inferentially in others like him. In a measure only, it is true, and not in so great measure as he super- ficially thinks, for while he is conscious of the products of infraconscious mental activities in himself he is not CH. in CONSCIOUSNESS AND CONTINUITY 47 conscious of their processes of formation, to the basic work of which every organ of the body secretly but vitally contributes. From the crown of the head to the sole of the foot there is not a part of the body which has not its orderly participation in the constitution of consciousness and does not by its changes affect its fluctuating func- tion. No soul is ever a simple thing, uncompounded and unbegotten ; every soul is a quintessential compound of bodily qualities and, so to speak, ancestral souls incorpor- ated hereditarily : the soul of a savage not the soul of a citizen, nor the soul of a sinner the soul of a saint. To say that mind performs itself is greatly misleading. It is the particular self constituted as it individually is which performs every conscious thought and act the concrete person who wishes and wills, not an abstract metaphysical freewill in him which wills as it wills. As persons differ manifestly in constitution, no two being exactly alike in features, gestures, gait, speech and carriage of body, and every one exactly expressing his individual character by his special features, so their re- spective bodily elements, even their blood-corpuscles and ultimate proteid compounds, have their minute secret differences ; and inasmuch as every mood bespeaks its underlying physical state, which is constantly affected by the thousand fermenting changes of metabolism, con- sciousness necessarily varies in everybody according to his constitution, and in the same person according to his mood on every occasion of its manifestation. To no two persons in the world nor to any single person in different moods is the world therefore ever the same ; to every person in it truth is what he troweth, and to every com- posite social body what it troweth. Ideal truth is a pure abstraction separated from realities, a name only, albeit a useful fiction to serve progress. Human conduct is not based on absolute truth and certainty but always on prob- ability, this varying in degree from doubting opinion to the strongest certitude. When proper attention is given to the unity and 48 MENTAL ORGANIZATION PT . i continuity of nature's processes it is evident that the least and the greatest, the nearest and most remote, are bound together at bottom in flux of motion and unity of being. Even the refined joys of parents in their children are self-gratifications, though the selfishness be called divine ; the protection they give to appealing and confiding weakness pleases their sense of power, exalts their sense of self, and projects a like affection outwardly to that which they feel inwardly. The renunciations, anxieties, sacrifices, cares and pains they undergo for their sakes are pleasing because undergone for those who, sprung from the rapturous fusion of their dear selves and being renewals and memories of themselves, are still united to them by impalpable rhythms of subtilest feeling. The joy of love rises in proportion to the love bestowed, and grief is proportionately deepened by the death of the beloved. Were it not that love of offspring is the vital principle of the family, which hitherto has been the solid base and cement of society the real social unit it would be positively antisocial, almost ferocious sometimes, in its exclusive selfishness. That is what sexual love notoriously is when blindly and passionately indulged, the logic of propagative feel- ing along its special cerebral tracts then inhibiting the logic of sane and sage self-conservation in the surrounding tracts ; only when desire is assuaged and its fire abated does rational consideration of self in its relations to others revive. Where is the reason of the impassioned lover who kills himself or his beloved or both because of frustrated love or lust ? Nature maddens mortals temporarily to ensure its continual progress through them, though the irrational transport is not counted madness because it is transient and all the world is seized by it at one time or another. The lover withal, behaving much as the lunatic does, generates the hallucination or illusion which transports him, projecting from within the glamour which he perceives without in the beloved object and is then infatuated with ; he loves his love with the ejects of his own inflamed CH. in CONSCIOUSNESS AND CONTINUITY 49 self-love, which is much what the enraptured mystic un- consciously does who, although human, absurdly deems his or her transport a transcendental flight beyond humanity. How else could he perceive in her the enchanting qualities which no one else perceives and she is probably destitute of, and he himself fails to see when, passion past, he no longer feels the enchanting ravishment. Let a breach of contact for a little while occur, with the ingress of another charmer on whom he then projects his impas- sioned ejects, and he is liable to be sued for breach of contract. For the time being he is the bewitched slave of nature to serve its purposes, irresistibly transported by it to perpetuate his species. It is no marvel then that the species is likewise moved by the productive flux through it to entertain the hope or belief of indefinite advance and future felicity, and that the believing hope seeks its sure foundation not in the reflections of reason but in the deep intuition of feeling, preferring the un- conscious course of instinct before the conscious discourse of reason. When all is said parents do not ask themselves any more than the animals do whether they do their offspring a service by begetting them ; they gratify a present lust without the least regard to possible consequences. The father who would scout the notion of living his life over again, or perhaps any single year of it, were the offer made to him, scruples not to launch half a dozen creatures on a similar sea of troubles in a vale of tears to that which he is glad to have nearly done with. In old age he may look back on its events with a sense of surprise and humiliation that he could ever have taken himself and them so seriously, seeing what pale spectres of a troubled dream they then appear, and regretting perhaps that the nature which beguiled him so brilliantly in the flush of youth and more sedately seduced him in mature manhood did not end him when it ceased to delude him. Happily the mass of mankind, instilled with the un- failing productive force of nature working in and through E 50 MENTAL ORGANIZATION PT . i them, do not look so far forward as to realize what the disenchanted verdict on life will be at the end of it. Vanity of vanities is a rather sweetly sad utterance of melancholic sentiment when the mortal only knows ; it becomes a vivid feeling of reality only when he nears and feels the ending of his mortality. Mentally shortsighted, most persons never look beyond a link or two in the chain of causation, satisfied to repeat a few indistinct and inadequate ideas acquired by tradition, suggestion, custom and imitation ; rehearse their narrow lives of thought and action by rote without ever bringing half their latent faculties into exercise ; gratify their appetites, affections and ambitions in the present without disquieting them- selves in vain about things to come which may never come to them ; think and act as the transient bubbles they are on an everflowing stream of being from everlasting to ever- lasting. In conduct, if not in theory, they acknowledge their inclusion in the general life of nature, the nature abiding in them and in which they abide. Few are the persons who duly foresee and provide, many more those who aftersee and lament. The productive or creative energy of nature, so amazingly prodigal and wasteful in all its works, especi- ally in the prolific shoots of human imagination which are its highest and most sublimed outcomes, goes through a refined and elevated development in human conscious- ness much redeeming its gross animality. In the ascent of its socialized development from the coarseness of lust to the refinement of love, from mere animal appetite to affection of mind, there is a progressive rise of the material to the ideal, of the sensual to the spiritual : a natural gradation which despite their separation by words is strictly traceable in fact when observation of the continuous developmental process is not barred by preconceived metaphysical notions. Spiritualized in its most refined expressions, embellished with all the graces imaginable, its splendour transcending the beauties of colour in vegetable life, the melodies of song in bird life, CH. in CONSCIOUSNESS AND CONTINUITY 51 the exquisite rhythms of form and motion in animal life flowers the living vesture of love, the melodies of birds' love-songs, its spiritual sublimation an unspeakable human joy love can never be extolled enough by human beings nor ever sufficiently revered as divine ; a word which just because it is undefinable serves best to denote its ineffable rapture. Religion, poetry and music are suffused and thrilled by its transporting ecstasies : its religious trans- port the sure evidence of a spiritual intuition higher and more illuminating than mere intelligence, which exalts those who by gift of faith possess it to a supernatural sphere and superlative being ; its poetical and musical transports the raptures of a mind whose finely structured organization is sensitive to exquisitely subtile rhythms of nature and human nature which it strives to express in melodious verse and the perhaps subtiler rhythms of music. When reason then is at a standstill, baffled by its impotence to formulate the mystery of things, feeling is confidently cited, love assigned to be the divine prin- ciple of the universe and its heights of mystical ecstasy to signify a direct communion with an absolute loving Reality. 1 What higher tribute to the universe can man, proud man, render than ascribe to it his highest attributes ? The pure exquisite delight of the ecstasy is absolutely self- proving: it is the infallible testimony of a spirit detached from its life of relation, the indubitable and illuminating witness of its own divine value. Love emerges triumphantly as the pervading principle on earth in spite of the displeasing fact that there is perpetual war every- where in the air, on the earth, and in the sea, and not an untamed living thing which does not flee for its life from the face of man when it sees or feels or fears him near. 2 1 The Dean of St. Paul's, as reported, has declared that "mysticism was religion in its most acute, intense and living sense " that " mysticism had been the very heart of Christianity." Presumably too of other religions where its testimony is not less positive. 2 An Archbishop of the Church of England therein evincing the special character, political and social, of the Church of England, as by law- established, is reported lately to have excused fox-hunting by the vulgar 52 MENTAL ORGANIZATION PT . i Here at last the human relative is somehow transmuted into the divine absolute, if it be not perchance the divine absolute degraded into the particular human relative ; the individual self-consciousness in that case being the more intensely spiritual the more ravishing its delirious ecstasy, and its gratification sometimes the keener the freer its outpour of incontinent emotion in senseless rhapsody. Yet when all is said the enraptured subject might properly reflect that his transport is special and of purely personal quality, and that hysteria is still hysteria, though it utter itself in religious guise ; moreover, that under such sacred canopy there are special forcing conditions of spiritual pride, which is the worst of all prides, to grow and thrive with- out suspecting its true nature. The transported person does not stay to consider that he is only a transported self, which may be of poor quality, and that his mystical translation is at best a forced and purely selfish exercise of mental debauchery benefiting no one but himself, even if it does so much as that ; moreover, that the ecstasy is always the ecstasy of his particular religion, which may again be of poor quality. The joy of the performance is no proof of its value ; for folly is the joy of fools, knavery the joy of knaves, delirium sometimes the joy of madness. The sure and joyful belief that love is the divine principle of the universe is nowise weakened, is even strengthened in religious minds, by the contradictions, then sanctified as mysteries with which the concrete facts of animate nature confront it. Yet these might warrant a plausible inference that hate had and must have an almost equal sway with love on earth. As in truth they have done ; for it has always been found necessary hitherto to postulate a Spirit of Evil, or a God in a state of evil spirit, or an actual Devil to account for the so- called evil done on earth ; and the problem of coexistent argument that the pleasure to the riders, the horses and the dogs was out of all proportion to the brief agony of the fox, the happy life of which, kindly protected on purpose for the exhilarating sport, would otherwise never have been. In face of suffering and other apparent evils on earth it evidently behoves men to take wide and long views of the divine purposes. CH. in CONSCIOUSNESS AND CONTINUITY 53 opposites still remains when the notion of a Devil is discarded and that of a personal Deity dislimned. With the utmost goodwill it will be no easy task for sincere observation and sound thought to separate love and hate in concrete nature as the contraries which they are made in the abstract ; still less easy to eliminate hate as a provisional and transitional agent in the working out of good, which would be an amazing upset of the existing equilibrium, as the sore-afflicted Job perceived when he repudiated the notion that he ought not to receive evil also from the source whence he received good. The joy of the cat is the grief of the mouse, as the Russian proverb says ; the monkey-eating eagle loves to kill and eat the young monkeys which doubtless hate to be eaten ; and the carnivorous man to kill and eat the young lamb the frisking gambols of which on a sunny hillock he watched with unspeakable delight on a bright spring morning a little while before. It will be odd if the extinction of what is called hate and the prevalence of what is called good is to be the end of things created. How then is love to live and thrive with no store of hate to sustain it, no resistance for it to react against ? Could the bird fly if the opposing air, which it might think hindered, did not support it? Everywhere throughout nature vigorous life joys to express itself in feeling and action, and everywhere the joy of living involves the pains of dying. Putting aside egotistic prejudice and self- pleasing yearning and looking at facts dispassionately in the pure light of reason, it must be fairly owned that there is neither principle nor purpose discoverable in the being and doings of nature, at least nothing corresponding to man's notions of principle and purpose. But what of the import of his instinctive yearn- ing ? Does not the inextinguishable desire infallibly claim satisfaction and even satiety, his wish surely predict what shall be when he no longer sees, as now, through a glass darkly ? The agreeable answer therefore is that it is the cry of the heart uttering the intuition of a truth 54 MENTAL ORGANIZATION PT. i transcending the lame achievements of understanding ; nothing less than the presage of a world to be one day in benign correspondence with man's highest aspirations and wishes, which nature's present procedures plainly are not. Be the expected correspondence between the world and his wishes ever complete or not, this much is certain now that the yearning is fundamentally the cry of life lusting to live and live more abundantly, whatever reason may or may not say, even if only that and nothing more. Seeing that man is a part of nature and the present highest product of its evolution, it would be strange if he did not feel in himself and reveal in his consciousness its organic impulse to rise to higher development. Naturally then a hopeful look on the bright side of things is deemed the laudable optimism of high-thinking minds, a desponding look on the dark side the illaudable pessimism of low-minded thought ; marking a lack of the exultant lust of life, it is disvalued accordingly by lusty life. The pity is that things have two sides : that it is not always and everywhere light, darkness being as constant a fact as light and that which is not pleasing so rudely obtrusive as to force itself into sight and require no search to find it out. Nevertheless it is undoubtedly by the aspiration, hope and endeavour of optimism that advance of life is made, and the grace of right feeling is accordingly to feel everything to be right at bottom notwithstanding that so many things seem wrong on their surface. The uncritical heart witnesses to a deeper truth than the critical intellect. Necessarily so since without the desire of the heart there would be nothing for the thought of the intellect to criticize. Man, being a double nature, spiritual and material, a sort of lofty superorganic superimposed on, if not evolved from, a low organic nature in which anyhow it is somehow rooted, is fashioned fitly to sympathize spiritually with the beauties and to enjoy materially the gratifications lavishly provided for him to admire the frisking lamb and thereafter kill and eat it, CH.III CONSCIOUSNESS AND CONTINUITY 55 To foresee the elimination of hate in the organic evolu- tion of the human species and the prevalence of universal love is still a limited conclusion at which the most ideal aspiration would be disappointed to stop. Therefore it does not stop there. Faith steps in promptly to discover in a cosmic emotion of pervading love the transcendent inspiration of a divine essence personal, quasipersonal, or impersonal in, through, and above all objective pheno- mena, incarnate and incarcerate in everybody proportionate to his goodness of character, caged here for a while on earth until the tyranny of the body be past and death dissolve the partial and temporary severance which life is. The metaphysician says much the same thing in his special language ; only he calls the back of the beyond the ultimate Reality and aspires to get into contact or communion with it by the superior power, subtilty and skill of his philosophical mind. 1 Obviously the apotheosis of mystical feeling and intellectual sublimation is a vastly more rarefied and refined sort of anthropomorphism than that which once crudely portrayed the ultimate reality in lower terms of human symbolism as a magnified man and many still think of as a sort of subtilized and formless personality made in the exalted likeness of man's spirit ; urged thereto by an intellectual craving to translate the incomprehensible into something apprehensible with which they can get into psychical union. Having conceived, or rather tried to conceive, an infinite, eternal, incompre- hensible reality and given it a name, the practice is to endow it with the requisite contents and after that to derive from its primal source the origin and transcendent value of the highest human qualities, intellectual, moral and aesthetic. Thus to translate mystical or cosmical feeling into transcendental apprehension, is it not to give 1 The odd thing is that a very relative and finite being in contact with a mere fraction of the universe persuades himself that his speculations con- cerning absolute and infinite reality are ever anything more than barren and meaningless. Such questions as "Whence am I?" "Where am I?" " Whither do I go ? " in their transcendental sense or non-sense might perhaps fairly be answered by "Thence," " Here," "Thither." $6 MENTAL ORGANIZATION PT . i up an advantageous, if not impregnable, position and un- wisely or unwittingly to let in reason, which then justly exercises its right to criticize and judge the value of what is thought and said concerning the incomprehensible ? The butterfly's necessarily excels the caterpillar's feeling of reality, but is in the end only a butterfly's feeling, whether or not a continuity of personal consciousness then go along with the bodily transformation, as it is presumed to do with the human transmutation. Why should love-thrilled faith be so eager to leave out hate in its valuation of things, seeing that hate is also divine and apparently a necessary condition of love's being ? " The giver of all good things " is also the giver and hater of all so-called evil things ; the source from which all blessings flow the source from which all suffer- ings shower. There is no virtue without its opposite vice in a yet imperfect world any more than any vice without its opposite virtue, no virtue carried to an excess, when extremes meet, which may not become a vice, " no evil in the city and the Lord hath not done it." Why then are the Religionist, the Socialist, even the Positivist, so eager to expedite the coming of universal love, which might be a calamitous upset of the equilibrium ? It was plainly well for the human race in the divine order of things that moral goodness did not prevail in the past seeing how much human progress has owed to its lower nature : avarice, ambition, emulation, envy and other selfish passions, along with the grosser animal appetites and desires, having been as necessary and useful factors in its progress as its higher moral qualities. Without his inferior qualities man could never have been stirred to develop his superior faculties : without their work in his genesis to achieve his epigenesis. The inventions, arts and sciences by which he has striven so laboriously to master the external world and to live more comfortably in it, could they ever have come into being if he had been so innocently virtuous and happy as he is fabled once to have been in Eden and expects again to be on CH. m CONSCIOUSNESS AND CONTINUITY 57 earth ? The reasonable aim obviously is not to eradicate selfish appetites and passions in the individual but to rule them for social ends, not to starve them out but to use them to feed higher qualities, wisely -ruled passion being an excellent social force. Now the effective way to rule unruly passion is plain enough : it is to praise, flatter and foster those qualities which promote social welfare, and to blame, disparage and repress those which hinder it to practise a prescribed natural selection in the social sphere. Proud of his superi- ority over other animals, man naturally esteems most those features which mark his superiority, his erect body and heaven-looking face as well as his soaring intellect and expanding social feeling ; his pride and self-love thereupon urging him steadily to widen the gap between himself and the animals and to advance his socialization by flattering and fostering the qualities which distinguish him from them. To call a man an animal is everywhere an insult. 1 Those persons therefore who possess the right qualities he praises and caresses as superior social beings, those who are destitute of them he blames or coerces as inferior or antisocial beings. The supreme aim of right feeling being thus to develop the social body by moulding the in- dividual units to its service, it is deemed but the folly of cynical conceit to question the value of that perfecting body, at any rate in the ultimate event if not always now in the particular case. The public punishments of the whipping post, the stocks, and the shameful exposure on the pillory to public scorn and abuse, and still more the terror of the scaffold when executions were public, were primitive measures effectively employed formerly to teach social responsibility. The open disgrace of them appealed directly 1 And yet grossly to insult the animals by naming "brutal," "beastly," " bestial " his invented and practised bestialities, of which no animal was ever guilty. So prompt to furnish the animals with his vile qualities, so slow to value their good qualities, so merciless and reckless his use of them for his food, his sport, his service, his prosecution of knowledge ; which last, glorify it mightily as he may, signifies at bottom his increase of power, and comfort on earth. 58 MENTAL ORGANIZATION PT . i and forcibly to the understanding and feeling of the offender and the lookers-on, which more humane methods yet fail to do. To use flogging now as a proper punish- ment for a particular crime is to deprive it of much of its educational value as a preventive when the flogging is done in secret : the public gives the criminal the painful benefit of it, but does not give him or itself the instructive social benefit which might be obtained from its edifying exhibition. Yet it would cruelly shock humane senti- ment, would be thought demoralizing, to do publicly that which it is thought rightly human, if not humane, to do privately, and Christian sentiment allows in placid defiance of Christian precept. Conformably to the approved reign and culture of expedient hypocrisy, such bodily scourgings of badly-organized persons are decently put out of mind as out of sight, being incidental and exceptional reprisals to be done away with when the sad necessity no longer exists. Yet the flagellated criminal might, had he the requisite instruction, remind his executioners of two in- controvertible truths : first, that every person's history is the exposition of his character, and secondly, that the tyranny of his organization is virtually his fated character. Expediency demands for the present that which counsels of perfection disapprove. These must always be gradually and steadily applied, for they would oftentimes be not only useless but pernicious if abruptly put into practice. Cato was a stern and consistent expounder of moral maxims, but, as Cicero said of him, he did not consider sufficiently that he preached to the dregs of the Roman populace as if he were living in Plato's ideal republic. The right work of education is to make persons good citizens by practical inculcation of self -discipline and self-renunciation, to teach them civic responsibility not personal self-indulgence and self-interest and self-pity, to root morality painfully in experience not to think to establish it pleasantly by abstract moral precepts ; so in fact to instruct the ill-disposed person that he shall perceive the value of disciplined subordination, truthful- CH. in CONSCIOUSNESS AND CONTINUITY 59 ness, self-denial and other social virtues, seeing how much he profits by them and how badly things would fare for him as well as others in any social body if nobody could be depended on to speak the truth, to pay his debts, to fulfil his contracts, to help his neighbour, to do justly by him : a comparatively simple lesson which might be learnt by him even when he is not capable of learning the harder lesson that hate, envy, greed, fraud and the like bad passions hurt nobody as much as they hurt himself. His social nature can only in the end be improved by observance of and obedience to the laws of socialization, as his physical nature is improved by observance of and obedience to the laws of physical nature : he can only (if the wording be preferred) perfect his reason and himself by searching out the divine reason and observing its statutes to do them. As the lesson of right conduct is effectively learnt only by actual doing, instruction might profitably descend from its abstract moral heights and impracticable extremes, which multiply pretences and hypocrisies, to the concrete realities of life ; for to teach a man that when some one steals his cloak he should give him his coat also is about as senseless a precept in actual social life as it would be to teach him that when his neighbour steals his dinner he should lend him his appetite to enjoy it. When all is said, repulsions are as natural and uni- versal as affinities, if search be made backwards from beginnings from the loves and hates of men which have hitherto wrought to make them what they are, the loves and hates of animals which notably sometimes exhibit elective affinities in the same species, the male obstinately refusing to mate with one female and passionately select- ing another ; the loves and hates of plants ; the affinities and repulsions of chemical elements ; and the attractions and repulsions of electrons. It might indeed go ill with the existing world-system if its repulsions and antipathies did not counterbalance its attractions and sympathies and thus maintain the equilibrium of things. To suppose that 60 MENTAL ORGANIZATION PT . i love shall grow steadily through the ages to come and hate dwindle to extinction is to assume such an eradica- tion of self-love as would be an extraordinary mutilation, if not emasculation, of human nature. It is a vision of things to come unimaginable by those minds which have not been elevated to Hegelian heights of thinking Reality, where discords are resolved into harmonies by successive ascents, opposites seen to be phases of higher unities, being and not-being proved to be identical, affirmation and negation in synthesis to mean the same thing. 1 Meanwhile, as it is natural for every living thing to make much account of itself, so mankind, being the pre- dominant living things for whose life all other life exists, take themselves very seriously despite all abstract con- fessions of sin and unworthiness. They cannot help wondering that nature does not concern itself about opposites as they do, and almost persuade themselves that it acts wrongly or imperfectly when its stern laws 'pay no heed to the prized feelings with which it has infused them. Why such hurt to their tender sensibilities as the long tale of pains, slaughters, sufferings, and all kinds of horrors and sorrows which the record of animal and human life from its beginning on earth is ? That must have its fundamental meaning : either that the world is to change in conformity to man's wishes, or that his wishes are to prove illusory. Will it then at last come to pass that nature, revolting against its past and present processes of red tooth and claw and reforming itself mercifully in conformity to human wishes, shall establish peace and concord through a yet unharmonized world ? The truth perchance is that nature is waiting for man to begin the abolition of self-inflicted slaughters and sufferings. However that be, it is surely unwarrantable and ridiculous for a transient being in the small fraction of the universe with which it is in touch to 1 Not after all original on the part of Hegel, for speaking of Heraclitus Cud worth says "Among the rest of his opinions this also is said to have been one, that contradictories may be true." CH. in CONSCIOUSNESS AND CONTINUITY 61 apply its judgment and wishes to the boundless immensity which lies beyond its conscious range and on which the liked and disliked events of its little world ultimately depend. Though man is barred absolutely from cognition of the whole, he as part is dynamically supplied by it with the physical energy in and by which he lives and moves ; whereupon, being himself individual and thereby partially detached, he necessarily sets up defined and fixed static concepts to hold on to while he lives in its continuous motion. Thus severing what is inseverable, he creates the ills, anomalies and contradictions which then perplex and trouble him and he thinks it his mission to explain. The appalling antinomy between love and death which has caused an unceasing stream of piteous lamentations in prose and poetry is no real antinomy in nature ; they are only the unthinking outbursts of human egotism. Disorders and destruction are the beginning of new order and constructions ; the disruption of the combined elements of one compound opening the way to the loves of other elements. Even the common hate of two persons may become a bond of mutual alliance and friendship, the decomposed love of two friends the cause of exasperated hate, the deplored death of the ever-to-be- lamented spouse the opening to an ever-to-be-beloved new one. It is in the same spirit of narrow thought, overweening conceit and egotistic sentiment that men pour out their mournful wails concerning the beguiling hopes of youth, the mocked aspirations of manhood, the disenchantments of experience, the lost faiths of disillusioned old age, the perpetually proclaimed and perpetually ignored vanity of mortal things, reiterated and re-echoed day after day and generation after generation by successive actors in the drama, the actors only changed. Actors too who are loth to realize that they like their forefathers must leave the stage when their part in the play is over. As if life's purpose were not to decay and die as surely as to live and thrive, its very essence to die daily, the gloomy 62 MENTAL ORGANIZATION PT. i renunciation and retirement of the waning half of life when hope dies down and belief of life's value is lacking as natural as the joyous striving and pursuit of its waxing half! Such wailings are the natural utterances of conscious organic compounds repugning, while vitally compounded, the decomposition which ensues naturally in conformity to the universal law of composition and decomposition of elements in the perpetual flux of things. Resenting dis- ruption as long as they can hold together, they bewail accordingly the vanishing illusions of the successive steps of the natural process. It is not so much the prospect of death, the fears and pains of which are so mightily magnified by vigorous and commonly so little felt by dying life, as the retrospect of past illusions, ambitions, errors and follies which adds to the dispiriting melancholy of old age ; for while recent events then make a shallow impression and are soon forgotten, the memories of past events, even those of early childhood, are apt to revive vividly in dreams and the wakings of the night as well as in the dreamlike broodings of the day and thus some- times to make memory a veritable curse of old age ; to those at any rate who, not being so happily constituted as to forget their faults and follies, revivify in imagination the mortifying events of their life-drama. More pleasant would old age sometimes be if it could blot from memory what it would gladly forget The succeeding changes of feeling through life's chang- ing seasons and shifting scenes respond exactly to the succeeding fluctuations of vital energy to the earlier addition to and later subtraction from life and to every morbid perversion of its process. In youth, flushed with the vital force of growth, buoyant exhilaration, jubilant activity and cheerful outlook prevail, life and hope fore- feeling and pressing on to the future ; in maturity, when there is a balance of forces, gravity of thought and motion rule ; in old age, when the destructive forces preponderate and a gradual decline takes effect, sluggish dejection of thought, feeling and movement ensues, for every day is CH. HI CONSCIOUSNESS AND CONTINUITY 63 then a gradual subtraction from life which, hope extinct, lives only or mainly in the past. The natural utterances of happy childhood therefore are discharges of energy in smiles, shouts, leaps, cries, joyous activity for its own sake, those of infirm old age in sighs and moans and groans and torpid movements.: to all the changes of vital energy answering changes of moods and motions. Even in youth and maturity the mind is strangely overclouded at times by passing moods of unaccountable dejection owing to secret derangements of some organic process such as are permanent in old age ; for the derangement is a temporary hurt to life and a corresponding subtraction from mind. Mind being fundamentally life in mind necessarily suffers with its sufferings. A toxic substance in the bloodstream generated by a fault in one of the many subtile processes of metabolism is the direct cause of a temporary or lasting melancholia against which the strongest effort of the thereby lamed will, or rather of the self who wills, fights in vain. How can the volitional current of motion the stream of feeling guided and directed by reason, which is concrete will flow well and pure when the source of feeling is temporarily vitiated or dried up ? The whole aspect of nature is then woefully changed : every impression a pain because there is no power of fit reaction, every act an uninteresting and heavy labour because there is no desire, every thought a distress or despair because there is no hope, every function of the body even seemingly abnormal because the body has lost true sense of itself and the person therefore of his person- ality. Men and women move about like pale spectres or shadows, seen not felt, their forms and acts waking no vital perceptions of real beings ; in all the world " was never misery like unto my misery which is done unto me," wails the sufferer. The very vagueness of the vast misery deepens the gloom and intensifies the distress. Its name- less woe would be alleviated if the sufferer could give it a name or even invent some cause of it which he might lay hold of as a sort of explanation, as indeed happens 64 MENTAL ORGANIZATION PT . i when the feeling takes form in a congruous delusion and its misery is actually lessened : the man who believes he has actually committed the unpardonable sin less wretched than he was before he discovered the cause of his woe. Consciousness as in a nightmare neither precedes nor rules, only follows the gloomy fancies of the cerebral disorder. Then haply and happily the minutest chemical change occurs in the faulty metabolism and the cloudy horror disperses like an ugly dream : the heart-broken pessimist becomes instantly the light-hearted optimist. If it be true that there is nothing good or bad but thinking makes it so, it is more deeply true that there is no thinking, good or bad, but the body makes it so. Reflecting on what is the physical basis and physio- logical import of feeling, it is natural to ask whether any feeling, even the individual transport of blissful love or mystical ecstasy, is ever so transcendent and super- naturally pregnant as it is thought to be. A rapture of delight the transport is, but is it therefore specially divine, its sublimed consciousness something discontinuous and essentially different from as well as superior to the elementary consciousness of the lowest sensation ? Where positive evidence fails, as fail it must where the practice is to wrap the proof in the postulate, desire-born faith avails to produce belief, and different persons answer differently according as they ascribe more value to feeling than to reason, or to reason than feeling. Certain it is that while reason applied directly and sincerely to the actual facts of man's mortal life, as they have been and still are, may declare that it might have been better for him not to be, and does solemnly give hearty thanks " for his deliverance from the miseries of this sinful world " when he has ceased to be, feeling impels, nay compels, him to be. The illogical has deeper and stronger root in human nature than the logical. Inevitably so, seeing that his organic being whence feeling springs is a continu- ation of the organic life of nature the unfailing impulse or nisus of which, working in and through him, is some- CH. in CONSCIOUSNESS AND CONTINUITY 65 thing that reason neither originates nor authoritatively rules, but must accept, regulate, direct and make its rational adaptations to. Reason might even shrink from pushing its exercise to its utmost logical consequence for fear that it might end in demonstrating its own short limit and final nothingness. Needing " its mortal mixture of earth's mould " as instrument in its service, nature instils the will to live and the wish to have more life by observing its statutes to do them, and the wish to believe easily becomes in most minds the will to believe what is wished. Those therefore who would enjoy the gift of a particular faith are rightly taught by its religion that they must strongly wish, earnestly crave, and strenuously strive to obtain it. Then they may expect to strain, direct and fix their faculties successfully to the required function and thereafter enjoy its exercise. CHAPTER IV REASON, FEELING AND WILL AS VITAL FUNCTIONS Reason and Reality. Structuralization of reason and will. A barren method of mental study. Lust and joy of life. Illusion and disillusion- The immortal germplasm.- The biological basis of feeling. Uncon- scious art and conscious artifice. Genius and rfadness. Inherited aptitudes of mental structure. Cerebral function and consciousness. Organic and spiritual influx. Materialization of spirit and spiritualization of matter. Infinitesimally minute and infinitely active matter. A decline of the propagative instinct. Physiological defect and humani- tarian enthusiasm. Is the animal to be worked out of human nature? FORASMUCH as pure reason purged of feeling and applied sincerely to the facts of life is dispiriting, the yearning hope is for a Supreme Spiritual Reality, infinitely wise, good and powerful, with which the human mind can come into communion, to cling to the symbols of the changing representations of it, to recoil passionately from a rational test of their values while serviceable. How could self- conscious, self-pitying, self-adulating beings bear to live otherwise in a world of pain, sorrow, strife, suffering and slaughter ? Always therefore have they believed by deep logic of feeling according to custom of time and place that which was rationally incredible. As they live by suitable symbols or fictions of thought in a reciprocal evolution of themselves and nature, a deep instinct has warned or withheld from too close a search into the mean- ing or value of their symbols, since the research might end in depreciating the value of truth and finally lowering the import of the human drama. By the instinct of mental self-conservation therefore the collective spirit of the time and place has been instant always to repress the 66 CH. iv REASON, FEELING AND WILL 67 first offending intrusions of doubt. The new truth is generally recognized to be true only after it has been experimentally tested and become a function of life : the thing lived first and then rationally demonstrated. Neither reason nor will is the self-existent and inde- pendent faculty in man which self-esteem deems and metaphysics make it. These functions of himself exist in creatures below him in the scale of life and are entitled to their metaphysical value there. Being compositions of the nature outside and the nature within him, evolutions of it and him, they necessarily change with the changes of its creative flux. It is no abstract reason therefore which guides him nor abstract will which commands him, they are but names ; it is the bodily self the he who thinks and wills which performs reason and will accord- ing as it is well or ill constructed and trained, just as it performs movement well or ill. To speak of reason and volition as abstract faculties is to speak as if reason per- formed reason and will performed will when the perform- ance is the performed reason and will of the performer. As well say that memory performs memory or feeling performs feeling. It is too to ignore the continuous process of organic development by which they have been gradually fashioned in the race and in the individual by experience. Reason as it is built up by fitly organized experi- ence, inherited and acquired, is the proportioned method by which the person consciously directs and regulates his conduct, the fit formulation of the vital impulse of feeling ; will, springing from the composition of reason and feeling, the force by which he actuates his conduct, the better his performance the better their structuraliza- tion that is to say, their in -formation as this has been organized in the particular brain by inheritance, experience and training. Without the silent memories of good inheritance, without fitly stored experience, with- out wise culture, they are notable only by their defects, for everybody must patiently learn them as he must 68 MENTAL ORGANIZATION PT . i learn to talk and to walk ; he will then reason and will well or ill accordingly. When the good shepherd teaches his attentive dog the rudiments of reason, he at any rate believes that it is the dog which reasons and wills ; he is not a metaphysician enough to invent a pre- existing rational entity to perform itself. He has the good sense too to select for his purpose a dog in whose brain are hereditarily latent the memories of intelligent ancestors. Viewing the facts simply as they are without any pre- judging bias, it is not unfair to think that an overweening conceit of consciousness as an abstract constant, not the actual variant which it is in every particular manifestation, has been the cause of much barren philosophy. It is not inconceivable, though it may appear well-nigh in- credible, that the ingenious and elaborate disquisitions in which many capable minds have been and are diligently employed, and for the teaching of which special provision is made in all universities, may even turn out to be mostly barren and unprofitable. A startling supposition, it is true, but not more so than it would once have been to suppose that the many subtile and acute disquisitions concerning quiddities, essences, entities and the like, which exercised and pleased so many active intellects and fill so many volumes, should ever be more than signal exhibi- tions of the finest mental gymnastics. While thinking, however, on the prodigious labour displayed and the little fruit gathered as was inevitable where men living in seclusion with ample leisure and no practical converse with the objective world occupied themselves solely in dissecting their own minds and weaving fine-spun webs of subtilties it is nevertheless agreeable to think that the special exercise kept intellectual activity alive at a time when it might otherwise have been extinguished, just as the acro- bat's exercises serve to keep up and heighten his bodily activity. Besides, it might be found now that in such subtile and subtle intellectual work and in the obscurities and CH. iv REASON, FEELING AND WILL 69 ambiguities of the language then used to express it there lies hidden some substance of thought which would be of value if translated into the terms of present thought. The proper question of course is as to the value of the method ; for the labour of the strongest intellect on a wrong path can no more avail to reach the right goal than that of the swiftest runner following a wrong track ; it can only lead farther and faster from the true goal. Joy in the performance and assurance of its value are no guarantee of its truth ; for it is sure to be a pleasing exercise of self-expression in the special and habitual groove of thought. Self-consciousness is always prone the more to glorify itself the more intense it is, as it commonly is the narrower it is even then sometimes to sanctify opinion as conscience ; which is not to be wondered at seeing how mightily the human species mag- nifies its abstract consciousness. Although reason, viewing things in its dry light and reflecting on the unlimited adaptations which a finite being in an infinite universe never can make, pours forth from time to time just reflections on the miseries of this mortal life and on the nothingness and emptiness at the bottom of everything, these are unminded so long as the organic impulse of creative motion works actively in the individual being, infusing into each form of life its sufficient joy of living for life in vigour, though it think it believes in death, never really does so they are minded only when life's waning strength foretells its impending ending, its hardened tracts of thought no longer flushed with a steady stream of vital feeling. Therefore it is that when failing strength denotes waning life and desire fails and hope dies and the grasshopper is a burden disillusionment takes its melancholy effect. It is the exceptionally virile old man who, clinging tenaciously to life, keeps his faith in its value and fights against dying to the very last, present- ing then sometimes a pitiful spectacle of reluctant self- surrender. Throughout all life is that organic rule manifest in the falling leaf and the fading flower, in the 70 MENTAL ORGANIZATION FT. i playful kitten and the sedate old cat, in the frisking lamb and the placid old sheep, in the gambolling puppy and the melancholy old dog. To the rigid structure of a nation, again, as to that of an individual, which has passed its prime and begun to decline an apathetic indifference or fatalistic resignation is natural, not natural to a mobile and plastic national organism flushed with the lust of life and vaunting in its vigorous sap. The Christian religion and the Buddhist system of ethics, both inculcating a meek and lowly spirit of renunciation, were born in the aged, if not worn-out, spirit of the East ; they were and are perforce practically ignored by the young and lusty life of the West exulting and insulting in its strenuous vigour to increase itself. 1 Happily for human continuance on earth as the dis- illusioned decay and die and are forgotten the illusioned succeed, aspire and strive. Nowise dismayed by the particular mortal's death, however mighty he may have been, nor by the multitude of deaths which befall every hour, nature quickly makes good the losses in its world of teeming life, and furthermore, being itself, so to speak, immortal, inspires the ending mortal with the hope and belief of an immortal life elsewhere than on a planet where he is no longer wanted. Even the germplasm itself is not really immortal notwithstanding that it is now said to enjoy an undying continuity, like the special grace which has descended from the apostolic fountain upon bishop after bishop of the Holy Catholic Church. Here by the way it may not unfitly be asked whether to speak of " the immortal germplasm " is not to speak somewhat abstractly and equivocally. A continuity of germinal matter from generation to generation is not of course immortality of the particular germplasm which develops, any more than continuity of the family is con- 1 Christianity therefore naturally more suited to the vigorous life of the West than Buddhism, for although, like Buddhism, it inculcated self-abase- ment, it yet supplied aspiration and incentive to an active life of improvement on earth and by its doctrine of personal immortality a value to human life there which Buddhism did not. CH. iv REASON, FEELING AND WILL 71 tinuity of the parents. If the universe be immortal no single thing in it is fixed and immortal. That developing plasm is much changed in every succeeding generation, is not the same in any two collaterals of the same family, assuredly is not the same after a hundred years of such continual changes. Everybody knows that he has two parents, that a generation back he had four grandparents, a generation farther back eight grandparents, and so on backwards. Continuing calculations in that direction, it is said that in ten generations he would have 1024 pro- genitors and in twenty-one generations more than two millions who would all have contributed to the production of his individual germplasm and, being latent in it, might be said to be immortal. Moreover, to say that the un- used residuum of the germplasm is not affected by the constitution and vital functions of the body in which and by which it lives, being carried by it securely in serene aloofness from its order and disorders, its changes and chances, is certainly to make a very large demand on credulity. Considering, after the manner of Pascal, the human race as " one organism continually existing and learning" (which in that sense might be called immortal) it is hard to conceive how it continued to exist and learn with such an independent and self-sufficing element pur- suing its exclusive way. If human feeling has not the transcendent value which human self-esteem ascribes to it, but as in other creatures flushed with the joy of vigorous life is only a passing event in the everlasting flux of things, destined to flourish so long as the sun shines and to vanish into oblivion when its light and heat are 'extinct for man cannot honestly say that his wits and feelings owe no homage to the sun to which they owe their existence and continuance the ecstasy of feeling may be just the emotional outcome in consciousness of the life-infusing solar energy and of no more lasting value than the song of the bird, the hum of the bee, the chirp of the grasshopper, the croak of the amorous frog ; all which creatures are so many diversely 72 MENTAL ORGANIZATION w. i framed instruments through which the universal pulse of life more or less melodiously sounds. As also, in truth, are the finest utterances of the exquisitely delicate im- pressions and rhythms of nature in" music, in poetry, in painting, in sculpture which the greatest artists feel and more or less adequately embody in excellent work ; there- by so objectifying them in beautiful form as to kindle and educate similar fine rhythmical feelings in similarly susceptible minds. Constitutionally sensitive to, without being distinctly sensible of, these subtile rhythms of universal being, they utter them in harmony of form, as the bird utters its song in harmony of sound, when they have the adequate skill of execution. Is not that the biological foundation on which all the elaborate disquisi- tions concerning aesthetics rest at bottom fitly fine reactions to exquisitely delicate impressions ? Beauty as really felt is not absolute but a general name to denote relative feeling. That which one people or one person likes and calls beauty is disliked and called ugly by another ; and the beauty admired by the most civilized peoples is the result not of any postulated meta- physical notion of absolute beauty, but of their similar traditions, education, intellectual and social development. Similar feelings answer to similarly refined mental struc- tures. To go ideally beyond the positive basis of facts in order to discover in beauty, love or any other tran- scendental emotion a supernatural origin and import is to pass beyond the solid ground of observation and sober thought into mystical feeling and vague words which, whatever their personal delight and value, yield no in- struction. The last thing which a great artist of any kind who creates a true work of art does is consciously to devise and execute a particular embodiment of the beautiful, the true, the good, or any other abstraction which he may torture his imagination beforehand designedly to picture to order. The product in that case would at best be clever artifice not true art. True creation is no such conscious process, CH. iv REASON, FEELING AND WILL 73 is unconscious gestation consciousness illuming and supervising the execution. The creator works objectively better than he knows because he constructs well that which in nature his finely constructed nature is inspired to feel and joys to express. Therefore it is that he who is not born with the fit delicacies of feeling and aptitudes of execution can never be a great artist, labour he ever so hard, and that he who has them will, as Shakespeare did, express them exuberantly in exquisitely melodious work which is not always perfect art at all events not as the Greek poets understood art, or as Tolstoi did in his censure of Shakespeare's ' Mosaics.' Therefore it is too that the poor picture, lacking the essential subtilties of fine feeling and fluent expression, is no better, perhaps worse, than a coloured photograph, which is a similar defective and in the case of emotional expression a positively ugly fixity ; and that the scores of novels, poems and plays published are for the most part expositions only of the ill-structed, ill-nourished, ill-trained minds of authors appealing to the sentimentalisms and fancies of similar ill-fashioned and ill-toned minds. Here by the way notice may not unfitly be taken of Dryden's specious saying, so often quoted, that "great wit to madness is allied and thin partitions do the bounds divide," which is sure to be perpetually reiterated despite its very partial truth because it has so often been said and sounds so pat. Great wit is just what the partial and thin strain of genius allied to madness lacks. To speak of the so-called artistic temperament with its special sensibility as an innate excellence which requires neither sound thought nor patient observation nor dili- gent labour to nurture and perfect it, but excuses self- indulgent lack of self-discipline and industry, with persistent moral groping into its own sensibilities, is thoughtlessly to sanction self -inflamed and disproportionate feeling, to encourage egotistic self-sufficiency, and in the issue to foster a deformity and stealthy moral deterioration of mind. Its keen self-love and narrow self-worship really 74 MENTAL ORGANIZATION PT. i separate it from whole and wholesome converse with nature. 1 The greatest poets, and it is true of other great artists of Michael Angelo as of Shakespeare were sane and large-minded, assiduously industrious, intellectu- ally nourished by observation and experience, solid and sensible, not addicted to spinning fine webs of fancies, or complexities of rhythms, or preciosities of diction and rhyme out of imperfectly nourished brains in the closet ; nor setting themselves with deliberate pains to blow a thin emotion into iridescent bubbles of glittering verbiage ; nor again to throw in the face of readers riddles of artfully twisted grammar to hide obscurities or platitudes of thought and feeling, the meaning of which they may delight to guess or, not guessing, deem profound. On the contrary, they diligently fed their imaginations with facts, worked hard to assimilate them, disciplined their minds in vital con- tact with the realities of life, expressed themselves in plain and intelligible language. Their great genius was sanely nourished by, or sanely nourished, their great wit ; whereas the self-adulating artistic temperament lacks the wit to be conscious of its own want of wit That kind of genius, it is true, sometimes has a streak of madness in it, and it is equally true that in some kind of madness there is a streak of genius ; but the greatest genius is the sanest, the genius of Homer and Shakespeare far away from that of such so-called seers as Blake and Sweden- borg. 2 1 According to Aristotle the poet especially of all workmen is the fondest of his performances. And he might perhaps have added that he is most so whose works are most void of substance and flightily fanciful ; the reason being that he then loves to put as much strained subjective self as he can, and as little objective world into his substanceless work as may serve for a start in his ecstatic and sometimes semi-delirious flight of self-intoxicating words. 2 Of the genius of Swedenborg there can be no reasonable doubt. It was clearly shown in his wide knowledge, his ingenious speculations, and his remarkable scientific forecasts, anticipating much that has now been found out. He was truly a seer while he devoted himself assiduously to scientific investigation. It was after a short attack of mania (which his disciples willingly and wittingly ignore) that he relinquished his scientific studies and betook himself to the study of angels, " correspondences," heaven and the CH. iv REASON, FEELING AND WILL 75 Beneath all mental function, conscious and unconscious, lie the inherited quality and structural pattern of brain which no labour of thought can add to when they are defective, yet produces such good results when they are excellent. Instead of lame wonder, the wiser work would be to reflect closely on the positive significance of such remarkable facts as the prodigy of the calculating boy, the innate structure of whose thought is so aptly proportioned arithmetically as to function mechanically or instinctively ; on the precocious talent of the musically endowed child ; on the innate mathematical genius of the young Pascal, and on other extraordinary innate aptitudes so fitly fashioned as to react in mysterious response to their proper impressions. To find out what such special structure exactly is and learn how it has been organized in the person through preceding generations will be to supply a positive knowledge of individual psychology which may then require only simple words to set it forth plainly and render it easily intelligible. In the ordinary relations of social intercourse there are notably beautiful natures whose rhythms instantly strike pleasant concords, ugly natures which strike displeasing discords by subtile mental emanations personal affinities which instantly attract and antipathies which instantly repel : the world not a world of formal thought only but more a world of feeling, and moreover of sentience so exquisitely fine and fluent as many times to be scarce conscious of itself and quite unconscious of its causal ante- cedents. The exaggerated conceit of human consciousness as a constant entity, though this is but a general name, has not perhaps been wholly favourable to a just interpretation of the value of human life on earth. A truth which religion may claim to have instinctively recognized and expressly second coming of a New Jerusalem announced by him in his mission of a second Christ. As to Blake, his greatest admirers confess that notwithstanding his poetical and artistic genius much of his work was the product of a de- lirious imagination : in his case genius and madness were undoubtedly near allied. 76 MENTAL ORGANIZATION w. i avowed when it taught that without immortality mortal life would be meaningless. The real truth, as the so-called materialist holds, is that it is exquisitely fine cerebral structure which performs the fine mental function, not the attribute consciousness, as those suppose who speak lightly and loosely of its directing and controlling mental states. In his opinion the consciousness follows naturally as a functional reflex effect, whether as an ordinary consequent or an extra- ordinary parallel event, and no more controls the process than the reflection of the face in a mirror controls the play of its features. Such order of the process might perhaps be more evident and acceptable if adequate thought were given to the surprising creations and signally dramatic work done in dreams when, its life of relation suspended, the slumbering but irregularly active brain creates more easily, vividly and variedly than when working under conscious observation in waking ; con- sciousness then dancing attendance on the grotesquely incongruous yet sometimes congruous events of the unruly function without the least surprise, resentment, protest, or control : a notable uprising of physiology into psycho- logy by continuity of being. Or again, were observation made of the extraordinarily transformed consciousness of a person who, subject to brief attacks of a recurrent yet singularly coherent mania the so-called folie circulaire is during them quite a different personality from his normal self, and seldom more distressed or dismayed after them by any sense of responsibility or regret for his foolish deeds during them than the dreamer is by what he has imagined himself to have done in his dream. Not to speak of the consciousness of the hypnotized person servile to the special cerebral tracts which the performer on them puts into exclusive action ; nor in fact of the consciousness of one special sense when it directly contradicts the consciousness of another special sense, regardless then of the supreme authority and control of an abstract consciousness. The same lesson CH. iv REASON, FEELING AND WILL 77 of physical dependence and consequence is taught by the organized stores of memory incorporate in fit cere- bral structure and working unconsciously there, which, when brought into reflective consciousness, are conscious mind. To create and employ an unconscious mind to do the work which the conscious mind does not but the brain does silently perform in waking and in dreaming (wondered at then as if it were something anomalous) is gratuitously superfluous, pure metaphysics obstinately bent on prejudging facts and ignoring science. It is either to keep a conscious entity at work unconsciously, or to make two entities to conjure with. 1 Mysterious and yet inscrutable as are the subtilties and ecstasies of human feelings and inspirations they may after all only witness to an organic vital unity with the nature from which human nature proceeds and of which it is part, and the notion of their transcendental value be no more than the egotistic fiction of its self- idolatry : the influx of the spirit from above be really the natural influx of organic impulse from below. If its ecstatic transports really reach back beyond the external nature by which it lives and with which it is in necessary connection they still owe essential homage to the sun by sole virtue of which they and all living nature exist ; and should they be thought to reach yet farther back beyond the visible firmament they can be supposed to merge mentally into an universal pantheistic or panethereal communion which may be called "an equating of self- consciousness with the Allconsciousness," or some similar 1 More absurdly, if possible, many persons placidly write about a subliminal consciousness which is strictly an absurdly postulated consciousness below the level of consciousness, nothing else than a fictitious entity made out of a contradiction of terms. More than half a century was required to teach psychologists the lesson of unconscious mental function, and such is the present perversion of the lesson to the service of old prejudice. By perversion to its services of partially learnt physiological facts and translation of them into its .terms, however, psychology slowly brings itself into more vital contact with realities, which cannot fail gradually to qualify if not to subvert its abstractions. 78 MENTAL ORGANIZATION PT . i hypnotizing but senseless words. 1 Forgoing such super- natural flights of thought beyond the reach of natural thought, the sober inference from facts is that so long as the energy of organic evolution works in the human species so long will this be impelled by the self-con- servative and reproductive instincts of life to maintain its being and reproduce its kind, creating in its advance the required illusions or ideals to inspire ; and further- more that as long as human self-worship lasts, so long will its finest sympathies with external nature be thought to have transcendent value. Life in mind is the funda- mental fact to be borne in mind life in feeling and thought drawing on definite belief of some kind to fulfil itself in definite conduct ; the inherent craving and striving for more life consciously evolving in hope and achievement, and aspiring to full fruition in this or a world to come. It is obvious that man cannot any more than the lower animals choose but hold the illusion, if illusion it be, that life on earth is worth living for its own sake and practically spurn pessimistic, and even religious, deprecia- tion of it. Should productive instinct decline, however, though there is no present sign of a decline even where the fruits of it are least welcome, a coincident or sequent effect might be the decline of love and religion which, rooted in it, have risen by gradational development through family, tribe and nation to their fine human flowering and are expected to reach the glorious consum- mation of universal brotherhood. Thus to trace love to its root in lust is nowise, as ignorant prejudice might 1 Very much as the somewhat unfairly ridiculed old woman was comforted by the sound of the blessed word Mesopotamia. For the sound thrilled her heart by its sacred associations in the religious atmosphere of the hallowed place where from childhood onwards she had reverently prayed to an over- ruling Father in Heaven to sustain, aid and console her in patient endurance and quiet hope through the labours, sorrows and sufferings of a nearly spent life : the solemn feeling more real and worth more to her than anything which understanding could give. Can any purely social ideal ever give equal solace and support in life and death ? The derisive critic of the trusting old woman might well bethink himself how many less useful fictions of thought he now devoutly cherishes. CH. iv REASON, FEELING AND WILL 79 impetuously declare, to imply that love is lust, any more than to trace the flower to the leaf of which it is a trans- formation, or the leaf to the branch, the branch to the stem, the stem to the root, is to say that the flower is the root ; or after analysis of a chemical compound to say that its properties are the sum of the properties of the combining elements, which they are not. How can a natural phenomenon like life or love have its superior nature altered and be robbed of its value and dignity if the mechanism of its organic production be traced, and it is no longer an awe-striking mystery ? Yet that is the foolish fear of many persons who at the same time believe that they think and act naturally in an intelligent order of nature which it is the duty and glory of their intel- ligence to find out. 1 Why then such eager haste to invoke supernatural agency where there is no necessity ? With the increase of knowledge such necessity has steadily decreased. Degrees of rising conceptions must of course go along with degrees of the evolution of nature through man. And when all is said spiritualization, so far from being a detached and independent process in a separate region, may be the sublimation or impalpable subtilization of visible and palpable nature ; the materialization of the subtilized energies called spirit and the subtilization or immaterialization of the energies of the most rarefied matter being a question of words rather than of things : spirit not a separately acting self in two joined selves of one body but one bodily self raised to its highest power of spiritual function. Adequate conceptions of the nature and operations of infinitely minute matter cannot fail at last to modify the crude notions of materialism and mechanism derived 1 Or, as they sometimes absurdly say, a rational Universe which they aspire and think to express in terms of personality, not reflecting that what they would thus express is merely a small fraction of the inconceivable universe expressed within the confine of a small self, of what quality soever that may be, and that inferences beyond it intellectual or moral are as meaningless as unjustifiable, nothing else but the application of terms of the very limited to the illimitable. 8o MENTAL ORGANIZATION PT . i from superficial observation of so-called inert matter. Reflect biologically on the many subtile adaptations through countless ages which the small body of a bird or a bee quintessentially incarnates and easily uses in its automatic functions the wonderful mathematics contained in their minute mechanisms ; reflect, again, that every organ, every cell of the particular bird or bee is individu- ally characterized, differing in however minute degree from that of any other bird or bee and radiating its own rhythms of motion ; consider furthermore that the numer- ous substances which work continuously in the intimate and complex metabolic processes are infinitesimally minute yet most subtilely potent ; and, lastly, endeavour to picture in mind the inscrutably minute potentialities of their several architectures in the speck of each seem- ingly homogeneous plasm, so small the speck as to be invisible to the naked eye, yet so wondrously pregnant. Then, having duly pondered these things and their import, and by way of supplement called to mind in aid of con- ception the subtilties, potencies and energies of radio- active matter, candidly ask whether it is reasonable to insist on an impassable gulf between materialism and idealism and on the breach of evolutional continuity which the theory of two separate unities upholds. The plain fact of objective observation is that there is no gap but that the creative motion, proceeding continuously, culminates in the mental functions of the human brain : the unity of human evolution with the unity of nature's organic ascent the fundamental fact. The aim of positive research therefore is now patiently to find out the nature and operations of the sun's energies on protoplasmic matter and the yet undiscovered minute physical and chemical changes which are known to go on in regular order of increasing complexities. And for this purpose new methods of observation are notably invented and profitably employed ; for although the processes are so exceeding subtile as to be invisible through the most powerful microscope, undemonstrable too for the most CH. iv REASON, FEELING AND WILL 81 part by the most delicate known chemical reactions, they produce their more delicate physiological reactions which then furnish a method of deeper and more subtile research into the secret recesses of life. Hope here, it is true, is yet far ahead of achievement ; for the physiological chemist obviously has a great deal of minute work to do before he can explain the scent of the violet, if perchance he ever can. When, however, the subtile physical and chemical processes condensed within the small compass of a living cell and the exquisitely fine and intricate intra-workings of its secret structure are made known, it will be interesting to see what the unified outcome of their energies is if it is not vital, and by natural law individually vital in its diverse developments, bodily and mental. In view of the physiological conditions at the bottom of all mental processes, especially manifest in those underlying the development of the reproductive system, it is curious to think what might happen in the sad case of a decline of the propagative instinct before the far-off goal of human perfection was reached. Might not a downward course of things putting off rudely and rapidly the culture which has been slowly and painfully put on through the ages, and is so quickly put off on critical occasions, possibly then repeat the worst features of human history perhaps even worsen them seeing that " lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds " ruthful love degenerate into brutish lust, moral into immoral force, religion into base superstition ? Then too might perish hope itself which Epimetheus, after he had rashly let loose a swarm of calamities among mortals, hastily shut down in Pandora's box. Little indeed would life's worth be without hope ; for hope marks the animating pulse of life, and the saddest sorrow is to sorrow without hope. Such gloomy forecast of the consequences of a failure of the propagative instinct is, it may be said, a gratuitous exercise of pessimistic fancy. The result might eve*- be a higher spiritualization of humanity. For it is note- G 82 MENTAL ORGANIZATION PT. i worthy that there have been signal instances of fervent sentiment, superior intellectual endowment and passionate humanitarian zeal in persons who were sexually impotent. Not, it is true, persons to whom it would have been safe to entrust the management of the world's affairs, which they would probably soon have wrecked by their impractic- able enthusiasm, but self-prizing and self-admiring idealists pleased to discharge vehemently in passionate rhetoric the emotional outpours of their spiritually inflamed self-love, in defiance of the needed conventions and rude necessities of practical reason. Yes, verily fundamental self-love, harsh as it seems to say it, for their physiological defect inevitably deprives them of the essential elements of a whole being in its life of relation, impairs sense of pro- portion, prevents or hinders silent altruistic virtue in the practical commerce and relations of intimate life. So subtle and surreptitious indeed is vanity in its insidious permeation that it is prone to disguise and excuse, if not glorify, itself as superior constitutional sensibility and to feel any hurt to itself to be a wrong to righteousness. Without doubt such persons have their value to keep the ideal fire alive, Utopias being useful ideals, and may there- fore be accounted useful stimulants provided that they are but a small minority in a community. They are plainly not in any case to be relied on as fit mental and bodily material for the sound reproduction and stable continuance of the species, whose nature is fundamentally animal, its development an organic process, and its progress a struggle to continue and increase. Always of necessity a struggle with the physical environment, many times individually and internationally with the living environment a goal which in either case can only be won by strife. Considering calmly and impartially the association of spiritual idealism with the lack of reproductive capacity, its deliberate abnegation by the inmates of monasteries and nunneries, its suppression by other persons who have aspired to special saintly lives, the glorification of human Parthenogenesis, and the conventional reticence and reserve CH. iv REASON, FEELING AND WILL 83 habitually enforced concerning its function, a curious if fanciful surmise is whether in a perfecting human progress the animal is ordained to be worked out of man and he to be finally purified from all lusts of the flesh. Instead of expecting the realization of that ideal on earth in a kingdom of man it will doubtless be more prudent and safe for the optimist to relegate it to a kingdom of heaven where there is neither marriage nor giving in marriage. CHAPTER V MENTAL CAPITALIZATION Increase of human resources. Capitalized mind in machinery. Mental capacities and moral sense. Natural inequalities. The social unit in the social structure. The miser, the misanthrope and the recluse. Specially structuralized minds. Subjugation of reason and subtle self - deception. Special racial structures. Abstract and concrete morality. Gratitude and ingratitude to the past. The growth of truth out of errors and hurts. Mournful experience and joyful aspira- tion. Western cult of personal salvation. Systematic structuralization of individual mind to prescribed pattern. The happy upleap of a variation. Signal instruction by imitation. Animal instruction of the young. Instinct implicit reason, reason explicit instinct. Modification of instincts. Exquisite mental organization, complex composition of nerve - element, and mind or soul. Introspection barren and de- ceptive. The unconscious metaphysical mind and the degradation of matter. AN optimistic view of human nature may not lack reasons to justify it, provided it soar not aloft to the vision of an ideal perfection, near or remote. The motive power of the race's progress in ages past can safely be counted on for years to come. 1 As nature is subdued more and more to human uses by intelligent observa- tion of and adaptation to its laws and by the various disciplined associations and fit co-operations of persons and labours in a complex and compact society, human 1 Even the Positivists, who reject supernatural help and derive inspiration from the Great Being of Humanity, satisfied with the worship of its supreme self-hood, share the expectation of perfection with those who worship a supreme supernatural Being. These might perhaps say of them as Pascal is reported by his niece to have said of the philosophy of Descartes : Je ne puis pas pardonner a Descartes : il auroit bien voulu dans toute sa philosophic pouvoir se passer de Dieu ; mais il n'a pu s'empecher de lui accorder une chiquenaude pour mettre le monde en mouvement ; apres cela il n'a plus que faire de Dieu. 84 CH. v MENTAL CAPITALIZATION 85 resources are immensely increased. Rapid locomotion, facilities of quick intercommunication, free and easy ex- changes of thought and products, scientific discoveries, mechanical inventions, improved agriculture, and many other combined achievements have notably made a prodigious addition to the commodities, appliances, pro- ductions, opportunities and general assets of civilized peoples, and greatly modified their social and economic conditions. By slow degrees and irregularly from the first has mental capital thus been gradually accumu- lated and fitly distributed, and is now being rapidly added to. In every machine, cart, carriage, wheelbarrow, pump, pulley and other useful implement ; in every grain of rice and wheat or other cultivated product of field and garden ; in every look, gesture, smile and word are embedded the capitalized gains and memories of a long line of precedent workers, unknown or unremembered, who toiled generation after generation to fashion and perfect it to human uses. 1 Although substantially so called dead matter as if matter ever were really inert and dead and its apparent passivity did not imply reacting energy to the agent acting on it, such reaction being essentially its act a complex machine performing its purposive work exactly and regularly, without haste and without worry, is a quasi-living solidarity, so to speak. Inwrought with the rational adaptations of successive generations of nameless improvers which its structure imports, it discharges its function automatically instinctively it would be said, were it alive being in fact so much structuralized intelligence embodying and using so many 1 Too little thought is usually given to these silent gifts of inheritance by the posterity which hourly profits by them. Yet if we look back in imagination on the pains once required to light a fire when, if the tinder failed to glow, the person was obliged to go to a neighbour's house to beg a smouldering turf or piece of live coal, we might wonder at the ease with which a fire is now lighted and the indifference with which a match, itself the product of long and laboriously accumulated experience and thought, is now thrown away as of little value. Human nature, like other animate nature, feeds on past life and for the most part shows as little open gratitude. 86 MENTAL ORGANIZATION PT . i mind-powers. A single person putting it to work can now easily apply its power with perfect precision and enormous advantage to do that quickly which he could not do for himself if he had to make the invention and could live a thousand years to perfect it. The wonderful calculation it would be to estimate the number of mind- powers incorporate in and now represented by the modern battleship evolved step by step from the primitive canoe which was patiently and laboriously fashioned without axe or chisel out of the felled or fallen tree : the values of the multitude of past minds which have acted in the mental constitutions of its successive inventors and act now in the performance of its perfected functions. It is in like manner that the intelligent instincts of animals represent the silent memories of past habits of acquired function grafted in structure, and that the innate capaci- ties and aptitudes of human intellect signify the quint- essence of immemorial consolidate adaptations transmitted as unconscious mind by heredity. In the battleship the process is called mechanical ; in the animal it is called instinctive, which is just to say that it is fitly organized mechanism in it ; in the man it is deemed something beyond physics, though in nature not essentially of it, mysteriously divine. Yet the word divine, when it is positively examined, has no definite meaning, at any rate not the same meaning, if it has meaning, to different minds ; it is really a vague term of pleasing embellish- ment. It is because of the divine essence specially claimed for their nature that many persons who think it natural and right to trace how the instinct of the machine to do its proper work and purposely does it has been acquired yet think it impious to enquire into the gradual implanta- tion of the most highly developed functions of mind, its noblest aspirations and feelings, by processes of regular organic becoming ; and this notwithstanding their pro- fessed belief that in the process of creation " man became a living soul " and that his body now is " the temple of CH. v MENTAL CAPITALIZATION 87 the living God." They recoil from thinking of them otherwise than as gifts of grace from on high without either mortal origin or ending, divinely instilled with an immortal yearning foretelling an immortal be*ing. Especially repugnant is any positive research into the earthly origin and nature of the moral sense which the scientific enquirer cannot choose but make. To him it seems odd that those who now accept the doctrine of evolution in lieu of a special creation of man should shrink from applying it to all qualities of the. evolved product. The creation of mind in man obviously being no more a special creation than the creation of Adam and Eve, seeing that animal minds of different degrees and qualities exist and that every single quality of the human mind is present in germ or rudiment in one animal or another, it is plainly reasonable to investigate every mental function positively by the scientific method profitably applied to every other natural phenomenon ; unreasonable to suppose that its study can be safely based on the introspective skill of different persons well or ill endowed and equipped mentally for the purpose ; especially when it is remembered that the conscious is the disclosure only of a part and that but a small part of the precedent unconscious mental process. Mankind would fare ill without its rich store of incarnate mind beneath the abstract conscious attribute. Antecedent humanity lives in the silent memories of habits of function inherent in its present constitution as well as in the number of ingenious mechanisms multiply- ing a thousandfold its power of action. It is the bad fortune of him who does not possess an adequate furniture of innate mental capacity and aptitude to enable him to assimilate and use the store of latent intelligence : a defect of structure for which not he but his forefathers might be blamed, had blame any place in a purely scientific exposition of what has been and is. For when all is said it is the stock in him not his particular parent which counts more than environment in the personal struggle of life. The fond belief that natural inequalities 88 MENTAL ORGANIZATION PT . i shall be done away with on earth as in heaven, and all those who are low in the mental scale be raised to a lofty intellectual and moral plane by the action of a uniformly favourable environment and a wonder-working education, is for the present a wild vision of amiable optimism wilfully blind to disagreeable facts. Degenerate elements notably seize and use in good surroundings matter to feed themselves. To say that man is a social being is of course to say that he not only lives in and serves a constituted society but that the society lives in him, which is the reason why he feels and thinks radically as he does in it ; the reason too why the historian rightly endeavours to judge the character and conduct of an eminent person in connection with and relation to the social spirit, circumstances and language of the time, although judging them by the standard of his own habit of thought, feeling and language in another mental atmosphere and other circumstances, he is very apt, if not pretty sure, to misjudge. In the mental composition of every sound social member is embedded the particular social spirit of his medium as well as of the past of humanity ; its mental atmosphere he imbibes from cradle to grave ; its currents of activity insensibly permeate and infuse him ; in its continuous stream of being he lives his transient being. How estimate the long suc- cessions of patient thinkings, flashes of imagination and intuition, motive pulses of feeling, immemorial adaptive strivings, mostly anonymous, from generation to genera- tion through many myriads of years which have con- tributed to the funded capital of intelligence and are now represented in the traditions, laws, institutions, customs, language, and the social, economic and political organization of a modern civilized State, the lessening intellectual and moral capital as well as wealth of which the decadent State recklessly spends ? Spending is seductive and easy when there is much to spend ; it spends therefore as recklessly as it spends the immense capital of coal stored in primeval forests by the incor- CH. v MENTAL CAPITALIZATION 89 poration of the solar energies which, when released, now so effectually serve it. 1 The misanthrope who is sometimes the might-have- been philanthropist turned inside out, a morally sensitive nature harshly grated by his rude experience of life, ready once to love his neighbour before he learnt to know him well, owes his power to shun or hate his kind to the kind inwrought in himself; the miser who, mentally warped perhaps by the penury of his forefathers and his early sufferings, hoards riches which he can never make use of, joys in his hoardings only because of their value in a social exchange which he blindly or wilfully abjures ; the recluse who, shutting himself out from society and despis- ing its conventionalities, lives a solitary and self-absorbed life of meditation or devotion, or vents his inflated self- love in declamatory prose or passionate rhyme, which is an agreeable discharge of the incontinent emotion of self- love, constructs a pleasing social medium out of a glorified past or an idealized present in which he is a sort of play- acting prophet. In his heart is implicit the latent convic- tion that his coming into the world was a boon to show it what it is, to warn it from going from bad to worse, to urge it forwards on the right path. That it would go on well without his example and admonitions is displeasing and hardly credible to his self-esteem. Surprising it would be if the people of differently structured nations did not feel and act differently seeing how surely their physical, social and political environment has effected a steady organic shaping and fashioning, a literal mental instruction of individuals from generation to generation to think, feel and act alike. Naturally and necessarily therefore in their vital struggle nations com- pete, emulate, quarrel and fight, counting their patriotism 1 And not perhaps always quite wrongly, for the exhaustion of the supply must needs be a stimulus to find out some other and better way of obtaining heat and power, necessity being the mother of invention, and the aim of civilization to multiply wants and their means of gratification. There is no imaginable limit to what man can expect to do when he can quietly release and regulate the condensed energies contained in the atom as well as the active little midge rules and uses the condensed energies of its minute body. 90 MENTAL ORGANIZATION PT . i a creed. Daily observation shows that a class of persons in a community, designedly and systematically fashioned by special education, traditional observances, official train- ing, habitual performances, are so physically organized that they cannot choose but think and feel as they have been trained and constructed to think and feel the subtile motions of their minds then as mechanical as the movements of the soldier who performs the prescribed movements of his drill ; therefore they go on to rehearse automatically in their special language the fixed functions of their mental structures irresponsive to, indeed imperme- able by, the freer thought around them. How can they do otherwise, being thus organically framed by habit to respond to special impressions and do special work ; for the mental habit is silently strengthened by its agreeable exercise and what is a real danger then surely tends to deform or disintegrate the personality ? Naively wondering at and sadly outraged by the monstrous irrationalities of a barbarous religion, the missionary of a superior creed is not in the least disquieted by the irrationalities of his own creed ; to him they are illumined supra-rationalities which, transcending and contradicting reason, are sacred mysteries marking its superiority and he therefore devoutly hugs as verities of faith. How could a miracle be a miracle a mystery to be adored if it did not contradict and tran- scend plain reason ? How can the collective self-love of a specially framed pattern of humanity do otherwise than love and adore its special creed ? A pathetic and rather piteous effect of an infallible creed in a changing world and changing creatures is the occasional spectacle of a subtile and subtle intellect driven deliberately to a resolute subjugation of itself to believe dogmas against which it secretly rebels, yet piously and sternly suppressing the least rebellious intrusion of reason and rigorously upholding the supremacy of the fitly fed and fenced faith in its superior and sacred domain. More disagreeable to the impartial observer is the spectacle because, knowing mind to be a unity, he cannot but feel CH. v MENTAL CAPITALIZATION 91 that a mental disunity implies an incoherence and in- sincerity of thought entailing the risk of a subtle self- deception and an insidious demoralization ; while the habit of such surreptitious self-deception, obliterating the consciousness of it, becomes a pleasing exercise. Without doubt the complete subjugation can be determined, dared and done by the method of perseveringly moulding a mental fabric which Pascal recommended and Cardinal Newman practised. 1 Is a higher unity of mind then really attained in the realm of the approved faith, not- withstanding that the method is equally applicable to the several conflicting religions and equally successful when applied strenuously with equal zeal ? Obviously it ought to be used only in the case of the true religion, other- wise it would authenticate and sanctify falsehood ; for, as Shaftesbury says, "the most ingenious method of becoming foolish is by system." Obviously too it ought to be used with discretion ; for most persons nowadays would shrink from the complete abasement of reason which Pascal, following St. Paul, recommended. A full development of reason in due subjection to a not too exactly defined faith, that is the ardent desire and at the same time the undeniable, if not insuperable difficulty. It is a discreeter and easier procedure to cherish the faith ideally and conventionally to profess it while privily reserving and practising a subordination of its dogmas to reason. The formation and segregation of a specially reserved mental compartment in which the person invests a special capital of almost isolated thought and feeling illustrates within a narrow compass and comparatively short period 1 To begin as they began and do as they did who succeeded : c'est en laissant tout comme s'ils croyoient, en prenant de 1'eau benite, en faisant dire des messes, etc. Naturellement meme cela vous fera croire et vous abetira. The work may be done by fervent and persistent prayer without such ceremonial observances, although these no doubt help greatly. By the habitual exercise of a wish and earnest effort of the will to believe, an intent and intense expectation of the desired result, a resolute rejection of the least intruding doubt, the fit tracts of thought and feeling can be strained to a fixed habit of exclusive and pleasing exercise and a separate world of grateful function thus created. 92 MENTAL ORGANIZATION PT. i the organic process which has proceeded on a large scale and through long time in the mental structuralization of the race by the incorporation of adaptive function into its now innate forms and aptitudes of thought, feeling and conduct ; as also of the special types of racial mental structure which, notwithstanding a doctrine of universal brotherhood, are more or less antipathetic, incapable of genuine sympathetic feeling and reciprocal understanding, and therefore urged instinctively, if not to internecine conflict, at least to refrain from intermarriages which are likely to degrade the higher without improving the lower type. Race-prejudice is in fact self-conservative race- protection ; a formidable barrier therefore to the lateral expansion of humanity optimistically lauded and looked for prior to its eventual uniform and universal upleap. Inevitably then it comes to pass that abstract morality is ideal, revivified from time to time by great teachers, which remains an abstraction, and that concrete morality is the positive habit of thinking, feeling and doing to which the units of a nation have been organically moulded and they actually practise. Moral values are notoriously as nearly diverse as peoples and the moral ideal of one people different from that of another. Con- sciousness as a reality, being custom-trained, obediently follows suit as a special conscience, nowise of uniform quality and quantity, but actually a varying and fluctuating product of mental function. As one kind of feeling, good or bad, proceeds from one kind of thinking and doing, so another kind of feeling, good or bad, proceeds from another kind of thinking and doing. Thus happily for the sinner in the individual case does the habit of sin and self-deception diminish the sense of sin and ease the doing that which at first was done uneasily ; so subtly and insidiously too sometimes that he can at last persuade himself that he sins rightfully if not righteously. For the most part too little thought is given to the mental inheritance from the past and the vital work which it has done in the production of present thought CH. v MENTAL CAPITALIZATION 93 and feeling. Inevitably does an abstract spiritual mind evade observation of the processes of its positive de- velopment and gradual organization. Christianity, it is true, pays its pious homage to the past in respect of its special origin and doctrine, although when it arose it made a complete breach with the past, repudiating as foolishness all precedent knowledge, exultantly vaunt- ing its fitness for babes and sucklings (this isolated atti- tude wisely abandoned when its learned disciples like Augustine, Jerome and other fathers of the Church discovered that learning could be usefully employed to support its precepts) and counting all previous human life as meaningless before the stupendous event which was to make atonement for a race of fallen beings whose hard fate through many myriads of years it was to live without and not even expect it. Yet the irreverent repudiation of knowledge and previous moral instruction was as unreasonable as it was self-sufficient and pernicious : it could not fail to make Christianity the conventional profession rather than the real practice which it virtually has been. Hundreds of years before Christ, Buddha had evolved and set forth not a religion of supernatural import, it is true, but an ideal system of ethics which was far from being foolishness and is still vital, and Confucius a religion which was a pure code of morals. Had St. Paul been acquainted with Buddhism and Confucianism and duly studied the Greek philosophers and their Latin pupils, instead of having only sat at the feet of the learned Jew Gamaliel, it is curious to surmise what the effect might have been on his life and writings and on the sub- sequent course of the Christianity which through him became a direct offspring of Judaism. Be that as it may, it is obvious ingratitude and folly in any present which is the natural evolution of the past to despise its knowledge as worthless and its errors as contemptible, and mightily to magnify its own superiority ; for these very errors had their place and value to promote the evolutional process 94 MENTAL ORGANIZATION PT . r of which it is the outcome. All the more strange because the present never is but instantly, before it can realize itself, becomes the past. A just reflection by the persons of a particular epoch and place might so far clarify thought as to teach that its truths of to-day are in part the products of the errors of yesterday and that truths of to-morrow will proceed from truth-deemed errors of to-day. A single failure can notably teach more than a hundred counsels (quae nocent docent, as the Latin proverb taught) : to go wrong and suffer in consequence is to learn to go right and profit thereby. Hurt and discomfort provoke curiosity and reactive effort to find out the means to prevent and avoid them, thus eliciting fresh adaptations and pro- gressive intellectual growth, whereas the comfortable situation, being quietly enjoyed, stirs no desire nor adaptive effort to change it. Had the human species lived at happy ease in Eden and not been obliged to earn its bread by the sweat of its face it might not have troubled to advance in knowledge ; there would have been no evil in the world to provoke spiritual reaction ; for no ideal truth to be laboriously pursued would then have sprung up from the comfortable equilibrium of a blissful life. Nor would the hope of everlasting felicity in a world to come have been required to compensate the unhappiness of life in an actual world. The curiosity of its first parents to know made its posterity the miserable sinners which they then learnt and have since sorrowed to be, happily or unhappily without relinquishing the curiosity to know. Perceiving what labour and sorrow the lust of knowing and growing has cost, the aspiration is to an ideal life of eternal rest and bliss which shall be a negation of the present life of struggle on earth a life in which there shall be no more striving to know with its accompanying toils, pains and griefs, no goal to be won, no real con- tinuity in fact of present life. The individual person shall continue to be, but so transformed spiritually, either CH. v MENTAL CAPITALIZATION 95 immediately or purgatorially, as to be quite another person at rest for ever in unspeakable bliss, which he could hardly be if he were not so changed as to be completely oblivious of past persons and his past personality. Is the craving for such rest and peace at last (a virtual non- existence) a deep instinct of human nature foreboding the vanity of its long labours under an expiring sun ? Thinking on what knowledge has been in the past, its changing values and frequent eclipses ; on what religion has taught to be the supreme aim and right conduct of a transient life of labour and sorrow, which in the morning is, like the grass, green and in the evening cut down and withered ; on what fine precepts of conduct and maxims of stoical endurance philosophy has found it necessary to inculcate ; on what laborious thought and provisional stay of belief in one shape or another man has sought and taught to give meaning and value to his life on earth, or at least to make its miseries explicable and endurable ; on the successively exploded myths, fables, superstitions and hypotheses which he has invented to help him on his way since he began to think ; and above all on the furious contentions, ruthless persecutions, odious cruelties and destructive wars which he has practised in his fights for a creed or a doctrine or a word in a creed ; thinking on these things, it may be that beneath all his lauded civilization there is a lurking doubt of its value, perhaps a deep instinct of the final nothingness of human life. 1 Be that as it may, the ever-craving, ever-seeking, ever- hoping vital struggle to attain ideal truth and happi- ness will evidently persist while organic energy lasts in vigour, even though it be only a splendid illusion ; will continue, too, to evoke and promote the progressive adaptations of aspiring life to fuller being and therewith 1 If a person could be found able to form a full, true and exact mental picture of the human drama through the past and of the actual conduct of life in the present he might be puzzled to think how the species can take itself so seriously as it does, to boast so exultantly of its present state, to expect so confidently its perfecting or perfected future upleap. 96 MENTAL ORGANIZATION FT. i changing truths. But why then call the yearning an illusion ? As a mentally evolved reality it does its useful work in human evolution until its force is spent. Inspiring and inciting while it lasts it may be called the true real, the so-called real which changes and lapses in the vital flux the passing unreal. Mental growth being organically propelled must inevitably break fixed moulds of thought or else be stifled ; beliefs and beings alike, big or little, bright or dull, floating more or less buoyantly down the stream of time until they are lost in the ocean of oblivion : everything fixed mortal and illusory, the flux of being only immortal and the presumptive intuition of a contact with reality. Eastern nations, mindful of their hereditary patri- mony, have notably shown a more grateful appreciation of their debt to the past by their religious observances and reverent cult of ancestors than the dominant Western nations have done by their inculcation of an immortal personal salvation as the servile motive and supreme aim of individual life ; an exclusive self-regard which is now undergoing a silent supersession by the wider devotion of self to benevolent schemes of social salvation. A true Christian spirit, hitherto frustrated by interested perver- sions and exploitations, governmental and ecclesiastic more perhaps by fundamental qualities of human nature with which it was in direct conflict is expected to make a reconciliation of individuality and socialism in the body politic. Few persons would nowadays heartily approve a personal conduct in this world which was motived and governed solely by the mercenary wish to obtain a happy life everlasting in a world to come, although custom of belief sanctions a conventional commenda- tion of the selfish cult, and monasteries and nunneries in some places still shelter and perpetuate it To a growing social organization a personal self-regard carried to such extreme is naturally repugnant. 1 Moreover, the 1 Here Roman Catholicism with its fixed creed and Protestantism with its fluent creeds are at variance : the former intent on preserving the value of CH. v MENTAL CAPITALIZATION 97 formerly inculcated doctrine that men are all born in sin and conceived in iniquity, without health in them, deserving and suffering a divine chastisement with the engrossing interest in self, abject self-abasement and servile worship which it engendered and fostered has not been found consistent with the hopes, aspirations and objective struggles of an evolving humanity or with due gratitude to those who laboured and helped in its evolution. The worship of the living spirit of ancestors living in their descendants and embodied in the constitution, language, traditions and institutions of the nation who inspire its aims and labours is the grateful tribute which an Eastern nation and the Western Positivist pay to the priceless inheritance bequeathed to them. When all is said the kingdom of heaven must come to mortals on earth before it can come to them immortally, must be within the persons who enter into it and into whom it enters. What else is the purpose of education but constantly and steadily to fashion the young and plastic individual mind to a prescribed type by ingrafting into it the in- herited acquisitions, habits, modes of feeling and thought of its ancestors ? From the very outset of life the child is perseveringly and patiently taught by smiles, caresses, frowns, flatteries, words, cries, gestures what it should think, feel, do, and what it should not think, feel and do. Its plastic brain is much instructed by gestures before it the immortal individual soul, the latter actually merging it socially, without clearly perceiving or confessing its change of thought and teaching, into the immortality of the species. According to Cardinal Newman "the Church would rather save the soul of a single bandit than draw a hundred miles of railway through the length and breadth of Italy, or carry out a sanitary reform in its fullest details in every city of Sicily, except so far as these great national works tended to some spiritual good," which they no doubt might individually and generally. The Cardinal does not go on to say whether if these works did or did not tend spiritually the Church would even then consent to sacri- fice the soul of a single bandit, would ever subordinate its infallible creed and sacred organization to the general system of thought. Apparently not, seeing that it now opposes legislation to curtail the liberty of weak-minded persons to propagate. The more souls then the better if they can be saved. What matters it if they are imperfect on earth when it is sure they will be made perfect in heaven ? H 98 MENTAL ORGANIZATION PT. i is instructed by speech, gesture-language preceding articu- late language in the order of its mental development as in the mental development of the race. Then example, praise, blame, admonition, advice, and every possible mode of persevering instruction by mother, father, nurse are brought to bear upon the susceptible and naturally imita- tive creature ; afterwards at school follow the instruction of its tutors, the potent traditions, conventions, examples and rules of the environment with the systematic education to which it is subjected ; later still, it learns to conform to the special laws, customs, regulations and social con- ventions of the active life into which it enters. Could any succession of steadily acting influences be more designedly ordered and persistently applied to plastic organic matter ever in constant flux of colloid motion to mould it to a desired pattern ? The creature is literally in-formed or in-structured mentally by the persistent pro- cess of in-formation, such gradual instruction being a strict physical process of fitting mental organization. By a quite different system of mental edification it might be built into a quite different mental being to think and feel wrong that which it thinks and feels right: to think and feel as the Dyak maiden does when she scorns the head-hunting lover who does not gratify her vanity or moral consciousness with a rich enough present of human heads. The wonder is not that so many persons in the same nation think, feel and act alike, being so many mental organisms sedulously constructed after the same pattern but that anybody ever thinks differently; a greater wonder perhaps that, thinking differently, he ever makes his thought thrive against his own interests and the dead weight and active resistance of conservative opposition. A happy proof then of the persistence of vital vigour in the stock of the community is the varia- tion which he starts, the grave fault of a too rigid social system sometimes to suppress it. Now, however, that ex- changes of thoughts and products on earth are so quick, constant and easy the stolid and self-complacent nation, CH. v MENTAL CAPITALIZATION 99 insensible to new ideas when they are first put forth, learns and profits by the inventions and enterprise of the more nimble-witted and ingenious nation, which might once probably not only have outwitted but outpaced and perhaps overpowered it. The demonstration of the fact in visible working teaches sluggish apprehension what the theory could not do. There is hope therefore for the nation which is not either so far behind in development, or so rigidly bound in fixed conventionalities, or so decadent throughout as to be incapable of proper apprehension and assimilation. The positive effects of imitation, conscious and un- conscious, on the construction of habits of thought, feeling and conduct are seldom adequately realized. The human infant, like the monkey, is an essentially imitative creature, signally reminiscent too in its earliest developmental changes of its nearest animal kin ; and there is a class of idiots, reverting in this respect to human beginnings, who evince an extraordinary aptitude for and skill in imitation. Surprising and not uninstructive in this connection is the degree of education through imitation which the clever monkey is capable of, monkeys like human beings differ- ing much in their capacity of attention and consequent capability of education ; for attention, which psychology treats as a distinct mental faculty, is just a general name denoting fundamentally the inherent organic property of mental structure, naturally strong or weak, to re- active adaptation to and assimilation of its environment. Sufficient as a thought -symbol once, the word is not sufficiently real now that thought is in closer contact with realities. An intelligent monkey has been taught to dress and undress itself, to sit on a chair and take food at a table, to smoke a cigar, to ride a bicycle, and to do various other performances which profanely encroach on the human domain. So soul-like in intelligence yet with- out a soul ! On the other hand, there are stories, more or less well authenticated, of human infants which, having been carried off by wolves or bears, go on all-fours and ioo MENTAL ORGANIZATION PT . i howl or growl like them, being of course quite destitute of speech. It is beyond doubt anyhow that an infant not trained in the least by human example and precept would not think rationally, nor walk upright, nor talk articulately, nor feel humanly. So soulless then with a soul ! The potent influence of education and imitation to organize mental structure by the adaptations which they elicit and foster is not perhaps so entirely limited to human and simian beings as is commonly supposed. Other creatures throughout the animal world appear to learn from and imitate their parents, although in less degree. Far from being the mere machines of ready-made functions they are commonly thought to be, the young of birds, for example, probably owe something to the instruc- tion and imitation of their parents ; more perhaps than men think who, not understanding the language and gestures by which the teaching is done, imagine that it cannot be done otherwise than by words. Experiments have shown that the young bird does not sing its parents' song but that of its foster parents when it is brought up in a different songster's nest ; nor would it perhaps venture to drop into the air from the twig which, by the weight of its body pressing on the tendon of its claws, it cannot help clutching mechanically, if it were not enticed by its parent's calls and example to learn the use of its wings. , The infant seal, like the human infant, would be drowned when it first got into the water, it is said, if it were not taught by its parents to swim. Birds and beasts not domesticated would not flee for their lives from the face of man if the parents who have capitalized their painful experience in their instincts did not earnestly instruct them what a dangerous enemy he has been to all living things which he could not utilize for his profit or his pleasure. As mankind would fare badly if they had to depend only on their inherited instincts, so animals might fare badly if they received no outside instruction from the wisdom acquired by the species. And mankind CH. v MENTAL CAPITALIZATION 101 and animals would alike be in much worse case if the vital energy of organic evolution working beneath instinctive and conscious action did not propel its adaptations and assimilations. The words instinct and reason do not of course really signify so clean a separation in nature as is made artificially by them in thought. Instinct is virtually em- bodied or implicit reason that is a habit of past pro- portional adaptations incorporate in structure as uncon- scious memory, reason the explicit unfolding in function and conscious memory of proportional, which is rational, structure ; the work of implicit embodiment and explicit manifestation being a constant process of organic develop- ment : instinct, so to speak, consolidated reason, and reason such a process of consolidating instinct as goes on regularly and familiarly in all acquired reflex function. To make the word instinct into a substantive entity and stop there is no better an explanation than it would be to make a substantive of the word innate and thereupon to set it to do wonders. The right task plainly is to discover and expound the formation, character and function of the minute and complex mechanism which has become innate or instinct in the special organization. Besides, a so-called instinct is not the quite fixed faculty it is usually assumed to be. Birds and bees and other creatures are notably able to modify their opera- tions in some measure when they encounter difficulties to be overcome, and then make suitable adaptations to new circumstances. They then exhibit so much in- duced or reflected consciousness (as consciousness always is induced by an obstacle to a habit of set function) and perform just so much reason as is required to over- come the difficulty ; not otherwise than as the human engineer does on a higher plane when he meets with an unexpected obstacle to his plans and surmounts it. As the predominant instinct of the species does not entirely prevent some degree of fit adaptation on low planes of life where the nervous system is almost rigidly fixed, it 102 MENTAL ORGANIZATION PT. i may be assumed that the collective spirit of a progressive social body in the human domain, where the nervous elements still are plastic and mobile, will favour rather than, as many persons fear, suppress individual variations and their developments. Organic life in mind and its progressive incarnation in advancing structure, that, be it repeated, is the concrete basis which no metaphysical abstraction can profitably divorce itself from. A definite mental organization of the various plexuses of a most exquisitely constructed nervous rete mirabile always discharges its definite func- tions, its labyrinthine structure having been organized fitly, and the answering functions being exactly pro- portionate to the degrees of its formation. Then the accordant diversities of consciousnesses follow as natural phenomena ; for which reason the notion of independent parallel functions is a fanciful and gratuitously superfluous hypothesis without the least basis in observation of facts. Moreover, beneath its physically determined functions proceeds a regular flux according to fixed physico-chemical laws of a series of the most subtile biochemical processes conceivable or yet inconceivable, without which mental function would be as impossible as fire without fuel. Apart too from its minute and complex organizations, the nerve element is itself the most complex and special element in the world, the incorporate quintessence, so to speak, of all its laws and forces, to comprehend which would be to comprehend the laws and forces of the universe : the human body as a whole the most com- pounded thing in nature, a microcosm comprising all the qualities and properties of nature, and its supreme nervous structure the quintessence of all the bodily qualities. That is the reason why it is naturally and necessarily affected every moment by the subtile rhythms, perceptible and imperceptible, of its parts and their constant and regular exchanges. It is perhaps the fundamental but unrecognized reason too why many persons habitually think and write of the soul or spirit as though it were CH.V MENTAL CAPITALIZATION 103 something superior to and almost separate from the mind ; for while the word mind is used to denote the intellectual processes of the supreme cerebral area (and may be grudgingly granted to animals), the word soul may be supposed to denote the sub-consciously refined fusion of the whole mental and bodily self in its rela- tions, conscious and unconscious, with the external world. Herein mysticism might seek its natural excuse and perhaps its justification, were it not bent on separating mind from body and postulating a supernatural origin, union and import. Now as every element of the body enters into every thought and feeling, even into the most abstract specula- tions of him who performs them, the concordant and unified energies of its constituent cells being the exactly positive determinants of every function, mental and bodily, it follows that a method of purely introspective enquiry into the operations of mind which leaves out these funda- mental facts must at best be abstract and barren, appli- cable only as it is to the conscious product inapplicable to its unconscious gestation. And worse perhaps than barren, since each mind, being the self-sufficient self-valuer of its introspections, cannot choose but infuse into its conclusions the limitations, imperfections and vitiations of its self-hood ; for it would be preposterous on its part to assume that self-consciousness can get quit of all self-love and self-imperfections, still more of all their bodily con- stituent qualities. How then can its revelations fail to testify to its affections and defects ? The very ecstasy of the subjective performance, which is its delight, is its danger. For its self-prized disclosures cannot be soberly compared, tested, rectified and verified objectively, as discoveries are regularly and rigidly tried and proved by independent and impartial observers in every positive and advancing science. To put forth speculations con- cerning a personal or impersonal ultimate reality by whatever name it be called with which the individual mind can come into subjective communion or objective 104 MENTAL ORGANIZATION PT . i communication is, when all is said, to fashion something anthropomorphically or rather anthropomentally after the want and wish and the special pattern of the particular person's mode of thinking and feeling (which may be only delirium) and to count it invaluable because of the infinite value which he puts on his self-consciousness and imagined intuitions. Is it withal really the extravagant statement which it looks on the face of it to say that to judge mental processes by the exclusive study of their partial conscious manifestations, without taking notice of their necessary physiological antecedents and mostly sub-conscious work- ings, is much like what a policeman might do who should think to watch what was going on at night in a whole town while scrupulously keeping himself within the range of a particular gas-lamp's light ? Asa matter of fact the pure introspection ist has been obliged at last to invent and employ an unconscious metaphysical mind to do below the level of consciousness what the conscious mind cannot do but the physiological factors which he stubbornly ignores constantly do normally by day and with abnormal vivacity in the dreams of the night. The existence of a metaphysical mind based entirely on or synonymous with consciousness, yet consciousness not a constant nor necessary attribute of it ! Is there any sound reason when matters are fairly and fully considered, any cause but traditional prejudice, why a just appreciation of mind should imply a gratuitous degradation of matter and its energies, which are essentially just as wonderful, perhaps just as subtile, certainly just as ultimately incomprehen- sible and, so to speak, divine ? l Into the infinitesimally 1 Cudworth (Intellectual System) says of the Atheists (which he declares the Materialists to be) that they are possessed with a certain kind of madness that may be called " Pneumatophobia, that makes them have an irrational but desperate abhorrence from spirits or incorporeal substance " ; at the same time "they are afflicted with a ffylomam'a, whereby they madly dote on matter." Might not the Materialist fairly retort by saying that the Spiritualist is possessed by a Hylophobia that makes him have an irrational abhorrence of matter, being at the same time afflicted with a Pneuniamania whereby he madly dotes on Spirit. CH. v MENTAL CAPITALIZATION 105 minute as into the infinitely great an impassable barrier to human adaptation and assimilation is set. Unwilling as the mystical or metaphysical adept is to think it, a relative being is probably not framed to get out of his personal life of relation into intelligent or intuitive touch with the incomprehensible reality and either metaphysic- ally or mystically to tell of the ineffable. CHAPTER VI SCIENCE AND SOCIAL ADVANCE Progress of science and social advance. Luxury and simplicity. Self- interest and social conscience. Social fellowship and social distinc- tions. Scientific thought and real religion. The merit of Positivism. The scientific basis of abstract precepts. No common standard of Deity. Ethical feeling and biology. The gross and minute effects of physical and chemical injury. Milton a declared Materialist. Stable moral feeling and diverse theologies. Reign of law and individual character. Self-excuse and self-pity. Sentiment and reason. Organic formation of character. Service of the species. Quiet dissolution of old faiths. Scientific study of moral nature. Future acceleration of scientific knowledge. Morality in theory and practice. Lust of slaughter for sport. Co-ordination of specialized sciences. Trans- formation of nature through human nature. A perfect human nature. Transcendental intuition. The Positivist Religion of Humanity. IN all forecasts of the human future due account ought to be taken of the fact that the progress of science works socially as well as intellectually and materially for the good of the race and of the masses more than of the privileged classes. As every conquest which science makes eventually subserves social development, every creed which is hostile to its advance is an enemy of the human race. The manifest drift now is to the equalization of conditions by conferring on the poor advantages which were formerly enjoyed only by the rich, bringing down that which was almost a difference of kind to a difference only of degree. For a penny any one can send his private news quickly and safely from one end of the kingdom to another, indeed from one end of the earth to another, although formerly special messengers making tedious journeys at great cost and 1 06 CH. vi SCIENCE AND SOCIAL ADVANCE 107 risk were required to do a much inferior service ; and the peasant travels cheaply from place to place as quickly and almost as comfortably as the prince. Such the benefit which science has conferred by its conquests and by fit social co-operation in making use of what it has won. The poor again now obtain gratuitously as a matter of course in well -equipped hospitals, established and supported for the most part by voluntary contribu- tions, the skilled medical and surgical relief which the rich man purchases dearly for himself, many times less promptly and efficiently, and their forefathers could not have purchased with all the wealth of the Indies. This he does because the expert surgeon in learning his art gains in a short time and puts to skilful use the capitalized wealth of knowledge stored up by a long line of precedent scientific workers. For the value of true science is that it does not hold out fixed truths for submissive acceptance on pain of damnable heresy, but steadily adds truth to truth to form and apply higher truth in its progressive systematization of knowledge. Patient addition to capital- ized knowledge and increasing co-operation in utilizing it, that is its theoretic aim and its practical value in promoting socialization. The rich man, it is true, can be housed luxuriously, feed sumptuously, amuse himself expensively ; but these are semblances rather than realities of advantage, seeing that the capacity of eating, drinking, and other sensual gratification is strictly measured by the constitution of the human body, which is the same in rich and poor, and always obtains more wholesome satisfaction from simplicity and moderation than from excess and satiety, which are prolific causes of unease and disease. It is no gain to indulge in excess, for excess is waste of life, no wisdom to buy satiety, for satiety is sad. To labour for a pleasure is a pleasing exercise ; to obtain the grati- fication without labour is to rob it of half its pleasure, if not to make it a labour. All which goes to show that the esteemed luxuries of civilization, being unnecessary io8 MENTAL ORGANIZATION PT . i to sound life, indeed apt to be morally and physically detrimental, are possible seeds and signs of degeneracy. By pure self-interest again is the rich man constrained to take care that the physical and social conditions around him are not such as breed disease and crime ; for, being of the same species as his poor neighbour, he is susceptible to the contagion of his diseases as well as a prey to his possible cupidities. The proximity of Lazarus and his sores at his door would be an odious danger ; for the invisible microbe easily leaps the social gulf between the rich and the poor man. Let his lack of mental sympathy be ever so great, he cannot divest himself of bodily sympathy with the infections which attest his brotherhood, nor feel quite safe always from the envious resentments which plutocracies and privileges are liable to engender in those who are poor and in misery. It costs him less in the end to pay grudgingly in money than painfully in person for the poor man's betterment : a bodily sympathy with his kind serves to make him kind. Thus a sanitary contributes to the formation of a social conscience, and science is triumph- antly vindicated in its social consequences. As sanitary considerations thus bring home to the rich and privileged person the conviction of a human brotherhood in the domain of health, so it is not impossible that a growing feeling of social fellowship in time to come may actuate him to divest himself of his privileges and distinctions and sympathetically to share a common humanity. Science here again may give good help when, pursuing its positive investigations into individual de- velopments and degenerations, it demonstrates how pre- judicially some passions for distinctions are liable to work on characters ; for no purely self-regarding passion, whether vanity or vainglory, or ambition or avarice, or anger or revenge, or envy or hate, but acts to deform or debase the individual mind in a social system. The person of superior social station, when he reflects, might do well so far to liberate thought from the thrall of custom CH.VI SCIENCE AND SOCIAL ADVANCE 109 as to ask himself what he would lose in manhood and might gain in self-respect by not being a Knight of the Garter, or a Gold-Stick-in-Waiting, or a Groom of the Chamber. Were he wrecked with other persons on a desert island or implicated in some other great catastrophe, physical or social, he would hardly claim social privilege, might indeed be taught a prompt lesson of equality if he were silly enough to expect it. A direct vital con- tact with realities acts to shatter conventionalities ; and insurgent realities are pretty sure to uprise sooner or later in over -conventionalized civilizations. The due incorporation of the working classes into the national economy must obviously be done at the cost of many customary conventions, shams, servilities and hypocrisies. That the intellectual and material advances of science as it pursues its positive investigations into concrete realities serve steadily to promote social and moral im- provement no adequate reflection can reasonably ques- tion. Its plain and positive demonstrations of the natural workings of causes and effects tend inevitably to reality and unity of thought, which is their justification, not like speculative theologies and metaphysics to differ- ences, schisms and quarrels, which is their condemnation. Promoting the co-operative applications of real know- ledge by right methods to profitable uses, they are the learning of nature's statutes, physical and social, to do them and thereby further the progressive humanization of the race, whose feeling and thinking are not withal, any more than that of the individual, of much value except so far as they lead to doing. There would probably be no real conflict between religion and science if those who concern and vex themselves with it were honestly to try to purify religion from theological dogmas which for the most part they disbelieve or only partially believe or fancifully symbolize or allegorize, to subject all religions indifferently to a strict scientific and impartial study, and clearly to understand that science which they make a bugbear simply means knowledge and each no MENTAL ORGANIZATION PT . i science only a specially organized system of knowledge. Its right work is to see in order to foresee, to know well in order to do well, gradually to know better in order to do better. Strictly to define and impose a special religious creed, however excellent, as infallible and unchangeable on changing persons in a changing world is a practice as futile as it is foolish ; a real religion must first be lived by right social doing, not presupposed abstractly as a creed ; the proper formulation will then duly come after. The merit of Positivism is not to have invented and propounded a new religion, as many persons suppose, but to have traced and scientifically expounded the natural origin and development of lived religion and taught the method of its future vital development. Withal that is the course which Protestant religion is more or less con- sciously following by its gradual adaptations to advancing thought and its quiet glide into social aspiration and function. In its steady promotion of a completer social solidarity through increasing interrelations and intercommunion of its special branches, science thus surely supplies a solid basis to abstract moral precepts. The foundations of moral feeling and conduct are by it sunk deep and safe in the ground of vital experience, as they always were in practice ; for they were the natural inductions of en- lightened self-interest in advancing adaptations to the physical and social environment. Furthermore, from the principles of right social function based on intelligent experience and embodied by degrees in definite mental structure was evolved by natural biological process the corresponding social and moral feeling : blossoming like the rose, they, like it, then exhale their proper fragrance. The fond hope is that a like moral feeling to that which exists partially within nations shall eventually be com- plete in them and fully evolved internationally. Be that as it may, the certain fact is that life in mind organically evolves the feelings of its progress, the theories being CH. vi SCIENCE AND SOCIAL ADVANCE in afterwards formulated consciously, that is reflectively. What want does it meet, what desire gratify, what ex- perience sum up, what conduct prescribe, is not that the fundamental origin of moral maxims as well as of proverbs, beliefs, customs and like rules of life ? The life is plainly best fit to survive which makes the most fit inductions by experience. Civilized persons are pretty well agreed all the world over what are good manners, because they are brought into direct personal converse and contact with one another in a social medium and must adjust themselves accord- ingly ; but they are not yet agreed as to what is the best government or the best religion, because the matter is a very complicated and comparatively abstract problem respecting which experience has hot yet established satis- factory conclusions, and they have not clear and distinct ideas what they want it to be. Therein truth is still in the making. What, it may be asked, have not the nations of Christendom a very distinct idea of what is the best religion ? No, for when they fear and adore the same God, and supplicate His aid and blessing in their wars and slaughters they do not really appeal to the same God ; each nation appeals to the God which it fashions to its wishes and likings, the same only in name ; for it projects outwardly the national image of the God which it hopes and believes will favourably hear and help it. There is no common standard, only a common name. To the metaphysician and pure psychologist it no doubt seems preposterous to say that aesthetic or ethical feeling can ever be evolved by biological process. Nevertheless it is a positive fact of observation that it has thus supervened in the course of human development and social progress concurrently with the advance of cerebral organization through the ages ; and the reason why the pure introspectionist cannot conceive it possible is that he will not learn what the human body is and does, is content to remain ignorant of the minute, subtile and complicated physical and chemical processes which ii2 MENTAL ORGANIZATION PT . i go on at the basis of all mental and bodily function. How can he judge rightly when he, the occasional and partially conscious, leaves those essential ever-acting sub- conscious factors out of sight ? l As fine feeling, ethical or aesthetic, emerges as the emotional emanation, the motional discharge, of exquisitely fine organized mental structure, so it is by observable de- generation of structure that it is reduced or erased when its delicate basis is defaced or effaced by injury or disease, the first noticeable symptom of a degenerative insanity being a marked blunting or loss of such refined feeling. By a similar biological formation of feeling on a lower mental plane a sanitary conscience or an eugenic conscience, good or bad, emanates from the respective structuralized groups of definitely organized ideas that is, when they are duly permeated by the subtile chemical streams and rhythmical motions proceeding from the sympathetic functions of the correlated visceral organs, every one of which enters essentially into the constitution and functions of the mental life. Without these occult physico-chemical opera- tions moral feeling could no more exist than sexual attraction and its moral refinements in love, or rather in loves (there is no abstract love, there are really only varieties and degrees of love), without the special secretions and rhythms of the sexual glands and their regular and constant exchanges in the bodily harmony. Crudely materialistic as such statement looks on the face of it, no one has the right to reject it on the ground of precon- ceived theories of materiality and immateriality. In the present state of scientific knowledge, it is plainly absurd 1 " No one, however, can understand this distinctly (the union of mind and body) unless he first adequately understand the nature of the human body." Spinoza's Ethics, Pt. ii. Prop. xiii. " Whence it follows that when people speak of this or that act of the body as originated or produced by the mind, which is then presumed to overrule the body, they do not know what they say and only confess in high-sounding words, without any kind of misgiving, that they do verily know nothing of the true cause of bodily actions." Pt. iii. Prop. ii. The quotations are from Spinoza : His Life, Correspondence and Ethics, by R. Willis, M.D. ; a book which, whatever its defects, shows a juster apprecia- tion of Spinoza's thought in some respects than any English account of him. CH. vi SCIENCE AND SOCIAL ADVANCE 113 to contrast so-called inert matter and its gross mechanisms with that which is called negatively immaterial or in- definitely mental, psychical or spiritual ; the notion of inert matter being as false as the notion of pure spirit is fanciful. The fact that a small gland in the body pro- duces qualitative effects on thought and feeling so great as even to revolutionize them is not only positive proof of the essential influence of these fine physico-chemical processes on the whole mental life, intellectual and moral, but also of the absence of any breach of continuity between them and the so-called immaterial or spiritual forces. The minute operations of physical and chemical de- rangements are yet, however, far from being adequately appreciated, though their gross effects are so marked as to have been always obvious : the physical effect of injury to the head sometimes to pervert the whole moral character of the person, which may perhaps be happily restored by a surgical operation to relieve the damaged brain ; the chemically impaired mind consequent to the lack of the special secretion after emasculation, when the dominant male characters recede and are replaced by emergent female characters which exist together in every human body ; and, again, the striking restoration of the mental functions of an imbecile child with a defective thyroid gland when it is supplied with the thyroid extract of a sheep. Evidently the structure of human mind and the sheep's structural processes have an essential affinity whereby the beneficial effect is possible : an elective bio- chemical alliance so subtile yet positive that it might well excite useful thought and enquiry rather than be met with tame wonder and reverential passivity. It is the groundless fear of traditional prejudice to apprehend that the dignity of mind is debased and its value lowered when its vital functions are based on life in matter. To divest a thing of its sanctified mystery and exhibit the gradual processes of its natural occurrence is not to detract from still less to degrade it, since the I H4 MENTAL ORGANIZATION PT. i performance positively exalts the mind which traces and discloses them. Strange it is to think how obstinately the natural impulse to know and grow mentally has been opposed by the fear of knowledge, and how long the Jewish fable of the first calamitous acquisition of know- ledge has survived in spite of experience of the accrued benefits of knowledge. 1 Milton, whose powerful imagina- tion so dramatically represented the scene and events of that supposed fall from ignorant and innocent felicity, good Christian as he was, did not shrink from thinking and saying that mind was the outcome of matter. 2 Is he then a despicable and discredited materialist ? Little unprejudiced reflection is needed to show that the con- stitution of an atom is no less admirable a physical creation than the constitution of an idea and, were thought not enslaved by words, equally divine. Timid anxiety as to whether moral conduct requires the intervention and sanction of an exterior and superior personal power who can be praised, supplicated and moved to hear and help, no sufficient motive to do right being derivable from purely human intercourse and relations in their ordained course of evolution, may disappear gradually when biology and sociology are positively constituted sciences, and biology contributes its ever more and more useful services to social ends. Even the Christian moralist out of the pulpit, in which a professionally trained mental structure performs by rote its special functions, 1 Plutarch, who relates that the Athenian general Nikias was prevented by the ill omen of an eclipse of the moon from prudently retreating from before Syracuse and thereby saving his army from destruction, adds : " Men at that time could not endure natural philosophers and those whom they in derision called star-gazers, but accused them of degrading the movements of the heavenly bodies by attributing them to necessary physical causes." They cast into prison Anaxagoras who had clearly explained the causation of eclipses, his release being obtained only by the powerful influence of Pericles. It is said that Philolaus and Aristarchus of Samos, who lived 2000 years before Galileo, were both exiled for having taught that the earth turned on its axis and revolved round the sun. Unthinking life bent solely on living shuts out forethinking thought. 2 See especially his elaborate argument in support of the opinion in his Treatise on Christian Doctrine, quoted by me at length in my Physiology of Mind, p. 134. CH. vr SCIENCE AND SOCIAL ADVANCE 115 unwittingly testifies to the trend of things when he now uses the words social and anti-social and seldom uses the word sin. With more courage to face facts and more sincerity to apprehend and express clearly what they teach, he may safely do what he has done quietly with the story of a special creation of man a dead because no longer needed Jewish fable and relegate supernatural intervention to the first beginning of things ; if his observa- tion of beginnings and ends in time and space render it absolutely necessary for him to postulate such a beginning in conformity to his notions of time and space, which are, if so applied, absurd. Tracing the natural development of mental life from its first dawn to its full splendour, and noting well how surely and effectively the collective spirit of a people works upon individual minds to mould their modes of feeling and thinking, he may then infer that moral feeling was a necessary and divine effect of social evolution being social feeling raised and refined to its highest power and that as it has existed so it will exist in- dependently of rival theologies with their contending religious creeds, dogmas and rituals, some of which have notoriously taught the wildest irrationalities of belief and even the grossest immoralities of conduct. 1 The diverse creeds and sometimes disgusting rites which have pre- vailed among peoples from primeval to present time might seem a precarious foundation on which to base the existence of a universal religious instinct were it not that the axiom, having been first postulated, is thence- forth tacitly implied and surreptitiously applied to prove the abstract religious value of every concrete negation of religion. A vital conception of the universal reign of law and of a general law of evolution cannot fail to affect bene- 1 It is interesting, perhaps a little surprising, to note how naively Christian writers who comment on such pagan moralists as Plutarch and Seneca wonder how they could ever have come by the fine moral precepts which they did not obtain from the teachings of Jesus. They apparently persuade themselves that Jesus invented or first validated them. n6 MENTAL ORGANIZATION PT . i ficially the mental constitution of every person who sincerely and firmly grasps it. Among other things it may teach him that excuses for faults, failures and follies, however pleasing explanations, are not justifications. Although an invisible subjective self, he is an objective being in nature who must observe and obey its laws and be judged as object. If he did not do the right thing in the right way it usually was because, passion's bias put aside, he did not bend his mind attentively to observe and understand ; if he did not foresee, it was because, pleased with himself, he was too indolent or indifferent to be at the pains to see ; for everybody likes himself and his habits of thought and action, how small soever the reason for the liking, and then oft sanctifies his opinion, however narrow and prejudiced, as conscience. Fine precepts of self-culture have never been rare and although perpetually reiterated have rarely borne fruit. The wisest maxim of intelligent experience, which might render other maxims superfluous, would perhaps be never to make an excuse or indulge a self-pity. It is on the full and rigorous use of understanding, on the wise direction and employment of individual aptitudes, on direct sense of personal responsibility that a sound and strong character is fashioned, as it is on well-disciplined, well-fashioned characters in a community, not on wild schemes of sentimental benevolence to nurture weaklings, that the social body can be built stably. Lamentations, remorses and self-reproaches for faults are mostly self- indulgent outpours of self-pity and self-excuse on the part of those who make them and, being pleasing incon- tinences at the time, tend rather to shallow repetitions than to future continent strength and instructed use of mind. The stern lesson of wise thought and the good work of strong will are to bear lightly or at least stoically the hardest strokes of fate and use them to spur intelligent and steadfast reaction, thereby strengthening character and disarming fate. The weak or self-indulgent or apathetic person who does not intelligently and resolutely CH. vi SCIENCE AND SOCIAL ADVANCE 117 react but indolently suffers or impotently bewails his ill- luck and failures hurts and further weakens character, which no help from without will then do much effectively to help. To strengthen the stock organically and to fashion in- dividual characters by wise discipline and indispensable self-sacrifice is plainly the right policy in every sound national body ; else the number of the few wise and good in it may not always be a sufficient leaven to make expiation for the faults of the many foolish and bad. However good a social essence pity be in a community, there is small sense in teaching its members self-pity. The certain effect of philanthropic schemes dictated by humanitarian zeal and sentiment without proper regard to causes and their natural consequences is to demoralize individual character by the destruction of self-reliance and self-respect : the prevalence of such schemes a positive hurt to the health of a community, which is strong only in the strength of its units. As a building is precarious when its bricks are rotten, so a social fabric is unstable when its units are unsound. Reason, though it does not impel, has its proper function to guide, direct and regulate the vital motion of socialization. To smother its sense of sane proportions under soft sentiment is essentially irrational in the persons who spend the sentiment and life -harming to those on whom it is spent. A sure feeling implanted in the person that he must conform to nature in order to transform it, must conquer by obeying, must develop self mainly by self-help, help without self- help being no benefit, and prayer for supernatural help futile except so far as it inspires earnest self-suggestion inciting self-reliance and self- exertion such sane and firm attitude of mind is calculated to produce a vivid sense of responsibility, a steadfast self-reliance, a sincere hold of facts, which will sharpen insight, quicken foresight, direct efforts definitely to definite ends, and tend by degrees to strengthen and heighten character. 1 1 The person who earnestly wishes and prays for supernatural help, hoping and expecting to obtain it, is naturally moved to believe and will accordingly. n8 MENTAL ORGANIZATION PT . i Character in that case is strengthened not in any mysterious metaphysical way but by positive process of mental organization through right and fit reactions of self in fact by the habit-making operation of organic law in the supreme cerebral centres. Nor must the person then act rightly once in a way only but persevere in patient well-doing if he aspire to make habit and strengthen character. Obviously, then, as all mental growth is a process of steady mental organization, the training and formation of good habit should be begun early in life when the tissues are plastic : education be a solid and stable organic building of character by fit discipline and doing, not a mere intellectual forcing and embellishment. The function of all life is action in word or deed, thought and feeling subserving action, and the approved end of human action social well-being, to which it matters not a jot what the individual feels and thinks without doing, though the self-worshipper think otherwise. What is wanting is a just apprehension of the organic nature and natural development of social feeling and conduct. To say that science is not concerned with ethics is unwarrantably to put an absolute stop to thought. Were the moral law seen to be as real in progressive socialization as the law of gravitation in physical nature, its violation would be recognized to be as foolish and disastrous for the social body in the ultimate issue. This truth is not duly realized because the evil consequences of social ill-doing in a complex system are often subtile, secret, remote, not easily traceable, and mankind are short-sighted, live for the most part in the present, not By the anticipation he nerves his will and work. When he happily gets what he prays for his faith is fortified, for he is not disheartened on the occasions when he is disappointed, devoutly believing that the failure was wisely ordained for his good. If he has not nowadays the faith to pray heartily for an interruption or reversal of the known physical laws of nature on his behalf, he can still expect by prayer and concordant effort to affect wisely his own mental attitude. If this is not what it should be, his prayer may help him not only to submit reverently but also earnestly to try to make his nature more like what it should and he would have it be. His prayer is then an inspiring and useful mental function. CH. vi SCIENCE AND SOCIAL ADVANCE 119 looking beyond a link or two in the chain of causation. Yet the moral law by virtue of the social relations with which it is concerned must needs attract a pious affection which the law of gravitation does not inspire, and its violation therefore cause a quite different reprobation. In the end mankind cannot fail to acknowledge that if they discard a theological basis of morality and do away with ecclesiastical and social hierarchies they must still work together co-ordinately and subordinately in the service of the species, if they have any concern for its welfare and belief in its perfecting progress ; that without some such ideal of an improving humanity to inspire and guide conduct blind work for self or selfish unions of sects and sections which are all too prone to grow selfishly in a society for their particular advantage and to its disadvantage would be pretty sure to end in the deterioration or disruption of the organization. What can be more noble, asks the detached moralist, than to sacrifice personal interests to the service of others, to love them as much as or more than self, to transport self, loverlike, into the beloved and adore ? That is just my opinion, answers the socialist, for which reason my bowels of compassion yearn to apply the principle in practice to the whole human race. Why, then, illogically oppose and decry me ? Because you are in a frantic and foolish hurry, answers sober reason, alive to the unreason of extremes, and do not reflect that strong and stable growth takes place by slow degrees with due reverential regard tp past structure and orderly continuity of development, ignore too the psychological factors in human natures. The kingdom of heaven on earth, if it ever come, will not come by altruistic shouting and catastrophic violence, ; nor grow to maturity as fast as a grain of mustard seed. Preserve and preach the ideal by all means, it is a worthy aim and pleasing outlet of pious emotion, but reflect coolly that wisdom was not born yesterday nor to-day but has slowly matured ; that humanity consists of many million ignorant individuals 120 MENTAL ORGANIZATION PT . i who will possibly require many million years to be taught to think, if they ever can be taught ; that fiery zeal without knowledge may do incalculable hurt in the real affairs of a delicately and complexly organized community. Faiths of one kind or another with their appropriate symbols have been the incentives of mankind to attain their present height of being, the faiths which have done their work being naturally supplanted in due season by new faiths, which in turn have " lighted fools the way to dusty death." Although the supplanting process is inevitable so long as knowledge grows, it need not be violent and contemptuous, as if the obsolete faith were something which ought not to have been ; by having been it vindicated its right to be ; and the safe and sure way of dispersing it is to allow a new and vital belief quietly to sap and subvert it. That is what the socialist who beholds without surprise the bankruptcy of Christi- anity believes that his creed will eventually do do, in fact, what after nearly two thousand years of trial and failure Christianity, he thinks, cannot reasonably be expected to do and he might now be allowed to attempt to do. To destroy madly without thought of the value of that which is destroyed, with wild and vague notions only of that which is to be put in its place, as the Anarchist would do, is the enthusiastic folly of fanaticism gratifying its lust of power and pride of self-deception, and in the result to do recklessly what is pretty sure to be rationally restored .in the nation which is not undone by the experiment. Destruction, even when required, ought not to be in violent hurry. The progressive gains of culture which have been slowly and painfully put on through the ages are quickly put off now, as they have many times been put off in the past ; for the fundamental brute in the human animal is not yet worked out, nor can be while life is essentially what it is. Be the final value of any creed what it may, certain it is that science, which is knowledge of the relative CH. vi SCIENCE AND SOCIAL ADVANCE 121 and has no concern with the absolute deals only with a knowable world not with the Universe cannot stop its advance with the investigation of physical nature only. It is bound to go on patiently and resolutely to search out the origin, growth, developments and degenerations of the moral nature, and to trace their consequences in the affairs of social life, the laws of which, being no less fixed and certain beneath all complexities and obscurities, must be observed in order to be profited by. " Hitherto and no farther " is a warning signal of the sanctuary which it is bound to disregard on pain of nullification. If its waxing knowledge sever morality from waning theology, it will steadily tend to convert religion into social aspiration and service, thereby consistently uniting true knowledge with true religion in the unity and continuity of things. Yes, even when those whom it quietly moves from their old posts protest the while that they are not moving an inch and, using the old postal names to designate quite different stations, thereby impose usefully on themselves. The great and rapid progress in discoveries, inventions and industries made by the steadfast prosecution of right methods of research, which are methods of more special and complex apprehensions of external nature and its consequent growth of mind in man, warrant the expecta- tion not of a continuance only but of an acceleration of the advance ; for every new discovery is a step to more discoveries in the same science, and every discovery in one science fraught with unforeseen action on and profit to other sciences ; the separations of specialized sciences, although necessary for purposes of study, being purely artificial divisions of inseparable knowledge. Chemistry is a comparatively recent science, yet the great advances made by it in a short time excuse, if they do not justify, the surmise that it may one day produce in the laboratory those organic constituents of food which are obtained now by laborious processes of sowing and reaping, of breeding and rearing sheep and cattle ; thus concentrating into a 122 MENTAL ORGANIZATION PT . i few hours processes of food formation which require years of slow accomplishment and into the small compass of a fine essence products which now require large room. Yet such is the complex harmony of elements and organs in the bodily unison that the grave trouble might then be with the long coil of human intestines which, finding their occupation gone, would (as the vermiform appendix is perhaps hastily said to be) become useless and even dangerous survivals, even if their loss of function were nowise so disastrous physically and detrimental mentally as it well might be. A direct and profitable capture from the atmosphere of fertilizing nitrogen which is now sought far afield in guano beds that are likely soon to be exhausted is already in process of successful accomplish- ment, so that the nitrogen-fixing bacterium of the soil, losing much of its business, may soon have to seek other fields of enterprise and perhaps undergo other forms of development not so beneficial to mankind. Obviously in case of these imaginable advances the population of the earth might be multiplied a hundred- fold without lack of food or perhaps room, and man be raised to a more refined and spiritual being by ceasing to breed, feed and kill other creatures to feed himself; for he can hardly be quite happy in mind when he is perfect in moral nature to make the selfish and murderous use of weaker life either for his food or his sport which he now thinks right. Having then learnt the duty not to slaughter them, he may learn too the ruthful duty to spare himself from ruthless slaughter in sanguinary wars, which will be a marvellous eradication of his fundamental animality and a signal metamorphosis of himself. His present mental attitude is somewhat confused and incoherent ; for the magistrate who punishes the cruelty of cutting off the end of a dog's tail, while suffering patiently the amputation of a lamb's tail and testicles, eagerly joins in the exhilarating sport of stag-hunting or otter-hunting or hare-hunting, in which the agony of the victim is prolonged to the utmost stretch and the enjoyment of the chase enhanced accord- CH. vi SCIENCE AND SOCIAL ADVANCE 123 ingly. The tender conscience of the ardent anti-vivisec- tionist, again, who protests frantically, and not always unjustly, against the physiologist's sometimes reckless ex- periments on animals, which he makes for the most part for the avowed purpose of obtaining knowledge to alleviate suffering and cure disease though wishing at heart that the discovery should be made by himself rather than by somebody else, is not hurt by the slaughter of animals for his food, passionately demanding only that it should be done pitifully and mercifully, or by the previous mutilations of them on purpose to make their flesh more tender to his tooth. If he thinks their flesh necessary to sustain his health and strength which it is not he might perhaps make the long-sighted reflection that the scientific vivisectionist was employed in hastening the day when its condensed essences shall be artificially produced in the laboratory, and thereafter view his dis- tressing researches and keen curiosity to know with less abhorrence, if not more indulgence. It will certainly be odd if man as he becomes more spiritual joins exultantly with merry packs of hounds to chase the timid hare, the frightened stag and the subtle fox ; or as a more heroic sportsman, while himself at a safe distance or in more or less safe hiding, shatter with explosive bullet the peaceably browsing elephant if there be any elephant then left on earth for him to kill ; or even to glory in the slaughter of hundreds of half-tame pheasants raised for the purpose of his sport, deeming his exploit the grander the bigger his bags of slaughter. 1 Strange, it might seem, were any human inconsistency 1 The sportsman who slaughters his thousands of pheasants for his pleasure and joys in his big bag makes compensation, it is true, sometimes by sending a few braces to the hospitals. In that case the donor might not do amiss to make curious enquiry as to the fate of his gifts. Patients in hospitals are not often in a state of health and appetite to care to eat pheasants, nor of a class that ever does or would like to eat them. "They treated me very well," said a discharged patient, " except when they gave me stinking fowl which I could not eat." Servants in many houses might rebel if they were asked to dine on the pheasants which they are supposed to enjoy when sick in hospitals as luxuries. - 124 MENTAL ORGANIZATION PT. i really strange and human power of self-laudation, self- admiration and self-deception not unlimited, that man can think so highly of his own spiritual nature and its glorious destiny while he holds such selfish pursuits of a strenuous life to be necessary to his happiness and rightly to subserve the progressive spiritualization to which he aspires in this life and hopes to acquire fully in a life to come. Strange, also, to think that Christianity, in striking contrast with Eastern religion, has shown so little sympathy with animal life and has not a word to say from its thousand pulpits in condemnation of the systematic pursuit of human pleasure by animal suffering and slaughter nay, clerically sanctions the hare-hunt as a suitable exercise and diversion for the boys in a leading public school. But it is after all no real wonder : Christianity is the religion of peoples still infused with the brutal lust of life, for which reason the Christian nations are naturally occupied in frantic endeavours to increase their armaments on sea and land and in the air to be ready for the next great war (written before 1914), whereas Buddhism and Brahmanism are the religions of peoples who have outlived that inherent impulse of aggression which is characteristic of young, vigorous and expanding life. The matter is fundamentally biological : in the man as in the animal stronger life lusts and strives to supplant weaker life, though masking usually under fine motives the impulse which the animal displays openly and coarsely. Without going into details of scientific advances, it is sufficient to point out that the progress of electric science is pretty sure to achieve conquests as much outdoing its present achievements as these surpass what was conceiv- able a century ago. The disintegration of the atom and the discharge of its intra-atomic energies opens limitless prospects of sources and possible utilizations of energy when they can be quietly unlocked and intelligently handled. Considering how surely and profitably the various sciences react on one another, how far-reaching CH. vi SCIENCE AND SOCIAL ADVANCE 125 the unexpected effects of a new discovery in one science often are, and how at last all the sciences must be con- catenated and co-ordinated in thought as their subjects are in fact, the enthusiastic optimist may behold in imagination the day when man, effectually harnessing winds and tides, sun and ether, yokes all nature's forces to his triumphal car and thus gloriously develops it through him. 1 And what then ? What of the earth planet when its nature is transformed through human nature, all its forces being brought under human control and direction ? For that is the implicitly held or explicitly avowed expecta- tion. While the lower animals only adapt themselves to so much of their limited environments as they can and continue in their fixed adjustments, he goes steadily on to adapt his environments to himself. That is his supreme distinction as the organ of progressive life. By his conquests of nature and wise utilizations of his know- ledge of its laws, and, above all, by carefully storing and classifying the records of his gains for the instruction and use of future generations, he has been able to survive under different conditions of place and climate and circumstances, and to obtain and hold his predominant position on earth. The impulse of organic evolution he has usurped, and its future is in his hands. And he cheerfully shoulders the burden, heartened by the hope of illimitable progress and fortified by the belief that the goal he pants for is sure warrant that it will be won, else why should he crave it ; which, if it be the illusion of his wish is nevertheless a subjective reality serving well 1 A concatenation of the different specialized sciences is for the present only a devout imagination, their various and minute divisions being widely separate and little mutual intelligence between any two of them : one member of the Royal Society occupied exclusively in searching out the composition of a chemical compound ; another devoted entirely to the study of the stars ; a third eagerly interested in the minute anatomy of a flea or a bee, without the least understanding of each other's language ; yet the results of their respective labours enshrined in volumes of so-called Philosophical Transactions. No conjunction of labours, no co-ordination of results, no common intelligence, no synthesis of the necessarily specialized analyses yet attempted or possible the Transactions admirably laborious but the Philosophy wholly wanting. 126 MENTAL ORGANIZATION PT . i to spur aspiring effort and unlock his latent energies. Comparing great things with small, he might compare the great thing which he is with the small living cell ; for as it absorbs and transmutes the fine chemical and physical forces around it and unifies them in the higher synthesis of its growth, so he assimilates into his nature the large forces of external nature, physical and social, by successive analyses and ascending syntheses, and thereby furthers his mental growth as the highest vital development. When at last he is the proficient and perfect creature which he expects to be, comprehending all things and governing them to his liking, inductions drawn from his present experience as a very imperfect being will obviously be out of date and out of place. Possessing universal intuition, which will not be to think lamely by halting steps as he does now, he will be quite another creature, almost Godlike in capacity ; for his present toilsome ascents by generalizations and abstractions are but so many correspondently lessened imperfections of under- standing and the setting up of so many appropriate symbols to designate them for the time being. Time and space withal, which now strike wondering awe in him, like as the starry heaven and his own moral sense did in Kant (who might, after all, have observed with equal awe the structure and leap of a flea) will be no more, being but necessary categories of his present thought-limitations. Forgotten, too, in dark oblivion will then be all the dili- gent workers who now toil in painful drudgery to bring the glorious consummation to pass ; their sufficient reward the present consciousness of being more or less useful stepping-stones towards light in their day and generation. It is a rapturous prospect of what may well look like delirious optimism to those ordinary persons who are not graced with the extraordinary intuition to apprehend truth beyond the limited demonstrations of reason and to get into intimate touch with the Absolute. Quite inad- missible by them is the opinion that the noblest function of mind when it is raised to its highest power as spirit, CH. vi SCIENCE AND SOCIAL ADVANCE 127 soul or psyche, is limited to the demonstrative method and range of positive science. The presumptuous error of reason, they hold, is to apply the sense-acquired per- ceptions of material objects and their relations in time and space, and the concepts formed from them at a higher mental level, to the timelessness and spacelessness of a spiritual intuition which is dependent on no such precedent informing. A somewhat perplexing saying to those who cannot choose but think that every concrete function of mind actually proceeds slowly or quickly in time and place, and note how those who think otherwise habitually speak of a space or tract of time as though space were necessary for time to continue in. (" They cried out with one voice about the space of two hours.") There can be no objectivity, it is true, without an answer- ing subjectivity, no outer world to man but the world he mentally makes, for they imply one another, being a natural composition ; but it does not therefore follow that every subjective experience is duly composed of a rightly apprehended and assimilated objective reality. If that were so, men might still be frighted by ghosts, amazed by miracles, feel and think themselves to be in unhappy mental communion through their evil passions with a very powerful though as the dialogue with the Deity concerning the experiments to be made on Job shows not absolute Devil. Reflecting on the great work which science has done, is doing and may be expected to do for the advance of socialization, and as the fond hope is of a progress- ive humanization and universal brotherhood, its spirit of devotion might be called a religion, the religion of science, which would be much what the Positivists call the Religion of Humanity. For they alone base an organized system of religion on an adequate consideration and scientific appreciation of what the human race has felt, thought and been in the past, of its continuity of development in the present, and of its instinctive aspira- tion for the future. That they are yet so few in number 128 MENTAL ORGANIZATION PT . i and so little regarded notwithstanding the great thinker which the founder of Sociology and scientific philosophy was, and the lucid exposition of his doctrines by a few zealous and capable followers, is owing mainly to the crass ignorance of the unthinking multitude, but in great measure also to the lack of scientific method and know- ledge in the more cultured classes ; for they, constrained by the prejudices of their inadequate education, the scheme of which was fixed in pre-scientific times and is still adhered to in most universities, are naturally averse from making themselves acquainted with that which re- pugns their habits of thought and feeling. The progress of Positivism, if it is to progress, must inevitably be slow, because it demands an unprecedented labour namely, that the people learn to think. Moreover, by its rejection of a supernatural power and work in human affairs and the flattering doctrine of human immortality otherwise than in the perfecting of the so-called Great Being of Humanity it grievously shocks traditional Christian belief, and lowers the sense of human value. To be merged in what is after all a transient humanity on earth is sorry consolation for one who has beatific visions of everlasting union with a Supreme Being in heaven. Yet as the Positivist aims at the same perfecting of mankind on earth by improved social service and by the same moral means as the Christian or the purely social reformer their aim the same, their belief in unlimited perfectibility the same, their methods of practical ad- vance much the same the doctrine which he inculcates as right in the kingdom of man might obviously in any case be a suitable groundwork for his continuance in the kingdom of heaven. Why not then appreciate and utilize his work without troubling about his theories ? When, however, the Positivist soars aloft into the abstract ideal, pours forth a gushing stream of emotional aspiration, bows down in adoration of the Supreme Being of Humanity, he parts company with sober science and cannot properly call his religion the religion of science. CH.VI SCIENCE AND SOCIAL ADVANCE 129 He is perhaps prone, like the great founder of his creed, unconsciously to infuse the feeling of his early religious culture and its forecast of a heavenly world to come into his scientific anticipations of a world to come on earth. For when all is said, it cannot truly be said that science gives any reasonable support to the optimistic opinion of a perfect humanity before its end with the end of things created. Uniform and universal knowledge, social salvation and sovereign goodness, a golden age to come excelling a past golden age, a Paradise regained in lieu of a Paradise Lost, in fact a kingdom of heaven on earth or elsewhere, are not yet matters with which the sober-minded scientist can undertake to grapple. K CHAPTER VII CONDITIONS AND PROSPECTS OF CIVILIZATION Benefits and detriments. Increasing solidarity and power of labour. Com- mercial interdependence and credit. The gospel of trade. Clouded prospects. Pessimistic scepticism. The lust of life and the joy of its action. The vox populi the voice of might. Social production and distribution. Equal opportunities. The heroic person. Subjugation of unequal or attainment of equal capacities. Vital energy in social development. Increase of individual value by social subordination. National immortality. Indefinite phrases and hard facts. Social poultices. A natural vis medicatrix in the social body. The ideal and the real. WITH the increasing benefits of a complex social organization go along counterbalancing detriments which are not always adequately noticed and considered. Now, as of old, a Devil dogging the Divine sows furtive tares among the wheat ; or at any rate a depersonalized power of evil, yet lurking deep in human nature, still starts up to work apparent disorder and evil in the orderly course of things. Although the standard of living has been generally raised and the comforts of life enhanced and extended by the multiplication of desires and their means of gratification, yet the consequences are more desire-born expectations, more vital dependence on the indulgence of increasing wants, more impatient exasperation and angry revolt when hopes and wants are not gratified. Gains generate desires, desires settle into wants, gratified wants grow into habits, and habits become a second nature ; whence ensues in a community a collective spirit of material and social advancement, a dominating mass- spirit, which operates to level social inequalities. 130 CH. vii CONDITIONS OF CIVILIZATION 131 When habits of universal ease and comfort are formed, will the means of their gratification grow in proportion ? Reflection on the service which is done nowadays for a penny paid on the postage of a letter might wisely note how much a penny added to the price of a loaf of bread in hard times can do to excite dangerous riots in populous cities. Such, again, is the increasing solidarity of workers in the various departments of the many specialized industries that a revolt against the conditions of labour or the rates of wages in one department occasions the instant threat or actual occurrence of a sympathetic general revolt which might or does paralyze the activity of a compact and complexly interrelated community ; so helpfully dependent on one another are the members as to be almost helpless when left to help them- selves. A growing sympathy of labour throughout the civilized world with an increasing loyalty of co-operation is evident, and it is equally evident that labour is awaking to a vivid sense of its wants and its power ; which is a movement that reason cannot resist but must adapt itself to. Having educated the masses to feel and think like them and displayed at large the ostentatious examples of their own luxuries and indulgences, the so-called upper classes naively wonder that those begin to feel, want and wish like them : having been so long at the top where they would like to stay, they cry out vehemently against the iniquity of setting class against class. But why iniquity, asks cool reason? It would be foolish unreason to set the single person to fight against the strength of the united class. The obvious truth is that when mental organizations are trained to the same type of develop- ment on the same level, they will want and function in the same way, with the resulting wishes and wills of minds so near alike or akin to gratify them in the same way. The very stars in their courses might be said to work for human solidarity-^-that is, if the stars be concerned in human affairs as they were once thought sympathetically 132 MENTAL ORGANIZATION PT . i and synergically to be. So numerous, close and widespread are the ramifying relations between the several nations, their interests so delicately and intricately interwoven, that a disturbance, political or financial, in one country produces grave and incalculable consequences all the world over. The hope indeed is that with the increase of interfinancial, interscientific and interpolitical relations a perception of their interests may eventually impel mankind to more humane feeling and intercourse, human and humane at last be synonymous terms ; teach them too perhaps that war is commercially, if not morally, an evil, which may then be a strong motive to do away with it, the commercial spirit and interests being what they are ; duly considered, albeit that a scientific discovery or indus- trial invention which is welcomed may be more ruinous to a town or a district or even a nation than a great war which is deplored. Startling it is to think what would happen if every Bank, Institution, Municipality, State throughout the world were called on to realize assets and fulfil obligations. Fortunate it obviously is that men have the faith in each other which they have, seeing how largely the whole structure of commercial life is based on credit and with what a disastrous crash the huge fabric might topple down were all promises to demand early performance. With the combination and pooling of credit in big Trusts and the prudent distribution of it to check local panics the danger of such a catastrophe is lessened yet not wholly removed. Besides, in the last resort and worst event the State can intervene and enact that nobody who has given credit shall be entitled to demand payment, at all events for a time, which to the uninitiated seems an odd way of keeping up its value, but a sure way of inflicting great loss during the process of recovery on many who have given credit. However, by the elimination of the weaklings who break under the strain, credit is then put on a sounder basis of reality for the time being. The foundations of trade being ethical, it will be an CH.VII CONDITIONS OF CIVILIZATION 133 evil thing if ethics in trade become a diminishing and uncertain quantity, which is the danger of a too passionate and little scrupulous pursuit. In that case its eagerly desiderated extension, which is the real national gospel of the day, may be a peril to the health and strength of a nation. Not to speak of the quarrels and rivalries between nations which trade competitions occasion, or of the subtle and violent forcing of their goods and gospels by strong nations on weak peoples who desire nothing better than to be left alone to work out their own develop- ment in their own way, without such so-called civilizing and often destructive invasions. Why should a strong nation, just to become rich itself, any more than a strong person, insist on forcing its wares and creeds on a weaker neighbour on doing to another that which it would not have the other do to it ? Because it is superior ? But when does superior strength of lusting life ever fail to inspire belief in its superior worth ? Because a lateral extension of civilization, until it includes the entire human race, is a necessary prerequisite to the general upleap of humanity to its destined perfection ? So be it ; but if it be so, the lateral extension cannot fail to involve a great deal of lateral extinction, which, however necessary for civilized expansion, seems likely to be as sanguinary and deplorable a perpetuation of the course of human progress through ages past and a lurid outlook for ages to come. When all is said in praise of the expansion of trade and increase of population, it might be well for a nation to consider calmly whether these are unqualified blessings, and the sure means of perfecting itself and thereby help- ing to perfect humanity. More and stronger life in a nation, however, is pretty sure, subtly or violently, to prey on weaker nations outside it, and to think it a blessing to them to be exploited by and subdued to its higher type. Although a lusty and expanding, nation is not in the least inclined, or ever likely, to make any such self-deny- ing reflection, its own horizon is not quite unclouded. Intestine troubles may occur from its commercial pursuit 134 MENTAL ORGANIZATION PT. i of wealth and be dangerous. Multiplying specializations of knowledge and industry require more specially skilled workmen, and the opportunities of employment for the unskilled workmen are lessened in proportion as machines, concentrating in their ingenious structure many man- powers, increase production and dispense with rude manual labour. If every stroke of a single big steam-hammer applies the forces of several thousand men, the leaders who teach their followers that their labour alone creates wealth are themselves in evident need of instruction. The labourers who are thrust aside in the struggle as in- efficient or unneeded, if they increase in number, as they are bound to do if population increase without check or guid- ance, constitute a burdensome or even dangerous residuum, seeing that, useless for work which is wanted, they still have the wants of the complex society of which they are members. As constituent units of it, bred in and by it, they claim the right to work in or be fed by it ; which means that those who work and prudently put by the fruits of their industry must part with what they have earned, either to put to work which is not wanted those who want or to support them in idleness. An easy solution of the social problem, so long as those who work are willing and able to go on working well on such terms, and the claims of those who want do not exceed the resources in the possession of those who work. Meanwhile, although gratification is limited, desire is unlimited in human nature, and ignorance unfitted to put a reasonable check on it. Besides, it is possible that if the feeble, indolent and ' inefficient are fed by the strong, industrious and efficient, the number of them may increase with the decrease of the workers. The profitable citizens may not care to excel in work if they are not to excel in reward or dignity, may cease to labour in invention and to provide employment by investing capital in the industries of their country, or even to beget many children ; and the increase of population will be made by the unprofitable persons, who must presumably be employed somehow. CH. vii CONDITIONS OF CIVILIZATION 135 And how ? It would not be of much use to set watch- makers to plant trees, nor any benefit to a community to set them to make watches which were not wanted and nobody would buy. Nor would it mend matters to establish all sorts of technical schools to teach and send out a number of skilled workmen if there were no suitable work for them to do when they were ready for it. Not only would they clamour for employment, but the skilled workers in a particular industry might be unaltruistic enough to revolt for fear of lowered wages, and thus cause serious troubles in the social organization. The belief that the ideal good of the species will be a strong enough motive to induce the efficient to work willingly everywhere for the inefficient, the industrious for the idle, the virtuous for the vicious, is founded on the optimistic hope of what shall be, not on observation and experience of what has been. In view of the dire and dismal travail of mankind through ages past the thorough- going sceptic may even harbour a doubt whether the species anywhere is now really worth what it has cost to become what it is, or ever will be so essentially different as to be worth the present sacrifice of himself in his sphere which he is called to make for its benefit ; or at least, if he does not sink so low in pessimistic cynicism, whether the inculcation of the doctrine or the imposition of a rule of uniform social service on everybody is a means calcu- lated to improve the constitution and further the advance of the species. Had he lived at the time of its beginning on earth, and miraculously foreseen its sad and sanguinary course of evolution to its present actual nature, his pessi- mism might then have been excusable. The simple truth is that human history is a positive demonstration of the lust and strength of the will to live, not motived either rationally or morally of the funda- mental vital movement in human form : the glorification of a life of meekness, humility, love of enemies and the like self-abasements, an impracticable gospel of lowliness and weakness which, had it ever been put in practice, 136 MENTAL ORGANIZATION PT . i would have been the deterioration and probable extirpation of the person, tribe or nation which made the experiment. As matter of fact, practical recognition of the fundamental working instincts of self-conservation and reproduction has been embodied in the familiar adage that all is fair in love and war. In the ideal future matters may be different and self-abasement be true self-development ; but during the transitional ascent, be the ultimate issue what it may, it is pretty evident that the comfortable settlement of the relations between the classes who inherit or produce more wealth than they need, and of the disinherited masses who have less than they want, is likely to be a trouble- some business in the economic conditions of society. With the increase of self-consciousness and the growth of self-indulgence and self-pity, the masses, keenly aware of their wants and educated socially to feel them, begin to perceive their power, and, the predatory instinct not being extinct, are likely, if not sure, to exert it ignorantly, selfishly and tyrannically, yes, maybe even ferociously ; for the human instinct to kill in order to possess, which habitually gratifies itself in the joy of killing animals for food and sport, is furiously and frantically excited on dire occasions to kill men when passions are inflamed and human brutality let loose. And that without the least self-reproach ; for in collective crimes there is no feeling of personal responsibility. Vital power naturally likes and strives to exert itself it would not be power if it did not and is likely to retain its old habit of doing that selfishly. Fondly fanciful is the amiable notion of the Christian Democratic Socialist that the socialistic move- ment was and is mainly ethical ; its motive was and is fundamentally vital and economic. 1 The alluring hope is that the masses will learn social duties and social responsibilities as well as claim equal social rights feel what they owe and ought as well as 1 As, indeed, Marx maintained, although some of his disciples now declare that he was wrong to attribute competitions and wars entirely to the material and economic factor and to ignore the psychological factors. CH. vii CONDITIONS OF CIVILIZATION 137 what they want and wish and thereafter use power wisely in the interests of the community, not selfishly in their own interests only or mainly ; that the many-headed monster the bellua multorum capitum whose voice is divine, may be a many-hearted monster sympathetically discovering and tenderly applying the right adjustments between individualism and altruism which undivine reason cannot yet formulate ; that the clamorous vox populi which is the voice of latent might will be the considerate voice of right and justice, especially when sanctified as public opinion. A large expectation, it is true, when it is remembered how selfishly the classes have heretofore used their power to subjugate and exploit the masses, and how necessary the explosive fury of the French Revolution with its terrors and horrors was to assert the ideal rights of liberty, equality and fraternity, which were forthwith ferociously violated in practice ; when further- more it is remembered how effective the sycophantic flattery of the mob by basely abused oratory was to overthrow Athens and other Grecian cities and to subvert Grecian liberty and independence. 1 When things are only bad they can be mended ; when they are so bad that they cannot be mended they can only be ended. Then upsurges the irresistible stream which has been gradually gaining volume to sweep them quietly or violently away ;' all the more surely when its blind fury has been supplied with a captivating ideal of an im- possible happiness and thus brought to a head. A social body cannot of course be insensible to the obligation to care for its individual units. Not only does it evolve a more tender social conscience as it grows but it has not the power, even if it had the will, to 1 Euripides and Aristophanes express their detestation of the oratorical pests. Cicero, centuries later, states his opinion that the glory and greatness of Greece were destroyed " libertate immoderate ac licentio conscionum " ; and Quintilian similarly describes the evil wrought "vitio conscionantium." Are we to suppose that what were pests then are blessings now, the proper and salutary stimulants to a democracy less instructed and less intelligently interested in affairs, but endued with better feeling and latent potentialities of a much higher intelligence ? 138 MENTAL ORGANIZATION PT . i shed them as encumbrances ; if it does not want them because they are detrimental it must contrive to forgo their production, for they show no disposition to sacri- fice themselves for it, even though that might sometimes be the greatest service which they could do. Naturally, therefore, as they increase in number and feel themselves sunk in misery and want, the demand becomes louder and more articulate for the means of production and distribu- tion of wealth to be owned and worked by the State for the common good. How can there be a true common- wealth, it is asked, unless the wealth be shared in common ? It is socially created and ought to be socially distributed, the less efficient person sharing according to the service which others do and ought to be glad to do, not according to the service which he is able or willing to do. Everybody, whatever his talents and industry, shall, like the industrious bee, make honey not for himself but for the hive : the busy bee and the " parsimonious emmet " his " pattern of just equality " and fraternity. 1 Here then the socialist perceives and uses his advantage ; for he supplies smouldering unease and discontent with a cap- tivating ideal which easily becomes a creed and then, creedlike, pays no heed to reason. Yet matters are left by socialists in perplexing obscurity. While agreeing in the main demand that competition shall be done away with, they are not agreed whether distribution shall be wholly according to wants or in some measure according to merits, nor quite sure how far individual development of character should be checked when not actually suppressed ; they are sure only that it will not be seriously hurt by being strictly regu- lated. The more moderate among them demand vaguely that there shall be equal opportunities and adequate 1 ' ' The parsimonious emmet, provident Of future, in small room large heart enclosed ; Pattern of just equality perhaps Hereafter." Paradise Lost, Bk. vii. Such Milton's socialistic surmise. CH. viz CONDITIONS OF CIVILIZATION 139 rewards, not duly considering that the natural merit of one person is selfishly to seize opportunities which another person fails to do or cannot do, and that the latter is then so far repressed. Opportunities are oppor- tunities only to him who sees and promptly grasps them, and the missed opportunity may never recur. To present them equally therefore to everybody is no better than to offer him who cannot seize them a stone when he wants bread ; he will lag behind and be a burden, however good his chances ; for want of insight and will are no less real physical incapacities than weakness of nerve and muscle, though like them capable of being more or less strengthened by suitable discipline and exercise. No luck, no chance, that is the common cry of the indolent, the self-indulgent and the impotent. A cry not perhaps wholly inexcusable, since he has not only had the bad luck to be badly born, but does see that luck counts for a great deal in the unforeseen changes and chances of things ; so much so indeed as to have given currency to the somewhat equivocal saying that fools only are fortunate, when the better saying would be that fools only rely on fortune. To plant in a barren mental soil, or a soil pre- occupied with prejudices, a sound idea which would root, grow and branch into association with other ideas in a clean and good soil is as futile as it would be to plant good seed in a stony ground or a ground overrun with weeds. Far from the struggle for existence in a social body being a physical struggle of individual against in- dividual a hand-to-hand fight, so to speak, in which the weaker succumbs it is a keen mental struggle promptly to descry and skilfully appropriate what is profitable in the surroundings and to grow in mental life by its appre- hension and assimilation ; the inevitable consequence of which is depression and deterioration of the dull-minded and unenterprising who are thrust aside and left behind in the competition. It may be a pity but it is none the less true that all souls are not of the same value in this 140 MENTAL ORGANIZATION PT . i world the soul of an idiot of the same value as the soul of a genius ; and it might be a grave mistake to deprive the latter of his opportunities of full self-expansion, as it certainly would be a bootless labour to try to raise the former to an average mental level. Nature's silent aim apparently is to preserve a typical mean ; therefore it permits not either idiot or genius to propagate his special kind. Heretofore in the history of human well-doings and ill- doings the progress made was undoubtedly due to the initiative, ambition and enterprise of the person who possessed superior insight and put forth superior power to the individual variation and its intrinsic force, which then made its own election and owed little if anything to an outside natural selection ; this a factor in the evolution of species which after all perhaps operates negatively so to speak, by suppressing the survival of the many so-called unfit rather than positively by its support of the few fit who naturally uprise and select. Anyhow the heroic person was not meek and lowly in spirit, but on the contrary bold, self-satisfied, self-assertive, and often aggressive in the expression of a stronger, if not superior, vitality. Assuredly he would never have been the hero he was had he not thus forcibly asserted himself. There- fore it is that the person of extraordinary prowess in the world lives in famous remembrance ; the act of clemency or pregnant saying of Alexander picked out for admira- tion notwithstanding the innumerable rapes, rapines, slaughters and unspeakable sufferings which his over- weening Macedonian ambition caused to mankind. So proud is the species of the magnificent specimen which it has produced that he is covertly, if not expressly, excused when he succeeds, despite his unscrupulous violation of the accepted precepts of morality. His extraordinary person is tacitly granted the right of a different morality from that of ordinary mortals ; which is not withal so absurd as it looks on the face of it, seeing that it is an instinctive avowal that his life opportunely found and CH. vii CONDITIONS OF CIVILIZATION 141 filled its proper part in the human movement and fulfilled the will of destiny. For, when all is said, what has been has rightly been in the human drama and cannot now be divinely undone ; it ought properly therefore to be studied and described scientifically in the dry light of reason un- affected by moral censures which would have made things other than what they were. These, it is true, have their useful function in the present to incite better human feel- ing and conduct, and perchance to promote a better future when triumphant might shall not be thought right and famously commemorated accordingly. Be that as it may, in the case of the upleaping hero the organic variation was manifestly not the passive servant of natural selec- tion, though necessarily presupposing and testifying by its nature to the vigour and virtue of the stock from which it sprang and the ancestors who live in it ; its growth not a simple matter of adapting itself to its environment but in the main rather a case of adapting its environment to its growth by election and intrinsic energy of its natural affinities. It is certainly hard to picture in mind a realm of righteousness in which the swift runner shall be forced to neglect opportunities and slacken speed on purpose that the slow runner or the sluggard may keep up with him, as he is directly compelled to do now by the rules of some Trade Unions, and might be indirectly obliged or personally disposed to do in the best socialistic democracies possible ; more hard to think perhaps that all runners shall eventually be endowed with equal aptitudes to seize and equal strength and will to use opportunities. For the present, capacities being unequal and opportunities limited while desire is not, while the masses are deliberately taught to desire more and more, there is a constant source of discontent and trouble, with the evident need of a strong government of some kind to enforce and maintain orderly progress. Looking on matters from a biological point of view, it is not easy to conceive how a great perfecting change 142 MENTAL ORGANIZATION FT. i shall take effect in the physical constitution of the human body, even such an increase of fine cerebro-mental com- plexities within its present cranial compass as might be requisite for the purpose. However that may be, it seems probable that if all persons were now put on an equality and rewarded not according to their works but their wants the result might be not only to increase the number of the contentedly useless and selfish persons but also to check, weaken, or stifle the useful impulses to valuable variations both by curtailing individual liberty to expand freely when the initiative was made and by suppressing its production. Would a society which was reduced to a dead level of stereotyped uniformity furnish a suitable soil for the anticipated shoots and free growth of moral and intellectual development without end ? How could apprehension and assimilation go on in a fixed social equilibrium with no changing matter in the surroundings to elicit individual enterprise and reaction ? If the social system were as placid as that of a flock of sheep and as altruistic and industrious as that of a hive of bees or a nest of ants it ought at the same time, unlike them, to be so far dissatisfied with its condition as persistently to strive to raise itself to a higher plane, else its bliss might be its blame. Yet that impulse would be an ever-recurring cause of unrest and disturbance. Speculations of reason, however, as to the future of humanity are at best vain and futile ; for its progress is not moved by reason, and the reason of to-day is often the unreason of to-morrow. It will no doubt go on craving and striving so long as it is imbued with the organic impulse of life, consciously finding in its craving a creative cause thereof, joying and hoping when the impulse has free play, sorrowing and fearing when it is hindered, and matters will adjust themselves more or less reasonably somehow ; even better and better if its aspirations are sound and strong, less and less well if they weaken and wane, until cycles of doing and un- doing are ended and things wax and wane no more, CH.VII CONDITIONS OF CIVILIZATION 143 the womb of nature becoming its grave. 1 Meanwhile social perfecting is the present concern and practical pur- suit and the way of it simple namely, for everybody to strive to do as he would be done by ; which has been a doctrine so necessary to its advance that it was preached several thousand years before it was taught in Galilee and may possibly need to be preached through several thou- sand years to come. The uncertainty is whether, if the principle were realized in practice, life would advance and everybody then strive to do what was worth doing. That the superior mental variation, individual or national, should not be permitted to develop its intrinsic vitality freely and fully along its own lines of expansion at the least cost to other units but have its energies directed into more useful social or international channels, is plainly contrary to the order of development of organic nature outside human nature. Could a tree ever grow to its full height and form if its weaker or less favourably situated branches did not suffer or succumb in the struggle of life against more vigorous or better situated branches ? Or the type of any animal species ever have been what it is if its members had loved the members of a competing species as themselves ? Self-sacrificing care for its young in the interests of the species is common to animal nature, but when they are grown up and able to fend for them- selves they are left to protect and provide for themselves in the vital struggle in which they may even find their parents to be fiercely hostile competitors. It is the characteristic of human nature to have initiated and pursue a new order of social organization in which a constant protection of its weak members is enforced, the stronger individual being instructed to forgo the gratifica- tion of such native tendencies as are anti-social. He is therefore taught that he will not suffer by the personal self-sacrifice which he is compelled to make, but will be more than compensated by the multiplied benefits of 1 As Milton says of Chaos " The womb of nature and perhaps her grave." 144 MENTAL ORGANIZATION PT . i social co-operation, gaining in variety, fulness and power of life out of all proportion to his loss of individual liberty. He will count best individually by such orderly subordination. Being, so to speak, an organ of that organization, he is enriched with its wealth of worth and will function better for himself and better for it as he is better. If a hard fate has not fashioned his native mental structure fitly with proper ingrafts of social culture and he cannot successfully adapt himself to the environment in which his lot is cast, he is ousted as a social alien, a miscarriage of some kind imbecile, wastrel, weakling, lunatic or criminal. His mishap is to be a mischance of nature, which, as Bacon says, sometimes " modum tenere nescia est." Yet he might perhaps have fitted into the circumstances of a lower civilization where a propitious natural selection would have operated not to hinder or hurt but to sustain, energize and help him. The pity of course is that unheeding fate seems oft to misplace mortals in a mad world. As social organization increasing in complexity is the destined aim of human progress, individualities being tamed and shaped accordingly, it is an interesting sur- mise whether a national organization at its best is likely to last interminably. Nations have one after another perished in the many tragic dramas of the past, some of them now so clean forgotten as to require much patient and laborious research to discover and disinter their remains in such places as Tunis, Egypt, Babylon, Asia Minor, India. 1 Not to speak of Greece and Rome where flourishing cities and civilizations once existed and men thought and acted much as they do now, and doubtless believed that they would continue to think and act. Like vast primeval forests and huge species of animals they were nevertheless one after another sub- merged in oblivion. Strange then it is to see how 1 The ruins of the great prehistoric city of Tiahuanaca on a plateau of the Andes, over a thousand feet high, are supposed to be the remains of a civilization which is thought to have flourished eleven thousand years ago. CH. vii CONDITIONS OF CIVILIZATION 145 confidently the opinion of national mortality, mindless of the human past, is now sometimes scouted as a despicable pessimistic fancy. The self-flattering nation likes to live, just as the self-flattering person does, and as it would like to live for ever, as he does, hopes to live for ever. Yet when the matter is duly considered, it is not strange but natural and fortunate ; for the esteem and adulation of self by the nation, as by the individual, undoubtedly acts in a measure to curb ill-doing within it, to sustain its self-respect and dignity, to incite virile and perhaps virtuous energy. Let the human future be what it may, it might be well in the present to leave off fighting furiously about words which have no defined meanings and to look facts frankly in the face ; for it is poor nourishment to any mind to feed it on words, and it is on facts not on words that the issue ultimately depends. Equal opportunities, equal chances, equal individual values, socially created wealth, human perfection, absolute truth and righteous- ness, and similar general phrases sound pleasantly and serve well as rhetorical outpours and excitations of senti- ment, but in present human conditions have little rational application to the concrete facts of life. Attempts to translate them into practice might be more likely to hinder than help the desired progress, not unlikely indeed to cause a disastrous regress ; for the practical application of a phrase, the meaning of which is not really appre- hended, might in that case be a disagreeably effective means of testing its value and thereby proving its inanity. Enthusiasm is without doubt a valuable force when it is reasonably controlled and regulated, but it is pernicious irrationalism when it flares incontinently into sentimental fanaticism : it is then as wrong as silly to sanction still more to sanctify its frenzy. What do some of these vague and ambiguous phrases mean when they are definitely set forth as acceptable theses ? Equal individual values when no two persons are equal ; equal opportunities when opportunities for unequal persons never can be equal ; L 146 MENTAL ORGANIZATION PT . i socially created wealth when every penny of it is the work of particular persons ; human perfection when no one has the least idea what or when the perfection is to be. The prudent path of reason is discreetly midway between the unreason of extremes, that is between the animal and the angelic whose different natures man is supposed to share, subduing the while the animal part which is yet strong in evidence and stimulating the spiritual which makes its hard struggle to develop : fervent aspiration to the ideal with calculated opportunism in conduct. The basic fact which shallow sentiment and loose thought pleasingly ignore is that in a yet imperfect humanity there are many weaklings and sluggards who will not work when they can live on the work of others, and good reason to fear that many more would become inefficients under a benevolent system of teaching work- shirkers self-pity and supporting them in idleness : a result nowise serviceable to the sound constitution of any society, even when it is pleasantly christened social reform. As a good government needs good citizens to keep it sound, so a bad government breeds bad citizens because, representing persons who have no other thought of the State than as an unfailing source of supply, no active desire to purify, strengthen and mend it, no vital concern with what they owe and therefore ought, absorbed only in their own personal interests and indulgences, it encourages them in indolence, self-indulgence, lack of self-reliance and self-respect, by the application of so- called social remedies which aggravate the evil ; like the poultices which it was once the medical practice to put on sores and wounds before it was understood that the right practice is so to purify and strengthen the body as to aid its healing reaction. 1 That a sound and stable State must 1 The Workmen's Compensation Act for injuries and illnesses has notori- ously increased largely the percentage of accidents and illnesses, having encouraged carelessness and produced a host of malingerers with fraudulent claims. A medical writer whose experience has been large and special has in fact described the new disease as Ergophobia. The Insurance Act, too, has been rightly or wrongly charged with having caused much public demoraliza- CH. vii CONDITIONS OF CIVILIZATION 147 rest at bottom on sound and vigorous individual characters which constitute it is a truism to which every one assents in theory but is apt to be neglected in practice, especially by rulers in a democratic nation who depend for power, place and pay on the suffrages of the masses whose passions and ignorance they flatter and exploit. Sure, however, that the voice of the people is divine and has proved its divinity by putting them in power, they easily persuade themselves that their particular profit, which is real, is identical with the public good, even when that is not evidently real. It would be indecent, if not insulting, to suggest that the stealthy operation of self-interest ever masked itself insidiously in the guise of righteousness and biassed the person's conduct. Is thy servant a dog that he should do this thing? is a question quite out of place when matters have matured and the thing is maturely done, if not as a matter of principle, discreetly as a matter of personal interest, or at any rate of just expediency when the public opinion of an ignorant majority demands it. Then it is the fine patriotism of the politician to sacrifice his honour and conscience for the good of his country. Away with petty considerations of the means and details of the existing social development, it may be said ; all will be well at last. Trust may be safely put in the vis medicatrix naturae of the social organism which, like as in the bodily organism, shall work continuously to purge it of the evils engendered in it and to ensure its well-being. All that is necessary to keep it in health and wealth is for it to disdain and discard the pursuit of wealth as its sole and chief aim, and rightly to distribute the produced wealth in a perfecting progress which will soon be vastly accelerated. A resolute control and regulation of unrighteous competition, and a persevering tion by multiplying malingerers. The feeding of poor children by benevolent municipalities has undoubtedly tempted many parents who were quite able to feed their children to obtain the free food which they see their neighbours get for their children. 148 MENTAL ORGANIZATION PT. i ejection of the debasing wiles, guiles, frauds, corruptions which infect its moral atmosphere, vitiate individual characters, render it insensible to its secret iniquities that will be the saving health of the community unto all generations when words shall be duly suited to actions and actions to words. Such is the splendid ideal to be brought to pass some day, in spite of the formidable difficulties to be encountered and surmounted. Until that blessed consummation is reached, the opposing struggles between the ideal and the rear must continue, both being natural and neither a fault or a blame ; for the one denotes the onward impulse of life in human evolution, the other the resistance of con- servative stability. The resulting movement, therefore, of their opposing forces may be an expanding orbit of motion, if not finally perchance in a contracting orbit. As the earth travels over and over again through its orbit round the sun, so may human life, as sometimes surmised, travel over and over again through its cycles of waxing and waning ; and should the earth fall at last into the sun, or the sun's fire go out, the human cycles must surely end with the extinction of its vitalizing rays. 1 Throughout the long period of measureless time before that event happens, if it ever happen, the bright star of the right ideal for ideals are far from always right will be neces- sary and useful to incite and guide human travail onwards ; for the soul without its ideal would be virtually soulless. It would mark then the final decline of progressive life in mind. 1 " Empedocles and Heraclitus, and afterwards the Stoics, did not only suppose the world likewise generated and to be again corrupted, but also that this had been and would be done over and over again in infinite vicissitudes." CUDWORTH, vol. i. p. 175. CHAPTER VIII FUNDAMENTAL INSTINCTS AND SOCIAL ATONEMENT The fundamental instincts. Love a subject of scientific study. Reproductive prodigality. Moralization of the reproductive instinct. Social sympathy and conduct. Subjective and objective unity. Social atonement. Sentiment and sound sense. Self-denial and self-indulgence. Altruistic idealism. Heredity and social influence. Physiological and mental checks to reproduction. Intellect and infertility. Artificial infertility. Eugenic breeding. Pessimistic forebodings. Present exultation and future retrospect. Intrinsic mortality of animal species. Man and the microbe. THE work of social development is to humanize and, so far as possible, moralize the two fundamental instincts or needs of human nature, from which the primary passions and secondary emotions spring and evolve, namely, hunger and lust the one urging to maintenance, the other to reproduction of self. 1 Not, certainly, to eradicate them, which would be folly, but to spiritualize them, which is their anticipated end. The moralization of the self-con- servative instinct has gone forward on the whole in the course of human progress, albeit irregularly, slowly and intermittently, in spite of discouraging set-backs which are easily put out of mind when out of sight. Much, however, undeniably remains to be done to moralize the propagative instinct. As human beings are yet constituted, 1 Reproduction is not done advisedly to beget offspring, but as a present gratification of instinctive lust. Similarly, when the soldier in deadly personal conflict with his enemy fights furiously he does not act on set purpose to kill, but by instinctive self-conservation strives to save his own life by killing his assailant. In neither case therefore is self-reproach or remorse felt afterwards for what was done. 149 150 MENTAL ORGANIZATION PT.I and likely to be for a long time to come, seeing how long they have been essentially what they are, it is hardly credible that if the self-conservative instinct were no more to involve them in fierce competition and strife, the con- scienceless sexual lust would suffer them to live in peace and concord. There is a stubborn disinclination, however, to look the reproductive instinct frankly in the face and to deal with its function in a natural way ; a scrupulous reserve and reticence concerning it being enjoined and practised as though it were something of a moral degrada- tion, whereas it is neither moral nor immoral, but simply animal and non-moral. It is shut up in a sanctuary of silent secrecy to draw it out of which would be an offence or a shame. Were the function owned to be natural and more openly treated a vast amount of vicious hypocrisies would be done away with, and many lascivious imaginings spring up less pruriently than now under the suggestive provocations of secrecy. Although love be a divine attribute of human nature, it is neither profane nor wrong to subject it to scientific study ; for if all nature be divine, reproductive energy is eminently so. Love is plainly rooted in lust, and has been spiritualized from it by gradual social development in conformity to natural laws : the graceful flower in the air is nowise entitled therefore to despise its ungraceful root in the ground. Love thus sublimed is not, of course, lust ; for while lust is a mere animal appetite, love is an affection evolved from the close interaction of one mind with another, each of which, being a complex of social and moral sentiments, necessarily imbues it with the finest essence of social beings in a social body. But it is not, therefore, unlawful to enquire into its vital source, and to expose the natural process of its development the organic mechanism of its production, so to speak which is all that science attempts, and all in the end it expects to do. Thus, to enquire positively is repugnant only to the vulgar conceit that such a demonstration of its development is to debase its dignity by destroying its mystery. Mankind CH. vin FUNDAMENTAL INSTINCTS 151 dearly love a mystery, flatter and fondle their sense of awe of it, and having fenced it round by a sacred taboo as the refuge and sanctuary of ignorance, resent as materialistic profanity any attempt to search out and explain its nature. Its superlative value is then to- put a dead stop to thought and to evoke a superlative faith, and the superior person is he who is graced by celestial inspiration with the proper faith. Why such shrinking fear of natural facts ? Why is it unlawful for natural beings to trace the origin and development of all natural things in a world of natural law ? Mystery enough will always be left in the immen- sity and inconceivability of the boundless processions and processes of things beyond the compass of human thought, however great the progress of science within the narrow compass of sensorimotor evolved intelligence. The growth of the brilliant flower from the minute seed, of the majestic oak from the small acorn, of the large and complex animal structure from the microscopic speck of protoplasm is marvel enough, although familiarity with the spectacles has deadened observation and staled wonder. To reflect adequately on the complex, intricate and elaborate struc- ture of the human body, and the more wonderfully pregnant potentialities of its microscopic germ, in which are physico- chemically pre-ordained not only every organ but every part and property as developed ultimately in the multitudes of diverse persons, no two of whom are exactly alike, is surely calculated to teach how little that which is per- ceived and handled is when compared with the exquisitely fine physical and chemical subtilties of the infinitesimally minute which cannot yet be perceived and handled ; to teach, too, that man in the germ when invisible is not something detached from nature after he has grown to visible maturity, however spiritual he may then think or feel himself to be. When all is said, it is a fact that the father begets and the mother conceives the child's soul as well as its body ; that soul, moreover, impregnate with the silent memories of ancestral souls reaching intermin- ably backwards. 152 MENTAL ORGANIZATION PT . i In the organic impulsion or propulsion of nature's motion through man there is obvious reason for the urgent insistence of the propagative instinct and its secret curiosities and anticipations from the first dim waking of its energy ; no need therefore to wonder at the worship which the religions of mankind have always symbolically paid it. How is the cogent instinct to be more moralized ? Only by making it less selfish, more consciously altruistic, more regardful perhaps of nature's method of sacrificing the individual to the species. Reckless gratification along with entire indifference to consequences is no doubt in keeping with the productive prodigality and waste in every department of animal and vegetable life where a single oak produces many thousand acorns, all doomed to rot unless perchance they serve for food to a foraging pig, a single insect ova enough to devastate a whole territory were each ovum to reach maturity, a single person during life germinal cells enough to populate a big city had they all the luck to live and thrive. 1 Of the multitude of potential human beings only one here and there possesses the intrinsic vigour or, favoured by fortune and circum- stances in the vicissitudes of things, gratifies its affinities and realizes its potentialities ; the rest perish abortively. Nature with its illimitable fecundity has no need to use bad or unsuitable material ; it can afford to cast it aside as worthless and even waste immense quantities of good material for which it has no use to further its course and maintain the balance of the species. Hitherto nature has not cared to moralize its reproduc- tive energy unless perhaps in the case of bees and to a certain extent in monogamous animals. The fit moraliza- tion may be reserved for enactment in time to come when, 1 The ovary of a mature maiden has been calculated to contain 7000 ova, each of which, had fortune favoured, might have developed into a human being. A single fleshfly is said to produce 20,000 larvae which can reach their full size in five days. A thrush, a blackbird, a titmouse, if allowed, would have twenty millions of descendants in ten years. It matters not whether these figures are exact or not, for a few thousands may be subtracted or added without lowering the value of the lesson. Floods of life-germs and lives are squandered as man from his point of view thinks purposelessly. CH. vni FUNDAMENTAL INSTINCTS 153 becoming moral under the control and direction of an improved human nature, it shall restrain or reform its present wasteful procedures in the human case ; for man believes that he can do the universe and its creator no greater honour than to attribute his limited notions of purpose to its illimitable and inscrutable processes and, having done so, to glorify himself accordingly. In any case the reverently prescribed duty is to perceive in the operations of nature an unconscious and effortless perfect- ing beneath all conscious labours and failures, gains and losses, all the alternating progressions and relapses of human nature going on in and by it ; patiently in quiet confidence to expect the happy day of amity and concord when the cat shall nurse the mouse, the kite brood over the chickens, the lion lie down with the lambs, and the man, pleased to behold the happy spectacles, cease to kill and eat the lamb. It is hard to conceive the realization of such a state of innocent felicity in the world constituted as life is and human beings as they are. The wiser and easier part no doubt is to nurse the notion as a spiritual ideal useful to in- cite and promote aspiration whereby the growth of a perfect- ing social organization may be forwarded. Having learnt the saving lesson of strength by organized union in the war of life, the human species has conquered its paramount position in animate nature, and furthermore, by the loving care, prolonged protection and assiduous instruction of its acquired knowledge which a slowly maturing offspring requires and obtains, has fortified itself there impregnably. The natural result of associated action, consonant feeling and congruous thought in compact social union has there- fore been an evolution of ethical principles of conduct to supersede the rude law of natural selection by moral sympathies and rules of conduct. Unthinking natural selection deprived of half its power is not permitted to exterminate what it rejects and only to further what it selects ; instead of being eliminated the weak and unfit are enabled to survive by the help of the more fortunate 1 54 MENTAL ORGANIZATION PT . i fit. Nor is this the biological anomaly and plain evil which it might superficially seem to be ; for the sounder and stronger the social feeling and cement in a community, the more complete its solidarity, the better is it fitted to prosper in the struggle of life against other communities whose animosities, competitions and hostilities do so much by the reactions which they elicit to keep it in vigorous being. In the heightening and strengthening of the social organization by ideal aspirations and ethical precepts of conduct, which is the present trend of human evolution, the unconscious of nature and the conscious of mind merge in unison ; for the subjective of human feeling and thought is seen to proceed by natural law from the inter- action of the organism with the objective world mind and matter to be combined in a vital unity. This is a truth which may be more acceptable to one who reflects that he always looks objectively on the subjective of another person ; sure of his own thinking self as a subjective reality he infers a similar self in the objective reality which he perceives. But whatever he may think of the intuitive assurance of his spiritual personality and its metaphysical source he would not possess it subjectively if he were not objective reality, bodily and mental, to other persons. When all is said, the verdict of sound common sense, which is the common judgment of solid experience within its proper sphere, will probably be that there would be no mental within if there were no material without, and pronounce Dr. Johnson more rational than ridiculous when he kicked a stone in practical refutation of purely abstract idealism. The question which perturbs many minds whether any social body will be strengthened in the end by the benevolent care of its members when these are weak in mind, infirm in body, or otherwise defective need not trouble a firm faith in the glorious future of the race. The well-being of the whole plainly benefits by the social virtues and self-sacrifices of individual units who them- selves, so far from being gainers, may even be sufferers CH. vin FUNDAMENTAL INSTINCTS 155 by the exercise of them, doomed by the law of social atonement painfully to make expiation for the failures and faults of others ; for the righteous man is often less fitted to prosper in a land of unrighteousness than the less righteous who, being best suited to the environment, survives and prospers. If it be not strictly true that the worst endowment which a person can have for succeeding in the competitive struggle of life is a too tender moral sense, it is certainly true that a dull moral feeling with a crafty intellect and alertly pushing egoism is a very useful composition of forces. Nor in truth is the hurt to tender feeling in that case always a mere hurt to individual self- love, as the cynic might say ; for if the self be a righteous self it is a hurt to righteousness in person. To the tenderly conscientious and over- scrupulous person is left the soothing thought that he exemplifies in his conduct the useful working of social atonement, to which ke may join the far-sighted reflection that his recompense will be to live on immortally in the Great Being of Humanity which he helps on its way by the good leaven of his faithful service. Thus also, perhaps, may the social body console itself when it appears on the face of things to sacrifice itself to the lame and erring persons in it. Fate has not dealt kindly with the pessi- mist who, disheartened by knowledge of what has been in the human past and what actually is in the present, lacks the faith in humanity to care to live on in it immortally after his mortal life is ended. Is he, then, an abnormal and defective being, mentally misshapen and bound in consequence to a bad habit of thought and feeling? That is the natural conclusion of an exulting vitality in the mind of the species. That it behoves every social body to care for and nurture its weak, diseased and similarly inefficient members is acknowledged in all civilized countries. Its aim should obviously be to prevent noxious production, so far as possible, and, when by mischance produced, to render it innocuous. As regards the congenitally defec- 156 MENTAL ORGANIZATION PT. i tive and the diseased there need be no question of the justice of compassionate treatment, but in the cases of criminal and otherwise viciously anti-social persons it is noxious folly to permit soft sentiment to smother sound sense ; for many of them are more or less amenable to social stimulants and may justly, if painfully, be stimulated. A self-indulgent habit of inordinate self-pity disguising and expressing itself as pleasing commisera- tion, yet violating the rights of truth and justice, cannot be wholesome in the long run. To let the crime pass unpunished is to breed rather than check crime. Senti- mental denunciations of the stupidity and cruelty of society in dealing with anti-social persons is an easy and self-indulgent discharge of narrow and incontinent feeling* The anti-social person is not rendered socially innocuous nor the society immune by sorrowing over him ; and, when all is said, the duty and right of society, if it is to live in health and strength, are to exclude or seelude or otherwise control its internal enemies, not merely to feel for them but to deal with them by means which are necessarily a punishment to them. Punishment, therefore, is properly inflicted, not out of revenge for the wrong done, which would benefit nobody, nor many times with any reasonable expectation of reforming the wrong-doer whose radically unsound nature would often need to be regenerated, but as a stern admonition to others not to do wrong and incur a similar fate ; for which purpose the severities and cruelties of past punishments may not have been entirely unnecessary and useless, inhumane or in- human as they are called now. When the General ruthlessly decimated his troops which had cowardly fled, executing the one out of ten men on whom the lot fell he perhaps the one just man or at any rate not more guilty than the others, it was a drastic but effective way of teaching them that it was perhaps safer to run on than run away. Their executions in an organized military body were an expiation for the sins of the defaulting members. Although mankind have risen to their present height CH. via FUNDAMENTAL INSTINCTS 157 of development without formulated rules to eliminate the unfit, these were nevertheless subject to effective means of elimination. Plagues, pestilences, famines, wars and all sorts of diseases and wretched conditions of existence had formerly their free function to kill the weak, diseased and otherwise unfit, and to leave the strong and healthy to propagate sound and vigorous stock. Under conditions of less ease and comfort, it is true ; but, when all is said, life in a hovel with open door, simple food, thrifty habits and wholesome exercise in hard work involving stern self-denial and self-discipline was more favourable to the quality of the stock than charitable doles to poor persons herded in the squalid and overcrowded rooms of a big city's slums, ill and wastefully nourished there on food chosen rather for its colour than its nutritive value, in foolish imitation of the example set by the self-indulgence of those above them in social rank. The old opinion that man must labour in the sweat of his face, and the strife of competition to live is being sup- planted by a growing feeling that he ought never to work so hard as to compete and sweat, and by a fatuous assurance, implicit or explicit, that everybody has the right to be com- fortable and happy in this world : the religious doctrine that human life is a preparatory pilgrimage or transitional purgatory of labour and sorrow from which death is a blest deliverance discarded as an obsolescent superstition ; for few persons really believe its martyrdom now to have been a justly prescribed punishment of the race to expiate the one forbidden sin of its first parents. Destined perfec- tion and final felicity on earth is the tacitly cherished opti- mistic vision and pleasing divination of human self-esteem. However that be, whether just anticipation or egotistic illusion, certain it is that effective work was formerly done to maintain a right balance of life ; and it is not incon- ceivable that, failing the purgation of wars which mightily disvalue human life, man with his exalted estimate of the value of every individual life might disturb the balance to his own detriment. 158 MENTAL ORGANIZATION PT . i Throughout the whole system of nature conflict and destruction of life is the inexorable law ; even within the intimate tissues and functions of the organ when, for instance, the microscopic leucocytes of the blood which supplies its nourishment and very life hasten to attack and consume the cell in it which is so decrepit or damaged as no longer to possess vital strength enough to resist the assault. The microbes which, though so minute in sub- stance, now loom so large in apprehension were not formerly vigorously assailed as if they had no proper function in the human province and were unlawful in- vaders. They assuredly have and perform their proper function ; for as the aim or purpose of life is to live by organic compositions and decompositions, so its end or purpose is to suffer disintegration by their living agency. 1 The self-conservative instinct with its evolved passions and emotions having been much altruized, it is a natural question what check, if any, ought to be put on the propagative instinct. In matter of fact its fundamental operation is altruistic. What can be more altruistic than the ephemeral insect which lives only to propagate, dying as soon as it has discharged its ordained function ? And that too doubtless without thinking of its useful purpose in an imagined purpose of things. In the human case the instinctobtains its right development and so-called spiritual- ization through family unity and the loving care of offspring, thence by ascent from the compound social unit of the family to the tribe or clan, then onwards to the nation, 1 Which they manifestly effect, whether well or ill, from the human stand- point. Their abundance and the rapidity of their multiplication are truly amazing. A single ounce of soil has been calculated to contain a hundred and seventy million bacteria, and a single bacterium under favourable condi- tions can, it is said, multiply in twenty-four hours to one hundred and eighty millions . If noxious to the part of nature which man is, they are not noxious to nature as a whole ; on the contrary, they rightly serve it by killing him when, being weaker life, he is a proper subject to be killed and rendered innocuous, which he is apt to think he never is. Hostile as the typhoid bacillus and other bacilli are to him, they do no hurt when he is strong and fit to live ; for they are often found inhabiting his body in typhoid-carriers when he appears to be in quite good health. Are they then functionless, as supposed, in respect of him, only waiting harmlessly on guard to act and end him at the proper time ? CH. vin FUNDAMENTAL INSTINCTS 159 and finally in theory to a perfect humanity having one faith, one brotherhood, one country, one happy life of peace and concord. Then at last shall individual egoism obtain its finest and highest expression, selfishness be swallowed up in altruism ; when in matter of fact the words egoism and altruism must have lost their meaning, since one is meaningless without the other. Being an abstraction, Humanity supplies ample scope for optimistic imagination to disport itself in, ignoring what it has been and is actually under the glamour of what it shall be. With all the more assurance since despite flagrant relapses the race has undeniably advanced and can therefore look forward to a continued advance in the moral and spiritual develop- ment to which it aspires. For what other end than a human end has the whole world groaned and travailed hitherto in pain and still groans and travails ? Inspired and inflamed by such a glorious conceit, how can the optimist trouble himself with speculations concerning the propagation of the unfit or with minute enquiries as to what means ought to be taken to prevent it ? Anyhow it is pretty certain that although some thought is now anxiously given to the possible con- sequences of the instinct to increase and multiply without regard to the place of multiplication and the quality of the increase no stringent means will soon, if ever,- be adopted on purpose to regulate the process. With the present lack of all exact knowledge of the obscure laws of heredity, and with the luxuriant crop of futile specula- tions which spring up, measures of the kind would probably do more harm than good. To eliminate madness from a stock might be to eliminate the special sensibility of unstable nerve- element which undoubtedly issues some- times in the variation of individual talent or genius. To select and pair two eminent intellectuals might be either to breed no progeny at all or to breed an idiot. That the child of a Judge is five or fifteen hundred times more likely to inherit mental capacity than the child of a peasant, as the eugenic enthusiast has said, is an assertion 160 MENTAL ORGANIZATION PT. i which, plausible as it looks, is certainly not warranted by observation and would not be proved by experiments. The child is likely, no doubt, in the event to attain a more eminent position, but that is usually owing to heredity of influence rather than heredity of capacity. Born and bred in a higher social stratum and more favourable environment, member of a family which has learnt the lesson of using these adjuncts, pushed by every available solicitation and intrigue, the favoured scion of average ability easily obtains and fairly holds a position which he would never have won by his own merits and exertions. To cite the instance as a con- spicuous proof of inherited mental capacity is preposter- ous ; it is an instance only of organized nepotism. Lord Chancellors, Bishops and Judges have notoriously not been remiss in promoting their kith and kin and even their wives' kin ; and it can hardly be said that their offspring have especially distinguished themselves. The truth is that the peasant has often in his unexhausted stock a latent fund of sound vitality, a silent stoicism of character, a solid mentality which the more cultured product of a conventional civilization has not ; and the quality in the stock counts for more than the particular paternal show. Is it to be believed for a moment that Shatkespeare or Napoleon or Abraham Lincoln would have gained anything by being the son of a Judge and trained in due course of custom at a university to a set mental pattern ? Each would pretty surely in that case have lost much natural spontaneity of action and freshness of insight, being unmade by being artificially made, and not been the signal person which he was. To be poor in wealth and ignorant of conventions is nowise to be disendowed mentally, as it is the foolish conceit of fashionable commiseration to assume. 1 The true source of a sound and strong vitality lies in the wholesome 1 Let six average peasants or artisans on the one side and six average judges on the other side be chosen and set to breed, and let their offspring enjoy equal opportunities and advantages, the shrewd calculator might safely bet at least two, perhaps ten, to one on the peasants or artisans. CH. vin FUNDAMENTAL INSTINCTS 161 contact with and assimilation of nature, not in a life of artificial and weedy conventions superimposed on it Other checks than legal enactments to a reckless increase of population, whether fit or unfit, are possible, if not existent. The production may decrease naturally, as the apparent drift is in civilized nations, from hidden physiological causes which take effect in consequence of changed conditions of life, whether these be for the better or the worse ; from the increase especially of the mental unrest, dissipation of energy, luxurious indulgences, hurry and worry accompanying the multiplication of desires, ambitions, gratifications which are called civilization and pleasantly mistaken for it. Women who revolt against the pains and perils of childbirth and shrink from the anxieties and troubles of children may become naturally less fertile or positively barren, and men, shirking the burden of a large family, more continent or less virile. That mental states physiologically affect and are affected by the delicate and complicated biochemical processes upon which all life depends is not so hard to conceive now as once it was when mind reigned as a separate and supreme entity in its realm, inhabiting and using the body but owing no evolutional homage to it. In the complex unison of exquisitely subtile rhythms and exchanges which the whole living body is, notwithstand- ing its internal competitions of parts, there is not a bodily rhythm of any part which does not become mental, nor again a single mental rhythm which does not become corporeal. The conscious desire shown and the provident means taken to limit offspring may then be the emergent manifestations of impulses from the unconscious strata of physiological function to which the so-called subconscious mind is tied, and in which the pure psychologist supposes it mutely yet mentally to operate, not knowing itself the while to be mind. Again, it is not improbable that an extraordinary intellectual activity may itself be a cause of infertility, although that is a cause not seriously to be apprehended M 162 MENTAL ORGANIZATION PT . i generally. That the great work of thought in the world has been chiefly done by childless or unmarried men, as Bacon observed, was not perhaps owing only to the fact that they had no families to divert and dissipate their energies in making provision for them ; a possible reason may be that the eminently intellectual person is not the best qualified for reproduction and does not marry or, if married, is childless. Man being a compound of animal, emotional and intellectual qualities owning one source of vital origin cannot well develop one part of his nature to an abnormal height in the balance of functions save at the cost of other parts and the risk of mental deformity. If he become a god in intellect as he aspires to be, or an angel in feeling as he fain would be, or a brute in lust as he often actually is, he necessarily ceases to be a sound whole being. A further consideration to be borne in mind is that population may decrease rapidly, as it now decreases gradually in some classes, in consequence of the general adoption of the artificial measures taken to prevent con- ception which, among his many inventions, man's superior reason has found out and taught him to employ success- fully. If that be a vicious misuse of reason, as may be openly argued when the practice is directly challenged, it is undeniably a present accompaniment of his intellectual and moral distinction. Moral or immoral, it is at any rate a signal illustration of the function of reason to make its suitable adaptations to the fundamental force of feeling, even to the insistent impulse of the reproductive instinct. One consideration more concerning an increase or de- crease of population is that, as some persons confidently expect, there may be such a fine development of a tender eugenic conscience as shall induce people designedly to forgo or otherwise to hinder the propagation of the unfit and (when they have learnt how to do it) so cleverly to mate the fit male and female as steadily to improve the breed of the species. Quality will then be wisely bettered and quantity prudently lessened ; for a collective eugenic CH. vin FUNDAMENTAL INSTINCTS 163 conscience will be formed and fixed, not otherwise than as a collective moral consciousness has been formed. When that work is done those who are then alive may behold such a spectacle of masculine and feminine self- renunciation as has not hitherto been exhibited in human history, but has perhaps been dimly foreshadowed by the praise and practice of celibacy many times in many places. Lastly, not to launch further on a sea of surmise, population may go on increasing and conditions of life worsening until the race works out its own decline ; which, however extravagant and repugnant a supposition, is not an unimaginable end of human things. With the advance of reason the suspicion may intrude that reason pushed to its logical extremes ends in depreciation of the human life-drama, or at any rate supplies no inspiring aim, followed thereupon by the sombre or apathetic con- viction that it is not worth while to go on struggling in self-sacrifice for the future of the species and its socializa- tion ; so uncertain the result in view of its past and present, and so little at last will its utmost advance count in the cosmic procession of events. What century of its existence from its beginning would the human race now wish to be exactly repeated ? Not even probably the last century over the glorious advance and moral superiority of whose civilization it ceased not to exult jubilantly until rudely and unexpectedly awakened to the gross actualities of things. If a well-instructed pessimist gifted with a singular fore- sight had on the eve of its outbreak predicted the biggest, costliest and bloodiest war by Christians in which mankind has ever been engaged during its troubled history waged, too, ruthlessly and deliberately with all the scientific appli- ances of skilful destruction which its persevering ingenuity and toil have laboriously achieved during its latest exultant progress his forecast would have been indignantly scouted as the vision of a madman or the base outrage of a wickedly perverse imagination, nothing else than an impious denial 1 64 MENTAL ORGANIZATION PT . i of the value of Christianity and a scandalous declaration of its bankruptcy. Yet he would have been truly a seer. Away with gloomy broodings and cynical forebodings is the optimistic exclamation of spiritual insight ; they have always existed sporadically and always been rightly derided and despised. Democritus and Diogenes, not- withstanding their eminent intellectual gifts, were mis- begotten and malformed mentally ; and that was the reason why they lacked the wholesome spirit of idealism and were pleased to laugh and sneer at the tragi-comedy of human life. It is the pleasing custom to take short views. Why look a long way back or try to see a long way ahead, when it is wiser and better far to live from day to day in the present and thus patiently to advance ? The Christian nations which predominate and rule now by virtue of their strong vital energy and the persistent violation of their religious principles have persuaded themselves that the world never was before at such a splendid height of intellectual and moral development, never before had such a divinely begotten creed, never was fraught with such pleasing promise of continuous process. Their peoples think and act for the most part as though the Annus Domini which is the beginning of their calendar was the beginning of things. But as it was far from being the beginning, so it may be far from being the end of them. It might indeed not be amiss quietly to reflect and try to picture to themselves what the inhabitants of the earth, five or ten thousand years hence, looking back with impartial eye on the history of Christendom, may possibly think of its supernatural origin, its professed beliefs, its actual practice, its vaunting virtues, and its sanguinary wars. Of one thing these retrospective enquirers will certainly see proof enough namely, the persistent opera- tion of the fundamental instincts and passions of animal life in spite of habitual disparagement of them. If the human race ever shall improve so much as heartily to desire an exact repetition of a century of its CH.VHI FUNDAMENTAL INSTINCTS 165 existence, it still cannot hope to last for ever on earth : it may indeed have, as other species have had, a destined period. The researches of paleontology are now thought to disclose evidence that some animal species only existed for a longer or shorter period through the countless ages of organic life ; not solely or chiefly owing to change in the environment or to the struggle for existence these undoubtedly important factors but because of their definite constitutional natures, the intrinsic changes of decline being merely hindered or modified by a succession of influences from the environment : natural selection, in fact, not the main cause of their death any more than it was perhaps of their original start into their specific types of being. Species had presumably their natural periods and died their natural deaths, obeying the general law that all things tend to their end. Not only extinct species of which remains exist, but also some vanished species through the countless ages of the past of whose undiscoverable forms and functions we have no trace and can form no conception. The rise of life to higher planes traceable through the successive geological periods would in that case witness to some deeper factor than so-called accidental variation fostered by natural selection to an intrinsic upleap to a definite morphological structure of parts, not otherwise than as in the crystallization of chemical compounds. That may be and probably is so, yet he who reflects on the vast forests which once covered and the huge animals which then inhabited well-watered regions of Central Australia, and on the present barren and almost waterless wastes on which a few poor wander- ing natives contrive to keep themselves alive, will hardly be inclined to under-estimate the potent influence of the environment. When all is said, this may act by minutely gradual and yet undiscovered steps through prolonged time on the germinal elements both to originate and to exterminate specific forms of animal life : the effects of immeasurably prolonged time as important a considera- tion as the changing influence of the medium. 166 MENTAL ORGANIZATION PT. i If species have their natural course and destined period owing to failure or frustration of the reproductive energy, the human species may not continue to advance by unlimited conquests of and adaptations to its environ- ment, notwithstanding that owing to its dominion over animated nature and the natural selection which man as part thereof is in respect of other living things, it runs no danger from a struggle for life against them at all events against such as it can see and handle. For it may yet have reason to dread the infinitely little as it once dreaded the infinitely great. The repeating rifle so fatal to the big lives of elephant and rhinoceros is useless against the microbe. Although man by his pre- dominance has suppressed the upward development of every visible animal species which might be hostile to him and is anxiously fortifying himself against the invisible attacks of the microbe, he cannot yet be certain what its developments may be nor how serious their con- sequences to him. Its amazing fertility of reproduction, so rapid as to make such a contraction of the process in time and space as amounts to a virtual continuity of growth, shows that the dynamic motion of life in its original and simple plastic substance, unhindered by specializations of tissue and fixed divisions of labour, has a free, full and active play which may under the impressions of a changed environment issue in yet undiscovered develop- ments. Is not withal growth fundamentally reproduction and reproduction fundamentally growth ? 1 1 A single paramaecium, which is a small infusorium visible only under the microscope, would, it has been curiously calculated, under favourable con- ditions of food-supply form a mass of protoplasm the size of the earth in one year. CHAPTER IX THE MICROBE AND MAN Dense population and easy infection. The pneumococcus and other microbes. Favourable conditions of the medium. Ptomaines. Prayers and sup- plications. Nature's catastrophes and human consciousness. Im- mensities and personal insignificance. The infinitesimally minute. Breaches in nature's continuity. Life and physico-chemical processes. The true value of prayer. Necessary errors, lies and truths. Natural causes and their natural ideal. The preservation of knowledge. Emasculation of human nature and social stagnation. The sanctity of human life and the defeat of the microbe. A possible microbic victory? The Gonococcus and the Spirochaeta pallida. A conceivably supreme irony of nature. Extirpation of disease and war. National life and international morality. WHEN all is gloriously fancied and eloquently said of human life and its prospects, its tenure may be more precarious than men like to think who for the most part live as if they would live for ever, although sure that they will not live long and may not live a day. Is it certain that densely packed peoples will always effectually save themselves from the poisons which they breed and nurse ? The breath of man is fatal to man, and every congregation of persons in a great city is obliged to take untiring pains to protect itself from the poisons of its own exhalations and excretions. The denser the population on a given area the greater is the danger of breeding or nurturing a noxious microbe, the closer the contact, the more sure and rapid the infection, the more deadly the consequent devastation. Medical science, it is true, justly prides itself on its discoveries of many secret perils and its ingenious means 167 i68 MENTAL ORGANIZATION PT. i to thwart them, but is obliged at last to confess that some infections (the so-called pneumococci infections) have increased in severity and frequency. The minute pneumococcus visible only to the trained microscopic eye is not only the recognized cause of inflammation of the lungs, but is carried by the blood and lymph to all parts of the body to the brain, the heart, the joints, the kidneys, the bones to cause its various inflammations in them. Lurking where no eye can see, it awaits the opportunity of a lower vital resistance to make its deadly attack, quietly and callously then perchance killing the great man of his age, to the utter dismay of a lamenting world which for twenty-four hours deplores its irreparable loss and then quietly repairs it. Would this same world heartily welcome the lamented lost one, little or great, were he inopportunely to come to life again ten or twenty years after his untimely death ? Like a ship on the sea each mortal passes out of sight, leaving in his own wake a trail of frothy motion which, long or short, is soon lost in the ocean of oblivion. Although it is a wild it is still not a quite inconceivable surmise that a specially malignant microbe may be generated, or a comparatively innocuous one undergo such a noxious development in the suitable medium of an overcrowded community as might easily and swiftly sweep its members away ; or that a constitu- tional state of body may not be produced in which one or another of the many microbes in residential or floating existence shall find the fit soil of a virulent activity and fulfil its function on earth. For, when all is said, the microbe does no wrong ; on the contrary, perfect in itself, it does its proper work, and is only thought to be a fault or evil in nature by the overweening conceit which assumes that the universe, or at least a privileged planet of it, was created solely for human use and end. So prompt and proud the self- admiring spirit of man to construct and construe a Great Spirit of the universe in the image of what he would have it. Extravagant as is the supposition of a microbic CH. ix THE MICROBE AND MAN 169 devastation, it may not seem so wildly fanciful when one considers how carefully civilized societies preserve all sorts of weak and corrupt social material and thus supply the microbe with large opportunities, fit fields and favourable conditions of a strenuous and prosperous career. And that not by a direct physical deterioration of the stock only but indirectly also by the anti-social and immoral corruptions which in the end act to produce physical deterioration ; for mind and body are one in life and neither ever suffers without the other suffering with it. As sound bodily health serves good social feeling, so sound social feeling produces good bodily effects on a social being. In the universal scheme of things in which nothing is single, nothing isolated, inscrutably subtile affinities and repulsions of being prevail, and mean things are ordained to cause mighty effects. How compute the many millions of persons who are now supposed (not yet quite positively proved) to have died from plagues caused by a rat's infected flea ? Nature manifestly pursues its own ways of keeping up the balance of life, with no more regard to human than to lower life, its mighty tide of being flowing with equal indifference through fleas and men. So near, again, in complex chemical composition are some of the minute products of the normal metabolic pro- cesses of bodily nutrition and function to certain deadly poisons the so-called ptomaines engendered within the body that the marvel is that the organism grows and lasts so well and so long as it does. The least chemical fault or default in its complex laboratory of subtile bio- chemical changes and compositions suffices to convert the innocuous into the noxious compound. Every assimila- tion implies an eventual dissimilation, every integration of organic molecule a subsequent disintegration, every complex composition a complex decomposition. In the multitudes of microbes, therefore, which inhabit and invade the human body, and in the divers and diverse ferments which are constantly at work in the orderly i;o MENTAL ORGANIZATION PT . i succession of its secret biochemical processes there is an incalculable number of deadly possibilities which it happily ignores while it can and succumbs to when they become realities. They, like it, perform their proper functions when the unforeseen concurrence of causes and conditions called chance unexpectedly occurs ; for when something in the antecedent motion of the dynamic flux of nature can be definitely detached and laid hold of as static thought it is named the cause, which, being itself effect, it never is but in part. Mankind will have things to their liking ; for which reason they like and call orderly that which, suiting their bodily and mental apprehension, is useful to their comfort and advance in life, disorderly and dislike that which is hurtful or not useful but is really just as orderly, most deeply orderly perhaps when seem- ingly disorderly ; and in the same egoistic way ascribe purpose to the ferment which works to make the man but refuse it to the ferment which unmakes him, as also to the falling tile which wantonly or at random knocks him on the head. Once upon a time man fell down prostrate in abject fear and awe of the unknown forces of the universe which appalled him with the sense of their almightiness and his littleness, anxiously peopling the immensity with fear- fashioned powers divine or demonic, aerial or ethereal, which he strove to placate and propitiate by all sorts of supplications, sacrifices, fulsome flatteries and servile rites ; for he naturally ascribed to them the feelings and motives which characterize him. Piteously he prayed to them not to hurt but mercifully to incline their ears and help him. By this imaginative projection from within of out- side invokable powers to help him he was heartened to live and hope and strive ; the fictitious beings constructed to inspire and sustain him being the then appropriate vital vestures or symbols of the successive developments of nature through him, acting too more powerfully on his conduct than real persons have done ; doomed, therefore, naturally to die and be superseded in due season by the CH. ix THE MICROBE AND MAN 171 more fitly created fictions of his perfecting nature, of whose evolutional life imagination is the supreme mental shoot. 1 Ever more and more triumphant by intelligent observation of the cosmic forces and by ingenious arts of controlling and regulating them for his service in his advancing adaptations to external nature through inter- action with it, he has relegated a host of dead Deities and Devils Satan last of all to a museum of extinct religious superstitions which patiently expects more specimens. And here be it noted in justice to an obsolete myth as to other obsolete myths that Satan while he was a reality of imagination influenced human thought, feeling and conduct more effectively and usefully than any actual human being has ever done. It is unfailing testimony to the strength of nature's organic energy of development that while man casts away one after another of the succeeding illusions fashioned in and by him he continues to create, believe and advance. So many and great are his conquests of nature though while he conquers nature he is being conquered by it, since he conquers only by obeying and in the end is conquered and so exultant is his ensuing pride of power that, oblivious of their achievement through strict obedience to its laws working through him as means, nowise necessarily as end, he is prone valiantly to exult, almost to insult, over it. Yet its forces fail not from time to time to vindicate their might and right by catastrophic explosions which confound and terrify him, forcing him in fright to his knees like his benighted forefathers to seek protection and pity from the sky. Nay more, he is appalled some- times by the furious outburst of nature's elemental forces 1 Representing essentially the aspiring shoots of mental life : wantonly fanciful and least restrained, therefore, in primitive people and children ; almost absent in animals ; flowering more or less sanely and gracefully in poetry ; soberly disciplined in scientific discovery and invention ; rioting in absurd fictions when it is not duly fed and ruled ; fantastically flighty in dreams when, though organic activity persists and suggests mentally, all controlling life of relation is in abeyance ; in sum the ever -active and efficient vital impulse by which adaptations most of them tentative and futile, few only successful are made by the only developing animal species. MENTAL ORGANIZATION PT. i in his own lower nature and driven then to seek comfort and support in a day of special humiliation and prayer. Nevertheless he can always console himself, as his un- enlightened forefathers could not, after the manner of Pascal, with the reflection that were the whole universe to conspire to crush him he would still be greater than the universe since he would know that he was being crushed, whereas the blind universe would not be aware of the disaster which it was doing. Such his estimate of the superlative and immortal value of self -consciousness : because he can cry aloud when he is hurt he is infinitely nobler than that which makes him cry. But why in that case rob the universe of consciousness when it with pre- sumable purpose overwhelms him ? He would not repine but rather rejoice if he were in true unison with it, piously resigned to think that its will not his will was done. Or why infer the inestimable value of his consciousness as an end in itself rather than as means to an unknown end ? Withal it is a fair question whether his present emotional outcries of alternate self-pity and self-exultation are in- contestable evidence of growing human value in a non- pitying and non-exultant universe, the course of which hitherto has not been in keeping with human wishes of what might have been and it is fondly expected shall be. 1 The notable enlargement of man's conceptions of things consequent to his astronomical observations naturally tended at first to produce a confounding sense of his littleness and cosmic insignificance, though the acquired knowledge by exalting his pride of intellect has since 1 As human consciousness is the culmination of nature's unconscious evolution, its aim must plainly be to bring all knowledge of nature including human nature obtained through the various methods and channels of research into sympathetic union : that the true and practical Monism to be obtained. The charge against metaphysical philosophy is that it keeps aloof from facts, not descending to learn objectively what is known before it attempts subjec- tively to synthesize ; for which reason its speculations are empty of substance, and it fails and must fail to make a true synthesis. Meanwhile emotional outcries are mere passing discharges of no value when they do not issue in useful action childish wails against troubles which there is not the intelli- gence to surmount or, failing that, the resignation silently and stoically to endure. CH. ix THE MICROBE AND MAN 173 abated his humiliation and sense of lowered personal value. Such are the immensities, velocities and eternities with which they have to do that he can form no definite notions of the numbers, rates of motion and distances of the innumerable suns and stars through infinite space ; cannot, for instance, think definitely of the immeasurable yet limited path along which the far -travelling comet speeds during the long intervals between its disappearance and reappearance. Where has it been and on what, as some may fancy, have its sublimed spiritual inhabitants looked during all that long time ? For if bodily matter so rarefied can keep its individual form through eternity, dying as a natural but raised to life as a spiritual or ethereal body, it may choose the comet's rarefied substance for habitation, if any settled habitation it then needs. Be that as it may, it is because the innumerable hosts of heavenly bodies whirling and rolling through infinite space are so mighty in relation to man and he is so small in relation to them, being tied intellectually to his glimpses of the merest fraction of the universe, measuring artificially by fictions of time and space, and slowly making his gradual adaptations, that he is stricken with overwhelm- ing Wonder and awe ; for wonder is bred naturally of ignor- ance and, testifying to the small part's fundamental feeling of absolute dependence on the unity of the vast and in- comprehensible whole, naturally stays there. On the other hand, because he feels himself to be so large a body in comparison with the infinitely little he fails yet to realize its subtile potencies and his precarious tenure. To be overwhelmed by the infinitely great seems natural and not humiliating, to be overcome by the im- perceptibly minute is repugnant to his self-esteem and seems almost unnatural. He is not moved to pride him- self over the unimposing microbe because he knows what it does to him and it knows not what it does when it kills him. Yet adequate reflection on the potencies of minute matter might give him reason to tremble before them, seeing how much he is at the mercy of such an entity as 174 MENTAL ORGANIZATION PT . i the microbe which cannot be seen until it is magnified microscopically, which multiplies with such amazing rapidity, and a colony of whose progeny might settle on a needle's point without over-populating it. For all that appears to the contrary the microbe may be destined to live after, as it probably lived before him on earth ; for experiments on the liquefaction and solidification of gases prove that its minute forms of life are not killed at a temperature far below that which would suffice to freeze man out of existence. The Rotifer which presumably lived before he lived still lives in the frozen regions of the Pole. Life, whatever its end, was plainly not created for human consumption only, was before man was, lives where he cannot live, shall live probably when he is not. Two abrupt but unwarranted breaches in the con- tinuity of nature sanctioned by tradition and custom of thought ought plainly to be done away with : first, the customary breach made between human and lower forms of life ; secondly, the absolute breach between life and death. In the obscure osmotic workings, surface-tensions, chemical compositions and colloid energies of the intimate metabolic processes by which dead is continually trans- formed into living matter, minute search is now being diligently and hopefully made to find out how life came to be, what are the essential conditions of its continuance and increase, and what its ultimate value ; these con- ditions known positively to exist although too minutely subtile and complicated to be yet disclosed and exposed. When their secrets are found out, the discovery may enable man, if not to generate life at will, which is far from inconceivable, at least to arrest its pernicious growths in the body the multiplication, for instance, of the proliferating cancer cell which, secretly excited perhaps by some yet undiscovered stimulus in its complex nutritive medium, breaks loose from the organic con- federation and runs wildly amuck, defying in its morbid vigour the leucocytes which ought to attack and swallow it when it goes wrong. For when it is considered how CH.IX THE MICROBE AND MAN 175 quietly and surely gaping wounds are steadily healed, morbid swellings slowly absorbed, the patterns of re- membered structure restored by the healing force of nature the so-called vis medicatrix it is no wild hope that a way may be found of so strengthening the control of the vital whole as to inhibit the riotous energy of the cancer cell in a particular part. Meanwhile microbe and cancer cell, being the proper agents of organic nature to do their perfect work in the never-failing vital strife, may forebode other end of human life than its fain perfected end. To the confident assertion which no doubt will con- tinue to be made most positively, too, by those who, knowing not what is scientifically known, are least competent to judge and most emphatic in the conceit of ignorance that life cannot possibly proceed from any physical and chemical processes, be they ever so subtile, the natural answer is that no such exquisitely subtile and complex processes within so small a compass take place anywhere as in a particle of living protoplasm, and that the unified product of their compositions must be some- thing very different from the properties of the combining elements. What is the new product, then, if it be not living substance ? A new energy of matter, it is true, yet an epigenesis naturally evolved from the composition of lower energies in fact a so-called vital force, not metaphysical but physical. The real truth which prejudice stubbornly refuses to see is that there is no such absolute separation between life and death as it is the traditional custom to think : separation enough, it is true, between the living and the gross dead body, but not between the living molecules of which it is built and their subtile activities in their ambient medium. Life and death are abstract and postulated contraries, but in the concrete there are all degrees of transition between living and non- living matter, the one passing by insensible gradations into the other so closely and continuously that it cannot always be said where the one ends and the other begins. i;6 MENTAL ORGANIZATION PT . i Strange it is to think that while dead changes into living matter every moment in the intimate processes of the upkeep and growth of a living organism a change which for aught we know may be going on now in the secret recesses of nature the beginning of life should be tabooed as a sacred and insoluble mystery. Fire was likewise once thought to have a miraculous origin, yet the practical savage managed to obtain it by rapidly whirling a dry pointed stick in a hole of suitably dried wood, and it is easily got now by sharply starting the requisite transmutations of force in the chemical matter of a lucifer match. Perceiving plainly that things proceed by fixed laws of continuity of energy and its transmutations and not expecting them to proceed differently, it may be thought right at last silently to relegate the miracle of life, like other miracles, to the imaginations of less instructed ancestors or of miracle-loving contemporaries. In no case are mankind likely to betake themselves whole-heartedly to prayers and oblations and irksome ceremonies to propitiate the microbe, which being so minute has had the bad luck to be discovered so late in a realm of science as not to inspire awe and adoration. Prayers to affect the course of known natural laws necessarily become somewhat faint-hearted as knowledge spreads and superstition wanes. In face of the observed reign of law and order few adequately instructed persons now pray heartily, though they may do it officially, for rain or fine weather, or for a special deliverance from famine or pestilence, or even for a miraculous recovery from a certainly fatal disease, having an uneasy con- sciousness that in doing so they do much as the ignorant savage does when he offers a pinch of snuff or tobacco to placate the thunder-god, or makes his affrighted appeals to unknown powers in more grotesque and ludicrous ways. 1 Not that such prayer is quite futile : uttering 1 It is well, however, not to be too swift to judge ; for there has lately been a signal instance of prayer having been put up for a miraculous interven- tion to supersede the hitherto known laws of the universe, some Bishops of the Church of England having recommended their clergy to make special CH. ix THE MICROBE AND MAN 177 a cry of the heart for expected help, it was a stay of mind in the mysterious changes and chances of things, a support in the conflict with unforeseen calamities, a comforting hope in apprehensions and adversities, a wholesome stimulus to vital reaction ; especially so by the individual person in despondent sickness, being then an inspiriting auto-suggestion to endurance, resolution and energy. That the prayer of faith is a positive aid to recovery from disease by the lively hope engendered in the sick believer is undeniable ; for to animate hope is to revivify languishing structure, no mood being so deadly as despair. Those who shrink sensitively from seeing matter in mind are not pained but pleased to observe such evidence of mind in matter ; they regard it as proof that matter was made for mind, not mind for matter ; which is true in a sense, for without mind there would be no perceptible matter, though at the same time without matter no perceiving mind. Nevertheless, what- ever the relations of mind and body essentially are, observation shows that the evolution of mind goes along with, if not from, matter. Withal the method of intro- spection, however acutely practised, can only deal with the conscious mental products, not at all with their hidden mode of gestation. So sure and proud are men of the value of the truth which they possess at any season of their progress that they are prone to undervalue the use of the errors which prayer for fine weather in August 1912 during the excessive rainfall of that exceptionally wet month. The immediate result was such a deluge of rain as the Meteorological Office had no former record of, although it had rightly pre- dicted the certain continuance of wet weather. That was presumably the wise answer to unwise prayer. In which connection the fable of ^Esop is still instructive. "A man had two daughters married, one to a gardener, the other to a potter. After a while on paying a visit to the gardener's house he asked his daughter how she was and how it fared with her. ' Excellently well,' she said : ' we have everything we want ; I have but one prayer that we may have a downpour of rain to water our plants.' After- wards he went on to the potter's house and asked his other daughter how matters went with her. ' There is not a thing we want,' she replied, and I hope this fine weather and hot sun may continue to bake our tiles.' ' Alack ! ' said the puzzled father, ' if you wish for fine weather, and your sister for rain, which am I to pray for ? ' " N i;8 MENTAL ORGANIZATION PT. i were truths in their season. Erroneous beliefs were obviously the necessary transitional steps of their mental evolution. To deny the effective work done by fictious and positive lies because of the adjudged value and expected prevalence of an ideal truth is strangely to ignore or misread human history. The opportune lie has notably served to make a nation. Would Germany or Italy have been consolidated into the nations they are if Bismarck and Cavour had possessed only the innocence of the dove with no guile of the serpent ? Now if erroneous beliefs have done much, if not as much as true beliefs, to help mankind on their way, the rulers who put to death the eager and hasty denouncers of old faiths and thought when these fanatically proclaimed new faith and thought were not wholly irrational ; they were perhaps sometimes wiser in their generation than their victims, the children of light, whose unseasonable utterances might have conduced to the disintegration of a community not fit to assimilate them. They had that excuse at any rate for doing that which a wiser posterity, thinking that to be wrong then which would be wrong now, deplore ; the more fundamental excuse too that, being what they were in the circumstances, they rightly did what they were fated to do. Man may mend the future by his action in the present, but is not entitled to think that he could have mended the past. Is it not a little presumptuous, if not profane, for a more instructed posterity to suppose that the universe has been governed on a wrong principle, with deplorable past and present consequences, and would have been better managed had they been at the helm of affairs ? The truth is that the searching question What is truth? which Pilate asked, not in jest, as Bacon said, but in serious if cynical earnest, must await its answer so long as the truth of to-day is liable to become the untruth of to-morrow. The believer in a true God, when his belief is not merely verbal but vital, cannot choose but acknowledge that it has been in the purpose of the universal plan to CH.IX THE MICROBE AND MAN 179 provide for human progress by the help of a succession of diversely fashioned false gods. Could he patiently suffer the intrusion of the unwelcome thought that the universe was not created for him and his anticipated perfection, he might conceive it possible that its course of prolific pro- duction and prodigal destruction of life in all its forms was and will continue to be the fundamental law of its being ; in which case all his present petted feelings, lauded thoughts and magnified doings, so gratifying to his self-esteem, may be but the transient incidents of his painful pilgrimage on earth which religion piously owns them to be when it declares that with no immortal life in heaven mortal life on earth would be without value and meaning. Religion in one shape or another is the natural consequence of a low just or not valuation of human life on earth. When appeal to the supernatural is left off by natural beings living in a world of natural law it is displaced by an appeal to the ideal of a perfecting humanity. Such an ideal is evidently necessary and useful in order that they may go on reaching forwards, even though it turn out at last to be an illusion. Meanwhile progress thither- wards by discovery and practical recognition of invariable laws is being patiently and steadily pursued and achieved with ever-increasing profit ; the accumulating conquests of science encroaching gradually on the unknown and every addition to its systematized knowledge being a subtraction from the supernatural. To find out causes and to trace and deal with their effects, thus to see clearly in order to foresee and do wisely, is the sole and sufficient aim of positive science to discover, for instance, the secret microbal enemy by minute research and to exorcize its evil spirit by a suitable antitoxin, as medical science sanguinely hopes to do at last in every case. Super- natural power can then, if wished, be called and counted on to help those who naturally and strenuously strive to help themselves. Nor will fundamental religion suffer even though its divers and diverse dogmas be discredited ; for its feeling does not necessitate the intervention of an i8o MENTAL ORGANIZATION FT. i objective supernatural agency, being the natural outcome of the subjective aspiration of mankind to rise to a higher objective being : the craving and nisus of life rooted in- stinctively in nature's highest organic evolution, whence- soever in the suprasolar region the craving and nisus be transcendently derived. If mankind are to improve in right feeling, thinking and doing, in their expected course of perfectibility, they must obviously take good care not to lose the know- ledge which they have acquired, as vanished civilizations have aforetime done. Considering how comparatively few persons really possess, preserve and transmit existing knowledge, how indifferent and complacently ignorant the immense majority are, how liable to make a passionate creed out of irrational sentiment and to nurse it in utter disregard of its disruptive danger to the nation, how much stolid opposition scientific research still encounters, how habitually practice contradicts profession, and how placidly inconsistent and contradictory beliefs are entertained side by side, it is not easy to imagine what the loss would be were the light of the comparatively few instructed lives suddenly to be put out. That is an untoward catastrophe which is not so likely to fall out now that knowledge is carefully preserved in all quarters, communications between peoples quick, close and constant each nation soon in- structed in the advances of science and the arts as it was when nations were comparatively isolated and each went its separate way, at all events when one was not attacking and plundering or enslaving another. Easy and rapid exchange and distribution of knowledge against which for the most part no jealous bar (outside religious sects) is raised has tended to promote more solidarity of nations and to secure a mental communion and continuity which did not exist formerly : a security which shall of course be greater if amity and concord between them increase, wars and contentions cease, and a brotherhood of feeling strengthens, as the optimistic hope is. Yet with the strong wish and best will to believe it is CH. ix THE MICROBE AND MAN 181 hard to picture the expected transformation of human nature by the eradication of the inherent factors which have thus far been its active agents of evolution, so radical an emasculation as that would be, and so extraordinary a transformation of the known laws of its progress. A quite different world in that case would necessitate a quite different order of thinking : a mode of thought apparently in which progress could be conceived to go on without regress, systole without diastole, flexion without extension, action without reaction, good without evil. Those who picture in sanguine imagination such a state of ideal perfection in which life shall live without struggle, as it never has done nor can do, and reach at last a restful consummation on earth, do not consider adequately, if at all, what might be the possible fate of a concrete social stagnation in which action shall go on without opposing reaction. 1 In such a state a degenerative process might be easy, rapid and widespread, and in such a soil the microbe conceivably find the suited conditions of a virulent function. For if it is assumed that the microbe will then be impotent or extinct, it must be assumed also that the perfection will be uniform and universal, else corruption and conflict might ensue between the perfect part and the imperfect parts which, lagging behind, might then let in the enemy. It is strange to think withal how as the perfecting process goes on the many destructive ways of going out of the world, the divers diseases and modes of death, which have heretofore been necessary to counterbalance the one productive way of coming into it, shall be done away with ; curious, too, to see how eager the present aim is to stop every exit save that by natural decay, with the pleasing but rather fatuous hope of rendering that ever more and more remote. So overweening is the opinion of the merit of human life that it is counted something 1 Or consider that as the rule of nature is to sacrifice the individual to the species, so it may be the rule of the universal plan to sacrifice nations by wars and diseases. 1 82 MENTAL ORGANIZATION PT. i heroic when it chances to last for a hundred years, its length being then admired and its end conventionally regretted. And that although it may have been of little value at any time, and little more than a dwindling decrepitude during the last weary years of that dreary period. Why ? Simply because it was human life and therefore a sacred thing in the world's process, notwith- standing that external nature, while imparting the feeling, does not appear to share the opinion. Duty therefore enjoins, as instinct impels, it to continue as long as it can, and the approved work of the scientific expert is to find out the means of neutralizing the toxins which it breeds and nurtures within itself. Obscure causes of disease are accordingly sought out, rigorous methods of prevention devised, dangers of infection guarded against with almost meticulous care, at the same time that all imaginable measures are employed to keep weak life alive and full freedom granted to defective life to pro- pagate itself from generation to generation. All this in implicit assurance that despite the innumerable multitudes of microbes, some of them aspiring to higher powers of life and diligently seeking and using the opportunities of their development, all shall be well at last on a planet specially created for the human species and its uses ; for it would be nothing else than profane pessimism to suspect world-wide peril to humanity from the ordained function of the microbe. As mankind from its beginning projected the gods which suited its successive stages of development and worshipped them, although they were often more malignant than benign, more devilish than divine, so now it projects a glorious Being of Humanity and worships that ideal of itself in spite of the disagree- able truth that hitherto man's only devil has been man and that human nature is still fundamentally much what it has been. When all is said, it is not quite certain that the hostile and hitherto fairly prosperous microbe will ever find its poisonous occupation gone. It is even possible CH.IX THE MICROBE AND MAN 183 that in spite of sanitary measures and suitable antitoxins and appointed days of humiliation and prayer the over- crowded denizens of populous places may breed a more virulent microbe ; or at all events that in a closely packed population where much material of suitable quality is condensed and infection made easy an infesting microbe of some kind may make a virulent upleap of life and then work an appalling devastation. Viewing the enor- mous cost in money and the continual labour required and spent by mankind to keep themselves alive by getting rid of their own exhalations and excretions in crowded cities, considering furthermore what might happen were the unceasing and increasing expenditure to fail or cease, and then comparing the vital energy spent outwardly to live in health and strength with the internal vital energy required to live and thrive, it is a curious surmise what the issue of the affair in a nation might sometimes be. Certain it is that in weakened life, its lawful prey, the microbe will always find its sphere of opportune and useful function. 1 The supreme irony of nature it will be (and the frequent so-called irony of nature is a hackneyed observa- tion the real import of which is never realized by those who make it) if man who in his process of improving and embellishing nature has made desolate places beauti- ful and fruitful, the desert even sometimes to blossom like the rose, and is now bent on improving its morality and making it worthily agree with his wishes, who has conquered and is fast exterminating all big creatures which harm him or it is his sport to kill, should in the decree of unknown fate fall a victim to the microscopic microbe, sent and set in that case to avenge their destruc- tion. Somewhere at some time in a remote past his 1 In view of the sanguine medical expectation by the injection of suitably prepared serums and chemically constructed drugs to defeat the noxious microbe or parasite of every kind, are we to look forward to a state of scientific medicine in which a number of human weaklings shall submit themselves to such systematic medical treatment in order to be kept safely alive? Is the medical expert in that case to be the nature-made means by which nature is made better ? 184 MENTAL ORGANIZATION PT. i pleasant vices engendered or invited and nurtured perni- cious microbes to scourge and slay him. To unwholesome sexual intercourse or other infection he owes the diseased work, if not the origin, of the Gonococcus and the insidi- ously multiplying Spirochaeta pallida^ the loathsome infec- tions of which minute lives have caused innumerable diseases are guessed to be responsible for 7000 or 8000 deaths annually. It is a little startling to reflect that the reproductive function, misused or not, has thus done and is doing such effective and disastrous work to cancel its purpose. Although then a microbic devasta- tion of the human species may be a wildly fanciful notion, it is not more difficult intellectually to conceive such a check to life, though undoubtedly less agreeable to feeling, than the notion of an ideal perfection and stagnation to be ultimately attained, which might withal be a bane rather than a bliss. Those persons who are deeply impressed by and mightily magnify the purpose and purposes which they discover in the universe having themselves as minute parts created purpose in the limitless whole after the image of their limited purposing might soberly and logically reflect that one purpose for which the organism has been created is for the habitation and function of a host of microbes ; their purpose too as they migrate sometimes from organism to organism, impelled by the lust of life, to multiply and rise from strength to strength in their life-travail until they are able to do furious work. Now if the microbe, like the man, when it encounters obstacles to overcome grows in strength by overcoming, a decisive victory over it at last is not so absolutely certain as sanguine medical science desires and hopes for. All the less so if increasing numbers of organisms are rendered weak, defective and deteriorate by absorption of every sort of degenerate element, material and social, into the stock ; for, as before said, bad social fails not in the long run to engender bad material ingredi- ents. The hope to make all tissues so sound and strong CH. ix THE MICROBE AND MAN 185 and all persons so thoughtful and skilful as to extirpate the noxious microbe by inanition is not only a vague and visionary hope, but is even a questionable aim. When all is said, the two principal human aims namely, to extirpate disease and to abolish war are not incontrovertible. To do away with these natural processes might possibly be to do great disservice to the human race by weakening the strong vital qualities by which it has reacted prosperously to the oppositions of its environ- ment and hitherto been maintained and furthered. Such gloomy reflection, it will be said, is nothing else than puerile pessimistic scepticism ; for if one thing is certain it is that humanity is destined to go on perfecting itself indefinitely, its aspiring wish the intuitive testimony of what it shall be. Think on the immense material pro- gress which it has made in the short time since the invention of the steam-engine, and ask whether that does not justify the belief that a constantly accelerating pro- gress will be likewise made in social development and therewith maybe in process of time an accompanying moral improvement of individual natures ; which last will presumably be a necessary condition or pre-condition. Mankind has now for the first time wakened to a scientific perception of the value of organized social service and individual servitude thereto, is inflamed by an unexampled humanitarian zeal, and is faithfully instructing itself in the method and means of its moral advancement. It remains only that continent output in practice should go along with incontinent outpour of sentiment in words, which like other discharges is easy and pleasing and the more pleasing the more easy and demoralizing it is apt to be : self-consciousness witnessing in its narrow intensity and conceit to the lack of silent strength and to a pro- portionately keen personal self-love. For the present it would seem prudent to limit such anticipations of moral advance to the particular nation, seeing that the vigorous lust of life in the expand- ing nation does not point to an early uniformity and 1 86 MENTAL ORGANIZATION PT . i universality of moral feeling and conduct. Such fondly divined and finely divine affection is yet a pleasing vision which can be realized only when national life is no longer deemed a proper end in itself but rightly a life of inter- national service and righteous servitude to the welfare of humanity ; which is a consummation yet uncertain and remote, one too which would be such a reversal of the law of life throughout nature as is not easily imaginable so long as strong life in contact with weaker life subdues or devours it. The race must obviously expect and endure a long travail through ages to come, not perhaps much unlike that which it has traversed in ages past for the same causal factors and laws of operation cannot fail to produce the same effects not forgetting that as it has marched over the graves of innumerable myriads of mortals and many vanished civilizations, so it may be destined to make a similar long triumphant and pitiless march in the future. The sad thought in that case that the myriads who have gone before and the myriads who are to come after can have no experience and enjoyment of the perfect humanity which presumably shall be ! But why sad, it may be asked ? The Positivists piously and gratefully consecrate a day of commemoration a sort of All-Saints day to the dead, known and unknown, who have helped to make Humanity what it is and whose Great Being they adore, rejoice in the belief that they are aiding in its perfecting process, and are sure that the final product will be worth all the labour and suffering which it has cost ; while the Christian can foresee at the ending of its mortality, owing to the unremembered services of those who have lived righteously, such a perfect transformation of being as will fit it with little further change for its immortal career. PART II ORGANIC TO HUMAN: PSYCHOLOGICAL AND SOCIAL 187 CHAPTER I THE CURRENT OF SOCIAL FEELING The socialistic stream. Value of traditional belief and custom. Undefined terms. Power of words. Unions and Companies. Charitable gifts and bequests. Dissolvent flow of social feeling. Educational value of economic unions. Arguments against Socialism. Christianity and modern progress. Its superiority as a progressive religion. Its pro- fessional teaching and the real life beneath it. The force of feeling and the demagogue's appeal to it. Power in the masses and the classes. Transitional violence and disorder. The Anarchist and his motives. Revolt a symptom of social unease. Feeling and reason. Irrational beliefs. Creeds and their excuses. The religious instinct and mystical feeling. Social equalization. Privileges and Titles. THE social and political state of the Western world yields conclusive evidence of a steady drift towards what is called Socialism. Not only does the number of professed socialists increase fast, but their doctrines silently infiltrate the minds of many who, not professing the creed, yet sentimentally favour and further it ; of legislators too who protest that the laws which they enact, although manifest steps of easy ascent or descent towards its goal, are not imbued with its spirit nor suited to its end. Meanwhile the Socialists are under no illusion : they welcome the effects jubilantly as positive proof of the socialistic stream. As it is the habit of mankind to hold fast the name after they have got rid of what it means and stealthily infused a quite different meaning, so they tranquilly imbibe a new doctrine while hotly repudiating its name. It is the agreeable way of smoothing the course of past into future thought in the constant flux of the real. With the same conservative hold they cling nominally 189 ipo MENTAL ORGANIZATION PT . u to venerable superstitions, awful and useful in their season, which have outlived their day of usefulness and are lifeless survivals no longer adored, although it would be unseemly frankly to question the conventional cult. For it is deemed lawful and right to rehearse by rote the formulas after tacit relinquishment of the substance of a creed. These were not merely the dress of it to be put off at will ; they were the incarnation of it at the time, its living vesture ; and they linger in use as social customs like the lingering sap in the bark of a tree after its root is rotten. Custom of belief being the constant and useful power which it has been to maintain the cohesion and stability of families, tribes and nations in the evolution of the race, it can justly protest against a violent demolition and exact a gradual and gentle dissolution. The rude abolition of a nation's customs, as sometimes desired or disastrously done by the unthinking missionary of a superior creed and its rites, is nothing else than the blind and reckless destruction of a suited organization by an unsuited organ- ization a signal instance of intemperate zeal without thought and forethought ; for stable growth, being organic, is a slow and gradual process, its destruction quick and easy. The word socialism notably obtains no exact definition, which is its merit as an inexhaustible subject of contro- versy, being used vaguely to name quite different condi- tions ranging from a progressive socialization which, being in the natural order of human progress, is more or less approved generally, to a much less acceptable communistic or State socialism in which production, exchange and distribution of wealth are to be carried on by the State and all property to be held and shared equally all wealth to be in common in the true commonwealth. So long as the furious fight is about a word without definition of and agreement as to its meaning, with no clear and distinct idea therefore what the fight is for, the interminable battle can go on without definite result. It would be a grievous shock to most minds if they were obliged always to use c H . i CURRENT OF SOCIAL FEELING 191 words signifying clear and distinct ideas. Even meta- physical philosophy might suffer hurt were its terms bound to have definite meanings, which they seldom have, and the same word the same meaning in different minds, which it seldom has. A common sight is to see how placidly persons feed themselves on words which, because they have no concrete meaning, they persuade themselves have a metaphysical or sacred profundity. Slaves of the traditional words which they have been bred and taught to use, they put them before experience and thereby prevent its lesson, instead of searching into the origin of them, weighing their value, suiting them to experience : such prejudiced medium of words being then an insuperable barrier between the facts as they are and right observation and judgment of them. How many wars, little and great, might never have been fought, how many millions of lives spared, could the human race have understood clearly and exactly what its chiefs and their interested associates, beguiling it with words, summoned it to fight for ! Yet it would have been wrong in the evolution of things had there been such in- telligent insight by the people, so incalculable has been the service which words and wars have done for human progress from the rudest tribal organization to the most complex civilized society. So far as facts warrant infer- ence it is that States have owed their construction and stability more to the pressures and purgations of war and the fears of wars, and to the ignorant obedience of the multitude, than to the intelligent appreciation and loving attraction of the units ; these also having owed much of their virile and valuable qualities of character to the self- sacrificing martial virtues of the warrior which militarism evolves and commercialism saps. The ideal state of in- dustrial peace and individual equalization which social democracy fondly expects to be realized when its prin- ciples are faithfully applied in practice would have plainly been ill-timed in the past. In the economic sphere the trend of trade and com- 192 MENTAL ORGANIZATION PT . n merce is in the socialistic direction ; for it is to the accumulation of capital by unions of persons and its advantageous employment through many channels and on large scales. Slowly and surely is the small trader, unable to cope with the accumulated forces which capital represents, ousted from one business after another ; Syndi- cates, Trusts, Companies, Co-operative Societies and like associations constituting a powerful organization of industry for productive and distributive purposes which leaves the individual trader hopelessly beaten in the struggle to make a survival-profit. In contrast with their steady gains quickly made he slowly gains only an uncertain flow of meagre profits, or can only do by tedious toil in many days that which is promptly and quickly done by an easily worked machine embodying in its structure and putting forth in its function the powers of many men. At present the bulk of the garnered wealth is appropriated by a few persons, the many humble workers profiting little by the large gains ; but these are pretty sure to rebel at last, per- sonal ties of mutual intercourse, sympathy and bargaining between employer and employed being absent in capitalistic companies and the struggle one of rival collective interests in which conscience has no part. The corporate con- sciousness is naturally conscienceless, for individual con- sciences are swallowed up. In view of the growth and spread of the social spirit and of the ignorance of the masses, who feel more keenly than they think, and soon make a creed of what little they think, it is nowise incredible that the production and distribution of wealth may eventu- ally be gathered into the hands of the State and organized in the common interest If Syndicates and Companies do away with individual competition and increase the pro- duction of wealth now unfairly distributed, is it not reason- able to expect, it is argued, that in a rightly organized community where all join forces in harmonious labour under orderly discipline, competitive friction and waste being got rid of, more wealth will be produced and then distributed more fairly ? It is a captivating theory which once it has CH. i CURRENT OF SOCIAL FEELING 193 sunk as a creed into the minds of the masses is hardly likely to expire without a struggle to realize itself in practice. All the less likely seeing that it will not be without a strong ally ; for the predatory instinct, nowise extinct in human nature, is apt to show itself violently and viciously when passions are fiercely roused. Part of the wealth of the millionaire and his like, it is true, is sometimes spent now in benevolent gifts to the public, but it is a question whether his large donations do not provoke in the minds of many persons a feeling of surprise, if not of resentment, that his immense wealth, gained mainly by the exploited toil of a host of poor labourers in a social system which protects such accumula- tion and provides for its and his security, should be dis- posed of according to the whim and caprice of a single person, thereby strengthening the socialistic stream of feeling. Moreover, the clutch of the dead hand, which is treated with a sacred tenderness, is not always or entirely beneficial ; the wasteful bequests of testators for selfish, useless, sentimental, even ridiculous and sometimes mis- chievous purposes being such as but for the ruling custom might cause surprise that they are tolerated. Innumer- able charities too exist, many or most of which, founded and kept up chiefly for the glorification or gain of their founders, waste much of what they rake in by persistent begging, misapply more, and for the most part demoralize the recipients and the would-be-recipients whom they attract ; insomuch that their effects on the whole can be plausibly argued to be more hurtful than useful. Would not a systematic provision by the State for all, it is asked, be better for individuals and the community than such waste, corruption and demoralization ? By the steady flow of social feeling beneath the custom- ary formulas of thought that which was hardly conceivable becomes easily conceivable. Popular education was once mainly charity ; no one looks on it in that light now ; the poor receive it as their natural social right without grati- tude, which matters little, and for the most part without O 194 MENTAL ORGANIZATION PT . n answering sense of civic duty and responsibility, which matters much. And those who would formerly have thought the legal imposition of a tax for education an act of spoliation pay now as a quite natural thing. They are even becoming accustomed to the notion and largely extending the practice of feeding the children of the poor at the public expense without the least regard to the expec- tations which they beget, the self-reliance they destroy, and their inevitable consequences. Fifty years ago Trade Unions were denounced as revolts of an antisocial or even criminal character, whereas they now enjoy a privilege above the ordinary law, the votes of their members having been needed by politicians who protested that they never would assent to such exceptional legislation and soon after proceeded to carry it into effect. So surely and steadily does advancing social feeling sap regulations and institu- tions which seemed to be in the fixed order of nature, so tamely individual endurance then follow social domination. That the undeviating trend of things is towards the ideal of a social hive in which the good of the species shall be the supreme aim, the individual being more and more sub- ordinated to it, is undeniable. A practice which is acknow- ledged to have been a reckless distribution of demoralizing doles in the corrupt Athenian democracy and the declining Roman Empire is thought to take on quite another char- acter under the name of social reform in a better-constituted and advancing society. Yet Cleon doubtless thought and called himself a social reformer and like other historical persons has perhaps been misunderstood and maligned. The social enthusiast can plausibly argue that economic unions of persons in groups and companies although not wholly blessed, prone indeed to be collectively selfish, are yet necessary and natural steps in the education of the people to the conception of higher social union ; sectional habits of feeling and thought which shall teach them to feel and think more largely and eventually expand into one vast and sweet democratic communion of human hearts and heads. Meanwhile it is noteworthy and significant CH. i CURRENT OF SOCIAL FEELING 195 that these economic unions are not drawn and bound to- gether by the soft attraction of brotherly love, but mainly welded by collective self-interest and the rude pressure of outside forces with which they are in conflict and com- petition ; and it is a natural question how it will fare with a whole community which, exempt from any out- side pressure, is bound together solely by silken ties of affection. Hitherto it seems to have been well for the world that it was not ideally virtuous ; for in its system of close, complex and multifarious relations private wrong- doing is undeniably sometimes public good, private virtue carried to an extreme sometimes public wrong. The present formidable advance of Socialism, open and secret, provokes angry repugnance and quite a host of hostile arguments to demonstrate its falsity, folly and iniquity. Excellent work of the kind no doubt, did the definite statical notion fully represent the indefinite flux of feeling and were mankind moved by reason, but futile so long as evolutions and revolutions originate in feeling and are driven by its motive force, which pays small heed to existing right and reason. A foolish and absurd super- stition, as Tacitus contemptuously called it the exitiabilis superstitio of one Jesus cherished only by poor, mean and ignorant persons (whose cruel persecution neverthe- less he did not wholly approve) spread through the Western World, submerged all intellectual progress during the Middle Ages, and is still the professed creed of the most advanced portion of the human race. Was the intel- lectual world foolishly irrational to despise it then, and is it admirably rational to believe and adore it now ? * 1 The vitality of the ethical principles proclaimed by Jesus of Nazareth with an extraordinarily alleged supernatural authority no doubt helped to sustain the creed, which might otherwise have been extinguished at once by the disloyalty of His poor and ignorant disciples ; for Judas treacherously betrayed Him, Peter denied Him thrice, and at last they all forsook Him and fled. Fortunately, however, for the life and spread of the doctrine the enthusiastic ardour of St. Paul, brought up at the feet of the learned Jew Gamaliel, with his single-minded devotion, dauntless courage, untiring energy, and great organizing faculty, saved its life and secured its spread as a development of Judaism an ethical New Testament to supplement the defects of an unethical Old Testament. 196 MENTAL ORGANIZATION PT. n So eminent a Christian philosopher as Kant has sur- mised and somewhere said that the moral and political condition of the earth has not been improved by eighteen centuries of Christianity, and other thinkers have thought and said likewise. Diderot even ventured to declare its religion to be the most absurd of all religions, the most abominable in its doctrines, the most stupid and the most barbarous. If that virulent indictment were true, Tacitus, although at fault in his foresight, would not have been altogether wrong in his insight. At its outset Christi- anity contemptuously disowned all past human culture, renounced and denounced all pursuit of knowledge, dis- valued all previous life on earth, and wrought powerfully to disintegrate national organization. Had its triumph of feeling not been so complete, reason might have had a better chance to perform its regulating function in human affairs and their course been saner and less sanguinary. To ascribe to Christianity all the progress in civilization which has been made in Christendom since its birth, as is often done, is quite unjustifiable adulation and a blind ignoring of the long and sanguinary wars which it pro- voked. The deplorable fact is that as organized by rulers and ecclesiastics in their selfish interests it did its utmost to stifle and, failing that, to obstruct science ; did its best to keep the masses in servile subjection, soothing them with the hope of compensation in heaven for their wrongs and inequalities on earth ; did little or nothing to soften manners, for wars, tortures, burnings of heretics and witches at the stake, cruel persecutions, slavery and other grievous oppressions flourished vigorously under its sanc- tion, and were often directly incited and piously blessed by it (religious wars almost, if not entirely, peculiar to Christendom) ; did not create morality, as many persons think, for moral principles existed long before its advent and have perhaps suffered in some degree by being fast linked to theological dogmas which are slowly changed or tacitly shed only when the opposition between them and growing knowledge becomes too flagrant. And then CH. i CURRENT OF SOCIAL FEELING 197 with reluctant Surrender ; for some Bishops and clergy, as loth to discard miracles as the savage to disbelieve in magic, still half-heartedly, by custom of training and ritual, pray for fine or wet weather according as the country is in sore need of the one or the other, without regard to how other places or countries might suffer if their prayers were granted. The prayer being a supplication for a special interposition to suspend on a special occasion in their interest the known laws of the universe and thereby wreck it (which is much like an urgent notice to the Omniscient that things may be going wrong and a prayer for special attention), the wise powers deny it for their good. 1 When the impartial historian in distant time to come relates the story of Christianity and judges its value in human evolution he may not perhaps place it so high above Buddhism and Confucianism and Mahometanism as its devotees naturally vaunt it to be. Those who, resenting its past doings and its present clinging to obsolete dogmas, lay angry stress on the hindrance which Christianity has been to the progress of thought are apt to overlook the work done by it to promote the civilization of the nations which espoused it The systematic violations of its principles and misuse of its dogmas throughout the dark period of intellectual barrenness enforced by it never quite quenched its ethical spirit. It obviously did a great deal to bind a nation in spiritual unity, to develop moral conscience by its doctrine of monotheism with the awful adjuncts of heaven and hell and the day of judgment to come, to temper barbarism by the inculcation of human brotherhood on earth and equality in heaven ; for each nation prayed to a common Father in heaven for special aid and observed days of thanksgiving when they obtained it prayed indeed then as now for the blessings of peace while perpetrating and We, ignorant of ourselves, Beg often our own harms, which the wise powers Deny us for our good ; so find we profit By losing of our prayers. Antony and Cleopatra, Act II. Scene i. 198 MENTAL ORGANIZATION. rr. n blessing the horrors of war. Now therefore it can con- sistently co-operate with the social reformers who pro- claim the brotherhood and equivalence of souls in this life. A singular unreason in any case it would be for the Western World, being what it is, to deny the work which Christianity did by the development of social feeling and the consequent advance of socialization to make Christen- dom what it is and is proud to be. It united men by the tie, however loose, of a moral ideal however grossly violated in practice. Religious feeling, like other feeling, naturally clothes itself in diverse-suited forms, but it does not follow that a particular religion has been all good because it conquered belief and spread through a large part of the earth. It may even be a formidable hindrance to progress when it refuses to change its worn-out vestures for new ones in which the flow of feeling can more fitly enshrine itself. The religion of Mahomet, sublime in its absolute declara- tion of one God and superior, as it has been, in effecting a brotherhood of true believers and a quietly fatalistic resig- nation to the divine order of things, can hardly justify a claim to have furthered the general progress of humanity, albeit the Arabs once showed that its profession was not incompatible with the fruitful pursuit of science and philo- sophy ; 1 nor has ethical Buddhism, which includes nearly a third of the human race, been an active force in human development. No fruitful science has sprouted and flour- ished under their shadows ; their structures remain rigidly fixed ; whereas science sprang up and pushed vigorously on in the lusty life of the West in spite of the opposition of ignorant rulers and bigoted priests, and wrought gradually by its mental communion, rapid intercommunications and material achievements to humanize nations. 1 An Arabian, Geber, is said to have invented algebra and he was far from being the only great Mahometan thinker. That Mahometanism is incompatible with progress in civilization is a fixed opinion of Christian nations. Yet there is no valid reason to allege why belief in the specific inspiration of the Koran may not go the way which belief in the specific inspiration of the Bible has gone. CH. i CURRENT OF SOCIAL FEELING 199 Moreover, when heterodoxy was seen to be of excel- lent use to modify rigid orthodoxy, and wise doubt to be the essential prerequisite of new thought, persecutions of heretical opinions became irrational and odious. Contend- ing religious sects, as each in turn rose to power, realized and tired of the folly of righting and persecuting one another for a common creed or a differently used word in the same creed. Now therefore science is gradually moving Christianity to shed its cramping dogmas and instructing it to become, as it aspires and openly proclaims itself to be, a progressive religion ; which it manifestly cannot really be so long as it tenaciously clings to and carries on its back dead dogmas and teaches them literally to children in the schoolroom and to the people in the church. Reasons against its theological tenets were as valid and secretly entertained or subtly hinted by scattered thinkers centuries ago as they are to-day but were utterly im- potent as they still are in many pious minds. Now, however, it feels the dissolvent effects of the time-spirit and, preach- ing a pure doctrine of brotherly love, ethical aspiration and social service, identifies itself with growing social feeling. Its manifest trend is towards pure socialism in combina- tion with a vague mysticism and the blessed hope of a better life after death, any definite conception of the nature and place of which spiritual life would be an impertinent and impious debasement of a sacred mystery. Is it not indeed now felt at heart to be a dubious and rather mercenary way of inculcating morality in this life to base it, mainly or wholly, on the hope of reward or fear of punishment in a life to come ? Meanwhile openly and frankly to discard dogmas which, being, discredited, are now burdensome, and to trust to the power of its moral precepts to affect feeling without shocking understanding,, would be to show an unbecom- ing ingratitude for the past service of these dogmas as well as to require an unprecedented exercise of logical thought and sincerity of conduct. Although reason evolves new thought, old faith naturally shrinks from 200 MENTAL ORGANIZATION FT. n confronting its unwelcome incursion. It is a little pathetic to see how bitterly Bishops of the English Church deplore the weak hold which it has on the working classes and how earnestly they urge their clergy to get a stronger hold of them, or at least a stronger drag to church. Were these dignitaries able to rise out of the conventional habit of thought and special mental atmosphere in which they have been reared and live, and to come into real commerce and contact of mind with the intelligent work- ing man who has to deal with the stern realities of life and to think and act in them accordingly, they might be surprised and hurt to find how disrespectfully or con- temptuously he often thinks of the clergy as a sort of artificial persons who perform their professional work like actors on the stage, " saying what they are paid to say," and how great is the gulf of thought and feeling between him and them. The thoughtless mistake they innocently make in continuing officially to recite and teach literally the stories of Balaam and his ass, of Jonah and the whale, and of dead persons raised to life again is to forget to think that he thinks. And what can he think of them but as professional actors performing their appointed parts if he believes that they think ? Returning now from a line of thought which, although digressive, yet demonstrates how surely reason is forced to suspense or suppression in face of feeling, no more signal instance of the power of feeling to move mankind mightily need be cited than the abstract sentimental theories of Rousseau which, though contrary to the plain inductions of actual experience, effectually helped to kindle the fire which flamed so fiercely in the French Revolution, and in the fanatical person of Robespierre sincerely to justify its horrors. Magnifying reason, as men do, they are slow to realize how suddenly and quickly a whole structure of belief which seemed fixed and impregnable, fast fortified by tradition, custom, law and reason, topples down when a steady flow of feeling has silently sapped its foundations. Old institutions revered as sacred then CH. i CURRENT OF SOCIAL FEELING 201 quietly collapse. The demagogue of the day does not appeal to the cool reason of the people whom he courts and fulsomely flatters ; on the contrary, he is alert to obtain from their many- throated roar the inspiration which, as it is without understanding, he is sure is divine ; for divine right, having deserted the kings, is now lighted on the mob and sycophantically worshipped there. Besides, when all is said, it is not he who creates the mob-spirit, inflamer and acceptable leader of it though he gladly makes himself; he is the product and representative of the suffrages of the majority of the people who evolve the leaders they like, deserve and obtain. Obviously he could not kindle a fire were there no suitable material of unrest and discontent to be set on fire. Peradventure now as afore- time the truth hidden from reason is revealed unto feeling and the foolishness of the simple ordained to confound the wisdom of the wise. A not unquestionable supposi- tion, it is true, seeing how badly past democracies have fared and how likely the unthinking majority in which power lies in a democratic nation is to be conscious of its power and eager to use it before it is conscious of wisdom to use it wisely. What is to hinder power in the masses from being as selfish, coercive and corrupt as it has been in the classes, indeed more heavily tyrannical and suppressive of indi- vidual liberty ? Power in the classes was curbed in some degree by a secret sense of the force latent in the masses who might rise in dangerous revolt if intolerably oppressed, whereas power in the masses will feel no curb from a sense of force in the classes whose revolt would be futile. The democratic socialist and his sentimental allies are untroubled by any apprehensions, although the former is sorely grieved sometimes by the intestine feuds, jealousies and quarrels among his comrades who fail to put off selfishness and to put on the requisite altruism. His most effective work so far has perhaps been to inspire and actuate Syndicalism which, so far from moralizing the individual conscience, has collectively quenched it and 202 MENTAL ORGANIZATION PT . n seems calculated by its sole regard to selfish interests to endanger the realization of his ideal. Fired by philanthropic fervour or by inflamed self-love wearing its guise he will not abate one jot of his faith whatever may betide. He can look with serene indiffer- ence on the prospect of possible calamities in a troubled period of transition to the anticipated Utopia to which he would fain start mankind forthwith. Destruction of the old and effete must precede the construction of the new and vitally vigorous, organic life as it expands necessarily shatter old moulds of thought. A great human move- ment flowing triumphantly on, even when so revolutionary as to look like madness, is in the sequel directed and regulated by reason which makes its suitable adjustments. As orderly progress is the inherent law of every sound vital process, anarchy, being the negation of order, is necessarily short-lived. When the tumultuous and turbid torrent is past everything is not swept away and the wreckage is gradually repaired. The bad luck of the single person no doubt is to be caught and tossed in the torrent, but many a one has had the mishap to come too soon or too late into the world for his comfortable adjust- ment therein. Besides, such trifles as individual lives matter as little in the vast procession of things as they notoriously do in great wars. The Anarchist or the Nihilist, in sympathy with nature's elemental forces and their explosive cataclysms, which heed not the personal lives of mice or men, can look on the destruction and break-up of a kingdom as a small price to pay for the advent of the perfect liberty and felicity which he desires and expects. Of its speedy coming he is as sure as the Galilean disciples in their day were of the Second Coming of Jesus in glory and His Reign on Earth when they too should reign with Him, seated on their twelve thrones and probably as surely mistaken. Desires breed faiths and faiths determine values, evolving their agreeable ideas. Did not so devout a Christian as Bossuet in his eloquent funeral oration on a royal lady exult in CH. i CURRENT OF SOCIAL FEELING 203 the thought that God counts as nothing the destruction of a kingdom in comparison with the eternal salvation of such a noble soul as hers ? 1 Some explanation by way of excuse can after all be made of the Anarchist whose fierce fanaticism does not obtain fair and dispassionate consideration because of his atrocious methods ; the motives and reasons of his violent revolt against the inequalities, injustices, hypocrisies, oppressions and selfish leagues of the existing social and political systems being lost sight of in the indignant abhorrence of the destructive means by which he seeks to effect a transforming change. Beholding with horror or persuading himself that he does the sad and sordid spectacles of poverty, starvation, toil, misery and all kinds and degrees of suffering which inflame his pity, side by side with the wealth, luxury, comfort, lavish expenditure and gross self-indulgence which excite his envy ; thinking on the enormous waste of lives and national wealth in wars and preparations for wars, which he denounces as man's stupid inhumanities to man ; considering further- more the close compact and complex texture of interests, institutions and confederacies in the present systems of government which fix and maintain human oppressions and hostilities ; and, lastly, confronted by the monstrous fabric of conventions, artificialities, shams and hypocrisies which corrupt realities and stifle veracities in the existing social system ; he believes it impossible to regenerate it by gradual reforms or rose-water revolutions. No develop- ments of vital value can, he thinks, be made in such a complicated fabric of hardened tissues no longer pliable and plastic ; the supposed social or political reforms made with the best intentions doing directly or indirectly more harm than good in the rigid structure : their indirect and unforeseen effects indeed then often the most important. A time comes as things tend to their end when they 1 " II met les ames a ce prix ; il remue le ciel et la terre pour enfanter ces elus ; et comme rien est plus cher que ces enfans de sa dilection eternelle . . . rien ne lui coute pourvue qu'il les sauve. " 204 MENTAL ORGANIZATION PT. H are so bad that they cannot be mended and ought to be ended. In a society choked with conventionalities and shams as in a garden overrun with weeds tender scrupulosity is out of place ; ruthless destruction not soft sentiment is what is needed ; for in base times, as Bacon said, active men are of more use than virtuous men. What help can there be save in a clean sweep and a new beginning? Such is the cry of the Anarchist's outraged feeling, and such his mood of revolting thought. Although a rabid fanatic, he is not without vital motive nor is his feeling perhaps absolutely irrational. It may be that there lies more hope for the life of humanity in his frenzied emotion and passionate denunciations than in a contented acceptance of, or apathetic indifference to, or cynical out- look on the existing conventions and conditions. Moreover, after all is said, he is himself a natural revolt : if his acts are execrable they are not inhuman, for he is human and did not breed himself nor frame the social system which exploits him and against which he protests and would uproot. His frantic outbursts are symptoms of an ailing social constitution which calls for suitable remedies ; for in a social as in a bodily organism convulsion signifies disease, and the violence of the reac- tion is in proportion to the turmoil of inward distress, the outward motion answering to the internal commotion. Unease in the body politic tends to disease and disease unremedied tends to death. The fervid champions of a strenuous resistance to the socialistic stream might pause to reflect whether they are not fighting against a movement which reason cannot stop but must reckon with and make its rational accommoda- tions to. Deeper down in human nature than any con- scious measure fathoms lie the foundations of feeling ; they spring from the dynamic energy of nature which is nearest to if not reality ; wherefore reason cannot choose but give way to the motive force of feeling, as fortunately for the continuance of the race it has hitherto done. Small heed has the propagative instinct notoriously ever CH. i CURRENT OF SOCIAL FEELING 205 paid to its counsels. The office of reason is to teach men how to act, to guide and direct their instincts and desires, in which its success has been but partial and uncertain ; hereafter as heretofore the mass of them are pretty sure to feel and act in defiance of it Life is naturally assertive and lusts to live, whether rationally or not, and does live however irrationally. The nations which flourished and passed away in tragic succession through ages past evidently failed to make the good use of reason which they presumably ought to have made ; for the nations of to-day in their conceit of moral and intellectual superiority imagine that vanished nations perished not in consequence of an inherent mortality in specific organiza- tions or of irresistible adverse circumstances, but because they lacked the wholesome virtues and wisdom in which modern civilization excels and so proudly vaunts. Nor has mankind in general paid great homage to reason in its sore travail through the ages ; for the history of human beliefs shows that nothing was ever more firmly believed than that which was rationally incredible. Its function then was, and in many minds still is, to sacrifice its lesser light to the greater light of a customary faith, counting the merit the greater the greater the sacrifice. The extreme irrationality of a creed by heightening the mystery proportionately exalts the faith and validates the intuitive certainty ; for the mystery is then not a mere negation of knowledge but a sacred creed above knowledge to be adored humbly in despite of reason a credo quia impossible. All which was no doubt natural and necessary in the process of human evolution ; the creed of the time being the symbol of the vital force of development through man, and its formulation in words and ceremonies the sequent work of the intellect, itself then prone to enshrine its symbols as sacred dogmas and to christen them eternal verities. Meanwhile feeling flows on in the perpetual motion of things evolving its suitable notions, and the perplexing difficulty is to secure changeless truths by a changing creature in an ever-changing world. 206 MENTAL ORGANIZATION PT. n Reason does its best, but reason is not the main factor in belief and conduct might indeed, if pushed to the utmost, expose its own final impotence. It is therefore naturally overpowered by the vital force of feeling. 1 The favoured few who rejoice in the fine sensibility of a superlatively tempered soul whose intuitions transcend in value all purely intellectual processes and put an absolute stop to thought possess a firmer basis of unforced belief and a higher sublimation of faith than those less favoured persons who, clinging to old dogmas, deliberately cultivate a forced faith by which with the sophistical aid of metaphors, symbols, reserves, reticences and subtle tricks of interpretation they strain their minds to believe or half- believe, or doubt, or disbelieve at the same time. When they continue without disquietude of mind reverently to perform the customary ritual of worship and to repeat the verbal dogmas which are tacitly devitalized, the per- formance on the face of it looks insincere. But it is not the deliberate hypocrisy after it has become a habit of thought and action which it might hastily be called, and for two reasons : first, because symbols and fictions of thought are the only means by which the incomprehen- sible and ineffable can be brought into any sort of mental touch and the feeling of it expressed, however inade- quately ; secondly, because the deep mysteries of religion cannot be communicated to the vulgar mind otherwise than imperfectly by means of metaphors, symbols, allegories, parables, fables and the like simple instruc- tion suited to childlike apprehension. These had their proper value once and are still thought necessary albeit they are not now to be understood literally by the superior mind. It would no doubt be foolish to endeavour to teach the people in language which they could not understand, yet it might perhaps be wise to change the mode of instruction according as they learn to think. If the augurs be tempted to doubt or even smile sometimes 1 " La derniere demarche de la raison est toujours un aveu d'ignorance."- PASCAL. CH.I CURRENT OF SOCIAL FEELING 207 in secret conclave, they may still be serious in the pro- fessional performance of their official functions. Even the Thibetan prayer-mill has its symbolic virtue and value. And when all is said the functionary may be sincere in his narrow faith, however much wanting in depth and breadth of thought, for to many minds it is not the least shock to hold contradictory beliefs and to pursue incon- sistent conduct ; and it is undeniably possible by means of special and exclusive training organically so to form or deform a mind as to make it function in a special reason- proof compartment and thenceforth to enjoy its habit of function. Whatever a mind may be in the abstract it is a special organization in the particular reality ; its con- crete manifestations being always the definite functions of definitely organized local structures, and the several varieties of mental structure in persons and nations wit- nessing exactly to the special modes of organic fabrication which their instruction or literal construction is. The general, if not universal, prevalence of a so-called religious instinct in spite of the grotesque perversions, absurdities and even obscenities in practice which have marked its course of function from the first obviously has its origin and sufficient reason in feeling. It plainly testified at first to man's abject fear and later to his solemn awe and reverence of unknown powers, mythically symbolized, which it was necessary to propitiate according to human notions of propitiation either to appease the malice of malignant gods who hindered or hurt him or to supplicate the aid and comfort of benignant gods in his hard struggle to live. As also more intimately and vitally to the reverential wonder inspired by the observa- tion of the perpetual dying and renewal of life everywhere, death always ending life and life ever springing anew out of death. Perceiving himself to be a part of this perpetual flux of dying and reviving life it would have been strange if the consciously dependent creature had not felt a pro- found sense of absolute dependence on the motion of an incomprehensible power or reality beyond himself from 208 MENTAL ORGANIZATION PT . n which he proceeded and in which he lived his temporary life ; had not, moreover, conceived the notion of his own continuing motion of life after death, the craving for such unending life being to him a positive testimony of the heart which, as Pascal said, " has its reasons which the reason does not know." Perhaps too, as some persons believe, this assurance of the heart validates in them the yearning which they indulge mystically to merge and lose themselves in an ' universal Being while they are still alive, thus obtain- ing an ecstatic foretaste of that bliss which they shall enjoy in full at death ; an event which they nevertheless rather inconsistently wish to put off as long as they can. Strange indeed it seems at first sight that mind, feeling itself to be immortal, should thus dread and shun death, which is the gate of a happy release from its mortal cage ; but it is not really strange when we reflect that life by its very nature repugns death and that mind is life raised to its highest power and therefore, like all life, lustful to live. All dying things dying trees, dying flowers, dying creatures are saddening and repellent, matters mostly to be got rid of out of sight, because life in con- scious being dislikes the spectacle of going out of being, joy- ing naturally in the flux of spring, desponding in the reflux of autumn. Be that as it may, failing the fusion into a divine union which the mystic ardently solicits in whole and persuades himself he gets in part, either by pure spiritual communion or, as sometimes alleged, by actual verbal communication, he can lose himself in a pious ecstasy of social feeling and an enthusiastic rapture of humanity which, invaluable or not, is certainly not motived by reason. That the stream of social feeling is towards a closer, more complex and equal society, a completer human solidarity, is undeniable. It is not to be believed that were a clean sweep made of existing systems and a new social organization started any society would set up the distinctions and privileges and unequal distributions of CH. i CURRENT OF SOCIAL FEELING 209 property which are still patiently tolerated. The million- aire might now ask himself whether the bare wages of the labourer whom he employs in the production of his wealth constitute a fair share of the profits ; deep down in the heart of the workman who is not a professed socialist throbs an inarticulate feeling that they do not, that he is somehow unfairly kept down in the life -struggle, that there ought to be a change ; and the Duke might so far purge his mind of prejudice as to consider what natural or divine right, now that he is not a Dux or leader, he has to his privileged position in the social system. As social bodies in cities draw in streams of outlying persons, which they seem to do by gregarious attraction, they evidently tend to make more equal and equitable ad- justments. However great a personage a Duke may be in his private domain among his own servants and dependents, so soon as he steps into the streets of a big city he must adjust himself to the equal claims of others who do not now, as once they did, make way for him to pass in ducal dignity. He can, it is true, justify or console himself with the soothing reflection that he has still his superior social and economic value as desiderated Chairman of a public meeting, or director of a Joint Stock Company, or patron of a philanthropic Institution, none of which would prosper so well without his titled presence and august counte- nance. He can, too, nurse the pleasing thought that the newspapers will be eager to publish and the public pleased to read the detailed description of the costume worn by his bride when he marries or by his wife when she appears with him at a public ceremony. Still it is not quite inconceivable (especially now that titles are so often bought and sold in the social and political mart) l that the time may come when no sane and self-respecting citizen will choose to be called a Duke or by any similar distinctive title, any more than a person of rank would 1 Of the customary purchase of titles in England, the great Chinese statesman, Li Hung Chang, commenting on what he saw during his visit to Europe, said, " I would cut my face with a knife rather than obtain an office or an honour by bribery." P 210 MENTAL ORGANIZATION PT . n choose now to show himself in the street with bag- wig and sword, splendidly dressed in velvet, lace and ruffles, to relinquish which foppery would once have been thought a terrible degradation of his dignity and an upset of the ordained order of nature. Happily the relinquishment was not fatal, and it may be suspected that the order of nature will continue to subsist if the effect of the social current be to sweep artificial inequalities away and to kill titled vanities. CHAPTER II THE SOCIAL TRANSFORMATION OF HUMAN NATURE Two questions concerning Socialism. The Christian Socialist and Socialism. Socialism not Christianity. Individual enterprise and private competi- tion. Ideal and real humanity. Human perfectibility and human beings. Love of self and neighbour. Cycles of cosmical process. Altruism of science. Commercial altruism. Custom-made belief. Scientific re- search and social approbation. Diamonds and pearls. Social feeling of sheep and bullocks. Higher apes not social. Social dependence of bees. Hives of bees and national commonwealths. Material motion and immaterial Mind. Time and space. The scientist's hope of fame. The pioneer's joy in expression. His consolation in neglect. Discovery and personal merit. The discovery linked to a name. Necessary coincidences of thought. Two grave questions concerning the social drift into extreme socialism, by steady pursuit of nature's method of sacrificing individuals to the species, obviously are first, whether it would so weaken individual initiative, enterprise and energy as practically to extinguish them, equality killing liberty, ambition and independence, which is confidently assumed on the one hand and is seen to occur now in Trade Unions ; secondly, whether the in- dividual units would be sufficiently imbued with the altru- istic spirit of the social hive to work heartily to produce as well as easily to share in the distribution of wealth, which is confidently assumed on the other hand. Will the socialism of blessed achievement to-morrow be as earnest and eager to raise the level of the man at the bottom as the socialism of to-day is to lower the level of the man at the top? To divide wealth after it is pro- duced may be no hard matter, but it may not be so 211 212 MENTAL ORGANIZATION PT. n simple and easy to adjust the labours and claims of those who produce the wealth to be divided. Specious as equality is in theory, it may even be doubted whether the ardent socialist would be content to share equally in a distribution of all the inequalities, miseries, diseases and other manifold ills of mankind, were they heaped into one huge pile and then equally distributed ; which would be ideal justice. The so-called Christian Socialist who yearns to put in practice the socialistic principles of Christ, hitherto so deplorably neglected, might prudently reflect that the disciples were taught to toil not, neither to spin, as the worldly-minded did, which was conduct not calculated to increase production ; secondly, that those who shared a community of goods were for the most part poor persons of the meanest sort with very scanty goods to share, who were in daily expectation of the coming of the kingdom of heaven on earth, in which they were to be exalted into high places and those in high places on earth to be brought low ; to expedite the delayed coming of which eagerly- looked-for event was the probable motive of the treachery of Judas, who, when he discovered his mistake, so bitterly reproached and tragically expiated his treason. By an impressive parable they were taught that Dives, who had fared sumptuously every day, was damned to everlasting fire in hell, while Lazarus in heaven, who had picked up the crumbs that fell from the rich man's table, was not permitted so much as to dip the tip of his finger in water and give him a drop to cool his tongue. Prudence, again, in any case might forbid a hasty Christian alliance with the socialist. Although Christianity glides easily into Socialism, it is certain that Socialism is not Christianity, which is a creed based upon positive dogmas every one of which the socialist contemptuously derides and denies ; and if these are discarded the evis- cerated residue is not Christianity. It is then actually, as it now sometimes proclaims itself to be, a " new religion " or with more ignorant presumption " the religion of science." CH.II SOCIAL TRANSFORMATION 213 If the Christian thinks it right to work with the enemy for an immediately good end, the end justifying the means in his case as in the evolution of good out of evil in the world-process, and tacitly suppresses his dogmas, he may properly ask himself whether he is not helping to flood the stream which shall wash Christianity clean away and whether that is a possibility which he ever seriously thinks of. Roman Catholicism, professing a sincere belief in the sacred and inviolate dogmas divinely delivered unto the Church, may justly assert that he has no right to call himself a Christian, which is undeniable, and that he shall without doubt perish everlastingly, which is deniable. Anyhow he has abandoned the historical testimony of a divine revelation in favour of the testimony of his particular spirit, of what quality soever that may chance to be. A strange achievement of Protestantism it will be, having liberated Christianity from Papal thrall and then bound it in the closer shackles of a verbal inspiration of the Scriptures, if it go on by its divisions into divergent and jealously contending sects (some hundred Protestant sects or more in Great Britain, it is said) and by its rationalistic conversion into pure social feeling to do away with the dogmatic religion of Christ ; which is its present tendency and apparently fated function. What else is it then but an inclined plane down which Christianity stripped of its dogmas slides into personal mysticism and a social service of humanity, if not into State Socialism ? It is certainly remarkable that while the individualist is justly to be subordinated and the collective spirit to rule in social development a pure individualism is sanctified and all ruling authority rejected by Protestantism in religion : no kind of government (outside Romanism) to be tolerated in matters of faith by any individual conscience however poor its quality and intense its conceit. The real question of course is whether a socialistic issue is to be desired and earnestly pursued. Human nature being essentially much what it has been since it has 214 MENTAL ORGANIZATION PT. n known itself to be, a natural fear is that if private com- petition were done away with and all persons put on a social and economic equality individual enterprise, industry and efficiency would be lessened. Might not the social command to subdue or quench individual self-regarding passions and ambitions in the end sap a vigorous mental life to the growth of which they have hitherto been as essential as the root to the branch? In present con- ditions when one producer or company of producers prospers by virtue of a, valuable invention other producers are obliged, in order to compete successfully, to adopt the invention, or to improve it, or to invent a better ; for which reason enterprise and energy are stimulated and production kept up at a high level. Will the individual be content to toil and moil all the days of his life to produce inventions and wealth which he cannot specially benefit by and others who do not toil and moil like him shall equally enjoy to excel in anything when he gains nothing by excelling ? Although he will not then be permitted to exploit others to serve him which is the now alleged injustice of things it is obvious that others collectively will exploit him in the socialistic system and expect him to like his servitude. The sanguine socialist is not vexed by any apprehen- sion of trouble ; he is sure that in a happy company of like-minded and like -hearted comrades everybody's particular pride of conscience will be to do the best work he can in the situation assigned to him the Dustman equally with the Lord Chancellor and that the new invention will always be eagerly adopted by a number of enlightened bureaucratic officials and promptly utilized by the conjoint labours of enthusiastic indi- viduals working with one consent to make the most of it and themselves ; which will assuredly be a remarkable change for the better in official appreciation and employ- ment of new inventions. The inventor is expected to show the same zeal in discovering new adaptations to the physical world and in the skilful control of its forces, and CH.II SOCIAL TRANSFORMATION 215 gladly to merge his individuality in the social body of which he is an organic member. Inventors, moreover, shall then spring up like mushrooms in the justly prepared soil and " wealth flow like water," it is alleged ; more wealth being the right aim and its flow an incalculable benefit to the community because every member of it shall then have the leisure to cultivate music, poetry, painting, athletics and other accomplishments, intellectual and physical, of a no longer oppressed nature : the whole duty of everybody be to produce wealth at ease in order that all may enjoy and be happy together in a golden age to come, which, if it come, may not then turn out to be golden. The lame-minded sceptic cannot for the life of him nurse the same sure faith. To him the Paradise of such an ideal mankind may seem likely always to be ideal, no better than the illusive vision of a Paradise to come in lieu of the lost Paradise of a fabled past. Progress and humanity are fine - sounding words which captivate the imagination, but observation teaches that men are in the habit of ascribing immense value to, and joining in approbation of, a word when they are not agreed as to its exact meaning, are tacitly agreed perhaps to understand it differently or not definitely at all, and to denounce the unseemly behaviour of any one who, exposing the vague- ness or irreconcilable difference, asks for a precise defini- tion. Less tall talk about humanity and its progress in the abstract, and more thought of the actual persons and their doings who constitute humanity and give the word substantial meaning, might conduce to more clearness, substance and veracity of thought. When all is said, it is not an abstract Humanity which marches in real life but innumerable multitudes of concrete individuals such as they are, many of them by their vicious conduct or their sluggish pace and the help which they claim and obtain much hindering the desired advance. Helpful too it would be, instead of vague notions of human perfectibility, to be furnished with a clear and 216 MENTAL ORGANIZATION PT . n distinct idea of what the perfection to come is to be and of the right method of its attainment. Then the hardened sceptic might be less disposed than he sometimes is now to doubt whether the promised social perfection is ever likely to be worth the sacrifice of self on its behalf which he is called on to make within the short span of his life. Meanwhile he cannot help being sometimes dispirited in his particular society when he considers what its govern- ment is and who and what are the multitudes who actually constitute the community ; what sort of light and leading they like and their leaders of opinion like to supply ; how firmly they cling to irrational superstitions and placidly embrace flagrant contradictions of thought ; how widely their conventional faiths differ from their habitual practices, the most sacred professions of belief being habitually violated without the least mental qualm ; how mechanically they repeat in new circumstances the traditional thoughts and doings which they have learnt, pleased then with their performances as if they were something new and better ; how ready, in defiance of reason, a group of persons in a nation, or indeed a whole nation, is to con- vert ill-founded opinion into a creed and adore it. That the individual in a particular society should always subject himself absolutely to its service and find his merit in such subjection, even though he admire not its fashions, revere not its sanctified customs and superstitions, approve not its economic system or political administration, is certainly to demand a large subdual of independent thought and liberty of action in its service. Yet the sceptic who utters a haunting doubt will be scouted off-hand as a despicable cynic or counted an asocial, if not antisocial, person ; which latter in fact, rightly or wrongly, he virtually is where he is. The optimist, on the other hand, wherever he is and whatever the character of the social and political system in which he lives, is sure that it is worth the sacrifice of self to its service and would willingly force the doubter to feel and think likewise. The latter's misfortune is to be misplaced or mistimed, but he may CH. ii SOCIAL TRANSFORMATION 217 console himself with the thought that had he chanced to live in the time of Nero or now in Dahomey his fate would have been worse. There is some excuse, when all is said, for the sceptic who wishes to stand on the solid ground of realities. To love his neighbour as himself, as he is taught to do, but no mortal ever yet has done and any mortal would be mad seriously to try to do, may be a useful ideal to entertain, but too often in the real world it falls out that the more a person knows his neighbour the less disposed is he to love him. Love in its divinest incarnation did not embrace the vehemently denounced Pharisees and the driven-out traders who made the House of God a den of thieves. Besides, how ardent soever the love of neighbour, nobody is imprudent enough to tell him fully everything concerning himself, feeling in his inmost heart, although he may not avow it to himself, the wisdom of the cynical advice to deal with a friend as if the friend might one day become an enemy ; which, in matter of fact, is what frequently occurs when their respective interests clash. For the present, at any rate, the obvious task is patiently to labour in quiet hope and remote expectation, seeing that an evolution little short of a revolution of human nature must perforce precede its perfect altruistic transformation. A long and slow process of amelioration thousands of years that are but as days must tediously pass before such social feeling is ingrained in the stock as shall instil into everybody a constantly insistent instinct to feel, think and work for others as he would have others feel, think and work for him. But that need not hinder the optimist from expecting the ideal to-morrow ; all the less so since to-morrow is not but always 13 to be. Meanwhile, if the impartial observer who puts aside the warm light of personal feeling and coolly reflects that the cosmic process has gone on from everlasting and seems likely to go on to everlasting through a succes- sion of alternate evolutions and dissolutions without evolving into anything very different or perhaps more 218 MENTAL ORGANIZATION PT . n perfect, repeating its recurring cycles of doing and undoing, he may be caught by a sharp spasm of doubt whether human nature, which is part of the nature of the earth- planet, is entitled to expect an extraordinary and ultra- natural or extra-universal fate. He may, it is true, argue that the universe was from the beginning of its existing order and still is striving slowly and painfully to attain consciousness through him as he strives to perfect himself ; and he can then join and joy in the belief that his planet is glorified above other planets and raised to incompar- able value by being the habitation of man, and shall have had everlasting value after it is a cold and dreary desert because it was the privileged scene of the stupendous human drama. That belief, the incorrigible sceptic may reply, is just the natural outcome of a flattering self- adoration and not really incontestable. When all is said, every animal is imbued implicitly with the spirit of self- admiration the turkey-cock and the peacock in notable display, although this obtains most explicit exposition and glorification in the self-consciousness of the human species. An evolutional metamorphosis of human nature in ages to come is not, however, inconceivable nor perhaps quite incredible. Men sometimes now throw their gains into the common store without thought of pecuniary reward. He who makes an important medical discovery imparts it to all the world, often too in such eager haste that he proudly proclaims it before he has rightly verified it ; for which reason it not seldom happens that the announced discovery of to-day is denounced to-morrow. If, for instance, he finds out a successful means of medical or surgical treatment by which incalculable suffering is prevented and innumerable lives saved he does not keep the discovery secret or patent it for his personal profit he would be thought a despicable quack if he did he is content with the esteem which it brings him, the gratifica- tion of his ambition to excel, the boon which he confers on his kind, and above all perhaps with the joy which CH. it SOCIAL TRANSFORMATION 219 his self-expression is to himself; for all self-expression is pleasing even when it is the incontinent discharge of passion or hysteria. The flash of self -approbation he counts a sufficient reward for all his toil and drudgery. In the universal order of things the vanity of man is ordained to promote and praise it. May not a similar generous and magnanimous spirit some day rule in the commercial world ? All the more possible if the individual realize that his gift to the com- munity by placing at its general disposal the fruits of his particular invention and industry not only benefits all the persons constituting it and himself as one of them, but multiplies the value of his product a hundredfold by social co-operation in utilizing it. But in truth he will not need to make the trite reflection in the realized social ideal ; for its collective spirit may be then confidently relied on to subdue him naturally to the custom of thinking and believing as it would have him do, and he will be unable to feel and think otherwise. Inevitably do the thoughts and feelings of men conform to the social environment, changing with its changes in time and place ; they would be aliens not social beings if they did not conform. Strange it seems now to think that Aristotle asked in wonder how it was any more possible for masters to do without slaves than for a statue to transport itself or for a shuttle to do its own weaving. 1 Custom-made creatures never cease to wonder at the thoughts, feelings and con- duct of creatures organically formed to think, feel and act in different moulds of custom. Strange, too, it may no doubt seem to some of those who are alive in remote time 1 A reflection, by the way, which the socialist might fitly make as he prosecutes his equalizing work is whether Aristotle himself and the cluster of poets, sculptors, orators and philosophers who constituted the brilliant con- stellation of Grecian intellect would have risen and shone had there been no organized slavery in Athens to do menial work. He may of course say that it was because of the good social feeling and general intellectual culture of the Athenians and their eager participation in public affairs that such eminent products occurred (the slaves being a class apart), and that in his ideal state a similar result may be expected without slavery. Yet the Athenian demo- cracy, jealously resenting individual superiority, signalized itself by tyrannic- ally banishing or putting to death its best citizens. 220 MENTAL ORGANIZATION PT . n to come to think that beings who could travel over the earth and fly through the air at a speed of a hundred miles an hour, could kill one another at a distance of ten miles, could send a message through the air for two or three thousand miles, and finally could astonish the fishes by submarine invasion of their domain that beings so powerful and skilful by their use of reason in the conquest of nature could at the same time devoutly cherish some of the irrational beliefs which they embrace and hold fast. If it were not that reason is counted a lesser light than faith, or no light at all in the high sphere of religious revelation, the wonder would be that in an age of so much knowledge the great majority of the people remain so placidly ignorant and contentedly irrational. But there is no need to wonder when the process is duly noted and considered by which a plastic organism in its proper medium is organically shaped by tradition, training, law and custom to a habit of function after a set pattern ; any number of similarly fashioned organisms then doing their routine thinking in herds, fortifying it by union of feeling and infection of sympathy, and counting their collective thought and feeling divine. Thus it is that Mahometanism has organically fashioned the Mahometan, Judaism the Jew, Paganism the Pagan, Christianity the Christian. The vexed observer who resents the tyranny of custom in sanctifying diverse contradictory beliefs and practices and rendering much mental function mechanical may, however, properly call to mind the amends which it makes by its time-saving and labour-saving habits in all the relations of social life ; the machinery of the social system thereby working steadily, automatically, efficiently, which, were thinking required by every person on every occasion, it could not do for a day. Without the un- conscious store of instructed mind which is mental structuralization every function of it would be a perpetual beginning to construct itself. A socially constituted being living in and imbued by his special mental medium naturally expresses himself 221 socially in it and is pleased with such self-expression and the social approbation which he desires and obtains. It is a powerful incentive to work well in it. In the various departments of scientific research numbers of zealous workers are constantly toiling to discover the so-called secrets of nature without other motive, as they na'fvely persuade themselves, than the pleasing pursuit of truth. Yet these embedded secrets are after all just tentative and improving adaptations on man's part to better his estate, proudly objectified by him as secrets of infinite wisdom for his finite faculties to find out. But what would the value of a new discovery be were there no social approba- tion, no persons of the same mode of thinking and feeling to appreciate and applaud it ? In no case can the single person do without the social medium which can usually do well enough without him. What would the property in an idea be worth if its owner could not give it in free exchange to like-constituted minds ? Exchange in mind, in commerce, even in the intimate functions of the bodily organism is the beneficial rule of life. Although the idea is private property of which the extremest socialist cannot rob him it would be as useless as gold in a country where gold, not being a token of value, could buy nothing ; as worthless as the finest pearl to a barndoor fowl insensible of the value which it has to the superior creatures who adorn their persons with it. Such precious social value among the many conventional values which it creates does civilized society bestow on an encapsuled oyster's alien particle or parasitic invader. When the keen-feeling but narrow-thinking humani- tarian points indignantly at the diamonds, pearls, trinkets and all kinds of ornaments with which women decorate their heads, necks, wrists, ears noses and ankles being yet a reserve for semi-barbarous peoples and computes curiously how many poor families their cost would feed and clothe in a year, he does not reflect that they would have no value whatever were there no social customs to give them value and create a demand. If he did thus 222 MENTAL ORGANIZATION PT . n ponder, however, he might feel logically urged to ask what was the lasting structural value of a conventionalized civilization which sets such artificial values, what the existing moral values and what the eternal values of beings whose dear delight it is thus to bedizen their persons. So wide and deep the gulf between what they are now while clothed in mortality and that which they shall be when unclothed in immortality. Obviously it is from the reflection of self in a fit social medium by similarly constituted selves that the personal joy of a scientific discovery is felt, and from their exchanging interactions, sympathetic and synergic, that it is appreciated and utilized. The most brilliant discovery would not interest an Andaman islander or a tribe of anthropoid apes, nor would the most eloquent oration addressed to a herd of bullocks provoke anything more than a bovine stare of vacuity. Yet such is the fellow- feeling in bullocks and some other gregarious species that they live in herds, a solitary bullock or sheep separated from the community and deprived of its sense of support therein being restless and distressed until it rejoins its companions, when it ceases to bellow or bleat piteously and begins to pasture quietly. So far down in animal nature lie the germ of social feeling and the im- pulse of social development whence proceed in due course of evolution its various growths in different communities and nations ; so deep the organic root from which its finest blossoms ultimately spring. 1 It is the manifest nature of vital matter infused and bombarded from its beginning by the sun's rays to rise to more and more complex compositions under the conditions of a favourable environment in which the elective affinities of its growing molecular structure can act freely ; which is withal no more real marvel, save for the set resolve to think life a mystery, than the rising complexity of chemical com- positions which nobody wonders at. Organic molecules 1 "If eating and drinking be natural, Herding is so too. If any appetite or sense be natural, the sense of Fellowship is the same." SHAFTESBURY. CH. ii SOCIAL TRANSFORMATION 223 have their fixed biochemical affinities and repulsions, and combine or not accordingly by natural law ; and it is just as legitimate to ascribe implicit purpose to the one as to find explicit purpose in the structural compound which each makes. Yes, even when that natural compound chances to be fatal to man and his highest purposing. Here, by the way, it is interesting to note that although man is the supreme social species his nearest of kin the gorilla, the chimpanzee and the gibbon are not social ; they do not, as some lower apes do, live in societies, live only a brief family life. Perhaps their unlucky course along a non-social path was a cause of their present mental inferiority, as man's lucky start from the common ancestral stock along an altruistic social path through the par- ticular inspired variation perchance of some primitive genius was a cause of his mental superiority. Instead of joining in social defence against dangerous foes or hostile members of their species, as the wise bees furiously do and the silly sheep tamely do not, they apparently betook themselves for refuge to forests and trees, using their hands mainly for prehensile purposes ; which was after all to develop them as factors and expressions of intelligence. How natural and exquisitely effective such sensorimotor development of intelligence can be several human instances especially those of the blind and deaf Laura Bridgman and the wonderfully instructed Helen Keller prove conclusively. Thus specializing and limiting the use of their hands, however, they became frugivor- ous beings acting on the defensive rather than carni- vorous beings strong to take the offensive ; which was a peaceful mode of conduct unfavourable to their pro- gressive development, as it has been to the human tribes which adopted it, albeit favourable to the develop- ment of the stronger and fiercer tribes and nations which subdued or exterminated them. While the anthropoid apes have then maintained a close similarity of general physical structure they have not developed the finer and more complex convolutions of the brain, the superior mass 224 MENTAL ORGANIZATION PT . n and labyrinthine structure of which in man embody the gains of his progressive social advancement and discharge themselves in his thoughts and functions as a social being. 1 The recluse who can live alone secluded from his kind must, it has been said, be either a brute or a genius, albeit in the latter case he does not really live so entirely aloof as he appears and perhaps thinks to do ; for he is in sympathy and converse with the great minds which have preceded and helped to fashion his mind and now live on in it. The brutish ascetic, even though he did not, like Simeon Stylites, exhibit his spurious humility on the top of a lofty column, was a debased and anti-social being who in a later age would have been rightly relegated to a lunatic asylum or a prison. A signal instance of social dependence is exhibited by so small a creature as the bee, which has effected an admirable social organization without conscious premedi- tation or self-glorification, and without the need of a convoluted brain. An isolated bee dies in a short time although supplied with ample provision and placed in a suitable temperature is said to die of solitude though probably more of the exhaustion produced by its frantic but futile efforts to escape. So essential a constituent of the bee's life, however, is its social medium that it is to all intents and purposes a vital organ or element of the society to which it belongs and from which when separated it dies. The notion of its separation and of the space through which it travels in its long flights blinds observa- tion to the possible fact that it is not out of exquisitely fine physical touch with the hive but, so long as it is free, in mysterious communication with it by subtile and im- palpable ethereal motions to which the delicate rhythms of its fine structure respond, holding it in sympathy with 1 A statement acceptable in the general, yet when reason is said to be incorporated in rightly proportioned which is strictly ratto-na.1 structure and thereafter discharged consciously in rational which is proportionately adapted function, indignant repudiation is made of so crassly materialistic a notion of reason : the implicit reason denied because it is not explicitly displayed. CH. ii SOCIAL TRANSFORMATION 225 the hive whether near or distant that is to say, when the exquisitely subtile rhythms have not been accidentally or artificially blocked. What matters it in that case that the distance is a mile or a millimetre ? Space is not the separating void in the universe which it is made in thought. It is now believed to be filled with an elastic ether through which the most subtile wave-motions constantly travel in their different directions to immeasurable distances at immense speed from every object in it ; empty space being the mentally created figment which a large object like man, insensible to the finest subtilties of matter and motion, traverses in his massive motions to approach or recede from a visible object. Is not the space between atoms and molecules greater in proportion to their size ? Were he to consider the matter closely he might conclude that the compendium of fine and complex motions con- densed in the small compass of a bee's body and radiated from it in its busy activity was more complicated and wonderful than the large spatial display of a dozen solar systems. Man creates space and time out of his own limitations of thought and is then lost in admiration of the actual negations of thought which infinities and eternities are. Every plant and animal is known to be built up structurally by innumerable multitudes of differentiated cells working together in unity and concord for the well- being of the whole in their several fit divisions and ex- changes of labour. In like manner on a higher plane a hive of bees or for the matter of that a national common- wealth, which is a colony of diverse parts working together singly and in groups for the good of the whole, they in it and it in them, may be viewed as a composite organism in the labours of whose development as a whole specializations of industry necessarily and naturally ensue. Far from being simple substance the small cell is a compendium of motions, so numerous, subtile, complex and rapid as to be utterly inconceivable ; yet they are few compared with the multitudes and complexities of subtile motion Q 226 MENTAL ORGANIZATION FT. n in the whole body of a minute insect, the unwearied activities of whose movements on a fine summer's day might well excite wonder whence so much energy in so small a compass was derived, a wonder perhaps that it has not been thought necessary to derive it metaphysically or spiritually. And would be more surprising were the conception of intra-atomic forces and invisible mechanism not now supplanting the crude notion of inert matter and gross mechanism which still blinds and satisfies the anti- materialist. Not that he always thinks now, as he was wont to think and contemptuously talk of inert matter and gross motion ; for wireless telegraphy has enabled him vaguely to imagine subtilties of matter and motion which he never before dreamt of. Although he will not allow material motion ever to be translated into mind in this world, he can assume the existence of an universal mind pervading all things and persons, and a consequent continuity of memory somewhere of its imprisoned personality on earth, not troubling then to say or think what becomes of animal minds. Nay more, if bent on keeping hold of such personal immortality, he can scientifically use uni- versal ethereal motion to constitute the disembodied spiritual substance of mortal individuals in an immortal world, even when he does not go so far as to claim actual communication with them, as he sometimes does. Partially to apprehend new discoveries and then use them to sus- tain preconceived opinions and waning superstitions is a familiar practice which is pretty sure to continue while ill- based beliefs and cherished superstitions last. It is by a like process of thought that the insane sufferer from a mania of persecution who, rational in other respects, believes that he is persistently tormented by mysterious agencies in impossible ways from any distance however remote now lays hold of wireless telegraphy, the telephone and so-called telepathy to confirm his belief, contemptu- ously rejecting all arguments to controvert its impossibility. Being true to him what matters it how untrue it be ? CH. ii SOCIAL TRANSFORMATION 227 Like Tertullian, he believes the impossible just because of its impossibility. He can always say that the known possible is very limited, the unknown and seemingly impossible illimitable. Thought is necessarily conditioned by its notions of time and space and by the statical divisions and separa- tions which it makes of the dynamic flux of nature, in which continuous stream of motion ideas while they last are as real vital values as acts. Let imagination emanci- pate itself from the thrall of time and place, the past, so far as it is known, would be present, the remote close at hand Socrates drinking the hemlock in his prison, Seneca bleeding to death in his bath, the ideal Hamlet who never lived a more real human force than any concrete Hamlet who ever lived. All knowledge, even the most religious and scientific, is in the end symbolic, being the fittest mental representation of so much of incomprehensible whole as is comprehended at the time, and the great poet's just insight into and creation of a character a truer develop- ment of human relations in their essential nature than any historical character which the historian for the most part complacently shapes more often misshapes by depicting it as thinking, feeling and acting as he himself in his different medium and with his quality of mind would feel, think and act in the circumstances. Inasmuch as these at the best are often obscure, ambiguous and largely guessed at, the particular history in the end is very much the his- torical novel of the particular writer, as his mental habit is of its different environment. Assuredly the historical person described, could he read the elaborate exposition of his motives and deeds, would be amazed sometimes to discover what manner of man he was, if he recognized himself at all in the artistic portrait. He would learn with surprise how great the difference was between self- knowledge and the knowledge of his character which the penetrating insight of the acute historian, knowing not himself but able to know others, easily supplies. It is by reason of the social hive innate in its human 228 MENTAL ORGANIZATION PT . n units and of the spirit of the particular hive in the units born and bred in it that the scientific enquirer thrills with a present delight in the anticipation of a posthumous fame which he half believes will please him when he is not. Thus craving to live in immortal admiration after his mortal ending, so he craves immortal life in a world to come ; both cravings proceeding from the same source and neither being so sure of gratification as he would like it to be. Hope is the toiling worker's real solace and incentive, the very pulse of mortal life on earth. Often- times the discoverer reaps no benefit, dying obscurely perhaps in the meanest poverty, unless perchance his discovery is a mechanical invention which, having an acute commercial instinct, he has the good fortune to patent and get successfully applied ; in which case the capitalist who supplies and risks the requisite funds to effect the practical application is often the principal or entire gainer. It is the old story repeated as it probably will be to the end of time : the poor wise man delivered the besieged city, yet no one remembered that same poor man. 1 It is not the manual labourer only whom capitalism exploits ; the discoverer might fare no better on the whole in the slavery of a socialistic community, though there at least he could caress the soothing thought that no one profited more than himself by his invention. Fellow-feeling in affliction mitigates the sense of suffering, as fellow-feeling in joy augments the joy, being a pleasing balm to hurt self- love. Besides, the fervent enthusiast, scouting pessimistic doubt, can always persuade himself that the enlightened bureaucracy of a perfect social system, in league of sympathy and conceit of function, will be as eager, alert and enter- prising to supply the requisite funds and venture the necessary risks as the self-regarding capitalist. Not that the poor and neglected discoverer is so much to be pitied as people think when they make the belated discovery of his merits, lament the obscurity in which he lived and died, reproach themselves or their forefathers 1 Ecclesiastes, ch. xxv. 16. CH. ii SOCIAL TRANSFORMATION 229 for deplorable blindness, hasten to set up a tablet, statue or other memorial of him. They are pretty sure to do the same thing to-morrow so long as to-morrows be. The earnest pioneer has his own reward in the good work which he does, in the gratification of doing it, in the joy of his own mental growth, in the full expression of his nature and the nature developed through it. It is not for the applause of the ignorant multitude, which is usually spurious, always fleeting, often debasing, that he labours if he is a genuine worker ; praise by the many is praise by those who, unable to understand and appreciate solid worth, are captivated by specious show and glitter ; it is for the sincere and adequate expression of that which he feels and thinks in fact, for his own gratification by the utterance and ease of himself. The producer of new thought gratifies an intellectual vital hunger ; the curiosity to know in order to grow in mind being as fundamental an instinct of life in mind as the appetite of hunger or the lust of feeling in body and in truth sometimes almost as eager and reckless in its gratification. It is at bottom the desire of human nature to get more power and more comfort by in- creasing conquest of the environment, the craving of life to obtain more and fuller life ; whence in the mental sphere a dislike of continuing doubt and a liking to believe some- thing for present stay and use with the consequent too ready belief in that which sorts with prejudice, constitu- tional or acquired. The life of prejudice, like all life, strives to increase itself by food suited to it ; and many a mind is mainly a fixed mass of traditional organized prejudice. A chastened reflection after his work is done and the flattering belief that if it was well done it will not have been done in vain may mitigate the grief of the pioneer who fails to obtain the recognition and appreciation which he deserves. Why should it matter much to him while he is when it will matter nothing to him after a little while when he is not? In a world of compensations he 230 MENTAL ORGANIZATION PT. n was not without his recompense, for he was spared the envy, censure, enmity, perhaps actual persecution which he might have encountered for the inopportune enuncia- tion of new ideas unwelcome to the thought and feeling of the time. And if perchance he is openly despised and condemned he is not necessarily abased ; to confront smilingly or stoically the hard strokes of fate is to triumph over its malignancy. In no case has any one who throws pearls before swine the right to lament because they take no notice of them ; it pleased him to throw them, and the swine were in their right not to swallow what did not please and would not agree with them. Is the great discovery or invention ever a matter of personal merit deserving a special reward ? Whence the superior capacity on which the individual achieve- ment and claim to merit are based ? Nobody owes his mental tone and stature to himself or to natural election or selection in his lifetime, any more than his bodily grace and stature : they were not spontaneous creations uncaused and unfashioned organically but inherited boons. What too of his incalculable debt to the tradition, the culture, the common stock of images, the beaten track and accumulated capital of thought and feeling which, constantly penetrating and permeating him, he silently assimilates ? Scientific discoveries, mechanical inventions, and other achievements of human thought and skill are not, as vulgarly supposed, the quite original work of a single person owing little or nothing to the past ; they have been laboriously and obscurely prepared by many toiling pioneers in the evolutional process, most of them nameless for evermore. Seldom therefore is a great dis- covery made and welcomed but it has been forefelt, or dimly foreseen, or actually made before, without obtaining any appreciation from the thought of an age not then risen to the requisite height of knowledge to apprehend it. The untimely birth perished timelessly ; for it could not thrive in the medium of a mental atmosphere hostile to it. Good mental growth requires fit surrounding condi- CH. ii SOCIAL TRANSFORMATION 231 tions ; if these are bad they not only repress or suppress the good but by natural selection nurture the bad varia- tion ; for which reason a degenerative regress is just as natural a biological process as an evolutional progress, and takes effect as surely and quietly. The nation which is undergoing deterioration is quite unaware of, or blindly indifferent to, nay perhaps complacently satisfied with its process of decline, especially when, as it is prone to do, it loudly extols in theory the virtues which it ignores in practice. In morality as in literature, in art, in patriotism, fine talk is apt to be loudest when performance is at a low ebb. As the social like the bodily organism responds favour- ably to that which it can assimilate, it bursts out into acclamations of praise when it has made the delayed assimilation. The person whom it crowns with honour, linking his name ever afterwards to the discovery, is the patient and persevering worker who has made a clear and distinct exposition of it, demonstrating its value by detailed proof to the common understanding. Having thus successfully proved and taught it, he is thenceforth the man of mark and merit. Common opinion is set on having a single cause in neglect of antecedent and con- current conditions : if the invading microbe kills only one out of fifty persons whom it infects the microbe is still the cause of the fatal disease. 1 Yet the laborious and meritorious expounder who has successfully cultivated the seed may not after all have shown so much originality as the lonely pioneer who first sowed it with presension only or dim prescience of its eventual growth and was ignored as a visionary or perhaps counted no better than 1 The postulate of a definite static cause in the universal flux of energy necessitates the anthropomorphic concept of a first cause and a beginning of things though in all human experience cause which is not effect is a meaning- less word. Because a very limited and quite relative being has a beginning and consciously exerts power as supposed freewill he believes himself entitled to assume that there must have been likewise a beginning and uncaused first cause of things, although it is hard to understand how the conception of beginning and end has real meaning outside the limit of human relativity and thought ; for, as Sir Thomas Browne said, " who can speak of eternity without a solecism, or think of it without an ecstasy ? " 232 MENTAL ORGANIZATION PT. n a madman ; for men call him visionary when, unable to see what he sees, they conclude that he sees nothing. To ascribe the successful achievement exclusively to him who perfects and proves it would be as much as to say that there is no simmering before the water boils, no turbid fermentation of grape-juice before the clear wine appears, no quiet and silent unfolding of the bud before the full flower expands. Naturally then it comes to pass that ignoble disputes as to priority occur in case of almost every great discovery, and in the end perhaps it is found that the angry disputants were themselves fore- stalled. Coincidences of thought inevitably happen in similar mental organizations functioning in the same or a similar social medium, without being the plagiarisms which they appear to be. The truth is perhaps that it is not so much the individual who makes the discovery as the discovery which is made through him. The majestic mountain rises not in solitary grandeur from a level plain ; it is the highest peak of a range or cluster of mountains which have been upheaved by the same ele- mental forces. What more than a just debt does the discoverer pay when he gives back in fit form to the community that which his individual nature, born, bred and nurtured in it, has received substantially from it when he distributes socially the socially created riches of mind ? CHAPTER III SOCIAL TRANSFORMATION (continued} Capitalism and ownership. The Anarchists' aim. Contagion of feeling. Domination of capitalism. The demagogue and Democracy. Titles, stars, ribbons, etc. The -hereditary principle. Detrimental dis- tinctions. The perfect State and the perfect citizen. Details of accom- plishment. Individual philanthropy. Personal value of social service. -Self- renunciation in theory and practice. Bad men useful factors. The philanthropic zealot. Personal enthusiasm and self-deception. The physical basis of fanaticism. Mental convulsion, divine or patho- logical ? -Religious conversions. Deceptive self-valuation. Cells in an organism and individuals in a community. Social development and the imposition of Socialism. Biological and sociological conceptions. Biology and psychology. HAVING regard to the grim .story of its operations it must be confessed that capitalism is no less strong, grasp- ing and selfish now, even in democratic nations, than the organized few were when they took possession of the land they could seize, exploiting the weak and unorganized many as serfs to till it for their profit. Without doubt they would likewise have taken possession of the air and the sunlight and leased them could they have circum- scribed and held what they wanted. Is not the legal presumption now that the owner of any piece of land, even if it be only a back-garden, owns the sky above it to the zenith ? Nevertheless the feeling grows and strengthens that" the ownership of land rests on a different footing from that of capital, and that the soil ought rightly to belong to the community and be cultivated for its benefit ; so that the personal tenure of large tracts begins to look precarious and is in fact being gradually weakened 233 234 MENTAL ORGANIZATION PT . n by social legislation. And no doubt would be more pre- carious were it not that the land with its augmented values has often been bought and sold by a succession of persons who had no part in the original robbery ; for which reason it is not thought right violently to plunder and evict the present owners without compensation. A tender sense of justice might be hurt if the confiscation were not done gently, though when done it may be called a wise conveyance. Such lenity the Anarchist scouts as sentimental folly. Why should the spoliation or ruin of a few persons within a wrongly organized society weigh against the well-being of all its members in a righteously constituted State ? It has never counted nor counts now in wanton or wanted wars between nations. Good construction, moreover, cannot be done without destruction of that which cumbers the ground, and it is generally wiser to pull down a dilapidated building than to remodel and repair it. The way of thought is short and straight from the seizure of land to that of capital and may be easily traversed ; for although avarice and covetousness are words which have fallen out of use in a commercial age the passions they de- note subsist in the multitude as well as in the millionaires. That which in feudal times seemed the natural, necessary and immutable order of things that the few should have privileges and rule in luxury and the many toil in subjection and poverty, content to honour and obey their pastors and masters in the humble station in which it pleased Providence to place them, is beginning to excite wonder that the great majority so long and patiently endured it. The surprise might be greater did not daily observation show with what sheeplike docility the herd follow the few leaders who beguile, infatuate and exploit it, bleating in gregarious sympathy when its leaders bleat and faithfully imitating them in leaping like sheep over a precipice to destruction or an imaginary obstacle in a gateway ; easily driven moreover when they are not led, it being notoriously easier to drive a flock of CH. in SOCIAL TRANSFORMATION 235 sheep than a single sheep. Thought of some kind is necessarily roused in the person who is in a position where, having no outside support by his fellows, he must act singly and cannot stand still ; whereas in a herd his individuality is absorbed in the sense of support it obtains from the collective spirit which it then obeys and helps to swell. A never-failing spectacle of folly is that of mobs of men quickly infecting and inflaming one another with their noise and passion by contagious sympathy and the furious fools they then make themselves. Elderly fathers of families and sober men of business assembled in a Parliament of opposing parties and dominated by the collective party spirit howl and yell and gesticulate as no house of madmen ever did or ever would. Nothing like it outside Bedlam, it is said, when nothing like it was ever seen in Bedlam. No lunatic asylum would be manageable if its inmates were capable of the mental contagion and frantic follies of those who thus collectively violate reason outside it and exult in their performances. Rightly considered there is no marvel in it ; for the subtile penetration and permeation of passion among like-feeling persons in a crowd seems quite natural when due thought is taken of the exquisite subtilties and velocities of the finest motions ; the radiations of feeling and its visible gesticulations being really the moving out- wards the e-motion of exquisitely fine motion and their impact in the mass on each person overwhelm- ing. Striking the many sympathetically, such motions madden them collectively, the more frantically the more excitable the national temperament. They are unfelt only by the antipathetically immune and indifferent or cynical- minded person who, beholding the grotesque exhibition, may then be prompted sometimes to ask himself whether he really belongs to the same species. Sense of private responsibility and public duty is swallowed up in the mob spirit. The optimist can of course expect that in happy time to come a milder contagion of fine and calm 236 MENTAL ORGANIZATION FT. n altruistic feeling shall likewise infect, permeate and per- fect his ideal social organization. Anyhow it is not likely that with the steady growth of social feeling and the waking sense of solidarity and power in the masses of a community they will be satisfied with the sort of liberty, equality and fraternity which has hitherto been granted them. They will probably expect to obtain on earth the equality and fraternity which, denied them there, was graciously promised them elsewhere by the priests and rulers who exploited them. In scattered and recurring manifestations there is ample evidence of a deep feeling of revolt in the working classes against the domination of capitalism, more in- stinctively brooding perhaps at present than intelligently articulate. Yet the impartially reflecting observer may doubt whether the big financier, once looked down on with some contempt notwithstanding the useful service which he did, ought to be allowed to capture and manipulate the economic and corrupt the political forces for his single profit. When all is said the millions of peoples are of more account than the millionaire, modern plutocracy not more sacred than feudal aristocracy. The former really does now by force of acute and subtle parasitic intellect what the latter did by rude physical force and is not blamed for his covetous lust, intellectual being more laudable than physical exploitation of others. The far-reaching power for mischief and the large cause of demoralization which enormous capital in the hands of solely self-regarding persons can be is not clearly perceived, or at all events not adequately realized in thought, although felt in practice, so much of its opera- tion being secret and subterranean, not easily detected and less easily exposed. Therefore it escapes the odium or envy which the large landowner's visible possessions are apt to provoke. Democratic feeling is not likely to shrink as democratic power grows, whatever the issue, whether in the social millennium anticipated from its righteous growth or in CH. in SOCIAL TRANSFORMATION 237 the disorder and anarchy which have heretofore followed democratic rule. Notably too where it might perhaps have been least expected in the enlightened democracy of Athens pleased to listen to the eloquent Philippics of Demosthenes, although heedless to profit by them and take the displeasing measures necessary to thwart the treacherous designs of Philip. It was more agreeable to democratic conceit jealously to ostracize displeasing superiority than to take its counsels to heart and learn from them. How could a self-complacent and self-in- dulgent people do otherwise when the rhetorical displays of their orators and the prowess of their athletes interested them more deeply than the impending Macedonian in- vasion ? Be the end what it may, certain it is that human feeling strongly stirred will pay small heed to economic theories, pretty certain too that a crop of self-prizing and self-deceiving demagogues will spring up ready and eager for their own gain and glory sycophantly to flatter the selfish passions and ignorant prejudices of the mob who put them in power. Of what use would the honest leader be who could not lower himself to a base level ? He would be pretty sure to lose his leader- ship if he did not say that which was liked and did say that which was disliked ; and that is what a leader seldom likes to do. For the present at least he could not risk the honest venture, seeing that the majority, if not positive fools, cannot be called wise, unless perchance wisdom be latent in the instincts of their passions and lurk in the depths of their ignorance. Did not Cicero go so far as to declare that all places swarm with fools, and does not Augustine say somewhere that wisdom is driven for safety to place itself under the protection of fools ? Stultorum infinitus est numerus, an old aphorism. 1 1 Apollo, when he was formerly consulted, could not find one good and wise man among many thousands : Vir bonus et sapiens qualem vix reperit unum Millibus e multis hominum consultus Apollo. 238 MENTAL ORGANIZATION PT . n If the foolishness of mankind cease to preponderate over its reason in the life of the species its future prospects may darken rather than lighten. In the socialistic community to come when property shall be equally distributed and no one desire or be permitted to possess more than another, much might no doubt be done to foster a personal ambition and enterprise to excel in social service, were it thought right, by the bestowal of stars, ribbons, crosses, garters, medals, titles, feathers and similar badges of distinction ; for it is probable that the love of distinction, if not the vanity, of human nature may even then be safely reckoned on and usefully exploited. Self-respecting persons of all classes are notably pleased to bedizen their bodies with such badges, and are the more pleased the greater the number and the higher the marks of distinction above their fellows which they are entitled to display. Such decorations would be a cheap and easy way of rewarding merit and might be usefully employed provided that they did not provoke envies, jealousies, intrigues and other selfish passions likely to disturb the general harmony of the socialistic State. Instead of an ambitious person working hard in trade or commerce to acquire wealth and spending a large sum judiciously placed to buy a peerage, or a baronetage, or a knighthood, he might be granted the title directly in honourable reward of the wealth added by him to the common store. It might doubtless be more grateful to him personally thus to get his badge of distinction without being put to the shame of holding his hands out to beg. In that case it would probably be thought right, so much being con- ceded to the sentiment of equality, that the father should not bequeath title and privilege to a son who might be vicious or criminal or imbecile. The hereditary descent of titles, privilege and property was no doubt a wise device to maintain the power of a family in a simple society, and politically useful to secure trained and capable leaders in council and in war ; CH. iii SOCIAL TRANSFORMATION 239 but it is not a necessary nor perhaps now a natural part of the order of development, and may therefore come to look like an obsolete and even hurtful survival in a more advanced society which evolves its own suitable leaders as it moves democratically onwards. Be that as it may, seeing with what persevering intrigue, pestering solicitation, servile adulation persons of all sorts and conditions (except of the working classes where con- ventionalities do not smother realities) strive and struggle for a badge of distinction which shall give them pre- cedence on entering a room or sitting down to dinner, it is hardly credible that the same motive would cease to operate in the ideal social community. Besides, reasons of mere social convenience might then necessitate some rules of precedence to prevent a number of persons from pushing and crushing into or out of a room through the same door at the same time, or, were they so polite that nobody would go first, from not going into or out of it at all, though if the room were on fire the courtesy of culture might rudely and ferociously be put off. For that purpose at least the hereditary principle performs its useful function of leadership, even though it operate sometimes to put vice, incompetence and imbecility in high place. A fit social spur of some kind would seem to be almost indispensable to ease the ascent of socialistic development, at least until the altruistic transformation of human nature is perfected and self-interest, subtle or crude, no more a fundamental motive of human conduct. That being so, the pity is that the social heaven is not unclouded. Con- stituted as human nature yet is, there is evident risk that the establishment of grades of titles might breed envies, jealousies, intrigues, strifes, conspiracies and similar dis- cordant factors incongruous with perfect harmony and orderly progress ; such commotions not then owning selfish motives which are presumed to be nearly extinct, but stirred perhaps by righteous regard to the welfare of the community in members who suspect or detect favour- itism or negligence or indifference or incompetence in 240 MENTAL ORGANIZATION FT. n the administration of affairs by a host of officials fraught with the pride and power of office in sympathetic alliance. A danger all the more possible if it once fell out that the smouldering fires of envy and jealousy, resenting an ex- traordinary favouritism, burst ablaze in heaven and caused a deplorable rebellion there. The story, though now relegated to the museum of religious myths, is still not uninstructive, for it shows how man who aspires and expects to banish all evil passions on earth was unable to expel them from the ideal heaven which he pictured to himself in the sky. Evidently he found it impossible to get outside himself and be the transformed creature in imagination which he hopes to be some day in reality. The perplexing puzzle of the matter is how the perfect citizen shall fashion the perfect State or the perfect State fashion the perfect citizen, even though the work be a mutual co-operation and support. While the socialist is ready enough to believe that his ideal State will produce the perfect citizen he does not consider adequately, or at any rate does not explain how he is to get a perfect State from imperfect citizens who necessarily determine its character, or how the method of social servitude which he advocates and would forthwith apply is calculated to im- prove and virtually regenerate the then enslaved citizen. His quarrel for the present ought plainly to be not so much with existing institutions, the existence of which after all testifies to their past value in the order of things, as with nature which, not having learnt the doctrine of equivalent personalities and the iniquity of the exploita- tion of one person by another, persists in producing in- dividual variations above and below the specific mean and instilling into every variation the impulse fully and freely to express its being ; perhaps also in less degree with the stolid human nature which does not go about designedly and systematically to mend its unthinking nature by the adoption of such wise principles of eugenics as shall pull everybody up to the same high level of body and mind and keep him there. CH. in SOCIAL TRANSFORMATION 241 But why should the socialist disquiet himself in vain concerning the working out of details which he cannot foresee, sure as he is that the principle is sound and its inspiration noble ? It may be safely trusted to effect its fit and orderly fulfilment in the happy time to come, the right feeling steadily impelling the right rational adjust- ments in spite of the fact that details of execution are apt to nullify a principle which is so abstract from realities as to enjoin the impracticable. He may certainly point to the first enunciation of the ideal principles of Christian ethics and ask whether it was then thought necessary to trouble about details of practice. It was not, it is true ; but his opponent in his turn may point out that the consequence has been that the principles have not been put into practice and that a stupendous fabric of approved pretence and systematic hypocrisy has been built up that is Christian only in name ; which is not what he wishes to happen in his society. That no one can be a true Christian and at the same time unjust to his neighbour has been an obvious truism for nineteen centuries, yet during all that time men have thought and called them- selves Christians and at the same time been habitually unjust to their neighbours. A question which troubles even some philanthropic persons is whether to repress or almost suppress individual- ism in the socialistic state might not be to repress or suppress it in good as well as in bad enterprise, good and bad being the inseparables they are in the order of things. Everybody sets a high price on himself, so high indeed that he would seldom wish really to be somebody else though he might like to be himself in somebody else's place, and is prompted thereby to fulfil himself and realize his value. If the impulse is sound when it urges him to acquire wealth to be enjoyed by himself or bequeathed as a legacy to his children, thus cementing and strengthening the family social unit and therewith the social body, is it not even better when it animates and actuates him to develop his own mental character by personal efforts to R 242 MENTAL ORGANIZATION PT . n help the weak, to raise the fallen, to comfort the afflicted, to combat generally the evils of the social system in which his lot is cast ? Will it go well with mankind when, as socialists desire, the charity-monger is as extinct as the Dodo ? Imbued with the inflamed sense of his own virtue and value, the humanitarian enthusiast is unwilling to be told and loth to believe that he shall be personally reduced to a condition in which his benevolent aspirations and philanthropic labours shall not be required, or at all events shall not involve any self-conscious, self-developing pains, being just as natural and automatic as those of the ants and the bees. Consciously to raise his individuality to a higher plane either as its present reward on earth or in hope of future reward elsewhere is his inspiring aim ; whereas the socialist would have him sink self and its glorification in quiet unself-regarding work for the good of the hive and think that a sufficient reward. To ask him thus to feel the same altruistic affection for the community at large as for the particular objects of -his egotistic benevolence seems on the face of it much like asking the religious devotee to feel the same love for an impersonal Ultimate Reality as for a personal Father in Heaven. Yet, if he ponder the matter duly, the ardour of the humanitarian need not necessarily be quenched by the contemplation of his subdual and regulation in a socialist community. If he is still inflamed with the zeal to spend himself in the service of his species, he will manifestly be stronger and better qualified for his altruistic work by applying himself to it not in separate action and with great waste of energy but as a fit factor in a wisely ordered system of organized co-operation and economized power. So doing, he will do much more good to his kind as well as obtain the best fulfilment of himself through social subordination and service in interactive relations with other lives. Sinking self in sympathy of feeling and associated work, he will raise his own value and the value of his work will save his life by losing it. That is the good lesson of self-surrender which the particular social body CH. in SOCIAL TRANSFORMATION 243 naturally instils into its individual units ; by fit compulsion or cajolery of them it provides carefully for its preservation and growth, sure that it is worth the devotion it enforces and obtains. But will the individual person always save his life by losing it ? It is a question which may sometimes perturb assurance and engender doubt. May not there be some loss of life to the individual who thus merges himself wholly in the collective life of the particular social body whatever its quality, and, as would inevitably happen, his conscience in the collective conscience ? Such an absolute self-renunciation was inculcated nearly two thousand years ago, but is still only a lofty ideal remote from realities, no nearer realization in actual practice than it was then : a splendid vision of uniform and universal goodness, but a vision only. Far from the coming of the expected kingdom of heaven on earth having hitherto been the work of meek and lowly persons who subdued themselves to the particular services of their social body, good or bad, history shows that the strong vital energy of the self-esteeming, self-asserting, arrogant, and not always attractive person who revolted against self-surrender and pushed rudely forward in defiance of established rules and conventions was needed and used to stir up the community out of a perfunctory routine of thought, feeling and conduct into which it is always liable to drift and then content to stay : the self-confident and often pugnacious disturber of its peace, sure of his righteous inspiration and divine mission, an invading and apparently very valuable vital force. If bad men even had not sometimes been of more use than good men it might have gone badly with the world that is, if the world has gone right thus far, as must be logically and loyally acknowledged even by those who find it yet seriously wrong and look for the good time to come when bad men shall no more be needed and when men, all good, shall be sunk in placid social servitude. Yet bad men are not really so entirely bad and useless for good, nor good men always so entirely good and useful 244 MENTAL ORGANIZATION PT . n as it is the custom to think and pleasing to say ; for in a mixed world of closely linked good and evil in which circumstances do so much to determine values and evil oftentimes turns out well in the issue, the bad man some- times does useful work and the good man useless or even hurtful work. Certain it is that the annals of the race are not records of the triumphs of peace and goodwill, but of the merciless conquests of rude vital force ; nor do prehistoric remains indicate that the progress of human evolution was made by moral men and means. That the course of nature has been and is a continual doing of so- called evil that good may ensue is undeniable, however disagreeable to sentiment and perplexing to thought. Things may perhaps be different if its course change and the opinion finally prevail in the human sphere that it is wrong to do evil that good may come : a principle which, though revered in the abstract, is not always regarded in practice nor anywise quite unimpeachable in theory. History might perhaps deal more truly with the facts of the past and teach more justly were it, after the manner of Machiavelli, to rule out ethical comments on the right or wrong of them from its imperfect narratives as irrelevant and limit itself strictly to a simple and purely scientific exposition of causes, conditions and consequences, so far as known. Against the operations, past or present, of the fundamental force of vital expansion by natural law it is puerile to express indignation ; stronger vital force only will repress it. Vegetable life was ordained to supply food for animal lives, and these to supply increasing value of organic matter for the consumption of higher animal life in its successive ascents, thus sparing it as it rose in height of being the labour and time of preceding preparatory processes : growth of higher life in fact by physico-chemical process through consumption of weaker life everywhere in the economy of nature from protozoon to its topmost human height. As for the humanitarian zealot burning to express his enthusiastic self and lovingly gilding his fervid self-love CH. in SOCIAL TRANSFORMATION 245 with a brilliantly virtuous halo, the socialist can look with equanimity on his disappearance from the scene, believing that it will be better for the world and the community if his self-conscious flame be subdued into a quiet glow of uncon- scious altruism, with the more assurance seeing that the value of his actually lived life is not always that which he believes and others amiably assume it to be. The sober truth is that the ardent enthusiast, whether philanthropist, zoophilist or other sort of unduly inflamed fanatic, sure though he be that righteousness is incarnate in his superior person, is commonly keenly sensitive, narrow-minded and egotistic, not quite lovely or lovable, nor always so little self-seeking and righteous personally as he persuades him- self he is and those who have not to do closely with him in worldly affairs or domestic intercourse imagine him to be : his aspirations and doings as a public performer and his conduct in his private relations proceed sometimes on different and inconsistent lines. He is all too liable to be unduly and vainly sentimental in his ejects because his self-love keenly and persistently stimulates his sentiment of self. Ecstasy of self-feeling, being a sort of mental spasm with its consequent deformity of mind and loss of sense of proportion, acts to render him unconsciously ego- istic and egotistic, void of sympathetic imagination with its due conformity of conduct in his personal relations, even positively selfish and shiftily untrustworthy sometimes in defence of his sensibilities, harsh as it seems to say it ; for his quasi-delirious rapture blinds him to the consideration that thrilling personal zeal is not a valid excuse for faults and guiles of conduct, and that a good life consists not in pleasing heroics of incontinent feeling but in the humbler and harder virtues of daily self-renunciations and prosaic duties. His passionate outcry is then the discharge of a conceit of superior sanctity, a self-righteous spiritual pride, his burning zeal the keenest self-love raised to its highest point of inflammation. 1 1 Would it be possible to cite a meaner, baser, more selfish and despicable character than Rousseau, whose sentimental enthusiasm was so signal and so- 246 MENTAL ORGANIZATION PT. n Not that he is himself aware what his real mental condition is, for the self-righteous duper of self easily learns to dupe others, the more effectually the more sincere his self-deception, and to deceive others leads by natural reaction to strengthen self-deception, the habit of practice becoming a pleasing exercise, as habits, good or bad, are prone to do. Moreover, as in self-deception the self is always present and alert, whereas in deception of others it is comparatively intermittent and occasional, his egotism is constantly aflame and justifies all means that serve his cause righteous then because he identifies it with his self-righteousness. Thereupon he cannot help thinking it perverse, almost criminal, obliquity in others not to think so highly of him as he does of himself and to feel as hotly and exclusively as he does who rigidly bars out all reflective thought. His case has become a creed, an object of faith and worship, not a doctrine to be examined and weighed rationally ; therefore those who reject it are no better than infidels, misbelieving heretics whom, had he the power, he might think it right to punish for their unbelief. For that is the propensity of a creed, notwithstanding that there always have been different and conflicting creeds, that creed after creed has come and gone in the world, that the fervid delight of a creed is no proof of its value. For the life of him, there- fore, the enthusiastic fanatic cannot see things in their just proportions and relations and set forth the truth soberly as it is ; sees only that which suits with his impassioned feeling or his mental prepossession constrains him willingly to see. Like everybody else he likes him- self, and his narrow and intense self-liking is sensible only to that which pleases and feeds its prejudice. signally indulged ? His Confessions, though they exhibit much odious and nauseous matter, omit any mention of some meanly vile events of his early career e.g. his detected calumnious forgery and consequential perjury on one occasion. They were truly evidence of an inordinate self-love and vanity actually pleased to make them because they were his. In his case genius was near akin to badness as well as madness ; for his inordinate self-esteem was plainly afflicted with a mania of persecution. CH. HI SOCIAL TRANSFORMATION 247 Withal there is nothing to wonder at. The result is a simple physical necessity when every current of thought from outside the locally strained tracts or area of thought in his brain and from outside himself in the brains of others is inhibited by the ecstasy or standing out of its dissociated and quasi-spasmodic activity. That disunion too is the probable physiological substratum of the ecstasy, invaluable or valueless, into which the mystics of different religions designedly and persistently transport so much of their minds as they use for the purpose when they suspend their life of relation and lose themselves in the mist of feeling which they translate into mystical intuition ; as it is also in less degree physiologically of the hypnotic suggestion and the auto-suggestion by which an exclusive attention to and exercise of special tracts of thought and feeling strain them to a special, dispro- portionate, almost exclusive function ; yea, in still greater degree pathologically of the monomaniac's fixed delusion when the dissociated or functionally dislocated area or tract has become structurally fixed. The mischief of it is that such an abnormal dislocation of a special part of the normal mental confederation is no more wholesome, no more good for the whole, than an ordinary bodily disloca- tion, is likewise made easy by repetition, and may at last become a fixed deformity. In no case is the delirious rapture of the dissociated exercise certain proof of value that is, unless mental spasm or convulsion be some- thing divine, as bodily convulsion was once thought to be. Although epilepsy, catalepsy, nympholepsy, demonolepsy are not now believed to have anything specially divine in them, as once they were, but are relegated to the patho- logical domain, the mystical transport of a theolepsy in fitly sensitive minds ' is believed by many intelligent persons to mark a direct spiritual communion and even sometimes verbal communication with the divine, 1 be the 1 St. Theresa, that eminent and very capable administratrix, called it "a complete absorption of the soul in God," and " it was plain enough what that union was two distinct things becoming one." At her highest transport or flight of the spirit voices and visions occurred in which the Will of God was 248 MENTAL ORGANIZATION PT . n underlying physical condition what it may. That is to translate mystical feeling into positive knowledge by virtue of a postulated intuition which, after all, is purely personal, worth as much or little as the mind which enter- tains it, not amenable to any means of verification ; its absolute certitude possibly no less illusory than the equally strong or stronger certitude of the monomaniac who converts his exclusive subjective feeling into objective form. Instructive in this connection are the stories of sudden religious conversions related by some of those who have undergone the process. After deep and prolonged de- jection of a mind brooding fearfully on the possibility or certitude of eternal damnation the now faded or nearly extinct notion of which has been such a torturing dread to many anxious minds in the past much persistent and tormenting introspection, agonizing prayers for an absolute conviction of salvation, transient gleams of hope alter- nating with gloomy relapses into despair, the sufferer feels vividly on a sudden " a glow of heat in the brain," or as if " something broke within him," a sort of " snap in the brain," as he sometimes describes it, and is instantly transported into the rapturous assurance of a spiritual conversion and safety ; not otherwise than as in the patho- logical domain profound melancholic depression sometimes changes suddenly into the exultant excitement of acute mania. By prolonged strain of specially exercised tracts of thought and feeling, a persistent attention implying a continued tension of them, he has so intensified their activity that they break loose from the inhibitions of the con- catenated tracts of the mental confederation and thereafter revealed to her. She, however, proved that mystical strains of temporarily dissociated tracts of thought and feeling even when objectified as voices are compatible with sound judgment and practical sense in contact and deal- ings with the realities of ordinary life. Her mystical self in hours of ecstasy she kept strictly apart from her practical self in daily work, and had little patience with the hysterical nuns who did not exert similar control and exhibit similar good sense. She evidently realized too that the divine union was a union with a personal God, and would have repudiated the notion of an impersonal God as the meaningless contradiction in terms which it is. CH. in SOCIAL TRANSFORMATION 249 function autonomously and almost independently. Then an extraordinary delight, as in acute mania sometimes, accompanies the delirious ecstasy and pours itself forth perhaps in an eloquent rhapsody of self-expression. Some- times also, it is true, in the more worthy part of a changed conduct of life in which he absorbs all his thought, energy and self-esteem : a righteous life which justifies his self-righteousness. The natural consequence, however, of such breach of mental unity is that although he is sincere in his conviction of a spiritual transformation so sure of its sanctity that he is sometimes moved to accost a stranger by his side and urge him to think of his mortal state and the need to be saved immortally he is apt to lose sense of sane proportion in his judgment of himself and others, to become even arrogant and aggressive in spiritual pride and conceit of humility, to fail in practice to be the perfect Christian he fain would be and flatters himself he is. When all is said, his ecstatic belief is at best a personal beatification acquired by self- regarding attention to his own immortal welfare and of no real social value, if not somewhat anti-social ; although founded on the testimony of the particular spirit, that spirit is purely egoistic, oftentimes egotistic, maybe too of the poorest equality. Is this to take a low material view of a high spiritual process and basely to degrade it ? Why so ? If it has the transcendent illumination ascribed to it in every case the value remains even when the physical basis of its manifestation is demonstrated. As all mental function in the natural world confessedly requires the brain as the material instrument of its ecstasies, these may, nay must, need the extraordinary or abnormal cerebral pro- cesses as the proper material instruments of their im- material flights : mind and matter act independently in mysterious parallel union or exact concert of function there as elsewhere. There is, moreover, no good reason to declare such exaltation of matter, the wondrous sub- tilties and ultimate incomprehensibility of which are now 250 MENTAL ORGANIZATION PT. n being discovered, to be a degradation of mind, nor for mind in its ecstatic flights to wish to sever itself absolutely from matter as something not sufficiently divine. The right question to be frankly faced at the outset and definitely answered is whether the mystic really possesses the special sense which puts him or her then into com- munication with a hidden world. Of that a personal vouch is not proof. An important fact of which the enthusiast of every kind, being his own self-valuer and joying in his zeal, .does not take any account is that, possessed by an absolutely righteous conviction, as he claims, he ignores or is blind to the qualities of self which modify, detract from, perhaps quite annul the value of his inspiration. Yet the fool is not made wise, nor the liar truthful, nor the double-dealer honest, nor the arrogant humble, nor the lecher chaste by being a fanatic. His very fault or vice of character may insidiously aggravate his special fanaticism and render it the more inconsiderate and unscrupulous ; all the more since he is pretty sure all unconsciously to convince him- self that the sanctity of his cause extenuates or excuses or compensates the indulgence of his vice. That is the reason why hypocrisy thrives luxuriantly and uncon- sciously under the sacred canopy of religion ; impracticable principles spiritually held necessitate inconsistent worldly practice and consistent hypocrisy. The poor character, it is true, may have a good cause, but the goodness of the cause nowise guarantees his valuation of it and himself, still less justifies the intem- perate and little scrupulous means by which he some- times prosecutes it. The community willing to think enthusiasm evidence of virtue and in any case admiring his devotion, can overlook or excuse his failings, as he with sublime unconsciousness or indifference does himself. Just as the hypothesis in scientific enquiry, even though it turn out to be erroneous, is often of value as a useful standing- place for a time useful, indeed, to provoke the fruitful enquiries and reflections which sometimes CH. m SOCIAL TRANSFORMATION 251 overthrow it so the fanatic's work may be of more or less value ; for in any case it gives a salutary shock to routine of thought and stirs up counteracting forces by which in the upshot a resultant composition of forces ensues and the proper advance is made. Besides, the enthusiasm of feeling may after all have some deep value ; for the logic of feeling clothing itself in forms of imagination is prior to and deeper in human nature and progress than the logic of reason which has to make its suitable adjustments : insane delusions and conduct even adjustments to insane feeling. Truths of reason, so far from being fixed constants always, are often the fit steps in the becoming of truth, its changing phases the cause of the different aspects which it presents and its unchanging essence at the bottom of so deep a well that it cannot be laid hold of. Moreover, though the truth be the same, it must always be differently con- ceived by persons who are all constitutionally different. Considering the matter from a psychological point of view it may be doubted whether the burning philan- thropist, if subdued in his social community to subordinate all desire for the acquisition of personal distinction, would work with the same personal zeal as one of an undis- tinguished multitude, serving it without other reward than the consciousness that he was its good and faithful servant. 1 But why doubt, it may be asked ? May not that come to pass some day in the perfected social organization which obtains naturally every day in a 1 Philanthropists may be broadly divided into two classes between which there are of course intermediates : the self-esteeming, self-righteous, pushing, self-advertising person who takes himself and his doings very seriously and rejoices to proclaim his zeal and devotion, always tempted to exaggerate and sometimes invent evils in order by glaring colouring to excite sensation, inflame his imagination and keep himself in vogue as a popular figure ; on the other hand, the sober, sensible, thoughtfully practical and quietly working philanthropist who after a long experience of hard work among men and evils and close personal knowledge of them is pretty sure to feel much disillusioned, perhaps to confess sadly that the only effective help is to those who help themselves and therefore seldom need help, help to those who will not only confirming them in their helplessness and dependence. Unthinking philanthropism is more hurtful than useful in the long run to any community. 252 MENTAL ORGANIZATION PT. n sound bodily organization in which multitudes of cells, diverse in form and function liver -cells, spleen -cells, kidney-cells, nerve-cells serve the whole faithfully in due subordination and concert while keeping their several characters and performing their individual functions ? Why not a similar unison and unity of life in the one organization as in the other ? A necessary condition of social harmony and well- being in that case will obviously be that the various units shall be content to perform their diverse functions well in their different stations of life, not aspiring or pretending to other work than that which they are fitted and set to do by some superior authority, nor demanding higher wages than the work is worth that is, if every sort of work is not to have the same value and to be entitled to the same wage. Everybody ought to know his proper value and scrupulously abide by it, or, like a devout Jesuit in his well-organized Society, yield unquestioning obedience to a sort of priesthood of moral and intellectual superiors who shall think for him and direct his conduct. Things might go badly otherwise, as they would do in a bodily organism if the kidney-cells, for example, claimed to do the work of the brain-cell, rebelling against its inferior station and function, or at least to receive the same nourishment. Although the true Christian spirit, hitherto so grievously thwarted, be socialistic, will it when it prevails at last be thought right that the Archbishop or my Lord Bishop if the Christian be then permitted to call himself or any one Lord should receive no higher salary than the humblest curate in his diocese ? Yet what becomes of the sacred principle of the equivalence of persons and of the iniquity of any exploitation of one person by another if one has to do less agreeable work than another, even if he receive no lower wages for it, or if he is compelled to obey the orders of a superior authority which does the thinking and directing and thus exploits him ? Against exploita- tion by the individual he can always make some sort of CH. m SOCIAL TRANSFORMATION 253 fight ; he will be powerless against exploitation by the community. Even the ideal social community will con- fessedly need a government of some kind, evolved or elected somehow, which ought evidently to be government by the wise and subjection of the unwise so long as all are not equally wise and efficient. The probability, well- nigh a certainty, is that for a long time to come, if not to the end of time, there will be persons who are fit only to do comparatively menial work and must be so employed or not employed at all. For the present, in view of the long process of human transformation and the slow process of forming sound individual characters which are the indispensable basis of all true progress and its institutions, the harmony of a. stable social organization would seem more likely to be achieved by a gradual constructive growth from the root of the past such as appears to be slowly and irregularly proceeding in civilized countries than by an abrupt imposition of a rigid social system which, being a breach with the past, might cause serious and irreparable damage to a mature national organization. Sound social, economic and political developments seem not any more than bodily developments to proceed purposely in pur- suance of pre-conceived theories but to make their own growth, the theories being framed afterwards as explicit formulas of the implicit process. A formidable task in truth it might be for mankind and the individual if compelled to formulate a theory of life before living it. It is not of course safe in any case to use conclusions drawn from the bodily organism to interpret the processes of a social organization which by virtue of its being on a higher plane necessarily calls for a different order of conceptions. A rise of thought must accompany the step upwards from biology to sociology. All that can be rightly said is that granting the necessity of new and fitter notions a study of the bodily organization may, by likening things unknown to things known, help to suggest conceptions of the higher laws and processes. 254 MENTAL ORGANIZATION PT . n Analogies, metaphors and hypotheses have their temporary value even when superseded in due course by more exact and truer representations ; for in the end all knowledge is symbolic denotation of organized mental products re- presenting for the time so much as is known of the ultimate unknowable. Man does not exist for the ridicu- lous purpose of comprehending the universe or even apprehending the ultimate reality as he pines and almost believes he is meant to do, while at the same time sentimentally and sillily bewailing his impotence, but for the modest purpose of incorporating so much of external nature into his mental structure as shall serve its growth ; nature not existing for him but he existing for nature, to be conquered in the end by it when he has done his utmost in conquering it. In this process of social growth it is obvious that a superior order of conceptions cannot truly be formed without a knowledge and utilization of the lower biological knowledge. Therefore it is that mental evolution requires for its adequate interpretation a study of the vital root from which it sprang, and that the lack of such positive study has been the principal cause of barren metaphysical speculations and disquisitions in which the same un- meaning questions are asked and answered in no less unmeaning ways by each newcomer : speculation ever moving but always in a circle. Instead of emptying his mind of all prejudice, observing the facts sincerely and directly, and drawing clear and distinct ideas from them, the enquirer comes to his task with a mind pre- occupied by fixed metaphysical prejudices and thereupon sets forth in wearisome iteration what his predecessors have taught and said, commenting on and criticizing their expatiations, using the same prejudging phraseology in the same beaten tracks. Thus he bars his mind from vital contact with realities, persuading and pleasing him- self that he has made an advance when he has given a new name or new interpretation to an old speculation. So exclusively occupied is he with thinking on thinking CH. in SOCIAL TRANSFORMATION 255 that he neglects to think on things ; for which reason as things give substance to thought his thinking is then necessarily unsubstantial. Quite otherwise is it with every natural science ; for in that case the student can discover how it began in fables and fancies, trace how these were discarded gradually, fictitious entities one after another thereafter got rid of, erroneous hypotheses in due course abandoned, and thus follow its progressive development to its present stable and fruitful state. Why, then, does not the metaphysician vouchsafe to descend from his lofty heights to plant his feet on the solid grounds of realities and thence step by step to mount in safe ascent? A full and exact study of bodily structure and function before he rises to his abstract syntheses would be a right addition to his reasoning or reckoning (which all reasoning fundamentally is), in no case a dis- advantage, and might be unexpectedly instructive and gratifying. But the study should be thorough and com- plete, not limited to a mere general notion of what the body is and does ; for a superficial acquaintance with its physiology leads only to the misuse of inadequate knowledge to support pre-conceived theory and thus to chain the living to the dead. CHAPTER IV EDUCATION AND SOCIALIZATION Progressive socialization and human transformation. Ideals and actualities. Stored knowledge and improved environment. Social through in- dividual service.- -A right method of education. Labour and sorrow the portion of man. Supernatural sanction in education. The domina- tion of social sanction. Human Calibans. Good mental and physical nature. Heredity and environment. Three plain conclusions. Humanitarian optimism. Diverse types of perfecting humanity. Moral 'and material progress. Need of new laws against new crimes. Barbarity of wars and admiration of victors. Maleficent and beneficent inventions. Moral virtues of the warriors and wars. A peaceable time to come. THE student of social advances and relapses is faced by the question whether the general improvement of indi- viduals, which is essential to a perfecting society, can be reasonably expected. If it can, then the perfect society shall come into being, no matter how far off the splendid day may be, seeing that if there is not so much time left for future as has been spent in past evolution there is a fair prospect of quicker progress in shorter time. Any- how it seems prudent not to think of ten thousand but of thousands on thousands years. How venture to limit the height to which the vital flux of nature through man may rise in that time ? Between the creature who is now and the transforming being who is to be the travail, it is true, must be long and laborious, more so perhaps than that between the primitive and the present man, yet not a transformation after all so great as that between the cater- pillar and the butterfly ; this last so amazing a meta- morphosis that, did it not occur visibly, no one would 256 CH. iv EDUCATION & SOCIALIZATION 257 dream it ever would occur. On the other hand, if the vision of ideal perfection be not realizable, the human Utopia so persistently craved will turn out to be the supreme illusion of optimism. Yet it will then have done its useful work, like other vanished illusions and fictions of the human drama. A golden age man will have at some period of his pilgrimage on earth ; and although knowledge of his origin and development has done away with the legend of a past golden age, he looks fondly forward to its future coming when he has brought all the appliances of eugenics, education, nurture and environment to bear intelligently and systematically on the species. By means of these powerful agencies, representing the accumulated wisdom of the race now suitably stored and classified for use, he expects not only to develop the exist- ing potentialities of human nature and to structuralize them in fit mental organization but also to add to its innate potentialities indefinitely. Is it probable then that the effects of good nourishment, sane and elevating surroundings and a perfect system of education will eventually raise human offspring to a perfect intellectual and moral height ? Nurture being all that it should be, will nature be gradually mended and a complete survival of the fit ensue because everybody shall be completely fit to survive ? A large hope truly of what shall be, having regard to that which has been and still is ; a hope too grounded mainly on the in- tuitive assurance that yearning is destined to be gratified, aspiration to be achievement, the ideal to be reality man in fact to transcend his present self while still a human self. Within historical time it cannot be said that there is convincing evidence of the mental growth which has taken place in the prehistoric past. No individual mind comes into the world endowed with superior mental capacity to that of Isaiah in prophetic inspiration, of Plato, Aristotle and their predecessors in philosophy, of Thucydides in history, of Phidias in sculpture, of Demosthenes in s 258 MENTAL ORGANIZATION PT. n eloquence, of Homer and Aeschylus in poetry ; nor is it credible that these superior minds sprang into abrupt being without natural predecessors whose names are sunk in oblivion. 1 The good fortune of modern mind is to come into easy possession of a prodigious store of organ- ized knowledge which they never dreamed of ; by virtue of such mental inheritance in a rightly ordered system of advancing socialization wherein everybody is well in- structed and has equal chances of mental growth a store of excellently organized material may be obtained from which aspiring variations shall spring up abundantly and be everywhere welcomed and fostered. In the well-planted and well-ordered forest every tree shall refrain tenderly from the least encroachment on the light and space .required by its neighbours ; or if some encroachment be obligatory where there are many trees on a limited space of ground, the limitations shall be so nicely calculated and contrived that no tree is in the least favoured but every tree have its proper chance of growth. As for the innumerable unneeded seeds and shoots prolifically produced by a nature which is said to do nothing in vain, they may rightly be stifled before they can challenge attention and protection. In no case shall there be a tree stunted for want of nourishment and space, no underscrub, no sacrifice of the weak for the benefit of the strong, even though one tree naturally wants more room and food than another, organically strives for them, expands fully by obtaining them, is so far robbed of life when it does not obtain them ; the forest 1 It is noteworthy that Confucius, Buddha, Zoroaster, Socrates, Plato, Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides were all alive in the fifth century B.C. Is any century to come likely to be distinguished by a more brilliant con- stellation of intellects ? Two or three thousand years, however, are but a short period in the life of mankind. It is now scientifically taught that some early human beings of whom vestiges have been discovered had brains not smaller on the average than those of modern Europeans, while some primitive people in the Stone Age the giant race of Cromagnards, famous for their art actually excelled them in the volume of their brain-cavities. After all, the men who discovered fire and its uses and learnt how to plant wheat and to make bread or its equivalent were capable of sound and solid thought, and still have immortal life in the life of mankind. CH. iv EDUCATION & SOCIALIZATION 259 may then gain in uniformity though it may lose in variety, vigour and grandeur. Happily for the social organization it is not a forest and its units are not trees ; on the contrary, by co-opera- tive association and the inheritance of the organized accumulations of past labours mankind gain immensely more than they lose by individual self-surrender. While the relations of trees in a forest is a simple struggle of the single tree to do the best for itself, a fight of individual against individual, each tree losing nor gaining by its neighbour's success, the relations of the members of a human society are a complex affair of reciprocal vital relations, interfused feelings, happy consents, regulated rivalries and combined achievements in the co-operative formation of a corporate life. By the perfecting of such an organiza- tion a social body is to be formed at last in which individual egoism shall be subdued to the exact altruistic point requisite to let all persons live and thrive, everybody in it being then naturally disposed to love and serve his neighbour or at all events to refrain from hurting or hating him. There shall in fact then be not only a con- tinued assimilation of external physical nature by successive conquests of it but also an assimilation of the socialized human nature by willing subjection of self to its service, and therewith in the fullness of time the international humanization of the race ; which is an ever-springing hope. To breathe a good social atmosphere is insensibly to live and grow by it, man being, as Aristotle called him, " a social animal " who naturally and necessarily therefore likes to be thought well of, dislikes to be thought ill of by his kind, and is moved thereby to develop the talents and virtues which it esteems. It is in principle the difference between the bee and the tree, although it is neither desired nor expected that the result shall be stagnation in the human as in the apian hive ; for a fixed socialization in the particular case might plainly be fatal to progress, as it was apparently in China. Not that such an inglorious issue is for a moment feared in the 260 MENTAL ORGANIZATION PT. n general human sphere ; for the social perfecting process in which the individual is merged as means is the presumably ordained aim and consummation of things created : a regular succession of ends to be attained until the goal of them all is an end in itself. Without such perfect end, it is asked, what would be the value of all human aspirations and strivings ? Would not human life on earth be meaningless ? If education is to do at last the wonder-working work which it is expected to do to moralize and perfect the race, certain it is that it ought to be instruction not of intellect only or mainly but of character. Not instruction acutely to think only but also to feel and do rightly ; for if moral qualities are lacking the person will not benefit himself nor others by the knowledge imparted to him ; which in that case might serve only to make him the cleverer knave, as it notably does now with the fraudulent company -monger and the conspiring con- federates whom he craftily entices to join in, accredit and profit by his nefarious avarice. And in no case, it cannot be too much emphasized, can moral qualities be implanted by mere precept and praise of them. It is doubtful indeed whether all the trite moral platitudes lauded and inculcated time out of mind have ever influenced seriously a single life, even the life of him who eloquently expounded them. To be effective in the conduct of life morality must be rooted in the individual nature by inheritance and inclination, and fostered by right discipline and habitual practice from childhood onwards, so that the habit becomes a second nature and its exercise natural and unconscious, its breach a shock and a remorse. Thus only by regular discipline in well-doing are the impulses to ill -doing immanent in the child's nature restrained and the principles of good conduct organized in structure : for children are nowise the pure innocents which it is pleasing to imagine or represent them. A child were better unborn than untaught, as Plato some- where says, and better untaught perhaps than taught CH. iv EDUCATION & SOCIALIZATION 261 badly. So far from being mental instruction the so-called education which thrusts unassimilable matter into the young mind is hurtful, if not destructive, to its weak and tender shoots of growth, unless most of it is not soon thrust out and happily forgotten. True mental instruction, being the gradual organization of fit mental structure, is done only by suiting good action to good words. Though man be instinctively a " social animal," he needs to be made explicitly so by persistent and patient training. The parental fondness which would give children less work, more play, less self-renunciation, more self- indulgence, a more easy life in a higher social station, readily degenerates into parental folly. It is to set before them a false ideal and to teach them to look outside themselves to obtain from circumstances the measure of happiness which they can gain only by honest labour and wise training of their own minds ; to make them the while conventional beings without adding anything to their happiness, yet with positive loss to their human value in a social system which needs different labourers in different stations and cannot well subsist if everybody is taught that his chief aim ought to be to rise to a higher and easier social position. 1 Although man is not now, even by theologians, thought to be the miserable sinner who fell from a state of purity and felicity, but an aspiring being who strives to improve his nature and purge it of its impurities, certain it is that he has risen and can only continue to rise through the sufferings, self-denials, pains and toils which that useful fable de- clared to be necessary for his moral redemption. Having given up the opinion of a sinful fall from bliss, it is absurd to nurse the pleasing fancy that he will gain a sinless happiness by abrogation of . the toil, suffering, sorrow and sin which have been his lot on earth, and 1 That is apparently the aspiration which the modern educationist is bent on instilling into every Board schoolboy and schoolgirl. He cannot conceive it possible that ever again a ploughman can become a Burns, a tinker a Bunyan, a railsplitter a Lincoln, an actor a Shakespeare or anything nearly like them. Hypnotized by the word education he cannot think of the thing. 262 MENTAL ORGANIZATION PT. n utterly unwarrantable to bask in the monstrous assump- tion that the final purpose of the universe is to make him rich and happy. The right to be happy on earth has not yet been granted to mortals ; it might well be the worst gift which Heaven could bestow on them. Hitherto supernatural sanction has been found neces- sary and authoritatively used as a right means of educating men to obey the laws and do right. Great legislators have always got more credit for and willing obedience to their decrees by feigning or fancying to receive them from a supernatural source Numa from the nymph Egeria, Moses from a divine voice on Mount Horeb, Mahomet from the angel Gabriel, and others from other supernatural sources ; for in all times and in all places nothing has been so efficacious as superstition to govern the people. By coercing antisocial impulses into social channels each superstition while it lasted was a potent and useful fiction to subdue them to the laws, rules and customs of the particular society which it was desired to uphold ; for which reason a natural fear is that the needful moral restraints and purifications of the animal nature will not be effected unless, as heretofore, they have the sanction of a supernatural power exterior and superior to humanity. Man must, it is supposed, in the future as in the past be awed or cajoled or coerced into right social conduct ; such supernatural authority all the more neces- sary now that Heaven and Hell are not the vivid realities of imagination which once they were, the former being volatilized into a vague luminous haze somewhere, the latter lost in a blackness of darkness nowhere. Yet if there be no supernatural reward for good conduct and no supernatural punishment for bad conduct, why insist on the necessity or value of a supernatural authority in natural processes ? Besides, it is obvious that education in a creed of the supernatural cannot well be efficacious so long as there are different creeds and the contending sects of the same creed, each sure and proud of its superior sanctity, cannot agree what the common creed CH. iv EDUCATION & SOCIALIZATION 263 is but execrate and excommunicate one another. A com- munion of Christians distraught by intestine jealousies and rivalries kept apart even sometimes by prohibition of inter-marriages is scarce an edifying exhibition either of the value of supernatural authority in education or of the supernatural value of the creed professed by the divergent sectaries. 1 Leaving these rival sects, not yet happily " bound each to each in natural piety," to their present demonstrations of religious disunity and brotherly rivalry and looking at the facts frankly without prejudice, the ruin of morality from the abandonment of a supernatural sanction does not seem to be the formidable danger which is timidly apprehended. A right understanding of the dominating and well-nigh irresistible operation of the social organiza- tion on persons who are a vital part of it might dispel ill-grounded fears. Whatever the customary religion or morality of a social body, it will not lack authoritative social sanction. In the rigid system of Indian caste, as it prevails now that its original useful spirit has been corrupted and petrified into dead formulas, the individual is notoriously quite impotent to rebel ; if he did so no one would consort with him, no one would do anything for him, he would be shunned as a social leper, refused a refuge in any other caste, banned as an outcast, literally excommunicated. Such is the inexorable tyranny of a 1 The contending sects, it is true, sometimes deplore their quarrels which give occasion to unbelievers to smile or sneer, and blame themselves accord- ingly, although their lamentations do not issue in any notable effect on their conduct. The exhibitions of their envies and jealousies prove how much more deeply grounded in reality these are than their conventional professions of brotherly love : by their works only they are truly known. As each sect plumes itself on the superior value of its particular doctrine and on the moral superiority of its members as upholders of it, and as each individual conscience, whatever its value except the convicted criminal's and the certified lunatic's is nowadays entitled to its privileged sanctity and socially disruptive work, a disagreeing or conflicting doctrine is conscientiously rejected. Until it is decided and defined what the common creed is, whether that which the Roman Catholic Church scrupulously preserves or that of a developing Christianity, it is inevitable that the religion which ought to unite will continue to disunite : between orthodox Churches too the orthodox Roman Catholic to excommunicate the orthodox Greek Church. 264 MENTAL ORGANIZATION n. n set social environment where it is not moral. Will it not then be equally cogent when it is moral, assuming that it is moral when it is all - potent ? A perfect moral environment might safely be trusted to render noncon- formity almost impossible ; the individual unit born and nurtured in it, his nature the organized structure of it, would need no other exterior and superior authority to make him conform, for he would be deprived of the will as well as the power to dissent. Is it not conceivable then that a sound system of scientific education based on a clear and distinct recogni- tion of the nature of a social organization and on the instruction of every member in his duties, obligations and interests as a vital part of it might do more to make men good citizens by its positive methods than is now done by the inculcation of dogmas of supernatural origin which for the most part have lost their vitality, are openly rejected by many persons, silently ignored by many more who shrink from an open expression of doubt or disbelief, accepted with much mental reservation by those who profess to believe? 1 Although the Positivist entertains no doubt of the sufficiency of a purely social motive, or at any rate of an adoration of the Great Being of Humanity, the theologian who reflects on that which beliefs in the supernatural have done to promote past human develop- ment above all on the tremendous influence which the belief in a day of judgment to pronounce the doom of eternal suffering for ill-doing and the reward of immortal happiness for well-doing has had on the constitution of Christendom cannot choose but shrink from any sudden removal of the supernatural supports, and fearfully insist on their maintenance in a system of education. To him it seems incredible that humanity, notwithstanding its 1 The Bishop of Oxford has recently protested earnestly against the common opinion that the clergy are compelled to sign the Thirty-nine Articles. They are required only to give a general verbal assent to their doctrines, he says, reserving to themselves the right to believe or half believe so much as they like of the positive and specific statements. Might it not be more wholesome mentally both to the examiner and the subscriber in that case not to exact from him nor for him to give even a verbal assent? CH. iv EDUCATION & SOCIALIZATION 265 high estimate of its value and destiny, shall continue to advance in development without any higher faith than faith in itself, how excellent soever its system of per- fecting education. The sanguine believer in the perfecting effects of education is undoubtedly confronted with serious diffi- culties when he comes to deal with hard facts. Germinal compositions in breeding sometimes go lamentably wrong in their secret recesses. The day is yet to come, if it ever come, when no more idiots or otherwise mentally deficient persons shall be born ; when all the positive faults of mental structure, visible and invisible, between idiocy and normal intelligence, which are the physical basis of gradational differences of moral and intellectual capacities, shall no more oppose insuperable hindrances to benign nurture and training. For the present it must be frankly owned that the best nurture in the world cannot make equal those whose natures are unequal. There are many Calibans on whose nature " nurture will not stick," all pains taken to mend them be lost ; who will be a lasting burden to the community which it increases by trying to humanize them. Yet so high is human self- valuation that it demands the benevolent expenditure of sympathy, care and money on so noble a creature in its most defective shape, helpless impotence, and uncleanly habits. Some benevolent persons, it is true, who have con- ducted the appropriate experiments, assert that decent citizens can be made of the children of degraded parents living in squalid surroundings if only the young creatures be caught soon enough and trained aright, although others who have made similar experiments in the same social medium are not equally confident. An important fact liable to be overlooked is that all persons living in poverty and squalor are neither degraded nor degenerate, some possessing a solid fund of sterling sense, a silent stoicism, a worthy habit of self-help and mutual help, and keeping up a right standard of conduct in adverse 266 MENTAL ORGANIZATION PT . n surroundings whereby they are strengthened in character and well qualified to breed healthy mental offspring ; more so probably than many weedy creatures in higher social stations who spend their mental vitality in sustain- ing their conventions. Good mental and physical heritage is nowise the privilege of superior social station, as often ignorantly and arrogantly assumed ; for a sound animal nature and a life of contact with realities constitute a better material for breeding than that supplied by artifici- ally moulded beings who live empty lives of ease, affecta- tion and self-indulgence divorced from stern realities. It would not be in the least likely to strengthen the health and stability of a nation to make the former like the latter, even if the resemblance were thought to raise them a step higher in civilization. As a matter of fact, the upper layers of society are now only beneficially invigorated by the incursions of the lower layers, a progressive socialization being thus promoted by the breaking down of classes and the spread of social equalization ; which need not foolishly mean that no one shall be content to be a labourer. In view of the notable pliability and strong imitative propensity of young life, it is pretty certain that some children not happily born who are allowed to degenerate in their bad surroundings might be saved by early trans- plantation of their plastic natures into a more whole- some physical and mental environment and fit training systematically applied. To this opinion assent may be given without assuming that hereditary qualities and propensities, although modifiable in the formation of character, can be eradicated by the best-designed nurture and environment. Such propensities work with silent certainty in the depth of character and are apt to burst forth openly and unexpectedly when the critical tempta- tion presents itself; as in the instructive fable of the cat which, transformed into a Princess, showed its real nature when a mouse ran across the table. No nurture and training can avail to transform radically different human CH. iv EDUCATION & SOCIALIZATION 267 natures any more than the notably different colours and characters in a litter either of kittens or of puppies. The curious observer who, inspecting his features in a looking- glass, is surprised to discover occasional striking glimpses of one or another of the traits of his progenitors or their collaterals, might, were he to recollect and reflect, discover similar revivals of their qualities in his character and conduct and blame or bless accordingly ; nay more, might perhaps, if fanciful enough, conclude that he himself was fated from all eternity to be what he is and for that reason neither overblame nor overpraise himself. He may at least feel pretty sure that he is living his forefathers essentially over again, though necessarily with different surface responses in his different circumstances, and furthermore suspect that the vicious or virtuous ancestral quality, imbued as silent memory in his nature, may leap to light on the occasion of its fit stimulus. An exact study of the characters and conduct of relations would always be useful to teach self-knowledge, more so perhaps than the acutest introspection can do : to know himself in others like him be the true way to know himself. It is practically assumed that although the physical organism ejects, or sequestrates, or otherwise tries to cancel the bad cell which cannot do its proper work, or, not ejecting or neutralizing it, is seriously or even fatally hurt sometimes by its alien proliferations, the social body shall suffer no ill effects from the pernicious presence of asocial and antisocial units which, so far from rejecting, it embraces. Yet the obvious conclusions of observation and reflection are first, that persons are born whose natures never can be so much improved by nurture and culture as to make them good citizens ; secondly, that the right aim is so to qualify and strengthen the stock from which good and bad elements proceed as to increase the good and eliminate the bad products to prevent the propagation of unsound and promote the propagation of sound stock ; thirdly, that defective and pernicious persons ought not, even under guise of sacred conscience, to be 268 MENTAL ORGANIZATION PT . n permitted either to injure society by their presence and antisocial conduct in it or to weaken the stock by propaga- tion of unsound qualities. " He comes of a bad stock " is a shrewd saying, summing up common observation, which was once and is still perhaps used to explain and in a measure excuse the vicious doings of an antisocial person in a country village where the people really know a good deal of one another. It is of course justly said that conclusions drawn from the physical organism are not rightly applicable to the social organism which manifests its superior nature by the very fact that it absorbs all its weak and defective members into its body. Universal humanitarianism being the purpose of natural development through man, it may be safely trusted to work out successfully the details of its eventual accomplishment. A noble faith in the pro- gress of humanity to perfection is assumed to justify that trust, an ignoble pessimism alone to hazard or harbour a doubt. The present duty of mankind therefore is to proceed with quiet patience, untiring hope and steady advance step by step in the pursuit of its realization, not troubling about means which human understanding can- not yet foresee but it is the beneficent purpose of the universal plan to provide in proper season. Why disquiet themselves about intellectual foresight when instinctive forefeeling yields infallible assurance of a benevolent design ? Man, pleased and proud to think himself the present crown and future consummation of nature, is sure of his divine communion with the supernatural, doubts not that he shall be nobly perfected, discovers proof thereof in his intuitive assurance and the course of its gradual accomplishment in his progressive socialization. 1 Meanwhile, the pity is in the present imperfect state of things that the nations of the earth are not agreed as to what is the best type of a perfecting humanity ; they there- 1 "The communion of the soul with God is an absolutely certain fact of experience which needs no philosophic argument and no historical proof." Speculum Animae, W. R. Inge, D.D. CH. iv EDUCATION & SOCIALIZATION 269 fore instruct, train and construct their units differently. For the most part each nation is by hereditary instinct of its nature and custom of culture so self-satisfied, so self- sufficient, so self-admiring, so proud of its characteristic qualities and so sure of the value of its superior type as to look down with some contempt or compassion on other national types. The Englishman glorifies his special type and can give his conduct no more flattering praise than to call it truly English, the Frenchman likewise to prize his culture and conduct as specially French, the German to laud his brutal culture and conduct as superiorly German, each bragging vulgarly of his national qualities in a way which any single person would be ashamed to do of his individual qualities in any decent society. So far from being thought offensive, a national conceit of superiority is accounted a patriotic virtue to be sedulously taught and cultivated side by side with the profession of a religious creed which, to say the least, does not sanction nor sanctify it. A brotherhood of mankind in the abstract, it is true, but away with the practice of it in reality ! So little sometimes is a negro or other coloured person a brother in Christ that he is liable to be shot offhand as a beast, or burnt alive at the stake without compunction, and that without provoking unseemly comment. It might be no unprofitable task were each vaunting civilization, leaving off its self-glorification and self- idolization, candidly to reflect on its inconsistent beliefs, its organized hypocrisies and conventional shams, and sincerely to enquire into the soundness and safeness of its own civilized foundations which, to be safe and sound, must at last be sunk in realities. Looking deeply and closely into what present civilization really is beneath its surface and show, is it reasonable to think that all the vanished civilizations of Egypt, India and other places were much inferior morally, or perhaps even so grossly material and brutal ? or that the civilization of China may not outlive, as it forestalled, that of Christendom ? Although it is hardly possible to overrate the growing 270 MENTAL ORGANIZATION PT . n intellectual and material wealth of the present day, when the pursuit of wealth and comfort is the inculcated aim and practice, or to foresee the probable advances of modern science, it is still easy and not uncommon to overrate its moral progress. A great achievement it undeniably is to travel on the ground faster than sixty miles an hour and to fly as fast as a hundred miles an hour, but the advance does not necessarily imply a corresponding advance in moral feeling and conduct. The fundamental principles of morality have been the same in all known civilizations ; there could have been no such civilizations had they not been evolved in them. Are they now better and more safely embedded in practice ? It cannot of course be denied that there is a larger and more tender feeling of humanity, at any rate over the greatest part of the earth ; people are not so coarsely, deliberately and devilishly cruel as they once delighted to be, the propensities to torture and kill one another and the atrocious cruelties which they used their in- genuity to devise and inflict being so repugnant to a more humane nature that they call such past human conduct inhuman and devilish. But why inhuman when they were wholly and solely human ? And why devilish seeing that man has always been man's worst or only devil? Having himself made a hell on earth by wars, slaughters, persecutions and tortures, he made a Hell below for a mythical Devil to dwell and reign in. Yet to put upon the devil the instigation of the iniquities of which he himself was sole doer was rather a mean and demoralizing excuse for evading his own duties and re- sponsibilities. The hideous and atrocious cruelties of the Holy Inquisition inflicted by zealous Christian ecclesiastics bent on torturing persons into becoming such Christians as themselves are not likely to be repeated under any ecclesiastical powers present or to come. There is withal a keener sensitiveness to the sight of suffering, with a great deal more of sentiment and self-pity than apparently there ever was before, and a diffused feeling of human CH. iv EDUCATION & SOCIALIZATION 271 brotherhood is more or less infused by a zeal for its welfare : so much so that when a nation invades and sub- jugates a weaker nation it is presumably or professedly done, if not for the latter's good, at any rate for the advance of a true civilization to which its feebler existence was a hindrance. However that be, this much is certain that whatever guise of virtue it wear, it is fundamentally the work of strong and growing life bent on subduing weaker life, if not directly to itself, at any rate to the type of life which it thinks ought to be and persuades itself that it nobly represents. Meanwhile the humanitarian con- science waxes slowly in spite of frequent eclipses, and every fresh achievement of science and commerce, by promoting rapid and easy national intercommunication and interdependence, is expected at last to increase it. Whether individuals on the whole have really now a more vital sense of social and moral responsibility than ever before is not so certain as it is thought, or wished to be. They notably need a continual enactment of new laws to prevent them from doing what they ought not to do and to compel them to do what they ought to do in their commerce with one another ; but with the multipli- cation of laws to enforce right dealings in a more com- plex society, a multiplication of transgressions and subtle evasions has proportionately gone along. Happily the worst offenders are not now so void of sense of social responsibility as to have recourse to the instigations of the devil to explain, if not palliate or excuse, their sins against society ; they recognize more or less clearly in thought and prove plainly in practice that acts and their conse- quences are strictly causes and effects which proceed by natural laws in the social domain without such super- natural intervention. Though they wish and believe themselves to be Christians in the abstract, that does not prevent them from acting according to known laws and being concretely unchristian in their desires and conduct. - So complete is the necessary separation of abstract profession from possible practice, and so much is real 272 MENTAL ORGANIZATION PT . n morality a matter of time, place and circumstances. St. Thomas Aquinas has been canonized as a Christian saint notwithstanding that he rejoiced in the anticipation of the enhanced happiness in heaven which the saints would enjoy from the sight of the torments inflicted on the damned in hell. 1 To a Christian of to-day it seems strange that a Christian could have felt and said so, yet at the same time have believed himself to be a Christian ; he is not, however, blamed as a willing or witting hypocrite but excused as a socially constructed person who necessarily reflected the thought and feeling of his epoch. Christianity has plainly not had so much to do with the improvement of social and moral feeling as increased knowledge and better social feeling with the improvement of Christianity. A growth of humane feeling is evident again in the growing sense of the barbarity of wars, which are, or are thought to be (written before 1914), less frequent, less destructive, less prolonged, more humanely conducted, more feared. Many persons, having the wish, have acquired the will to believe that the enormous slaughter of the species by the species, which has distinguished the human from other animal species, albeit a consequence of its necessary vital expansion and superior intelligence, a plainly ordained factor in its evolution, shall be regarded as a wicked, unprofitable, almost impossible practice, its utility indeed questioned out of pure self-interest ; and this notwithstanding the signal admiration universally bestowed on the successful conquerors who have done the greatest slaughters in the world ; their infamies forgotten, their names famously remembered. And that not alto- gether illogically, for if war had been suppressed in the past as the evil which it is commonly said to be now the progress of the race, if it could have taken place at all, must have been on quite a different track : might not even be progress in the future perhaps if vigorous life lusting to live and expand cease to subdue or swallow weaker 1 " Beati in regno coelesti videbunt poenas damnatorum, ut beatitude illis majus complaceat." THOMAS AQUINAS. CH. iv EDUCATION & SOCIALIZATION 273 life. As war was once good even if only good in the making, its heroes therefore obtain grateful recognition and commemoration : Alexander, Caesar and Napoleon unfailing objects of interest and admiration not so much for their exceptional intellectual powers and civic accomplishments as for their famous victories. That it is wrong to do evil that good may ensue is a principle which, though pleasing and plausible in theory, has always been more honoured in breach than in observance. How- ever sublime in spirit, it cannot now be applied without qualification to the progress of the race or even to in- dividual conduct Past progress was properly accomplished through discords and wars ; orderly progress with love as the animating principle and bond of unity is a beatific vision of the blessed rule in a golden age to come. The perplexing difficulty in practice of course often is to decide what is evil in the particular circumstances, evil and good being abstractions and the abstract evil perhaps a particular good in the actual circumstances or at all events in the sequel. For the present it is obviously natural and necessary that maleficent inventions in the arts should keep pace with and be no less prized than beneficent in- ventions ; for which reason the first thought respecting the recently invented flying machine was how it might best be utilized for war, and the present earnest aim is how to perfect and use it for that purpose. Still it is perhaps imaginable that destructive ingenuity may eventually work its own cure ; the cost of its continually improved instru- ments becoming so enormous, and their devastations so terrific so little too the personal glory of the combat and so great the suffering that nations may conclude it mad- ness to go to war and from motives of self-interest keep the peace ; especially if they discover how much they gain by an altruistic change from self-assertion, suspicion, rivalries, hatred and enmities, and by free communication of persons and products. Something too can be opti- mistically expected from the spread of a socialistic gospel of peace and goodwill on earth ; though its claim to do T 274 MENTAL ORGANIZATION w. n what Christianity has failed to do after nearly two thousand years be arrogant presumption. Will mankind, when all is said, be really doing themselves a service or a disservice by doing away with war ? l It is in any case curious to think that the moral virtues of the warrior his courage, obedience, loyalty, self-devo- tion and self-sacrifice have been developed by immoral means, and hard to think that like virtues can spring up and flourish amidst the competitive struggles of a com- mercialism bent more on money-making than making men, or of a socialism intent on making them as much alike and as little self-sacrificing as possible. Obviously one service which a disastrous war might effectually do to a civilized nation would be to force it out of conventionalities and hypocrisies into veracities of thought, speech and conduct, and to break up the hardened shams, fictions and hypo- crisies into which it is prone to glide and content to stay. Failing such beneficial purgation, there can be no assurance of such a reinvigoration of its national life as shall deliver it from the stifling conventionalities and customs which much of its vital energy is spent in keeping up. Happily the hope of the optimist is unquenchable, and he can always find grounds for hope. Tribal and inter- tribal retaliations for offences and at a later period single combats have been mostly superseded by Criminal Courts, which would once have been inconceivable or incredible ; Industrial Courts are foreseen as likely to oust wasteful conflicts between capital and labour ; and the sanguine hope is entertained that International Courts of Justice may eventually be set up to settle the quarrels between nations, and to provide the means necessary to enforce their edicts, which will obviously be the real difficulty. If that event appear remote, as the optimist may now be 1 " Fighting will go on for a million of years yet to come, and in pure sympathy with the grander interests of human nature every person who. reads what lies below the surface will say (as I say) God forbid that it should not. In that day when war shall be prohibited or made really impossible man will commence his degeneration. He will then have stopped vital progress." DK QUINCEY, Essay on California. CH. iv EDUCATION & SOCIALIZATION 275 forced sadly to own, it can nevertheless be fondly cherished as a valuable ideal to the realization of which the race is in sore but sure travail. With the steady progress of science and the rapid increase of international communica- tions and exchanges of thoughts and products, nations which more and more think and work together may possibly come by biological law to feel together as in- dividuals in a nation have done, and thus perhaps gradu- ally to evolve an international conscience and establish an International Court of Justice. That at any rate is the blessed hope of optimism. Then the slaughterous exploits of Alexander and Napoleon and other less famous con- querors may be looked back upon with no greater admiration than the revolting massacres of savage African chieftains are now. Then too when this ideal is realized by a glorified race, the result may be deemed a sufficient compensation for the dire and deplorable real of its past. Yet the hardened pessimist who looks back on the past and projects imagination into the remote future when the history of Christendom shall be written may conclude that the biggest and bloodiest war in which the human race has ever been engaged was a natural and necessary conse- quence of men being what they are and not what they fancy or feign themselves to be fundamentally in fact the natural work of sound and vigorous life insistent on maintaining and increasing itself. Abolition of the de- struction of life by life may withal require much abate- ment of the sun's rays which infuse and propel existing vital energy. Then may be done generally for ever what is done now periodically when its lessened beams in winter suspend temporarily or suppress much animate life on the earth planet. CHAPTER V PRACTICAL MORALITY OF A NATION Specializations of industries and frauds. Tacitly sanctioned frauds. Legal complexities and delays. The hired advocate. Petty crimes. News- papers and their advertisements. Hypocrisy and self- laudation. Extinct nations and Western civilization. British hypocrisy. Sexual hypocrisy. Acute mania and Adolescent Insanity. Habitual perjury. The Divorce Court. Ingraft conventions and customs. Ineffective or mis- chievous social reforms. A fated national period. Civilizing disinte- gration of lower races. WHEN due account has been taken of the state and prospects of the human race and the anticipated effects of a right system of education to hasten its perfect con- summation, qualifying considerations fail not to obtrude in the case of the nation. Because the race on the whole progresses it does not follow that a particular nation rises in civilization ; it may be on the downward grade, nursing the seeds of its own decline, without realizing what it is actually and where it is going. The specializations and complexities of modern civilization have created many conditions favourable to varieties, subtilties and quantities of fraud which never were before and are taken crafty ad- vantage of. Every fresh adaptation to the environment in the advance of knowledge becomes the occasion of astute misuse, and with the increasing complexities of social relations and the multifarious divisions of labour the opportunities of vicious ingenuity and fraudulent devices are multiplied. Gross and open wrong-doing is subtilized to trickle through a thousand fine channels of 276 CH. v MORALITY OF A NATION 277 corruption infecting the commercial world specially and the community generally. The fraudulent company - monger whose conscience would revolt against stealing sixpence from a shoeblack, and the big financier who to gain an exorbitant com- mission launches loans which he knows at heart must fleece thousands, both spoil and ruin at large by their unscrupulous greed and craft, doing more harm than a hundred robbers could once have done in simpler circum- stances, and think no ill of their doings on that large scale, nor for the most part are seriously thought ill of while they continue to prosper. So sacred is the gospel of trade and so many are the customary deceits and corruptions tacitly sanctioned in its various branches that a jury of tradesmen, imbued with the trade-spirit, cannot always be relied on to condemn them. In a nation of shopkeepers where the business is to buy and sell, and the legal maxim that the buyer must take care of himself, evil acts which are thought good for trade lose much of their turpitude. That such spirit can work well in the end is questionable, though not likely to be seriously questioned while the spirit rules. Yet trade rests at bottom on an ethical basis and may topple down in ruin when this is corrupt. Powerful financial conspiracies to monopolize production and to raise prices for the personal gains and selfish use of the conspirators are, to say the least, not altogether a blessing either to the conspirators or their victims. In the delays, prolongations, complications and techni- calities of legal proceedings the great criminal has always a fair chance of escape which the perpetrator of simpler crimes has not. So formidable are the cost, trouble, worry and uncertainty of convicting him in a court of law that the prudent victim is deterred from undertaking the prolonged and expensive business of a hazardous prosecution. If he be simple and sanguine enough to think that the trial may last at most for two or three days he may discover sadly that it goes on wearily for a week or two or three weeks and costs thousands of 278 MENTAL ORGANIZATION PT . n pounds. 1 It speaks much for the wholesome strength of the retaliatory instinct in human nature that the thankless venture is ever made. For in no case, however bad the cause, provided that the large price of hire be paid, will the professional skill of the most eminent advocates at the forensic bar be wanting to defend the most fraudulent doings, to prolong the trial from day to day for their own display and daily gain, and to pride themselves on their victory over truth and justice. " To justify the wicked for a reward " is not now the iniquity which the Hebrew prophet of old denounced ; it is the hired advocate's business of the subtle head in which the heart is forbidden to enter : the professional conscience and performance of the actor on the forensic stage kept strictly apart from his private conscience and performance off it. So skilful is he that he can divide his mental self and keep the two divisions separate. Getting instantly quit in private life or in other public employment of the whole habit of intel- lect which he has systematically employed to make wrong appear right (when too he feels at heart or knows that he is doing his utmost to serve the wrong 2 ) he at once proceeds to think and act sincerely as a whole being ; so much easier is it to change a mental than a bodily habit, to divide a mental than a bodily self and yet preserve its integrity. To an unsophisticated dweller on another planet look- ing down on the spectacle with impartial eye it might 1 Extract from a letter in a newspaper by a " City Solicitor for over thirty years" : " The bulk of mercantile men have rightly a horror of litiga- tion, and mainly for the following reasons : (i) The ignorance shown by many Judges of ordinary mercantile matters. (2) The low standard of the modern special jury. (3) The desultory conversations and irrelevant remarks by Judges and counsel during trials. (4) The ever-increasing amount of counsel's fees. (5) The efforts of many solicitors to 'make costs.' A member of one of the most important mercantile firms in the City said to me, ' I long ago made up my mind that the best way in business is to allow yourself to be cheated as long as you are cheated reasonably.' " 2 From a report in a newspaper it appears that a Committee of influential barristers, after examining the question recently, decided that the advocate might rightly defend a client who had privately confessed, so long as he only did it legitimately by his suppression of the true facts and suggestion of false facts in the plausible case which he presented to the jury. CH.V MORALITY OF A NATION 279 appear an odd anomaly that while prostitution of the person for hire was condemned as a vile degradation pro- stitution of the intellect for hire was an honourable trade. As the intellectual is more noble than the animal function he might in his simplicity think that prostitution of it was the more ignoble. But that would be too hasty a judgment, unqualified by due regard to the complex con- ditions and necessary adjustments of things ; for hired expert help is plainly indispensable for the true presenta- tion of his case by the unskilled litigant in the maze of legal complexities, subtilties and technicalities in which Bar and Judges chosen from and in sympathy with its powerful Trade Union are trained to act. The man is fortunate therefore who can afford to hire professional help ; the poor man who cannot must suffer without remedy, though less perhaps in the end than if he tried for a remedy. Protesting persons from time to time ex- pose the burdensome injustice, but their protests are futile in face of the compactly woven system of traditions, interests, collusions and customs with which they are benetted round. Here, as in Dahomey and elsewhere, the practical morality of a people witnesses to its custom of thought, feeling and conduct. So subtile, subtle and insidious is the intrusion of commercial fraud through its secret channels that in many businesses special deceits are sanctioned as legiti- mate customs, and persons honest in their private relations, lulled by the trade-conscience, which like some other consciences is special, see no harm in them. The number of petty crimes, again, which daily occupy the police courts, where indulgent sentiment often leaves the first crime unpunished, is but a small proportion of similar crimes which are not prosecuted because the injured party will not be at the pains, cost and worry of a prosecution likely to end in a compassionate acquittal or a nominal conviction. How can he be fairly expected to perform his duty to society when society, forgetting its duty to him, makes his task onerous and thankless ; 28o MENTAL ORGANIZATION PT . n when in fact while he feels it his duty to prosecute the crime in the interests of society, without any special ill-will to the criminal, society compassionates the criminal without due regard to the crime and itself? Leniency in such case may be as hurtful as it is apt to be loose-think- ing ; for when all is said the purpose of laws is to fashion citizens to a right habit of thinking, feeling and doing ; and although to know all in the particular case might be to excuse all, yet such pity, if freely indulged, cannot conduce to the right fashioning of them which it is the interest of society to uphold. A wholesome fear of strict penal consequences surely and quickly to follow criminal conduct being a useful means of restraining persons from wrong-doing, it is humanitarian folly to accuse human justice when it is prompt, stern and summary. The injustice, if any, lies farther back in the bad fate of the criminal's organization and should be imputed elsewhere that is, if human notions of justice and injustice have any proper place there. Notice, again, in this connection might properly be taken of the illicit commissions, lying advertisements, gambling incitements, bought commendations, sensational reports of invented or falsified events, constituting a rami- fied system of fraud by which some newspapers of a low class are kept in being, and which newspapers of a higher class that abstain from the worst defilements of their own pages tacitly condone as a more or less excusable part of their beneficent business, or at all events out of special trade- sympathy refuse openly to condemn. Large commercial swindles notoriously owe all their success to the prodigal use of money in fraudulent advertisements plausibly devised to deceive and entrap the unwary but palpably reeking of falsehood to the instructed and wary reader. The proprietor of the newspaper can, it is true, assume and allege that in thus directly and efficiently furthering the fraud he does an indirect educational service ; that it is good for people to be deceived who like to be deceived, since they are thus taught by painful experience prudently CH. v MORALITY OF A NATION 281 to rule their likings and to think and act intelligently. He can moreover plead sometimes that he makes a beneficent use of his profits for large social and chari- table purposes and thus in the long run does more good than harm. The matter is fundamentally bio- logical : in the natural lust of life and power fools are the proper prey of knaves ; they might multiply to an alarming extent were there no knaves to keep them in check and thus ensure a supply, if not a preponderance, of intelligence. So many, various and widespread are secret corrup- tions when honestly exposed and frankly faced that the believers in an improved morality who impartially look on the facts are driven to contend that the proof of moral advance is at least shown in a keener conscience of right and wrong, a louder denunciation of vice and crime, a more general laudation of morality, and to believe in the virtuous efficacy of a habit of openly condemning and privily lamenting the actual immorality. The very news- papers which help to promote and ensure the success of the big commercial fraud by their advertisements do something to make amends by an occasional general denunciation of commercial iniquities in their leading articles, prudently sparing the while the particular advertis- ing miscreants. Yet a sound and sincere reflection might perhaps suggest the suspicion that the louder the tone in which morality is theoretically proclaimed the more probable it is that practice is going in the opposite direc- tion, the virtuous show being then a protective cover of the secret and habitual corruption. That is the inherent and insidious danger of a conventional system divorced from realities and of the remedies which it seeks to apply to the diseases when after corrupting the units it thinks to mend matters by soothing social plasters which are sure directly or indirectly to aggravate the mischief. What is it but insidiously and insensibly to demoralize them essentially, and then openly and demonstratively to pretend to moralize them superficially ? A face-saving 282 MENTAL ORGANIZATION PT . n habit is nowise so peculiar to China as self-flattering Western nations are apt to assert, nor perhaps so deeply rooted in national character as in some of them. As mankind do not live in an abstract world of things as they should be, nor in a chimerical world of things which they feign to be, but fundamentally in a world of hard realities, it is what they are and do, not what they say and simulate, which counts at last. To bemuse and beguile themselves with conventionalities treated as realities, hypocrisies labelled sincerities, verbal inanities christened absolute verities, is to make a fair and imposing show without reflection on what foundations the fine- looking but perhaps frail structure rests. Civilized nations just because of their pride of present civilization and con- ceit of superiority are unapt to look thoughtfully back on the ruins of the human past and seriously to ponder the lessons of its extinct energies ; they think and act for the most part as if human history began yesterday or at all events not more than two thousand years ago. So vastly more wise and good are they than any past nation ever was and under such a special divine dispensation do they live that inferences from the past are not properly appli- cable to the future of beings animated and actuated by the noble Christian spirit which it is their privilege to profess or believe themselves to possess. How could the innumerable multitudes of persons who lived and died in the countless millions of years before the Great Atone- ment attain the moral development and glorious hopes of those who lived and died since that long -delayed and late event ? Christianity is a vital integrant of the most advanced national constitutions, although it was an active disintegrant of the declining Roman Empire ; it is a boon therefore which it is right to force on nations of whose customs it is a destructive solvent ; for thus by the extinction of a lower people can the blessings of commerce and true religion be spread and the lateral expansion of a higher humanity ensured. Yet an im- practicable ideal, which may be harmlessly or usefully CH. v MORALITY OF A NATION 283 cherished in the air, is bound to do harm if the attempt be made to put it into present practice on earth. Away with all gratuitous questions of the value and stability of present Christian civilization which are suited only to gratify pessimistic fancy. What though the glory of ancient Greece, which was mainly intellectual and artistic only, and the grandeur of old Rome, which with all its valorous virtues and strong sense of citizenship (a sentence of banishment thought as bad as a sentence of death) lacked the fine essence of Christian humanity not to speak of past nations and once flourishing cities, the sites of which can hardly now be located have vanished, that is no relevant warning to British or other national self-glorification. The Roman Empire fell because Rome conquered and ruthlessly exploited peoples for its own gain and glory, whereas Britain has conquered and governed for the good of the conquered, as every right- thinking Briton ought to recognize, although other nations fail to see the unselfishness of its conquests and to ac- knowledge the obvious truth of its moral superiority. So strangely yet fast fixed among the nations is the opinion of British hypocrisy. 1 They apparently hold that hypocrisy, like selfishness, is never so perfect as when it is so ingrained in the nature as to be unconscious of itself. To thrust Christianity and Trade, whose gospels have gone along hand in hand together, on an unwilling people by force of arms was always a pious work done to raise them in the scale of civilization, without the least thought of benefit to the invaders or conquerors who, if they benefited at all by the enforced trade, did so incidentally in the divinely ordained course of things. Individual 1 Why ? The Englishman believes in his heart that it is out of jealousy of his moral superiority and envy of his national prosperity. But is that really so ? A nation, like an individual, might not do amiss to try to see itself as others see it. To profess and pretend to be the most Christian nation in a very imperfect world in which profession and practice inevitably clash and the struggle for existence is yet a potent force tends surely and unconsciously to increase cant and hypocrisy. 284 MENTAL ORGANIZATION PT. n traders, it is true, might be purely selfish, but the nation when it went in arms to their support was purely bene- volent and beneficent. Setting aside any question of national superiority in hypocrisy, it is undeniable that it is a social growth, whether good or bad, which thrives well in modern civiliza- tion, markedly distinguishing it in that respect from the old civilizations of Greece and Rome. To profess and laud virtue in theory while evading its practice shows a sense of right and wrong, however, which may chance to stir a reactive effort in particular minds to do right or at least to refrain from doing wrong. Some proper feigning that things are not what they are and are what they are not is without doubt a useful and necessary lubricant to smooth the ordinary relations of social intercourse ; common courtesy demands varying degrees of reticence and pretence according to circumstances ; for if truth were always spoken outright no society could hold together. Beneath the smooth surface of things there are funda- mental human qualities which need to be repressed and concealed, simulations and semblances which must be artificially kept up. As on the stage of the theatre, so on the stage of life, to strip the actors of their appropriate vestures for the parts which they play would be utterly to spoil the illusion of the drama. It is different with the lower animals which, dealing directly with realities and with one another, have not learnt hypocrisy except perhaps the dog, owing to its long and familiar companionship with man. But in a complex human society, though hypocrisy may be a private vice, it is a necessary factor in the process of socialization and so far a public virtue. It becomes a manifest evil only when pretences are divorced from realities and carried beyond the just mean to excess ; when instead of a sincere grasp of facts as they really are and the branding of vice, fraud and crime by their proper names, polite feeling stubbornly ignores the truth, shrinks from plain speaking as brutal, gladly uses some CH. v MORALITY OF A NATION 285 decent euphuism or circumlocution to designate the ugly fact How ugly soever that be its polite designation must then not be ugly ; however false the show it must be respectfully treated ; for the thing will not be so bad if its bad name be suppressed. It comes then naturally to pass, language working back on thought and surely laming or vitiating it, that men are tempted to think of it lightly and conventionally. By robbing crime of its proper name they rob it of its ugly horror. Even among thieves and murderers and other criminals the proper names of their crimes are habitually suppressed, the slang names which they give to them hiding from them- selves much of the real significance of their criminal conduct. Less polished forefathers certainly showed a more vital hold of facts, possibly a sounder though less refined vitality. Compare the following words of Latimer, preached soon after the death of Seymour, with what would be said now of some great man recently dead, how- ever great a scoundrel : " He was a man the farthest from the fear of God that ever I knew or heard of in England." " Surely he was a wicked man ; the realm is well rid of him," but "as touching the kind of his death, whether he be saved or no, I refer that to God only. He may, in the twinkling of an eye, save a man and turn his heart ; and when a man hath two strokes with an axe, who can tell but that between two strokes he doth repent ? " Were a person of equal eminence and similar character to die now the announcement of his death would be made with pro- found regret, his virtues and services be lauded, and not a word said of his vices or of the social mischief which he did by his selfish conduct, bad example and evil influence. Vice may properly be blamed in the abstract, but the eminent individual must be decently and scrupulously spared. Good taste demands the indulgent reticence conventionally for the sake of his surviving relatives, notwithstanding that the community really suffers by the reticence. 286 MENTAL ORGANIZATION PT . u Now if a complex fabric of shams is built on an organized system of polite hypocrisies, amiable pretences and conventional phrases and practices, the question naturally arises whether such luxuriant growth of hypocrisy and artificialities is a wholesome part of an advancing civilization and a safe guarantee of its stability. Does the conventional cult of hypocrisy denote and promote a stable and soundly progressive civilization ? Can the social as well as the economic business of the community be carried on for ever on inflated credit ? Nowhere is the habit of hypocrisy more marked and perhaps more fitting than in the matter of sexual relations. Condemning the coarser habits and plain speaking of their ruder ancestors men and women practise a decent con- cealment of sensualities and observe a mannerly mode of speaking of them. But reticent reserve and secrecy do not imply non-existence, nowise fewer prurient imaginings or less indulgence. The impartial enquirer who has had and used his opportunities of observation might even con- clude that there was less sexual licentiousness among the so-called savages who go about nearly naked than among those whom shocked missionaries have induced to put on burdensome clothes, to the injury sometimes of their health, comfort and morals. It is custom only which associates indecency with nakedness, as it does with the exposure of the woman's face in Turkey and not with the exposure of half her back and bosom in England. And it may well be that there was less lubricity among ancestors who thought and spoke more openly of sexual matters than among their descendants who put on con- ventional clothes of thought and speech. Subtle and allusive suggestions of sensuality to the imagination are certainly more keenly provocative of licentious thought and lust than naked coarseness, refinements of vicious culture more ingenious too in devising and gratifying such stimulants. To conceal nature is not to expel it, and secrecy, enticing and inciting prurient curiosity, is a keen incentive to vicious imaginings, which might be less CH. v MORALITY OF A NATION 287 frequent and busy if concealment did not suggest and tempt them. 1 It is not without sufficient reason that a turbid torrent of indecencies of speech and conduct is sometimes poured out in acute mania by a virtuous maiden whose up- bringing has been conducted with scrupulous care, and the customary puritanical assumption that maidens are sexless in thought and feeling until they are married ; the dis- tressing sight amazing the beholder where and whence she could have derived such ideas, feelings and language. But the matter is no real wonder, for innocence of doing nowise implies absence of the Eve-like curiosity to know which is rooted in the female nature. Ophelia was not unchaste when her madness not herself tinged her sad snatches of song with unchaste allusions. The conscious show was the physiological upsurge of the latent contents of her unconscious mental life. The reproductive instinct needs not to be taught its office and is curious enough instinctively to anticipate its function and prompt its secret enquiries even from childhood ; it fails not therefore to thrust its disquiet- ing suggestions into adolescent consciousness, waking or dreaming, when the obscurely molesting intrusions would gladly be repelled or expelled. In this as in other performances consciousness is consequence not cause, the open uprise of a latent complex of thought and feeling. Withal disease creates no new functions, patho- 1 The following quotation from Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy is interesting in this connection ; for it is the frank testimony of an impartial observer who was genuinely surprised at what he saw and cannot be accused of hostility to missionaries as a modern enquirer giving similar testimony probably would be : "John Lerius, the Burgundian (cap. 8 Hist. Navigat. in Brazil), is altogether on my side. For whereas, saith he, we found both men and women naked as they were born without so much as any covering of their privities, and could not be persuaded by our Frenchmen that lived a year with them to wear any, many will think that our so long commerce with naked women must neads be a great provocation of lust ; but their nakedness did much less entice to licentiousness than our women's clothes." He goes on boldly to affirm that the various garments, ornaments and other accoutre- ments of his countrywomen cause more inconvenience in this kind than that barbarian custom " I could evince the truth of this by many other arguments, but I appeal to my companions there present who were all of the same mind. " 288 MENTAL ORGANIZATION PT . n logy and physiology not being severed provinces ; it disturbs and perverts natural functions, which might in the case of the reproductive function wisely perhaps be more openly and frankly dealt with. The matter is no 'doubt a difficult one to. handle as things are; for the sense of shame is so strictly and persistently in- culcated from the earliest years, even by the sympathetic nurse on the baby kicking out its bare legs too freely, that it dominates the conduct of life. Yet it is certain that a more open dealing with a natural function would dispel much hurtful ignorance, do away with a great deal of enforced hypocrisy, and prevent an incalculable amount of secret and anxious suffering at the critical period of adolescence when the reproductive instinct enters into the conscious mental life, disquiets it by its obscure stirrings, profoundly revolutionizes it as it develops, wrecks it some- times in so-called " Adolescent Insanity " : a signal instance in that case of the occasional sad consequence of one class of approved conventional reticences. Although custom makes conventions sacred, it fails not in turn to make conventional that which is sacred. Were it not that familiarity has annulled surprise and staled reflection, it would be appalling to observe how habitually perjury, once deemed an awful sin, is practised and how leniently it is tolerated now that waning belief in the supernatural has divested it of its terror. Was there ever a time in civilized history when its occurrence was so frequent, so lightly regarded, so placidly condoned ? The solemn oath perfunctorily taken to speak the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, is instantly and unconcernedly violated, the fear of kissing a dirty book causing a sharper pang of apprehension than the fear of swearing falsely, the sanitary more tender than the moral conscience. In the foul and unwholesome atmosphere of the Divorce Court especially, perjury il a daily practice tacitly accepted as normal, if not natural, sometimes even treated as excusable ; while it is inculcated as a chivalrous duty by the code of honour sanctioned in the higher ranks CH. v MORALITY OF A NATION 289 of society. For a guilty co-respondent to confess his guilt when his partner in adultery boldly denied it would bring on him more contempt for base conduct than esteem for speaking the truth. Bad form is sometimes a worse offence than bad doing ; good form the nice homage which bad doing pays to conventional virtue. In this respect as in other matters of conduct the code of honour and self-esteem in the social world has always been signally and successfully opposed to the Christian code of meekness, humility and self-abasement. Revolting as is the brazen front with which litigants in the Divorce Court perjure themselves, it is less nauseous than the stories of mean, treacherous, base and vicious conduct which they relate without a blush in the false evidence which they swear to be the truth. Their shame- ful and shameless exhibitions of treacherous vice supply the socialist with a strong argument in support of his proposal to do away with marriage in his improved State ; and the reflecting person who is not a professed socialist may be tempted to think that one of two things might well be done either the Divorce Court abrogated as a demoralizing institution or the marriage tie much loosened. Its vile disclosures, though familiarized by custom and placidly accepted, are not calculated to edify morality, nor warrant the opinion of an improved morality which it is the habit to assume and the wish to believe. If hypocrisy be the tribute which vice pays to virtue, it must be owned that virtue has seldom, if ever, had to felicitate itself on a more ample and constant subsidy. The result is natural and inevitable in a social medium of conventions, conventional phrases, conventional creeds, conventional morality, in which there is instant recoil from vital contact with displeasing realities. Born and bred in the particular society, its customs and con- ventions of thought are ingraft in the nature of the social units and silently assimilated by them ; they cannot rise out of them, cannot choose but resent attacks on them ; cannot abide the prophets who, exposing their character, U 2 9 o MENTAL ORGANIZATION PT . n do not prophesy smooth things, even when they pay these disturbers of their peace a passing lip - homage : as in fact they have the courage to do when censure is prudent enough not to descend from denunciation in the abstract to condemnation of particular instances, which would be inexcusably bad taste. So clever is optimistic sleight of thought that it can see in the neglected warnings of the prophets who prophesy hard things a laudable strain of national virtue which shall in due course work righteous wonders. Yet history shows that impassioned prophets of calamity were not wanting to utter their unheeded warnings to decadent nations, being ignored or despised and rejected for their pains. Their cry of insight was the despairing cry of impotence, foreboding and futile, the pathetic protest of lucid reason against an irresistible stream of blind feeling. " Blessed are ye when all men shall revile you " is withal a saying of large and possibly lasting application ; hereafter as heretofore the few wise and good may be doomed to make expiation for the ignorance and sins of the many foolish and bad. Mistaken and misapplied remedies in a social body are liable to be more hurtful than beneficial to the disorders which they are employed to cure : their direct effects thoughtlessly desired, their indirect and lasting effects unthought of. A benevolent tinkering with social reforms where the units are bad and the whole social body unsound is but a poor spectacle of misplaced hope and misapplied effort, at best a futile endeavour to treat symptoms rather than do away with the causes of disease. The natural effect is to demoralize the units more by the means used to better them. That which preceded the fall from within of every once flourishing nation was the weakening and deterioration of the social and moral character of its individuals, the more conspicuous features of the decline sometimes described as causes being rather effects. The history of the nation as of the individual is its character. No organism, moreover, which has passed its maturity and has got its constitution and therewith its CH. v MORALITY OF A NATION 291 fate virtually fixed, even though it be fairly sound, can readily make plastic adaptations to new conditions and assimilate new matter vitally ; for which reason changes, political or social, devised for its good, if sudden or at all serious, are apt to produce constitutional disturbances which further its decline : the indirect and hidden opera- tions of the change then often more important than the direct and evident effects. To shunt decaying age off its beaten tracks is to do it a dangerous disservice, especially when any special constitutional infirmities accompany the general decay. In any case the nation like the individual may have its fated period, unwilling as it is to think it. So far as evidence warrants inference, it is that upon life in all its forms is imposed the strict law of preservation and increase by unease and struggle, of corruption and disease by ease and stagnation : to strive and grow the essential principle of life, to stay at rest inevitable regress. To the nation therefore which craves not more life and strife but is content to live at ease a period is fixed by its constitution and circumstances. What else is the tale of geological strata but a record of the building of life on death, the long history of human evolution from age to age but a story of the supersession of weaker by stronger races, the mental growth of to-day but the consumption of past mind ? So far from war being an abnormal or unnatural event and peace the normal and natural state of the human species, war was in the beginning, is now and probably ever shall be the normal means of its growth, purification and progress. Forms of life pass away, but life, so to speak, is immortal and continues to put on new forms. How then can any social body, let it grow to ever such a height, be exempt from the law of organic maturity and mortality? Having reached its perfection, it may, like the flower, inevitably decay and die. As it was in the past so it is now when the destructive invasion of one nation by another is feigned or fancied 292 MENTAL ORGANIZATION PT . n to be benevolent but proves to be pernicious. Certainly no more powerful disintegrant can be thrust on a savage or semi-barbarous people than the forms of thought and conduct pertaining to a higher civilization. Shattering the cement of old customs which kept it coherent and stable, the invaders introduce new modes of thought and feeling which it cannot assimilate, not being risen to their level. What it does therefore is to lose its own simpler virtues which suited its state of development ; not to acquire the virtues which are above it, but to assimilate and perhaps worsen the vices which are on its level and thus to hasten its own decadence. In this way as also by the introduction of the diseases of civilization, which in like manner as the" vices work a destructive devastation in the fresh constitutional soil, is the lateral extinction of lower and weaker races accomplished and the will of destiny done : the general rise of humanity to a higher plane secured and its self- approbation gratified and augmented. For it would be treason to doubt whether a Prussian Junker is not a higher and finer specimen of humanity than an Arab Sheik, a British tradesman than a South Sea Islander, or to compare the ceremonial sym- bolical offices of the Archpriest in a Christian sanctuary to those of the African medicine-man communicating in his magical fashion with the supernatural. CHAPTER VI PERFECTIBILITY AND PRACTICABILITY The anticipation of perfection. Tolstoi's idealism. Beneficent effects of education. The patient stolidity of the masses. Signal organic trans- formations. Selfishness of corporations, unions, trade unions, etc. Sympathetic revolts of labour. Democracy and socialization. Socialistic jealousies and wrangles. The Anarchist's stern logic. His disregard of human psychology. Loss of original spirit in religious and in other bodies. Grounds of socialistic hope. Socialization no human inven- tion. Egoism of heroic persons. Their special morality. Altruism and intelligence of bees. Parental devotion of bees and ants. Tran- scendent value of self-consciousness. IMPLICIT in the melioristic theory of human progress to serene heights of altruism and universal brotherhood is the assumption that man is destined to rise in being indefinitely : the assurance that notwithstanding past relapses following advances in different times and places, some so remote as to be lost in dateless oblivion, there has been and still is a deep onward movement of the human ebb and flow which is sure to go on rising slowly to its perfect height. It is undeniable that in spite of many drawbacks mankind have advanced through ages past and are still urged by native impulse to advance through ages to come ; the notion therefore that the rising tide may come to a stop and ever ebb is utterly repugnant to the human life which now is and ever craves to be more. That the ascent of life can be otherwise than through a perfective human species is moreover a quite incredible supposition, the supersession of a lower by a higher and more fitting species being unthinkable in its case. Human nature has notably changed since its 293 294 MENTAL ORGANIZATION FT. n beginning and may therefore continue to change during a long period of evolutional ascent ; so much so that its crowning product shall be a sublimation of the old animal into a new moral being, the spirit gradually be made flesh. Dazzled or blinded by the splendour of an ideal, enthusiasts like Tolstoi advocate and anticipate the glorious advent of an universal reign of love when the strong shall cease to oppress the weak, no one injure another, no one resent or retaliate ; when wars shall not merely be denounced but renounced ; when all peoples of all climes, countries, colours and conditions shall be united in bonds of amity ; the true principles of Christ, no longer perverted to serve the purposes of an unrighteous order of things, being universally recognized as the inspiration of faith and sincerely applied to the guidance of conduct. 1 In the vitality of these principles despite their violation in practice ever since they were enunciated lies the promise of an ultimate regeneration of human nature, when the present instinct of retaliation, operating under the chastening influence of the herding instinct and resenting hurt to one member as a hurt to the social body, shall by a continuous ascent in socialization expand into universal humanitarianism. By persistent curbing of the personal and insistent stimulation of the altruistic instinct shall this moral transformation be brought to pass, even though the individual remain fundamentally 1 Precept and practice were oddly consorted in Tolstoi's case. He is said to have disapproved of money yet to have let a servant carry a purse in his stead ; to have disapproved of private property in land and to have given up all his property rights, including the copyright of his books, but to have made them over to his wife ; to have disapproved of doctors yet to have been pre- vailed upon to have a resident doctor in his house who was called a secretary. If that were so, as stated in a recent Life of him, it is perhaps not unwarrant- able to suppose that his family regarded him as a person obsessed by an ideal and not quite fit to take proper care of himself and manage his affairs, and were probably more disturbed than gratified by the fulsome adulation of intrusive visitors : perhaps too a reason why the Russian Government left him undisturbed notwithstanding his fervent preaching of revolutionary doctrines. His play The Light which shines in Darkness plainly indicates how grievously he himself was sometimes perplexed and distressed by the inconsistency between his real and would-be person. CH. vi PERFECTIBILITY & PRACTICABILITY 295 animal, retain his animal instincts and continue to re- produce his kind in animal fashion, if perchance, being perfect, man does not then conclude that his long day's task on earth is done and leave off reproduction. Mean- while, despite the optimistic faith and fancies of Tolstoi and his disciples the working world will probably go on much as it has done and, while praising the prophet openly and approving his ideal in the abstract, privately think him a visionary ideologue and his ideal imprac- ticable. More sober-minded thinkers can however look con- fidently forward to the wonder-working effects of a right system of education through a longer course of time than the sanguine enthusiast requires. So sure are they of the beneficent influence of wise education steadily employed through generations that in spite of the unpromising nature of the mass of material and the huge transformation to be made they are nowise disheartened. So sober, lucid and logical a thinker as John Stuart Mill (albeit the repressed sentiment of childhood and youth surged up in a singular outburst in his manhood) who avowed his belief in the coming of socialism, based his hope of its success on the beneficial effects of education to make men worthy citizens in the process of time. Considering then how many thoughtful persons firmly hold that faith the pessimist may be driven to suspect whether his nature is not in fault, his doubt not a treason against humanity yet still doubt. Evidently the righteous order of things cannot come to pass while the exploited labourers of every kind, as Tolstoi bitterly lamented, are so stupid as not to perceive their own interests and the easy means of emancipating themselves ; so long as they patiently sustain the power which wealth gives and press eagerly to obtain the bare wages without their just share in the profits of its employ- ment ; so long as they are blind enough to supply the soldiers, the policemen, the officials of all sorts in the political system which keeps them in bondage. Although 296 MENTAL ORGANIZATION PT. n the many are thus sadly illogical and provoke the scorn or pity of humanitarian zealots eager hastily to upset the present constitution of things while they can be pleasing agents in the work, it may be that in respect of the maintenance and stability of the State there was and is more silent sense in the patient stolidity and unconscious conservatism of the masses than in the ecstasies of mystical enthusiasm ; for these, after all, if coolly considered, may be no more valuable a personal quickening of the particular spirit than the extravagant groans, cries, shrieks, grimaces, contortions, leapings, creepings, dancings and other grotesque actions of the vulgar religious revivalists which, like the frenzy of mad- ness, unloose convulsively such extraordinary latent energies in the semi-frantic performers. 1 History teaches that States have hitherto been based on the ignorance and properly directed obedience of the many rather than on their insight and independence, which was presumably right then, however wrong it be now ; for it cannot be reasonable or reverent to suppose that the world, if still a bad world, has gone on a wrong track. It no doubt went its right way in the past and will go its right way in the future, be the conse- quences what they may, conformable or not to human notions and wishes ; and as the past flows by natural law into the present, and the present naturally into the future, that which shall be must needs savour largely of that which has been mankind in reality long relish of its old stock however virtuously inoculated now and in time to come. 1 Men and women have mutilated themselves with knives, danced in frenzy until they dropped, thrown themselves before an idol's car under the influence of so-called religious emotion : the emotion obviously real enough but the religion not so obvious. Have these quasi-convulsive activities really ever had spiritual meaning, or were they not, when soberly considered, pathological phenomena strictly comparable to those of hysteria ? If that were so, then it deserves consideration whether the transports of spiritual ecstasies in different religions which stop short of equal or any violent discharges in shouts and screams and frantic movements are not simply milder developments of the same pathological process, having neither more nor less spiritual significance. CH. vi PERFECTIBILITY & PRACTICABILITY 297 Meanwhile, as wonderful transformations do occur in organic development it would be rash to assert that the existing social organization and its constituent members may not be greatly transformed, they gradually reforming themselves to make its reform sure ; not otherwise than as on a lower organic plane the caterpillar is now trans- formed into a butterfly and the tadpole into a frog, each then rapidly revivifying in brief sketch the latent memories of the long and slow process of organic evolution through the ages, and as after aeons of evolutions the first living matter has been evolved into man and the small germ is now developed through quickly passing animal stages in the human womb. All that is necessary for the optimist, whether Democratic Socialist, or Christian Democrat, or enthusiastic Positivist, is to transfer the expected glorifica- tion from a once imagined happy past wrecked by the curiosity to know to a happy time to come when the curiosity to know shall be satisfied and satiated. The ardent Social Democrat and his somewhat rashly sympathetic Christian ally who yearn to put ideal theory into speedy practice might do wisely not to hurry, but rather to reflect coolly how much of the primitive man still survives in his living descendants and how slowly through the ages human development takes effect. Not to speak of international wars and their brutal barbarities, he might think on the over -valuation, selfishness and conscienceless indifference which bodies of men united in aims and interests, such as corporations, sects, profes- sions, trade unions, cabinets and the like, are notably apt to display and, being strong in union, how much less amenable to right feeling they are than the single member who, if inclined to dissent from the projected policy, is either dominated by the collective spirit of the body or, not succumbing to it, is forced to retire. Yet the over- mastering collective spirit may be keenly self-regarding and he truly but powerlessly embody sound moral sense. A prolonged moralization of unions of men which work now mainly for their own interests with little or no regard 298 MENTAL ORGANIZATION FT. n to the good of the whole, as well as of individuals, would seem to be not merely a desirable but a necessary pre- condition of advance to a righteous socialization that happy state of things in which a poor collective conscious- ness shall not swallow up a good individual conscience. The reflecting reformer, like a prudent general, will con- sider the difficulties to be surmounted and not be too swift to advance. After a conflict of nearly two thousand years it is all too certain that Christianity, although inspired by pure social principle with love as the basis, has not been put into practice nor is in the least likely soon to be ; and it is not quite just to attribute its want of success entirely to the perversions of its spirit by rulers and priests, although these have been systematic and constant ; nor is it fairly reasonable to expect the early enthronement of an enlightened and virtuous democracy imbued and actuated by its true spirit. A proved im- practicability of such a culmination two thousand years hence may likewise be the fate of the enthusiast's hoped- for social and political Utopia : strifes, wars and competi- tions of life prove to be the normal course of human progress. For the present at least the preaching of a doctrine of whole-hearted brotherly love and universal self-renuncia- tion is not any more likely to promote social fraternity and equality than it has done in the past ; there is obviously too large a leaven of self-love and hate to allow altruistic affection to make such a diffusive and attenuated expansion. What is plainly needed and, being more in accordance with the past course of events, more likely to come to pass is either that the oppressed shall not so love their oppressors in the social system as to make no attack on them but resolutely set to work with one consent to break the shackles by which they are riveted in it, or that the oppressors out of growing love or fear of their more numerous fellows shall denude them- selves of their powers and privileges ; after which the oppressed can in their turn and are pretty sure to become CH. vi PERFECTIBILITY & PRACTICABILITY 299 the heavier and irresistible oppressors. A revolt of the kind seems to impend now when strikes of organized workers in large industries paralyze the activities of a whole complex and interdependent community and it becomes doubtful whether authorities based on popular votes, believing themselves to be divinely put in power by them and wishing to stay there, will always venture to order the stern suppression of riots, or even whether the forces of soldiers and policemen can always in the last resort be safely relied on to do the disagreeable work. Meanwhile, for the professional politician working in their service and his own interest, and sycophantly flattering their passions to give preponderating power to ignorant masses without burdening them with the direct feeling of civic and political responsibility which the exercise of power would enforce is a procedure which, though it keep him in place and power on their back, hardly bodes well for the welfare of a State, may indeed demoralize him and them, and him as much as, if not more than, them. Straight and easy is the path which the social dema- gogue pursues. His socialistic schemes are obviously suited to gratify the predatory instinct of human nature ; for socialism originated in and is mainly actuated by an economic demand for an equal possession of the wealth produced, which is a real aim, not in moral zeal for an universal brotherhood, which is its ideal fancy. Besides this powerful working motive it has the advantage of furnishing a definite organization for definite ends, thus supplying articulate form and function to the uneasy fermentations of feeling and dumb aspiration of imagina- tion in the masses who become conscious that they are poor and in misery and find no remedy. Whether the remedy shall be sought peaceably by a quiet evolution or turbulently by revolution, love and sympathy or hate and discord predominating in the process, is a question of the patience and organization of the oppressed and of the prudence and foresight of the oppressor. An obvious risk in that case is that imagined rights may 300 MENTAL ORGANIZATION rr. n be claimed before corresponding duties are learnt, and that a troubled period of transitional disorder, confusion and oppression may occur before the new spirit of expected democratic righteousness shall ripen and rule. In order that sound and stable social advance may acclaim its victories superseding and surpassing those of war it is obvious that the component units ought to be infused with some such collective spirit of comradeship in arms as that which engenders and fosters the martial virtues of courage, devotion, endurance, obedience, self-sacrifice and loyal co- operation in struggle, danger and suffering ; virtues that have yet to find their place and function in the wealth- craving industrialism which supersedes militarism and now evolves a quite different spirit. For when all is said in favour of everybody's right to be comfortable and happy it is probable that human life on earth will con- tinue to be a pilgrimage of labour, sorrow and suffering from which death, though dreaded in the prospect and naturally repugned by the instinct of life as long as possible, is confessedly the weary-laden pilgrim's blest release : a subject notably of " hearty thanks for his deliverance from the miseries of this sinful world " by those who, attending his obsequies, devoutly pray for " the speedy accomplishment of the number of the elect," and the hastening of the kingdom of heaven ; which would be the early, amazing and not really expected or desired end of the kingdom of man on earth. 1 Assuredly the fervent advocates of socialistic equality and fraternity do not themselves exhibit the clear signs of altruistic feeling which they wish and expect to prevail. The motive forces which actuate them sometimes smack more of corrosive envy and enmity than of brotherly love and sympathy ; and they are notoriously divided in bitter quarrels among themselves. That is not to be much wondered at ; for the most ardent lover of his kind is liable unawares to be possessed by the keenest self-love resenting hurt to its sensibilities, which it discharges 1 Church of England's " Burial Service." CH. vi PERFECTIBILITY & PRACTICABILITY 301 agreeably in the gilded guise of philanthropic zeal. So sure, though undiscerned, is lurking love of self that he would have nobody preferred before himself, or believe that the thing can be so well thought and done by any one as by himself or in his way. Even the great religious prophets and reformers have not been meek and lowly in spirit ; on the contrary, they have shown arrogant self- assertion and mightily magnified themselves and their mission ; so much so that their righteous explosions might probably have suffered a rude repression in an ideal socialistic community. Inflamed sentiment is a favourable forcing atmosphere of self-esteem as well as a fit protective cover for its egotism to germinate and thrive under. Beneath roseate theories of social perfection, so pleasing in the prospect and so fondly entertained in fancy, there lie fundamentally gross psychological factors which the visionary ignores ; an ideal man being assumed from whom half or more than half the essential qualities of the real man are left out Now the so-called Anarchist, disdaining the spurious pretences of love and specious semblances of reform, openly desires to give the cleansing forces of hate and destruction free play. What is the use of babbling of peaceable and piecemeal construction, a mere battling with symptoms, he asks, when the ground is occupied by a monstrous fabric of organized injustices, systematized oppressions, conventional shams and hypocrisies making it quite useless to attempt a sound reconstruction ? Things cannot be much worse if mankind have to build afresh from the bottom ; which they will not really have to do, since they will be in possession of past mental and material gains to instruct and help them to build better, even though they get rid of the consolidated wisdom of existing institutions and start life on a new career. Here, however, it is only fair to bear in mind that the more sober-minded Anarchist suffers in reputation not only from the intemperate violence of his hot-headed comrades who are often narrow-minded and egotistic neurotics, but 302 MENTAL ORGANIZATION PT. n also from the use which criminal-minded persons make of his doctrines to justify their antisocial conduct ; these finding a plausible excuse for their evil propensities in the doctrine that private property is a theft from the com- munity. 1 Being a theft from the community, this, how- ever poor its particular quality or corrupt its constitution, may seize and use or misuse. Putting aside the extreme Anarchist, unmindful that he must regenerate the citizen before he can regenerate the State, as a socially generated abnormality or mishap in the chances and changes of things, the important question is whether a socialistic or even too socialized State is calculated to perfect individual characters and to be the beneficial means of an immense progress of humanity, or whether, if realized, its enforced servitude might not lead to a deterioration of characters and an eventual ruinous plunging of society into confusion, bloodshed and anarchy a Kingdom of Hell rather than a Kingdom of Heaven on earth ; which is certainly not incredible. For after all jubilant laudation of human progress a word which serves well because it sounds well and is never exactly defined the notion of relapses such as have formerly followed advances cannot be dis- missed as preposterous. The dazzling vision of a glorious humanity to come blinds the ardent social democrat to the psychology of the human past of which the present is and the future will be a natural development by inexorable laws. It certainly would be an extraordinary emasculation of human nature to extinguish hate which has hitherto been as ordinary and useful a force as love in human history and might, if extinguished, render love an inanity. Indeed, it is difficult to conceive how love can be without hate any more than Heaven without Hell ; for if all persons, being immortal, go to Heaven and keep their personalities and memories there, a place thus 1 The often-quoted dictum of Proudhon which Marx, after ceasing to love him as a comrade, pointed out in a savage criticism of him as a writer was a literal plagiarism from an older and obscure writer. CH. vi PERFECTIBILITY & PRACTICABILITY 303 inhabited would be an odd sort of Heaven, and if love is to be universal on earth, all persons loving one another equally, the diffused love, deprived of its opposite, would be so attenuated as to lose all flavour of reality. Is it for a moment reasonable to think that the selfish passions which have always performed their ordained functions in human affairs will wither away in the pure ethereal atmo- sphere of a communistic society under the rule of an organized army of bureaucratic officials with their evolved sympathies and power of office ? Or, again, is it likely that they shall be extinct in the domain of a truly Christian democracy expected by those who, not quite approving economic socialism, yet discern in the principles of co-operative societies, trade unions and other associated bodies promising evidence of a right social advance and look for a final reign of righteousness in a realm of religion and ethics when these bodies shall not act only in their own interests but be duly moralized ? Was Isaiah only premature in his beatific anticipation of the happy time to come when men shall not learn war any more, when the wolf shall lie down with the lamb, when the little child shall put its hand safely into the cocka- trice's den ? The history of religious bodies can hardly be said to justify the expectation of such a blessed realization. Religious as well as political and other parties, however virtuous in their beginnings, are notoriously apt to be transformed in spirit when they have successfully rooted themselves, to pride themselves on their superior virtue, to magnify their merit, to lose everything but the name of their original spirit. Instilled by the lust of life to live and the lust of power to grow, they allow the spirit of self-approbation and self-increase to supplant the true principle of their origin. Of that truth the history of Christianity and its sects is a conspicuous illustration ; for its doctrine as preached by its founder was a wholly different thing from that which state-craft and priest-craft put in practice to keep the masses in feudal subjection, 304 MENTAL ORGANIZATION PT . n to protect the classes in their many times ill-gotten gains, privileges and power, to bless wars and consecrate victories, to oppose the birth and growth of science, to obstruct the social advance which is now discovered to embody the true spirit of Christ, and the jealously contending sects fondly expect some day to unite them in Christian amity. The present hope that this spirit, renewing the vitality of its righteous youth and in sympathetic alliance with an enlightened democracy, shall effect a rapid social trans- formation is not based on successful results of sporadic attempts hitherto made to bind Christians in socialistic union. 1 It is no unreasonable fear therefore that the rude economic may oust the fine ethical spirit and the concert of the Christian and the Socialist be a temporary comrade- ship. If the Socialist without knowing or owning it be inspired by the Christian spirit, he certainly knows and proclaims himself to be the irreconcilable foe of Christian dogma. Considering too how competitions, enmities, wars and their atrocities have gone on, still go on, and seem likely to go on in Christendom, he may claim that there is more hope of a reformed humanity in the progress of his creed which is vital, than in a professed creed which has had such small vital effect on practice. 2 Nevertheless, there are at least two considerations which may be fairly urged in this connection : first that the survival of Christianity for nearly two thousand years through all its perversions and violations, in spite too of ingeniously strained arguments, and sophistical pleadings in defence of its dogmas these for the most part, as has been said, calculated to raise more doubts than they settle in an intelligent mind 3 is proof of the vitality of its principles and justifies the expectation that, purged of its dogmatic excrescences, it will attain a righteous fulfilment in social 1 See note at the end of Chapter. 2 It is noteworthy that in no time and in no place have there been great wars about religion except in Christendom : witness the Thirty Years' War, for instance. 3 The pious founder of the series of Barnpton Lectures, were it able to look down on their special pleadings, calculated reticences, symbolical mean- CH. vi PERFECTIBILITY & PRACTICABILITY 305 practice ; secondly, that the establishment of socialistic principles on a large scale where the whole national organization is imbued with their spirit and fitly fashioned accordingly will be a very different thing from their artificial application to a small self-supporting community of would-be brothers planted in a differently organized and more or less hostile social environment ; in which, therefore, individual passions and self-regarding natures cannot be subdued effectually as they would be by the collective spirit of a universal and uniform dominating social organization. Thus eventually perhaps may the common social principles of Christianity and Socialism be brought to work together in unison. Meanwhile it is neither logical nor just for the Protestant sects of a pro- gressive Christian religion openly to blame the absolute opposition of the Roman Catholic Church to so-called Modernism, while themselves exhibiting a similar opposi- tion to mental progress by clinging nominally to traditional dogmas which contravene it actually and they do not really hold at heart but tacitly shed. Why censure Catholics for not being as illogical and insincere as themselves ? A not uninstructive observation to make when lost in admiration of social organization and its promising prospects is that mankind did not invent it any more than they invented the many ingenious mechanisms throughout the animal world by low organisms. For the most part they think and act as if they did make the brilliant discovery, or as if it were a privilege conferred by special grace on them, whereas the plain truth is that the august laws of social evolution own no human invention and are no human prerogative. Signal achievements of complex social development in the animal world furnish a pregnant lesson not duly learnt because of its familiarity. ings, forced interpretations and sophistical arguments might well fear that their attempts to base on reason what ought safely to be pure faith are doing much to undo what he wished and designed them to do ; might perhaps hope that, being now out of date and prejudicial to mental integrity, they will soon be as much out of use as the Bridgewater Treatises. X 306 MENTAL ORGANIZATION FT. n The bees and the ants have notably forestalled human socialization ; they have done well by native instinct itself no mysterious entity to conjure with but a positive organization of unconscious mind that which conscious intelligence teaches to do by deliberate purpose. No bee or ant works for itself, each bee and ant toiling with untiring industry in an organized social system for the community, imbued and actuated by the corporate spirit of it. There is a manifest impulsion or rather propulsion to the organic becoming of things the so-called conatus fiendi or conation in the creative flux of life which makes for social organization and, as the hope is, for its ultimate perfection : the union of individuals in an advan- cing society just as inevitable an effect of natural law as the union of chemical elements in more and more complex compositions. Like the ant and the bee, man feels the propulsion in him, and in accordance with his higher and more complex nervous organization expresses it in more numerous, special and complex relations. Yet their stable societies preceded and were prophetic of the more complex organization of the human hive, and exhibit on a lower plane that which is more perfectly developed by it on its higher plane. Strange it is to think how much of the Sermon on the Mount these small creatures enshrined ages before that sermon was preached. Instructive too it is to observe what the effect has been on bee character equality and fraternity in full measure, it is true, but at the same time liberty and independence manifestly abolished and variability suppressed, as might be the case in the human hive were that sermon put in practice. Although the bee has not learnt the moral lesson of compassionate care for the afflicted or injured member of the hive which man has learnt, it has learnt somehow that the hive has gained immensely by social servitude, which is the lesson the individual person is required to go on learning for the service of his particular hive. He is not to count except as a means of social service, and the CH.VI PERFECTIBILITY & PRACTICABILITY 307 social body, whatever its quality, shall count itself worth the service. Thus to subdue individuality and extinguish variability in the human hive, as the bees have done in their hives, would obviously be to go contrary to past human procedure and to begin a new chapter in human life. Few, if any, of the great men who largely influenced the course of human affairs, and are most admired in consequence, sub- dued individuality to act altruistically ; on the contrary, they captured, unified and used the scattered and confused forces of the society in which they lived to aggrandize themselves personally and to initiate a new order of things to their liking, oft with small regard to moral principle and sole regard to themselves. Yet these heroic persons were naturally, indeed divinely, inspired to appear. Many a revolution or successful war or great political change would assuredly have had a different issue but for the lucky emergence of the strong man who resolutely pur- sued his self- regarding course and directed events with unscrupulous energy, sagacity and tenacity ; for which reason it is apt to be thought that the fit man, moral or immoral or unmoral, arises providentially at the opportune crisis, no notice being taken of the many more occasions when he did not emerge but might have appeared with advantage, seeing that the great movements of the world have been mostly due to the motive energy of the one strong man. If such servitude to self be really an in- carceration in egoism, as the enthusiastic altruist holds, and true liberty consist in thorough permeation by the sacred essence of brotherly love, it must be owned that mighty men of old contrived to do well for themselves and human progress in their egoistic prisons without such liberty. They made their servitude to egoism not only serve themselves but effective to make others serve them and thereby do the will of destiny. As private vices are sometimes public good, so the unrighteous man sometimes does right, if not righteous, work. It is for that vital reason probably that in spite of the 308 MENTAL ORGANIZATION PT. n approved moral ideal the great men who disdained the ordinary principles of morality in their practice receive the grateful admiration of posterity and are famously commemorated ; they embodied the virile qualities of vigorous life which really work in the world and men most esteem at heart in themselves. The excuse, if excuse be needed, is that the proper concern of pos- terity is with the extraordinary and abiding work done by them, which alone signifies, not with the insignifi- cant demerits of their characters which were passing matters suited only to gratify a vulgar curiosity. They made great history, and it is therefore futile and foolish work historically to unmake them ; the right work of history is to accept frankly, estimate judicially and de- scribe impartially what they did. The perfect morality of imagination succumbs rightly to the imperfect morality of practice. Now if the exceptional person who has thus passed beyond the bounds of morality or perhaps never entered its precincts is entitled to the privilege of a special morality, the evident inference is that morality is not absolute but relative in the evolution of nature through human nature which, as a matter of fact, it always has been in practice. Man may be said indeed to have invented and improved morals as he has invented and improved tools ; therefore he goes on to modify and adapt his morals in practice as he does his tools to suit new conditions goes on creating as nature-made creature in creation. When all is said, to break through the lifeless moral platitudes and artificial conventions of a society sunk in fixed customs and sterile rut of thought and conduct may be the salutary means of raising a custom- thralled consciousness into wider and better activity, of bringing it into vital contact with realities, of lifting it to a higher reflective plane. It is necessary, of course, in that case for the breaker of the customary code to win admiration by success, as he may then be sure he shall ; for if his venture fails he is liable to be despised as a CH.VI PERFECTIBILITY & PRACTICABILITY 309 fanatic or condemned as a criminal or confined as a lunatic, or otherwise disclaimed as an antisocial person of one kind or another. Although he may perchance have been right in his aim, he was rightly a failure in execution and suffered accordingly. The wonder is whether things will be quite different in a future society. Yes, it may be said, for that which was necessary in an imperfect social system will not be so in the perfect society of equality and fraternity when all persons shall think soundly and act rightly ; for then all sorts of useful individual varia- tions shall sprout quietly and grow freely in an enlightened medium of universal sympathy and support. 1 Orderly progress without selfish competition and with love as the animating principle, such is the beatific vision of humanity which has hitherto groaned and travailed in strife and hate and pain. Vanity of vanities may be the just verdict of the individual mortal looking back calmly on the course of his ending life and its dream- like events, but it is a conclusion nowise to be properly applied to mankind as a whole notwithstanding that concrete individuals constitute humanity which would be a bodiless abstraction without them, and that the verdict therefore rightly applies to the whole. That, however, is not a matter of present concern, for the species is not within sight of its remote ending or within proper range of such sombre reflection, certain though it is that it had a beginning, grows slowly and painfully to maturity, must decline and end. The progressive socialization which is going on and is confidently expected to improve in value will assuredly require a rare combination of excellent qualities in the in- dividual persons, as the examples of bees show. Think 1 Yet if all persons had equal intellectual powers, the labourer being as capable of the invention as the inventor, there would be a redundancy and great waste of intellect, for all, thinking alike, might be employed in doing what one person could do and teach well. Nobody would need to be taught, and the result might be as disastrous to the social body as it would be to an army in which every soldier was a captain equally able to give orders and there was no one left simply to obey. Would sympathy then, as in the bee- hive, suffice to maintain stability ? If so, would it then ensure progress ? 3io MENTAL ORGANIZATION PT. n on the sacrifice of the individual bees for the good of the species, their entire unselfishness, the silent intelligence automatically applied by each bee in the construction and economy of the hive, the rational, if not reasoned, adapta- tion of means to ends, even sometimes in circumstances which necessitate suitable modifications, for instincts are not so fixed in them as to be incapable always of making partial adaptations to changed, if not too much changed, environments ; on the scrupulous sanitary care, the inde- fatigable industry, the loyal co-operation and harmonious co-ordination of the units for the good of the whole in time of peace, and the absolute self-sacrificing devotion in furious fight when the hive is attacked : a solidarity of social life by which they have established and preserved their societies and something like which will be required for the realization of the ideal human society. Fortunately perhaps for the bee it has not possessed so much con- sciousness as to be aware that it loved its brother, else it might have needed and evolved an opposite feeling of disturbing hate which could hardly perhaps have wrought so usefully in the beehive as it has done in the human hive. However that be, certain it is that apian intelligence and virtue, which mankind, had they minded, might obviously have learnt by observation of the bees instead of themselves painfully evolving them, are the result of the altruistic evolution of organic matter in bee-form and discharged functionally by its exquisitely fine and complex structural mechanism, the subtile ingenuities of which in- finitely surpass the finest mechanisms of human invention. The long, long time that must elapse before man toiling consciously at the improvement of his cumbrous and noisy flying machine can embody so much unconscious contriv- ance, power and speed in anything like such minute and fine structure. That may be, if it ever shall be, when he has learnt to release and handle the condensed energies of the disintegrating atom. With what heedless indiffer- ence he now crushes the small gnat or fly ! Yet he CH.VI PERFECTIBILITY & PRACTICABILITY 311 might reflect that in its structure organic matter exhibits an implicit ingenuity of reason and skill a fund of un- conscious mind, if you will which it is never likely to attain in the laboured constructions of intelligence, which are its latest developments : that in the wisely industri- ous spider, for instance, were framed and employed its admirable spinnerets ages before Arkwright invented the spinning jenny. "The infinite wisdom which has planted such marvellous instincts ! " naively exclaims the admiring theologian, justly appreciating their excellent work, and stops there pleased with the mystery which he hugs as sacred and resents examination of. The positive enquirer, not seeking the wisdom outside the admirable structure, finds it incor- porate there and proceeds to enquire what is its char- acter and how it was organically acquired and became instinct in it. All too prone is the overweening conceit of human self- consciousness to under- value or ignore what is outside, and to over-value and glorify what is within it. Yet much that is outside it excels that which is within it and the essentially productive part of mind is not within it. How more intelligent in its special performance could the bee be, how more virtuous, were its intelligence and virtue self-conscious ? Consciousness could add nothing to their value although as self- consciousness it might lessen their perfection. A keen and increasing self-consciousness is without doubt the characteristic distinction of man, he being still in the making, but is it therefore of transcendent value in itself and even certain at last to promote a sound and stable development of humanity ? It may possibly tend, if too intense and indulged, as it does in the individual, to spoil the will to act at all events to act resolutely, sanely and unsentimentally. When the rolling rock crushes the man and the bee at the same moment, the man had he time to think might feel himself to be greater than the bee because he was conscious of what was befalling him, but what can it advantage him (if the dead, man or bee. 312 MENIAL URBANIZATION PT. n rise not) when they are both crushed and he knows it not ? It is instructive again to think on the signal parental virtues incarnate in the small bodies of bees and ants. In respect of loving care of their offspring they exhibit as admirable examples of devotion as mankind do and sometimes do not, although when an extraordinary instance of such human devotion occurs words fail adequately to express the admiration. There is certainly something to do more than wonder at in the attention which bees give, and men do not, to the prudent reproduc- tion of the species, the care with which they tend and fend for the queen-mother as the symbol or representative embodiment of the race, the devotion with which they caress, brush and daintily feed her. And again in the strong collective love of offspring and the passionate zeal to preserve them shown by the busy ants when, their nests rudely upset, self- forgetting and self-sacrificing, they rush about in anxious hurry to carry their pupae to a place of safety : conduct truly heroic were ants only aware that they are heroes. Do they then act as mere organic machines, and do men not act all mechanically when they perform perfectly automatic acts which they have learnt consciously by degrees to perform thus uncon- sciously. Here, again, the possession of a reflective con- sciousness which, lacking the proper plexuses of cerebral tracts, the ants cannot have in the same measure, would add nothing to the virtue and value of the work, though it might increase the vanity and hamper the execution. So far from being the exclusive property of the human species love itself when the thing in its concrete varieties and different meanings, not the word only in the abstract, is considered is plainly a property of organic life in its humble forms, being an essential attribute of its repro- ductive function. To call it mere blind instinct in the lower animal and to make it specifically divine in man because of its more complex and exalted quality is to make vague words do duty for clear thought, nothing CH. vi PERFECTIBILITY & PRACTICABILITY 313 else than the conceit of human egotism. One of two conclusions necessarily follows from unprejudiced observa- tion and reflection : either that it has transcendent value in the animal, or that it has no special transcendent value in the man ; both which conclusions are repugnant to human self-esteem bent on virtually limiting the divine, and love as most divine, to human consciousness. Here, in concluding this chapter, the question may fairly be put whether self- consciousness has the tran- scendent cosmic value which it is the customary conceit to ascribe to it. When all is said it is a hindrance rather than a help to the best work, although a necessary accompaniment of its attainment, a defect rather than a grace in the perfected relations and conduct of life. Consider the self-conscious woman who, aping the vulgar fashion with a fidelity surpassing that of any imitative ape, imagines that she elicits admiration when she pro- vokes a stare by her affected carriage or the grotesque absurdities of her costume (which she herself will despise, after two or three years) and is the more vain of her folly the more notice it draws ; the awkward shyness and constraint of the person who is thinking too much of himself in polite society ; the distasteful affectation of the self-conscious preacher or orator who is less concerned with what he has to say than with his own rhetorical display in saying it ; the skilful acrobat who spoils his performance and perhaps hurts or kills himself through an unlucky intrusion of self-consciousness ; the poet or other creative artist who is not so pregnant of his subject as to be unconscious or barely conscious of its gestation in him ; the prose-writer too who makes his style utterly bad by thinking more of embellishing it than of lucid and simple expression, or nauseates the reader with the pleasing discharge of his incontinent sentiment in ven- tosities of inflated verbiage. It would hardly be a paradox to say that the func- tion of consciousness is so to direct, guide and regulate assimilation in the interactions between the individual 314 MENTAL ORGANIZATION PT . n and his environment as to construct and perfect un- conscious function so to rule the organizing process as to form the fit nervous pattern for the particular work which it may then perform by a scarce conscious instinct automatically. Assuredly the human mind as well as the human body would be in poor case without a number of these organized nervous complexes which, embodying the lessons of experience, effect an immense economy of time and conscious labour, and now by their appropriate word-symbols denote values which can be used abstractly in thought without constant reference to their concrete basis in experience. Self-consciousness is a necessary and important factor of man's becoming, being evoked by the hindrances to adaptation in his environment ; when he has become the perfect being he fain would be, having attained a complete equilibrium with his environment, he may be little conscious, if not unconscious, of himself as a product in the order and unison of nature. Then too it may be that with perfected knowledge he shall attain the felicity which he is fabled to have forfeited in Eden when he sought unwisely to know, lose too the consciousness of good and evil which he obtained in consequence of his curiosity, and finally gain for ever somewhere the bliss which he lost by his neglect to eat of the tree of life and live for ever there. Note to p. 304. The story of a South American Colony (New Australia) is instructive. William Lane, an ardent Socialist and brilliant journalist, after the failure of his first plan of advancing the socialistic millennium by capturing the Trade Unions of Australia and promoting a general strike, which caused wide- spread disaster, decided on a stupendous programme of wholesale migration. The Government of Paraguay granted 450,000 acres of excellent agricultural and grazing land free of charge. Thither he sailed with 241 pilgrims, men, women and children, who were afterwards followed by 190 more. Troubles occurred from the outset, some having secretly reserved pocket money who were supposed to have put every penny they had into a common treasury. Then dissatisfaction arose as to the way in which labour was distributed, the men who were set to dig wishing to ride after cattle, and the cowboy wishing to be a schoolmaster. In the end Lane, who had made himself a tyrannical despot, found it necessary to call in the native soldiery to maintain his CH. vi PERFECTIBILITY & PRACTICABILITY 315 authority. Secessions of members followed who appealed to the British Legation to be assisted out of "this hell upon earth," as they called it. Then Lane himself seceded with 45 followers and started a new colony which soon collapsed in discontent and misery, so that he deserted it and returned to Australia to live under protection of the society which he had passionately tried to upset. Those who remained behind in the New Australia elected a new manager, abjured their socialist and communist absurdities, returned to separate ownership, settled down to hard work and are doing well. {New Australia : the Story of a South American Colony. Stewart Graham.) Several colonies, more or less socialistic, have been established in the United States, but one after another has failed to survive. Those which survived the longest, and those which perhaps still survive, were bound together by some special religious faith and doctrine : their socialism in fact a special and exclusive socialism proudly enjoying its own superiority of creed and conduct. SUPERNATURAL AND NATURAL COMMUNION Severance of self from nature. Bodily and mental sympathy with it. Anthropocentric notion. God, Immortality, Freewill. Uncaused first cause. The infallible testimony of consciousness. Mystical feeling of primitive minds. Poetical feeling. Matter as divine as conscious mind. The speed and physical basis of consciousness. Conceit of personal consciousness. Self-love and immortality. Intuitive personal certitude. Animal and human social development. Organic construc- tion and design in animal life. The propulsive force of vital impulse from solar rays. A lesson of social progress and retrogression. Pro- gressive and stagnant socialization. Liberty, equality and fraternity. The lateral extension of humanity by destruction. Social servitude and its compensations. The past value of individual uprisals. Self-love of organized bodies and virtual impotence of the individual. His possible influence on a plastic and modifiable social environment. Self-assertion a fundamental life-instinct. Subordination of individuals in a social as of cells in a bodily organization. Supernaturalism, positivism and the scientific spirit. MAN in his pride of supremacy and conceit, if not now of a special creation, at least of his special sanctity and destiny, severs and sequestrates himself from the nature of which he is part, prides himself on a sacrosanct nature in but not wholly of it, forgets his root in it, his essential dependence on it, his vital unity with it. Yet the sober truth is that neither in origin nor in nature nor in function nor in end is he the separate and independent being which he would fain be : nowise an end himself but means to an unknown end. The purpose of nature, if it has one as he, because he purposes, holds that it must likewise have he owns to -be inscrutable, its ways past finding out, yet while perceiving that its purpose is the ending of his life on earth he is sure it cannot be his end. 316 CH. vii NATURAL COMMUNION 317 However that be, certain it is that his present life con- sists in direct action and reaction on surrounding nature, physical and social &r/nzmental, tntermentail and intra- mental. 1 Beginning as what superficially looks like homogeneous protoplasm which grows by formation, proliferation and differentiation of cells, he lives and grows, like other organ- isms, by suitable adaptations to or rather interactions with and incorporations of his environment, evincing his funda- mental affinities with vegetable nature by the need and use which he has of it to feed him, and by the signal effects which its essential alkaloids produce on his mind and body, either to hurt and lame or to aid and raise their functions : their essences and his essence in intimate natural sympathy and his vital interactions with external nature, though vastly more complicated, as natural and necessary as those of unicellular life. Too profanely materialistic it might be to enquire scientifically what is the real nature of the physical and psychical process which takes effect when alcohol, opium or some similarly acting drug exalts his mind to a state of blissful reverie, or quickens it into an exhilarated activity transcending its normal functions, thus enabling him sometimes, as the mystic says of his self-suggested transport, to " pass beyond humanity." The enquiry might suggest a too near kinship with external nature and lower the proud sense of human separateness and destiny. As it was once thought right to hold the geocentric notion of the universe, so it is now thought right to hold the anthropocentric notion of man as the noble creature for whom the universe has been created and is in everlasting travail. 2 His personal consciousness which in its supreme achievement is the splendid light by which all things shall in due course be illumined, not merely as 1 Extramental has been used to signify the outward impressions made on mind ; intermental the interactions between different minds ; intramental the complex and intricate operations within the same mind. 2 In a recent article in a leading quarterly Review the writer boldly asserts that "the universe was created for no other purpose or end than the 318 MENTAL ORGANIZATION PT. n phenomena but intuitively in themselves, without which they would presumably be meaningless. Other planets in the immensity may, it is true, perhaps be inhabited, but in any case his small planet is plainly glorified above all planets by being the habitation of man and the scene of the stupendous mystery of a divine incarnation and supreme propitiatory sacrifice for his sake ; a dim pre- sentience or premonition of that culminating sacrifice, so long delayed and so recently executed, having neverthe- less been deeply latent from the first in the religious in- stincts and barbarous rites of primitive savages, and even obscurely foreshadowed through past ages by a succession of gross sacrifices, human and animal, to supplicate and propitiate the unknown powers, benignant and malignant, of the universe. Sure of the inestimable value of himself as a self- conscious being divinely infused and " trailing clouds of glory " whence he came why he is here and whither he is going he cannot choose but find in his desires agreeable solutions of the great problems of thought which exercise and sometimes trouble his reason : God, since there must be a Supreme Personal Being whom he can love and pray to, fear, flatter and adore, in whose image he is made and he makes more or less in his exalted image ; ascribing to him in perfection the attri- butes of love, pity, anger, hatred, jealousy, righteous hatred and vengeance, which he possesses in part, and who acts omnipotently and omnisciently in the same intelligent way in which he does tentatively and im- perfectly ; Immortality, because as he loves life while existence of the human race." What will become of it when, the human race having come to an end, it is bereft of its glorious inhabitants and left derelict ? Likewise the late Dr. A. R. Wallace "The final purpose of the whole universe was the development of so marvellous a being. " In this declaration human self-esteem and self-worship plainly reach their utmost height. Only by virtue of that superlative conceit of human value could any one venture to divine the purpose of creation and persuade himself that the innumerable multitude of suns and stars through infinite space were created and set in motion from all eternity to serve the production of his transient self. CH. vii NATURAL COMMUNION 319 noV alive the craving to live is an instinctive assurance of the heart transcending reason that he shall go on living for ever somewhere, for it is incredible that such a yearning should have been fast rooted in him otherwise, though the truth is that life would not be life if it did not crave, hope and strive to live ; Freewill, since he can choose to do this or that, or not to do either, and therefore acts freely yes, even when, sore afflicted and life-weary, he freely hangs himself, or as his similarly afflicted neighbour, not being life-weary, goes on living. Similarly afflicted, it may be, but not equally ; for hereditary temperament and incarnate memory of special life-experience count for a good deal in every human determination, to will as he likes not being to determine his likings. Freewill obviously can never act even in its highest metaphysical sphere without memory, which is confessedly not free but always tied to its physical registration of experience and determined by it. That is the funda- mental fact beneath the conscious pulse of power which the separatist ignores. The scientific enquirer who faithfully observes and rightly appraises the influence of hereditary antecedents and training in the racial structure and particular formation of individual character, and justly weighs the developmental effects in its different circumstances cannot choose but take a different view of will and its freedom from that of the pure introspectionist who, delighting in its present exercise, takes no account of the necessary physical antecedents of his self and it. As everybody, being a self, likes to act freely to maintain and develop self and by law of life dislikes being hindered in self-expansion, he translates the un- hindered action of which he is pleasantly conscious into the notion of an abstract and independent freewill ; not otherwise than as the moving stone (to use Spinoza's illustration) < might no doubt do could it think and act consciously, and as every living creature which moves, though itself necessarily moved, perhaps implicitly believes 320 MENTAL ORGANIZATION PT . n it does. Having thus fancifully imagined an uncaused will moving in a world of motion in which one wave inevitably pursues and is preceded by another, the skilful artificer is not disquieted in the least by the notion of an uncaused first cause ; for he stays not to reflect that cause as known by him is always effect and without antecedent has no meaning, is a word only without substance. Consciousness having axiomatically postulated its transcendental value as a means of communion with the supernatural, it is deemed the gross error of the crude materialist to think that although it is aroused into being through the several avenues of the different senses and strictly reflects their special and limited impressions, being a special consciousness for each special sense, its highest composition of their special consciousnesses never illumines more than a mere fraction of the universe ; that all which it really testifies to is the very limited relations of the particular self and its environment, whether animal or human, being never the same in any two selves nor the same in different moods ; that it is in fact the precise consequent of the reflecting function of fine and complex cerebral structure, with no demonstrable existence on earth apart from that or similar structure. That the body can thus generate consciousness in itself is thought wildly impossible (notwithstanding that things thought impossible do occur) but must be put into it from without by a separate mind. Yet creatures living in the uttermost depths of the sea, where no light from the sun can ever reach and be put into them from without, do generate and somehow utilize the light of their luminiferous organs ; which would once have been thought equally impos- sible. The objective observation of universal causation in the physical world is forthwith discarded by the spiritualist in face of the intuitive testimony of his particular spirit which, whatever its quality, claims to be infallible. The glorious privilege -of the human species being to be in vital communion with the supernatural, its natural property to have supernatural vision, the mystical feeling of a transcend- CH. vii NATURAL COMMUNION 321 ental union is the absolute certainty of the heart which no thought of the head can touch ; the deepest, truest, most vital experience of the person who is constitutionally gifted by grace of nature to feel and interpret it. Of this fact he is subjectively sure, being happily one of the blessed elect, although his neighbour who has to do with him objectively as a working being in worldly affairs, seeing him as others see him, fails to find in his personality and conduct anything specially suited to blend with the divine, and sometimes sees a good deal that seems not so suited. By visible fruits in conduct he is neces- sarily and properly judged, not by the invisible super- fine feeling which he reports of himself and magnifies absolutely. The natural history of primitive human beings, it is alleged, witnesses to traces of communion with a super- natural reality ; for they have notably possessed the vague feeling of a quasi-mystical common life or communion with external nature, a dim sense of something interfused, and expressed their relations therewith not through the detached and definite ideas by which some anthropologists, themselves possessing them, are tempted to misinterpret primitive beliefs and customs, but by a conjoint reaction of interfused feeling, perception and action which is vague, undefined, instinctive or, as they think, magical. Living in and by the dynamic energy of the universe operating throughout surrounding nature and in their nature, how could they feel otherwise ? Moreover, it was by virtue of a life in common with external nature that they did not always look on death as so distinct from and opposite to life as civilized persons fearfully do ; to their primitive minds the dead were not so wholly dead nor the living so independently alive. Thus to attribute life to so-called dead matter was perhaps, after all, not so great an error as for modern thought to overlook the constant and necessary part which death is of life. The young child, again, whose mental development repeats in passing sketches the mental Y 322 MENTAL ORGANIZATION PT. n development of the race, as its embryonic development indicates in brief the long bodily development of animal life through the ages, evinces in its affection for and play with its inanimate toys a similar feeling of indistinctness between dead and living things, if not an obscure instinct of their continuity. To transfer modes of distinct and logical thought to simple minds which never dream of such explicit reasoning is hardly more reasonable than it would be to discover the doctrine of the Trinity, implicit or explicit, in the religious beliefs of savages, as some persons, set on finding not religion only but their own religion innate in the lowest specimens of mankind, have ventured to do. If reason imports proportional rules of interactive adaptation to the external world, how can the low savage who has not made the proper assimilations formulate the reasons ? To postu- late the required religious instinct in him is no doubt natural, since it is pleasing self - adoration, but it is absurd to construe it into definite ideas and processes of reason. Man undoubtedly lives and feels before he thinks, and lives and feels more deeply and largely than he thinks : it is not thinking which makes life and feeling but life which makes thinking and feeling, and by consolidate thinking and feeling that his unconscious mental life is built. Moreover, as his fundamental instinct is to live he will always cherish those feelings, consonant thoughts and suitable symbols which incite and help him to live best in the circumstances of his situation and to have life more abundantly. Poetry assuredly is not scientific, would not be poetry if it was, yet civilized people feel in it a fine and mystical sense of unity with surrounding nature and derive thence an inspiration and exquisite joy of feeling which they could not get from any purely geometrical demon- stration or scientific exposition or other subject of mere cognition. Its metaphors, similes and allegories, literally understood, would often be absurdities, but its spirit and melody bespeak a deeper unity with nature and more vital CH. vii NATURAL COMMUNION 323 value than science can formulate. 1 Modes and tones of finer sensibility naturally go along with successive rises to more refined thought and feeling. The. ideal which the great poet or painter strives to embody in his work is not a bare copy of nature but the expression of nature as seen and felt through his nature : the product not always a success, it must be owned, but when perfect an acute apprehension and beautiful exhibition of nature's subtile harmonies as felt and framed by a finely susceptible mind. It might then, indeed, like the religious instinct, be fanci- fully viewed as of supernatural origin and the presage of higher being to come. All this the stubborn materialist can frankly admit without acknowledging himself to be confuted and silenced. To him matter is equally divine with so-called spirit and its operations at bottom as subtile, recondite and wonder- ful. When he thinks on the admirable work which it has done from its beginning as protoplasm through its suc- cessive ascents to the human form and structure how can he think otherwise ? He will continue to insist on the undeniable fact of observation that consciousness is always individual idiomorphic, so to speak of specific origin and scope, localized in complexes of cerebral structure and answering in contents to their place and state ; its manifestations always demonstrably extinguished in exact proportion to the decay or destruction of its physical substrata. To make it absolutely independent of body and place is to contradict the plain evidence of ob- servation and experience, and to call it infinite in its reach, nothing else but to translate an adjective which is 1 The fantastic events and persons of the Divine Comedy and Paradise Lost may perhaps cause surprise in time to come that men could have imagined such preposterous representations and held such beliefs, although it is not likely that their creators believed and meant them as real. Yet as man through his special mental structure creates the special fashion of the world in which he lives, in changing fashions therefore as he changes, they were mental realities, useful symbols or fictions, which had their seasonal value in the continuous flux of nature through and by him, in which flux truth is ever in slow becoming. Moreover, the melodious rhythms of the poetry, like those of music, are a personal gratification ; they strike a finer rhythm of feeling than thought can apprehend and formulate. 324 MENTAL ORGANIZATION PT.'H mere negation into a positive something which is purely fictitious. The monstrous absurdity, it may be said, to limit in time and space consciousness which in the twinkle of an eyelid can travel from Kamschatka to Peru, from the remotest known past to the present, from the pictured beginning of life to its evolution in the categorical moral imperative ! Still impenitent, the materialist may protest that it never does really travel far in space and always does take time to travel ; that it only travels actually from one tract of the brain to an adjacent tract at a definite and variable, though not always at a yet measur- able rate ; that a person who had never heard of Kam- schatka and Peru, lacking the structural or in-structed tracts of thought, would in vain attempt to start it on the voyage. 1 All mental instruction with its corresponding consciousness imports organized construction (as the word instruction etymologically signifies), all forming of immaterial mind its material in-forming ; for which reason when dissociated tracts are severed functionally from their federal union, as happens in delirium and dreams, the result is a dis-tracted or disintegrated mind doing wondrously vivid and wild work of disjoined and misjoined contents. Following up his defence by a counter-attack the materialist can go on to argue that when the spiritualist, rapt in awe-struck admiration of his own consciousness, refuses to think of its physical genesis, its necessary organized tracts of motion and its possible extinction he is really thinking only of his personal consciousness and its possible disappearance for ever ; no life liking or able to realize its non-life, and most lives fearfully averse from trying to do so. To be subject to the common law of nature by dying is looked upon by human self-esteem as 1 Juliet was mistaken when she passionately exclaimed : " love's heralds should be thoughts Which ten times faster glide than the sun's beams." Her thoughts travelled by physical paths no farther than the image of Romeo in her own mind, and not so fast as the sun's beams. Thought notably travels at diverse paces in diverse minds and at different paces in the same mind. CH. v NATURAL COMMUNION 325 something to be dreaded, almost an anomaly in nature, the deplorable victory of " the last enemy " ; so that the person who meets the inevitable event with quiet mind, without quail or wail, is duly admired and praised for his composure ; and if a dozen persons, still more a hundred, faced by certain death in some terrible catastrophe, con- front their impending doom without rending the air with cries and lamentations, words fail to express the applause of their heroic conduct. Yet the catastrophe was probably just the natural and necessary consequence of rash or unthinking or incompetent conduct, and their fate there- fore natural and necessary. The implicit self-flatteries and self-laudations of all other creatures on earth, were they explicitly displayed and duly added up, might fall far short of the human sum. Such is the overpowering craving of individual life to live that although not distressed by the thought of not having been, many persons are much saddened by the dispiriting thought of becoming the nothing that they were before they began to be. Yet they do not feel it so hard to conceive the non-existence of some of the count- less myriads of mortals, from new-born babes " no sooner blown than blasted " to decrepit dotards, who have lived and died through the myriads of years since the human, parting from the simian, started on its own career. The hope of a personal mortality to put on immortality, true or not, rests at bottom on human self-love, and those who feel and hug the hope most intensely are notably those whose love of life and self is keenest, who would even like to live their lives over again ; the craving of a temporary self pleased to live translated into the blessed hope of an unending self. Even St. Paul could doubt what advantage it would be to him in the body of this life if his dead body did not come to life again as a spiritual body, as he ignorantly supposed the dead seed to live again. The sad and disillusioned person who is not in love with life but weary of its heavy burden and monotonous routine has no desire to go on living on 326 MENTAL ORGANIZATION PT. n earth or to live for ever in a monotony of heavenly bliss, but deprecates a delayed ending and oftentimes voluntarily ends it : his suicide then blamed by the social body because, though not irrational, it is a desertion of the post in it which he ought to hold. These considerations, the materialist argues, ought to make the individual thinker pause and reflect on the possibility of a personal and misleading bias in the matter; for if the bias of temperament never fails to operate even in pure scientific research, how much surer is its operation in a case in which the strongest personal feeling, life's very instinct of self-conservation, is ever present and urgent. But there will be no such dispassionate reflective pause on the part of the spiritualist. Away with such low-minded and humiliating reflections ; he cannot abide them ; safe- anchored in the deep of his superior intuitive feeling he is content to adore a sublime mystery transcending the limited reach of reason, and the baffled materialist gains nothing by his effectless argument. And maybe the spiritualist is wise in his generation thus to cling to the hope of a life everlasting, even if only as a probability or an ideal, for it undeniably has been and still is a useful aid to patient endurance in this life, a consolation in its afflictions, a strong incentive to well-doing ; a potent factor in human development therefore even should it one day be thrown away as a thought-fiction like other illusions which, having done their useful work in their season, are no longer needed. The impartial enquirer who tries to observe things as they are and to reflect dispassionately on them, and who moreover objects to being classified as an ist of any sort in their natural unity and continuity a continuity notably of mere sensitive adaptation up to full consciousness cannot choose but think it a pity that man does not lower somewhat his superlative estimate of self and take a more modest view of himself in keeping with his close kinship, structural and functional, with other animals. He might not then marvel so much at the social development of CH. vii NATURAL COMMUNION 327 bees nor at the organized unions of some animals for hunting and predatory purposes. Why wonder as though it were a sacrilegious encroachment on human territory that the monkey, standing sentinel during a foraging raid of its tribe, performs the same watchful function as the human sentinel during a similar raid, or that the captains in an army of ants marshal and direct their disciplined swarms in orderly march ? Only because he counts him- self so exclusively separate from, because so much superior to, monkeys and all other living creatures under the sun that he cannot own that their material minds as he tacitly assumes or openly alleges them to be possess any- thing of his superior attributes, especially such distinctive purposive action as he claims to be the special privilege and proof of his immaterial mind. Superior attributes, it is true, but not therefore really qualities of essentially different kind derived from a different source belonging to a quite different order of being or perhaps having a quite differ- ent destiny an absolute breach of motion in a material world of motion. Instead of wild surprise that there is anything of his superior nature in lower species he might not do amiss to discover how much of their nature there is in him and to understand its import It is possible that he may err in his heart because he learns not humbly and faithfully the ways of nature ; for that learning is a sin- cere natural communion by which he develops and shall probably continue to develop his being ; the supernatural communion which his desire postulates having been in any case a useful evolution of nature through and by him. When all is said, the morality and intelligence em- bedded in the social achievements of animal life are undeniable, and no more surprising than the intelligence displayed in the multitude of its ingenious mechanisms by low invertebrate to high vertebrate creatures. Human inventions and arts observe the same principles of design and construction, being at bottom no less processes of organic construction and design than the bee's honey- comb, the spider's web, the beaver's dam, the ant's 328 MENTAL ORGANIZATION * T . n tunnels and galleries : arts which these creatures did not learn from man any more than man learnt from them or other creatures e.g. the art of weaving from the spider, the art of sailing from the nautilus, the art of digging from the mole, the art of tunnelling from the ant, the art of procreation from any animal ; l or any more than one people learnt its familiar proverbs from another ; or one tribe of savages their totemic systems from another ; or than two separate scientific explorers hunting in the same field of research who chance to hit upon the same discovery at the same time necessarily learn from one another ; or indeed than a chemical compound in one part of the earth from a combination of the same elements in another part. So far from its being wondrous strange when mental coincidences occur in different organisms on the same plane of development in a similar intellectual medium, the stranger thing would be if they did not. Organic matter in its orderly development must needs obey fixed laws and proceed along its ordained lines to its several natural fulfilments. Fortunate perhaps it is for mankind that things were so ordained seeing that they had before their eyes the examples of intelligent constructions by animals, without learning the lesson of them, long before they made the belated discoveries for themselves. Organic processes of ascending developments according to fixed laws being as natural and constant as ascents of 1 The ant, small creature that it is, in some places builds a nest several feet high, as large in proportion to its size as a cathedral compared to man's size ; plans its habitation with apartments, nurseries, galleries, granaries ; trains soldiers to march and fight under their captains ; constructs long covered tunnels above ground across open and exposed spaces ; captures and employs slaves in its service, keeps and uses plant-lice as milk-cows, and cultivates fungi to be used as food. Evidently it discovered rules of archi- tecture, the excellent uses of co-operation, the value of military discipline, the principles of good economic and social administration without human help. If it be true, as it has been said, that an ant knows every individual in a hive of 500,000 ants and after a year's absence recognizes and welcomes the return of the wanderer, it is plain that it possesses powers of acute percep- tion which human beings might envy. The sluggard might learn more from its ways than mere industry and the student of them, considering intelligently, learn more modesty of thought. c. vn NATURAL COMMUNION 329 chemical compositions in complexities, it obviously follows that the constitution of a State by organic beings is just as orderly an organic development as the web of a spider, the structure of a flower, the architecture of a bee's hive or an ant's nest. The habit is to take chemical ascents for granted without surprise as not requiring to be thought purposive yet never to wonder enough at the mystery of purposive vital ascents, although these are infinitesimally minute physical effects based on the proper subtile and chemical ascents of chemical combinations on the ex- quisitely fine biochemical processes of colloid protoplasmic matter which, however life began, now every moment convert matter from without into living substance and add new life to a living organism. So long as, and no longer than, the sun's radiations supply the propulsive energy incarnate in organic matter and stimulate it, as they needs must, to rise from simple to more and more complex compositions, so long must life ascend as a natural consequence ; for it would not be reasonable to suppose that the sun's rays which determined the origin of life and sustain its continuance itself the very " light and life of nature " did not by its perpetual beatings on the concentrated and condensed motions insphered in the smallest living matter impel it to higher and more complex motions of composition. If the proteid molecule, as it is said to do, contains more than two thousand atoms, and each atom contains an innumerable multitude of electrons whirling with enormous energy and at tremendous speed in it, no mental picture can well be formed of the number of proteid molecules and the infinite complexity of motions within the small living cell. That the perpetual beat of the sun's beams upon these locked -up motions must necessarily add to their energy and expand their sphere of operation is then a natural and necessary con- clusion. 1 1 One may perhaps ignorantly wonder why those who hope and strive to start life in the laboratory out of physico-chemical processes do not summon the sun's rays to their assistance more than they seem to do, seeing what it has done to start life on earth and how dependent all life is on it ; its 330 MENTAL ORGANIZATION FT. n As the primal living cell divides and by successive subdivisions and differentiations of cells builds the specific organic form, and as the human germ-cell, marvellously pregnant with its various potentialities, builds the complex fabric of the human body, so the vital creative motion continues to evolve a more and more complex social organization, not yet fixed but progressively fulfilling the laws of its becoming. Because the human species plays so preponderant a directive part as conscious factor in this advance it is not entitled to usurp the credit of a process of social evolution, seeing that social evolutions are just as natural, though less elaborate and complex, in other animal species less conscious of their achievements and probably quite unconscious of their merits. Not unwise indeed it might be for the human factor to reflect sometimes that a civilized structure which has been built up by slow and painful toil and by gradual continuity of growth through long time can be easily destroyed in a short time by unwise conscious meddling, for it is easy to uproot in a day that which has taken years to grow. Moreover, retrogression need not travel through slow stages corresponding to its stages of slow progression ; the downward movement being not always leisurely but sometimes furiously fast and oftentimes masked and con- cealed. As the development of human social organization is progressive, stagnation tending to or ending in retro- gression, the example of bees does not commend itself to human imitation. The societies which they have formed are stationary notwithstanding that man's dominant ascendancy did not apparently stop possible progress in them, as it perhaps has done by its hostile environment in some higher creatures in the animal scale. There is neither deterioration nor improvement in their economy, poetic name, Phoebus, having been given to it because it was the light of life tf>Cjs fiiov, and the word Sunday still testifying to old sun-worship. It is hardly surprising that there have been devout sun-worshippers, seeing how entirely the life, thought and work of the world are due to it. CH. vii NATURAL COMMUNION 331 the perfection of bee life being to continue at a stay. Chinese civilization, it is true, like the bees' society, seems to have been stagnant without very evident degeneration until it was broken in upon from outside, but the present aspiration of a progressive mankind is to rise through improving national socialization to a general humanization when nations, sick of wars, sick also of commercial greeds and competitions, shall leave off their selfish conflicts and live in liberty, equality and fraternity of their members and in peace and concord with one another. An ideal aspiration no doubt remotely abstract yet from actualities ; for the risk is that a particular nation, proud of its superiority, exulting in its vital vigour, impatient of in- feriority, and tempted by weaker life outside it, may wish to settle what is the proper type of humanity and the right method of humanization, and to impose the type on other nations by its approved methods ; which means that its might shall be the measure of their rights. That at any rate will be an effective means of preventing stagnation until the approved type is secured and perhaps a necessary means of revivifying the race from time to time. Nevertheless the hope of a perfect humanity is un- quenchable : liberty, notwithstanding that it has been a chimera in any social organization and would be more than a peril in any bodily organism ; equality, in spite of the fact that no two persons are ever born equal and many persons very unequal ; fraternity, albeit that self-interest is fundamental and one person on whom another sheds his brotherly love may be secretly devising to deceive, cheat or otherwise overreach him. Hitherto in human story tribes and nations seem not to have been drawn and bound into union so much by internal attraction of parts as forced and welded together for security and defence against hostile attacks of competition and aggression. Can the internal attraction of affection and interest be relied on hereafter to hold separate nations in union and concord ? Its weakness may still be a hindrance to 332 MENTAL ORGANIZATION M . n universal humanization so long as each nation is bent on admiring and maintaining its own type and ideal, as in truth by its age - structured nature and instinctive lust of life it cannot help doing. How can it see itself as others see it when it is a different self which must feel and think differently at any rate until it is age-structured new nature ? It is hard to think how the evolution of international ethics can take effect and universal peace and goodwill be brought to pass by extinction of national greeds, rivalries and wars. The subdual or extirpation of weaker by stronger nations, which has hitherto been the rule, would appear to be the necessary prerequisite to a lateral extension of humanity and the general advance of civil- izations. For it is plain that peoples on very unequal levels of development are naturally averse from inter- mingling in breeding and could not do so rightly in the interests of the species : the higher type would be pretty sure to be brought lower, and it is more than doubtful whether the lower would be raised higher. When two races at very different heights in the human scale breed offspring the product seems to be much like that which ensues when a higher civilization is imposed forcibly on a people at a lower level : the offspring do not inherit the unsuited virtues of the higher, but do inherit the suited vices of the lower development. Prospective thought is thus confronted with a perplexing contradiction : on the one hand is the necessary destruction of inferior races in the interests of an advancing humanity ; on the other hand is the ideal of a perfect humanity to be brought about by universal brotherhood. Meanwhile the motive forces of actual conduct which virtually operate are the lust and power of stronger life with its primary passions however speciously disguised. It is noteworthy that even hives of bees, although they are on the same level of de- velopment, sometimes fight furiously and have been seen to slaughter one another in numbers over a derelict honey- comb. Much as they have learnt in socialization, they CH. vii NATURAL COMMUNION 333 have not learnt thoroughly the lesson of peace and good- will on earth. The species not being progressive, however, the bigger hive is not morally impelled aggressively to attack the smaller hive by its side and perhaps extermin- ate it in order to promote the advent of an ideal Apianity. Therein the superior human species witnesses to its superior vital energy in the service of nature and to the evolutional impulse which it has usurped and represents in the struggle of life. It may perhaps be taken for granted that a hive of bees would make a speedy end of the inspired bee which, rebelling against the rigid rule of the hive, tried to make a new start of development : their instincts inveterately hostile to such variations as might disturb the undeviating social routine. Yet there could not have been so complete a suppression of individuality in the successive stages of gradual ascent made by bees from the single honey-cells of the solitary bee to complete colonies ; for they, like men, apparently first lived in scattered dwellings before they built great cities. The humble-bee still lives in its solitary home, and is perhaps more happy in its selfish freedom and unenslaved activity than the slave of the hive in its social servitude ; for this might perhaps harbour a doubt, could it reflect, whether the final value of the hive, to be ruthlessly rifled by bear or man, was such as compensated it for its sacrifice of freedom and independ- ence. The individual bee, however, in its fixed social economy can hardly be said to gain the higher freedom, wider scope, larger powers of enterprise and execution which the individual man gains in his progressive socializa- tion. Although he may sometimes think himself unduly cramped, hindered and pestered in his civilized environ- ment and inwardly resent its conventions and restraints he cannot live apart like the solitary bee ; to his higher social nature a social mental atmosphere is vitally essential now that he is a social animal ; and he would assuredly feel himself mentally stifled if transplanted into the dull 334 MENTAL ORGANIZATION PT. n mental atmosphere of a savage society, even if he gained thereby the freedom to go naked and throw off all civilized encumbrances. A dull, heavy, fixed routine of tribal servi- tude to its sacred and silly customs weighing constantly on it would far outweigh any gain of personal freedom, vastly curtail his liberty of doing much that he is now able to do in his social environment, repress too the impulse to aspire and strive towards higher being which emerges in some members of a civilized society and initiates a fresh advance despite its dominating customs. Being permeated by its collective spirit through social union and service, its members feel and slowly respond to its evolutional im- pulse when it progresses, as also, it must be owned, quickly to its downward tendency when it retrogrades. Assuredly, if it lose its aspiring variations either in consequence of a stagnation which optimism repudiates or because it has attained the unchanging perfection which optimism at the same time expects, its collective will is likely, if not cer- tain, to impose on its members as compulsory and unpro- gressive a servitude as that which the collective spirit of the hive imposes on bees. The grave question is whether the desired but not defined progress to perfection shall continue if personal desire to obtain distinction and the rewards of superior work be superseded in a social community by co-operative work in which all share alike and of the fruits of which no one claims more than another. Will the superior person feel the desire to rise, exert the energy and obtain the freedom to fulfil himself? He may perchance sometimes doubt whether his particular social or even national body is worth the sacrifice. Hitherto it has been by the free exercise of individual qualities in the social body, even when these were sometimes of doubtful virtue or appar- ently vicious, that the variation al upleaps have occurred which have led to higher developments. Fitly endowed persons here and there have from time to time risen out of the rut of customary thought and feeling, earnestly resolute to express themselves, and started the variations CH. vii NATURAL COMMUNION 335 which, being disturbing to the general body, this by self- conservative instinct in its own defence has been prone to martyrize or suppress ; for the new start is an unwelcome intrusion, more or less hostile to the existing organization and therefore resented and resisted by it, actually sup- pressed sometimes when it is inopportune. To defend and preserve itself is the instinct of every organized body and of every definitely organized body in it, and that even when the instructed form is the fixed mental prejudice of a creed, a custom, a convention, or the error of a particular mind ; whence much apparent mischief in the realm of thought not only where prejudice always assimilates gladly that which feeds it and rejects that which is distasteful to it but also in the economy of a commonwealth. 1 No sooner is a sect, party, union, league, guild of persons of any sort formed than its first impulse is to maintain and strengthen itself, to initiate recruits into its mysteries and probably to wrangle and quarrel with other bodies, its collective spirit regardless whether its interests are the interests of the community but sure that in fighting for them it is doing righteously. Happily in the end, after much waste of energy, a resultant line of motion ensues out of the various antagonisms and compositions of forces. As for the individual in a large and complex society, he is practically impotent by himself however clear-sighted and earnest he may be ; for little or nothing can be accomplished save by the formation of cliques, leagues, parties, unions and like confederations of like-feeling persons pursuing the same ends. He can usually do nothing more than look on in sad or sombre indifference or cynical amusement, letting things be what they are and their consequences what they shall be. Hence the individual apathy which is apt to ensue in a growing social servitude, with tame or sombre sub- 1 Mind in the main cannot bear to rest in doubt ; a belief of some kind for the time it will have ; therefore the dislike or refusal to doubt is a strong and steady support of a superstition, a philosophy, a prejudice, even a vicious custom : scepticism repudiated as a bad habit of mind, even when it doubts what ought to be doubted for the sake of truth and progress. 336 MENTAL ORGANIZATION PT . n mission to bear unconcernedly the ills that are rather than make futile attempts to mend or end them. Is it incredible that a similar apathetic feeling generally could ever be engendered by the social domination of a social- istic community ? or that the chances of individual varia- tions to start or, if started, to develop might not then be lessened ? If such organic upleaps are not what are called spontaneous but responses to subtile impressions from the environment, what would happen when there was no variation elicited in a uniform social environment ? In spite of dispiriting doubts which may be presumed to proceed from short views of the human career, faith in its supernatural origin and destiny forbids pessimistic doubts of its perfecting advance ; its visible course now being a race to its invisible goal hereafter. Unlike the physical order of nature which is fixed and man must conform to it if he would live and prosper, conquering through obedience, the social order is yet plastic, more or less mobile and modifiable ; and the useful change is initiated by the unquiet person who does not rigidly con- form to the rules of customary thinking and doing, but is urged by a spontaneous impulse of his particular nature to break through the restraints of routine and to start on a new course. Oftentimes, too, to his own discomfort ; for among the innumerable variations in mental as in other organic matter, many or most of which untimely perish, the one which is preserved by natural selection or by its own elective affinities has usually to grow in face of much blind neglect or bitter opposition. Happily, perchance, after a while the solitary pioneer draws around him a small band of admiring followers who expound and defend his doctrines, obtain recognition of his work, and rescue it and his name at least from immediate oblivion ; the little leaven thence spreading and working until it leavens the whole body of opinion. Slowly, often very slowly, does the truth thus percolate downwards. The truly inspired pioneer may therefore rest in hope even when he is not heeded ; in any case he may feel sure CH. vii NATURAL COMMUNION 337 that another voice coming after him will say the same thing and say it better, may reflect also that it is what is said not he who says it which matters, and that in the end it will not matter what is said. Among the many useless vital variations which are called spontaneous and perish, nature may be surely trusted to provide the one proper individual variation of its advancing life to continue its progressive motion so long as it is inspired and impelled to move upwards. Besides, there is always left the optimistic expectation that in the perfect social state to come no change shall be needed, the perfect condition not being then rightly modifiable ; for the variation, were it started, would perforce disturb the equilibrium and be a detrimental mishap. Life in its essence is self-seeking and self-assertive in all its forms, high and low, mental and bodily ; its im- pulse always to continue and increase by subduing to its use and growth so much of surrounding nature as it can. When it is strong it fails not to exert its power rudely or subtly in the social as well as the material environment. The strong man dominates the weak man and grows stronger by the submission which he elicits or enforces : his conquest of nature then a fitting conquest of social nature. In the gratification of every faculty in which a person excels, even when it acts in the main altruistically, there is the pride as well as the joy of self-expression, not wholly untinged with a lurking feeling of superior contempt or compassion for those who are inferior. As self-assertion is thus a fundamental life-instinct, the fear is that to destroy it in the community would be a fatal hurt to the very root of life : to banish the natural out- comes of self-interest in ambition, emulation, envy and strife nothing less than to require an immaterial human nature supreme in a material world. Yet in order to make and keep up a peaceful state of felicity it might be necessary to have a near equality of good qualities in all persons, one almost as like another as one bee is like another ; an equivalence not so easily conceivable as it Z 338 MENTAL ORGANIZATION PT. u is conceivable that an enforced equalization of unequal qualities would be detrimental. The social optimist, sure that his ideal is sound and noble, does not vex himself to forecast details of execution. Why should he ? He reflects that great human movements never have been motived by reason, mankind having moved on not only by believing but by doing what was contrary to reason, and is sure that all things will go well although all persons are not equal. What creed has ever concerned itself with reason ? It would not be a creed if it did. The problem is perplexing only because of the present inability or reluctance of too egotistic selves to imagine that they can fulfil their being righteously and happily in the social organization as the diverse cells of the various tissues and organs do in the bodily organism ; for these work in due subordination and peaceful co-ordination for the common weal and at the same time preserve their different individu- alities : a result which human intelligence, had it been set to foresee it, would have thought impossible. In the ideal social progress to be gradually realized every individual self is likewise expected to learn the lesson of good service, of saving life by losing it in fit social servitude. When that happy event is brought to pass, it will be a perfect kingdom of man on earth in which a goodly number of self-regarding persons now alive would be quite out of place and may perhaps be glad to think that they will not then be living ; so dull, monotonous, flat and lifeless might such a perfect life be among perfect persons. Be that as it may, it plainly behoves the particular person who desires faithfully to fulfil the laws of social service in the social body of which he is a member to take care that his service is positive and practical. Although he hold fast the intuitive assurance of supernatural com- munion, he must recognize that his duty is not merely to feel the joy of his ecstasy but to put mystical feeling into right social action by observance of the natural laws of social development to obey them. Feeling without action is personal and of little or no value in the sequel : as he CH. vii NATURAL COMMUNION 339 unconsciously acts usefully when he winks or coughs by reflex action in response to the proper stimulus, so he will only act usefully when he puts feeling into appropriate doing through the conscious operations of higher cerebral reflexes makes outward in nature what is inward from nature. The supernatural transports which he relishes as partial foretaste of eternal communion are liable to be, if not delirious self-intoxication, at best debauches of delight which do no good to anybody but himself, even if they ever do so much as that. They are of no social service but akin to the practice, once approved but now dis- credited, of making personal salvation the main and almost exclusive object of life ; which was a mercenary practice unwholesome even when it did not issue in the harsh asceticisms of the monastery and the nunnery, or in the hideous and odious penances of the fanatic in the desert. The ecstatic assurance of supernatural inspiration may, it is true, serve and nerve the particular person to work earnestly in outward well-doing and thus in a way to bring the supernatural into the natural. That is its excuse and use, but is it a justification ? It is the boast of the so-called Christian scientist who by prolonged exercise for days and weeks attains the proper height of mental exaltation, thus straining his mind to such a pitch of special activity as to inhibit other consciousness, that he can then actually ignore disease and pain. But can he when he is seriously suffering ? And is it really well for him mentally to stupefy disease and pain in a world of ordained pain and suffering, though undoubtedly well to abjure an aggravating attention to symptoms ? Even well for his body entirely to stifle the signs of a disease which un- remedied may make fatal progress ? But here as elsewhere a creed laughs at reason. The enthusiast who enthuses himself feels the God in him and scouts materialistic doubt. Is ecstasy ever really wholesome and informing, not rather mentally deforming and debilitating? It is in 340 MENTAL ORGANIZATION FT. n any case an extraordinary physiological condition in the particular person, who may be of small value, which verges closely on the pathological, an extravagance in the literal sense of the word as a vagary off the normal track. Nor does it appear now to be as necessary and laudable as it was formerly imagined to be. A pious belief in the Great Being of a perfecting Humanity will, the Positivist assures the supernaturalist, yield an adequate and more wholesome aspiration. Not illogically the latter insists on going back to the source from which the inspiration of humanity to move upwards is derived. He can readily agree with the Positivist that the species shall extol and commemorate the famous and forgotten persons who have made it what it is by their useful labours and share the expectation of its unlimited perfecting on earth, but he cannot agree as to the present or final value of a species which began without supernatural interposition and is to end without supernatural future. For, after all, the Great Being of Humanity is not immortal, even if it were a real Being at all and not merely a general name to designate an innumerable multitude of concrete beings who, perfected or not, must end at last. As for the scientific enquirer whose business is purely with the study of natural phenomena from which he en- deavours to eliminate the bias of personal feeling, he prudently forbears to argue with those whose testimony of the spirit provides them with an implicit postulate which they can use explicitly to prove what is required. Communion with so much or so little of the natural as he can bring himself into useful relation with is his proper task and concern ; he refrains therefore from bootless endeavours to comprehend what is incompre- hensible, to interpret what is ineffable, to predict what is unpredictable. What he justly expects is to continue to make scientific discoveries which shall bit by bit add to the interpretable, subtract from the incomprehensible, enlarge the practicable and thus improve his estate on earth that is, if he has good sense enough at last not to CH. vn NATURAL COMMUNION 341 employ his inventions to worsen it : a self-bridling disposi- tion which thus far in the history of Christendom his communions with the supernatural have not grafted in him. As life in being is so much more real than life in theory, and strong life ever victorious over weaker life, he has persistently done by virtue of his vigorous vitality what he confesses he ought not to have done, soothing or beguiling himself with the certain hope or positive belief that he will one day do those things which he ought to do and leave undone the things he ought not to do ; which is at least a valuable incentive to self- esteem and better doing. CHAPTER VIII MORALIZATION OF THE REPRODUCTIVE INSTINCT The imperious sexual lust. Value of its human product. The mental subli- mation of lust. Celibacy and Parthenogenesis. Equality of reproductive opportunity. Hazardous consequences of bureaucratic domination. The impracticable not rational. Enforced or enticed citizenship. Democratic evils and democratic faith. Spiritualization of the procreative instinct. The example of bees. Animal and human breeding. Undiscovered laws of heredity. Useful instability of a mental stock. Ascent from biological realities to psychological theories. Emotion and nervous commotion. Natura naturans and natura naturata. Effect of nurture and education on mental potentialities. The negligent error of the sceptic. Optimistic and pessimistic temperaments. Their respective values. A REPOSE of human society in peace and concord is plainly menaced not only by the strivings and strifes of individual expansion, it may be in equal or greater peril of disturb- ance from the sexual lust. Throughout all history this unruly passion has been a terribly overmastering force, its gratification the dire cause of innumerable calamities to persons and nations. Divine though it be when spiritualized in human love it is rooted in lust, and its lustful explosions have notoriously wrought innumerable sorrows, troubles, suicides, murders, tragedies of all sorts, having sometimes even turned the course of human affairs. A particular woman less in the world or she less sexually attractive, or a particular man less lustful, and the history of a nation would have been different ; so momentous and far-reaching the endless and unforeseen consequences of seemingly insignificant circumstances. Startling as it is to reflect how the course of a single life-career has sometimes 342 CH. vin THE REPRODUCTIVE INSTINCT 343 been the direct consequence of a trivial incident a slight mistake or mishap, a chance call, a letter gone astray, the least apparent accident it is especially startling, almost appalling, to observe how the history of a nation and thereafter the history of the race have been determined by an ebullition of bestial lust. That small, mean and base things have had such mighty consequences in the human drama would be a blow to man's self-esteem were his sense of his significance and his self-adoration not well- nigh unlimited. Considering coolly the faults, follies, slaughters, perse- cutions, cruelties and all kinds of crime which have marked the human course in the past in which sexual passion has often played a leading part and by which mankind nevertheless have risen to their present height of development, a pessimistic doubt might arise whether the product of such a composition of forces, although the best that nature has done after so many aeons of labour, was really of the extraordinary value in the cosmic cycle of things which self-valuation puts on it ; a suspicion too perhaps that on the occasion of a violent shock the compound forces may quickly decompose into their brutal simplicities. Religion, deeply sensible of the nothingness and emptiness of human life on earth, has found it theoretically necessary to place its true value elsewhere although it has not failed practically to put its value here. Was religion then grossly mistaken in its low valuation of earthly life ? Is the vanity of vanities of the Preacher the pessimistic saying of one who was not the wise man he was reputed to be? Or does the perfectionist per- chance nurse a pleasing self-esteem and dream a pleasant dream ? Be the truth what it may, certain it is that the continual indulgence of the sexual passion from ado- lescence to the decline of life, despite its alleged war against the spiritual nature, shows that nature has con- centrated much and the best of its reproductive energy in its supreme human evolution. Not on the low plane 344 MENTAL ORGANIZATION FT. n of lust only, be it understood, but especially also on the higher mental plane of imagination, 1 whose fruitful shoots are essentially productive and forward-reaching. It is hard to conceive how the race can ever be fit for a perfect social and moral life so long as the lust lasts in full vigour, or this cease to be the formidable danger to peace and harmony in time to come which it has been in time past. Monasteries and nunneries, which are examples of socialistic communities, have always enjoined, though not always successfully enforced, its rigorous renunciation as a logical principle no less requisite than the suppression of private greed and gain. Yet not with wholly satisfactory results. Passions of human nature debarred from their free and natural outlets of discharge are prone to find their way through trickling channels of petty jealousies, envies, backbitings, mean selfishnesses and secret corruptions. Their spiritualization has not yet been successfully achieved anywhere, least of all by the narrow special intensive religious culture which, keenly inflaming self-feeling, is prone irritably to stimulate a special physiological impulse not always then transmutable into ecstasy of spiritual love. What is the real signification of the enforced celibacy of the Roman Catholic priesthood ? It would seem to be that sexual congress marks a lust of the flesh the sensual gratification of which is opposed to the higher spiritual nature and incongruous with the performance of the sacred offices of religion ; if it was not rather a well- calculated worldly device to maintain and strengthen the power of the Church by keeping its priests a class apart, divorced from all outside personal affections and interests, bound to devote their whole energies to uphold a powerful organization always more regardful of its own interests 1 All animals below man lacking the evolutional nisus and the requisite fine mental organization of supreme cerebral structure are wholly or nearly destitute of imagination, except perhaps the dog which pursuing the scent of the hare probably has the vivid perceptual image on a lower mental plane of the creature which it is hunting, if not something of the concept on a higher plane. CH.VIII THE REPRODUCTIVE INSTINCT 345 than of those of the whole body of the State. Thus they are taught that, absorbed in its service, they will gain a higher life by losing so great a part of their natural life. What they do gain is a corporate life of dependence and irresponsibility by losing a civic life of personal inde- pendence and responsibility. Be that as it may, it is a curious surmise whether a progressive spiritualization of mankind is destined to issue at last in a revolt against their animal nature and its mode of reproduction which even savages have sometimes thought to require a sort of purification or placation by suitable rites. 1 The mystery too of a virgin's conception, which is not peculiar to one religion, what does that ideal purity signify if not that the natural mode of reproductiou common to animals is something of a degradation of the higher spiritual nature of man ? Besides, as reproduction goes on without conjunction in some low forms of life, Parthenogenesis, miraculous as it seems in the human sphere, may be claimed as an exceptional reversion there to a natural process, the miracle-seeming event being a miracle only to a limited knowledge of nature and unlimited ignorance of what is beyond knowable nature. That many things were natural which were once thought miraculous is an undeniable truth which can always be adduced to justify a belief however irrational, when there is a strong wish and consequent will to believe. Socialists can look calmly forward to the time when in their perfect community men and women shall make and break their contracts of union at will and fixed family life be done away with ; which is logical on their part, since it is hard to picture a state of complete communism while the marriage tie continues to be held 1 "When I imagine the most contemplative and prudent man in this situation (performing the reproductive function) I think he has consummate impudence to pretend to be prudent and contemplative." "This subjects every thought to it ; and by its imperious authority makes an ass of all Plato's divinity and philosophy." " People of various religions have con- curred in various ceremonies as sacrifices, lamps, burning incense, fastings, oblations, and among others in the condemnation of this action. "- MONTAIGNE. 346 MENTAL ORGANIZATION PT. n sacred and the selfish family affections and interests persist. Putting other considerations aside, they can argue that physiological reasons ought at least to dictate chastity from the date of conception in the human as in lower species ; for which reason, in indulgent concession to masculine lust, they can hint at an excuse for polygamy. Nevertheless if marriage be abolished in the socialistic community formidable difficulties likely to disturb the general harmony still present themselves. Is the physic- ally or mentally defective or otherwise repulsive person whom no self-respecting or kind-respecting person would choose to mate with, and whose propagation no self- regarding community would wish to encourage, to be debarred from equal rights of reproduction with his more favoured fellows ? His or her elective affinities, are they to obtain no gratification, their wants, though they want merits, no indulgence in an equal distribution and exchange of commodities? Thou shalt live but not propagate would be a hard and harsh addition to the ten commandments and quite out of keeping with the injunction to love thy neighbour as thyself. Yet to enjoin a just rule of distribution of sexual favours as of equality, opportunities and property might well put so great a stress and strain on human altruism as to wreck the community ; not to speak of the possible deterioration of the race which an equal distribution might entail. When all is said, to love one's neighbour as oneself requires that his self should be on pretty nearly the same level of being, and nature has a perverse habit of putting persons on very unequal levels by fashioning them of very unequal physical and mental capacities and obliging them to think, feel and act accordingly. It does not yet second the efforts of a society to make all its members think, feel and act alike, nor perhaps is its final purpose to mould mankind to one pattern of mind any more than of body ; a standardization of humanity which might be more baneful than profitable in the result. The host of officials exercising office and authority in CH. vin THE REPRODUCTIVE INSTINCT 347 the several departments of a vast and complex bureau- cracy, bound together in official league of function, could they always be trusted not only to do their duty diligently and faithfully but scrupulously to abstain from every partial or corrupt use of their positions to gratify their sexual affinities ? In this respect they might possibly not exhibit a perfect disinterestedness, yet might exhibit the enterprise and energy which the fear is that they would not do in their official appreciation and prompt use of inventions, in the instigation and encouragement of commercial projects, in the eager production of wealth, in the active conduct of business ; all which now owe so much to personal zeal, interest, enterprise and sense of responsibility, and all which might suffer seriously were the lust of personal life much weakened with hazardous detrimental consequences then to individual character. Certain it is that the love-passion will need to be radically weakened or signally transformed hereafter if it shall no more paralyze reflection, stupefy conscience and inflame will as it has effectively done in the past and does now. Away with misgivings and mean imaginings of petty details and difficulties, the social perfectionist exclaims : they are speculative troubles only which will not count seriously in practice and can be trusted to solve them- selves naturally in the perfectly organized State. The existing real is naturally and necessarily more or less hostile to the ideal. That may be so, but in the mean- time the less sanguine mind cannot choose but suspect that he and his comrades who would straightway impose the rigid scheme of a new social organization assume and presume too much. Details of execution when recklessly ignored in pursuit of a visionary ideal however fervently inspired, have a practical way of demonstrating its actual impracticability. When all is said, the impracticable is neither rational nor laudable nor possible, its abstract ideal apt to produce systematic hypocrisy and liable to be supplanted abruptly on a critical occasion by the 348 MENTAL ORGANIZATION PT. n eruption of quite another sort of more vital and brutal ideal. 1 To nurse the optimistic fancy of a perfect society in which every one, being intelligent and virtuous, shall have a clear and distinct perception of the relations of himself to other selves and to the State as a whole, a lively consciousness of civic duties, a conscientious resolu- tion to work whole-heartedly for the common good, is for the present to see visions and to dream dreams foolishly to forget that there is a large preponderance of ignorant persons in the world ninety-nine thousand of whom out of a hundred thousand have not the least intelligent notion of what is meant by the State. On the one hand, a majority of perfecting or perfected citizens would seem necessary to fashion and maintain the proper State, and on the other hand the perfecting or perfect State be necessary to fashion and maintain the perfect citizens. A mere logical quibble where logic has no place, it may be argued, for the perfecting process will proceed gradually and rightly by reciprocal interactions in a world surely making for righteousness in the main despite its arrests here and there and now and then. A continual suppression of selfish passions and conduct shall go along with the quiet growth of a generally diffused social and moral sense. Social well-doing in the past was imposed on the people by authority from above, monarchic or aristocratic, not lovingly felt and intelligently practised, priests and rulers in league having enjoined and enforced discipline and civic duty. In democratic States the rulers were for the most part those who cleverly handled, bribed and duped the people designedly, because, not fit to rule themselves, they were fit only like children to be wisely managed and ruled. Will that which was necessary and laudable once not be required in the enlightened demo- 1 Although mankind have risen through the ages they certainly have not pursued a direct line of ascent. This was at best not direct but spiral. To jump straight from one turn of the spiral to the plane above was impossible. Fanaticism which would do so is no better than enthusiasm devoid of all sense of proportion and therefore utterly irrational and pernicious. CH. vin THE REPRODUCTIVE INSTINCT 349 cracy to come, firmly bent on ruling itself righteously, fully conscious of its social duties and responsibilities, earnestly resolute to fulfil them ? In that case a small majority at least of the good and wise will be needed as a wholesome leaven to keep the commonwealth sound and strong ; for as power will rest in the majority whose votes rule its course, each member possessing equal political rights, a minority of the wise and good by one vote might be disastrous. The wiser minority would be forced then to live in servitude to the ignorant majority and to make expiation for its unwisdom. That is appar- ently what has been its frequent fate ; warning voices in a declining nation have always cried aloud and cried in vain against the follies, faults and corruptions of the majority which were surely undermining it. To say that a nation declines because its civilization is corrupt is to speak vaguely ; it declines because its citizens in the worth of whose lives its health really consists deteriorate in character and debase it. Social reforms to mend the structure are of no value when the units are rotten ; they then only further the decline. It speaks much for the virility of Roman citizenship before the republic was overthrown that the decline of the Empire from Augustus to Augustulus was prolonged through centuries, considering the characters and conduct of some of the Emperors and the gradual deterioration of the citizens ; a deterioration which a succession of five good emperors Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian and the two Antonines might check but could not stop. When the citizens forget their citizenship, are without sense of civic duty, lack social conscience, absorb themselves in personal interests and pleasures, unite in selfish leagues, vote from mere personal profit, or in unthinking servitude to the leaders of contending parties of politicians who intrigue, flatter, beguile and bribe for their personal interests (which is what happens in most democracies), feel no vital interest in and exert no active influence on the affairs of the State, regarding them with apathetic indiffer- 350 MENTAL ORGANIZATION PT . n ence or sullen self-surrender, then a decline naturally and necessarily takes effect. In which case it often happens that the surer the national decline the more stolid is the self-satisfaction, the louder the self-laudation, the more stubborn the disregard of warnings. No deep pondering is needed to show that from rule by a wiser minority and submission to its authority the ascent to sound and stable democratic government can only be a slow and arduous mount in which the education of ignorance and passion by knowledge and reason must encounter many difficulties, require sound thought, unfailing hope, prolonged and patient labour. Yet the belief in success is not lacking ; for the democratic socialist who rejects the formulated theories of a State Socialism has the sure hope that the ordained function of democracy is to rule and to rule righteously ; that although it may not rule well at first the people will learn to rule well by ruling as men learn to do by doing ; that the certain cure for its transitional evils is not less but more democracy : l does much as the mystic does who transports himself out of sight of the evil in the world by putting on an extra strain of ecstasy. The persistence and prevalence of the belief in spite of past experience of the fates of democratic government witness at any rate to the faith springing from a vigorous and exultant vitality in the nation which cherishes it. Having become a creed, democracy absolutely ignores reason and glorifies itself when it is such in name only, not even a real rule by the people who are duped and dupe themselves with the word. In the happy event of a general enlightenment and 1 Yet the persons of a nation who aspire to righteousness and proclaim their belief in the righteous future of a socialistic democracy would pretty surely, were the nation to go to war, instantly throw all their moral precepts and ideals to the winds and join heartily in support of the national cause, whether that were just or unjust. They would need to be nationally recon- stituted to do otherwise. To apply moral precept to stem the torrent of feeling would be as futile as to set up a row of hurdles to stop a big river's tumultuous flood. Like good Americans, they might wish to "hitch their wagon to the stars," but would join with the mass of ordinary Americans in keeping it usefully on the road. CH. vni THE REPRODUCTIVE INSTINCT 351 moral transformation of human nature towards which mankind has so long travailed in pain and yet patiently expects is to be brought about it would certainly seem, having regard to the story of its past, that an extra- ordinary limitation of the procreative instinct some such spiritualization of it maybe as saints have craved or achieved must be effected in human life. Otherwise the socialistic reformer and his Christian ally may justly apprehend no less danger to their perfect community from its unruly activity, of which they take or make no account, than from the self-assertion and competition of the self-conservative instinct. All the more necessary will its moralization be if the family, hitherto so valuable a moralizing social unit to regulate and purify its lust, be abolished as an. obsolescent survival which, though once useful, has become a hindrance to social development Here, again, the signal example of bees is interesting, if not suggestive. They get over the troubles that might ensue from the procreative lust by a strict self-renunciation. Among them chastity is no theoretical virtue lauded and disregarded, it is a rigorous rule of the hive. Forgoing selfish gratifications, they limit the reproductive function to the queen bee which they carefully tend, feed and house for the purpose, royal princesses which might become rival queens being ruthlessly slaughtered, as from time to time also are the lazy drones. By the effective elimination of sources of bad breeding and lazy antisocialism has the social perfection of the hive been attained and its stability maintained. Yea, such is the value which these social creatures put on good service that they are said pitilessly to expel from the hive the unfortunate bee which, having been accidentally hurt in its work, returns home unable to perform its function in the economy. Can the health and wealth of the human hive be rightly kept up by unre- mitting propagation of every sort of individual degeneracy, by careful nurture and culture of weak lives, by pitiful provision for the lazy, the vicious, the thriftless, the self- indulgent, the diseased? Yes, it may be said, for these 352 MENTAL ORGANIZATION PT . n ill-fated creatures, in whatever depths of sin they are born naturally, have an immortal significance, and meanwhile have their mortal use to further the divine process of human development by exacting and eliciting the altru- istic sympathy and virtue of those better fitted and fated by nature. Thereby the social body is consolidated and strengthened without serious damage from its bad material. Besides, it is not absolutely certain that the superior person who himself expects a life of everlasting felicity has the right to prevent the production of inferior persons who might enjoy the same endless felicity in a place in which all inequalities shall be done away with that is to say, unless the first shall be last and the last first there. The absorption of every kind of individual infirmity into the social body seems on the face of it likely to weaken and worsen it by bad reproduction from generation to genera- tion, especially when the weak, stunted, poverty-stricken and inefficient are the most prolific, the persons presumed to be better fitted for breeding purposes having the fewest children. While breeders of sheep, cattle, horses carefully select the best and purposely reject the worst specimens to breed from, a perfecting human species pursues an opposite course in its progress towards the far-off divine event towards which it moves in lame and halting fashion. Having dominated the animal world, barred evolutional progress through it, subdued it largely to his uses, man expects a superior law to provide for and ensure the future advance of his species. Will the humanitarian sentiment in the issue promote the development of a sound and stable social body? Yes, it is argued, since there is all the difference in the world between selective animal breeding and freely elective human breeding ; for while the former is an artificial measure to produce a particular character or quality useful to man, which weakens character as a whole and, soon reaching its climax, comes to an end, the latter is an all-round .interbreeding of characters and qualities through sexual selection in which divinely instilled affinities have free play, the result being a fit member of an im- CH. viii THE REPRODUCTIVE INSTINCT 353 proving social body. In the case of human reproduction it is not a mere gross attraction of lust and liking but a fine attraction of love ; and love evolves by natural law as a divine ecstasy from the subtile and complex interactions of the most refined qualities of mind between two rightly constituted social beings ; can only spring up gracefully there, for brutish lust only could be excited in relation to the fairest-faced imbecile. Moreover, these subtile mental interactions may well have their secret physical effects on the product of their union. Incarnate in the socialized brain are its social gains through the ages, as indeed also in a measure in the domesticated animal's brain. A cow with any native originality and initiative, whether amatory or predatory, would not suit the farmer ; it would break through the hedges, leap the dykes and fences, and lead the quiet milk- producing and flesh- forming cows astray. The natural cow, unaffected by human selection, would be thought vicious, as is the horse which, obeying its natural instinct not to be enslaved, kicks, rears, plunges, bites and otherwise fights against being made a mere animated machine in the service of man which generations of breeding and training have made it. A fight not really vicious but natural on its part, albeit opposed to and con- trolled by nature in its development through man, who, having subdued and trained the creature to his uses, expects likewise ultimately to train and mould all persons of his kind to feel, think and act alike as fitting members of the great body of humanity. In the finite human breast hope is happily infinite. As the secret and subtile affinities of sex yet work mysteriously, it is probably wise for the present to disre- gard fixed rules of selective breeding in the human species. So little is accurately known of the laws of heredity, so numerous and barren are the speculations in which mentally pictured entities are baptized as external realities and then mechanically distributed, and so ill agreed are people what human qualities they ought to choose and 2 A 354 MENTAL ORGANIZATION FT. n join in order to fashion the ideal human being, that any attempt to proceed by rule might do a great disservice to the race ; for it would assuredly be no easy matter to pick the right qualities out of the manifold and diverse specimens of the race and to combine them into an ideal product which might then hold well together organically. Qualities which at first sight look bad are nowise always the unmitigated and uncompensated evils which they appear to be in their day and generation ; for not only are they sometimes perforce the natural defects of good qualities in the individual character, but by undiscovered modifications, neutralizations and segregations in the bio- chemical conjunctions of germinal elements they work well in the constitutions of persons of the following generation. In any case the expectation to eliminate from human repro- duction the profuse production and waste of vital material which is the rule of nature there and everywhere, and thus to secure valuable products only, may be no better than the flattering vision of human egotism always prone to count evil that which is opposed to or it cannot use for its ends. Besides, it may be that as in the bodily organism so in the social organism there is a pervading healing force which works constantly to keep it in well-being : the patient and persistent process by which the organism quietly repairs its wounds, injuries and disorders, restoring the substance and form of damaged structure and silently absorbing morbid growths, be matched by a similar heal- ing operation in the social organism. Observation of the hereditary transmission of qualities in families shows that a bad line of descent sometimes tends to die out naturally through deepening mental and physical degeneration. Yet there may be at the same time in the same family a good line of ascent in one or another person of the tainted stock. Indeed a degree of mobile instability of the mental stock which in excess or in unpropitious circumstances issues in insanity seems positively to favour the occurrence of the variation which develops sometimes into special talent or genius ; a too CH. vui THE REPRODUCTIVE INSTINCT 355 hardened and fixed constitution of the stock being unapt to change and put forth a promising variation. Eugenic rules of breeding, if put into force, might therefore not turn out to be entirely eugenic in their consequences ; to get rid of all the qualities in the species which are thought bad might be to pluck up the very taproots of its vitality and effectually emasculate it. 1 Perchance now as heretofore the wisdom hidden from the wealthy and wise is revealed unto the poor and ignorant. Why not ? As the divine instinct of the people can be trusted safely to govern a State despite their passions, prejudices and ignorance, it may surely be trusted to order their reproductive function aright. Be that as it may, this much is certain that life will lust to live and will live while it can in spite of reason and in defiance of eugenic precepts. It were in truth to be wished that the traditional philosophy of the closet and the schools, leaving off its abstract disquisitions concerning such sublimities as the ultimate reality, the supreme good, the greatest happiness, the entity of a conscious constant, the imperative moral category, the meaningless absolute and the like verbal abstractions which notwithstanding the elaborate expatia- tions displayed have confessedly not carried fruitful thought one step forward, nor perhaps helped a single human being to live one hour better, would descend from its misty heights to take positive account of the funda- mental impulse and actual work of life in mind. Then 1 The ideal moralization of the species without actual emasculation must needs be a difficult, if not insoluble, problem. War, which demands in the warrior brave and noble qualities, the moralist deems morally wrong, yet at the same time acknowledges that it may sometimes be a duty and self-sacri- ficing devotion : a moral duty, therefore, to do wrong. Such the dilemma in which thought is landed when the abstract is divorced from the concrete, names used as things, and the fundamental vital animal force operative in the man ignored or abjured. Besides, human history thus far is a history of pro- gress by wars and the virtues which they elicited and fostered. When Captain Cook arrived in his voyage on the coast of New Zealand he found a virile race of vigorous Maoris living under a tribal system with a community of goods. That was because the different tribes were often at war with one another, the result being that the weaklings were destroyed and manly virtues of courage, fortitude and loyal tribal unity ingrained in those who survived. Can the value of the Maori race be said to have improved since then ? 356 MENTAL ORGANIZATION FT. H safe ascent on solid steps of observation and experiment might be profitably made from biology to psychology and from psychology to scientific philosophy. Man does not live in order consciously to pursue the good or the true or any other abstract inanity, any more than on the first occasion he procreates to enjoy a pleasure which he has never felt, or at any time to make his progeny good or beautiful or intelligent or happy ; nor, again, than the infant in the cradle, which joys to fling its arms and legs about with all its little might and main, at first consciously foresees and seeks the pleasure which it feels ; nor, again, does he trouble himself seriously about the transcendent value of the moral ought which, when all is said, has socially imposed on the people of one part of the earth the mandate of a moral code which was immoral in another part ; nor, again, is he much disquieted about religions which rage furiously against and whole-heartedly excommuni- cate one another, the fiercer their rivalries and jealousies the nearer they are akin. He lives because vital plasm throughout nature is insistent to increase, and because he cannot help liking to live, even when living in squalor and misery, making the best rational accommodations he can, and loving his life as much as one who lives in luxury ; and he obeys more or less faithfully the impera- tive ought of conduct which his particular social medium has inbred and instilled into him as a vital unit of it because he would suffer seriously if he disregarded or defied it. Desire of the esteem and dislike of the con- tempt of his kind are the motive forces which mainly influence him to subdue selfish passions and impulses in his social environment ; naturally so since they testify to the operation of the personal self-conservative instinct in his special sphere in which actual self-interest, latent or disguised, is a surer working force than ideal love of neighbour. The very thief in a society of thieves, if he is not the meanest of his kind, has his code of honour, although that code, like the code of honour on a higher social scale, may be far from moral. CH. vin THE REPRODUCTIVE INSTINCT 357 The actual morality of the people everywhere is not that of an ideal moral imperative in the air ; it is the collective obligation of the traditions, customs and national spirit which the thereby moulded individuals may not or dare not violate in practice. It would go hard with the savage who did not conform to the barbarous, senseless, burdensome customs of his tribe, as also in less degree it does with the nonconforming person in a civilized society, even if the savage's accusing conscience were not so grievously afflicted by the commission or omission as to overwhelm him with remorse, or so deadly hurt as actually to kill him, as has happened sometimes, a signal proof in that case of the powerful action of mind on body, which, when it is cited to confound the materialist, ought to be accompanied by the reflection that the special social environment entered essentially into the mental constitu- tion of the sinning savage, thus only rendering him susceptible to the fatal mental impression ; and futher- more that a deep physical commotion of a special cerebral complex preceded or coincided with the commotion of conscience and travelled thence by special nerve-paths to paralyze the heart. Always when a sudden shock of grief or joy kills a person the sense -excited nervous commotion, whether by sight or sound, immediately precedes the mental emotion (i.e. the out-motion), and it is the conveyed physical motion of the emotion itself detectable, though not yet measurable, by electric disturbance in the nerve- tract not the supervening and consequent conscious- ness which shocks and stops the heart. Were there no such antecedent molecular agitation of the registered experience in its fit nerve-tracts the heavens might fall and the individual would not mind the shock. These are the basic realities beneath the vague and general psycho- logical terms, the essential facts which give them substantial meaning. However that be, certain it is that to live and propagate are the fundamental functions of human as of other forms of life, hunger and lust its deep motive forges. 358 MENTAL ORGANIZATION PT. n Man did not invent nor can he suppress them ; their gratifications are direct, positive, elemental, and their sub- limations or spiritualizations on the supreme cerebral plane of consciousness the refined reasons, pleasing embellish- ments and moral justifications which a superior being naturally evolves at its height of social refinement for doing what it cannot help doing and half despises itself some- times for its natural methods of doing. Viewing matters from a strictly biological standpoint, it no doubt looks on the face of it as if a vigorous elimi- nation of the unfit after the manner of bees might be as right for a sound human as for an apian hive. But there is properly a higher standpoint from which the mistake of such hasty judgment is evident. It is plainly not right to argue from the low level of insect society to the higher level of human society, for on that higher plane a new order of impressions demands an order of corresponding conceptions in conformity to the ideal hopes and aspira- tions of the race. Bees, it is true, form an admirable stagnant society of its kind, but human society is a vastly higher and more complex fabric whose strain of evolution will presumably not cease ; the natura naturans of creative production being sure to continue its upward work through its natura naturata to unimaginable heights. 1 What matters it that animal societies are imperfect and stationary, or that many highly organized human societies are vanished and sunk in oblivion ? That is in accordance with nature's fitful, irregular, uncertain and as it were tentative mode of progression in its slow work of evolution by processes of advance in the main through imperfec- tions, failures, errors, intermissions and improvements ; not otherwise in fact than as it is with human intellectual development in its gradual advance. Not that it is safe 1 " By the expression natura naturans is to be understood that which is in itself and is conceived by itself, or such attributes of Substance as express an eternal and infinite essence, in other words, God God regarded as free cause of all that is. By natura naturata, again, I understand all that follows from the necessity of the nature of God or from each of the several attributes of God. " Spinoza's Ethics, Part i. Prop. xxix. Spinoza uses Substance and God Substantia sive Deus as synonymous terms. CH. vni THE REPRODUCTIVE INSTINCT 359 to judge nature's doings by the standard of man's doings, though he is apt enough to do that ; its ways are not his ways nor his purposes the measure of its purposes ; instead of its doings being trials, failures and errors in the whole, it may be that a trying, failing and erring being who, seeing only a part and necessarily interpreting things in terms of his finite understanding and self-idolatry, calls trials faults and failures. The human mind in general, as in every individual, makes the world it lives in. If the reflection that civilized societies have perished and that the purpose of all life is to die when its energy is spent seems saddening, a just apprehension of the wide difference between the first simple and loose society formed after the human start on its social career and the latest civilized society justifies the expectation of a general advance in ages to come, even though the advance be irregular, intermittent and uncertain. The sanguine hope is that although acquired characters be not inherited and the son does not benefit constitution- ally by the well-doing of his father (which, considering the plasticity and educability of the human brain, is not perhaps the unqualified truth it has been boldly proclaimed to be), the steady operation of good nourishment, sane and elevating surroundings and a right system of educa- tion, intellectual and moral, shall raise human offspring everywhere to a proper mental height and gradually raise the standard of height Latent in the constitution of the stock splendid potentialities are assumed : innate intel- lectual capacity which needs only the proper stimuli to develop well and a fundamental goodness of nature which, though prone to hide itself, is ready under proper con- ditions to blossom into universal moral excellence. A sound and virtuously endowed stock shall put forth germinal variations sure to thrive well, and, its germ plasm being immortal, have no imaginable mortal ending. Such is the splendid vision of unfading hope. Faith eager to believe and achieve might many times sadly fail of fulfilment were it "sicklied o'er with the pale 360 MENTAL ORGANIZATION PT. n cast of thought " and not happily blind to that which it cannot or will not see. If it were not " the sub- stance of things hoped for and the evidence of things unseen," the hope might never be realized nor the things ever seen. The sceptic may no doubt harbour a suspicion, hardly differing by a shade from a doubt, of the possibility of such human perfectibility. But of him it will be said that he is fatefully biassed by his temperament and that his fault is not to give the proper value to two weighty con- siderations : first, that in the inherited acquisitions and appliances of a civilized environment in its traditions, literature, language, arts, customs, laws and institutions mankind inherit an incalculable store of capitalized wealth to which they owe their immense superiority over all other creatures, advantages which may be expected to multiply with the progress of the race ; l secondly, that although education cannot change a character, can only educe into being and direct innate potentialities, it is still possible that its persistent operation on individual natures from generation to generation through prolonged time may occasion and implant new germinal potentialities and thus 1 It would help to realize the prodigious amount of cumulative labour which has gone to the production of the existing mental environment quietly to walk through a great library and, surveying the long rows of books on the numerous shelves, to reflect what toil of thought and execution each book cost its author, and what gleam of instruction it may once perchance have imparted, or might sometimes perhaps still impart, were one in a thousand books ever taken down from its shelf except to be dusted. The useless pre- servation of books, many of which were almost still-born, or died soon after birth, is at least a sort of testimony of gratitude for forgotten labours, although most of these labours consisted in saying over and over again what had been said before over and over again, and the books are now as worthless as the dust which accumulates on them. So proudly and sympathetically interested in itself and its past is the species that it, like some individuals, cannot bear to destroy any records of its doings, ceases not to fabricate elaborate stories of them which it calls histories and uses as instructions, counts invaluable treasures any records or portraits or relics of the eminent persons who played a prominent part in them ; secretly flatters itself in fact that as the universe was created for it all that it has been and done must be of everlasting interest to the universe ; which, true or not, is certainly egotistic egoism in excelsis hardly less extravagant than that of the madman who believed and asserted that the sun had been created specially to give him light. CH. vm THE REPRODUCTIVE INSTINCT 361 vastly improve, if not regenerate, the human nature of a perfecting social system in which nobody's potentialities shall be starved for lack of nurture. Such a gradual regeneration, even when unlimited time is granted, no doubt makes a large demand on credulity, but desire-born faith, like desire itself, is wellnigh unlimited, and takes small account of limited reason. Here, by the way, a pertinent question not inappositely suggests itself, especially interesting to those who assert the equivalence of personality and deplore the iniquity of one person's exploitation of the labours of another. Why is one man born optimistic and praiseworthy, another pessimistic and blameworthy ? The difference is obviously innate, temperamental, nowise acquired feeling in con- sequence of different life-experience of joy or sorrow : whether life be glad or sad, not a matter of events so much as of him or her to whom they happen. In the one case there is apparently a strong constitutional vital flux which is lacking in the other ; a lively flow of energy through cerebral structure whereby a joy of living, a belief in the value of life, an elastic reaction to impression, a sanguine interest in and outlook on affairs and events are natural ; the person is pleasantly thrilled by the vital flux of nature, just as the young man is in the prime of vigorous adolescence and the mature man in sympathy with the moving sap of spring, when his bounding heart, like Wordsworth's, "dances with the daffodils." In the pessimistic temperament, on the other hand, there is a comparatively sluggish vital flux, with slower yet perhaps deeper feeling, a less lively reaction, a less sanguine belief and joy in the value of life, a proneness to fits of melancholy dejection which in the worst event issues in suicide ; not otherwise than as occurs in the failing force and increasing infirmities of old age when, mental not going along with bodily decay, an utter life-weariness, heedless of daffodils or even saddened by the sight of them and other harbingers of spring, precipitates a longed- for and too long delayed ending, so gloomy then the 362 MENTAL ORGANIZATION FT. n dreary waiting for the end. 1 He feels as well as con- fesses the vanity of mortal things, whereas the life-flushed optimist, though pleased to utter his mournful confession of their vanity, does not really feel and believe what he then only repeats by rote. Even the exultant and self- assertive person who joyed in the full expression of himself and, youthlike, was prone to exult over more modest and gentler natures, sometimes then presents a pitiful spectacle of melancholy ; gloomy remembrances of the intemperate self-confidence of his once abounding life perhaps deepening his dejection. The strong self- love which buoyantly upbore him in his prime wanes naturally when the weakening self loses its vital energy and there is little of self left to be loved or loving, the self-conservative instinct itself having almost died out. Which temperament has the truer view of life's value is a futile question, either view being fit and true for the person who holds it. As for the final outcome of the different estimates, that will be seen only when the species no more feels the uplifting impetus of the natura naturans which now through the constant impulse of the reproduc- tive instinct (or propulsion, for it expresses the full vigour of bodily life acting on a particular organ) urges it to attain more and higher being, but may when it fails leave such an estimate of values as the pessimistic temperament perchance forebodes and a spiritualization of the instinct countenances. Does not Aristotle somewhere say that persons of great genius have generally been disposed to melancholy ? Seeing truly they do not see visions, and seeing deeply into realities, undazzled by illusions, they, like the Preacher, see the vanity of them : see the vanity of the illusion while it flames, not as the common way is when it is burnt out and useless. Certainly it is not by 1 In some temperaments there is a native proclivity to suicide, the inclination being notably inherited in families. It is then done not only where there is positive insanity but when there is no reason but the suicide to allege insanity. The person deliberately resolves to have done with a life of which he is weary and the prolongation of which is a pain. Like Cato after Caesar's triumph, and several eminent persons in the reigns of Rome's bad emperors, he acts advisedly and quite rationally. CH. vin THE REPRODUCTIVE INSTINCT 363 the temperaments in which reason rules and pushes to its logical extreme but by the optimistic temperaments in which the unreflecting impulse of feeling is joyous and active that the future progress of the race can be effected. 1 That being so, it is natural for the optimist to praise himself as a superior and look down on the pessimist as a defective and inferior being. The conclusions to be drawn are fundamentally bio- logical : that the prolific energy of vital production will continue its constant propulsion to increase life while the sun's beams beat adequately on its protoplasm ; that life, once produced, will, as heretofore, strive to maintain and increase itself at the expense of weaker life and in- calculable waste and destruction, without much, if any, regard to human notions of right and reason ; that the history of mankind and its nations, families, tribes and individuals is a record of vital energy in thought, feeling and conduct ; and consequently that there is plain need of an optimistic temperament to look forward with absolute confidence to a final goal of humanity worth the pains and toil of reaching that is to a perfect moralization of a race of perfect beings on earth. 1 The ascent of life is slow and joyous, in the general and the particular, the descent comparatively quick and sad. " La vie est une cote. Tant qu'on monte on regard le sommet et on se sent heureuse ; mais lorsqu'on arrive en haut on aperfoit tout d'un coup la descente et la fin qui est mort. On va lentement quand on monte, mais on va vite quand on descend. "- GUY DE MAUPASSANT. CHAPTER IX MIND AND THE UNIVERSE The bees again. Their possible sanitary sense. Human sympathies with bees. The socialistic errors of bees. Simian kinship and spiritual ecstasy. Is unlimited perfectibility an illusion? The perfecting motion of nature. Mind a part of, not apart from, nature. Idealism and Realism mutually interdependent. Consciousness and its physico- chemical factors. The dual theory. The discarnate ethereal spirit. The sufferings of the imprisoned mind. Interaction between unrelated and independent factors. Materialization of spirit and spiritualization of matter. Psyche and psycho-physical interaction. Mind and the con- servation of energy. Cosmical feeling and impotent intellect. The universe not created for the human species. The mystery of the universe and its lesson. Democritus and Hippocrates. REVERTING to the spectacle of bees from tempting digressions suggested by every aspect of the subject, one thought when not artificially made static flowing dynamically into another, it must be owned that they do not present examples of social perfection for mankind to follow. They do not repose in peace at one stay of contented fruition, which is the aspired goal of human perfection. Not only do they massacre the drones, which would be called inhumane in the human sphere, but swarms of them, after much tumultuous activity, furious or friendly, leave their well-stored and overcrowded hives at the proper time in eager sympathy and company with their young queen to migrate to fresh territory and repeat their unreflective and unprogressive routine of life else- where. In them plainly is implicit the belief that the species demands and is worth the sacrifice, and the apian is no less entitled than the human species to its special 364 CH. ix MIND AND THE UNIVERSE 365 self-worship ; for apian and human instinct at bottom witness to the vital impulse of organic nature and to the preservation of the species as the right aim of bee and man. It would be interesting to learn clearly and distinctly on what principle the bees act in deciding which party in the hive shall migrate and which shall stay behind whether as in over-populated human hives the strong and fit make the venture, the weaker and less fit being left in the old hive, or whether the weaker party is not driven out by forcible persuasion or force. Maybe also there is the prompting of an instinctive sanitary sense to get out of the saturated atmosphere and surroundings of an over- crowded life in the old hive, for bees possess a remarkably clean sanitary sense and may, more keenly than some human persons, feel it wholesome to get away from their own exhalations. Whatever be the explanation, it seems possible that, failing the outlets of free expansion and the vital vigour to enforce openings, human societies, notwith- standing their diligent care to keep themselves in health and wealth, may suffer hurt ; for, unlike bees in that respect, they have not physical insalubrities only to fight against, but in addition the unwholesome and pernicious corruptions of their superior social developments, these the more subtle, insidious and pestilent the more complex, specialized and conventional the civilization. Such infect- ing corruptions which accompanied and hastened the ruin of former civilizations are plainly not lacking in modern civilized nations ; and these, when all is said, may possibly obey the same laws of decline as they have obeyed the same laws of development. It is interesting again, by the way, to call to mind how very special and close time out of mind have been the human sympathies with bees, as many fables and some lingering superstitions testify. In some parts of the country a custom still prevails of telling the sad news to the bees, and even of putting the hive in mourning, when the head of the household dies ; for it is thought that if 366 MENTAL ORGANIZATION PT . n this respect were not shown them they would desert the hive or die. For some reason or other the two societies are supposed to be in singular sympathy, as though a kindred social feeling had been evolved by nature as the result of a kindred social evolution. The pity perhaps is that although man has thought to tell the bees his news they could not impart to him the intelligence implicit in the structure and economy of their hives. Had they done so, he might have been spared much painful labour in slowly finding out and achieving for himself what was in being and function before his eyes in that and thousands of other instances ; might now also perceive that in in- telligence and socialization, so far from being absolutely apart as he likes to think himself, he is but the supreme product in the evolution of nature. Especially instructive it is to observe how deep an instinct of unity with its productive force is signally evinced sometimes during the reproductive season by animal life, when birds, for instance, build their nests and rear their young in places close to where man is regularly at work in the framework of a pump or a post-box where they would never stay for a moment at any other time ; just as if they trusted implicitly then to a natural right of sympathy and protection which they feel at no other season. Their conduct is a sympathetic claim of organic kinship in the common function of pro- ductive nature which is then sympathetically acknow- ledged. The faith of the socialist is nowise weakened because the bees have lost all desire to improve their social organ- ization. He can argue that it is just because they rigorously restrict reproduction to its social fixities incar- nate in the queen-bee instead of allowing its motion the chances of free combinations, because they suppress pos- sible variations by the strict routine of the hive, because they kill the drones instead of providing kindly for their maintenance in the social economy, because they emigrate in swarms to reiterate the same routine elsewhere, that CH. ix MIND AND THE UNIVERSE 367 their fixed economy is a warning to avoid rather than an example to follow ; that the organic laws ruling in human social development are sure to work differently on its higher plane where manifold divisions of labour are vitally combined, interdependences and interactions more intimate and intricate, solidarity more complex and closer, variations fostered, the social feeling spiritualized morally ; in short that the universal plan will surely guide, protect, prosper and advance human social organization in the future as it has done in the past until it reach its destined perfec- tion, when it will presumably rest at last as contentedly stationary as a hive of bees is now in its stagnant social organization. It would probably help to strengthen weak knees if the socialists and those who, though not embracing their full creed, are imbued with a like ardent belief in a lofty height of human being which shall equal the fabled glory and felicity of a past golden age would furnish more solid reasons than mere desire why there shall be so vast an ultimate difference between creatures formed after the same morphological type, some of them like the orang, the chimpanzee and the gorilla hardly distinguishable anatomically from primitive man their blood-serum now of the same specific quality and all alike creeping for a while on the periodically undulating and occasionally crumbling crust of the habitable part of one of the mean- est planets in the solar system, glorified though it be above all other planets by being the habitation of man. An increase or increased use of fine and close cerebral organization will evidently be required to go along with the anticipated moral advance, unless it be that those persons who by special grace are endowed with a superior sense of transcendent intuition are exceptional instances of mind unfettered by physical bonds and capable of ecstatic flights away from any material basis ; which so far from being yet proved is not seldom discredited by observation of their little superiority over ordinary mortals in the actual conduct of their lives where real characters, 368 MENTAL ORGANIZATION PT . n undisguised by words and pretences, are displayed actually in deeds. It may appear a harsh saying, but it is none the less true, that such self-idealizing and self-idolizing persons are not the most trustworthy in the real affairs of life, from which they indulge their pleasing habit of gloriously transporting themselves. Their ecstatic exercise of spirit without properly fitted outward action being a purely personal gratification, dangerously self-deceptive, is often- times accompanied by conduct not truly commendable, nay actually detrimental to character ; for their extra- ordinary exaltation and exultation are based on physical tracts of cerebral structure strained beyond the normal life of relation to a kind of spasmodic activity which necessarily elates the pride of self, inhibits or prevents just reflection, blunts sense of proportion, renders true judgment of themselves and others in the affairs of real life impossible. Their self-deception then compounds for the faults of their real being by what they believe to be the superior insights of their spiritual being. To think the hope of human perfectibility an illusion of self-worship would no doubt be sad, nor would it entirely dispel the gloom to relegate the perfection to a life after death, notwithstanding that it might be pleasing to think that compensation was then made to those deplorable victims of a hard fate whose wretched lives on earth were nothing else but a prolongation of cruel oppression, system- atic ill-usage, unmerited suffering, perhaps long bodily agony. Without such hope of compensation these martyrs of the race might with more reason than St. Paul consider themselves of all men most miserable. With such hope they can expect to behold their oppressors humbled and themselves exalted " in that unseen state where all inequal- ities are righted," as Cardinal Newman alleged and many less eminent persons believe, but Milton with his hierarchies, orders and degrees there apparently did not. Be that as it may, certain it is that " the world is not for aye " and that the kingdom of man on earth, however splendid at CH. ix MIND AND THE UNIVERSE 369 last, must come to an end. Nor is it quite inconceivable that human expectation of unlimited perfectibility, the progress of which hitherto has been through a succession of useful illusions while they lasted, may be the supreme illusion of human egoism and egotism. Instead of life proving the nothingness of dreams, may it not be that dreams prove the emptiness and nothingness of life ? If the human race ever come to so dispiriting a con- clusion it will be because it can no more create and cherish an ideal ; which is a conclusion it will not come to so long as the creative energy of organic evolution, its natura naturans, works in and through human nature to inspire and thrill feeling. Although kingdoms may come and go and be forgotten in time to come as passing scenes in the human drama, empire after empire be into ruin hurled, a perfecting motion of nature natural however supernatural its source shall still work to raise humanity to ever higher and more perfect being, at any rate until the possible term when " the sun shall be turned into dark- ness " and life on earth end. For the present naturally the race, so believing, is not disposed to echo the dis- illusioned poet's cry that " a world weary of the past may die and rest at last." Undismayed by the melancholy story of its past it will continue to feel the joy of life and, united by the tie of a common moral ideal, strive for more and better life, despite the somewhat disheartening thought that nature has done no better after countless millions of years than make human nature what it is. It is a splendid vision of international piety but maybe a vision only ; for each nation, determined by its hereditary structure and culture, proud of its special qualities and culture, is prone, if not sure, to interpret the moral ideal in terms of its aspiring national spirit, and to count the gratification of its ambition to excel the fulfilment of its destiny and the true moral and intellectual humanization. The question at the root of all thought is whether man is essentially a part of nature, only that and nothing more : his mind just the culminating product of the Jntercom- 2 B 370 MENTAL ORGANIZATION PT. n munion and interaction of his organism and external nature. Is he on the other hand, as he likes to think and complacently assumes, something in essence above nature, a self-sufficing mental entity contained for a while in it but not wholly of it, destined to live for ever some- where after its escape from it ? By putting himself, as his habit of thought is, not merely at the summit of nature but above and aloof from it in essence, he absurdly ima- gines himself able to contemplate it calmly from outside, setting the nature which he perceives and apprehends in himself by interactive union cannot possibly comprehend but is comprehended in objectively over against himself as an external separate something ; and this even though the reflection by which he forms his thought and the very breath by which he utters it are possible only through the incarnation of external nature in his mental structure. Yet as the world which he thus assimilates and perceives is only that small fraction which his senses and motions bring him into relation with and he on a higher cerebral plane thinks, not his solely nor it solely, it would mani- festly be a very different world if he were otherwise con- stituted if, for example, he were furnished with a new sense ; and it is without doubt a quite other world to the insect and other creatures whose perceptions and acts he tries to interpret by means of his forms of perception and thought which he projects into them and probably ab- surdly misinterprets. To himself it is notably a much altered world when he is an altered self, despondent in sickness or joyous in health, not because external objects are then changed in the least but because the sad change is in him and their impressions on him therefore make another world. A minute bio-chemical change in the process of metabolism instantly transforms the world which he feels and thinks, translates him from one to quite another dream of it. The long process of evolution by which every animal species has been built up into its specific type and diverse forms implies the special external nature with which it CH.IX MIND AND THE UNIVERSE 371 was in relation and to which its vital plasm gradually accommodated itself; the resulting type then the fitly em- bodied organ of nature with its special function as a part of it Embedded accordingly in the mental structure of the human species are the special patrimonies and latent memories of its functional experiences from the cradle of its being ; wherefore human beings unconsciously re- member and consciously think alike fundamentally beneath their special racial structures of feeling and thought and, perceiving that they do so, conclude their mode of thinking and feeling to be the true as it is undeniably the highest mode. The sum of the matter is that there is no human nature without outer nature, no outer nature as perceived without human nature, no outer nature to any creature, human or animal, otherwise than as it is mentally appre- hended and formed by the percipient. If this broad statement be true it draws after it the conclusion that there is no real division of nature between Idealism and Realism, that one imports the other, and that the inter- minable and hardly intelligible disputes about their relative value are generally barren contentions over ill-defined or undefined words. That every living thing moves and has its origin and being in nature is an obvious truism, and not less true, when due consideration is given to the fact, that every pulse of life whether of body or mind is equally immanent and dependent. From the low unicellular organism which grows by assimilating matter from without, thus con- tinually making more and more so-called dead into living matter (for there is no such thing as inert and really dead matter) as it grows and proliferates by successive divisions up to the highest mental function of the most complex organism, there is no single and minutest process into which the surrounding nature does not enter directly or indirectly as a constituent factor. Every blood-cell, every nerve-cell, is vital only by virtue of the oxygen carried to it and used as a constituent of it and its function, could have no life without it ; and the special consciousnesses 2 B 2 372 MENTAL ORGANIZATION PT . n of the several senses by which external objects are per- ceived are as absolutely dependent on the oxygen and other agents of external nature for their special contents as the meanest living cell. The composite self-conscious- ness itself, different in every different self and fluctuating with every changing mood of the same self which they go to form, imports the underlying physico-chemical processes and the reflecting cerebral structures of a nature-made self in whose brain the fit paths of reflection have been physically organized. Without these organized tracts by which memory exists and the idea, unconsciously hatched, is consciously reflected or, so to speak, mirrored well or ill according to the quality of the mirror self-conscious- ness never was nor ever is in this world. By them does it exist and when they are effaced cease to exist. Such are the facts to be faced and dealt with by a positive mental science, however distasteful they may be to the theories of a more or less abstract psychology bent on making a separate mind do this or that and thereafter stay consciously to interpret itself, all the while really unconscious of the underlying store of latent mind of which it is the comparatively superficial product and outcome. For consciousness is not itself a power doing work, as it is commonly said to be ; it is but the illuminant of the precedent work done, much or most of it done un- consciously. By the prejudging assumption that conscious- ness is a constant not an infinitely variable, a fixed entity abstract from reality, true observation and thought are barred. Thence apparently proceeds much of the dispute whether animals reason with or without more or less consciousness. What is evidently needed now is a more precise definition of reason, which is a word loosely and obscurely used without definite signification of what is strictly meant by it. Instinct and reason are artificially separated by words though it is impossible always to distinguish them in action and instinct is the indispens- able basis beneath reason. Many persons who are lost in CH. ix MIND AND THE UNIVERSE 373 wondering admiration of the remarkable intellectual ability which they perceive and speak of in the produc- tions of animals forthwith recoil from the notion that they reason. And that in face of the thousands of skilful mechanical structures which, by so-called blind instinct, fishes, insects and other creatures, vertebrate and in- vertebrate, invent and use to trap their prey, to protect themselves from destruction, intelligently to provide for the safe reproduction of their kind. 1 Assuredly, whether they are or are not entitled to the word they are entitled to the thing ; they do all the work of reason by the energy immanent in the vital plasm of their forms with or without consciousness, or at all events with just so much consciousness as they need for their intelligent work. Now that the pure psychologist habitually speaks and makes use of an infra-conscious or unconscious mind, using it as a receptacle into which he puts what he likes, he can of course ascribe the work to it ; in which case he may likewise ascribe the numerous and various animal inventions which amaze him by their implicit reason to unconscious mind, and thereupon translate his blind instinct into unconscious intelligence that is so long as he concerns himself with words more than things. Mean- while he cannot well choose but acknowledge that the skilfully fitted ratios or proportions materially combined in their ingenious works is essentially of the same in- telligent nature as his conscious reason, whether done by an independent mind or by the immanent and unceasing 1 The various experiments diligently made by enquirers to decide whether dogs reason might perhaps have been rendered unnecessary by simple observation of the work of an intelligent shepherd's dog. Competent observers and unprejudiced thinkers have never doubted that they do reason. Milton seized an occasion expressly to demur to the opinion that beasts do not reason The latter I demur, for in their looks Much reason, and in their actions, oft appears. Paradise Lost, Bk. ix. Hume again, somewhat contemptuously said : " No truth appears to me more evident than that beasts are endowed with thought and reason as well as men. The arguments are in this case so obvious that they never escape the most stupid and ignorant" 374 MENTAL ORGANIZATION PT . n energy of the superabundant vital plasm in its continuing process of growth. Although individuality is in a measure separate, as it needs must be for the word to have meaning, it is not severed ; it is always a connected part of the whole, infused by it, and no more vitally detached from it than the organ from the body, the bud from the branch, the branch from the trunk, or the whole plant from external nature. To separate essentially the components of mental life in brain as matter and the mind and, having made the absolute separation, to declare mental function to be the independent function of the latter is a gratuitously superfluous metaphysical assumption directly opposed to scientific observation, which would, if true, render a positive mental science impossible. Animal minds which may be viewed as nature's tentative and instructive experiments in the making of mind illustrate and plainly demonstrate the organic continuity of the process. The right aim and work of scientific enquiry is therefore diligently to trace the natural process of evolution through its vital ascents and to exhibit its highest expression in the mental structure and function of man. It is metaphysical mind only which, drawing its energy elsewhere, can disown its relations and dispense with the vital energy of nature. Whence mind comes to be embodied or as some say imprisoned, and what becomes of it when disembodied or set free, are questions which, it is alleged, will be answered some day " not by the ordinary methods of science but by extending those methods to another region than the known material world " : the same ordinary methods apparently to be used profitably then in an extraordinary psychical region never yet entered by them. 1 By such anticipated use of them the confident hope is not only to prove the persistence of personality of every human degree and kind after bodily death, but also to understand " the conditions regulating intercourse across the chasm." 1 See the Presidential Address of Sir Oliver Lodge to the British Associa- tion at Birmingham in September 1913. CH. ix MIND AND THE UNIVERSE 375 The discarnate mind shall then be scientifically pursued on its spiritual flight through the vast empyrean and soli- cited or constrained to personal converse with incarnate spirits on earth by means of such suitably endowed mediums as the famous Mrs. Piper and like specially graced experts. As science now assumes the existence of an universal ether l of the motions of which every particle of matter is a supposed whorl or knot or complex of motions, the infinite complexity of whorls which constitute the human body, when undone by death, shall reintegrate themselves mentally and in conformity to its continuity of being abide somewhere for ever in the empyrean ; the " ethereal " or " bright aerial spirits " (as Milton called them) able then to testify to their existence by vague, fragmentary, incoherent and mostly puerile communica- tions which at their best never rise above the vulgar intellect of the particular medium. Such is the hard fate of the disembodied and much hampered spirit when summoned and painfully strained to give tidings of itself and its whereabout. The soul of the late F. W. Myers, who founded the Psychical Research Society for the express purpose of proving personal immortality, is now believed by the members of the Society to be thus labouring, though yet with poor success, to tell anxious enquirers something of itself and its fortunes since it took leave of its discarded body. The theologian who warmly welcomes the support of an eminent scientific enquirer to the doctrine of personal immortality can hardly, when he reflects, be satisfied with the picture of it as a mere ethereal existence, nor will the pure metaphysician perhaps see in it a satisfactory source of communion with the ultimate Reality ; and both prob- ably will look with some suspicion at least " on its con- verse across the chasm " with curious enquirers through professional mediums who systematically summon and 1 Speculations concerning the constitution of the universe by ethereal worlds are very much a repetition of the speculations of old Greek philo- sophers about the vortices of atoms. They also thought of ethereal or aerial bodies such as their demons were supposed to be. 376 MENTAL ORGANIZATION PT . n exploit it for their personal gain or fame. The discredited yet obdurate materialist will no doubt continue to think and say that the " ethereal existence " dissolves with the body and is thence dispersed into other ethereal whorls. In any case the extraordinary extension of the ordinary methods of science to another region than the known material world will then manifestly require extraordinarily skilled performers and may well demand for the present extraordinary credulity. The absolute severance of an immaterial mind or soul from its material body and the subjection of its function to a body which has been created for or, as some say, by it (" soul is form and doth the body make "), but from which it will one day be happily delivered, has always led and still leads to barren speculations as to how matter can act on mind and mind act on matter. The dual separa- tion is based on the supposed infallible testimony of con- sciousness, though in matter of fact consciousness does not testify exclusively to the postulated separate conscious entity ; it always testifies essentially to the mental sub- limation of the whole bodily self and to its own entire and exact dependence on the whole bodily life. 1 Putting aside prejudging assumption and question-begging terms (the general term the mind not the least) which produce a medium through which the facts cannot be observed in their naked simplicity, and viewing them as they are, it is undeniable that mind is invariably lamed by the imper- fections and disorders of its cerebral mechanism in e-xact accordance of place and proportion of degree to the defect or damage, and that it is virtually suppressed or effaced at the worst when its finely organized machinery is worn 1 Because the internal sense of consciousness is different from the special consciousness of each special bodily sense it is supposed to reveal an im- material or asomatous something of quite different nature from the material things perceived externally through the senses and each sense perceives differently. Would it not be just as reasonable to suppose that the sense of sight revealed a different object from the sense of hearing, or the sense of taste a different object from the sense of touch ? The composite sense or consciousness of the different senses combined in the brain, being a synthetic abstraction from them, must necessarily differ from that of any one sense. CH.IX MIND AND THE UNIVERSE 377 out. Whoever has attended the sad spectacle of the concomitant shrinking of body and mind which goes on by tedious degrees in the final scene of death by senile decay and watched the last faint flickers of mind before the body's lingering remnant of life is extinct the auto- matic groans and moans and fluttering heart-beats of the prolonged agony continuing for hours after the highest brain is dead and the waning consciousness finally extinct may be excused if he wonders where and how the im- material mind can be so confined in the dilapidated material tenement as to be utterly impotent to make the least show of itself in response to the most piteous appeals. Yet it must suffer that painful imprisonment while it is there, for it cannot be supposed disloyally to desert the body so long as the least life lingers there must permeate it sluggishly or wait in suspended animation therein until the critical moment when it takes its happy leave. It does not clearly appear what interpretation the dualist puts on the facts : whether the mind, being safely locked in suspense and its vital energy essentially unimpaired by the bodily ruin, emerges in full vigour to be breathed out in the last gasp, or whether it suffers a shrinkage along with the bodily shrinkage, not however expiring with the body but taking its ethereal flight from it with the last expiration, to be forthwith reintegrated as a spirit or " spiritual body " in the empyrean. Alike after its obscure entry at a momentous stage into the undeveloped brain of the new-born or unborn babe, where the nervous plexuses of its function are not yet organized, and before leaving the decayed body of senility when they are worn out, must the independent mind the animula vagula blandula> hospes comesque corporis find and feel itself disagreeably circumstanced. Other difficulties of thought confront the dual theory. How make an impossible line of division between the lowest mental and the highest bodily functions between simple reflex action and conscious reflection, which is just reflex action through circuitous intra-mental channels at 378 MENTAL ORGANIZATION PT . n a higher remove in the supreme cerebral layers ? What again of the undeniable and usually underrated mental functions of animals, which might logically claim their spiritual source and corresponding destiny ? The higher animals are certainly not mere unconscious machines (as Descartes prudently said perhaps rather than really thought) : their minds obviously differ not essentially, differ only in degree, from the lowest human minds. What of the plain, invariable and positive dependence of every mental function every low sensation, oft-changing mood and high thought on the subtile and complex bio- chemical changes of compositions and decompositions in metabolism. Such minute material changes which in- evitably produce their definite mental effects can only act by their material properties and modes of action and therefore only on matter, while a postulated immaterial spirit in its turn can only act by its immaterial properties and therefore only on spirit ; yet as they assuredly do somehow act on each other the dual theory of two sepa- rate existences is one of prescribed mutual interaction between absolutely unrelated and independent beings ; which, if not absurd, is not rationally conceivable. A pre- established harmony between their respective operations which is still apt to find implicit acceptance where it is expressly rejected would logically import a pre- established harmony of decay, dying and death in a pre-ordained system of natural parallelism of being and function. The truth is that the dualist, while upholding the separate and independent existences of body and mind and fabricating verbal juggleries to explain their interaction, really either materializes spirit or spiritualizes matter ; a result which need not be much deprecated, whichever solution of the gratuitously factitious problem be preferred whether in fact matter be etherealized and spiritualized in " immortal shapes " or etherealized spirit be materialized in mortal shapes. The proper work to be faced and done is not to attempt to explain CH. ix MIND AND THE UNIVERSE 379 the interaction between two independent existences but strictly to enquire into and test the value of the postulated axiom which is taken for granted thus rightly from the first either to prove or disprove the theory of absolutely separate existences. While we are ignorant what either matter or mind really is all speculation concerning the supposed and adored mystery of their connection is in truth utterly stale and barren ; they may be essentially one and the same, to be named mind or matter according to the person's fancy as he looks at them within or with- out himself, designating them by the attributes of thought which, as Spinoza said, is invisible extension or of exten- sion which is visible thought. Why not call the union a fusion (if it must have a name) and leave the matter there ? Matters are not mended in the least by using a quasi- scientific phraseology instead of the simple words matter and mind. That is only to conceal ignorance under pretentious names and to count the intoxicating verbiage an addition to knowledge ; nay, it is to make matters worse by disguising the old theory of a separate mental entity in a quasi-scientific dress and bringing it in surrep- titiously under false pretences. What can be more barren than to speak of " a psychical being or Psyche possessing psychical activity and psycho-physical interaction " which, so named, is able to act on cerebral processes and more or less successfully govern them ? Is that to say anything more really than that there is a mind which acts on and is acted on by matter and to hide the old difficulty under contradictory words united by a hyphen ? l New names given to old things are supposed to mean more because they sound grander and hide more : Psyche (with its capital P) to have a profundity of meaning which mind 1 Such is a late achievement of animistic psychology which has com- mended itself to some critics as edifying : a Psyche possessing psychical activity (what other activity could it possess ? ) able by virtue of a hyphen to perform psycho-physical interaction and thus to explain how mind acts on matter. Might not the materialist likewise speak of a body possessing bodily activity and able to perform physico-psychical interaction ? A string of imposing words can notably sometimes impose a belief in their value on the 380 MENTAL ORGANIZATION FT. n has not and a subtilty of energy to do by " psycho- physical interaction " what simple mind cannot do to matter. Yet what is Psyche at best but a grandiose name for the highest sublimation of mind ? If not, it is then perchance a superior entity to the postulated mental entity ? Has man, as some say without thinking what they say, a mind, a soul, and a Psyche? That mental life may end with bodily life is an opinion as unreasonable as it is repugnant, it is argued, for it is a direct contradiction of the law of the conservation of energy. But is it really a contradiction ? Obviously mind cannot, if its separate and immortal entity be pre- supposed, do otherwise than continue after death, if and wheresoever it existed before birth ; there is no need in that case to argue at all ; but if for the mind be sub- stituted in thought the mental organization and its federated functions matters may be studied with less prejudice and perhaps more profit When all is said mind began in mankind sometime somehow, as it does now in the foetus, and may end as it began, the whither it goes be as blank as the whence it came. Anyhow a post-existent mind would presuppose logically a pre- existent mind. Besides every individual mind has done its constant and consistent work, little or great, good or bad, during its mortal life ; its energy, such as it was, being never lost but lasting in its unending effects. The good man's mind sometimes does endless harm as the sinner's mind perchance endless good. The whole acts of a particular life, what are they but instances of the transformation of mental energy ? What else would a coiner himself and on others. The shrewd advice which Mephistopheles gave to the student is never out of date Im ganzen haltet euch an Worte ! Dann geht ihr durch die sichre Pforte Zum Tempel der Gewissheit ein ; Ein prachtig Wort zur Diensten steht for what goes on and does not go on in the human brain, Fur was dreingeht und nicht dreingeht. CH. ix MIND AND THE UNIVERSE 381 true biography were a true biography ever honestly and truly written be but a narration of the energies of a particular mind whose work lives for good or evil in the continuing life of humanity ? The mind which has spent its energy in doing its mortal work on earth must as- suredly need a fresh supply when it starts on its immortal career. To go deeper into reality than reason can ever reach and to escape from its doubting suggestions it is necessary to summon and rely on feeling which, bespeaking the fundamental motion of life and perhaps the still more fundamental universal energy, cannot be framed in stated categories of the understanding. Resting there, the en- quirer is fairly well entrenched and not easily assailable, but he plunges into a morass of futile speculations and assumptions when he goes on to construct a system of notions concerning what exists and happens beyond the range of thought in other words, when he thinks or pre- tends to think where he cannot possibly know. How can he do otherwise than agreeably delude himself when he, a relative being, applies his intellectual processes and uses their language to comprehend and explain that which, being absolute, is avowedly non-relative, incom- prehensible, ineffable? Having humbly declared the im- potence of the intellect it is an impertinent abuse forthwith to proceed to use and necessarily misuse it. Nor can he now, as once he did, trust securely to a special revelation ; for he has robbed, and is intent on robbing, that revelation of its substantial contents, although glorifying himself as the privileged recipient of it and conspiring by silent consent to keep up the conventional pretence of its sacred truth. While relying really on intuitive feeling and dis- valuing reason as the basis of a progressive religion he cannot refrain from trying to prove that its silently dis- carded stories may be true in some allegorical, meta- phorical, or symbolical sense, though shrinking from saying distinctly that he does not believe them to be literally true and still insisting on the propriety of teaching 382 MENTAL ORGANIZATION FT. n them to children and preaching them to the people literally as suitable instruction. 1 Could he but lower his over- weening pride of self-consciousness with its self-adulation, and endeavour frankly to realize his true position and kinship in nature, he might perhaps conclude to leave the absolute alone as a meaningless word, or at least to nurse it as a sublime cosmical emotion without trying vainly to grasp it in any form of thought. There is vastly more wisdom in nature than he is ever likely to find out and mentally represent through the organized nervous patterns of his assimilations of so much and that so little of the environment as sense and motion bring him into relation with ; for he naturally labels wisdom that which he does partially find out. The more he learns to know the more clearly he perceives how little he knows and how much there is that he does not know and never can know ; and he need never lack sound work enough in adding to his nature by discoveries in and adaptations to the knowable environment. That addition always has been and always must be, so long as mind is life pressing onwards in its propelled course, a very limited progress of organic through human nature. In the end, however, that which befalls individual life must one day befall all life ; it will end at last and the universe, visible and invisible, will not end with it, bereft as it then will be of the glory of its human inhabitants. In the infinite multitude of worlds whirling and rolling through infinite space (distant suns said to be 600 times 1 Having mystified so much of Scriptural doctrine as is dogmatic and displeasing, it is agreeable to expand it into a mystical emotional rapture of union with the divine. And not without use and comfort ; for that which is no longer a profitable doctrine for instruction may still be a useful ideal, a joy of feeling, a solace in sorrow, a consoling hope to the fearful person who passes through "the valley of the shadow of death." The proper question of course is as to the supernatural value of the rapture ; for when all is said it is not what the enraptured person feels but what he is and does in con- sequence which is of real value all one as if non-existent when it is not put forth in action. The purely personal assurance of value may be as mistaken as that of the delirious and delighted madman who knows not that he is mad. Does the subjective delight of any mystical rapture then truly validate its claim of supernatural access to a region of superior objective reality to which thought cannot reach nor words apply ? CH. ix MIND AND THE UNIVERSE 383 brighter than the earth's sun), which have come and gone through measureless time and are still coming and going, it is possible that cycles of events like or unlike the existing cycle on earth have been repeated over and over again ; in which case the flattering notion of an universe specially created for the existing human species may be no less absurd than it would be for a grain of sand on the seashore (were it conscious) to think that the sands and sea were created for its special self, or for a blade of grass in the field to be sure that the field was green and flourished on its account. Man when his dream of life is over will probably be as little missed as the blade of grass which withers in the field. If that be too humiliat- ing a thought for self-esteem he can always inspire and console himself with the flattering reflection that his ability to make it is proof of his mortal and presage of his im- mortal value. The wish to be he can count infallible testimony of the spirit that he shall be. Yet, when all is said, the mystery of the universe concerning which he wonders and wails is a mystery which he makes for himself out of his own valuation or overvaluation of himself. There would be no mystery if he, urged by his vital instinct to gain more mental life, did not think it his business and privilege to find it out and himself to be curtailed of his rights by his impotence to reveal more than can ever be revealed. The higher he rises in power by his conquests of nature the higher is his pride of self ; and the higher his conceit of self the surer he is of the value of his aspiration and of his rise to higher being world without end. Persuading himself that the earth planet at least, if not the universe, was created for so noble a creature and that Omniscience thinks in like manner as he does, only in perfect fashion, he would fain " think the thoughts of God after him " ; which is un- deniable comfort to his self-esteem, a support to his self- respect and an exaltation of his dignity. Yet a less impious, more moderate and modest self-estimate might perhaps teach him that it is not his business or fate to 384 MENTAL ORGANIZATION PT . n compass the encompassing universe ; that it is absurd to imagine he ever can comprehend it, and just as silly for the philosopher to pour out sentimental wails about the mentally unknowable as it would be to wail because he cannot grasp the intangible ; that his modest function is to do the best for himself while he is a transient self in his little corner of it and for his kind in the particular social environment in which his lot is cast. That useful work he will do best not by vain specula- tions which attribute to an infinite creating Power the finite thoughts and modes of action which he would have entertained had he been the creator, nor by the emo- tional incontinence of mystical ecstasies which are purely personal gratifications liable to become debilitating mental debaucheries, nor by self-abasements and penances of asceticism which are humiliating apologies for being the being which he is and ought not to be, but by sane and useful work while he can work in the world, and there- with by legitimate function of every appetite, instinct and emotion which gives pleasure to himself and does no hurt to others ; all the more gladly when he can think that its most elevated gratifications by doing good to others are calculated to promote the progress of sound socialization. Legitimate gratification in every case, be it understood, for if surfeit or^ other ill effect ensue the wrong is not in the gratification but in the folly which misuses it. The spirit is properly weak when it opposes itself entirely to the lawful demands of the flesh. The development of the human species rests at bottom on its animal nature in the vital struggle ; and it is not as an end in himself but as means to an end in the social organization that the indivi- dual is properly taught to live and labour. What the social perfection exactly means which he is to expect as an end in itself and to which he ought to subject his personal impulses and devote his energies he is unable or unwilling to define ; he is sure only that the notion of it is not illusory nor the result of its development at last into a rest of stagnation likely to be bad. Yet of all the CH. ix MIND AND THE UNIVERSE 385 illusions which the human race has cherished the greatest illusion perhaps is that life being anything like what it essentially is, an end of conflict and an eternal peace would be a state of bliss. Is it a low material view of human life opposed and repugnant to its spiritual aspirations to lay stress on its substantial animal nature ? If it be so, its direct and present advantage would at least be to base life on realities, to bring profession into more vital contact with realities, to shatter many demoralizing shams and con- ventional hypocrisies and thus to promote a wholesome sincerity and veracity of thought, feeling and conduct. To hold life in wholesome contact with nature could not fail to be a salutary check on the spiritual tendency to lose vital hold of nature. And that might be a result at least worth attaining and perhaps supply an excellent groundwork for a superstructure of sound spiritual development. Why not then make profitable use of it ? The mischief is that the devotees of different faiths are so eagerly bent on attacking what they think bad in other faiths that they have no mind to search out and assimilate what may be good in them. Materialism neither can nor ought to be got rid of. To think such riddance possible is to perpetuate pre- tence and invite unrealities and hypocrisies of thought. Human nature being fundamentally organic even when at its ethical best is liable, like all organic life, to be degenerate by its own ill-growths and corruptions ; for mental ideals and bodily processes may both deteriorate and take a wrong course. Outwardly then to overlook what is inwardly corrupt, insisting that it does not exist because the show is fair and the evil perhaps verbally denounced, cannot ensure sound and stable progress in any nation ; yet it is a habit not likely to be relinquished in a luxuriant civilization encumbered with conventions, shams, hypocrisies, priding itself on their artificial values and spending its life in keeping them up. In spite of modern self-laudation Democritus, were he living now, 386 MENTAL ORGANIZATION PT. n might perhaps see as good reason to laugh at the follies, lust, frenzies, envies, ambitions, conflicting creeds and conventional hypocrisies of mankind as when, the Ab- derites, thinking him mad, summoned and prayed Hippo- crates to cure him, which, being a wise physician, Hippocrates wisely did not try to do. THE END Printed by R. & R. CLARK, LIMITED, Edinburgh. Works by Prof. HENRI BERGSON CREATIVE EVOLUTION. Translated by ARTHUR MITCHELL, Ph.D. 8vo. IDS. net. 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