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 Human natureand its remaking^^ 
 
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 Library 
 
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 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924013962950 
 
HUMAN NATUEE AND ITS REMAKING 
 
HUMAN NATURE AND 
 ITS REMAKING 
 
 WILLIAM ERNEST HOCKING, Ph.D. 
 
 PROFESSOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN HARVARD UNIVERSITY 
 
 NEW HAVEN 
 YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS 
 
 LONDON: HUMPHREY MILFORD 
 
 OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS 
 
 MDCCCCXVIII 
 
^finW 
 
 
 
 copyeight, 1918, by 
 
 Yale Untveesity Press 
 
 First published, May, 1918 
 
 & 111 \3 
 
TO 
 GEORGE HERBEET PALMER 
 
 SKILLED INTERPRETER OF 
 
 HUMAN NATURE 
 
 TEACHER AND FRIEND 
 
PEEFACE 
 
 SINCE books are no longer supposed, whether by 
 author or public, to contain the final and finished 
 truth, no book need apologize for being unripe. One's 
 hope is, not to close discussion, but to open it. What 
 I have here aimed to do is the work rather of the 
 quarryman with his blasting powder than of the 
 sculptor with his chisel. 
 
 Not that the quarry of human nature is a new one. 
 But that we are only beginning to learn the technique 
 of dealing with the larger masses. Few of us, I dare 
 say, are satisfied with the degree of clarity we have 
 reached about the rights of the primitive impulses, — 
 of the instincts of pugnacity, sex, acquisition, etc., — as 
 compared with the claims of social orders such as we 
 see dissolving before our eyes, or of super-social 
 orders, of art and religion. These and other agencies 
 attempt to transform the original material of human 
 nature; human nature resists the remaking process; 
 the groping effort of mutual adjustment has continued 
 throughout the length of history, has made the chief 
 theme of history; we still seek the broader principles 
 which govern the process, call it what you will, — the 
 process of remaking, of educating, of civilizing, of con- 
 verting or of saving the human being. Quest of such 
 principles is the object of this present essay. 
 
VIU PEEFAOB 
 
 No doubt, we have always liad our authorities ready 
 to spare us the trouble of search, ready to settle ex 
 cathedra what human nature is and ought to become. 
 And presumably we have always had a party of revolt 
 against authority, convention, and the like, in the name 
 of what is 'natural,' — a revolt which has commonly 
 been as dogmatic and intuitional as the authority itself. 
 
 But the revolt of today is no longer either impres- 
 sionistic or sporadic. It is psychological, economic, 
 political : — and it is general. The explosive forces of 
 self-assertion which have finally burst their bounds 
 in the political life of Central Europe have their seat 
 in a widespread spiritual rebellion, a critical im- 
 patience of 'established' sentiments and respecta- 
 bilities, a deliberate philosophic rejection not more of 
 Hague Conventions than of other conventions, a 
 drastic judgment of non-reality upon the pieties of 
 Christendom. 
 
 This rebellion would hardly have become so wide- 
 spread or so disastrous if it were wholly without 
 ground. (It indicates that our moral idealisms like our 
 metaphysicaHdealisms have been taking their task too 
 complacentlyy Our Western world has adhered to 
 standards with which it has never supposed its prac- 
 tice to be in accord ; but heaving a resigned sigh over 
 the erring tendencies of human nature, it has offered 
 to these standards that 'of course' variety of homage 
 which is the beginning of mental and moral coma. By 
 labelling these standards 'ideals' it has rendered them 
 innocuous while maintaining the profession of defer- 
 ence: an 'ideal' has been taken as something which 
 
PBEPACE IX 
 
 everybody is expected to honor and nobody is expected 
 to attain. 
 
 It is just these ideals that are now violently chal- 
 lenged, and the challenge is salutary. It is precisely 
 the so-called Christian world which, having gone mor- 
 ally to sleep, is now put to a fight for life with the men 
 who persist in reducing their standards to the level 
 of common practice, in reaching their code of behavior 
 from below upward, not from above downward, in 
 keeping their 'ideals' close to the earth or at least in 
 discernible working connection with the earth. Their 
 creed we may name moral realism; and the craving for 
 an ingredient of moral realism in our philosophy seems 
 to me a justified hunger of the age. The whole set of 
 realistic upheavals, Nietzscheian, neo-Machiavellian, 
 Syndicalistic, Freudian, and other, crowd forward 
 with doctrines about human nature and its destiny 
 which at least have life in them. Whatever else they 
 contain, unsound or sinister, they contain Thought: 
 and this thought must be met on its own ground. The 
 next step, whether in social philosophy, or in educa- 
 tion, or in ethics, requires an understanding between 
 whatever valid elements moral realism may contain 
 and the valid elements of the challenged tradition. 
 
 We find our initial common ground with this realism 
 by accepting, for the purposes of the argument, the 
 picture of original human nature as a group of 
 instincts. 
 
 With this starting point, the usual realistic assump- 
 tion is that human life consists in trying to get what 
 
X PBEFACE 
 
 these instincts want. Mankind's persistent concern 
 in food, adornment, property, mates, children, politi- 
 cal activity, etc., is supposed to be explained by the 
 fact that his instincts confer value on these objects. 
 By shaping our 'values,' instinct becomes the shaper 
 of life. And the first and main business of the science 
 of living would be to set up an authentic and propor- 
 tionate list of the instincts proper to man. 
 
 Then every social order, every moral or economic 
 code, every standard of living would be judged by the 
 satisfaction it could promise to the chorus of innate 
 hungers and impulses thus revealed. 
 
 This view is simple, attractive, — and profoundly un- 
 true to experience. The trouble is that no one can tell 
 by identifying and naming an instinct what will satisfy 
 it. Certainly we cannot take the biological function 
 of an instinct as a sufficient account of what that in- 
 stinct means to a human being — as if hunger held the 
 conscious purpose of building the body, or love were 
 an aim to continue the species. The word 'instinct' 
 has no magic to annul the obvious truth that satisfac- 
 tion is a state of mind, nor to evade the long labor of 
 experience in determining what can satisfy a mind. 
 Conscious life is engaged quite as much in trying to 
 find out what it wants as in trying to get it. 
 
 The truth is, instinct requires interpretation. We 
 can set up a usable measure of social justice and the 
 like only if we can find something like a true inter- 
 pretation of instinct, or of the will as a whole. In- 
 stinct by itself has no claims, because it has no head; 
 
PBEFACE XI 
 
 it cannot so mucli as say what it wants except through 
 an interpreter. 
 
 Our essay becomes, accordingly, an experiment in 
 interpretation. And there are various agencies which 
 offer aid in the undertaking. In the person of parent, 
 pedagog, lawmaker, society stands ready to inform the 
 individual through its discipline, "This is what you 
 want, — ^not that," and to insist on his choosing the 
 alleged better part. All the usual processes of train- 
 ing or remaking purport to be at the same time works 
 of interpretation : they profess to bring to light a 'real' 
 will, as contrasted with an apparent will, and so to 
 introduce human nature to its own meaning. 
 
 But if society (as not a few of our social philoso- 
 phers believe) is the only or final interpreter of human 
 nature, human nature is helpless as against society. 
 Our individualisms, our democracies, with their brave 
 claims in behalf of the human unit, have no case. 
 'Socialization' is the last word in human development; 
 and society is always right. 
 
 If we refuse, as we do, to accept this conclusion, the 
 alternative is to find some way, in independence of 
 'society,' to an objectively valid interpretation of the 
 human will. The case of all liberalism, of all reform, 
 of every criticism and likewise of every defence of any 
 social regime, must rest in the last analysis upon the 
 discovery, or the assumption, of such a 'true' inter- 
 pretation. And my hope in this essay is that we may 
 chart the way to it, and thus sketch the valid basis of 
 an individualistic theory of society. 
 
Xll PBEFACE 
 
 We are not, of course, presuming that mankind has 
 ever, in practice, been without such a standard. For 
 mankind has always had a religion, and it has been 
 one of the historic functions of religion to keep men 
 in mind of the goal of their own wills. And in so far 
 as it has done its work well, religion has in fact set 
 men free from the domination of unjust social and 
 political constraints. The religious consciousness has 
 apprised human nature of its 'rights' — ^not merely of 
 its claims — and has become the source of whatever is 
 now solid in our democracies. 
 
 And even if the social order were perfectly just in 
 its arrangements, freedom would still require the ful- 
 filment of this religious function. For a man is not 
 free unless he is delivered from persistent sidelong 
 anxiety about his immediate effectiveness, from servi- 
 tude to an incalculable if not whimsical human flux. 
 He is free only if he can mentally direct all his work 
 to a constant and absolute judgment, address his daily 
 labor, if you like, to God, build his houses to God and 
 not to men, write his books to God, in the State serve 
 his God only, love his God in the family, and fight 
 against the (incarnate) devil and the devil alone. 
 Kepler's famous words at the end of his preface to 
 the Weltharmonik are the words of the free man in 
 this sense: 
 
 Here I cast the die, and write a book to be read whether 
 by contemporaries or by posterity, I care not. I can wait for 
 readers thousands of years, seeing that God waited six thou- 
 sand years for someone to contemplate his work. 
 
 An age of competition, like our own, unless it is 
 
PBEFAOE XIU 
 
 something else than competitive, cannot be a free age, 
 however democratic in structure, because its chief 
 concerns are lateral. To the competitive elements in 
 our own social order we owe much: — an impersonal 
 estimate of worth in terms of efficiency which we shall 
 not surrender, a taste and technique for severe self- 
 measurement, incredible finesse in the discrimination 
 and mounting of individual talents. But we owe to it 
 also an over-development of the invidious comparative 
 eye, a trend of attention fascinated by the powers, 
 perquisites, and opinions of the immediate neighbors. 
 The eternal standard is obscured : hence we do nothing 
 well; we lack sincerity and simplicity; we are sus- 
 picious, disunited, flabby; we do not find ourselves; 
 we are not free. Unless we can recover a working 
 hold on some kind of religious innervation, our 
 democracy will shortly contain little that is worthy 
 to survive. 
 
 But it is one of the permanent achievements of our 
 time that we recognize no antagonism between the 
 work of thought and the voice of religious intuition. 
 We must perpetually regain our right to an absolute 
 object through the labor of reflection, — in our own 
 case, the labor of interpretation. 
 
 In the preparation of this book, I have accumulated 
 many personal obligations, quite apart from the 
 scientific debts acknowledged at various points in the 
 argument. And beside these, there is an obligation 
 of a less personal character though not less real : that, 
 namely, to the liberal and heartening spirit of the Yale 
 
XIV PBBFACB 
 
 community. Those who heard the lectures on which 
 these pages were originally based, lectures on the 
 Nathaniel Taylor foundation given in 1916 before the 
 School of Religion of Yale University, will hardly 
 recognize them in their present form. But the incen- 
 tive is theirs; and if the idea has grown, I trust it is 
 by way of doing greater justice to the original theme. 
 
 WILLIAM ERNEST HOCKING. 
 Cambridge, March, 1918. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 Pkepacb ......... vii 
 
 PAET I 
 
 ORIENTATION 
 
 Chapter I. An Art Peculiar to Man ... 1 
 
 Why human character is and should be an artificial product. 
 
 Chapter II. The Emergence op Problems . . 5 
 It is only through much social experience that the funda- 
 mental problems of the art of remaking human nature are 
 recognized; the experience of religion, of politics, of the 
 social sciences. 
 
 Chapter III. On the Possibilitt of Changing 
 
 Human Nature .... 9 
 Intuition neither deceives nor settles the question of free- 
 dom to change; evidence, structural and historic, of human 
 plasticity; legislative pessimism and religious hopefulness; 
 why experience faUs to solve the problem. 
 
 Chapter IV. What Changes are Desirable? Lib- 
 eration versus Discipline . . 16 
 DiflSculty of realizing ideals casts doubt on the ideals; 
 doubt whether we know what we want; liberalism turns to 
 nature for instruction; the failure of pure liberalism; 
 Nietzsche. 
 
 Chapter V. The Liberator as Disciplinarian . . 24 
 Change of mind in Eousseau and in German Eomantieism; 
 why Hegel's work must be done over, and is being done in 
 part by naturalistic psychology; the element of strength in 
 Nietzsche; present state of the problem. 
 
XVI CONTENTS 
 
 Chapter VI. An Independent Standard . . 29 
 
 The logical possibility of being wholly just to nature, while 
 judging nature a blind guide. The position of Plato, of 
 Spinoza, of recent 'value theory'; method of our study. 
 
 PART II 
 THE NATURAL MAN 
 
 (^Chapter VH. The Elements of Human Nature: 
 
 the Notion of Instinct ... 37 
 The notion of instinct a result of abstraction; its biological 
 definition; its psychological side. 
 
 Chapter VIII. The Range of Instinct ... 45 
 What criteria can be used for recognizing instinct? How 
 and why observers differ as to the amount of instinct to be 
 attributed to man. 
 
 • c 
 
 Chapter IX. Survey op the Human Equipment , 51 
 The 'units of behavior'; the existence of 'general in- 
 stincts'; instincts of the second order; 'central instincts'; 
 a partial tabular view. 
 
 "^ Chapter X. The Central Instincts : Necessary 
 
 Interests ..... 61 
 The alleged instinct of curiosity as a problem in the 
 morphology of instinct; the theory of central stimulation 
 and response; importance and difficulty of the central 
 instincts. 
 
 / 
 
 Chapter XI. The Will 68 
 
 Probability that central instincts are not separable entities; 
 the will as the identical element in all value-experience when 
 that element becomes a 'stable policy'; the 'will to power' 
 as a name less bad than some others for the general element 
 in human wills; two Nietzscheian errors discarded at the 
 outset. 
 
 Note on Freud 75 
 
CONTENTS XVU 
 
 Chapter XII. Mind and Body : the Last Analysis . 78 
 The speculative question whether will can be further ana- 
 lyzed; 'energy' as an explanatory conception; wiU conceived 
 in terms of idea at work. 
 
 PART III 
 
 CONSCIENCE 
 
 Chapter XIII. The Interest in Justice ... 87 
 
 The interest in justice, according to Aristotle, is the basis 
 of political life, and is an exhibition of human nature; can 
 we admit an original moral disposition or instinct? 
 
 Chapter XIV. Conscience and the General "Will ." 91 
 
 Given sociability and a power of generalization, some kind 
 of an ' ought ' was bound to emerge ; but the socially derived 
 'ought' is not identical with the 'I ought' of experience. 
 
 Chapter XV. Conscience and Instinct ... 95 
 
 How conscience resembles an instinct — an untaught, tropistie 
 seeking for objects of primary devotion — and yet differs 
 from all hereditary mechanisms; it is a form of self -aware- 
 ness, dealing with fluxes in the being of the will. 
 
 Chapter XVI. Current Fallacies Regarding Sin . 101 
 
 The logic of moral error — does a lie prove a liar? The fal- 
 lacy of cancelling right against wrong; the fallacy of cus- 
 tom, to the effect that generality diminishes guilt; the fal- 
 lacy of 'nature,' to the effect that the natural is right. 
 
 Chapter XVII. Instinct and Sin .... Ill 
 
 No primitive impulse taken by itself is wrong; but in the 
 human mind no impulse is by itself, and crude impulses are 
 presumably not justified in remaining crude; sin as failure 
 to give an impulse its achievable meaning, i.e., as failure 
 to interpret it. 
 
 Chapter XVIII. Sin as Blindness and Untruth . 118 
 
 The descriptive difference between sin and right is evanes- 
 cent; sin may consist in suppressing an increment of knowl- 
 edge; and the act, by virtue of its environment, will then 
 express a false judgment. 
 
XVUl CONTENTS 
 
 Chapter XIX. Why Men Sin ... . 125 
 
 Sin cannot be causally explained; it is not to be referred 
 to the ' stronger motive, ' nor to the ' curve of learning ' ; but 
 the conditions may be described which favor the above- 
 mentioned blindness, namely, the existence of moral di- 
 lemmas. Various dilemmas described. The complete moral 
 motive combines the ruing of evil with the attraction of 
 good. 
 
 Chapter XX. Sin as Status . . . . . 137 
 
 Sin as deed cannot be original. But beside the moral act, 
 there is a moral status ; and if the holy will is a status to be 
 acquired, it is presumably not inborn; a moral status may 
 always be regarded as a matter of fact, and as such neither 
 'to be punished nor rewarded; it becomes a corresponding 
 question of fact whether such status has metaphysical im- 
 plications. The metaphysical assertion, sin involves finitude 
 or mortality, a legitimate addition to the moral motive, if 
 true. 
 
 PART IV 
 EXPERIENCE 
 
 Chapter XXI. The Agencies of Remaking . . 147 
 
 Original humaji nature always a factor in remaking human 
 nature: ultimately nothing can change a will but itself. 
 But outer facts must furnish data and incentives: and the 
 co-operation of outer and inner factors of change is 'expe- 
 rience.' We cannot distinguish between social and indi- 
 vidual experience; but we can distinguish between free ex- 
 perience and experience under social constraint. 
 
 Chapter XXII. The Task of Experience . . 151 
 
 Experience has (among other tasks) to effect the trans- 
 formation of general dispositions into individual habits 
 which interpret these dispositions; the work of intelligence, _ 
 euriosil^, and play; experience in active form as experi- 
 mentation. 
 
 Chapter XXIII. The Methods of Experience . 156 
 
 Pleasure and pain, the imiversal instruments of experience, 
 produce different results upon different types of mind; in 
 
CONTENTS XIX 
 
 the human being, pain leads to discrimination and thought, 
 rather than to blank inhibition. Human experience with any 
 given instinct thus takes the form of a series of hypotheses 
 as to what it wants, constituting a more or less coherent 
 argument, guided chiefly by the 'mental after-image'; this 
 argument might reasonably be called the 'dialectic' of the 
 wUl. 
 
 Chapter XXIV. The Dialectic of Pugnacity . 164 
 
 "What pugnacity wants, described in a typical series of 
 hypotheses: destruction, revenge, punishment, cure; this 
 development would probably take place were there no social 
 constraint upon the expression of pugnacity. 
 
 PART V 
 
 SOCIETY 
 
 Chaptek XXV. SocLiL Modelling .... 171 
 
 The presumption that social pressure warps human nature; 
 and the counter presumption that conventions have a mean- 
 ing. 
 
 Chapter XXVI. Main Directions op Social Model- 
 ling 177 
 
 Normally, social interference facilitates, and carries on 
 farther in the same direction, the work of individual expe- 
 rience, — ^and, for that matter, of organic evolution as a 
 whole; as instances: 'prolonging the vestibule of satisfac- 
 tion,' as seen in the case of hunger and sex; the widening 
 of the horizon of action together with increasing discrimi- 
 nation or restriction of objects dealt with. Thus, social 
 action is not primarily repressive; but there are three ways 
 in particular in which it becomes so. These are to be dealt 
 with in order. 
 
 Chapter XXVII. Ideals and Their Recommendees . 183 
 Most ideals are colored by the selfish wishes of those who 
 promulgate them; but not even the self-interest of society 
 as a whole takes precedence of the interest of its members. 
 Here is stated an individualistic theory of 'right'; and the 
 postulate is deduced with which society must comply if its 
 
XX CONTENTS 
 
 ideals are to be right ideals. Various social arrangements 
 which help to secure this condition : among others, the nat- 
 ural function of the Eeconunender ; and the conflict of ab- 
 stract ideals. , 
 
 Chaptee XXVIII. Laws and the State . . . 196 
 When we consider not ideals, but the material basis of all 
 instinct-satisfactions, it is obvious that social life neces- 
 sarily requires sacrifice, and that the question of the social 
 contract — is society worth the sacrifice f — ia not fanciful. 
 The condition under which a social life can be free, or worth 
 its cost, stated in a second postulate: it must be possible 
 to subordinate competitive interests to non-competitive 
 interests; this postulate can be complied with only through 
 the existence of the political State: the existence of the 
 State, therefore, is something which men necessarily (hence 
 unanimously) will. 
 
 Chapter XXIX. Institutions and Change . . 211 
 No institutions wholly comply, and perhaps none can wholly 
 comply, with the foregoing demands: it does not at once 
 follow that they should be abolished. It is to be considered 
 that part of the maladaptation, so far as it comes to con- 
 sciousness, is an incident of progress itself ; and that human 
 nature is adapted to maladaptation, provided that it can 
 regard all existing misfit as grist for its will to power. The 
 highest social expression of the will to power is found in the 
 changing of institutions; institutions must be condemned, 
 not if evil exists in them ; but if it persists. Our third postu- 
 late is that institutions shall make institutional provision for 
 change, as their unfitness is felt and diagnosed; but since 
 it is the wish of every radical and experimentalist that 
 something be established, he has an inalienable interest in 
 conservation. Hence a fourth postulate: conserving force 
 must be proportionate to certainty. 
 
 Chapter XXX. Education 226 
 
 The activity of educating has an instinctive basis and func- 
 tion; it requires social self -consciousness and self-criticism. 
 It is commonly regarded as a sort of social reproduction; 
 but it must provide for growth beyond the type; yet the 
 process of education is such that the type is transmitted; 
 the first business of education is to bring a will into exist- 
 ence; this can be done only by exposing all instincts to 
 
CONTENTS XXI 
 
 their appropriate stimuli. Education is, first of all, ex- 
 posure; and this exposure can only be effected by appre- 
 eiators of the goods in question. The exposure should be 
 proportionate; various problems considered; education of 
 thought; of the wUl to power. Problems of adolescence; 
 delay in acquisition and in sex -expression; sublimation in 
 the planning-instinet, and in world-building; education in 
 originality; the self -elimination of society. 
 
 Chapter XXXI. The Right of Rebellion . . 254 
 He who would destroy a too conseryative social structure 
 must assure himself (1) whether it has the good will to 
 change; and, if not, (2) whether he can have faith in its 
 possible gpod wUl. Society has the same two questions to 
 answer regarding the rebel. There can be no legal right of 
 rebellion; but this does not decide whether rebellion may 
 be right. 
 
 Chapter XXXII. Punishment .... 257 
 
 Punishment consists in making the external status corre- 
 spond to the internal status. The criminal must be distin- 
 guished from the rebel; he must be treated as possible rebel 
 and as possible citizen. The State has no choice but to 
 punish; yet punishment, administered by an imperfect 
 State, contains self-defeating elements ; the history of crimi- 
 nal procedure shows the various attempts of society to es- 
 cape this dilemma; but their chief success, so far, is in 
 , localizing the injury. The restoration of the criminal to 
 citizenship must be the work of forces not contained in 
 the State per se; in punishing, as in educating, society de- 
 pends for its success on agencies beyond its own border. 
 
 PART VI 
 
 ART AND RELIGION 
 
 Chapter XXXIII. Vox Dei 273 
 
 Can the distinction between the work of society and the 
 work of religion in remaking human nature be maintained? 
 The historical differentiation has apparently ended in elimi- 
 nating the distinct Vox Dei as useless; reasons for doubt- 
 ing this result; and proposal of a method for discriminat- ' 
 ing the work of society from that of further factors. 
 
XXU CONTENTS 
 
 Chapter XXXIV. The Public Oedee and the 
 
 Peivate Order .... 280 
 How much of the individual man can find expression, or be 
 'saved,' in each of the two orders that constitute society, 
 or in both taken together? 
 
 Chaptee XXXV. SociETT AND Betond Society . 285 
 The private order and the public order are so related that 
 each not alone supplements the other, but presupposes suc- 
 cess in the other; this success is always rather relative and 
 promissory than actual; and hence at no point can life in 
 society be satisfactory, imless the will finds some point of 
 absolute satisfaction outside society; the whole psychologi- 
 cal structure of society depends on some provision whereby 
 the wills of its individual members (in anticipation of the 
 result of infinite social evolution) may attain an absolute 
 goal; this need is professedly supplied, in one way by art; 
 in another by religion. 
 
 Chaptee XXXVI. The Woeld of Rebieth . . 293 
 It is not to be supposed that art and religion undertake to 
 provide only for residues, or lost powers, in human nature: 
 their business is with the whole of human nature, and with 
 residues only because they are concerned vrith the whole; 
 in early law and custom, at the time when these were still 
 regarded as sacred, we find art and religion assuming joint 
 control over the shaping of human nature. And as every man 
 was considered not alone subject to the law, but also a trans- 
 mitter and wielder, if not a maker, of the law, he was sup- 
 posed to come through it into the exercise of this same ulti- 
 mate control; the experience of 'initiation'; of conversion: 
 subordinating social passions to an ulterior passion. 
 
 Chaptee XXXVII. The Saceed Law . . .299 
 A more detailed examination of the sacred law, showing 
 that it was based not on social utility, but on a principle 
 claiming to instruct utility; its aesthetic and ethical ele- 
 ments; truth and error in its claim to validity. 
 
 Chaptee XXXVIII. Art and Human Natuee . . 316 
 
 Art wins independence from all religious entanglements; 
 in this free shape it is neither wish-dream nor imitation of 
 fact : it is a symbolized achievement of the will in- real and 
 
CONTENTS XXIU 
 
 objective media; it intends to have the force not of law, 
 but of convincing language, — a freer development of law; 
 beginning as an effort to define, and thus win- power over the 
 object of common desire — assuming an ascendency over the 
 minds of the desirers — it finds a secondary satisfaction in 
 creating the image of that object; it thus discovers a field 
 of objects which can be possessed in no other way than by 
 thus reproducing them; these objects are called 'beauti- 
 ful'; art becomes especially identified with the activity of 
 possessing the beautiful, in which all socially interested 
 activity is suspended; and its specific passion may super- 
 sede-all social passions; direct and indirect effect of art 
 on the shaping of human instincts : the inadequacy of art. 
 
 Chaptek XXXIX. Religion pee se . . . . 328 
 
 Eeligion seems left empty by the removal of law, science, 
 art, etc.; but it still claims a positive content, makes super- 
 lative claims for it, and has foimd devotees who declare 
 its passion supreme over, others; we cannot understand this 
 fact if we regard the ascetic as an anomalous and parasitic 
 denier of all social value ; it can only be understood through 
 the psychological necessity that aU social values, together 
 with those of law and art, be preserved by an alternation 
 between attending to them and turning away from them to 
 their source. Asceticism thus may be, and historically has 
 been, an assertion of the will to power; but it has been a 
 partial and imperfect satisfaction, and must give way to, 
 or be included within, a more concrete type of religion. 
 
 PART VII 
 CHRISTIANITY 
 
 Chapter XL. "What Christianity Requires . . 339 
 
 The practical injunctions of Christianity are directed 
 toward the feelings, and thus concern the theory of human 
 instinct; but there seems to be a psychological ineptitude in 
 a command to 'love'; hence these injunctions are commonly 
 reinterpreted in terms of behavior; there are reasons, how- 
 ever, for supposing that Christianity may have meant what 
 it says. 
 
\ 
 
 Xxiv CONTENTS 
 
 Chapter XLI. Christianity and Pugnacity . . 344 
 Society transforms pugnacity into constructive critical ac- 
 tivity, and for this reason cannot comply with the command, 
 Judge not; not only in the public order, but in the private 
 order also, in all education, the critical judgment must be 
 active; the Christian command seems an abandonment of 
 justice and a return to the moral indifference of nature; 
 but there are circumstances under which it may be the pre- 
 cise opposite, expressing a justice not to the static but to the 
 changeable self; these circumstances show what Christianity 
 means, and dispose of the opposite errors (1) of meaning- 
 less non-resistance and (2) of referring the ideal to a dis- 
 tant future. 
 
 Chapter XLII. Christianity and Sex-love . . 355 
 The general attitude of Christianity toward sex-love is as 
 negative as toward pugnacity; from the individual stand- 
 point it is not obvious that sex-love is necessary, as pug- 
 nacity is necessary; though the psychological function of 
 sex-love must be performed; the question: What is this psy- 
 chological function? Beginning as a craving for 'sub- 
 conscious respiration,' in which the will to power seems 
 mingled with an opposite impulse toward self-abandonment, 
 the experience of love is one of progressive discovery of its 
 own meaning; this meaning, while it certainly has a meta- 
 physical horizon, is not Platonic: it is, a giving of concrete 
 life, i.e., life of soul, body, and estate. Christianity assumes 
 that this life-giving impulse can be satisfied completely 
 apart from marriage, on the simple ground that it is not 
 the deepest thing in human nature ; at mo^t, it is next to the 
 deepest; it proposes philanthropy and art, when conjoined 
 with worship, as a complete ' sublimation ' ; but its intention 
 is that its ' absolute ' meaning shall live within the relations 
 of men and women, not displace them; and just because its 
 entire interest is in the ultimate meaning, it neither criti- 
 cises nor sanctions any particular convention: it insists on 
 nothing but its highly simple criterion. 
 
 Chapter XLIII. Christianity and Ambition . . 372 
 Early Christianity accommodated itself to the conditions 
 of State life; but professed scorn for all those things after 
 which "the Gentiles seek"; it was as far as possible, how- 
 ever, from attempting to eliminate ambition: it recognized 
 
CONTENTS XXV 
 
 the fact, not perceived by Buddhism, that ambition is the 
 essence of religion; it undertook, as its chief positive ap- 
 peal to human nature, to swing all energies into the channel 
 of spreading the 'Kingdom of Heaven,' an interest which, 
 in personal form, becomes the 'passion for souls,' the most 
 characteristic product of Christianity; it exists in many 
 recognizable forms; in this point, the meanings of all the 
 instiijets converge; and there is reason to regard it as the 
 ultimate transformation of the wiU to power. 
 
 Chapter XLIV. The Crux of Christianity . . 379 
 
 It is precisely in this form of the ideal — that of the will to 
 save men — ^that the profoundest objection makes itself felt; 
 the ideal is fundamentally presumptuous, and becomes in- 
 creasingly impossible to contemporary moral diffidence and 
 modest self -consciousness; this fact, however, is an addi- 
 tional reason for regarding it correct as an interpretation 
 of Christianity; for this was the ground for the hostility 
 provoked by the doctrine in its early days; and the moral 
 difficulty of any ideal is hardly a final refutation of it; 
 what we require of Christianity is that it be responsible for 
 showing how the ideal is possible. 
 
 Chapter XLV. The Theory op Participation . . 383 
 The 'essence' of any religion is to be found not in its 
 ethical demand upon human nature, but in its answer to the 
 question stated: How is it possible? The demands of Chris- 
 tianity create a logical dilemma; the phenomenon of par- 
 ticipation, by any given self, in the properties of the object 
 known, may lead to a solution, provided that the object 
 known can be an absolute or divine object, having the quali- 
 ties and powers which the individual cannot claim for him- 
 self; the objection to the phrase "the will to power" ad- 
 mitted, and the term rendered finally harmless; the ideal 
 of 'humility'; but the difficulty stUl remains that the indi- 
 vidual, as imperfect, cannot perceive the divine object. 
 
 Chapter XL VI. The Divine Aggression . . . 392 
 
 The logical situation resumed; the idea of salvation from 
 outside; in what sense obnoxious,, and in what sense rea- 
 sonable; the kind of theology by which Christianity meets 
 the situation; its large demands on belief; probability in 
 metaphysics out of place. 
 
xxvi contents 
 
 Chapter XLVII. The Last Fact . . . .402 
 Whether the ultimate reality of the world is such as Chris- 
 tianity affirms it to be is a question of fact; and this ques- 
 I tion cannot be completely settled by philosophical argu- 
 ment; an act of personal discovery or recognition is called 
 for. Becognition is a part of the operation of every in- 
 stinct; as the food-getting instinct recognizes objects which 
 may serve as food, so the total instinct of man will 
 recognize what it needs in the world of metaphysical reality, 
 if what it needs exists there; conversely, metaphysical 
 'findings' are not indifferent theories, but are matters of 
 life and death for the human instincts ; they form part of the 
 circuit of instinctive life; hence the beliefs men have long 
 held are to some extent corroborated by the fact that men 
 have lived by them; but in any actual belief, imagination 
 may mingle with experienced fact in unknown proportions; 
 our beliefs must be perpetually revised by the co-operation 
 of the mystic and the critic; meantime some guide to in- 
 dividual judgment may be had by historical analysis, en- 
 quiring what elements of existing beliefs have been essen- 
 tial to those developments of instinct which give our civili- 
 zation its characteristic qualities. Here follows a rough 
 sketch of such an analysis; in which the present war acts 
 as an experimental aid, by its tendency to attack all merely 
 subjective or sentimental beliefs; it appears that the belief 
 in a quasi-maternal relation of the world to human indi- 
 viduals, a belief partly coincident with the metaphysics of 
 Christianity, has been at the basis of our civilization; and 
 this belief, in turn, might plausibly be explained as merely 
 subjective or pragmatic; objective support for the belief in 
 question, men have supposed themselves to find in the his- 
 torical process itself, particularly in those experimental 
 sacrifices which, though they were deeds of individual men, 
 have seemed to carry an over-individual and authoritative 
 significance. Our argument ends in pointing out the alter- 
 natives presented to individual determination; a negation of 
 the characteristic metaphysics of Christianity would not 
 necessarily destroy human happiness: it would discounte- 
 nance only the highest aspiration, and would render futile 
 only the best of the past. 
 
 Appended Note ....... 417 
 
 Index 429 
 
PART I 
 OEIENTATION 
 
 / 
 
CHAPTEE I 
 AN AET PECULIAR TO MAN 
 
 WE have grown accustomed to think of Nature 
 as engaged in fitting living species to their 
 environments. The living things, however, for their 
 part, are largely engaged in fitting their environments 
 to themselves. It is true that Nature is inexorable 
 and that life is frail; but it is also true that Nature 
 as a servant is faithful and not without amiable traits, 
 while life is infinitely elastic, masterful, and deter- 
 mined. Wherever in the world we find signs of con- 
 scious activity, there we find the world being made 
 over into forms more auspicious for the persistent 
 ends of life. This is what, in the widest sense, we call 
 art: in this sense all conscious behavior is artful. 
 
 But man, I presume, is the only animal that delib- 
 erately undertakes, while reshaping his outer world, 
 to reshape himself also. In meeting unsatisfactory 
 conditions, — ^hunger, danger, or what not, — ^the simpler 
 type of mind has but one argument: "There must be 
 some change in the facts." The human mind has 
 beside this argument another: "Perhaps there should 
 be some change in myself." If a beast is threatened, 
 it may fight or fly; if a man is threatened, he may, 
 while dealing with the facts, take issue also with his 
 own fear or anger. 
 
^ OErENTATION 
 
 I do not say that man is tlie pnly creature that has a 
 part in its own making. Every organism may be said 
 (with due interpretation of terms) to build itself, to 
 regenerate itself when injured, to recreate itself and 
 to reproduce itself. But in all Ukelihood, it is only 
 the human being that does these things with conscious 
 intention, that examines and revises his mental as well 
 as his physical self, and that proceeds according to a 
 preformed idea of what this self should be. To be 
 human is to be self-conscious ; and to be self-conscious 
 is to bring one's self into the sphere of art, as an object 
 to be judged, altered, improved. 
 
 Human beings as we find them are accordingly arti- 
 ficial products ; and for better or for worse they must 
 always be such. Nature has made us: social action 
 and our own efforts must continually remake us. Any 
 attempt to reject art for "nature" can only result in 
 an artificial naturalness which is far less genuine and 
 less pleasing than the natural work of art. 
 
 Further, as self -consciousness varies, the amount or 
 degree of this remaking activity will vary. And self- 
 consciousness is on the increase. M. Bergson has 
 strongly argued that consciousness (including self- 
 consciousness) has no quantity;^ but I must judge that 
 among the extremely few respects in which human 
 
 1 Les donnfies immSdiates de la conscience, ch. i. Naturally one can 
 define a situation, such as the relation of being aware of an object, of 
 which one must say that it either exists or does not exist, — ^without 
 variations of degree. Such is Natorp's interpretation of Bevmsstlieit, 
 not essentially different, I think, from the consciousness of which Berg- 
 son 's statements are true. But such a situation is palpably an abstrac- 
 tion from the reality indicated by "consciousness" to which Bergson 
 himself wishes to call attention. 
 
AN AET PECUL.IAB TO MAN 6 
 
 history shows unquestionable growth we must include 
 the degree and range of self-consciousness. The 
 gradual development of psychology as a science and 
 the persistent advance of the subjective or introspec- 
 tive element in literature and in all fine art are tokens 
 of this change. And as a further indication and result, 
 the art of human reshaping has taken definite char- 
 acter, has left its incidental beginnings far behind, has 
 become an institution, a group of institutions. 
 
 Among the earliest of men (if we may trust our 
 powers of prehistoric speculation) we can perceive 
 merely such sporadic expressions of criticism and 
 admiration as pass perpetually between the members 
 of any human group, — acting then, as they still act 
 upon ourselves, like a million mallets to fashion each 
 member somewhat nearer to the social heart's desire. 
 Wherever a language exists, as a magazine of estab- 
 lished meanings, there will be found a repertoire of 
 epithets of praise and blame, at once results and 
 implements of this social process. The simple exist- 
 ence of such a vocabulary acts as a persistent force; 
 but the effect of current ideals is redoubled when a 
 coherent agency, such as public religion, assumes pro- 
 tection of the most searching social maxims and lends 
 to them the weight of all time, all space, all wonder, 
 and all fear. For many centuries religion held within 
 itself the ripening self-knowledge and self -discipline of 
 the human mind. Now, beside this original agency we 
 have its offshoots, politics, education, legislation, the 
 penal art. And the philosophical sciences, including 
 
4 OEIENTATIOM" 
 
 psychology and ethics, are the especial servants of 
 these arts. 
 
 The agencies have thus become diverse, and to some 
 extent have lost touch with each other, — ^until of late, 
 when common difficulties have tended to remind them 
 here and there of their common origin and common 
 purpose. It is our wish in this study to concern our- 
 selves with these common and original problems, 
 enquiring into the raw material of human nature with 
 which all such agencies must work, and considering 
 in what goal their various efforts should converge, and 
 what principles may guide them to success. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 THE EMERGENCE OF PROBLEMS 
 
 FOR all the agencies which are now engaged in 
 remaking mankind, three questions have become 
 vital. What is original human nature? What do we 
 wish to make of it? How far is it possible to make of 
 it what we wish? 
 
 I say that these questions have become vital, because 
 (though they sound like questions which any wise 
 workman would consider before beginning his work) 
 they are not in any historical sense preliminary ques- 
 tions. It is always our first assumption that we 
 already know both what human nature is and what 
 we wish it to be. Nothing is more spontaneous and 
 assured than the social judgment which finds expres- 
 sion in a word of passing criticism: yet each such 
 judgment ordinarily assumes both these items of 
 knowledge. And it assumes, further, that human 
 nature in the individual criticised could have been, and 
 without more ado can now become, what we would 
 have it. If we convey to our neighbor that he is 
 idle, or selfish, or unfair, and if he perceives our 
 meaning, nothing but wilful failure to use his own 
 powers (so our attitude declares) can account for any 
 further continuance in these ways. Now and always, 
 all spontaneous human intercourse — a nest of un- 
 
b OBIENTATION 
 
 avowed assumptions — takes for granted the common 
 knowledge and acceptance of standards, — at least the 
 fundamental ones, — and their attainableness.^ 
 
 It is only as a result of much failure in the effort 
 to remake men that the question of possibility gains a 
 status and a hearing. It is this same experience which 
 suggests that there is such a thing as a 'human 
 nature,' offering a more or less constant resistance to 
 the remaking process. These two questions, of possi- 
 bility and of original nature, are therefore not inde- 
 pendent : we have to consider the human material just 
 because it is this, primarily, which sets a limit to the 
 human art. It may be regarded, I dare say, as -a dis- 
 covery of religion that there exists a 'natural man' 
 who behaves as a quasi-inevitable drag upon the flights 
 of the spirit. No agency could struggle, as religion 
 has struggled, toward definiteness in its notions of 
 what men ought to be without at the same time win- 
 ning a large experience of the hindrances to the 
 achievement. It lay in the situation from which the 
 concept of human nature arose that the first picture 
 of the natural man should be disparaging. To say 
 that mankind is by nature bad is, in its origins, only a 
 more sophisticated way of saying that virtue is diffi- 
 cult. 
 
 1 One reason why conversation always assumes such knowledge, and 
 such possibility, may be that conversation is itself a momentary asser- 
 tion, and realization, of an ideal. In conversation the mind of each has 
 laid aside its egoistic boundary, as far as the fact of communication 
 goes, and has so far ' universalized itself. ' 
 
 A large part of the meaning of our ordinary postulates of knowledge 
 and freedom might with advantage be stated in these terms: Ton must 
 admit as general principles whatever is implied in your own act of 
 entering into this community of action which we call conversing. 
 
THE EMERGENCE OF PKOBLEMS 7 
 
 But religion is by no means alone in this experience. 
 Legislation and the social sciences have, with becom- 
 ing slowness, and each in its own way, reached the 
 conclusion that there is a human material to be reck- 
 oned with, having properties akin to inertia, just be- 
 cause each has found its original assumption of trans- 
 parent rationality and freedom difficult to maintain. 
 Economics, in setting up a typical man whose self- 
 devoted prudence should consistently stand above 
 suspicion, certainly postulated a very moderate degree 
 of virtue even for the sake of the argument; but no 
 science has more thoroughly discarded its error, or 
 more heartily undertaken tjie task of reckoning with 
 the non-reasoning strands in the human fabric. 
 
 Politics, especially the liberal politics of the past two 
 centuries, was inclined to build its faith upon the 
 existence of a reasonable public and a reasonable gov- 
 ernment. But the disillusioned — not disheartened — 
 liberalism of today turns itself heart and soul to 
 psychological enquiry. It perceives that there is a 
 human nature which invites the use of the same prin- 
 ciple that Bacon applied to physical nature, — some- 
 thing having laws of its own which must be obediently 
 examined before we can hope to control it. "The 
 Great Society, ' ' whether it is to be ruled, or educated, 
 or saved, or simply lived in, has to be taken as a meet- 
 ing ground of forces to which we would better apply 
 the name instinctive or passional than simply rational. 
 Thus the experience of all social enterprises seems to 
 converge in the common admission that human nature 
 
8 ORIENTATION 
 
 is a problem, because human possibility has proved 
 a problem. 
 
 But these problems are not so far identical that the 
 recognition of a 'nature' to be dealt with at once closes 
 the question what can be done with it. On this issue 
 wide differences of judgment are still possible. On 
 one side it may be held that this human nature is 
 unlimitedly plastic, — ^we can make of it anything 
 within reason; at the other extreme it may be held 
 that it is fundamentally fixed, — we may refine it and 
 polish it but can change none of its essential passions. 
 Let us look more closely at the present condition of 
 this discussion. 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 ON THE POSSIBILITY OF CHANGING HUMAN 
 
 NATURE 
 
 WE are said to have an immediate consciousness 
 of freedom, that is to say, of wide margins of 
 possibility. If this consciousness could be translated 
 into a definite proposition, it would presumably assert 
 not alone "I can do (within these wide margins) what 
 I will," but also, "I can become what I will." There 
 have been times when this 'testimony of consciousness' 
 has carried much weight, even to the point of being 
 held decisive; there have been other times when it 
 has forthwith been rejected as more likely than not an 
 illusion. At present, there is far less disposition to 
 believe that we have within ourselves either a foun- 
 tain of deception or a fountain of finished truth: we 
 are inclined rather to question what precisely these 
 intuitions mean, and to seek that meaning in facts of 
 a more objective order, such as the structure of the 
 human being, or his historic doings. 
 
 As to structure, human nature is undoubtedly the 
 most plastic part of the living world, the most adapt- 
 able, the most educable. Of all animals, it is man in 
 whom heredity counts for least, and conscious build- 
 ing forces for most. Consider that his infancy is long- 
 est, his instincts least fixed, his brain most unfinished 
 
10 ORIENTATION 
 
 at birth, his powers of habit-making and habit-chang- 
 ing most marked, his susceptibility to social impres- 
 sions keenest, — and it becomes clear that in every way 
 nature, as a prescriptive power, has provided in him 
 for her own displacement. His major instincts and 
 passions first appear on the scene not as controlling 
 forces, but as elements of play, in a prolonged life of 
 play. Other creatures nature could largely finish : the 
 human creature must finish himself. 
 
 And as to history, it cannot be said that the results 
 of man's attempts at self -modelling appear to belie 
 the liberty thus promised in his constitution, ilf he has 
 retired his natural integument in favor of a device 
 called clothing, capable of expressing endless nuances 
 not alone of status and wealth, but of temper and taste 
 as well, — conservatism or venturesomeness, solemnity, 
 gaiety, profusion, color, dignity, carelessness or whim, 
 he has not failed to fashion his inner self into equally 
 various modes of character and custom. That is a 
 hazardous refutation of socialism which consists in 
 pointing out that its success would require a change 
 in human nature. Under the spell of particular ideas 
 monastic communities have flourished, in comparison 
 with whose demands upon human nature the change 
 required by socialism — so far as it calls for purer 
 altruism and not pure economic folly — ^is trivial. To 
 any one who asserts as a dogma that "Human nature 
 never changes," it is fair to reply, "It is human nature 
 to change itself." 
 
 When one reflects to what extent racial and national 
 traits are manners of the mind, fixed by social rather 
 
WHAT IS POSSIBLE? 11 
 
 than by physical heredity, while the bodily characters 
 themselves may be due in no small measure to sexual 
 choices at first experimental, then imitative, then habit- 
 ual, one is not disposed to think lightly of the human 
 capacity for self-modification. But it is still possible 
 to be skeptical as to the depth and permanence of any 
 changes which are genuinely voluntary. Admitting 
 the importance of knowing what is possible by way of 
 the curious or heroic, it is still more important to know 
 the level to which all curves tend to return after the 
 fortuitous effort and circumstances are withdrawn. 
 Our immediate consciousness of freedom we may then 
 interpret as we interpret the report of our quite simi- 
 lar feeling of physical ability, i.e., as valid primarily 
 for the moment in which it is made. I feel just now 
 as if I could leap to any height, and this feeling is by 
 no means deceptive: I could indeed do so except for 
 the gravity of things in this part of space, which will 
 announce, in the next moment, the level I can reach 
 and where I must come to rest. Likewise, there are 
 few maxims of conduct, and few laws, so contrary to 
 nature that they could not be put into momentary 
 effect by individuals, or by communities. Plato's 
 Republic has never been fairly tried; but fragments 
 of this and other Utopias have been common enough 
 in history. No one presumes to limit what men can 
 attempt; one only enquires what the silent forces are 
 which determine what can last. 
 
 What, to be explicit, is the possible future of meas- 
 ures dealing with divorce, with war, with political cor- 
 ruption, with prostitution, with superstition? Enthu- 
 
12 OBIENTATION 
 
 siastic idealism is too precious an energy to be wasted 
 if we can spare it false efforts by recognizing those 
 permanent ingredients of our being indicated by the 
 words pugnacity, greed, sex, fear. Machiavelli was 
 not inclined to make little of what an unhampered 
 ruler could do with his subjects; yet he saw in such 
 passions as these a fixed limit to the power of the 
 Prince. "It makes him hated above all things to be 
 rapacious, and to be a violator of the property and 
 women of his subjects, from both of which he must 
 abstain.'" And if Machiavelli 's despotism meets its 
 master in the undercurrents of human instinct, gov- 
 ernments of less determined stripe, whether of states 
 or of persons, would hardly do well to treat these 
 ultimate data with less respect. 
 
 It is peculiarly the legislator who needs this wisdom, 
 since he must deal with masses and averages. And 
 there is, in fact, a kind of official legislative pessimism 
 or resignation, born of much experience of the unequal 
 struggle between high aspiration and nature, a pessi- 
 mism found frequently in the wise and great from 
 Solomon to this day. At present it derives large nour- 
 ishment from statistics. The secular steadiness of the 
 percentages, let us say of the major crimes, shows in 
 the clearest light where the constant level of no-effort 
 lies. When Huxley likened the work of civilization 
 to the work of the gardener with his perpetual war- 
 fare against wildness and weeds, he pictured a philos- 
 ophy for the legislator. The world-wise lawgiver will 
 respect the attainable and maintainable level of eul- 
 
 j^ The Prince, ch. xix. 
 
WHAT IS POSSIBLE? 13 
 
 ture, a level not too far removed from the stage of 
 no-effort. 
 
 Indeed, there are many who believe, at present, that 
 our social pilots would do Well to relax their strain 
 in the field of conscious character-building and turn 
 their attention to the stock. If anything extensive is 
 to be accomplished, may not eugenics offer a better 
 prospect than eternal discipline? The future of the 
 race may conceivably be found in a new and scientifi- 
 cally developed aristocracy of blood. (I say 'aristoc- 
 racy,' because evidently under our present arrange- 
 ments the lesser breeds will coexist with the new stock 
 for some little time, and the gap must widen between 
 the two. How to induce these rear-guards to seek 
 Nirvana in due time is one of the awkward problems 
 of the eugenic program.) 
 
 How different from this legislative pessimism is the 
 above-mentioned pessimism of religion. The great 
 religions have spoken ill of original human nature ; but 
 they have never despaired of its possibilities. No 
 sacred scripture so far as I know asserts that men are 
 born 'free and equal'; but no accident of birth is held 
 by the major religions (with the notable exception of. 
 Brahmanism) to exclude any human being from the 
 highest religious attainment. In spite of the revolu- 
 tionary character of their standards, they are still, 
 for the most part, committed to the faith that these 
 standards are reachable. And they have so far trusted 
 themselves to this faith that the entire accumulation 
 of scientific knowledge regarding the determination of 
 character, regarding heredity, and especially regard- 
 
14 OBIENTATION 
 
 ing the instincts, leaves them unmoved. This may be 
 a case of the usual indifference of religion to "prog- 
 ress"; but more probably it is a deliberate rejection 
 of the view that the born part of man is decisive. 
 Religion declines to limit the moral possibility of 
 human nature. 
 
 Thus in the world of practical endeavor as in the 
 world of theory the two extreme positions in the prob- 
 lem of possibility still confront one another. One 
 might suppose, since the question is a practical one, 
 that experience would long ago have settled the matter. 
 And probably, if experience could have settled the 
 matter, it would have been settled long ago. 
 
 For after all, how would you judge from experience 
 what the possibilities of human nature are? All the 
 remaking agencies, religion added, have failed to make 
 a world of saints, or any resemblance thereof. True ; 
 but they have made some saints. In a question of 
 possibility, negative experience counts for nothing if 
 there is but a swingle positive success. 
 
 As for the rest, their failure may indeed be due to 
 their incapacity. But there are many other conceiv- 
 able reasons for it, such as lack of effort, lack of faith, 
 political pessimism itself, and finally, lack of wish. Is 
 it altogether certain that the saint of history is the 
 one human success? To the coldly political eye, his 
 leaven seems to lose much of its distinction ais it 
 spreads through the lump, — as if the role hardly fitted 
 the majority. Indeed, those who pursue to the end the 
 counsels of perfection tear away from the mass ; and 
 the best examples stand in splendid isolation. May 
 
WHAT IS, POSSIBLE? 15 
 
 it not be true that the goal of character which seems 
 possible only to the few is closed to the many only be- 
 cause they cannot be brought wholly to desire it? A 
 revised conception of what is desirable may bring a 
 revised view of what is possible. 
 
 We turn, then, to consider the status of our third 
 problem, What do we wish to make of human nature? 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 WHAT CHANGES ARE DESIRABLE? 
 LIBERATION VERSUS DISCIPLINE 
 
 OF all the doubts that invade our primary assur- 
 ances, the last to arise, and the most disconcert- 
 ing, is the doubt whether we know what we want. We 
 inhale our ideals as we accept our mother-tongue : and 
 so great is the momentum of the vocabulary of lauda- 
 tion that it is long before we discover that not all eulo- 
 gistic epithets can be embodied in one being, — not even 
 in a god. Mr. Bosanquet has instanced Falstaff as 
 disproof of the notion that right and wrong are ulti- 
 mate qualities of the universe : — for who can approve 
 Falstaff 's principles, and yet who would willingly 
 consign him to hell? But is not the difficulty this, that 
 the praiseworthy and delightful qualities of Sir John 
 would be hard to unite with certain other reputable 
 qualities, such as responsibility and temperance; and, 
 generally speaking, that among the ideals which we 
 all accept seriatim there is conflict? If so, the natural 
 inference is simply that these ideals, taken one by one, 
 are somewhat false and abstract. Neither singly nor 
 jointly do they furnish a true picture of what we wish 
 human nature to be; and, in brief, we do not (concep- 
 tually) know what we wish it to be. 
 In this unavowed condition of groping ignorance, 
 
WHAT IS DESIEABLE? 17 
 
 mankind has made (equally unavowed) use of certain 
 guiding principles, among which is this: that if any- 
 thing is impossible, it is not wholly desirable. Every 
 failure to impress a nominal ideal upon human nature 
 works two ways: it strengthens the critics of human 
 nature, the legislative pessimists, and the rest; but it 
 also casts doubt upon the validity of the nominal ideal. 
 Men who, in quest of such ideals, have submitted to 
 much discipline have sometimes come to rebel, not 
 because they have reached their limit, but because the 
 friction of the process has led them to suspect the 
 authority of the goal. Such seems to have been the 
 experience of the Buddha, who after six years of 
 exalted austerity in the Uruvilva forest suddenly 
 turned his back upon his Brahmanic guides. And such, 
 in another vein, may have been the experience of the 
 pleadingly defiant Omar. In such cases, when 'Nature 
 rebels,' she rebels not as a traitor, but in the name of 
 a different conception of rightful rule. The average 
 man, I presume, has always doubted in his reticent 
 way whether those counsels of perfection are alto- 
 gether what they claim to be; whether the gain in 
 brilliance and purity has not been purchased by some 
 loss in the virtues of reality and concrete serviceable- 
 ness; whether, on the whole, something more like 
 "Follow Nature" may not be a truer guide to a wholly 
 desirable human quality. 
 
 There have been eras in history, eras of liberation, 
 when the general voice of this average man has set 
 itself against the tyranny of prevailing discipline. 
 They have been eras like the Eenaissance in which the 
 
18 OBIBNTATION 
 
 hypocritical seams in tlie traditional strait-jackets 
 have become especially visible, as well as the too- 
 interested character of the profession that men are 
 free to become what they are commanded to become. 
 But every age has its party and its prophet of libera- 
 tion, its Eousseau, its Schlegel, its Whitman, its 
 Nietzsche, — ^prophets always more or less philosophi- 
 cal, and sometimes political as well. The principle of 
 the Liberator is. Follow thine own inner nature, — 
 Express thyself. As legislator he is anything but a 
 pessimist, not because he thinks that the older dis- 
 cipline is possible, but because he thinks that what- 
 ever ought to be is possible, and that merely a mini- 
 mum of discipline ought to be. 
 
 The general influence of the philosophy of evolu- 
 tion has been liberating in this sense. Not long ago, 
 Spencer deduced from his "Biological View" the 
 obvious doctrine of any naturalistic ethics, that (other 
 things being equal) all 'functions' ought to be exer- 
 cised. For what else do functions exist but to be 
 exercised? There is a flattering piety in thus follow- 
 ing the intentions of Nature, which are, besides, much 
 more certainly decipherable than the other oracles of 
 Grod. It is true, we are obliged to do a certain amount 
 of guessing: but at least one trend of Nature 
 may unhesitatingly be affirmed, — a tendency to the 
 increase of Ufe, measured in terms of these functional 
 activities. The rule for human culture takes a shape 
 like the rule of the medical art : Eegard life as a quan- 
 tity; conserve and increase it; avoid all forms of 
 repression. 
 
WHAT IS DESIBABLB? 19 
 
 The evil of repression — an inevitable accompani- 
 ment of discipline — is primarily simply that it is 
 repression, i.e., subtraction from life. But beside this 
 quantitative evil, we are assured by Freud and his 
 school that repression is the root of numerous psychi- 
 cal disorders. Freud's importance to the cause of 
 liberation lies in his showing the very mechanism of 
 the process by which the ignoring of Nature is pun- 
 ished. The rule of life which these researches imme- 
 diately suggest is formulated by Professor Holt in 
 his recent book. The Freudian Wish, a simple but 
 universal technique for the release of instinctive ener- 
 gies and the solution of conflicts. The ethical prob- 
 lem reduces to this : to find such a mode of satisfying 
 any wish that all other wishes may also be satisfied. 
 This is clearly the principle of a democratic society 
 applied to human desires. The only admissible remak- 
 ing in a regime of this sort is such mutual adjustment 
 of the methods of satisfaction that our numerous 
 impulses may live together in harmony. The sacrifi- 
 cial choices of the older discipline are not merely 
 unintelligent; they are immoral. 
 
 It is clear that the freedom which interests these 
 prophets of liberation is not the freedom to control 
 and modify desire : it is the freedom to assert desire 
 as we find it in human natilre. If we affect freedom 
 in the former sense, a freedom which can only be dis- 
 played by submitting to self-imposed demands, we do 
 but punish ourselves. Such freedom is no more than 
 a Quixotic liberty to imprison our own nature. The 
 rights of self-government are not properly to be 
 
20 OBIENTATION 
 
 vested in any such transcendent 'ruling faculty' as 
 the Stoics tried to enthrone: these rights should lie 
 with those primary impulses which emerge, with life 
 itself, from mother earth. 
 
 It might be imagined that the religions of redemp- 
 tion, with their demands of rebirth, would find them- 
 selves at odds with the Liberators. And so, to some 
 extent, it has been. But the Liberator is mediatory, 
 and can offer an interpretation of regeneration itself, 
 such as liberal phases of religion are not wholly dis- 
 inclined to consider. Let us say that 'to save' means 
 simply 'not to waste,' — ^not to destroy, not to lose. 
 Eegard religion, then, together with ethics, as a gen- 
 eral economy of life, having definite applications in the 
 field of public justice.^ The work of religion is to con- 
 serve a maximum of energy, of value, of experience; 
 to prevent friction and mutilation, to turn all things 
 to account. A large part of the older meaning of con- 
 version, it is true, must be emptied out. Into this 
 view, no 'twice-born-ness' of the type depicted by 
 William James can be admitted: the precursory sick- 
 ness of soul, the horror of being cosmically lost, are 
 outgrown trials. The way of the mystics, wherein 
 overcoming the world meant mortifying the flesh, is 
 no longer to be followed. Hell has burned out: for 
 God, himself remade in the image of the expansive 
 spirit, is no longer thought of as one who can whole- 
 heartedly exclude any individual or denounce any 
 thing. The 'agonized conscience' of our forefathers 
 
 1 As in the recent writings of Professor T. N. Carver, The Beligion 
 Worth Having; Essays in Social Justice. 
 
WHAT IS DESIRABLE? 21 
 
 may be gently ridiculed as the passing gesture of a 
 'genteel tradition,' now empty of vitality. 
 
 In truth, it has been faring rather ill with the parti- 
 sans of discipline among us. The temper of our own 
 society, of America, is expansive : it is for giving liber- 
 ties to everything that can show a claim of right; it 
 is partial to the under dog, — and are not the primitive 
 passions the under dog in our psychical charade? 
 
 Nevertheless, we are becoming conscious that our 
 liberalism is at loose ends ; and a hunger for discipline 
 is showing itself in various quarters, — ^in politics, in 
 education, in the administration of justice, in provi- 
 sion for defence. The complete view of what we desire 
 in human nature does not lie with contemporary 
 Romanticism: so much we learn through our own 
 experience.^ 
 
 And what we thus learn is being borne out, I believe, 
 by what we are learning as spectators of events in 
 Europe. It has been asserted, and denied, that the 
 Prussian policy is the embodiment of Nietzscheanism : 
 and it should be clear enough that the teachings of 
 Nietzsche have no direct political connection with the 
 present struggle.' But it is wholly idle to argue away 
 
 2 Perhaps there is an element of immodesty in the title of The 
 Unpopular Review,' — the kind of immodesty that led Elijah of old to 
 complain to the Lord, "I, even I only, am left; and they seek my life, 
 to take it away." However, the Eeview has probably no disposition to 
 insist on proving its claim to the title by dying out. Beside being the 
 voice of the many who are ready to subscribe to the creed (and the 
 magazine) of Mr. Holt, Mr. More, Mr. Mather, and their collaborators, 
 it must be recognized also that the call for a goodly degree of discipline 
 is the voice of the persistent if sometimes subconscious common sense 
 of our racial stock. 
 
 3 Historically speaking, the economic historians of Germany, chief 
 
22 ORIENTATION 
 
 the fact that his words have coined the inmost principle 
 of many of our contemporaries on European soil, and 
 faithfully represent to the world a theory of conduct 
 which, while they have not caused, they have mightily 
 reinforced. The natural man of the Nietzschean ideal 
 is a very different person from the natural man of 
 Rousseau: he is far more strenuous, far more ac- 
 quainted with pain and hardness. But like his prede- 
 cessor, he finds his law within himself, and defines his 
 good as the venting of his energies upon the world. 
 He is a hater of Christianity chiefly because Chris- 
 tianity seems to him to curb the salutary surgical 
 processes of nature — Ms surgery. He has the grim 
 optimism which most rejoices to proclaim the goodness 
 of things when it finds the world red in fang and 
 claw — Ms fang and claw. The hero of Nietzsche is not 
 converted, and he rejoices in his non-conversion. We 
 now have, I say, an immense demonstration of the 
 working of his type of liberation. And we, who look 
 on, and who have made use of that same faith in our 
 own public and economic life, cannot quit ourselves 
 of taking part in the process by which the whole 
 Western world in horror and lamentation shall revise 
 its judgment. 
 
 Meantime we discover an element of this revision 
 in the inner life of the same nation whose international 
 behavior has chiefly displayed the error. For the 
 prowess of Germany, so far as it is due to the willing 
 
 among them SchmoUer, have far more directly influenced the shape of 
 German Weltpolitik than any philosopher, or than Treitschke or Bern- 
 hardi, whose writings are merely symptomatic. 
 
WHAT IS DBSIBABLE? 23 
 
 discipline of her own people, commands an admiration 
 which has not failed to enter the soul of her most 
 vehement critics; and just this admiration may have 
 been needed to present the cause of discipline with 
 adequate force to our own too complacent tempers. 
 
CHAPTER V 
 THE LIBERATOE AS DISCIPLINARIAN 
 
 WE have been doing Rousseau the usual injus- 
 tice in classing him with the liberators pure 
 and simple. Rousseau lived to see and thoroughly 
 fear the fallacies of his early cult of Nature. And 
 had the French public been as susceptible to his 
 words upon this point in The Social Contract as to 
 those of the Dijon Prize Essay, the excesses of the 
 Revolution, if they had still occurred, could never by 
 use of his name have ridden to their fall. By 1762 he 
 was ready to put the case in this way: 
 
 The passage from the state of nature to the civil state 
 produces a very remarkable change in man, by substituting 
 justice for instinct in his conduct, and giving his actions the 
 morality they formerly lacked. . . . 
 
 Let us draw up the whole account in terms easily compared. 
 What man loses by the social contract is his natural liberty, 
 and an unlimited right to everything he tries to get and 
 succeeds in getting. What he gains is civil liberty, and the 
 proprietorship of all he possesses. 
 
 We might add over and above all this to what man acquires 
 in the civil state, moral liberty, which alone makes him truly 
 master of himself. For the mere impulse of appetite is 
 slavery; while obedience to a law which we prescribe to 
 ourselves is liberty.^ 
 
 1 The Social Contract, Book I, ch. viii. 
 
THE LIBEBATOB AS DISCIPLINARIAN 25 
 
 Rousseau had experienced something like an intel- 
 lectual conversion; and for our present purposes we 
 should like to know more about the logic of it. But 
 we shall learn less on this point from Eousseau than 
 from other examples of the same process. 
 
 Germany, in the short interval between Kant's 
 Critique of Practical Eeason and Hegel's Philosophy 
 of Right passed in ponderous and explicit argument 
 through the entire gamut of these changes. Kant is 
 the unmatched exponent of the cause of discipline, 
 perfect prey, therefore, for an entire school of roman- 
 tic liberators. It remained for Hegel, imbibing all 
 that was valid in the Romantic movement, to fan into 
 an impressive flame the embers of Rousseau's genius. 
 Hegel had no crusade to preach against human 
 instinct: Kant's idea of a transcendent autocrat in the 
 shape of formal duty found little response in him. 
 Disjunctive choices, the either-or's of life, are wrong 
 choices; right decision, he thought, reaches a synthe- 
 sis, a both-and. So far, Hegel is of one voice with 
 Romanticism, — also with Freud and Holt. 
 
 But what Hegel saw (as Romanticism did not) is that 
 this original nature of ours which is to be given its 
 liberty is something very different from a bundle of 
 co-ordinate wishes. It is quite as much a bundle of 
 thoughts or ideas, with demands of their own. Of 
 all the primitive elements in man, the deepest are his 
 reflective and social dispositions; and if they are to 
 have any freedom at all, they will impose a certain 
 order upon his goings. Like the talent of an architect 
 which can find complete scope only in productions 
 
26 OEIENTATION 
 
 having a substance and system of tlieir own, so these 
 general human talents can find scope only in the law 
 and custom of a social order. What man is, thinks 
 Hegel, is best described by the word 'spirit,' and if 
 this is true, human freedom, like the freedom of the 
 Absolute Spirit in creating the world, will take con- 
 crete shape, and will look very much like submitting 
 to bondage. Human nature can only blossom out 
 under various forms of discipline, such as we find in 
 the economic order, the family, the state : without con- 
 formity to some rule, no liberty. 
 
 So far, Hegel's point is well taken; yet Hegel has 
 failed to convince the world at large that his variety 
 of liberty is genuine. He has failed to convince, not 
 because he seemed to have in mind the Prussian order 
 rather than the French or the British order, but be- 
 cause he supplied no clear way of distinguishing 
 between a better order and a worse. Agreed that only 
 a fuU set of social regulations can set us adequately 
 free, it still makes an immense difference how those 
 functions are adjusted, — aU the difference between a 
 conformity that is far ahead of, and one that is far 
 behind, the freedom of nature. It is the lack of a 
 sharp and usable criterion in Hegel's thought which 
 has given the seven devils their opportunity. To 
 advise an uncritical acceptance of the status quo was 
 probably no more Hegel's intention than it was the 
 intention of Burke when he celebrated the value of 
 prejudice as a source of English stability and strength. 
 But both thinkers were so mightily impressed by the 
 fact that existence, historical existence, WirJclichkeit, 
 
THE LIBBBATOB AS DISCIPLINABIAN 27 
 
 is the great and fundamental merit, that both neglected 
 to save themselves from the appearance of endorsing 
 whatever thus exists because it is actually there. We 
 shall therefore dwell no longer on Hegel. In him, 
 German liberation had turned disciplinarian; but his 
 failure to make coimection with the needs of an ex- 
 panding popular and industrial life in Germany, like 
 the failure of Burke to appreciate the demand for 
 reform in England, made it necessary for the next 
 century to work out the same problem in another key. 
 
 It is precisely this, then, that our own naturalism and 
 liberalism have been doing. They have tried to make 
 thorough and literal earnest of the proposal to set 
 human nature free, and have accordingly been drawn 
 into the attempt to set up a thorough and literal inven- 
 tory of all the ingredients of human nature, all the 
 instincts that are to be satisfied. It is not surprising 
 that they have found, as Hegel found, certain propen- 
 sities which could hardly be appeased without being 
 allowed to assume control of the other propensities. 
 There are some elements of human nature whose lib- 
 eration is discipline. It cannot be said that there is 
 agreement among our empirical students of human 
 nature what these controlling functions are ; but it has 
 become evident that our gregarious tendencies, our 
 sexual and parental tendencies, and our curiosity, are 
 not interests simply co-ordinate with our food-getting 
 and defensive dispositions, to be somehow averaged or 
 synthesized with them. Satisfaction, for them, means 
 organising the whole life on their own principle. 
 
 It is an element of strength in Nietzsche's philosophy 
 
28 OBIENTATION 
 
 that he not only sees this conclusion but seizes it, and 
 builds on it. He revolts against the discipline of 
 Christianity, that is true: but he revolts still more 
 against an amiable and indiscriminate expansionism.^ 
 His type of liberation was one that demanded the ut- 
 most severity of self -pruning, because he proposed to 
 give freedom to one of the masterful elements of human 
 nature. Geist, he said, ist das Leben das selber ins 
 Lehen schneidet; and almost furiously, in his demand 
 for the sacrifice of the unfit in self as well as in others, 
 he parodies the Christian paradox that life is to be 
 saved by losing it. 
 
 Thus Nietzsche expresses, though in characteristic- 
 ally violent speech, the logical outcome of nineteenth 
 century naturalism. As a goal for the remaking 
 process no superman yet depicted can hold our com- 
 plete allegiance: but so much can be said, — that our 
 question can no longer be between discipline and 
 liberation ; it can only be a question of what discipline 
 we shall have. And according to this naturalism, the 
 answer would depend on determining what ingredient 
 of our original nature it is which has the function and 
 the right to control the rest of our original nature. 
 The pure liberators have gone. 
 
 2 For this reason, Professor Irving Babbitt 'a classing of Nietzsche 
 I with Eousseau as a romanticist, in his vigorous and enlightening Masters 
 of Modern French Criticism, seems to me a partial truth which is in 
 danger of missing what is most characteristic in Nietzsche's thought. 
 No one has painted the type of the nineteenth century liberator more 
 vividly than has Professor Babbitt in this book. 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 AN INDEPENDENT STANDARD 
 
 IN a century of thinking, then, we have made head- 
 way. But with all that we have learned or are 
 likely to learn about our own nature, it is far from 
 clear that we can expect to discover by empirical 
 survey what positively and definitely we want to make 
 of ourselves.^ It is one thing to have outgrown all 
 faith in any romanticism which excludes discipline or 
 in any discipline which ignores nature: it is quite 
 another thing to find in following nature or any part 
 of nature a sufficient guide. There was a group of 
 schoolmen who taught that faith, without being con- 
 trary to reason, is beyond reason : there is a similar 
 logical possibility that the goal of human remaking, 
 without being contrary to nature, is beyond nature. 
 
 And what logic suggests, experience seems to bear 
 out. No clear oracle has been received so far on the 
 leading question. Just what is it, after all, that 
 'nature' would have us become? If we make the 
 experiment of putting 'instinct' in control of our 
 
 1 This would amount to merging our third problem, that of the goal 
 of remaking, with our first, that of the original material. No doubt 
 the three problems are thus interdependent, the complete solution of 
 each one waiting for that of the others, so that in the historical growth 
 of knowledge, all three must be driven abreast. But the logical effect 
 of considerations of fact upon questions of ideal is rather to exclude 
 errors than to provide positive hypotheses. 
 
30 OBIENTATION 
 
 behavior, we shortly discover that the dictates not 
 alone of instinct in general but of every particular 
 instinct are ambiguous: iastinct, as guide, shows a 
 fatal lack of sense of direction, and one suspects that 
 even where it seems to show the way it is covertly 
 depending on counsel from another source. The 
 attempt to follow a leader that cannot lead may com- 
 pel the discovery that our real guidance is to be sought 
 elsewhere. This need not mean that the pretender 
 should be slaughtered, nor even excluded from the 
 company; he need only fall in behind the new guide. 
 Nature may well exercise a veto power, or a second- 
 ing power, without having the capacity to make defi- 
 nite positive proposals. If there is anything in these 
 surmises, we should have to look beyond human 
 nature itself for the thing which human nature should 
 become. 
 
 Such an attitude toward nature, considerate, yet 
 independent, appears in the ethical thought of Plato, 
 and in his theory of education. For Plato, the goal 
 of education, as of philosophy and religion, was the 
 attainment of a blessed vision, a state of insight into 
 things as they are. The conditions for attaining this 
 goal included the ascent of an intellectual ladder, the 
 dialectic; but they involved also a purgation of the 
 desires, a genuine remaking of the natural man. The 
 original love for particulars and sensible objects must 
 be transformed into a love of the universal and abso- 
 lute. It is clear that a goal of this description cannot 
 be deduced from the rule of any social instinct, nor 
 of any other instinct observable in the primitive 
 
AN INDEPENDENT STANDABD 31 
 
 human animal. And Plato has often been regarded as 
 thoroughly hostile to the empirical side of human 
 nature. It has commonly been thought that the dual- 
 ism of Christian anthropology, with the excessive self- 
 distrust of mediaeval piety, traced largely to him. But 
 while Plato was unquestionably an aristocrat in his 
 attitude toward the 'senses,' what he required of the 
 natural impulses was far more like 'sublimation' than 
 like 'repression.' No one can read The Banquet in 
 the light of recent psychology without realizing how 
 completely Plato understood the transformability of 
 passions and desires; and how completely in his view 
 of the goal of human endeavor the original fund of 
 desire — considered as a quantity — was saved. For 
 him there existed a single passion, neither unnatural, 
 nor yet given by nature, into which all our various 
 natural impulses are to be emptied and translated. 
 
 Plato, I must judge,, was not hostile to nature. But 
 he had certainly not lost the power of exclusion. And 
 it is not out of the question that liberal religion, too 
 far acquiescent in the amiable expressionism of the 
 day, may regain significance for its concepts of evil 
 and conversion or rebirth through a new contact with 
 the immortal Greek. For Plato could still liken the 
 philosophic life to the pursuit of death. The direc- 
 tion of our remaking effort he conceived to be as dis- 
 tinct from the natural slope of our minds as, in the 
 philosophy of Bergson, intuition is distinct. In Plato 's 
 universe, death and matter and night are still reali- 
 ties ; and the destiny of souls has still its infinite perils ; 
 
32 QBIENTATION 
 
 terror and repentance are rational aspects of expe- 
 rience ; the way to life leads through a strait gate. 
 
 1 need not have gone back to Plato to find an illus- 
 tration of the doctrine of the standard which is inde- 
 pendent without being ruthless in its disciplinary de- 
 mands. Nor yet to Spinoza, who sought to preserve 
 and yet merge all passions in the sense of necessity, the 
 intellectual love of God. Thinkers have always existed 
 who have found the following of 'nature' as vague and 
 inconclusive as the following of fixed law is schematic 
 and unreal. At the present moment, there are those 
 who seek ethical and educational wisdom in a general 
 "theory of value." Such a theory must give an 
 account of what is common to all the different goods 
 in the world, i.e., to all -things whatever that appeal to 
 the human being as having worth or interest. And if 
 it looks inward, to the valuer, and backward, to the 
 origins, it will be likely to ascribe them all to 'feel- 
 ing,' or 'desire,' or 'instinct'; and a theory of libera- 
 tion will emerge merely from the method of attack on 
 the problem. If, however, it looks outward, to the 
 objects of value, and forward, to their standards, it 
 is likely to find itself dealing with an ultimate court 
 which gives laws to nature, rather than receiving laws 
 from nature.^ 
 
 2 For the most part, present writers seek to refer the phenomenon of 
 the ' normativeness ' of our values to some unity within the self, some 
 "Einheit der Gef iihlslage, " not defined directly in terms of the several 
 elements unified. To some it appears as 'the will' (H. Schwartz, Psy- 
 chologie des Willems; W. Wundt; H. Munsterberg, etc.); to others as 
 'personality' (Lipps, Dis ethische Grundprobleme, eh. i; A. Eiehl, 
 Einfiihrung in die Philosophie; M. Beischle, Werturteile und Glaubens- 
 urteile, referring all values to a Gesammt-ich-Gef uhl ; C. Sigwart) ; 
 
AN INDEPENDENT STANDARD 33 
 
 We shall be prepared, then, to find that that which 
 guides our wishes and instigates all the remaking is 
 a spark not lighted in 'nature,' as we commonly 
 understand the term. But if there be any such inde- 
 pendent source of standards,— and we shall not here 
 prejudge the question, — a study of the facts of human 
 nature, and of the ways in which various agencies do 
 in fact work upon it, should make that further fact 
 apparent. For what we ore must at least conspire in 
 our own remaking with any independent principle; 
 and with what we at first take to be the 'leadings of 
 nature,' any such foreign impulse will no doubt be 
 mixed. If it exists, it may be expected to reveal itself 
 in the course of our empirical labor. Without attempt- 
 ing therefore a prior critique of pure will, we may 
 now address ourselves to that labor. 
 
 to others as some function of reason or logic (A. Meinong, Psychologisch- 
 ethische TJntersuehungen, whose reference of moral values to a conceptual 
 impartial spectator revives memories of Adam Smith; J. C. Kriebig, 
 Psychologisehe Grundlage eines Systems der Werttheorie; W. Urban, 
 Valuation, Its Nature and Its Laws). Yet again, there is here and 
 there a tendency to abandon the search within the self and to refer the 
 whole matter of ultimate standards to the structure of the world we live 
 in, or to the conditions for improving the race (R. Goldscheid, Zur Bthik 
 des Gesammtwillens, also Entwickelungswerttheorie, etc., Leipzig, 1908). 
 
PAET n 
 
 THE NATUEAL MAN 
 
CHAPTEE VII 
 
 THE ELEMENTS OF HUMAN NATURE : 
 THE NOTION OF INSTINCT 
 
 IT is no longer possible to share the confidence of 
 Hobbes or of Eousseau that original human nature, 
 in distinction from all that education and civil life have 
 made of it, can forthwith be described. Certainly not 
 by direct introspection can any man draw the line be- 
 tween what is natural and what is artificial in himself. 
 Neither can we fi nd examplfia."f the unafF ected natTi rg,] 
 jstarteTthere are solitary wasps, but there are no soli- 
 tary human infants ; and with the first social exchange 
 the original self is overlaid. Further, this very modi- 
 fication of early character by training is a condition 
 for the normal appearance of later dispositions; an 
 experimental isolation of aJ mman being fo r, the sake 
 of^ observing his nat ural behavior would thu s bfi-selfki 
 deieating. 
 
 Our idea of our own nature, therefore, must always 
 be a result of abstraction. "We have to reach it as we 
 reach other inseparable units, — ^namely, by framing 
 hypothetical definitions of elements that seem to show 
 a degree of constancy, and allowing these formulas to 
 show their power, or lack of power, to express simply 
 the facts of experience. An 'instinct' is STjch-an 
 hypothetical unit. 
 
38 THE NATUBAL MAN 
 
 The notion of instinct is a survival of a long his- 
 tory, a survival of much rough usage (such as the 
 attempt to indicate in a single word the difference be- 
 tween man and the animals), a vagabond concept, 
 which has gained scientific standing only because it is 
 indispensable. And it is indispensable only because 
 all sciences which are concerned with human behavior, 
 whether psychology, or psychiatry, or the social 
 sciences above alluded to, are obliged to mould their 
 ideas very largely by the aid of biology. Thus, our 
 best clue to original human nature is found in studies 
 of heredity — ^the narrow gateway through which 'na- 
 ture' is transmitted; and our knowledge of heredity is 
 governed by biological conceptions. "When we enquire 
 how character is transmitted, we are asked to picture 
 a group of 'dispositions' which take on the physiologi- 
 cal form of 'reflex arcs' — the simple nervous mechan- 
 ism through which a specific 'stimulus' awakens a 
 specific 'response.' If we accept the reflex arc as the 
 beginning of wisdom in the biology of behavior, we 
 shall find it useful to distinguish between simple re- 
 flexes and complex groupings of reflexes — and we have 
 arrived at the notion of instinct. 
 
 For as the biologist sees it, an instinct is but a group 
 of reflexes whose parts follow a regular serial order 
 to a significant conclusion. The serial order is appar- 
 ent in any of the conspicuous animal instincts, as nest- 
 building or wooing and mating ; or in such a sequence 
 as carrying objects to the mouth, chewing and swallow- 
 ing, at that point in the seven ages of man when these 
 actions are still instinctive. The mechanism of the 
 
THE NOTION OF INSTINCT 39 
 
 serial arrangement is also fairly obvious: the conclu- 
 sion of one stage of the process furnishes the stimulus, 
 or a necessary part of the stimulus, for the next stage. 
 Thus, in general, the series can follow but one order; 
 and when once begun tends to continue to the end. In 
 many instincts, the stimulus is not single but mani- 
 fold ; an internal stimulus, for example, must co-oper- 
 ate with an external stimulus before the response can 
 take place. If the internal stimulus is persistent 
 (appearing in consciousness as- a craving) while the 
 external stimulus is occasional, the course of the corre- 
 sponding instinct may appear irregular, may be latent 
 or interrupted. The hen ready to brood is presumably 
 subject to an inner source of restlessness which per- 
 sists, like a hunger, until in presence of the nest and 
 its contents the long-deferred behavior sets in with 
 well-known determination or obstinacy (as one chooses 
 to look at it). It is not difficult to invent a scheme of 
 nervous connections which could be conceived to oper- 
 ate in some such way as this in human beings. All 
 such schemes are indeed too simple to account in full 
 for even the simpler cases of actual behavior : but the 
 biologist, like other scientists, lives by faith to this 
 extent, — ^he inclines to regard his problem as solved 
 when he can see how in principle it might be solved. 
 And for the present we may assume that he is justified 
 in his faith, if not by it.^ 
 
 To each instinct there will necessarily belong a set 
 of motor organs which may be assembled, in structure, 
 
 1 A carefully devised set of graphic schemes has been developed by 
 Professor Max Meyer in The Fundamental Laws of Human Behavior. 
 
40 THE NATUEAL MAN 
 
 as a single organ group, or may be dispersed. To the 
 swimming or flying or spinning instincts are bound 
 the distinctive apparatuses. With the beaver's build- 
 ing propensity goes the beaver's tail. And vice versa, 
 with every such group of motor organs^ will be found 
 an instinct for its operation. There is thus a very 
 rough correspondence between bodily shape and 
 instinctive equipment : the instincts are inherited with 
 the body, as its behavior-charter, so to speak. 
 
 But to the biologist, the notion of instinct contains 
 much more than the picture of a mechanism and the 
 mode of its operation. The mechanism is regarded as 
 a unit not simply because its activity has a definite 
 beginning and ending, but because this activity reaches 
 a conclusion which we called significant. More accu- 
 rately, it brings about a situation which in general 
 favors the survival of the organism or of its species. 
 Instincts are common to all members of a species or 
 to any given sex of the species ; and usually character- 
 ize its way of life. As hereditary paths of least resist- 
 ance, they serve as a sort of initiation, a foreshortened 
 education, for the vital activities of the species. 
 
 To be useful in this way, it is evident that they must 
 be successful with a minimum of training, or with 
 none. Social imitation helps the first efforts at flying, 
 swimming, song ; but it is the untaught and unteachable 
 skill that marks the instinct. Few, if any, instinctive 
 actions can be said to be perfect at the first attempt 
 (unless such unique actions as breaking through the 
 
 2 Any given muscle, it must be understood, may appear in a number 
 of such groups. The distinctness of one instinct from another lies in the 
 group, not in the motor units. 
 
THE NOTION OP INSTINCT 41 
 
 egg-shell, and even then, a preliminary rehearsal or a 
 second birth might well produce improvement). But 
 the instinctive action is effective from the beginning, 
 as it could not be effective had it to wait for either 
 experience or instruction. 
 
 This relation of the instincts to the wider interests 
 of the organism implies a further fact about their 
 physiology. Their nervous, circuits include branches 
 that run through the highest nervous center. The 
 instinct is under cerebral control; and after its first 
 quasi-mechanical operation, is subject to modification 
 through its bearing on other processes reporting at 
 the center. It is the destiny of most instincts to be- 
 come habits shaped by experience of the owner ; hence 
 they must work under the supervision of the owner. 
 They are not, like the winking-reflex, for example, 
 incidental reactions of a part of an animal; they are 
 reactions of the whole animal; they constitute the 
 whole business of the moment of their operation. 
 
 The language we have been using may all be inter- 
 preted physiologically. But for us, the significance 
 of an instinct comes from its psychological, not from 
 its barely physiological aspect. That a nervous loop 
 passes upward through the higher centers means to 
 us that an instinct is an element of consciousness as 
 well as of sub-consciousness ; it falls within what we 
 call a mind, a memory; it is material for remaking. 
 
 Prom the conscious side, the 'stimulus' appears as 
 an object of perception. And the circumstance that 
 this object tends to stimulate, to provoke a response, 
 implies that the perception will be accompanied by 
 
42 THE NATUBAL MAN 
 
 desire or aversion as well as followed by action. As 
 the nervous channel is the physical link between a 
 particular stimulus and a particular response, so a 
 desire is the conscious link between a particular per- 
 ception and a particular action. Without this link of 
 desire the other two mental facts would not be parts 
 of one mind. With the desire often appears feeling 
 or emotion, especially if the response requires a large 
 change in the energy or direction of the existing 
 mental current. But whether the stimulus, the object 
 perceived, arouses emotion or not, it always invites 
 interest. As the kitten finds fascination in a moving 
 string, prior to any experience with mice, so every 
 object that plays on instinctive tendencies appears to 
 consciousness as invested with an unexplained claim 
 upon attention. ^It has a seemingly intrinsic value. 
 It has a 'meaning' for us, more or less vague or pre- 
 monitory or understood, according to the extent of 
 our experience with that particular instinct and its 
 result. It seems probable to me that a pond of water 
 may have to a gosling some 'meaning' at first sight; 
 but any such instinct-object comes in time to 'mean' 
 definitely the whole instinct-process and its end. The 
 conscious 'stimulus' is the perception of the end as 
 the meaning of the beginning. 
 
 Because of this demand upon attention and interest, 
 always more or less unexplained, an instinctive im- 
 pulse frequently appears in the human mind, full of 
 what we regard more rational concerns, as a stranger 
 in the house, curiously external to the 'self that dwells 
 there. Thus fear or anger may invade a mind as an 
 
THE NOTION OF INSTINCT 43 
 
 intruder with which the self deliberately struggles, in 
 the name of reason or of principle. In working out 
 the issue with fear of the dark, a child commonly 
 reaches a stage in which this fear is ahnost an objec- 
 tive phenomenon within himself, and may be personi- 
 fied as a dragon or other foul spirit to be overcome. 
 The instinct with its ahnost mechanical sweep is alien 
 to my self. 
 
 Yet in this externality of the instinct — naturally 
 clearest in the aversions, the negative instincts — ^there 
 is a paradox. It is in instinctive action that one is 
 most himself. During the moment in which the object 
 of perception, the stimulus, may be purely 'interest- 
 ing,' the self stands outside the instinct; but the fas- 
 cination which that object exercises, whether auspi- 
 cious or baleful, conveys an invitation to identify that 
 self with an attractive process of action. To yield to 
 the invitation is perceived as a route of high satis- 
 faction, even though (as in anger) there is involved 
 an intense effort and possible pain. The instinct is a 
 channel down which the current of life rushes with 
 exceptional impetus; once committed to it, we reach 
 our highest pitch of personal self-consciousness, our 
 greatest sense of power and command. The self be- 
 comes identified with its greatest passions. Hence a 
 certain dread frequently felt at the brink of instinctive 
 behavior, even when it appears as a path of satisfac- 
 tion. 
 
 To resume our view of this term, instinct, so com- 
 monly invoked as a unit of human and animal nature. 
 As a physiological mechanism, we have noted the 
 
44 THE ISrATXJBAL, MAN" 
 
 orderly and progressive sequence of reflexes that com- 
 pose it, the contribution of this series, as a whole, to 
 the vital interests of the organism or species, the cen- 
 tral connection which marks its response as total, and 
 its destiny to be modified by experience and to become 
 an individualized habit. As a fact of consciousness, 
 we have described instinct as accentuating the interest 
 of certain objects of perception, endowing them with 
 a meaning to be worked out in a course of conduct 
 whose prompting is the essential part of the instinct, 
 giving zest, momentum, and assurance to that course 
 of conduct, — a zest not unmixed with the thrill of 
 dread as something fateful for the history of the 
 self, — and leading to a situation of repose whose value 
 is the conscious justification for the whole process. 
 
 If the entire human being is originally a bundle of 
 such instincts, this 'self which at any moment seems 
 to be contrasted with a given instinct may be regarded 
 as the representative at that moment of all the other 
 instincts. I doubt whether this will prove to be a 
 wholly satisfactory account of the 'self,' or of original 
 human nature, but it may serve us for the present as a 
 working hypothesis. 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 THE RANGE OF INSTINCT 
 
 IN forming our notion of instinct, we find at the 
 same time the criteria by which an instinct is to 
 be recognized. To external observation, the presence 
 of an instinct would be indicated by the trend of the 
 entire species into a distinctive mode of livelihood, by 
 an untaught skill in pursuing these characteristic ways, 
 and by the peculiar organs or organic contours that 
 correspond to them. An observer would look also for 
 outward signs of the inner states which accompany 
 instinct, for the expressions of spontaneous interest in 
 certain objects, of desire or aversion, of characteristic 
 emotions, and finally, of a degree of urgency and 
 insistence in the behavior. For the impeding of 
 instinctive behavior in animals almost infallibly excites 
 first vehemence and then anger. To long continued 
 observation other marks may furnish clues. Thus, 
 since instinctive action is an attractive experience, it 
 is likely to be not alone recurrent, but also the basis 
 of play, and in subtler expression, of the more enduring 
 interests, bents, powers, passions of the creature. 
 
 But these criteria are not all equally serviceable or 
 conclusive. For the most part, the identification of an 
 instinct tends to rest upon the simple question whether 
 there is an untaught skill, the other marks being 
 
46 THE NATUBAL MAN 
 
 merely corroborative. With these criteria at hand, 
 what range of instinct can we attribute to original 
 human nature? 
 
 At first sight, the human equipment seems compara- 
 tively slender. We have already referred to the rela- 
 tive absence of fixed traits in the human infant. Berg- 
 son has recently reaffirmed the once current belief that 
 man, with the vertebrates generally, has largely sur- 
 rendered instinct in the interest of intellect. This 
 "running to intellect," i.e., an innate propensity to 
 master vital problems by dissecting and reconstruct- 
 ing, such as men take to with more or less of untaught 
 skill, might with some justice be called the essential 
 instinct of man, a substitute for all other instincts. 
 In him, the vital impetus makes for curiosity, and for 
 the invention of hypotheses, and of tools. 
 
 It is true that many observers, from Darwin on- 
 ward to Chadbourne and William James, have been 
 impressed by the number and variety of instinct- 
 rudiments in man. But we are looking for funda- 
 mental factors in the building of a mind, not for relics 
 and fragments of an admitted animal ancestry. We 
 wish to know whether there are instincts which, as 
 McDougall claims, provide the nucleus of all human 
 values: we are less concerned whether there are 
 vestiges that explain the peculiar ways in which we 
 laugh or cry. 
 
 In animals other than man, instinct attracts atten- 
 tion partly because of the conjunction of apparently 
 superhuman cunning with subhuman powers of 
 thought; in part because of the remarkable bodily 
 
THE RANGE OF INSTINCT 47 
 
 structures which accompany them. Man lacks these 
 striking organic instruments ahnost entirely. He has 
 no horns, wings, humps, claws, quills, tusks, shell, or 
 sting. His body offers no visible foothold for notable 
 functions of offence, defence, or craftsmanship. He 
 is a relatively smooth and unmarked animal. Inter- 
 nally, also, his organs are undistinguished. Except 
 that he is obviously neither fish nor fowl, his structure 
 does not mark him for this or that habitat or diet, nor 
 for special mastery over any part of nature. Physi- 
 cally, he is as nearly as possible, animal-in-general. 
 
 From what we can infer of primitive psychology, 
 something analogous must be said of the inner man. 
 He shows no great native skills nor passions. He is 
 not strikingly social nor solitary, warlike nor submis- 
 sive, benevolent nor selfish. Hobbes and Grotius were 
 both in error, the one in representing us as dominantly 
 pugnacious, the other as dominantly amicable. Mon- 
 tesquieu showed greater insight. The natural human 
 being, he thought, shows no conspicuous powers 
 whether of loyalty, mastery, or achievement, inter- 
 ested or disinterested. Sufficient evidence of this may 
 be the wide disagreements of those who have ventured 
 to draw up lists of the principal instincts. Apart from 
 fear, hunger, pugnacity, and love, few names com- 
 monly recur in such lists ; and none of these can show 
 a wholly undisputed title. (Thus, psychically also, we 
 seem to be dealing with a generalized creature, not 
 with one specified in character by many instinctive 
 traits."^ 
 
 But there are reasons why in the ease of the human 
 
48 THE NATUBAI, MAN 
 
 being, the coarser criteria of instinct may not at once 
 reveal what is there. Three such reasons occur to 
 me: 
 
 1. The balance of instincts. If any organ or func- 
 tion is inconspicuous, it is always possible that it does 
 not exist, and this is no doubt the most obvious sup- 
 position. But it is also possible that supplementary 
 organs or functions have grown up beside it, balancing 
 its action, and tending to conceal it. So far as human 
 instincts are concerned, the latter supposition seems 
 the true one. Anatomically, it is the balance of powers 
 rather than the lack of them that distinguishes the 
 human type. The erect posture, for instance, implies 
 not the lack of a ventral musculature, but rather the 
 growth of an equivalent dorsal musculature. Like- 
 wise with the instincts. If no one impulse is dominant 
 in human behavior, it is not because the impulses are 
 lacking, but because in any situation two or more im- 
 pulses are likely to be concerned. Man is not fated to 
 predation, nor yet to a life of fear and flight. It is not 
 prescribed by nature that he should live in immense 
 herds, nor in mutually repellent families, nor alone. 
 Yet impulses in all these directions are present in him, 
 and he is the field of their conflict and adjustment. 
 
 2. Variety of pattern. For the sake of simplicity 
 we commonly picture the physiological pattern of an 
 instinct as a triple arrangement of sense-stimulus, 
 central adjustment, and muscular response, — for each 
 instinct a complete individual set of these three parts. 
 And where an instinct conforms to this simple design, 
 following a path of its own and using a specialized 
 
THE BANGE OF INSTINCT 49 
 
 group of muscles as in eating, vocalization, locomotion, 
 it will hardly escape detection. But few of our in- 
 stincts have such clear-cut rights-of-way: for some of 
 them few muscles or none are set apart. Thus, fear- 
 and-flight and anger-and-combat are highly contrast- 
 ing impulses : but they arise from similar stimuli, and 
 the muscles as well as the visceral changes involved 
 in one largely coincide with those involved in the 
 other. To instincts of this pattern, structure will fur- 
 nish no definite clue. 
 
 And there is, unless I am much mistaken, a still 
 more obscure pattern, — one in which the muscular 
 changes involved are variable, and in some cases com- 
 paratively unimportant, because the function of the 
 instinct is to effect adjustments within the nervous 
 system. If there is an instinctive basis for aesthetic 
 values, for example, it is probably of this pattern; 
 surely there is no typical series of muscular events 
 which can be said to be characteristic of our response 
 to beauty! An investigator whose eye is fixed upon 
 the pattern of sensible stimulus and determinate mus- 
 cular response will be inclined to deny the existence 
 of such instincts ; but we cannot so dogmatically close 
 the question. 
 
 3. Coalescence of instincts. There is a tendency 
 among instincts of all but the simplest patterns, not 
 alone to share in the tracts of physical expression (as 
 above), but also to participate in the satisfactions one 
 of another, vicariously. Are we prepared to say, for 
 instance, that a successful wooing provides satisfac- 
 tion for the mating instinct, but none for the instinct 
 
50 THE NATURAL MAN 
 
 of acquisition (if there is sucli) or of self-assertion 
 (if there is such), or, for that matter, of self-abase- 
 ment? If not, we must acknowledge that no enumera- 
 tion of instincts in which one is supposed to be wholly 
 different from the other in clean-cut division, is likely 
 to do justice to the actual situation. 
 
 When these sources of possible error are borne in 
 mind, it will appear, I believe, that the human equip- 
 ment of instinct is by no means a meager one. We 
 shall now endeavor to make a rough survey of it. 
 
CHAPTER IX 
 SURVEY OF THE HUMAN EQUIPMENT 
 
 FIRST, there are numerous clear-cut instincts of 
 simple pattern wMch we may call 'units of be- 
 havior,' because they are used in various combinations. 
 In the human economy not alone are there few muscles 
 that are used for only one achievement : there are few 
 of the simpler instincts which appear in only one vital 
 function. The operations of reaching, grasping, pull- 
 ing, shaking, are such units. They are sometimes 
 referred to jointly as an instinct of prehension. But 
 evidently there are few of the major instincts into 
 whose course they do not enter, as in the beginnings of 
 locomotion, in climbing, food-getting, curiosity, love, 
 pugnacity. It is as if in man the elaborate instincts of 
 his animal forbears had been broken into fragments, 
 or analyzed after the manner of human intelligence 
 itself, in order that duplication might be avoided, and 
 new possibilities of combining realized. Instead of a 
 one-piece instinct of locomotion, we have many partial 
 instincts which further the co-operation of various 
 groups of muscles in the numerous postures of which 
 the body is capable, in crawling, standing, walking, 
 running, climbing. Doubtless many of these innate 
 connections have yet to be isolated : no one knows what 
 instinctive hints and guidance may come to the aid 
 
52 THE NATTJEAIi MAN 
 
 of the first leap or of the first dodge or fall. Food- 
 getting when it reaches the mouth becomes almost a 
 specific instinct, though sucking, biting, chewing have 
 a degree of separability, and so of other employment. 
 The tendency of all careful study of instincts, guided 
 by the formula of sense-stimulus and specific response, 
 is to fragmentize in this manner the older instinct 
 categories. "Curiosity" disappears in a group of 
 instinctive movements of attention and of manipula- 
 tion such as we mentioned above. The result is an 
 elaborate gamut of units of behavior.^ 
 
 In the view of some writers, these units of behavior 
 are strictly speaking the only true instincts ; the wider 
 categories, curiosity, hunger, etc., should be recognized 
 as convenient and misleading class-names, represent- 
 ing no real unitary instinct.^ It is not evident, how- 
 ever, why a combination of such units to a single ser- 
 viceable end might not be prearranged by nature quite 
 as truly as the units themselves. It is a question 
 of fact whether such more inclusive instincts exist. 
 Flight, for example, under the impulse of fear, seems 
 a thoroughly instinctive performance, making use 
 with untaught skill of many units of behavior. It is 
 noteworthy also that the order and variety of these 
 units is not fixed : the end-situation to be brought about 
 by flight is describable only in general terms, as well 
 
 1 See the lists of James and Thorndike aoticed on pages 58-60. 
 
 2 A similar problem arises in the outlining of species. " In a handful 
 of small shells the 'splitters' may recognize 20 species, while the 
 'slumpers' see only 3. Thus Haeekel says of calcareous sponges that, 
 as the naturalist likes to look at the problem, there are 3 species, or 21, 
 or 289, or 591." Thomson, Outlines of Zoology, p. 14. But instinct 
 is less likely to be regarded a subjective entity than species. 
 
SXJBVEY OP THE HUMAN EQUIPMENT 53 
 
 as the means of reacMng it. The end is to get away; 
 and it is a secondary matter what place I reach, or 
 whether I run away, creep away, or climb away. I 
 should recognize flight as a genuine instinct, identified 
 by its vital meaning or end and by the general char- 
 acter of the process. And since both the end and the 
 process are to be described in general rather than 
 specific terms, this instinct might be called a general 
 instinct. Most of the traditional instincts are general 
 in this sense. Fear, which names an emotion rather 
 than an instinct, expresses itself not alone in flight 
 but in contraction, concealment, rigidity, etc. Yet it 
 also has a definable end; and its unity seems further 
 guaranteed by its genetic position at the head of a 
 group of defensive reactions. I should recognize fear 
 as the (rather inaccurate) name of an instinct of still 
 higher generality. 
 
 It is among these general instincts that the tendency 
 of the human equipment toward balance is most readily 
 recognized. Some of the units of behavior are paired, 
 as pulling and pushing, taking into the mouth and 
 spitting out, laughing and weeping; many again have 
 no specific counterparts. But the general instincts fall 
 naturally into pairs, as follows: instinct to general 
 physical activity and instinct to repose (including the 
 various modes of rest and sleep as units of behavior) ; 
 curiosity and aversion to novelty ; sociability and anti- 
 sociability. This last named pair is itself highly gen- 
 eral, including within itself such instincts, also general, 
 as those of dominance and submission, sex-love and 
 sex-aversion, and parental love, — ^which seems to have 
 
54 THE NATTJEAIi MAN 
 
 no more express counterpart than a repugnance to^ 
 children, which in most persons is a submerged trait. 
 
 It is possible that all of these instincts are derived, 
 as G. H. Schneider thinks, from a pair of primitive 
 reactions, expansive and contractive in nature. I 
 should, in fact, be inclined to group all the assertive 
 and outgoing instincts under one highly general 
 instinct of activity, or expansion, and all the negative 
 instincts under a highly general instinct of aversion or 
 fear. Pugnacity would be a general instinct, compara- 
 tively late in development, uniting in itself the quali- 
 ties of aversion and expansion. The most primitive 
 reaction to opposition is contraction, withdrawal, fear : 
 nature's second thought is that a reserve of energy 
 may be devoted to remove the obstacle — and here pug- 
 nacity, with its own characteristic units of behavior, 
 enters the scene. 
 
 In speaking of pugnacity, however, we touch upon 
 an extremely interesting development in the system 
 of instincts. In a wider sense of the word pugnacity, 
 it may be said that every instinct is pugnacious ; that 
 is, it is characteristic of instinctive action of all sorts, 
 even of fear, to meet opposition with irritation and an 
 increased appropriation of energy. Mr. McDougall 
 has made this fact the defining character of anger and 
 the instinct of pugnacity. That quality of spiritedness 
 which makes an obstacle a spur rather than a discour- 
 agement is unquestionably a more general form of the 
 fighting instinct. But the point of particular interest 
 in this wider form of pugnacity is that it is an instinc- 
 tive control of instinct, an instinct of the second order. 
 
SURVEY OP THE HUMAN EQUIPMENT 55 
 
 There are other aspects of the instinctive regulation 
 of the course of instincts. Play is a lightening of the 
 instinct-pressure, so to speak, under control of socia- 
 bility; as pugnacity is an enhancement of pressure, 
 under control of anti-sociability.^ Every instinct may 
 be expressed playfully as well as pugnaciously; and 
 the preponderance of one or the other of these tenden- 
 cies of the second order marks the difference in tem- 
 perament between the gay and the serious-minded. It 
 may also be said that every instinct is curious, for 
 every instinct, in man at any rate, tends to lend inter- 
 est to objects in any way bearing upon its own opera- 
 tion; or, conversely, curiosity may be regarded as a 
 function of control or guidance applicable generally to 
 instincts of the first order. Curiosity as an appendage 
 of food-getting, construction, sociability, etc., doubt- 
 less precedes in order of development the curiosity 
 which appears as an independent hunger of the mind. 
 This latter kind of curiosity is typical of that ex- 
 tremely important group of general instincts which in 
 our last chapter we spoke of as central. These intro- 
 duce a question so critical for our theory of instinct 
 that we treat of it in a separate chapter. It will be in 
 place here to throw into rough tabular form the survey 
 so far as completed, while recognizing the impossibility 
 of representing in two dimensions — or any other num- 
 
 3 Play and pugnacity, in this regulative capacity, furnish another 
 instance of balance, and we frequently find them alternating. But 
 their relation is not simply that of contrast and balance. As instincts 
 of the second order, the domain of each includes the other, i.e., we 
 often play at pugnacity, and are sometimes pugnacious in the pursuit 
 of play. 
 
SURVEY OF THE HUMAN INSTINCTS 
 
 POSITIVE (Expansive) 
 
 Aggressive 
 
 NEGATIVE (Contractive) 
 Defensive 
 
 Instinct to Physical Activity (?) 
 
 Stretching 
 Rubbing Eyes, etc. 
 
 Prehension 
 
 Graspinff 
 Reaching, PuiUng 
 Shaking, etc. 
 
 Locomotion . 
 
 Standing, Crawling ^^^ 
 WaUfing, Running ^ 
 Climbing, etc. 
 
 Food -Getting |^ 
 
 Sucking, SwaUoanng 
 Carryin^^ Mouth 
 Biting, eh^ 
 
 Hunting^-" 
 RovinO;^ 
 
 Acquisition {ly/ 
 Consta^tion (?) 
 
 S^^r-making (vestigial) 
 
 Curiosity (prumtwe) 
 
 Movements cf AtteTidmg^ 
 Mampuiating, etc. ^"^^ 
 
 Instinct to !nactivity(?) 
 
 Preparation for Repose, 
 Sleep, Death 
 
 Fear (primitive) 
 
 
 
 .version to Novelty 
 
 Sociability 
 
 ,.^ 
 
 VocaUzatiim 
 JmitaHve Acts 
 Gregarious^ Behavior 
 Etc, 
 
 ^ 
 
 Domination ^ 
 
 Duptaff, etc. 
 
 Sex-Love 
 
 Courtmff, Coputation 
 Home-making {?) 
 
 Parental Love 
 
 Nurring, etc. 
 Attachment to Parent 
 
 Averting Head 
 
 .Protective (extension of parental ?) 
 
 I Jvertion to Blooit 
 
 I 
 I 
 
 Anti-Sociability 
 
 I 
 
 Contrast Acts 
 
 Pugnacity (prtoio™) J 
 
 Secretivenesa 
 ^Submission 
 
 Bending, etc. 
 
 Sex-Aversion 
 
 Rejection qf Contact [ 
 I 
 I 
 
 Shame 
 
 Aversion to Children (?) 
 
 I 
 I 
 ,1 
 
 Jmtmcta itf ttcond onter tmttm (ktom page. Uvitt t^ bjtumor in ItfiKa. 
 Indmlalim adieaten digru tf gmeralUy, nol gmdic pmHn. 
 
SUBVEY OP THE HUMAN EQUIPMENT 57 
 
 ber — ^the relations between psycbo-physical entities of 
 this kind. 
 
 Note. For comparison I append several lists of instincts: 
 Chadbourne, writing in 1872, was one of the earliest in this 
 country to give attention to instinct in man. William James 
 was influenced to some extent by his work. His attitude is 
 modern in one respect at least: i^istead of arguing from the 
 inadequacy of instinct to the necessity of reason in man, he 
 argues from the incompetence of reason to the necessity of 
 instinct. Because reason, in the following respects, is unable 
 to adapt man to his world, a group of instincts is needed at 
 each point : 
 
 1. For the life of the individual and the species, a set of 
 
 instincts common to man and animals, and suffi- 
 ciently designated as 'appetites.' 
 
 2. For progress of the individual and the race : 
 
 The desire for society; 
 
 The desire for knowledge, property, power, esteem; 
 
 The impulse to confide in persons, or faith; 
 
 The disposition to do for posterity. 
 
 3. For benevolence (i.e., for maintaining the social and 
 
 moral life) : 
 
 The sense of obligation. "It is plain that we feel 
 under obligation to do certain acts for the doing of 
 which we can give no reason except that we feel 
 the obligation. ' ' Shown in four ways : 
 
 1. Impelling to choose the end for which we are 
 
 made; 
 
 2. Impelling to every act judged as means to that 
 
 end; 
 
 3. Impelling to certain acts whose relation to that 
 
 end is not seen ; 
 
 4. Impelling the "comprehending power" to do 
 
 its best to furnish the most favorable con- 
 ditions for realizing our obligation. 
 
58 
 
 THE NATUEAL MAN 
 
 4. For religion (i.e., for adaptation to supernatural 
 environment) : 
 The impulse to prayer, etc. 
 
 William James, writing in 1890, gives a list based largely 
 on Preyer and Schneider, remarking of it that "no other 
 mammal, not even the monkey, shows so large an array." 
 Approximately the first twenty correspond with our 'units 
 of behavior. ' 
 
 Sucking. 
 
 Biting. 
 
 Chewing and grinding teeth. 
 
 Licking. 
 
 Grimacing. 
 
 Spitting out. 
 
 Clasping. 
 
 Reaching toward. 
 
 Pointing (and sounding). 
 
 Carrying to mouth. 
 
 Crying. 
 
 Smiling. 
 
 Protruding lips. 
 
 Turning head aside. 
 
 Holding head erect. 
 
 Sitting up. 
 
 Standing. 
 
 Locomotion. 
 
 Climbing. 
 
 Vocalization. 
 
 Imitation. 
 
 Emulation or rivalry. 
 
 Pugnacity, anger, resentment. 
 
 Sympathy. 
 
 The hunting instinct. 
 
 Fear. 
 
 Acquisition. 
 
 Constructiveness. 
 
 Play. 
 
 Curiosity. 
 
 Sociability and shyness. 
 
 Secretiveness. 
 
 Cleanliness. 
 
 Modesty, shame. 
 
 Love. 
 
 Jealousy. 
 
 Parental love. 
 
 In making his list, James was guided by a method of "physi- 
 ological analysis," and he regarded his results, though con- 
 fessedly incomplete, as having clear advantages over such a 
 "muddled list" as that of Santlus (Leipzig, 1864), who had 
 classified human instincts under three heads, — instincts of 
 being, of function, and of life. 
 Wm. McDougall, whose interest is in the social significance 
 
SUEVEY OF THE HUMAN EQUIPMENT 59 
 
 of instinct, identifies seven fundamental instincts by means 
 of their corresponding emotions, namely: 
 
 Fear. 
 
 Disgust. 
 
 Wonder. 
 
 Anger. 
 
 Subjection, negative self-feeling. 
 
 Elation, positive self-feeling. 
 
 Tender emotion. 
 
 In addition to these, McDougall recognizes suggestibility, 
 imitation, and sympathy, as innate tendencies of a diiferent 
 pattern. 
 
 The most discriminating inventory is that of Professor E. L. 
 Thomdike, in The Original Nature of Man, 1913. Pro- 
 fessor Thomdike is as much of a "splitter" as Mr. McDougaU 
 is a "slumper." This is the iuevitable consequence of his 
 attempt to apply consistently the scheme of stimulus- 
 response. It would be impracticable to reproduce here the 
 net result of his painstaking studies in the form of a list, and 
 also somewhat unfair, as he regards the list as decidedly 
 provisional. 
 
 But a specimen of his reducing process may be given. To 
 recognize groups of instincts resulting in food-getting, habi- 
 tation, fear, fighting, anger, is a matter of convenience, not 
 of strictly scientific relationship. When named by situation 
 and response, the following innate connections, among others, 
 may be regarded as probable : 
 
 Situation Response 
 
 Eating 
 
 Sweet taste. Sucking movements. 
 
 Bitter taste. Separating posterior por- 
 
 tions of tongue and palate. 
 Very sour, salt, acrid, bit- Spitting and letting drool 
 ter, oily objects. out of the mouth. 
 
 Food when satiated. Turning head to one side. 
 
60 
 
 THE NATUBAL MAN 
 
 Beaching. 
 
 Not being closely cuddled 
 (in young infants). 
 
 An object attended to and 
 approximately within reach- 
 ing distance. 
 
 An attractive object seen. 
 
 Acquisition and possession. 
 
 Any not too large object 
 which attracts attention and 
 does not possess repelling or 
 frightening features. 
 
 Possession of object 
 grasped. 
 
 A person or animal grab- 
 bing or making off with an 
 object which one holds or has 
 near him as a result of recent 
 action of the responses of 
 acquisition. 
 
 * The Original Nature of Man, 
 
 Beaching and clutching. 
 
 Reaching, maintaining ex- 
 tension until object is 
 grasped. 
 
 Reaching and pointing, 
 often with 'a peculiar sound 
 expressive of desire.' 
 
 Approach, or if within 
 reaching distance, reaching, 
 touching, and grasping. 
 
 Putting in mouth, or gen- 
 eral manipulation, or both. 
 
 The neural action parallel- 
 ing the primitive emotion of 
 anger, a tight clutch on the 
 object, and pushing, striking, 
 and screaming at the in- 
 truder.* 
 pp. 50-52. 
 
CHAPTER X 
 
 THE CENTRAL INSTINCTS: NECESSARY 
 INTERESTS 
 
 WE have had several occasions to refer to the 
 place of curiosity in the group of human 
 instincts. However large the difference among men 
 in the degree of their inquisitiveness, this trait is evi- 
 dently in some degree a native character of the species, 
 in both sexes. It shows itself in certain units of be- 
 havior of the simplest pattern, such as grasping, tast- 
 ing, pulling to pieces. It bears an evident proportion 
 to other instincts: wherever animals are scantily 
 armed and slightly pugnacious, there is generally a 
 compensating development of fear or curiosity, or of 
 both as in the timorous and yet inquisitive herbivora. 
 These tendencies, whether in animals or in men, to 
 spy out, examine, test, dissect, appear to be untaught, 
 effective, and frequently absorbing. Sometimes they 
 re9,ch morbid intensity and become a "questioning 
 mania," or " GrubelsucM." Thus there are substan- 
 tial reasons for including curiosity among the instincts. 
 If it still seems anomalous to find the activity of 
 intellect, customarily contrasted with instinct, brought 
 within that category, we may remember that while the 
 intellect finds reasons (which are certainly something 
 else than instinct), it does not begin by asking the 
 
62 THE NATUEAL MAN 
 
 reason for finding reasons. The motive or value of its 
 own activity is, during that activity, unreasoned and 
 untaught. The exercise of thought, as has often been 
 remarked, is a matter of our impulsive nature ; and it 
 is the underlying craving -for action, not the particu- 
 lar type of activity, that betokens the instinct. 
 
 Yet if we ask what we should regard as the ' stimu- 
 lus ' in the case of curiosity, we find it impossible to 
 bring it under the usual reflex scheme. "There is no 
 one class of objects," McDougall points out, "to 
 which it is especially directed, or in presence of which 
 it is invariably displayed."^ Curiosity is commonly 
 excited by what is novel ; and what is novel is relative 
 to the previous experience of the individual in ques- 
 tion. The idea of a 'stimulus' as a group of sensa- 
 tions that will invariably excite the given behavior is 
 thus excluded in advance, — ^the conditions for excit- 
 ing curiosity negate the very definition of a stimulus. 
 Curiosity is also frequently aroused by signs of con- 
 cealment or stealth in others ; but try to express con- 
 cealment or stealth in terms of a constant group of 
 sense-impressions, and one forcibly realizes that these 
 are objects, not of vision, but of interpretation in 
 terms of social consciousness. 
 
 And if we ask what we should regard as the 're- 
 sponse,' we find a similar difficulty. Curiosity has its 
 manifestations in physical behavior like any other 
 instinct ; but the behavior is now of one kind and now 
 of another, — listening, peeking, testing with hands 
 and mouth, pulling apart, smelling, shaking, tiptoeing 
 
 a Body and Mind, p. 266. 
 
NECESSABY INTEBBSTS , 63 
 
 and creeping up upon, ox later, reading, asking ques- 
 tions, 'stopping to tMnk,' — there is no one-to-one 
 correspondence between tlie impulse of curiosity and 
 any type of physical action. 
 
 This does not mean either that we are dealing with 
 a multitude of fragmentary instincts, or yet, as Mc- 
 Dougall infers, that we are dealing with a purely 
 psychical process which has no complete physiological 
 expression. What it does mean, I suggest, is that we 
 must recognize a kind of process in which the ' stimu- 
 lus ' as well as the 'response' are primarily central. 
 It is the existing state of consciousness which deter- 
 mines whether, and in what quarter, curiosity shall 
 be aroused, and what constitutes its satisfaction. In 
 physiological terms, curiosity is a function of the con- 
 dition of the centers. 
 
 It seems probable that there is a group of such ten- 
 dencies, quite as native as any modes of muscular 
 behavior. If certain central conditions are natively 
 unsatisfactory and certain others natively satisfactory 
 (which can hardly be doubted), it is a question of 
 organization whether there will also be native ways 
 of bringing about a change from the former to the 
 latter of these conditions. Whether we extend the 
 word instinct to them, in view of their deviation from 
 the primary pattern, is a matter of choice in definition. 
 They might well be distinguished as 'central instincts.' 
 Or, since they would depend in the first place not on 
 specific routings of nervous energy, but on the nature 
 of the nervous system itself, the needs in question 
 would presumably be the same for every animal hav- 
 
64 THE NATUEAIi MAN 
 
 ing a nervous system ; it would be proper to speak of 
 them, then, as 'necessary interests." 
 
 That this theory may be of some use in explaining 
 our aesthetic tendencies, we have already suggested. 
 Consider the universal tendency to rhythmic expres- 
 sion, as in dancing, music, design, various forms of 
 play. There are many signs that the appreciation of 
 rhythm is as necessary a consequence of the economy 
 of nervous functions, as rhythmic behavior is of the 
 economy of muscular function, of respiratory function, 
 etc. When we want to gain the full flavor of any sense- 
 impression, we repeat it at intervals, as in tasting, 
 stroking, feeling textures, etc. So, too, with those 
 perceptions in which thought is mingled with sense. 
 In realizing the proportions of a fa<jade, a series of 
 buttresses or a segmented cornice aid the "grasp." 
 Even a small surface, as of a coin, seems more com- 
 pletely known when divided: the spatial perception 
 joined with the perception of number gives, as it were, 
 a perception of higher order. The principle may be 
 this : that to appreciate any experience in its totality 
 we must resort to the device of really or mimetically 
 building it up from numerable parts ; so that whatever 
 we desire to hold vividly before consciousness we will 
 necessarily tend to divide and recompose by segments 
 
 2 Note that the necessity of these interests is here described not as 
 a logical hut as a constitutional necessity. This necessity depends solely 
 on what modes of central nervous operation are satisfactory modes, 
 from the standpoint of the functions of the central nervous system. It 
 is thus a fundamentally different kind of 'necessary interest' from that 
 which Professor B. B. Perry recognizes in the satisfaction of interests 
 generally: this latter is a logically necessary interest, i.e., for a mind 
 sufficiently reflective to make a class of its own interests. 
 
KECESSABY INTERESTS 65 
 
 or in rhythmic intervals. Ehythm would then be a 
 general character of art forms, i.e., of the forms we 
 choose for heightened perception, because of a neces- 
 sary condition of the neural substratum of cognition. 
 In this sense we might speak of rhythm as a necessary 
 interest.' 
 
 Can these necessary interests be enumerated? 
 
 It seems evident to me that many names which have 
 rumbled through theories of instinct without gaining 
 any definite lodgment have been aimed at this place. 
 We have heard of an instinct of self-preservation ; and 
 as no definite stimulus or response can be alleged for 
 such an instinct, it has been dropped from the books. 
 The 'will to live' and the 'will to power' have been 
 allowed a possible place in metaphysics, but with the 
 distinct understanding that they have no status in 
 psychology. It has not been noticed apparently that it 
 is also impossible to define a sense-stimulus and re- 
 sponse for the social propensities of men, which in 
 some form are usually held to be instinctive. 
 
 My judgment is that the most significant of human 
 tendencies, those without which no theory of instinct 
 would be worth its salt in illuminating human nature, 
 are tendencies of this central sort. They are conse- 
 quences of the fact that the stuff of which we are made 
 works better in one way than in another, and not of the 
 fact that a given set of connections is arranged to start 
 moving by a certain impact from outside. I should 
 include among these necessary interests our sociability 
 
 8 Mr. Joseph Lee includes rhythm in his list of instincts. Play in 
 Education, 1915, ch. xx. , 
 
66 THE NATUBAL MAN 
 
 as well as our curiosity, and hence certain major 
 ingredients of ambition and the family affections. I 
 have mentioned our formal interest in rhythm, and I 
 should add, in unity, harmony, differentiation, com- 
 pleteness, and simplicity. As for self-preservation, 
 we may find a place for it as follows : 
 
 The will to live, for a being with a mind, must 
 always mean the will to be mentally alive as well as 
 to be physically metabolizing. The presumption is 
 that the simple fact of being conscious, other things 
 equal, is a satisfactory condition; and that a self- 
 conscious being would with a necessity both constitu- 
 tional and logical (in Professor Perry's sense) tend 
 to preserve and to increase the qug,ntity of his liveli- 
 ness. If it is not merely the contents of experience 
 that are valuable, but the process of experiencing, it 
 is clear that so far as a being is self-conscious he will 
 have a 'will to live,' or an 'instinct of self-preserva- 
 tion. ' 
 
 ■ In these necessary interests, we have the most sig- 
 nificant but also the most obscure of original human 
 tendencies. It is they that have been the chief stum- 
 bling block in the theory of instinct; for while that 
 theory becomes comparatively trivial when they are 
 omitted, it has always been muddled when they have 
 been included. The attempt to assimilate them to the 
 type of stimulus and response could hardly have 
 ended otherwise than in confusion. The chief diffi- 
 culty of reaching a clear and exhaustive enumeration 
 of these tendencies does not lie, however, in their pecu- 
 liar mechanism: it lies in the fact that they are not 
 
NECESSABY INTEBESTS 67 
 
 distinct and separable entities. They are in reality 
 various aspects of one fundamental instinct or neces- 
 sary interest. We have spoken of the tendency of 
 instincts to coalesce ; we must now givie some further 
 attention to that circumstance. 
 
CHAPTER XI 
 THE Wn.L 
 
 IT is notoriously hard to read the motives of other 
 men's acts. And while we have a position of 
 advantage in judging the motives of our own acts, the 
 chances of error are still large. A writer of fiction 
 might fairly be allowed to claim knowledge of the 
 minds of his own creations : yet even here, if I am not 
 mistaken, there is a visible dread of dogmatism, and 
 romance is tending to return to the psychological 
 reticence of the drama, which reveals the mind chiefly 
 through situation and behavior. 
 
 This new demand for objectivity need not mean that 
 'motives' are fictions. It may well mean that our 
 theory of motives is unsatisfactory. It is doubtless a 
 futile question whether one who joins the colors is 
 actuated by pugnacity, or by love of country, or by 
 ambition, or by mob consciousness, or by the need of 
 shining in the eyes of some woman: but if so, it is 
 because of a false assumption in the question. 
 
 The most elementary psychological insight will show 
 that the either-or assumption is gratuitous, since the 
 presence of one of these motives need not exclude 
 another. All actual motives are mixed. Synthesis or 
 fusion of motives, which to Holt is the chief moral 
 obligation, is in fact the universal and natural prac- 
 
THE WILL 69 
 
 tice. But the question I wisli to raise is not whether 
 motives are compounded : it is rather whether they are 
 originally separate. It is here, I believe, that we find 
 the root of the difficulty. 
 
 Can we say, for example, that curiosity is one thing 
 and the love of power or security a different and sepa- 
 rable thing? The interest with which civilization reads 
 its morning paper, the disposition to gossip and to hear 
 gossip, the most flagrant acts of prying or eavesdrop- 
 ping, — is it certain that these are to be put down to 
 intellectual hunger and not to the 'instinct of self- 
 preservation' (since ignorance is undeniably a state 
 of peril), or to the 'instinct of self-assertion' (since 
 knowledge promises control of persons and events) ? 
 If the superficial observer finds it hard to decide such 
 questions, is the psychologist in a happier situation?^ 
 
 A mental experiment, that is to say, an experiment 
 in imagination, may throw some light on this matter 
 of the relation of nominally different motives. Imagine 
 a mind at the beginning of its career, responding 
 to its first instinctive impulse ; and then to its second. 
 Assume that this second experience is as different 
 from the first as possible, involving different sense- 
 tracts, different viscera, and different muscles through- 
 out. By what sign would the second experience belong 
 to the same mind as the first; i.e., how could we dis- 
 
 1 Speaking of the motives of ' ' those dangerous journeys of dis- 
 covery, etc., by which the whole earth has been mapped out during the 
 last four hundred years," Graham Wallas suggests that "perhaps, 
 indeed, it is this desire for Fear, rather than the impulse of Curiosity, 
 which has been the most important single cause." The Great Society, 
 p. 89. 
 
Missing Page 
 
THE WILL 71 
 
 what things are good. But what good is it cannot 
 learn empirically; since the use of this knowledge is 
 implied in the first judgment. Nevertheless, experience 
 has everything to do in bringing this knowledge into 
 the foreground of consciousness. It may be a long 
 journey from the knowledge which we can only use to 
 the knowledge we can wield and express, — as long as 
 from our spontaneous 'cutting across corners' to an 
 enunciation of the axiom of the shortest line. A long 
 history of active acceptance and rejection is necessary 
 before the idea of good becomes an item of self-con- 
 sciousness, laden with concrete images. The dawn- 
 ing of such self-possession means the achievement of a 
 more or less stable policy toward incoming suggestions 
 and impulses. And to have a stable policy is to have, 
 in the specific sense of the word, a will. 
 
 Will in this sense is a matter of degree. At an 
 alarm of fire, a schoolboy may respond by running to 
 the scene approximately 'without a thought': in a few 
 more years the same stimulus encounters an order of 
 life having a momentum of its own, and if it wins the 
 day, it is by an act of 'will.' Will exists when, and 
 in so far as, any instinctive impulse has first to obtain 
 the consent of a ruling policy before pursuing its 
 course. The policy of a self is its acquired interpreta- 
 tion of its own central and necessary interest. And 
 thus, if men are alike in nature, we should be able to 
 perceive at the center of all "central instincts" and 
 "necessary interests," and indeed within all instincts 
 whatever, a nucleus of common meaning which we 
 would be justified in calling the fundamental instinct 
 
72 THE NATURAL MAN 
 
 of man, the substance of the human will. No one de- 
 scription of this central instinct is likely to be suffi- 
 cient; but the phrase "the will to power" is capable of 
 conveying a large part of the truth. 
 
 To illustrate: 
 
 It is not hard to see that many of the simple and 
 general instincts deal with the fluxes of power, in one 
 way or another, and may be referred to a general vital 
 interest in conserving or increasing power. Pood- 
 getting instincts reach their apparent goal in the sat- 
 isfying of hunger; yet it would be a bold psychology 
 that would affirm that eating to the human species has 
 no more general meaning than quenching this craving. 
 Hunger, I dare say, is felt as a diminished status, a 
 sign of a dependence on material intake, which eating 
 both confesses and temporarily removes. It is per- 
 haps the element of physical humility which makes 
 the taking of food a fit occasion for sociability: for 
 here is the most natural and permanent democracy, 
 that of dependence on material nature for continued 
 life. But the social instinct would hardly make so 
 much of a mutual confession of dependence if there 
 were not also a mutual emancipation. Eating, by 
 itself, is a form of conquest, surrounding what is alien 
 and making it a part of ourselves. The satisfaction 
 of food to a thoroughly hungry man is less a matter 
 of the aesthetics of taste than a consciousness of making 
 something his own, a sense of mastery. But beyond 
 this, he is aware of eating as releasing the springs of 
 his rightful attitude toward the world, his control 
 of his own fortune. In both ways, the satisfaction of 
 
THE WILL 73 
 
 hunger is at the same time a satisfaction of a *4ove 
 of power. ' ' 
 
 Play hardly bears the conventional aspect of the will 
 to power. It seems to consist, as we noticed above, in 
 a social soft-pedalling of the major instincts, rather 
 than in any distinct tendency of its own. Yet the play 
 world may be accurately described, on its psychologi- 
 cal side, as the world of practice in mastery. In play, 
 growing humanity carries on a career with plastic 
 materials, such as it can control with its small powers, 
 until it is ready to throw away its playthings and try 
 a fall with realities. 
 
 Fear is a negative expression of our concern for 
 power. The general element running through all the 
 scores of situations which excite fear is the presence 
 of an environment for which none of our instinctive 
 powers fit us. In water, or fire, or chasms of air, or the 
 world of ghosts, our instincts lose their grip. In such 
 event a residual instinct, felt as fear, tends to remove 
 us from the uncanny world to one in which we may 
 once more say I can. Thus fear also is a form of the 
 desire to be in a relation of power to experience. 
 
 I do not doubt that such tendencies as acquisition, 
 construction and destruction, the love of being a cause, 
 and all other human loves and interests will show 
 themselves, upon examination, in a similar light; for 
 the will to power is perhaps the nearest name that has 
 yet been found for the most central of instincts. The 
 will to live is in some ways a less misleading name, 
 and with sufficient study may be found to convey as 
 much. But in man, the will to five must take the form 
 
74 THE NATUBAIi MAN 
 
 of the will to live as a man; and this involves much 
 more than the cherishing of existence, — it involves 
 dealing with a world of objects and resistances, and 
 holding intact one's validity in the midst of that inter- 
 course; More than that, it implies the process of the 
 artist, that of imposing upon the external mass an 
 element of form and order that is first one's own. 
 This active and creative quality is better suggested 
 by the phrase, the will to power. 
 
 This phrase need not be regarded with aversion 
 because it has been used by Nietzsche; nor because it 
 allies itself with the most glaring defects of temper. 
 Nietzsche's error is not that he struck a false note 
 in human nature; but firstly that he supposed his 
 expression to be adequate, and secondly that he 
 thought of power as intrinsically competitive, a good 
 which can be gained by one only at the expense of 
 another. In our use of the phrase we shall at the out- 
 set reject both these errors. We do not regard the 
 will to power as an adequate name for the central 
 instinct : but it represents that instinct in a form which 
 we, of this age, have especial need to understand. And 
 we reject the competitive relation as necessarily im- 
 plied in the concept of power. Power over nature is 
 the unit of all actual commonwealth. And the power 
 of men over one another may be at the same time a 
 power-for,-pas the power which a parent has for, and 
 over, a child. And the rightful position of one man 
 toward others cannot be described without this con- 
 ception: for this position does not consist merely in 
 being amiably disposed towards them, but rather in 
 
THE WILL 75 
 
 standing in loco Dei toward them, and acting as a 
 Providence to them. To love mankind and to seek this 
 power are not separable ; and it is well to be reminded 
 that love without this element of responsible ambition 
 is not fit to survive upon this planet. The will to 
 power is Protean, but so is the instinct of man. We 
 shall therefore refer to the human will, so far as it 
 is embodied in human instinct, as the will to power. 
 
 Note. Other views of the will : the Freudian view. 
 
 "We have argued the question whether the self is a bundle 
 of distinct cravings or a single craving with many forms, as 
 if it were a question of logical necessity. Yet it would seem 
 to be a question for whose answer men might fairly be re- 
 ferred to their own experience. And I agree that what the 
 self is, and what the will is, are empirical questions whose 
 answer each self holds within its own experience; only, it 
 sometimes requires a touch of logic to induce the human mind 
 to face the facts. 
 
 Radical empiricism in psychology once meant seeing noth- 
 ing of the mind but a swirl of separable 'states'; a still later 
 empiricism professes to find nothing of the mind but a system 
 of behavior. But empiricism is not incapable of finding con- 
 nections and unities, — ^if they exist. The perception of unity 
 in psychology, though clearer to Plato than to ^ristotle, is no 
 prerogative of a monistic metaphysics. I doubt whether any- 
 one will accuse Buddha of being a monist, and he certainly 
 did his best to destroy the theory of a soul ; yet Buddha after 
 referring all suffering to desire, referred all desire to a single 
 craving which he described as the craving for individuality 
 or separateness of being. And modern naturalism is not 
 without tendencies of the same kind. If mind has an evolu- 
 tionary history, and particularly if it has grown by "dif- 
 ferentiation and integration" from the simple to the com- 
 plex, nothing would be more natural than to derive (as G. H. 
 
76 THE NATUBAL MAN 
 
 Schneider has tried to do (p. 24), or M. Haehet-Souplet) our 
 many instincts from a primordial instinct or tropism; and 
 nothing would be more natural than to suppose that these 
 kinships of origin would remain as kinships of quality and 
 meaning. 
 
 But evolutionary psychology, and in fact all genetic psy- 
 chology, is necessarily a mixture of empiricism with a degree 
 of speculation. It is therefore a matter of theoretical inter- 
 est when a group of psychiatrists, presumably on the basis 
 of clinical experience alone, find themselves reducing all 
 human desires to a single root as a working hypothesis. 
 "From the descriptive standpoint," says C. G. Jung, "psy- 
 choanalysis accepts the multiplicity of instincts. From the 
 genetic standpoint it is otherwise. It regards the multiplicity 
 of instincts as issuing out of a relative unity, the primitive 
 libido. It recognizes that definite quantities of the primitive 
 libido are split off, associated with the recently created func- 
 tions and finally merged with them. . . . We term libido that 
 energy which manifests itself by vital processes, which is sub- 
 jectively perceived as aspiration, longing, and striving. We 
 see in the diversity of natural phenomena the desire, the 
 libido, in most diverse applications and forms. In early 
 childhood, we find libido at first wholly in the form of the 
 instinct of nutrition. . . . Claparede in a conversation once 
 remarked that we could as well use the term 'interest.' "* 
 Others beside Claparede have observed that the Freudian 
 psychology has important philosophical bearings, which are 
 disguised by the misleading emphasis of its terms.' But if 
 'libido' is too specific in its connotation, the term 'interest' 
 is too lacking in descriptive force, while 'I' elan vital' is not 
 intended as a psychological term at all. The 'will to power' 
 
 2 Theory of Psychoanalysis, pages 40, 42. 
 
 s Dr. James J. Putnam has repeatedly called attention to this point. 
 "Let its name be altered, and its functions be but slightly more 
 expanded, and we have Bergson's poussSe vitale, the understudy of self- 
 activity." Journal of Abnormal Psychology, August-September, 1913. 
 
THE WILL 77 
 
 escapes all these defects. Sex-love itself which to the Freud- 
 ian mind seems the deepest thing in human nature is far 
 better placed as an expression of this will ; for what more pro- 
 found assertion of power is our nature capable of than in 
 that impulse which, assuming responsibility for the life and 
 welfare of another, may also summon a new life into existence ? 
 The greatness of the sex-motive lies in the junction which it 
 is able to effect between the human and the superhuman 
 ranges of power. But to invert the relation and make all will 
 a form of 'libido' is simply ex-centric; and can yield at best 
 a Ptolemaic system of psychology. Ptolemy's system for an 
 Egyptian of the second century was a great achievement, and 
 had at least so much of truth, — ^that the world has some center 
 of gravity. 
 
CHAPTER XII 
 MIND AND BODY: THE LAST ANALYSIS 
 
 MANY questions about human nature are left 
 unanswered by a discussion of instincts and 
 the will. For example, we have given no account of 
 personality. The will to power is not personality; it 
 reveals nothing of the nature of personal differences. 
 Upon such questions we shall not here enter: for it 
 is the business of psychology to find first what the 
 common clay is, and only then to enquire how it 
 assumes its individual shapes. But if there is a com- 
 mon clay, a craving which in some way underlies and 
 explains the rest, we are bound to take at least a glance 
 at the question what this clay itself is made of, or 
 whether it must be taken as an ultimate fact. We 
 shall accordingly make a brief excursion into the field 
 of speculation, or of ultimate analysis. 
 
 The concept of energy always stands at the elbow, 
 with promises of solving riddles: it seemed likely at 
 one time to afford the common term for the dualism 
 of matter and motion ; it has tempted many since the 
 time of Leibniz into a hope of passing from body to 
 mind and back again. If the will to power could be 
 understood, in Nietzsche's terms, as a need to give 
 utterance to the energy that is in us, we should be on 
 the way to a natural understanding of human nature. 
 
MIND AND BODY 79 
 
 All instinctive tendencies^ and so of course the cen- 
 tral instinct, are inherited with the body; they all 
 expend the energy developed by the bodily machine. 
 The nutrition of the body and of the nervous centers 
 produces a readiness to act, and indeed an uneasiness 
 if action is delayed. If we assume that our craving 
 accompanies this condition of readiness (to adopt 
 Thomdike's term) both of the channels of discharge 
 and of the centers themselves, we shall have a physio- 
 logical picture much more in accord with our concept 
 of a central instinct than any that could be furnished 
 by the schema of stimulus and response. The pres- 
 ence of energy as a tension or charge serves here in 
 lieu of a stimulus, acting immediately, without afferent 
 apparatus. The discharge itself, the transformation 
 of potential into kinetic energy, may be the primary 
 physical basis of 'satisfaction.' 
 
 I should not hesitate to look in this direction for a 
 physical theory of the primitive will to power. I 
 should not hesitate, because I am "not afraid of fall- 
 ing into my own inkpot." No one who thinks twice 
 can be in any danger of identifying the energy which 
 is measurable in terms of mv'' or fd with the 'energy' 
 of his own will or its fluctuating 'tensions' of desire. 
 Yet the ambiguity of these words is not accidental; 
 no doubt the two phases of energy belong together, 
 the one as substance and the other as shadow. But in 
 this fact, there is nothing to indicate which is the 
 shadow. In truth, when we seek for physical expres- 
 sions, we have left behind the direct facts of expe- 
 rience and have begun to spin hypotheses for the sake 
 
80 THE NATTTEAIi MAN 
 
 of connecting these facts with others. We do not by 
 this route penetrate more deeply into the nature of 
 desire. If we wish to know what desire is made of, 
 we should do better to seek it within the completer 
 expressions of the will itself, as we know them. 
 
 If we can anywhere catch a glimpse of the ultimate 
 character of the will, it should be in our answer to the 
 work of an artist. For it is his work to bring the deep- 
 est things in us into active response to the deep things 
 of the world outside. Eecently I saw a drama which 
 ventured to bring to mind the travesty which often 
 goes by the name of Justice ; and I returned depressed 
 and resentful and disturbed by what I had seen. 
 There had been forced upon my attention a world of 
 man-made necessity, the Law, in whose meshes man 
 himself could perish both as victim and as adminis- 
 trator. I saw the efforts of men to rise humanly above 
 this their own work. I saw a world of blindness and 
 futile sympathies, pompous certainties that are false, 
 and sentimental certainties that are vain; and men 
 going down in despair because no one but the poet 
 saw fiercely enough the realities which should have 
 outweighed the whole pretentious momentum of habit 
 and routine. I knew that the poet spoke some untruth ; 
 and also that he saw and spoke more truth than men 
 are usually privileged to see. And I knew also what 
 is important for us at this moment, that the feelings 
 and desires of men (so many partial a,pplications of 
 will) are made by such perceptions as these. 
 
 Desire, or more generally, feeling, is not something 
 disparate from thought: feeling is a mass of idea at 
 
MIND AND BODY 81 
 
 work within us. It is a thorougli fallacy to suppose 
 that one can feel or care about anything without 
 knowledge, or that feeling and knowledge are inversely 
 proportional to one another. The theory of feeling 
 has been seriously distorted by confusing feeling with 
 more or less incontinent or futile or unstable types of 
 motor discharge, "emotional temperaments" and the 
 like. Feeling is an experience of ''making up one's 
 mind," rising to an occasion, appreciating something 
 to the extent of mobilizing the powers of action. The 
 proper contrast to feeling is not thought but callous- 
 ness; and wherever I am insensitive to an interest or 
 concern which finer members of the race care about, I 
 may know that the root of my deficiency is a lack of 
 intelligence or vision. 
 
 If we are right in this, feeling, whether ia the form 
 of uneasiness, desire, aspiration, or satisfaction, is 
 thought more or less in control of things,^ and will, in 
 
 1 In terms of a common phrase, the common element in value is idea 
 "making good." It is easier to see that making good is a desirable 
 state of affairs, than to see that it is the desirable state of affairs. To 
 make good requires that one has first an idea of something worth 
 making, something that has value independent of the process of realizing 
 it. Then to realize it has the additional value of giving me a sense of 
 validity, — my 'idea' has come true. But what we want to find out is 
 the quality of this presupposed value: what constitutes the desirableness 
 of the object of my idea? B«alism in the theory of values holds that 
 the value is there, in the object, — an ultimate quality, and there's an 
 end of it. Belativism holds that value is the relation of the object to 
 my welfare, or my instinct, or my desire, — desire, instinct, etc., being 
 assumed as given facts about which nothing more can be said, except to 
 analyze their physiological basis, as above attempted. I hold that either 
 of these solutions, taken as final, simply gives up the problem. What 
 we desire, we do not desire helplessly, because we are so constituted that 
 a given object sets certain mechanisms tingling. What we desire has an 
 account to give to consciousness itself, and, — as we have maintained, — 
 
82 THE NATUEAL MAN 
 
 the last analysis, is thought assuming control of 
 reality. 
 
 It would follow from this that human instincts, all 
 of them, — ^while from the standpoint of physical theory 
 they are such stuff as solar systems are made of, are 
 from a metaphysical standpoint such stuff as dreams, 
 ideas, and reasonings are made of. 
 
 Pragmatic writers, in the interest of showing that all 
 thought has an active meaning, have sometimes gone 
 to great lengths in exhibiting the logical qualities of 
 instinct and tropism. Charles Peirce does not hesi- 
 tate to say that "In point of fact a syllogism virtually 
 takes place when we irritate the foot of a decapitated 
 frog.'" But the force of such interpretations is not 
 
 an account which in general terms is identical in all cases of desire. We 
 must penetrate the nature of the independent good as it appears to con- 
 sciousness. For example, suppose I care for music and exert myself to 
 be able to make music. There is satisfaction in the achieving; but there 
 must have been a prior satisfaction in the music. It is this prior satis- 
 faction of which I propose that it also is a case of thought making 
 good. The value of music, I would maintain, is that it sets before us a 
 world of which it would be too little to say that it was auspicious to 
 our ears, or with Kant, to our imagination; the value of music is that 
 it summons up through the vehicle of a mass of tone amenable to our 
 thought the entire reality of our experience, in vaguely generalized 
 situations and moods, with reflective or contemplative mastery. And I 
 should say the same of our more organic satisfactions. On this basis 
 we can do justice to both realism and relativism. To realism it seems 
 that desire is defined by the good, the good being defined by itself; to 
 relativism it seems that the good is defined by desire. From our point 
 of view the good is defined not by itself, but in relation to us; yet not 
 to us as beings fated to desire this or that, — rather as beings capable 
 of thinking and knowing this and that, and the whole of things through 
 them. To this extent, good is objective. 
 
 2 Instinct has sometimes been called an unconscious reason, not be- 
 cause there are any actual syllogisms in play, but because in reaching 
 what to consciousness is pleasant, it reaches what to nature is fit, — as if 
 
MIND AND BODY 83 
 
 to show that logic is permeated by psychology: it is 
 rather to show that psychology is permeated by logic. 
 That which from the standpoint of nature seems instru- 
 mental becomes, when we take a truly psychological 
 instead of a biological view of the object of value, the 
 substance of the end itself. Instinct, too, in the last 
 analysis can be understood as a wholly ideal activity, — 
 an activity of ideas. If there is any virtue in giving 
 a name to the ultimate stuff of human nature, it would 
 be more like thought than like physical energy; and, 
 if I may venture 9, final leap of speculation, more, I 
 believe, like conversation than like solitary thought. 
 What ideas they are that enter into this original 
 stuff we do not here enquire in detail. But one ques- 
 tion we can no longer postpone. We have made no 
 place for a moral quality in original human nature; 
 yet it is by this quality that man, according to an 
 ancient tradition, is thought to be chiefly distinguished. 
 This question is the subject for our next study. 
 
 it knew and planned the utility of its behavior. It is hardly supposed 
 by those who use this phrase that pleasantness is a dim recognition of 
 the fact of fitness: this would be to reduce the value called pleasant- 
 ness, to a function of a cognition, — a highly speculative procedure to 
 say the least. We certainly have no need to assume that what con- 
 sciousness means by its end is coincident with what 'nature' means; 
 it may be far simpler, and yet none the less real. 
 
PART III 
 CONSCIENCE 
 
CHAPTER XIII 
 THE INTEREST IN JUSTICE 
 
 WHEN Aristotle said that man is by nature a 
 political animal, lie did not leave this notable 
 saying uninterpreted. It is the faculty of speech, he 
 explains, which marks man for a civic existence; and 
 by speech we are to understand not the simple power 
 to make articulate signs as do many animal species, but 
 the power to coin*signs for general ideas, and particu- 
 larly for ideas relating to justice and injustice. We 
 may put Aristotle's meaning in this way : the communi- 
 ties which men make are political communities, as dis- 
 tinct from simple defensive or co-operative aggrega- 
 tions, because men are fitted by nature to frame ideas 
 of fair and unfair dealing, of right and wrong, and to 
 use them. The life of an idea consists in being recog- 
 nized and applied in the concrete; a state is a com- 
 munity in which the idea of justice has a chance for 
 life. 
 
 We need not debate here the question of priority, — 
 i.e., whether political society exists for the sake of a 
 morally reasoned life, or whether the moral reason 
 exists for the sake of a political society. Biological 
 interpretations of human life would prefer the second 
 alternative, at least as a preliminary hypothesis. I 
 shall simply point out in passing that a psychological 
 
88 CONSCIENOB 
 
 interpretation would have much to say for Aristotle's 
 way of putting it. 
 
 For our social impulses, when we examine them, can 
 be seen to depend to a large extent upon a need to put 
 our various thinking powers into operation. We have 
 spoken of sociability as if it were an instinct by itself, 
 and of curiosity as if it were another instinct by itself. 
 But if we should subtract from the natural interest in 
 social life whatever comes through the enquiring sides 
 of argument and conversation, and through persuading 
 others, managing and planning for others, we should 
 deal sociability a severe blow. And if we should sub- 
 tract from our natural interest in public life — the 
 political development of sociability,— whatever comes 
 from the discussion of personalities, laws, principles, 
 quarrels, wars, strands of history, legend, custom, on 
 their ethical side, we should lose much of its normal 
 motive. Political life is, as Aristotle later described 
 it, an arena for distinguished action, a conspicuous 
 jousting-place for contending principles and men hav- 
 ing much energy to discharge. And if you will watch 
 where the interest is hottest you will see that it is there 
 where questions of expediency, of bread and butter 
 and prosperity, have merged into questions of rights 
 and obligations; or where questions of a man's ability 
 and record have deepened into questions of his char- 
 acter and honor. It is there where the responses of 
 indignation, chivalry, applause, resentment, loyalty, 
 condemnation, the responses of our ethical nature, 
 have been called out. We are social and political 
 creatures, at least in part, because we need to inject 
 
THE INTBKEST IN JUSTICE 89 
 
 our reasons and our moral perceptions into the world's 
 work. We build states, at least in part, because of 
 this will to power. So far we can follow Aristotle/ 
 
 But here our question arises. If this particular 
 form of mental activity is characteristic of the species, 
 and helps to produce such distinctive products as laws 
 and states (surely as indicative of man as the habits 
 and homes of the beasts), we must find some place 
 for it in original human nature. Shall we say that 
 there is a native moral sense in man, a moral instinct ; 
 or if these expressions are inept, what account shall 
 we give of the untaught value which humanity places 
 upon justice ? It is usual for writers who view instinct 
 in terms of situation and response not to include moral 
 behavior among the original tendencies, but to regard 
 it as derivative and composite. It could be thought 
 to develop in the form of altruistic sentiment from the 
 maternal instinct (Sutherland) ; or from pugnacity, as 
 pugnacity becomes a 'disinterested resentment' (Wes- 
 
 1 And we may also agree in the place that he gives to speech. That 
 impulse to "vocalization" which we included among our units of be- 
 havior would not exist in us as it does unless it were destined to take 
 part in a more comprehensive tendency. Thorndike very justly observes 
 that it first appears as an aimless impulse (The Original Nature of 
 Man, pp. 135-138); but it is one of the common facts of our more 
 elaborate tendencies that their ingredients assemble themselves in sepa- 
 rate and leisurely manner in the course of growth. It is quite compatible 
 with its primitive aimlessness that the talking impulse should be a part 
 of some more general tendency, be it reason, sociability, or 'the political 
 faculty. ' 
 
 Behaviorism would read the relation the other way around. Thus John 
 E. Watson (Behavior, 1914, pp. 321, 319) : ' ' The lack of language habits 
 forever difEerentiates brute from man"; remarking, "We say nothing 
 of reasoning since we do not admit this as a genuine type of human 
 behavior except as a special form of language habit." 
 
90 CONSCIENCE 
 
 termarck) turned first outward and then inward. For 
 McDougall moral judgment is a complex attitude in 
 which the * self -regarding sentiment,' interacting with 
 social likes and dislikes has the chief role. Thomdike 
 does not positively exclude it from our native endow- 
 ment, but so far fails to verify its presence. He says 
 (The Original Nature of Man, p. 202): "No innate 
 difference of response to 'right' from 'wrong' acts 
 is listed here, in spite of the opinions of a majority of 
 students of ethics, and the authority of Lloyd Morgan, 
 who says emphatically: 
 
 Among civilized people conscience is innate. Intuitions of 
 right and wrong are a part of that moral nature which we 
 have inherited from our forefathers. Just as we inherit 
 common sense, an instinctive judgment in intellectual matters, 
 so too do we inherit that instinctive judgment in matters of 
 right and wrong which forms an important element in con- 
 science ('85, p. 307). 
 
 So much, however, is clear: that no account of 
 human nature can pretend to have touched the impor- 
 tant points unless it shows, in terms of its own theory, 
 how it is that a man can become what we call a moral 
 agent, or a political animal. And we have a double 
 concern in this subject, since the human conscience is 
 at once, in some sort of germ, deposited in man's origi- 
 nal nature, and at the same time one of the chief 
 instruments in his remaking. What account, then, can 
 we give of the moral aspect of human nature ? 
 
CHAPTEE XIV 
 CONSCIENCE AND THE GENERAL WILL 
 
 THERE is no need to assume an original moral 
 sense in order to account for the expression, 
 "You ought," or at least for some closely similar 
 expression. If human nature is equipped with 
 instincts such as we have described, and with the 
 preferences that go with them, and if these interests 
 are mightily affected by the neighbor's behavior, a 
 generalizing animal would hardly fail to perceive the 
 value of an habitual disposition on the neighbor's 
 part to consider the feelings of others ; and a language- 
 using animal would hardly fail to invent a term to 
 express to his neighbor his sense of the importance of 
 that disposition. What most of us strongly prefer 
 you should do would inevitably be conveyed to you by 
 a phrase such as, "You ought to behave thus and so,"^ 
 in which the 'ought' would imply that this line of con- 
 duct is such as would follow from the fixed habit of 
 'consideration.' It would remind you simply of a 
 
 1 ' Inevitably, ' I say: but note that this word 'inevitably' assumes 
 that it would occur to us, instead of simply growling at your encroach- 
 ments, to appeal to your intelligence and self-control. This is a large 
 assumption, and may be found to be the whole genetic question. Such 
 an appeal is used only when the addressee is supposed free and com- 
 petent, i.e., something of a psychologist, as we said. And conversely, 
 only then can the members of a group be treated as free, when they can 
 be approached with an 'ought.' 
 
92 coNsciEiircB 
 
 certain permanent condition of peaceable living, that 
 of being a reasonably good practising psychologist in 
 regard to the interests of others. 
 
 Every inducement would exist for an attempt on 
 the part of your fellows to give your permanent habits 
 a shape auspicious for them. For this work they 
 would hardly be content with the pressure of the ordi- 
 nary atmosphere of approval and disapproval, — ^if a 
 stronger pressure were available. They would gather 
 all possible prestige about this notion of "You ought." 
 They would presumably call upon the instinct of fear, 
 heightened by such religious or other imagination as 
 could be pressed into service, to aid in the shaping of 
 the other instincts. There would be, as there is, a 
 shade of menace in the attitude with which the 'ought' 
 bears down upon you. And there would also be, as 
 there is, a vigorous enlistment of the 'self regarding 
 sentiment' through the general refusal to permit the 
 man of refractory habits to think well of himself. 
 
 Everyone would thus acquire a high interest in 
 accepting the guidance of the social 'ought'; and if 
 not everyone, yet everyone's progeny, would end by 
 taking the interested spectator as well as the disinter- 
 ested spectator into his own bosom, seeing himself 
 habitually through the eye of the social judgment, and 
 assigning a certain authority to that judgment, to- 
 gether with his own. The moral Eubicon is crossed 
 when once the question is admitted as legitimate, 
 "What sort am I?" And the persistent presence of 
 social reaction, with a little generalization, would most 
 reasonably be admitted to raise this question in the 
 
CONSOIENCB AND THE GENBBAli WILL 93 
 
 mind of each member, and to keep it there, even if it 
 succeeded in lodging no permanent standards for 
 answering it. 
 
 Given, then, a being with a social instinct, and under 
 the kind of social pressure we have described, some 
 vocabulary analogous to the 'ought' vocabulary could 
 be conceived to arise and something like conscience to 
 emerge, without appealing to any original moral 
 deposit in human nature. But would this socially 
 moulded 'conscience' be identical with conscience as 
 we know it? The resemblance is, in reality, superficial. 
 It is impossible that the 'ought' as we mean it in its 
 current use should be a social product, as will appear 
 if we consider how the meaning of this word is ordi- 
 narily conveyed. 
 
 No doubt children listen with frequent perplexity 
 to the abundant You-oughts which are offered them. 
 No doubt they have to learn this word as they learn 
 other words for invisible things : making the assump- 
 tion that some meaning it must have, since the grown 
 world uses it; noting the circumstances in which it 
 is employed, the accompanying frowns, rewards, and 
 other appeals and sanctions; then devising various 
 hypotheses about its meaning until some one seems to 
 fit the cases and survive. The history of the master- 
 ing of this word is not outwardly different from the 
 history of the mastering of other difficult words : it is 
 late in finding a firm place in the mind. But when it 
 arrives, there is a clear distinction in meaning between 
 "I ought to do thus and so" and "It would be prudent 
 for me because others prefer it." This distinction 
 
94 CONSCIENCE 
 
 has been called out by soiiiething in tbe attitude of the 
 person who uses **You ought" not noted in the fore- 
 going derivation. The "You ought" is neither a 
 command, nor an item of information concerning the 
 general will. The reaction to one who is supposed to 
 have violated the "You ought" is not one of simple 
 anger; it has an ingredient of regret. It addresses 
 itself not alone to his future discretion, but also to his 
 past decision: it deplores the process by which he 
 reached his choice. It assumes, rightly or not, that 
 he was capable of a better process, and that he knows 
 it. In brief, the "You ought" addresses itself to an 
 answering "I ought" within; and unless the "I ought" 
 responds, it has missed its target. This "I ought," 
 since it is presupposed in the meaning of "You ought," 
 cannot be conveyed from without by means of the 
 "You ought." It can only find its way into our sign- 
 language by being taken as understood.^ While we 
 ply our moral epithets, we wait anxiously and all but 
 helplessly for evidence that our meaning has struck 
 home: for we know that every new person must find 
 this angle of vision for himself. The social use of the 
 word is thus never purely instructive : it is also, and 
 primarily, awakening. It appeals to a strand of self- 
 judgment which is original with every individual, and 
 in this sense belongs to original human nature. 
 
 2 In establishing a system of signs, there are always certain signs 
 which cannot be mutually agreed upon, since in order to agree upon any 
 sign, certain other signs must be used as already understood. These 
 must be thrown out as hopeful ventures, and confirmed first by the nod 
 of understanding, then by successful use. The sign for 'ought' is in 
 this position. 
 
CHAPTER XV 
 CONSCIENCE AND INSTINCT 
 
 IF the moral point of view must be acMeved by each 
 mind for itself, may the tendency to do this be 
 regarded as an instinct among the other instincts ? 
 
 It is conceivable that the inner scruple, finally 
 aroused by the moral batteries of our early environ- 
 ment, is itself an inherited relic of ancestral expe- 
 rience (giving Spencer the benefit of the doubt about 
 the methods of heredity). According to Lippert, who 
 certainly improves upon Spencer's psychology, the 
 race has acquired a group of "secondary instincts," 
 acting as counterbalances for the more violent of our 
 primitive impulses, those of pugnacity, sex, and 
 acquisition ; and these comparatively new tendencies to 
 respect and refrain are the essential ingredients of 
 conscience. From the Darwinian standpoint, it ap- 
 pears reasonable enough that only men in whom these 
 primary instincts were well mated and checked could 
 form stable societies, and hand their natures down to 
 us. Conscience would then be fairly regarded as the 
 last touch in the process of balancing human instincts. 
 
 Without doubting that certain specific inhibitions, 
 such as shame or the indisposition to inflict bodily 
 injury, may be accounted for in this way, conscience 
 itself is certainly not this kind of instinct. Our sense 
 
96 CONSCIENCE 
 
 of ought does not limit itself to any ancient categories 
 of behavior. It does not behave like an echo of racial 
 experience, but lights upon new types of action as 
 keenly as upon old types : it impels the return of 'con- 
 science money' quite as clearly as it provokes remorse 
 for murder. It seeks out its own applications, and is 
 capable of a development like the sense of beauty, 
 rising in some persons to the point of genius. Fur- 
 ther, it is not attached unchangeably to any specific 
 types of behavior at all, whether new or old. Its 
 demands have a more general character, and descend 
 upon particular actions only through a process of sub- 
 suming. The grain of truth in the wild assertion that 
 "the mores can make anything right" is sufficient to 
 discredit the view that the moral sense consists of a 
 set of acquired reactions to specific situations. 
 
 If there is anything innate in conscience it must 
 be sought in whatever about it is characteristic of the 
 species, i.e. (in other words), unchangeable and uni- 
 versal. And if all branches of the human family have 
 a conscience, there is at least so much that is univer- 
 sal, despite all variations in the particular scruples 
 it adopts.^ And we should be able to indicate certain 
 
 1 If one should answer the thoroughgoing relativist that amid all 
 variations in the moral code there was always a moral code, the answer 
 might justly be called empty and formal. But the criticism is irrele- 
 vant: the answer, empty and formal as it is, is sufficient. To refute 
 absurdities, one falls back on formalities. So if it should be said that 
 all moral codes have at least one common content, that of approving 
 mutual benefit above mutual injury, — the statement would properly be 
 called a banality. But the proper function of a banal truth is to meet 
 a banal error, such as this that because things vary there is no constant 
 element in them. 
 
CONSCIENCE AND INSTINCT 97 
 
 very general traits of moral behavior which are con- 
 stant throughout these variations. Thus, while cus- 
 toms vary enormously, conscience is generally inclined 
 to set a value upon custom. And while totem gods 
 and other gods give extraordinarily different com- 
 mands, the tendency of conscience to respect these 
 commands is always there. "We should come near to 
 stating a universal trait of conscience if we took what 
 is common to both these cases, — the disposition to find 
 an object of devotion, and to set this object up as 
 authority in details of conduct, finding what one 'ought' 
 to do not directly but indirectly through suggestions 
 from this source, — ^be it family head, totem, ruler, god, 
 custom, or law. 
 
 Thus conscience behaves somewhat like a general 
 instinct, craving an object of loyalty. It finds these 
 objects through its social context, and so is a close ally 
 of the social instinct. Indeed, every associate is prob- 
 ably to some degree a moral authority, though the dis- 
 position to centralize the sources of suggestion is 
 marked. But conscience is not identical with socia- 
 bility. It is not seeking neighbors, but authorities: 
 and while it seems to light on the objects of its devo- 
 tion often with an unreasoned tact, and adhere to them 
 with a blindness that savors of the tropism, it does 
 not authoritatively accept its authorities. It chooses 
 them with the same originality as hunger shows in the 
 selection of foods ; it chooses what satisfies itself, not 
 what satisfies the tribe. It is convenient and usual 
 that one can worship where his tribesmen worship, 
 and eat where and what his tribesmen eat; but the 
 
98 COKSCIENCB 
 
 hunger in each case is one's own. What the authority 
 does is to eke out the resources of the spark of moral 
 originality in each individual, so that it can perform 
 the task of regulating a whole life-full of actions. In 
 custom, law, and religious precept, we find not so much 
 other men's consciences as the remainder of our own. 
 The same motive that leads to the adoption of author- 
 ity may lead to its rejection, and the setting up of 
 conscience versus custom, etc. Thus, the authority- 
 seeking trait is symptomatic of conscience, and is well- 
 nigh universal; but it is not conscience itself. 
 
 The essential and universal thing about conscience, 
 in fact, seems to set it apart from all other innate 
 tendencies. For conscience is the principal inner 
 agency for the remaking of human nature; hence it 
 must stand as a critic over against everything that is 
 to be remade, and so over against all instincts. It 
 plays the part of censor, for the most part permissive, 
 and hence silent: but de jure it is cognizant of every 
 act of will, and of the total policy of the self. All that 
 belongs to the will, including every form of the will to 
 power, must be bringable under its scrutiny: it might 
 appear, then, that conscience is not itself any part of 
 the will, — certainly not an instinct, — ^but something 
 outside of all these, like self-consciousness pure and 
 simple. On this showing, original human nature 
 would contain, beside all its instincts, something dif- 
 ferent from instinct, a self-consciousness applying 
 certain standards of value to the control of behavior. 
 
 But if so, what is the nature of these standards, and 
 what is their source? Are they something uniquely 
 
CONSCIENCE AND INSTINCT 99 
 
 different from the will to power, and possibly opposed 
 to it now and then? Or is the standard simply the 
 whole will to power itself in its most adequate and far- 
 sighted interpretation? 
 
 My own view is that conscience stands outside the 
 instinctive life of man, not as something separate, but 
 as an awareness of the success or failure of that life 
 in maintaining its status and its growth. It is a safe- 
 guard of the power at any time achieved. It inter- 
 poses a check when an act is proposed which threatens 
 'integrity.' What conscience recognizes is that cer- 
 tain behavior increases our hold on reality while 
 certain other behavior diminishes that hold, consti- 
 tutes what the old Southern Buddhist called an asava, 
 a leak. The remark of conscience is: "That course, 
 or that act, promises to build, or threatens to tear 
 down, what you metaphysically are."^ Conscience is 
 native to human nature in the sense that it is within 
 the capacity of human nature to be thus self-conscious 
 in perceiving and controlling its own cosmic direction. 
 It is not an instinct. It is the latest and finest instru- 
 ment for the self -integration of instinct. And it is an 
 instrument characteristically human. 
 
 If we are right in thus placing conscience upon the 
 
 2 Conscience can come into existence only when such an increase or 
 decrease of being could itself become an object of perception. One can 
 be stronger or weaker, fresher or wearier, without noticing the fact; if it 
 occurs to one to remark on his own condition, that is a turn of expe- 
 rience analogous to conscience. In structure, it must take a form such 
 that some higher differential of the whole nervous process at the center 
 becomes available in regulating that process. See an article by the 
 author in The Psychological Bulletin, May 15, 1908, Theory of Value 
 and Conscience in their Biological Context. 
 
100 CONSCIENCE 
 
 growing edge of human nature, we can understand the 
 importance which men have assigned to its working. 
 While the occasional ciphering of many another innate 
 tendency passes without comment, the world has made 
 a particular tradition of the failures of conscience, 
 and has bewailed them as the essential failure of man. 
 Intellectual blunders it adjusts itself to with compara- 
 tive resignation. Against moral errors it renews its 
 warfare from day to day. 
 
 Our description of conscience so far has been rather 
 to locate it than to interpret it. Our conception is still 
 vague. Perhaps we shall always understand our moral 
 faculty better on its negative than on its positive side. 
 For it is in dealing with 'sin' that the moral nature 
 comes to its most vigorous and definite expression. 
 
CHAPTER XVI 
 CURRENT FALLACIES REGARDING SIN 
 
 IF a man is caught in a lie, the discoverer commonly 
 feels justified in calling him a liar. There is 
 obviously a large logical distance between the discov- 
 ered fact and the appellation. It is something more 
 than an inductive leap from the single lie to a lying 
 habit: it is a reference of the habit to a flaw in the 
 moral substance of the individual. To call a man a 
 liar is to make a metaphysical assertion. 
 
 If this logical leap can be justified, it is by aid of 
 the premiss that unless the flaw existed, the single lie 
 would be impossible. Character is a disposition which 
 makes a person 'incapable of this and that: it sets up 
 universal negatives. If a person lapses at any time, 
 it is obvious that he was ' capable ' of that lapse. Hence 
 he who has ever stolen is a thief; and one indiscretion 
 is enough to establish a woman's permanent status. 
 
 These fragments of moral logic are common enough 
 in the form of unexamined attitudes, sentiments, pre- 
 judices. We do not as commonly recognize them for 
 what they are, — forms of the ancient Oriental infer- 
 ence to the effect that he who has sinned is fallen, is a 
 sinner. When we inspect this argument in its mag- 
 nificent sweep, we incline to shrink from it. Many 
 repudiate it in toto; though the repudiation is for the 
 
102 CONSCIENCE 
 
 most part rather a hygienic and educational maxim, — 
 a pragmatic reaction from the morbid agonies of Cal- 
 vinistic tradition, — than a theoretical criticism of the 
 inference itself. 
 
 Yet the healthier mind of our time would be dis- 
 posed, I think, to reject also the theory of the argu- 
 ment, "A sin shows a sinner." A sin may show an 
 individual unduly strained or unduly depressed. The 
 distribution of blame is at least as difficult a problem 
 as the distribution of wealth. The head of a woman's 
 prison tells me that her murderesses are, as a class, 
 her best citizens. As men grow wise, the judgment 
 of moral censure tends to be replaced by the judg- 
 ment of misfit : if someone has gone wrong, it is very 
 likely that he is in the wrong place ; give him the right 
 work and the right neighborhood, and going right 
 follows of its own accord. Or, what we call sin may 
 be an incident in the normal process of groping our 
 way into our place. Nobody can do anything righter, 
 we think, than live out his powers, his instincts, con- 
 duct strongly the great adventure, a soul-building 
 process which must lead through an occasional swamp 
 as well as over mountain highways. "Through 
 angers, losses, ambition, ignorance, ennui, what you 
 are picks its way." When we think of "what you 
 are," as Walt Whitman does, under the figure of a 
 substance, the notion of sin reduces to that of aber- 
 ration in an orbit, a quantitative matter, for the most 
 part merely the extravagance of your virtues. In- 
 stead of thinking that a sin shows a sinner, shall we 
 
CUEEENT FALLACIES EEGARDING SIN 103 
 
 not say that a sin, taken by itself, shows nothing at 
 all? 
 
 In truth, there are signs of bewilderment in our cur- 
 rent moral judgments on this point. We see clearly 
 that there is something disproportionately dark in 
 the thoughts of Augustine and his followers; we do 
 not see clearly what to put in their place. General 
 amnesty is hardly more successful than general con- 
 demnation of the race. Let me try to get rid of the 
 idea of guilt, substituting for it the idea of illness or 
 misfortune. Let me take into my employ a man with 
 a 'record,' believing that society is part-responsible 
 for every crime, — I find that I feel far more confidence 
 for the future if my unfortunate brother condemns 
 himself than if he chimes in too heartily with my own 
 point of view. There is a margin of indulgence in the 
 moral bookkeeping of society, perhaps also of the 
 universe, and all of us profit by it; yet if anyone de- 
 mands this indulgence as a right, he disqualifies him- 
 self. If we think we can omit the moral sermon and 
 substitute the hygienic measure or the change of 
 place, we find the rebuke is still implied in the need for 
 these measures: the 'ought' is none the less active 
 for not being verbally invoked. The sense of sin 
 seems to have at least so much pragmatic force, — ^it 
 does not quite work to omit it, as a prevalent modem 
 attitude tries to do. 
 
 I presume that both the Calvinistic and this modern 
 attitude are wrong, and for similar reasons : one 
 assumes that wrong cancels merit, the other that merit 
 cancels wrong, like the positive and negative numbers 
 
104 CONSCIENCE 
 
 of algebra. This, I venture to think, is a fundamental 
 fallacy. It is much as if we should balance off the 
 black of one part of a picture against the white of 
 another part and declare the whole a muddy gray. 
 Nothing is more natural than to feel one is making up 
 for a wrong by good offices of some sort, or than a 
 misstep is destroying a good record ; but the result of 
 such a balancing process is that our moral self-con- 
 sciousness tends to become nondescript. We tend to 
 revert to the simpler state of mind in which we have 
 no more moral qualities, but simply are. There is 
 relief in this reversion, but as an abandonment of a 
 theoretical difficulty it is not a place to remain in. 
 The diffitfalty has a solution. 
 
 The solution lies, I believe, in a simple distinction 
 between the logic of physical things and the logic of 
 consciousness. It is characteristic of physical nature 
 that algebraic opposites neutralize one another: acid 
 and base combine in a neutral salt. It is equally char- 
 acteristic of consciousness to retain both components 
 without neutralization: it is this which gives con- 
 sciousness its 'depth.' Thus, in the physical world, 
 all that is real is present: the past exists only in the 
 form of present traces, records, ruins, hereditary dis- 
 positions, brain paths, momenta, — so many present 
 facts. The geological past is typical, existing in the 
 order and shape of contemporary rocks and scratches. 
 But in consciousness the past retains its character as 
 past: the glacial moraine calls up to it something 
 which no longer exists in nature; and the depth of 
 memory, the journey of thought as it reads its own 
 
CURBENT FALLACIES BEGABDllTG SIN 105 
 
 strata, — the journey from tlie present to the begin- 
 ning and back again, is one of the dimensions of a 
 mind. For physical purposes, two equal and opposite 
 forces produce a resultant zero. For consciousness, 
 two equal and opposite efforts remain two and oppo- 
 site : in the state of deadlock or equipoise, the elements 
 do not lose their identity. In consciousness there is 
 many an a minus a, but never a zero nor a neutral. 
 
 This principle holds good for the moral sense. 
 When we fall into the dull optimism which ventures 
 to hope that after all deductions there will still be a 
 moral balance in our favor, we are transferring a 
 physical calculus which our fresher judgments know 
 nothing of. When a fresh wrong has to be dealt with, 
 it is no one's first impulse to check it off against all 
 previous right-going: it stands by itself whole and 
 intact, — the right-going falls into irrelevance, for after 
 all why should one not go right? And when there is a 
 deed that calls for honor or thanks, where is the shabby 
 calculator who brings to mind the offsetting failures 
 or mistakes? On such a day, the critic fearing to be 
 disloyal to his criticism is likely to join half-heartedly 
 in the praise; unless he is set free by perceiving the 
 fallacy of the process of balance. The deed of the hero 
 is not dimmed by his crimes ; nor are his crimes wiped 
 out by his heroism. Consciousness is not a cancelling 
 ground: it is the region in which opposites are pre- 
 served. Character, that mysterious entity which we 
 surmise through single deeds, is much more versatile 
 than the psychology of either Calvin or Augustine or 
 Pelagius allows, 'capable of harboring many an un- 
 
106 CONSCIENCE 
 
 solved antithesis. But a corollary of this truth is, that 
 with all our good will to stand up for ourselves as men 
 in presence of the Adamic title of 'sinner,' that epithet 
 and its logic remain as something to be reckoned with. 
 
 But our disinclination to hear much of sin has other 
 roots than the fallacy of cancellation. It is due in part 
 to the fallacy of custom; by which I mean that the 
 usualness of a given type of wrong-doing diminishes 
 the psychological sense of its wrongfulness, and with 
 our increasing knowledge of evil, all types of wrong- 
 doing appear usual. Our knowledge of evil today is 
 no longer the knowledge of personal experience and 
 hearsay; it is the knowledge of social and statistical 
 science. It is a knowledge spread broadcast by jour- 
 nalism, by a literature of disillusionment, and even by 
 the necessities of a popular government which makes 
 every man responsible for knowing how the other half 
 lives. And in dealing with sin through all our insti- 
 tutions we accept a sort of complicity in all that we 
 know. The work of the jury is not simply to discern 
 the external fact regarding the behavior of the 
 accused: the jury are chosen as his peers, that is as 
 those who can perceive the fact, because they under- 
 stand his will, being of like circumstances and like 
 mind with him. In truth, the villains of the world are 
 a shade more comprehensible to us than its saints. 
 The latter, if we are cynical, we reduce to villains in 
 disguise in order to understand them. If we accept 
 them as genuine, we account them somewhat more than 
 human and endow them with a halo of supernature. 
 
CUEBENT FALLACIES BEGARDING SIN 107 
 
 The real villain is remarkable cMefly for the absence 
 of that nimbus of mystery which still enwraps the 
 common man. He is one who has yielded to the obvious 
 reason, the universal drag toward overt advantage, 
 the material day of unmodified instinct. Evil is the 
 thing we understand, through an unhindered partici- 
 pation in its motive. 
 
 But on the other hand, by a principle of human 
 psychology, the very extent of our knowledge of moral 
 evil tends to rob of tragedy the statement that "all 
 men are sinners, ' ' The sense of sin, which is at home 
 in the solitude of individual conscience, can hardly 
 survive in the universalizing atmosphere. There is no 
 better balm for the conscience of the nouveau mau- 
 vais than the assurance that "everybody does it." Or 
 if this cannot be said, then the more general, "We all 
 make our mistakes," or "To err is human," may be 
 used. It is a general principle of values that what- 
 ever introduces a wider horizon into an experience, 
 such as conceiving it as the common lot, sweetens it 
 and enhances its worth. It is for this reason, in part, 
 that the mores have been able to do so much toward 
 making the uncouth (an ancient) good. But beside 
 this, every man, as we were saying, is something of 
 a moral authority to every other; and whatever one 
 can do in company, or in a mob, is partly removed 
 from the sphere of private judgment. The principle. 
 Judge not others that ye be not yourself judged, is 
 inverted in its application : in order not to judge others, 
 we refrain from judging ourselves. ~ 
 
 This checkage of moral judgment in dealing with 
 
108 CONSCIENCE 
 
 common errors has many expressions. The touch of 
 nature which is said to make the whole world kin fre- 
 quently takes the form of confessing a common weak- 
 ness. Does it not add somewhat to ordinary social , 
 negotiability to live genially with the minor vices? — 
 I am speaking of psychological tendencies. Men 
 incline to meet and enjoy each other 'at the sign' of 
 their mutually admitted indulgences. The gaiety, the 
 humor, the color, to some extent the art of the world — 
 not to speak of the world's fighting and the world's 
 work — seem to thrive best in an atmosphere made free 
 by mutual agreement that the censor shall be, to some 
 extent, suspended. 
 
 This is by no means pure moral blindness. There 
 is soundness in the common judgment before which 
 the pharisee has always come off less well than the 
 publican. The righteousness which has to be achieved 
 by insulating one's sympathies is justly suspected of 
 abstraction and so far of unrighteousness. In the 
 effort after virtue there is a genuine paradox: to be 
 duly strenuous in the pursuit, and to retain perfect 
 charity for the unstrenuous are attitudes difficult to 
 combine. By general consent mankind seems to pre- 
 fer the kindly soul — if mankind must choose — to the 
 more consistent moral aristocrat. In Bohemia, the 
 humane breadth of common weakness, its liberating 
 and inspiriting fraternity, appear to deprive sin of its 
 sinful quality. 
 
 It is worth pointing out, therefore, that there is a 
 fallacy here also, a fallacy which can be read plainly 
 enough in the facts of our own experience. For 
 
CUEKENT FALLACIES REGARDING SIN 109 
 
 Bohemia finds itself, after all, no universal brother- 
 hood, but a region distinctly localized in our minds: 
 we know by instinct the place for this abstract gaiety 
 of forgetfulness and irresponsibility. It is in the 
 world of art, of letters, of fairly distant history, — in 
 brief, it is in the world of imagination (for remote his- 
 tory takes on imaginative quality), that Falstaff, 
 Aspasia, The Jolly Friars, Lucretia Borgia, Tarn 
 O'Shanter, Don Juan, and all the other heroes and 
 heroines of the morally unstrenuous life have their 
 rightful sphere. They are the glorified fringes of our 
 too sharp-cut and self-righteous ideals. Their human 
 value lies in the respiration they afford to repressed 
 possibilities within us, their conspiracy with our own 
 genius and invention, not in the actual frailty or vice 
 which they embody. If we enjoy them with a bad 
 conscience, it is because we cannot accept them in this 
 role ; we fear that this function of imaginative release 
 will be mistaken (by others?); we fear the subcon- 
 scious inference from the proposition. To err is human 
 (which is true), to the proposition. Error is not error 
 (which is false). This is the essence of the fallacy. 
 
 But there is a third fallacy which lends support to 
 the others, and is, perhaps, their more philosophical 
 expression. It may be stated thus : Whatever is nat- 
 ural is right ; Whatever is impulsive is natural ; hence, 
 Whatever is impulsive is right. The common misdeeds 
 of humanity, springing as they do from impulse, are to 
 be dealt with not as moral wrongs, but as effects of 
 natural causes : if the effects are unwelcome, they are 
 
110 CONSCIENCE 
 
 to be changed by cbanging the causes. As nobody can 
 do anything that cannot with equal reason be referred 
 to nature, this reasoning would at a stroke abolish the 
 category of sin. If this category is to hold its own, 
 we must be able to state what sin means, in terms of 
 human instincts. 
 
CHAPTEE XVII 
 INSTINCT AND SIN 
 
 THE early manifestations of instinct are crude 
 enough; but crudity and sin are not identical. 
 Many of the early assertions of natural impulse in 
 children are inconvenient to ourselves; but they are 
 not on this account anti-social. Some innate disposi- 
 tions we may justly call dangerous ; but this does not 
 make them wrong. There is nothing in original human 
 nature which taken by itself can be called evil. 
 
 This principle may be understood to mean that any 
 instinct is justified by virtue of its existence. Stanley 
 Hall and others, on this ground, are willing to recog- 
 nize such tendencies as lying, stealing, cruelty, greed, 
 and malice as right in their place. In the main they 
 hold it advisable that these impulses should come to 
 their natural expression, wearing themselves through 
 on a principle resembling the Aristotelian katharsis, 
 and paving the way for the more congenial impulses 
 that normally follow them. One is reminded of the 
 Sabbasava Sutta, in which it is held that some of the 
 asavas, or native weaknesses of character, should be 
 overcome by due indulgence. In view of these same 
 tendencies, however. Professor E. L. Thorndike feels 
 bound to hold that "original nature is very often and 
 
112 CONSCIENCE 
 
 very much imperfect and wrong.'" And had we the 
 same view of human nature as that adopted by these 
 observers, we should be driven to Thorndike's conclu- 
 sion rather than to that of Stanley Hall. But we can- 
 not agree that these particular impulses are natural, 
 however characteristic they may be of childhood. It 
 begs the entire question to ascribe to human nature 
 impulses to cheat, to steal, to bully, to torture, etc. : 
 the names chosen carry with them the ethical reproach. 
 An impulse, taken by itself, is a promise of satisfac- 
 tion, and so far, of good. We have a natural impulse 
 to climb ; and if we climb trees we may find other nat- 
 ural impulses to take what is growing there. But 
 this taking is not in itself 'stealing': it becomes steal- 
 ing only in relation to a social environment not 
 involved in the first intention of the act. There is no 
 natural impulse to steal. 
 
 The same is true of supposed tendencies to deceive. 
 Children have dramatic impulses which may acquire 
 the character of deception by the entrance from with- 
 out of a demand for facts. The moral quality lies not 
 in the impulse but in its relation to this demand. So 
 hunger may acquire the character of selfishness and 
 greed, by the arrival of other claimants. It is not so 
 obvious in the case of primitive fighting and sex im- 
 pulses, in which other human beings are normally con- 
 cerned, that the moral qualification can be denied ; and 
 doubtless it is these impulses that have had to bear 
 
 1 The Original Nature of Man, p. 280. He thinks the view that 
 original nature is essentially wrong and untrustworthy to be "probably 
 as fair" as the view that original nature is always right. 
 
INSTINCT AND SIN 113 
 
 the brunt of the traditional condemnation of human 
 nature. Yet here, too, we have to take the ground 
 of the primitive impulses themselves. And primitive 
 anger and love, if they make any excursion into the 
 minds of their objects, picture these objects to them- 
 selves as pure enemy or pure lover, and in this light 
 there is nothing in them to condemn.^ 
 
 Crude impulses must be described by non-invidious 
 names. Further, we may notice that the apparent 
 moral defect lies not in the impulse itself, but in the 
 manner in which it reaches satisfaction. With an 
 impulse are organized (to compose the instinct) cer- 
 tain methods of procedure, not inseparably nor exclu- 
 sively, but as the directest ways to the goal-^the ''nat- 
 ural ways," we may call them. Thus, it is more 
 natural, at least for Anglo-Saxon boys, to fight with 
 fists and according to the principle "all's fair," than 
 to fight with swords or arguments and according to 
 rule and order. The ways which represent much 
 social modification and technique are called "better": 
 the natural way is less adapted to the latest marches 
 of society. If we have an instinct to hunt and kill, it 
 certainly knows nothing of hook or gun: something 
 
 2 A wise critic puts to me this question : ' ' Are not these forms of 
 the will to power? Will not the self in its early stage, after finding 
 that he can subject the inanimate world to himself, attempt also to 
 assert his will on the living, as, e.g., in deception, stealth, pugnacity, 
 cruelty? Is there not a natural antagonism and does not morality 
 rightly arise through incipient immorality?" My answer would be that 
 self-assertion is indeed a form of the will to power, and when tried 
 upon fellow beings is frequently incipient immorality. But if it becomes, 
 let us say, actual 'cruelty,' it is because it goes beyond pure self- 
 assertion and begins to be aware of a conscious and suffering environ- 
 ment. 
 
114 CONSCIENCE 
 
 much more like Tolstoy's picture of the boar hunt, or 
 Fielding's picture of the Malayan sacrifice comes to 
 mind. In so far as the natural ways are unfitted to 
 contemporary social needs or sensitivities, or to their 
 own conscious environment, they are objectively evil. 
 But it is only as such unfitness enters the mental hori- 
 zon of the agent that a moral evil can be alleged.' 
 
 Admitting, then, that no crude impulse is sinful 
 taken by itself, it does not in the least follow that crude 
 impulses as we find them in human nature are there- 
 fore good. It does not so much as follow (as is often 
 stated) that they are devoid of moral quality. For 
 as we find them in human nature, no impulse is hy 
 itself. The moral quality of any impulse is due some- 
 how to its mental environment not to its own intrinsic 
 quality; but every impulse (after the hypothetical 
 first) has an environment. It is particularly true of 
 the instincts of pugnacity and sex-love, about whose 
 natural rightness much is said and with weighty con- 
 clusions, that the environment into which their full 
 strength emerges is elaborate and compact. It is, 
 therefore, thoroughly fallacious to argue that because 
 these impulses taken by themselves are justified 
 by their existence, these same impulses taken to- 
 
 3 I do not say that the perception of such unfitness is sufficient to 
 constitute a moral quality; I say only that it is necessary. To give an 
 act a moral character, it is further necessary that the person having 
 the impulse should recognize an obligation to achieve what is fit rather 
 than what is unfit, should perceive himself as qualified by his own act, — 
 subject, that is, to approval or reproach, — and should know, too, that 
 he is able to refrain from following his impulse in view of his obliga- 
 tion. These elements may all be present, of course, without any power 
 of analysis on the part of the moral subject. 
 
INSTINCT AND SIN 115 
 
 gether with tlie rest of a human mind are equally jus- 
 tified in their original crudity. Nothing can be con- 
 demned because it is crude ; but a moral question may 
 arise at once if an impulse has an opportunity to he 
 something else than crude. Sin lies, we judge, in the 
 relation of an impulse to its mental environment. 
 What in particular is this relation? 
 
 In our analysis of human nature, we recognized two 
 strata, that of the central instincts, and that of the 
 more specific instincts and units of behavior. These 
 central instincts, we thought, no matter how various 
 their names, were in reality forms of a single tendency, 
 which we roughly described as the will to power. As 
 for the other, more specific instincts, it appeared to 
 us that while each one had its own particular goal and 
 its way thereto, none could be wholly independent of 
 this central current of the will. Because every impulse 
 of a given mind belongs to that mind, it must at least 
 appear consistent with its central purpose ; more than 
 this, it must more or less fully satisfy that central 
 purpose within its special field. It is here that the 
 moral issue arises. For any given impulse may reject 
 the responsibility to carry any further meaning than 
 that of its own direct goal. I may say. Hunger is 
 hunger, it means bread, and nothing more fanciful ; or 
 Fear is fear and its whole significance is that I make 
 good my immediate escape, without responsibility to 
 any other instincts, social or what not; or Desire is 
 desire, and if any vague sense of my total destiny 
 attempts to impose a further interpretation, so much 
 the worse for the vague sense and its pretended claims. 
 
116 CONSCIENCE 
 
 The moral issue arises from this conflict : not the con- 
 flict between one person and another, nor the conflict 
 between one impulse and another in a given mind ; but 
 the conflict between a given impulse and the central 
 will, or between the separate and restricted meaning 
 of an impulse, and the wider meaning which because 
 of its human belonging it "ought" to carry. Sin, I 
 believe, is the refusal to interpret crude impulse in 
 terms of the individual's most intelligent will to 
 power. 
 
 The responsibility of the particular impulse to the 
 central will is, in fact, twofold. It has not simply to 
 be subordinate to the central will and express it; it 
 has also to aid in creating, or giving substance to, that 
 central will. For as we saw, the self acquires vigor 
 and definiteness of policy only by degrees ; all instinc- 
 tive experience must be laid under contribution to 
 give solidity and consistency to the central trend. The 
 mind is at first a very feeble and general unity, aim- 
 ing to become more concrete. Its numerous impulses 
 and hungers, as nature wakes them, establish for it a 
 lax routine, but no coherent purpose. Ask a young 
 child what its plans are for the day, the week, the 
 future; sufficient unto the hour, for the child, is the 
 pain or pleasure thereof. Indeed a unified policy is 
 never completely achieved: there is always a certain 
 desultoriness or unrelatedness in our many doings — 
 life is "first one thing and then another": each of us 
 knows only more or less what in the concrete he most 
 deeply wants. But just because of this more or less, 
 and because in administering our impulses we can con- 
 
INSTINCT AND SIN 117 
 
 trol the more or less, human existence takes on moral 
 character. Sin, we may say, is the deliberate failure to 
 interpret an impulse so that it will confirm or increase 
 the integration of selfhood. 
 
 Consider, for example, an impulse of anger. There 
 is another will which opposes my own; and the "nat- 
 ural way" of my impulse is to break down this oppo- 
 sition by main force, destroying the opposing will if 
 necessary. The will to power might seem to be in full 
 possession ; and to some extent it is in possession — but 
 not, for the human intellect, in full possession. For 
 power is lost, generally speaking, when an opposing 
 mind is treated according to the "natural way" as a 
 physical obstacle, or "thing." If that opposing mind 
 survives as a mind, it exists (as a physical obstacle 
 does not) as a force against the hostile self, and so far 
 as a subtraction from its power. If it does not survive 
 as a mind, there is so much less for the will to power 
 to rule over: this will, in human form, has robbed 
 itself of its normal domain. If, then, I allow my 
 impulse to assume its primitive and separate meaning 
 of destruction, I give it an interpretation inconsistent, 
 in general, with as much of my will to 'power as I am 
 capable of grasping. I sin. And I am aware of the 
 fact, however vaguely: — this is my conscience. 
 
CHAPTER XVIII 
 SIN AS BLINDNESS AND UNTRUTH 
 
 IN a sinful act, we were saying, one is aware of his 
 own deficiency of interpretation. If he were not 
 thus aware, his act, though objectively wrong, would 
 not be sinful. Yet this awareness is kept obscure by 
 the strategy of the sinful consciousness itself : for pur- 
 poses of protective coloration, it endeavors to sup- 
 press the unwelcome knowledge. 
 
 In any full-fledged passion, as of wrath, we can read- 
 ily detect this trait of wilful blindness. It is char- 
 acteristic of passion to exclude a part of the mental 
 horizon. There is immense satisfaction in radical 
 thought and radical action : by eliminating scruples or 
 further considerations, our mental state gains at once 
 that simplicity and unity in which we have a "neces- 
 sary interest," for they ensure that added intensity 
 in the process of living which is the object of the life 
 elan itself. The impeding call for the additional 
 meaning is at a disadvantage, because it appears as 
 hostile to more abundant life ; yet as it is the achieved 
 will to power that is attempting to assert itself, it 
 cannot be banished: it can only be thrown into the 
 margin.^ Sin, in fact, deals in margins. It involves, 
 
 1 One recommendation of this account of moral consciousness over 
 that of McDougall, for example, may be that the problem how the 
 naturally weaker motive acquires such strength as often to overcome the 
 
SIN AS BLINDNESS AND UNTRUTH 119 
 
 as has often been pointed out, an obscuration of knowl- 
 edge ; but what it rejects is only the difference between 
 one thought system and another slightly more com- 
 plete. Passion is always highly intellectual and alert. 
 The most primitive exhibition of pugnacity is full of 
 such concepts as — "On this issue (simple or com- 
 plex) — ^you (with your view of it) — shall submit — shall 
 regret — ^your obstinacy — shall go down — before this, 
 my attack — longer parley intolerable, stultifying — 
 all evasion shall be swept away. " It is simply that the 
 marriage between the given course of behavior and its 
 appropriate thought-system is so close that a read- 
 justment in favor of a more complete, and probably 
 less definite, thought-system is rendered difficult. 
 
 We see that sin cannot be defined, except very rela- 
 tively, as a preference of pleasure to reason : there are 
 pleasure and reason on each side. There is on each 
 side a satisfaction of the will to live — we have seen 
 that passion presents itself as a more abundant life 
 than its opposite; and on each side a satisfaction of 
 the will to power, which all human actions must in 
 some degree express. There is, in fact, no descriptive 
 difference between the act which is sinful and the act 
 which is not sinful : sin has all the psychological ingre- 
 dients of virtue, and virtue all the ingredients of sin — 
 even to the mental conqentration, the limiting of mar- 
 ginal thought. It is only the wholly individual situa- 
 tion, the reference of a given impulse to an available 
 
 naturally stronger motive loses much of its point. There is no need to 
 appeal to the growing strength of a self -regarding sentiment. For the 
 central will has as much of the strength of all the instincts as at any 
 time the self has succeeded in lending it by its efforts of interpretation. 
 
120 CONSCIENCE 
 
 charge of interpretative thought, that furnishes the 
 criterion. 
 
 An assertion of the individual character of sin 
 usually excites the question how it is then that social 
 organization, with its common laws and statutes, de- 
 scribing murder, theft, adultery, disorderly conduct 
 by definite and chiefly external means, is possible, — a 
 question which we have later to consider, — but the 
 principle of the answer seems to be this: There are 
 certain kinds of objective behavior which are so far 
 below the level of average human interpretative power 
 that we can assume with all but complete certainty 
 that the objective wrong implies a subjective wrong. 
 And for social purposes we must assume this, allow- 
 ing under liberal regimes that strong evidence might 
 still convince us of the contrary. It is, in fact, far 
 safer to assume that an externally anti-social behavior 
 is internally sinful than that an externally correct 
 behavior is internally virtuous. But neither assump- 
 tion is entirely safe ; and in our oa\ti discussion we are 
 speaking of principles, not of proportions. In all 
 strictness, no behavior can be defined as sinful by its 
 descriptive characters alone. 
 
 But we can perhaps find a still more complete ex- 
 pression of the nature of sin by considering a further 
 development of the "meaning" which an act may 
 carry. 
 
 Every day a great volume of money changes hands 
 without a word, the meaning of the transaction being 
 established by some understanding in the background. 
 The understanding may be an agreement for work and 
 
SIN AS BLINDNESS AND UNTRUTH 121 
 
 wages; then if, at the week's end, A pays money to B, 
 the acts of A in giving and of B in receiving bear a 
 definite meaning which could be expressed in the form 
 of an assertion. B's act of receiving means, "I have 
 done the work agreed upon, and am entitled to this 
 return"; A's act means, "I believe that you have done 
 your work, and this is your earning." If B has not 
 done his work, his act still conveys the same meaning ; 
 but this time, it is a false meaning. His act is equiva- 
 lent to an untruth. The wrong does not lie primarily 
 in the untruth; but the untruth points out the wrong. 
 Suppose now that we have arrived at an understand- 
 ing about the conditions which justify a decision in 
 general, namely that I shall only then decide and act 
 when I have fairly interpreted my impulses. In this 
 case, any decision or act of mine would have this fur- 
 ther meaning : that I have done my interpreting, and 
 am justified in releasing the act, in saying "Now" to 
 my impulse. And as my actions aim at some satisfac- 
 tion, whether in the acting or in the end reached,'it 
 follows that my pleasures themselves acquire a mean- 
 ing, because of the general understanding. Pleasure, 
 to the moral self, ceases to be mere pleasure : it means 
 a justified mastery; it means that so far as I know my 
 own will, it is now being realized; it means that the 
 material of experience is becoming subject to my 
 ideas and purposes. If I have accepted this under- 
 standing, and take a pleasure without complying with 
 the conditions, without doing my thinking and inter- 
 preting, then that taking of pleasure means a false- 
 hood. I sit down to meat, and my eating does no more 
 
122 CONSCIENCE 
 
 than satisfy my appetite, when by the grace of God I 
 profess that it concerns my widest plans and purposes 
 also: in this case my eating becomes a lie in action. 
 Always assuming the understanding, we can agree so 
 far with WoUaston — a keen but little-noticed thinker — 
 that all sin has the character of untruth, because of 
 the unspoken assertions or meanings of our acts. 
 WoUaston had in mind the meanings which acts carry 
 by virtue of social understandings and conventions. 
 Thus if I beat my wife, or betray my friend, I treat 
 them as if they were not wife, or friend : my acts con- 
 vey untruth. For us, however, the untruth lies far- 
 ther back than the social usage in treating wives or 
 friends: it is found in the general recognition by 
 human consciousness that human acts, at any rate, 
 must express a well-considered will to power. From 
 such a will, certain ways of treating wives and friends 
 will follow by logical necessity. 
 
 Sin, with this understanding, appears as a reckless 
 Now-saying, to the pleasure of action or enjoyment;^ 
 
 2 The thesis that pleasure has a meaning is likely to meet a cold 
 reception from those whose scientific conscience requires them to assert 
 in all cases that a primrose is a primrose — and nothing more. Let me 
 say that I do not deny that pleasure is pleasure. What I deny is that 
 pleasure to a human being is ever quite "nothing but pleasure." 
 
 What else, then, is it, as a matter of plain psychology? Psychologi- 
 cally, pleasure will be admitted an absorbing experience: it tends to 
 concentrate the attention within its own focus. But what, pray, does 
 it absorb? If it is my pleasure, it absorbs me; if yours, it absorbs 
 you: it absorbs the self that experiences it. But what is the self when 
 absorbed in the pleasure except that pleasure simply? The self is the 
 pleasure, if you like; but here the plain psychologist is in danger of 
 losing all the significant truth about pleasure: it would be better to 
 state the identity conversely — ^the pleasure is the self. For the pleasure 
 is not a fixed entity to whose measure the self shrinks; it is the self 
 
SIN AS BLINDNESS AND UNTEUTH 123 
 
 and hence as a false assertion that in that pleasure 1 
 am a complete man. I accept my wages; I have not 
 paid the price in labor, or in thought. 
 
 which is a relatively fixed entity to whose measure the pleasure tends 
 to expand. Child and man may find pleasure in the same object; but 
 the pleasures are as the child is to the man. 
 
 What does the self bring to the pleasure? Its meaning. The simplest 
 meaning of pleasure is that it is what life is for. It satisfies the self; 
 it becomes a guide. So much meaning biology is inclined to assert. 
 But has it any further meaning f 
 
 Experience develops further meanings. Pleasure is at first something 
 discovered; it is not demanded, it is hit upon. It is an enlightening 
 discovery; it seems to unlock the secret of life, and hence becomes, as 
 we said, a guide. But what is at first a privilege becomes looked upon, 
 just because it seems to belong to life, as a right. Pleasure begins to 
 mean something due, and claimed, and perhaps rightfully fought for. 
 The wUl to power takes the form that Hobbes so perfectly describes; 
 it tries to "ensure forever the way of my future desire." Any particu- 
 lar pleasure takes on the meaning of an element in a total life-require- 
 ment. 
 
 For human beings, experience passes through this stage, but does not 
 stop there as Hobbes thought. It is found that pleasure, as a private 
 right, fails to satisfy. With prey in mouth the cat at once becomes a 
 solitary beast; and with every pleasurable absorption men also tend 
 to loosen their ties with other men. Since pleasure satisfies my will, it 
 tends to make me complete in myself; every joy has a centrifugal com- 
 ponent, it tends to be a "joy apart from thee." Yet just this compo- 
 nent makes the meaning of pleasure so far attained incomplete. To a 
 human being pleasure seeks to take on the meaning, not of a private 
 victory, but of a victory in which my social world shares, either actually 
 or by consent. Eating ceases to mean scurrying into the thicket with 
 the snatched morsel; it begins to mean an opportunity for celebrating a 
 common life. 
 
 There is perhaps no limit to the meaning that a simple pleasure may 
 bear ; but even to plain psychology it cannot be called ' ' mere pleasure. ' ' 
 
 Thus, if one reflects upon the phylogenesis of our capacities for 
 pleasure, he may light upon the view that every enjoyment in the human 
 being represents a long history of self-denials on the part of our sub- 
 human ancestors. Pleasure would acquire a further meaning for such 
 a view; it would mean an inheritance of prehistoric labor and sacrifice. 
 And because of this meaning, illicit pleasure would mean, as for Mr. 
 G. K. Chesterton, the exploitation of a deposit, the violation of a trust. 
 
124 CONSCIENCE 
 
 We cannot forthwith define sin, however, as a pre- 
 mature Now-saying to action or enjoyment; it is sim- 
 ply an unjustified Now-saying, and it may also, though 
 more rarely, be too late. In a difficult decision delay 
 may itself become a momentary satisfaction: under 
 the pretense of further thought, a lesser volume of 
 thinking may be accepted — too little to win the right 
 of decision. Thus sin may more completely assume 
 the appearance of virtue, and obliterate the descriptive 
 differences. Yet in this guise also, it corresponds to 
 our analysis : it is the refusal to interpret ; it is like- 
 wise the false assertion, whether by action or by delay, 
 that my action expresses my attainable interpretation. 
 
 disloyalty to an implied compact with all the elemental virtue that has 
 gone into out human make. 
 
 Or, if the horizon in which our will has to work out its destiny is 
 enlarged by thought, until it tries to conceive the world as whole; and 
 if that whole-view perceives a quality in the world which might be 
 called divine; then pleasure will appear as a symbol of this divine 
 quality, possibly as a participation therein. If pleasure is used in such 
 wise as to blur or banish the holiness, or dignity, or beauty, or infinitude 
 of the conscious horizon, it is false to that meaning. From this side, sin 
 is secularization. 
 
CHAPTER XIX 
 
 WHY MEN SIN 
 
 IT is possible to analyze sin, and in a measure to 
 describe it. It is not possible to explain it. For 
 to explain it would be to show it as the necessary or 
 invariable consequence of certain conditions; and 
 whatever is necessary or automatic is not sin. Sin 
 implies that kind of freedom in which the fate and 
 character of each conscious act comes for a moment 
 under the control of 'self; and neither nature nor 
 environment nor God decides what meaning the act 
 shall bear. 
 
 It is true that right-doing lies in the direction of 
 effort ; and that wrong-doing, as the easier course, has 
 the advantage of the natural slope. Sin is likely to 
 pose as the "law of the members" and to claim the 
 indulgence due to the natively stronger motive. The 
 burden of explanation would thus be thrown upon 
 doing right: we should rather ask how it is possible 
 not to sin. But we have deprived ourselves of this 
 recourse, since the will, as the central thread of our 
 meaning, is on the side of the fully interpreted, 
 or right, action.^ Doing right, however, requires 
 
 1 In a self there is no " stronger motive ' ' except that which the self 
 makes stronger. After we have acted it requires no great wisdom to tell 
 which consideration was the prevailing one. But the wisdom which can 
 tell this ieforehand is still to be found. 
 
126 CONSCIENCE 
 
 "trying"; and if we were thoroughly necessitated 
 beings, we might explain the variable vigor of our 
 trying by the varying amount of the energy at our 
 disposal, and the fluctuations of that hunger and thirst 
 after righteousness with which we are endowed. But 
 unfortunately for this type of explanation, no expe- 
 rience is more familiar than that of trying more or 
 less hard, within the limits of the energy and interest 
 we have. The moral issue lies wholly within the range 
 of what trying we are able to do. 
 
 But in these respects, moral mistakes seem to bear 
 a close analogy to the mistakes which are inevitable 
 in acquiring any new art, and may have the same 
 explanation. The beginner at target practice will miss 
 the mark: that is a safe prediction. He is entirely 
 free to hit it; and there is no assignable reason why 
 he must miss it. "Good shooting," said a marksman 
 to me, "is simply a matter of caring enough about 
 each shot." Yet the beginner will miss. As time goes 
 on, he will miss less frequently, — a curve of his prog- 
 ress in learning can be drawn. Some men progress 
 more rapidly than others, and go farther toward a 
 perfect score; but there is a similarity in all curves 
 of learning. Is not sin a missing of the target, and 
 hence a phenomenon of the curve of learning? 
 
 For any particular technique at which we try, the 
 curve of learning holds; and so with the virtues so 
 far as they have a technique. Franklin's scheme of 
 monthly practice was a prudent one. But right is not 
 a matter of matching an objectively definable standard. 
 In all such efforts the full will of the individual is on 
 
WHY MEN SIN 127 
 
 the side of striking the mark, and the adjustment 
 is defeated by the physical obstacles of imperfect 
 organization and control. In the moral effort there 
 is no difficulty of this sort: the nature of right is to 
 be always within reach, otherwise there is no obliga- 
 tion. The point is that my full will is not on the side 
 of striking that mark. Hence the analogy breaks 
 down; and there is no law of learning for morality. 
 The sinful situation is not a failure to reach what was 
 by some organic law beyond reach; it is a defection 
 from what was within my power. I have, as a fact of 
 history, preferred an easier course. 
 
 Thus sin is in all cases a matter of history, or better, 
 of biography. Our judgment that all men sin is 
 statistical in part, taking into account the immense 
 number of decisions that men make; and in part it is 
 due to a knowledge of the conditions that favor 
 imperfect choices. It is on this ground alone that we 
 can approach an account of why men sin. In most 
 general terms, sin is possible because of the existence of 
 real moral dilemmas (and later of feigned dilemmas) ; 
 and every sin has a 'case,' either of innocuousness or 
 of positive virtue. When once we have begun to take 
 part in the world of action, the world sees to it that we 
 are driven from one venture to another : the exigencies 
 of growth compel us to face, from time to time, a new 
 step with all its possibilities of error, while the alter- 
 native of playing safe in the old way is itself an error. 
 It might be possible to show the entire history of sin 
 as a history of moral growth. I shall content myself 
 with mentioning a few typical situations. 
 
128 CONSCIENCE 
 
 1. There is one dilemma that attends every moral 
 act; though it is seldom that it becomes acute. It 
 concerns the process of coming to a decision. There 
 is an obvious danger of false judgment in acting 
 before deliberation is complete; but there is likewise 
 a danger of error in holding decision until deliberation 
 can be complete. 
 
 For deliberation never reaches anything but a rough 
 completion. Through experience every man finds for 
 himself a degree of certainty which he regards as 
 sufficient for practical purposes: he calls himself 
 'certain' when this standard is reached, and for the 
 most part his deliberative process rises quickly to this 
 level and passes into action without hesitation. For 
 he has found that if he acts at all, he must act when 
 his action will fit the case; he must reach the best 
 possible view of the case in the time permitted. He 
 is but occasionally aware of what is universally true : 
 that no case has ever been seen by him in its full 
 meaning. And since all of our fiats are issued in 
 partial obscurity, the chance is offered, as they fall 
 through the dark of the mind, for deflection toward 
 the lurking magnets of the cruder wishes. Thus there 
 is wrong in delaying beyond the moment of an action's 
 possible meaning; and yet the imperfect reflection 
 involved is the natural cover of sin. 
 
 2. No man can live a moral life in aloofness from 
 society and its various alliances; yet all alliance is 
 alliance with the imperfect. It might be hard to say 
 which is in the greater danger of political error, the 
 party man or the non-party man. Each has his own 
 
WHY MEN SIN 129 
 
 peril ; and a cynic would have it, we suspect botli. It 
 is evident, however, that growth lies in the direction 
 of belonging. It is at the cost of losing all effect that 
 one refrains from attachment to whatever is historical 
 and organized in the world. Institutions exist to lend 
 to each individual member their over-individual dimen- 
 sions and scope. It is not alone a practical but a moral 
 peril if I reject their aid. 
 
 It is equally evident that there are no perfect 
 institutions. Whatever is historical inherits the 
 strength and the weakness of all the past from which 
 it comes; and whatever is organized must make use 
 of concrete men whose virtues are mixed with their 
 vices. Is it possible to be an historical entity without 
 partaking of the evil with which one must make 
 alliance? It is not politics alone that involves this 
 threat of contamination and compromise: nothing 
 historical is free from it, the church, the professional 
 group, social traditions, societies everywhere, — even 
 friendship, if Emerson's dictum is right, "Friends 
 descend to meet." It is possible to be in the world 
 and not of it ; but is it possible to work with it and not 
 be of it? 
 
 I do not say that it is impossible: I say that there 
 is a moral difficulty in either alternative. I must ally 
 myself; but I must vigilantly interpret that alUance 
 as Burke interpreted the social contract, as an alliance 
 with all the honest strivings of my comrades, to the 
 rejection of the ease and profit of all guilty conformity. 
 In all positive living, the morally necessary ends are 
 perpetually pleading the justification of the means, 
 
130 CONSCIENCE 
 
 and who can avoid being carried from time to time 
 across the evanescent linef Sin has no need to enter 
 life as a separate deed: — it may be the simple pro- 
 longing of a good deed. 
 
 3. The moral life must become social, we have said : 
 growth lies that way. Among the necessary incidents 
 of this socially moral existence is the use of moral 
 authorities, which we have already referred to as a 
 natural habit of conscience. Perfect rectitude implies 
 an art of preserving solitude of decision amid the mass 
 of suggestion borne in upon us from our environment : 
 the distinction between the good and the evil of the 
 alliances we were speaking of requires and assumes 
 this power. But we cannot escape the need of moral 
 authority any more than we can escape the time- 
 element in decision. And the dilemma lies not so much 
 in the likelihood that we will choose radically wrong 
 authorities (for humanity has shown a singular 
 unanimity in its major selections, its heroes and 
 saints) as that we will take our authorities whole. 
 
 It is doubtful whether any leader is not liable at 
 some point to become a misleader. At such a point 
 clear judgment for the follower becomes peculiarly 
 difficult, since it involves a plunge out of congenial 
 company into solitude. Moral disillusionment is the 
 severest of experiences. The habit of deference takes 
 on the psychological quality of a secondary virtue: 
 when the rift appears in the halo, it becomes necessary 
 to choose either the distress of opposing an honored 
 guidance, or that tacit complicity which is the parent 
 
WHY MEN SIN 131 
 
 of cynicism, and whose creed is, "All men, even the 
 best, are at heart false." 
 
 Such an experience is severe only because there was 
 an initial error in the degree of reliance placed upon 
 the authority in question. The will had been seduced 
 into ease by the presence of an object of too great 
 trust: sin was already there. For this reason, it is 
 natural to plead for the alternative of rejecting 
 authority altogether in moral matters, an alternative 
 in which I do not hesitate to say there is an equal 
 danger of moral faltering, ineptitude, and obliquity, 
 even to the limited extent to which the discarding of 
 moral guidance is possible. 
 
 4. If moral disagreement is one of the incidents 
 of moral growth; and if it is the business of men to 
 incorporate their convictions in action, — as it is ; there 
 is no escape from the occasional dilemma between 
 fighting for your conviction, and letting your convic- 
 tion fail by avoiding hostilities. 
 
 What I conceive as right I am bound to work for, 
 and if need be fight for. The distinction between 
 working and fighting is gradual: in either case I am 
 opposing myself to what opposes my purpose. The 
 difference lies in the amount of faith I have in my 
 opponent, and in the time and effort I can subtract 
 from my work to accomplish his conversion. There 
 comes a time at which I must decide that he that is 
 not for me is against me : to defer this decision is as 
 evil as to hasten it. Yet wherever opposition enters, 
 there is so great a likelihood of the entrance of moral 
 
132 
 
 CONSCIENCE 
 
 wrong, that we are often counselled rather to forgo the 
 good it aims at. 
 
 For when one fights for human rights, is he not alSo 
 fighting for his own? And when one fights for his 
 own rights, is he not also fighting for his comforts? 
 Since public wrong, as a rule, first shows itself in 
 economic injury, he who fights for liberty and justice 
 has to reflect that his fight intends also to be profitable. 
 His opponent will seldom fail to remind him of this 
 fact, and to interpret his psychology accordingly. 
 And when motives are mixed, the warrior can hardly 
 be too confident about the color of his own purpose. 
 The justest warfare, in its beginnings, is open to 
 suspicion. 
 
 And further, however perfectly the belligerent spirit 
 is at first in accord with the necessities of honor, its 
 momentum tends to carry it beyond the point of the 
 moral issue. The activity of fighting has its own 
 instinctive delight ; and while the belligerent exaltation 
 is probably intended by nature to make easier the 
 transition from comparative sloth to full activity under 
 a vital demand, it is at least as difficult for this 
 passion as for others to hold itself within the bounds 
 of this function, as means to an ulterior end. And 
 morally, it is more necessary that it should accept 
 this meaning. 
 
 Perhaps it is superfluous to point out the moral 
 peril of warfare; yet it may serve a purpose in 
 measuring the moral peril of the alternative. The 
 dangers of hostility are obvious; but those of peace 
 are incomparably deceitful. 
 
WHY MEN SIN 133 
 
 It was Thomas Hobbes iwbo adopted the maxim 
 "Seek peace and pursue it" as the first law not of 
 love but of enlightened selfishness. As the wrongs 
 which I have not combatted and might have combatted 
 are indefinitely more numerous than the selfish 
 interests for which I have fought, it appears to me 
 that incomparably the greater bulk of moral error 
 is that which enters the will under the garb of peace. 
 Fighting is hard and distracting work: peace, I say, 
 has easier victories. But what if this more ideal 
 warfare does not take place? Here is my community, 
 for example, in which I do not have to look far for 
 examples of injustice, waste, maladministration, which 
 are bound to affect the health, happiness, or safety of 
 myself, my children, and many others; yet I do not 
 take issue with them. There are philosophers in 
 Europe who have been preaching for some time the 
 gospel of the right of might, or of the strong culture 
 which judges itself the best. I have known of this 
 too, and have not lifted a voice against it. Had those 
 who knew of it risen in time, and had they faced the 
 ills of which this doctrine was but a symptom, the 
 world might well have been spared its last and 
 greatest war. The test of an evil peace is that its 
 fruit is discord and not unity; and conversely, any 
 peace that eventuates in war is thereby shown to have 
 been an evil peace. 
 
 The moral seductiveness of peace lies in its method 
 of dealing with wrong : it is apt to deal with it as an 
 unclean person deals with dirt, — ^by preferring not to 
 recognize its existence, hence leaving it unmet and 
 
134 CONSCIENCE 
 
 uncured. The clean soul is militantly eager to find 
 the dirt: the true lover of peace with a similar 
 obsession seeks for the spot that is unharmonized, and 
 makes an issue of that spot until it is wiped out. He 
 smells afar off the issues that threaten war, ferrets 
 them out in advance, and tries to settle them.^ But the 
 greater part of our vociferous cult of peace has 
 become foul, stagnant, attempting to conceal in dark 
 closets the underlying differences of interest and the 
 unresolved dislikes of the world. Its policy is the 
 policy of Hush. It is the cover of our deepest and 
 largest guilt. 
 
 5. To generalize from situations such as the above, 
 the only right ways of behavior are ways which with 
 a slight change of inner adjustment become wrong 
 ways. Conversely, to venture a wrong way is a 
 condition of finding the right way. This much the 
 search after righteousness has in common with the 
 acquisition of skill. We begin, indeed, with something 
 better than random movements; but we do not begin 
 with a self -consciousness quick to discern the point at 
 which the imperfect maxim usurps the nest of the 
 perfect one. There is nothing to be achieved in the 
 moral life except at a risk which is a moral risk. He 
 who will not risk falling into egotism or undue self- 
 assertion can hardly win an honorable effectiveness; 
 for the crude plunge of action, if it has the merit of 
 vigor and decision, will rarely escape at first the touch 
 
 2 One of the best ante-bellum expressions of this genuine concern for 
 peace that has come to my attention is in a small work of the great 
 German jurist, Josef Kohler, in those sections of Moderne Eechts- 
 probleme which deal with international affairs. 
 
WHY MEN SIN 135 
 
 of insensitiveness. And lie who will not risk a fall 
 into cowardice or ease will hardly find the point of an 
 honorably pacific will. I do not say that we must fall : 
 I say that we must risk the fall. We must find our 
 moral equipoise through trial and the risk of error. 
 
 But behind the vagaries of such moral self-educa- 
 tion, there lies the good-will to win this eqtiipoise, 
 which is the redeeming feature behind many an actual 
 sin. It is the total will, not the partial will, which 
 gives the ultimate character to an act ; and so a career 
 of moral adventure, if it is a genuine search for truth 
 and not a covert lust for the joys of the taster, may 
 be by conscience itself required of the soul. Or let me 
 rather say, it is by conscience required of every soul; 
 though it also is attended by the subtlest moral peril. 
 For morality that is not original, is no morality. 
 
 It is with this proviso of a genuine and ultimate will 
 to win moral truth that we look if not with leniency 
 yet with hope upon those statistically certain lapses 
 which make of every individual a participant in the 
 sins of his race. For given this good-will, the forces 
 making for righteousness are twofold: the intrinsic 
 attraction of the good, and the repulsion of the evil. 
 Sin, when it occurs, enhances the force of evil, by 
 channelling deeper the path already easier by nature ; 
 but it also enhances the force of good, by awakening 
 the reaction we call remorse. It is a part of our moral 
 destiny, as a race, that we must work out our moral 
 life by the aid of both forces, the quest of blessedness 
 and the sorrowful ruing of our own guilt. In so far 
 as sin is capable of explanation in terms of a balance 
 
136 CONSCIENCE 
 
 of forces, the explanation is this : that since we must 
 win moral life through moral adventure, we need to 
 add the push of rue to the pull of the ultimate good, 
 in order to find our adequate and complete moral 
 motive. 
 
CHAPTER XX 
 
 SIN AS STATUS 
 
 THEEE was an ancient theological conception 
 wMcli attained a large social importance, and 
 even a political importance in the days when a wide- 
 spread fear of future punishment was a factor in 
 allegiance to institutions. This conception can be 
 couched in terms of a rude syllogism, somewhat as 
 follows : 
 
 The wages of sin is death ; 
 All men are born in sin ; ergo, 
 All men are, by birth, mortal. 
 
 I doubt whether this argument has been refuted: in 
 many minds it has suffered a severer fate, — that of 
 being outgrown by the gradual wearing out of the 
 belief in its premises. Upon the view of sin which we 
 have so far developed there can be no such thing as 
 "original sin": every man is his own Adam. As for 
 death, whether physical death or the cessation of 
 personal existence, we have ceased to see any causal 
 connection between this and moral delinquency. Sin 
 of course has its consequences, both social and 
 psychological ; the attention of ethical theory has been 
 largely occupied with these, as is natural in a prag- 
 matic era of thought. But the fact that these ascer- 
 tainable consequences exist hardly disposes of the 
 
138 CONSCIENCE 
 
 question whether there are also metaphysical conse- 
 quences. The idea of a moral causality which runs 
 deeper than the surface of phenomenal connections is 
 both ancient and modern, a property of all great 
 religions and of various philosophies. As a meta- 
 physical notion it lies just beyond the range of our 
 present enquiry. But it is human nature, and particu- 
 larly moral human nature, to make conscious con- 
 nections with ultimate facts; for this reason, we 
 cannot fairly finish our own task without stepping 
 over this border. 
 
 We may remind ourselves at this point that we have 
 been speaking of sin in but one of its two traditional 
 meanings. Sin has commonly referred to individual 
 deeds, — and so we have understood it; but it has also 
 referred to a status. As a status, or condition, it has 
 implied impurity, pollution, liability to banishment, 
 etc., metaphysical outlawry. The word sinner refers 
 to this status rather than to the particular deeds. 
 Eegarding it in this way we should have to say that 
 so far from rejecting the notion that there is a sinful 
 status, we should have to affirm one, so far, at least, 
 as psychology can carry us. 
 
 My moral status, as a fact of psychology, would be 
 the condition of my preferences — my character. And 
 my preferences I cannot modify in any so immediate 
 way as I can modify a deed. Suppose that, whether 
 by birth or by acquired habit, I simply do not as a fact 
 prefer righteousness, — at the price of moral effort. 
 I might not call this condition depravity. I should 
 certainly not call it holiness. 
 
SIN AS STATUS ■ 139 
 
 And this, on the whole, seems to be the condition I 
 am in. The necessary interest I have in blessedness 
 is relatively faint; it appears to me rather as some- 
 thing known about, or heard about, than of poignant, 
 present, and compelling value. And while some 
 shimmer of the beatific vision may lend a distant glow 
 to the pursuit of duty, the actual work of righteousness 
 has to deal rather with the raw materials of which 
 happiness is made than with happiness itself. It is 
 like a price paid in advance, sometimes far in advance : 
 there is a strain upon faith, upon imagination. One 
 "walks out upon his idea", — not upon his immediate 
 appreciation. Such is the balance of my nature; it is 
 this balance which makes it historically necessary that 
 ruing should add itself to the lifting force of the 
 good. And for aught I can see, this balance came with 
 me into the world, as a part of my inherited being. 
 From the first I willed the good with an effort; and 
 so, perhaps, as Augustine argues, what I willed was 
 never quite good. I do not say I should be condemned 
 or punished for this; I am now speaking of statuses, 
 i.e., of simple metaphysical facts. 
 
 We need not, however, attribute this judgment to 
 Augustine alone. If Aristotle is right, we are all of 
 us more or less in the position of patients who cling 
 to their illnesses, of those, familiar to psychiatry, who 
 resist being robbed of their delusions, even of their 
 persecutions. It takes the good wholly to prefer the 
 good. The holy will, no doubt, is something to be 
 acquired ; it is not innate. If this is what is meant by 
 being born in sin, I do not know how I should deny it. 
 
140 CONSCIENCE 
 
 I doubt whether this apparently somber judgment of 
 original human nature is primarily a product of 
 theological speculation. It has at least a strong sup- 
 port in common experience. For quite apart from all 
 theories, self-condemnation, when it comes, has an 
 extraordinary way of applying retroactively: blame 
 frequently reaches back over a past which seemed 
 innocent of the moral question involved. A new 
 insight tends to condemn all prior ignorance, not alone 
 regretting, but accusing, the long persistence in the 
 lower level of life. The lover enters his new vista of 
 consciousness with an embarrassment which is partly 
 moral, — ^the symptom of a critical self -judgment which 
 surveys the whole domain of past choices. He accuses 
 that past self at, least of a moral inertness ; it was dull, 
 as "atheists are dull who cannot guess Grod's presence 
 out of sight." 
 
 The argument of this retroactive judgment may be 
 this. That my life has been, if not an active rejection 
 of the good, yet a long acquiescence in something less 
 than good. I have failed to shake myself awake to 
 the conditions of my own welfare. I have accepted 
 without protest enjoyments I have not earned : I have 
 not enquired into the right of my own ease. Back of 
 all my passivity was an awareness that life has, after 
 all, its conditions; and I failed to force myself up to 
 the exertion or hardship of learning them. There was 
 a possible subconscious integrity in me which I was 
 disloyal to, all the while there was no one to hold me 
 to it. I have not known in detail what I ought to do, 
 and I cannot be judged for what I have not known, 
 
SIN AS STATUS 141 
 
 but I judge myself for living in an ignorance wMch 
 my will knew could be overcome. I was not without 
 that clue, nor that desire.^ 
 
 Apart from particular deeds of sin, then, our 
 common moral consciousness recognizes something 
 like a sinful status. As for those deeds themselves, 
 it is a matter of daily experience that they bring a new 
 status with them. Debasement is not an act; it is a 
 condition of choice resulting from a series of acts. 
 Each abandonment of the effort for complete interpre- 
 tation makes the next abandonment easier; and what 
 conscience is concerned about is not alone the issue 
 of this act but also, and primarily, the psychological 
 status which it creates. But what is the significance 
 of this status, whether original or acquired? Allowing 
 that we are justified in viewing it with regret, if not 
 wholly with indignation, is there any excuse for the 
 terror and guilt of soul, the "anxiety neurosis" of the 
 older theology? 
 
 1 In greater detail : There have been occasions in which I could not 
 be reconciled with my brother, through lack of available sympathy at 
 that moment. But I know that that sympathy would have been avail- 
 able, had I apart from times of stress been perceptive of facts which 
 it was my business to know, if I had been duly out-living, objective, 
 alive. Or, I cannot think of the right thing to say at a given moment; 
 and who can blame me for not thinking of the right thing? Yet I raa,j 
 well blame myself. For this, too, while a result of present perception, 
 is of a perception built on past alertness. Now I must prepare what I 
 would say, if I am to appear well. But if I were what I would present 
 myself as being, consistently and always, I need "take no thought for 
 what I shall speak"; myself would speak. What I am not accuses me. 
 Even what I am not in intellect traces back to lapses from what I have 
 been admonished to become. Admonished by what? By nothing except 
 by the perception that "life lies this way, rather than that, and for 
 the most part, in living in the object." Admonished, if you like, by 
 the original synderesis, adequate to its own work. 
 
142 CONSCIENCE 
 
 We shall see more clearly if we eliminate the 
 psychological element of blame, and ask again simply 
 for fact. What does this status entail? I do not know. 
 But I am not prepared to say that it entails nothing. 
 If I were told that it entails a form of mortality, I 
 should lend the assertion a respectful hearing. It 
 would seem reasonable to me that a lesser status, in 
 things relating to insight, idea, appreciation, should 
 be a measure of lesser validity in point of reality. If 
 ideas are the most real things in the universe, this 
 would most certainly be the case. If life is to be 
 measured in terms of intercourse with minds with 
 whom I am fit to converse, I can see that this status 
 of inferiority is one that must carry with it a lesser 
 degree of life. 
 
 Putting away all emphasis on moral ideals, let me 
 look at things ''naturally." It seems in this sense 
 natural to me that men should be sinful. It seems 
 also natural to me that they should be mortal. It is 
 not mortality that looks strange to me; it is immor- 
 tality. I could not rebel if I were told, without 
 prejudice, that my range of existence would be as the 
 range of my own effective wishes. This, I should say, 
 is obvious justice. Let those who care for immortality 
 take the pains; let the others have their own finite 
 reward. Let each have the degree of life which his 
 own status — ^by its natural hold on reality — commands. 
 
 This would leave us all in calm, were this the last 
 word. For who could regard that a "punishment" 
 which is simply a failure to attain an end that one 
 does not want? You thunder at me that unless I 
 
SIN AS STATUS 143 
 
 repent of my sin, I shall perish. I reply, I am content 
 to perish — indeed I had never aimed at anything else : 
 I have not "insisted on being immortal." 
 
 But we are not thus left, by nature, at our natural 
 ease. Having become self-conscious, we have no choice 
 but to see life for the good it is, and to be restless at 
 the thought of exclusion from that good. To lose life, 
 to lose the quality of life, to lose the possibility of 
 responding to what we believe to be the best, and hence 
 the possibility of being with the best, to be unable, as 
 Dostoievski's Father Zossima has it, — to be unable 
 to love, and to know this inability and this loss: this 
 ie a torment to man as it is not to the other creatures. 
 If man must recognize in himself a status of natural 
 finitude, we must also admit, as an element in his 
 original equipment, an impulse which repudiates that 
 status and demands a being at the level of his appre- 
 ciation. This is not something different from the will 
 to power; but it is the deepest expression of it. It is 
 the will to overcome death. 
 
 Religion has had this service to render: it has 
 co-operated with this human unwillingness to accept 
 mortality. It has constantly reminded man how easily 
 he may remain mortal, and how hardly he may earn 
 immortality. It has made him pray with a touch of 
 fear, ' ' Take not thy holy spirit from me. ' ' There are 
 those who refer to this state of mind as an 'anxiety 
 neurosis': it may become such. But in substance, it 
 is simply the original man in his wholeness facing the 
 fact of his natural status. Others have called it the 
 'divine spark' which somehow disturbs our clod. 
 
144 CONSCIENCE 
 
 Names matter little ; but the experience, I dare say, 
 some form could ill be spared from the armory 
 man's remaking. 
 
 This completes our survey of original human natui 
 We shall now turn to the process of its remaking. 
 
PART IV 
 EXPEEIENCE 
 
CHAPTER XXI 
 THE AGENCIES OF EEMAKING 
 
 IN studying original human nature, we have already 
 begun the study of the remaking of human nature. 
 For remaking is in large part a work of man upon 
 himself, i.e., the gradual transformation of the frag- 
 mentary and particular impulses by the central in- 
 stinct, the will. The self-conscious being is inevitably 
 a self -changing being; and what we have called the 
 moral aspect of original nature is simply the self- 
 conscious will taking a broad cosmic responsibility for 
 the work of self-building, making itself a present 
 partner with man's remoter destiny. 
 
 The moral consciousness is not separable from any 
 other aspect of self -consciousness. It is not necessarily 
 a moral sense which may lead one to such reflections 
 as "I am awkward, or slow, or peculiar, or inefficient" ; 
 yet in judgments of this sort, if there is a morale 
 behind them, remaking processes begin. Wherever the 
 human being can catch a glimpse of himself as a whole, 
 self-judgment will emerge, and the central instinct 
 will begin to impose its findings upon each impulse 
 severally. 
 
 And strictly speaking, nothing can transform a 
 will but itself. It is easily possible to force a man to 
 behave this way or that, by various sorts of coercion ; 
 
148 EXPEEIENCE 
 
 but this is not to effect a change in his instincts, and 
 unless the instincts are reached there is no change in 
 the man. To change human nature is to change what 
 it wants, or wills, and nothing can naturalize within 
 the will such a change but the will itself.^ 
 
 But the inner factors do no work except in conjunc- 
 tion with outer occasions which furnish the materials 
 and the incentives for self-judgment. And this 
 co-operation of inner with outer factors of change is 
 what we mean by the word 'experience.' 
 
 It is customary to make a contrast between what one 
 learns on the basis of his own experience and what he 
 learns from his social environment. On this ground 
 
 1 It is the recognition of this truth which distinguishes modern 
 education, the education of freedom as opposed to that of constraint: 
 the principle has been generally understood from the times, at latest, of 
 Pestalozzi and Froebel. 
 
 No doubt, external pressure long enough continued, a long imprison- 
 ment, for example, will be followed hj some change of character. You 
 may be able to recognize a convict as easily as you recognize a member 
 of the more liberal professions. But if so, it is because a degree of 
 consent has domesticated in him as in them, the presumably freer people, 
 certain of the repeated details and attitudes of his daily program. The 
 point is, that however little the program itself may be one of his choice, 
 the habits are his habits, — ^his ways of adapting his will to a persistent 
 situation. And such habits may, of course, mean little change in the 
 deeper strata of character. 
 
 As a rule, it is true, constraint does finally invade a will incapable 
 of permanent rebellion. It reaches it through this middle stage of habit; 
 for habits of any kind though imposed by necessity will reveal variations 
 more or less alluring, and the more alluring may become accepted by the 
 pliable character as its own choice. Thus force may develop into 
 seduction, for better or for worse: and no educational theory can safely 
 neglect the fact that many a horse, driven unwillingly to water, finds that 
 it wants to drinlc. We have no right to conclude, because all remaking 
 must be founded on consent, that therefore, in all education, obtaining 
 consent is preliminary. 
 
THE AGENCIES OF EEMAKING 149 
 
 we might be inclined to divide the agencies of remaking 
 into two groups which we might broadly label, expe- 
 rience and training. This distinction must have some 
 justification. Otherwise there would be no meaning 
 in the question whether social pressure, or some 
 particular brand of social pressure, is helpful or hurt- 
 ful to human nature. Such a question implies that 
 there is a normal course of development which human 
 nature, left to itself, its own data and reflection, would 
 tend to realize. When, for example, Mr. Bertrand 
 Russell says that "those who have had most of 
 'education' are very often atrophied in their mental 
 and spiritual life" — and no doubt he is right — he 
 implies that this mental and spiritual life of the 
 individual mind has a natural growth and destiny of 
 its own, capable in some way of being ascertained and 
 used as a standard for judging the results of social 
 action. We might then be expected to show what 
 experience would do with human nature if there were 
 no such thing as social pressure and education. 
 
 It is obvious, however, that social experience is an 
 integral part of individual experience ; since individual 
 experience has neither its complete data nor its work- 
 ing tools apart from social interaction. The various 
 standards of self-judgment gain certainty and vigor 
 only in the give and take of the group; there are no 
 more impressive arguments for changing one's ways 
 than the wholly spontaneous reactions of one's fellows ; 
 and the private self hardly knows its own desires 
 apart from the experiences that come through play, 
 submission, dominance, affection, and the like. Isola- 
 
150 EXPERIENCE 
 
 tion, actual or theoretical, would give us as distorted 
 a view of the work of experience as of original human 
 nature. There is thus no point in attempting a dis- 
 tinction between the effects of solitary experience and 
 the effects of companionship: the only distinction 
 worth drawing would be between one's own reflection 
 upon his entire experience, social and solitary, and 
 his neighbor's reflection, especially when the neigh- 
 borly views are enforced by artificial rewards and 
 punishments. 
 
 This is the distinction which we shall undertake to 
 draw, meaniQg by 'experience' simply that inner 
 digestion of data of all sorts whereby the outcome of 
 every essay in behavior becomes a basis for modifying 
 the next similar essay, and excluding the influence of 
 all deliberate suggestion and training. We shall first 
 glance at the task which experience in this sense has 
 to accomplish. 
 
CHAPTER XXII 
 THE TASK OF EXPERIENCE 
 
 THERE is more reshaping to be done in the human 
 being than in any other creature. This is partly 
 because in him the instincts appear in more numerous 
 fragments, less fixed in their connections ; and partly 
 because the central current of the will, which controls 
 the reshaping, is proportionately stronger and more 
 rapid in springing to a position of control. But it is 
 also partly because the great middle group of instincts 
 which we have called the general instincts are more 
 general, so that there is more work to be done to fit 
 them to specific circumstances. 
 
 No creature can engage in f ood-getting-in-general : 
 it must get particular items of food in particular 
 ways. Eveh the most definite units of behavior, as 
 grasping, biting, are generalities needing adjustment 
 to every individual task. All instincts, then, and 
 especially human instincts, have to be brought to earth 
 by building a bridge from the universal to the par- 
 ticular. The human being, so far as his original 
 impulses are guiding him, is in the position of an 
 agent under such widely general orders that he is 
 allowed, and obliged, to use a liberal 'discretion.' It 
 is in. this gap between the broad thrust of instinct and 
 the particular emergency that 'intelligence' finds its 
 first employment. 
 
152 EXPEEIENCK 
 
 When I say that intelligence — i.e., the idea of a total 
 end regulating the ways and means to its fulfilment — 
 spans this gap, I do not mean that it acts unaided. 
 Nature does not fail to make specific suggestions in 
 specific situations: in every circumstance there must, 
 of course, be some nervous route of least resistance. 
 Nature may produce a veritable magazine of handy 
 responses, which may be run through more or less 
 mechanically until some one suits the emergency, as 
 in the case of an animal seeking to escape from a trap. 
 But the significant thing is that Nature herself draws 
 the distinction between these suggestions and the 
 major instinct: they are alterable, loosely attached, 
 while the general instinct remains controlling the 
 alterations. The law seems to hold for human nature 
 that the more specific the suggestion, the more alter- 
 able it is. 
 
 Take, for example, an instinct to fly from danger — 
 a highly general instinct. No highly developed 
 creature is endowed with such an instinct without 
 numerous auxiliary responses. When a special sign 
 indicates a special danger — a loud noise, a "large 
 object coming rapidly toward one" — ^nature has one or 
 more proposals to make, also comparatively specific — 
 to shrink, to retire, to get closer to companions, to call 
 out, to hide. But it is just these special signs (stimuli) 
 and special suggestions (responses) which are modi- 
 fiable.^ Thus, birds which by impulse take to fiight at 
 
 1 McDougall holds that it is the emotional core of the instinct which 
 persists, while the two tennini, the afferent and efferent channels, are 
 subject to modification. But what persists is more than an emotion; 
 it is the entire general tendency. As the instincts which McDougall 
 
THE TASK OF EXPERIENCE 153 
 
 any loud noise may learn to sit through the passage 
 of a railway train; while the mere sight of a man on 
 foot will scatter them. The former special stimulus 
 has ceased to have the general meaning 'danger'; the 
 latter special stimulus has acquired that general 
 meaning. A rabbit at large when alarmed will make 
 for its burrow; in captivity, it will make for its box 
 or kennel. The general meaning, 'escape,' can no 
 longer take the former special route — ^the natural way ; 
 the latter response has acquired that meaning. In 
 such modifications of stimulus or response, or both, 
 consists the education or self -education of the animal : 
 they are the work of 'intelligence,' so far as they are 
 guided by the persisting idea of the general end, that 
 is to say, by a mind or self; we call them, also, the 
 results of 'experience' — ^understanding, however, that 
 apart from the 'intelligence' the experience would 
 mean nothing, and therefore accomplish nothing. 
 
 What is accomplished is usually something more, 
 however, than a fitting of a particular response to a 
 particular situation, as the examples given will show. 
 For the new stimuli and responses that are brought 
 under the general instinct are themselves general. 
 The bird has an attitude toward 'walking men' which, 
 though far more specific than its attitude toward 
 'danger,' is still a general attitude. These acquired 
 generalities we call habits. A habit might indeed be 
 fairly described as an acquired (and usually compara- 
 
 enumerates are themselves highly general, I should not hesitate to pro- 
 pose that it is they, in their entirety, which persist, while the modifica- 
 tion affects mainly such particularized channels as form the main object 
 of Professor Thorndike's studies. 
 
154 EXPERIENCE 
 
 tively specific) instinct.^ It is what experience 
 deposits when the mind has played long enough with 
 a situation that is bound to recur; has played long 
 enough, that is, with its repertoire of responses and 
 its own inventions, to adopt a general method as best, 
 and to turn its experience-interest to other situations. 
 Thus 'experience' moves through the growth of our 
 natural impulses like a reaper's swath, — concerned at 
 every point with the particular instance, while having 
 before it and leaving behind it only the masses and 
 bundles of grain, generalities of higher and lower level. 
 The result of this reaping of experience is that nothing 
 is left standing in its original relation to Mother 
 Earth. Everything is now brought into relation to 
 the purposes of the reaper. No natural impulse can 
 become a matter of experience and remain unchanged. 
 What we call memory implies that every new stimulus 
 will be invested with all the meaning of what followed 
 at the previous ventures. Every new effort is normally 
 
 2 As a connection between stimulus and response, habit has, as 
 Watson justly remarks, the same structure as instinct. It is not impos- 
 sible that instincts may have originated to some extent through such 
 deposits. But it is an error to hold that there is no essential difference 
 between them (Watson, Behavior, p. 185). Habit differs from instinct 
 in its relation to the higher centers. Since habit is not flung off, so to 
 speak, as a full-blown bubble, until the self is satisfied, or, — ^let me say, — 
 since habit is never even relatively finished, until attention is relatively 
 turned to other sequences, a habit is controlled by a central awareness 
 of the meaning of its sequence as an instinct is not controlled. An 
 instinct, we may say, turns into habit just in proportion as it yields up 
 to consciousness the secret of its destination. So far as action is 
 instinctive, consciousness is increasingly aware of the articulation of 
 parts into a total sequence; so far as it is habitual, the awareness of 
 elements is on the decline, and the centers are dealiag with the complex 
 whole as a simple entity, whose meaning is sufficiently grasped. 
 
THE TASK OF EXPERIENCE 155 
 
 more my own than any previous effort. And if a mind 
 is equipped like the human mind with vigorous im- 
 pulses of curiosity and play, the most favorable result 
 of any item of behavior will not preserve the next 
 following cases of the kind from experimental varia- 
 tion, though it were always for the worse. 
 
 But we must now look more particularly at the 
 methods by which experience works in transforming 
 instinct. 
 
CHAPTER XXIII 
 THE METHODS OF EXPERIENCE 
 
 WHEN we picture to ourselves experience as an 
 active agency, working upon a passive and 
 malleable mind, we think of it as wielding the tools of 
 pleasure and pain. These tools are universal, fateful, 
 and imperative, — especially pain: no man can ignore 
 them, and especially, no child. And the figure of 
 passivity has its degree of justice. I may launch what 
 ventures I will: I cannot decide in advance whether 
 the outcome shall be agreeable or the reverse. Here 
 I am at the mercy of the world, and of my own 
 constitution.^ 
 
 And the general method of experience is not a 
 secret. Whatever experiment of mine results in 
 pleasure will be confirmed, and its occasion will be 
 sought again. Whatever experiment results in pain 
 will tend to be checked or much modified at its next 
 suggestion. Pleasure heightens the rate and energy 
 of experimenting, and so tends to increase the total 
 volume of experience. It leads the will out, supplies 
 it with information of what there is to live for, and 
 
 1 To experience is to experiment and to read the returns of experi- 
 mentation. Experimenting is an active element; also mounting the 
 results. But if experimenting were sufficient to determine the results 
 themselves, as certain forms of idealism suggest, experiment would lose 
 its meaning. 
 
THE METHODS OF EXPERIENCE 157 
 
 increases the likeliliood that new types of pleasure 
 will be found. Pleasure is thus a type of experience 
 which favors its own growth, and so becomes the sub- 
 stance with which 'life' does, or normally should, fill 
 up. Of pain, in general, the reverse is true. Prob- 
 ably some retrospective alteration of the nervous 
 channel is being effected during the experience of pain 
 itself, tending to occlude the channel, as the physio- 
 logical side of that experience. 
 
 But what this change is and how far back it reaches 
 cannot be put down in any simple general proposition. 
 It depends in the first place upon the mind that expe- 
 riences the pain. The burnt animal, generally speak- 
 ing, dreads the fire, and avoids it. But it is not true 
 that the burnt moth ceases to approach the flame, nor 
 either that the traditional burnt child refrains from 
 further experiments. The phototropism of the moth 
 persists; the interest of the child persists likewise. 
 The child has connected the image of the flame with 
 the experience of being burnt ; the moth has not. But 
 beyond this quasi-mechanical linkage, with its inhibit- 
 ing force, the child recognizes in its own approach to 
 the flame differences of degree, of rapidity, of route; 
 and this recognition is a controlling factor in what its 
 experience means to it. In an animal intermediate 
 between moth and man the effect of the burning might 
 be a blank and absolute negative toward all flames. 
 For the human being there are no such negatives: — 
 there are acquired cautions and discriminations. Such 
 experience, in brief, drives a human being to 'think.' 
 
 Such thinking is still, like the first exercise of intel- 
 
158 EXPEBIEITCE 
 
 ligence, a subsuming of means under ends ; but here it 
 takes the direction of analyzing, and maMng hypoth- 
 eses, — ^i.e., of induction. In the result it will, if it can, 
 so modify its plan of action as both to gain the good 
 and avoid the evil. There is at once a beginning of 
 science, and of the economic virtues. 
 
 But the nature of the change produced by experience 
 depends, in the second place, upon the hind of pain (or 
 pleasure) — for different kinds of disagreeable expe- 
 rience give different kinds of thrust to the mind. 
 While it is true that every outcome of an experiment 
 must be either favorable or unfavorable, and that we 
 may call all favorable results pleasurable and all 
 unfavorable results painful, the names pleasure and 
 pain are so restricted in what they directly bring 
 before our thought that they give no adequate idea 
 of the working of experience. 'Experience' works in 
 different ways according as the agreeable or disagree- 
 able results are of one variety or another : it will be in 
 the interest of clearness, therefore, to make a few 
 simple distinctions in the kind of result we have to 
 deal with. 
 
 1. Definite sense experiences, — pleasures and pains 
 in the primary sense, together with other "original 
 satisfiers and annoyers" of which Professor Thorn- 
 dike speaks, such as bitter tastes, hindrances of 
 motion, contact with objects of aversion or disgust.^ 
 
 The relation of any such sensible annoyer to the 
 course of action is a purely empirical fact. Nature 
 might have made flame, so far as the child's insight 
 
 2 The Origiiial Nature of Man, pp. 123 ff. 
 
THE METHODS OP EXPERIENCE 159 
 
 goes, as innocuous as incense. It might have made 
 those unpalatable lady-bugs pecked at by Lloyd 
 Morgan's deservedly noted chicks as sweet as corn. 
 The attribute has to be learned as a fact, by the method 
 of contiguity. It is imperative that objects of the 
 attractive but dangerous class should thereafter be 
 divided into the nocuous and the innocuous, and dis- 
 tinguished by signs: the fate of our individual may 
 depend on success in finding such a sign. But the 
 imperative is categorical in the sense that it offers 
 no reasons for its existence. 
 
 2. General depression or elation. Every vital 
 sequence has its bodily reverberation as well as its 
 sensible contents. A general sense of physical well- 
 being or the reverse may accompany the end of a 
 course of behavior, or may come as an after-effect 
 more or less belated. This coenesthetic condition may 
 be of the same quality as the sensible result of the 
 behavior, but it may also be of opposite quality, as in 
 the disagreeable after-clap of an agreeable indulgence. 
 
 To bring these vaguer physical experiences into 
 connection with the original impulse and its direct 
 pleasures and pains requires some mental span, espe- 
 cially when they are of contrary quality. Thus, after 
 any strenuous exertion there normally follows the 
 depression of fatigue ; yet if the direct sensible results 
 of the effort have been pleasant, fatigue seems to have 
 no tendency to alter the sequence. In primitive self- 
 consciousness, the flux of bodily conditions is taken 
 for granted. The same is true in even greater measure 
 of the remoter after-effects. Our orgiastic ancestors 
 
160 EXPEBIENCE 
 
 presumably suffered from their excesses more or less 
 as we do ; yet there are few signs that they habitually 
 put two and two together. But when the causal con- 
 nection is observed, and the enjoyment (for example) 
 is recognized as a deceitful enjojrment, there will be 
 some modification of the next response to that invita- 
 tion, whether or not the response is inhibited. And 
 further, there will be a degree of insight into the 
 meaning of this connection of effect with cause; for 
 the beginning of seeing wh^ a given cause should have 
 a given effect, is the condition of seeing that there is 
 any causal connection at all. Hence the modification 
 that takes place will not be a wholly random one, but 
 will take the direction of escaping that particular 
 logical sequence. 
 
 3. Mental after-image. Distinct from all periph- 
 eral consequences of a sequence is a central comment 
 which may be subconscious or distinct, but is probably 
 always present in the human being. It is most 
 noticeable, naturally enough, when it is contrary in 
 quality to either the sensible result or the general 
 bodily condition; as when one succeeds in a competi- 
 tion and finds himself somehow dissatisfied with his 
 success, or as when one fails, and finds himself at 
 peace in his failure. Such a mental after-image may 
 appear at first as irrationally connected with my 
 experience as the burning with the candle-flame. But 
 it differs from the preceding types of experience in 
 the circumstance that the comment is recognized as 
 being not nature's comment, but my own. There is 
 the same demand as before for analysis and induction ; 
 
THE METHODS OP EXPEEIBNCE 161 
 
 but this time I am required to understand. This kind 
 of experience has such a crucial bearing upon the 
 process of revising my behavior that we must illustrate 
 it in greater detail. 
 
 I have a disobedient child ; and upon an accumulation 
 of petty refusals to obey, I act upon the advice of a 
 contemporary sage, "Never punish a child except in 
 anger." I secure attention and compliance, and leave 
 a fairly permanent impression; I go away satisfied. 
 I suffer from no physical depression. But in time, 
 perhaps, my sense of triumph abates, or becomes 
 obscured by a counter uneasiness. And when I analyze 
 the experience, I find that it refers to a defect in my 
 achievement: I gained what I defined for myself, — 
 namely, compliance; but obedience I have not gained. 
 When I gave rein to the pugnacious behavior, my will 
 had defined its object as the destruction of a state of 
 mind too little impressed with the importance of my 
 own. But I have not conveyed to my child any positive 
 conviction on that point, and so I have gained no 
 genuine authority. My strategy has been in some 
 measure self-defeating. The mental after-image of 
 my result is a negative after-image. 
 
 Such an after-image may have sufficient potency to 
 reverse the judgment of the other types of experience. 
 No one can engage in a brisk fight without incurring 
 much physical pain, and experiencing subsequent 
 depression; yet these circumstances are not in the 
 least competent to deter an enthusiastic fighter. It 
 woifld be false psychology to explain this as a matter 
 of the balance of pleasure over pain ; it is a question 
 
162 EXPEBIENCE 
 
 of the positive after-image. The pursuit of pleasure 
 among young people is still more or less orgiastic and 
 physically expensive; yet so long as the mental after- 
 images are favorable, the efforts and depressions are 
 judged worth the cost. If they become unfavorable, 
 the degree of pleasure does not save them. We incline 
 to estimate the human worth of a woman by the degree 
 of the deterrent effect which the pain of childbirth may 
 have upon her. By all the laws of effect, if pleasure 
 and pain were the controlling factors, the first child 
 should commonly be the last. It is the mental after- 
 image which normally determines the destiny of that 
 instinctive sequence. In fact, there are few of the 
 vital experiences of humanity that do not entail a 
 weight of pain and labor such as does in fact deter 
 those in whom prudence is the highest virtue. And I 
 do not ignore the fact that the mental after-image 
 varies markedly with one's general theory of the 
 universe. But I am here pointing out simply a law 
 of human nature as a fact to be reckoned with: it is 
 the mental after-image which determines whether a 
 given sequence shall be confirmed or weakened, and 
 how it shall be modified. If the after-image is positive, 
 any discomfort is prevented from eating into the 
 allurement of the stimulus; if it is negative, any 
 delight is prevented from enhancing it. 
 
 The nature of this after-image should be evident 
 from our previous discussion. It is the reaction of 
 the whole will upon the partial impulse, when the full 
 meaning of that impulse is perceived in the light of 
 its results. It is not necessarily a moral reaction, 
 
THE METHODS OP EXPEEIENCE 163 
 
 remorse, shame, sesthetic revolt, etc., are its clarified 
 varieties. Its significance may simply be, "TMs is, or 
 is not, what on the whole I want"; "I was a fool"; 
 "I hit it right." In the unfinished condition of our 
 instincts (and the slightness of our experience) every 
 course of action is launched more or less hypotheti- 
 cally. It is my theory, as I make my decision, that 
 this is what I want to do ; yet I am aware that there is 
 some doubt about it, and that I shall not be sure until 
 the returns are all in. The mental after-image is the 
 answer to the question involved in this tentative state 
 of mind. 
 
 If the after-image is negative, the natural result will 
 be a new hypothesis for dealing with a similar 
 situation. And the transformation of instinct, under 
 experience, consists essentially in the series of hy- 
 potheses which a given mind adopts, — hypotheses 
 about the ways in which impulses are to be followed 
 in order to satisfy the complete will. This being the 
 case, it is evident that the series of these successive 
 transformations must approach, as a goal, an inter- 
 pretation of the impulse in question in terms of the 
 individual's own variety of the will-to-power. And 
 inasmuch as each successive hypothesis is built on the 
 error of the preceding one, the process might well be 
 called, in analogy with Plato's method of finding true 
 ideas, a dialectical process. The work of experience 
 is the dialectic of the will. 
 
CHAPTER XXIV 
 THE DIALECTIC OF PUGNACITY 
 
 WE have frequently referred to the effect of 
 experience upon the instinct of pugnacity. I 
 have been somewhat deliberate about this; for I take 
 it that pugnacity is one of the impulses which we par- 
 ticularly' at the present moment in history have need 
 to understand. Let me, then, illustrate my view of 
 the dialectic of the will by a series of transformations 
 of pugnacity which may represent, somewhat symboli- 
 cally, the experience of the race up to a certain point. 
 
 In its original and crudest form, pugnacity makes 
 for the simple and radical destruction of its object. 
 This is what it 'means.' If this impulse appears in 
 a mind which is incapable of any social interest in its 
 object, the slaying of the opponent may be an entirely 
 satisfactory result. The mental after-image may be 
 positive. 
 
 But in most of the higher animals this is not the 
 case. Destruction brings, as we have noted, a degree 
 of defeat of one's total wish; there is at least enough 
 interest in the survival of the opposed mind so that 
 its chagrin, its acknowledgment of the victor, has a 
 value. The hypothesis, * * I want destruction, ' ' changes' 
 into the hypothesis, "I want revenge." Shand has 
 collected a number of instances in which animals have 
 
THE DIALECTIC OP PUGNACITY 165 
 
 with apparent deliberation refrained from destroying 
 in order to take satisfaction in the suffering or dis- 
 comfiture of the enemy. I wish to point out that this 
 revision takes place quite in independence of any 
 social constraint upon the fighting impulse. 
 
 Though the successive interpretations of pugnacity 
 are likely to retain their hold in certain relations 
 while showing their defects in others, yet revenge, like 
 destruction, tends to invade every relation of life. 
 Within members of any given group when murder is 
 recognized as undesirable, wrath is likely to take 
 everywhere the form of revenge, whether in the 'tit for 
 tat' of children, or in the petulant relations of parents 
 and offspring, or in the more deliberate and vindictive 
 eye-for-eye quarrels among adults. Eevenge has, 
 however, an inherent inconsistency of motive which is 
 bound to produce, in the regions of denser sociability, 
 a further revision of hypothesis. 
 
 For while revenge aims to leave such injury as to 
 exclude the restoration of amicable feelings, and 
 indeed, to gloat in the persistence of hatred and con- 
 tempt, one has need of the presence of the despised 
 and defeated adversary as a source of this satisfaction ; 
 revenge squints toward the maintenance of friendli- 
 ness. The solving of this puzzle turns revenge into 
 punishment, which is the next stage of the developing 
 perception of what pugnacity means. 
 
 Punishment aims at inflicting pain, but without 
 permanent injury. The anatomy of the infant verte- 
 brate commonly lends itself to this interpretation ; and 
 some of the animals, elephants at least, have acquired 
 
166 EXPEBIENCE 
 
 the same technique of punishment as prevails with 
 human parents. Punishment makes a discrimination 
 between the evil of a will and its essential nature, just 
 as I revenge made a distinction between the will and 
 the life. Punishment is an interpretation of pugnacity 
 as meaning the elimination of an evil element in the 
 will of another while retaining the integrity of, and 
 the regard for, that will as a whole. Punishment 
 intends to reinstate the original amity of the disturbed 
 relationship. 
 
 When this discrimination has once been made, it is 
 not a long step to a direct aim at the restoration of 
 the integrity of that will, and a subordination of the 
 effort to do justice to the defect. It may be an 
 empirical discovery at first, that a soft answer may 
 in some cases satisfy the whole aim of punishment, 
 and have the further advantage of avoiding the bitter- 
 ness of humiliating memory. It matters not how the 
 hypothesis was arrived at; so long as punishment left 
 in some relations a negative after-image, this revision 
 was bound to be hit upon sooner or later. This com- 
 plete suppression of the destructive behavior in the 
 interest of a resolute kindliness may not be the last 
 word in the development of the pugnacious impulse: 
 we shall have some further enquiry to make on this 
 point.^ But it is one of the views to which experience 
 leads. 
 
 And my point is that experience, given the human 
 mind to work upon, would be likely to lead to this 
 stage, quite apart from the disciplinary action of 
 
 1 Caiapters XLI, XXXI, XXXII, XXVIII. 
 
THE DIAOjECTIO OF PUGNACITY 167 
 
 society, and quite apart from the teachings of religion, 
 simply because the prior interpretations of the anger- 
 impulse are not what the human being, on the whole, 
 wants. I am intentionally omitting all reference to 
 the contributions which various types of social pres- 
 sure, economic, political, and others, make to this 
 result. It is far from my purpose to ignore or 
 minimize the extent of these contributions. I have 
 excluded them here, because I intend to speak of them 
 by themselves ; and because we are interested here in 
 finding a method of testing whether social trans- 
 formations tend to distort human nature, and to 
 carry it in directions which of its own momentum it 
 would not follow. So far as pugnacity is concerned, 
 my judgment is, — from the considerations here put 
 down, — that this proposition is untrue. The dominant 
 trend of the human will is, at least roughly, parallel 
 with the demands made upon it by society. 
 
 In a complete treatise each of the major general 
 instincts should be examined for its natural dialectic. 
 I must be content at present to indicate a method of 
 work; and in a later section to sketch some of the 
 tendencies in other instincts, , 
 
PART V 
 
 SOCIETY 
 
CHAPTEE XXV 
 SOCIAL MODELLING 
 
 IF human instincts, left to the teachings of expe- 
 rience, would grow very much as society tries to 
 model them, why not leave them more completely to 
 their own growth? Our result so far supplies a good 
 argument for greater freedom from social constraint, 
 if not for anarchy. Social interference with natural 
 growth is based, we know, upon a degree of distrust 
 of human nature: and when we perceive that human 
 nature has its own inward righting-tendency, its 
 'dialectic,' the distrust seems unjustified: social 
 modelling appears as an elaborate social meddling. 
 
 Attempts to steady an ark that will steady itself are 
 worse than unnecessary: they prevent the finding of 
 real reasons for preferring one mode of behavior to 
 another. The social reason is always at one remove 
 from the real reason, vitiated as it is by all the 
 motives that play for or against conformity.^ And 
 further, so far as society loses the invaluable guidance 
 of that stiU, small voice, the mental after-image, which 
 governs growth, how can we be assured that its trans- 
 formations shall, in the main, be other than deforma- 
 tions? Working, as society does, through 'sanctions,' 
 
 1 Cf . Holt, The Freudian Wish; Herbert Spencer, Education, etc., 
 for expressions of this ideal. 
 
172 
 
 SOCIETY 
 
 that is, through artificial pressures of reward and 
 punishment, the amount of such pressure may be an 
 index of the amount of warping which nature is likely 
 to suffer under its control. 
 
 The tabus under which we now live are indeed but 
 phantoms of the ferocities which helped to create the 
 first 'cakes of custom.' Consequently we cannot point 
 to any such mutilations or immolations of nature, such 
 head-huntings or widow-burnings, such foot-bindings 
 or soul-bindings, as cumber to satiety the annals of the 
 folkways, i Personal liberty has won many battles ; but 
 is its work complete? If such natural expressions as 
 laughter and tears, coughing and sneezing, are still 
 subject to social regulation, what shall be said of the 
 course of our deeper impulses, our antipathies, our 
 affections, our fears? Society is not precisely hostile 
 to our passions any more than it is hostile to our 
 sneezing; but it asserts jurisdiction over the ways 
 and methods of each. And it makes these ways and 
 means so much the essence of the agreement that 
 unless the impulse can be satisfied in the prescribed 
 way, society inclines to demand that it shall not be 
 satisfied at all. There are approved ways of earning 
 a living, as there are approved ways of winning a 
 bride, but who can recognize under the activities of 
 shop and factory and office an expression of natural 
 impulses to hunt, to fish, to gather where one has not 
 strewn? In its ways of food-getting, civilization has 
 listened to advisers more imperious than instinct ; yet 
 it insists that unless one follow these ways, he shall 
 not have a man's living at all. 
 
SOCIAL MODELLING 173 
 
 As for the weapons which produce conformity, if 
 the social lash has lost its barbarity, it has not lost 
 its sting. Fears of death and beyond-death are 
 seldom invoked; yet the fears which spring from 
 ambition and from multiform social attachments and 
 dependences are hardly less powerful. Man's need 
 of his fellows is so great, and increasingly great, that 
 he will not willingly forfeit a large measure of their 
 favor. Beside this, the knowledge and dread of our 
 own ignorance in the management of life can be 
 counted upon to herd the mass of mankind into the 
 beaten path, while ease, certainty, and the feeling of 
 at-homeness serve to keep them there. For the more 
 adventurous spirits, the finer but not less terrifying 
 punishments of ridicule and exclusion are held in 
 reserve. Hence 'convention' is a word which still 
 conveys a sense of enforced deviation from the natural. 
 What society imagines it wants imposes itself upon 
 what I want, and buries it. 
 
 Our attitude toward convention is for the most part 
 not only docile, but unreasoning. The modelling 
 process, working by suggestion and imitation as well 
 as by overt control, has done its work before the 
 critical powers are fully awake. To many minds, it 
 is something of a recommendation of usage that we 
 hold to it, as to a religious mystery, with the blind 
 adherence of faith. Yet we are destined to reach self- 
 conscious judgment in these matters as in all others. 
 We cannot hold a custom against reason, when once 
 reason has become competent to deal with it. On the 
 other hand, it would be a questionable procedure to 
 
174 SOCIETY 
 
 argue from the general unreasoning acceptance of any 
 social habit or belief that there are no reasons for it. 
 While we are bound to challenge whatever we can see 
 to be unnatural or outworn, yet so deep are the roots 
 of convention that most customs and prejudices 
 deserve a second glance — ^he takes great risks who 
 denies to any of them a meaning. 
 
 To take one example from among many, I find this 
 risk too lightly run in a recent chapter by that always 
 informing and vigorous thinker, Professor E. A. Boss. 
 He is dealing with a number of conventional beliefs 
 which modify behavior.^ He cites, among others, the 
 belief "that manual labor is degrading," a belief less 
 surprising among the upper castes who profit by it than 
 among manual laborers themselves. Yet these latter 
 also give it an unreasoned acceptance, thinks Pro- 
 fessor Ross, as seen in their ambitions for themselves 
 and their children to escape from the ranks of toil into 
 the ranks of the long-nailed mandarins. But why 
 translate this conventional direction of ambition, so 
 far as it is an article of faith rather than a desire for 
 greater income, as a belief that manual labor is 
 degrading? Why not recognize in it a highly reason- 
 able belief that a man should by all means have a 
 mental survey of his own work, and that the particular 
 kind of manual labor which is robbed of all mental 
 interest is degrading. There is a false note in the 
 desire to get away from toil; but beside it is a deep 
 and true note in the desire to live, as man was made 
 to live, by a union of toil with wit. As a second mean- 
 
 2 E. A. Eoss, Social Psychology, eh. vii. 
 
SOCIAL MODELLING 175 
 
 ingless convention, our author mentions the belief that 
 "pecuniary success is the only success." No doubt 
 society, less by what it says than by the turn of its 
 eyes, instils an admiration for the man who has made 
 his fortune. This value-attitude, if not exclusive 
 among us, is certainly overdeveloped; but can we say 
 that it is essentially unreasonable? If command of 
 the fruits of the earth is the normal and destined 
 position for man, why should one who has achieved 
 such a position, and in so doing has shown large 
 powers of one kind or another, not receive the recog- 
 nition that he, in so far, has succeeded? It is a man's 
 work to make a fortune, and under normal circum- 
 stances a measure of ability. It is not the only kind 
 of work that can be called a man's work, but it is 
 typical. It has the appeal that the qualities it calls 
 out can be understood by everybody. We must define 
 this convention rather by the values it justly appre- 
 ciates, if there are any such, than by its myopic 
 aberrations, its exclusion of other values. And unless 
 we are prepared to deny that the normal result of 
 economic effort, the mastery of nature, is a good,, we 
 must expect to deal, for all time, with a disposition 
 to admire the man who has become "ruler over many 
 things." Another meaningless convention, according 
 to Ross, is "that the consumption of stimulants or 
 narcotics by women is unwomanly." But I desist. 
 There are few prejudices or ceremonial observances 
 for which the users are entirely ready with their 
 reasons. If they were, these elements of mental usage 
 would forfeit the thought-saving merits of custom. 
 
176 SOCIETY 
 
 But if we forthwith pronounce an observance unrea- 
 sonable because it is unreasoned, we forgo all possi- 
 bility of penetrating into its often subtle and sub- 
 conscious grounds. 
 
 Rebellion we have always with us, and we need it. 
 It trims the dead wood, and summons latent reasons 
 into the open. Of the rebellion of today, it is perhaps 
 significant that it complains less of the common 
 customs of the tribe, so far as they affect the majority, 
 than of the incidental hardship which any custom, by 
 its uniformity, may work in special cases. Society 
 tyrannizes less by mistaking the conditions for the 
 welfare of the mass of men, than by classifying 
 individuals, who never quite fit the categories.' We 
 may approach our enquiry, then, without antecedent 
 bias either hostile to convention or in favor of it, 
 simply as a question of fact. How does society tend 
 to modify individual behavior? 
 
 s See, for example, Elsie Clews Parsons, Social Freedom. 
 
CHAPTER XXVI 
 
 MAIN DIRECTIONS OF SOCIAL 
 MODELLING 
 
 FOR the sake of proportion, our first duty is always 
 to the obvious. We must remind ourselves at 
 the outset of the most general way in which social 
 rules bear upon the development of instinct. Gener- 
 ally speaking, then, custom continues the direction of 
 development struck out by individual experience, and 
 facilitates it. 
 
 More in detail : it abbreviates the tedious process of 
 learning from experience; it saves from experiments 
 too costly for the individual, — such, for example, as 
 might cost him his life, or his health ; it speeds the 
 whole process of interpretation, through its own 
 acquired skill in imparting its maxims ; and on account 
 of all this economy, it carries the process farther than 
 personal experimentation could hope to reach. It also 
 preserves a common direction of growth, and at least 
 a minimum level of achievement in a great number of 
 individuals. Society is to each of its members a store- 
 house of technique : and as little as the learner could 
 spare the mechanical technique of the socially trans- 
 mitted arts and sciences, could he dispense with the 
 accumulated capital of wisdom in the ways of behavior, 
 the folkways of his own tribe and time. That is, he 
 
178 SOCIETY 
 
 could not spare them if what we call 'progress' is to 
 continue. 
 
 To say that social action continues the direction of 
 the work of individual experience understates the 
 case : it continues the whole work of organic evolution. 
 Let me mention two ways in which this continuation 
 is marked. 
 
 1. The 'vestibule of satisfaction' is prolonged. 
 By the 'vestibule' of a satisfaction I mean the series 
 of preliminary processes which lead up to it. Through- 
 out the animal series, we can trace a growing elabo- 
 ration of instinctive processes, and hence a prolonged 
 period of suspense between the first stimulus and the 
 final satisfaction. Consider the food-getting pro- 
 cesses, and the satisfaction of eating. An amoeba 
 ' eats ' immediately upon contact with a food-particle, — 
 if this activity of surrounding and absorbing may be 
 called eating. The sea-anemone has to observe a 
 preliminary or two: it must use its tentacles to waft 
 the food-bearing water into its body-cavity. When 
 organs of smell and vision exist, they imply that food 
 (as well as danger) is to be discerned at a distance, 
 and usually that the animal thus equipped is to go and 
 get it. Organs of chase and combat indicate still more 
 elaborate preliminaries; with hunting, stalking, and 
 killing, the vestibule is prolonged many fold. An 
 instinct to lay up stores for winter shows that a 
 farther step has been taken in the same direction; 
 and all this is accomplished without appealing either 
 to experience or to social instruction. Individual 
 experience not only retraces the phylogenetic journey: 
 
DIRECTIONS OP MODELLING 179 
 
 it carries farther tlie interpolation of means and 
 conditions in the form of labor and foresight between 
 hunger and consumption. If society, then, intercalates 
 further conditions and complexities, it is but exceeding 
 Nature at her own game. The prolonging of the 
 vestibule goes with a greater reserve of tissue, and 
 a finer balancing of the stimulus; so that the period 
 of suspense is not more than the organism is fitted to 
 sustain. The general principle holds good, that the 
 farther the stimulus is from the satisfaction, the less 
 its intensity, the more it is negligible, and therefore 
 the inconvenience of delay or even of ignoring it is 
 negligible, in the vital economy. 
 
 What is true of food-getting is obviously true like- 
 wise of mating. If society has interposed apparently 
 artificial conditions, such as the consent of the partner, 
 the approval of a social representative, a ceremonial 
 wedding, it is but embroidering upon the theme which 
 Nature had, in the practices of quest and courtship, 
 already inserted as preliminaries to the mating. 
 
 This conspiracy of all the phases of evolution in 
 prolonging the vestibule of satisfaction, can hardly 
 be looked upon as an end in itself, from the biological 
 standpoint, though it implies the complication and 
 development of the animal body. It means simply 
 that the organism is fit to live in a more complex and 
 extended environment, in which the time-factor and 
 the ability to wait are highly important factors in 
 survival. But from the psychological standpoint, the 
 scope of the process, and the fact that satisfaction is 
 hemmed in by an increasing number of conditions. 
 
180 SOCIETY 
 
 imply an immense development of the meaning of each 
 part of the long sequence, together with enhanced 
 powers of self-control at its beginnings. 
 
 2. Limitation of the range of objects with which 
 one deals. The protozoon must deal with the whole 
 world so far as that world impinges upon it ; it reacts 
 to everything with like thoroughness of attention. 
 The same organs that imply a lengthening of the 
 vestibule bring also a power of selection. The higher 
 animal reacts to a very small proportion of the total 
 objects that come within its ra;age of perception. The 
 law is analogous to that of the increase of power in 
 an optical instrument; the field is restricted as the 
 reach increases, — except that in the case of the 
 organism this restriction, being under the consent of 
 the actual perception of the whole, is not in the same 
 sense a restriction. This discrimination, society 
 carries further. It prescribes to some extent what I 
 may not eat, whom I may not fight, and whom I may 
 not marry. And this element of artificiality is in 
 continuance of the direction of phylogenesis and of 
 experience, as before. 
 
 These circumstances do not sanction the social 
 process in detail. But they make it altogether prob- 
 able that the gross normal effect of society upon 
 individual behavior is not only of biological value, but 
 favorable as well to that gathering of meaning which 
 is the business of individual growth. For a more 
 accurate knowledge of what I want, a better under- 
 standing of what any instinct means, could only be 
 gained by better excluding what it does not mean; 
 
DIRECTIONS OF MODELLING 181 
 
 and sucli exclusion would naturally be made effective, 
 in society, by setting up preliminary conditions with 
 wMcb I must comply, and by defining certain objects 
 to which I shall not react. If all custom were good 
 custom, it would in this way add to the meaning, or 
 value, of all behavior. And we are justified in 
 inferring that, of its own nature, society is not 
 primarily repressive. 
 
 But whether all custom, or any custom, is normal 
 custom these facts can give no hint. In actuality 
 society has been and is repressive; and especially in 
 three ways. (1) The standards and ideals it sets up 
 for me to follow are shaped to its own interest rather 
 than to mine, — for society, like nature, must look first 
 to the group and only secondarily to the individual; 
 (2) the material equipment and scope which it offers 
 me is curtailed by the competing needs of others, — 
 and there are too many of us for the supply; (3) the 
 permitted modes of behavior fall into fixed institu- 
 tional forms, and hamper the movements of any life 
 that grows beyond them. Social modelling can be 
 good, from the standpoint of the individual, only if 
 all these tendencies are corrected. 
 
 The old theory, then, that "the interests of the indi- 
 vidual are identical with the interests of society" we 
 shall not unconditionally accept. Our argument so far 
 may be taken as a confirmation from a new angle of 
 approach of the notion that in the main these interests 
 tend to agree, but not of the notions of Hobbes, 
 Burke, Hegel, and others which seem to sanction any 
 pressure society might choose to impose upon its 
 
182 SOCIETY 
 
 members. "We have set up the individual life, with its 
 natural dialectic, as the standard to which social 
 pressures must conform; and by the aid of this 
 standard we propose now to outline what none of 
 these thinkers has given us, namely, a set of tests 
 whereby we can distinguish a good social order from 
 a bad social order, considering in turn each of the 
 three ways in which societies are likely to go wrong. 
 
CHAPTER XXVII 
 IDEALS AND THEIR RECOMMENDERS 
 
 A MAN in the midst of a society which is trying 
 to shape him is not to be thought of as sur- 
 rounded by pure altruists. Whatever behavior is 
 recommended to him will bear some trace of the con- 
 venience of the source of recommendation. The 
 virtue of labor in the eyes of its employers is a 
 'faithfulness and industry' which smacks of acqui- 
 escence in statu quo. The ideal citizen, for the stand- 
 patter, is the 'loyal' vessel of party authority and 
 routine. The ideal child for the overburdened school 
 mistress is by almost physical necessity the 'good' 
 boy, not too beloved by his fellows, more docile than 
 enterprising. It has been said that the excellence of 
 wives as defined by husbands shows similar traits. In 
 proportion to its self-satisfaction, — and the tendency 
 of all aggregates is to be self-satisfied — any group is 
 prone to condemn its most vigorous as well as its 
 least vigorous members: if it must move forward, it 
 keeps a mean which it calls golden ; it learns but slowly 
 the truth of Aristotle's saying, that the best rule is 
 rule over the best. It inclines to shape its members to 
 its own ease, not to their advantage ; it supplies them 
 with a set of ideals visibly colored by its own idler 
 interest. 
 
184 SOCIETY 
 
 But all conversation assumes ah ultimate equality, 
 even that between master and slave, or between society 
 and the individual. What is required of me must come 
 professing to be for my good. Slaveholders, Aristotle 
 himself, tried to think slavery beneficial for slaves. 
 Interest may warp the particular judgment; but the 
 form of the apology reveals the principle at stake. 
 The interest of society by this involuntary confession, 
 is seen to have no authority over me unless it is also 
 my own interest. This is the primary and original 
 'right' in the relations of whole and member: a man's 
 right is to his own development ; the right of society 
 exists only where its own interest and that interest 
 coincide. And structurally (not historically) these 
 interests do coincide, not more because the member 
 needs the society than because no society can prefer 
 the less developed to the more developed member, 
 other things equal. Not even society, then, has a right 
 to make use of a person as a mere means to its 
 majestic ends.^ 
 
 The test of a good social order, then, will be this : 
 that I am not obliged to adopt any rule of conduct 
 because of what others prefer I should do or be, unless 
 I also have or can have that same preference. Let us 
 
 1 There can, of course, be no legal right against political society, by 
 the definition of a legal right as something created by society (how 
 mighty are definitions!). By the same sign it would be inaccurate to 
 speak of political society itself as having legal rights, since legal rights 
 are something which it confers on its members. Bat those who thus 
 argue from definitions sometimes forget that the legal right is a specified 
 form of a more generic relationship; and that under this generic sense 
 of right, questions of right may arise between two such unlike persons 
 as state and individual, or society and individual. 
 
IDEALS AND THEIB BECOMMENDEES 185 
 
 state this test in the form of a postulate or demand 
 which every good society must, and can, comply with : 
 
 What others wish me to be must be identical 
 with what I myself wish to be, — 
 
 a principle which we may call the postulate of identical 
 ideals. It may be that no society, no actual society, 
 complies with the requirement : but I venture to think 
 that no actual society despairs of complying with it 
 or fails in practical ways to aim at it. The conditions 
 of social life everywhere assume that however wide the 
 original disparity between what I think I would like 
 to be, and what my environment thinks it would have 
 me be, such an agreement can be found by some effort 
 of thought, or by the slow working of social arrange- 
 ments, or both. In point of fact there are arrange- 
 ments apparently as natural and as old as society 
 itself which help to secure precisely the agreement 
 required by the postulate. I shall mention the most 
 important of these. 
 
 1. The direct impact of social requirements comes 
 to the individual through the most altruistic part of 
 the social shell. This is especially true of his most 
 plastic years : he is born among his well-wishers. And 
 while the egoism of parents has also to be reckoned 
 with, the danger of social tyranny lies rather in their 
 lack of originality than in their lack of pride in the 
 personal growth of their child. It is always possible 
 that, as filtered through the medium of the family, the 
 demand of society will strike with too little force 
 rather than too much. For the identity required in 
 
186 SOCIETY 
 
 the postulate calls for an effort on tlie part of the 
 individual as well as upon the part of society, espe- 
 cially as the individual cannot be said to know without 
 much drastic trial what in particular he wishes to be. 
 
 2. Recommendership. If society were sufficiently 
 self-conscious to perceive that this immensely impor- 
 tant ideal-making function is everywhere muddled and 
 adulterated by short-sighted egoism, its own included, 
 it might be imagined as referring this function to a 
 carefully chosen and disinterested third party. 
 
 Such an imaginary arbitrator it would be difficult 
 to realize in the flesh. He must be no member of 
 society, either in its capacity as impressing ideals or 
 in its capacity as receiving and using them. He would 
 nevertheless have to know human nature to the 
 bottom, and the necessities of social order. He would 
 have to understand all parties, all social conflicts, and 
 all occupations, and yet participate in none of them. 
 
 Political theory has now and again attempted to 
 define such a functionary, inasmuch as the logical 
 problem of a liberal government in preventing the 
 warping of laws by political tyranny is very much the 
 same as ours. This problem is: so to organize a 
 public body that to every possible pair of parties 
 there is always a third party to pass judgment between 
 them, even when the two parties are the public as a 
 whole and any part or member thereof. John Locke 
 tried, in effect, to provide a perfectly general solution 
 for this problem, and all but succeeded. His 'legis- 
 lative' is a good third to every pair of parties that 
 can be defined among the people, including executive 
 
IDEALS AND THEIE BECOMMBNDBES 187 
 
 and people, and also including itself as part oi the 
 people. He only failed to provide for a third party 
 between the legislative in office and the people, which 
 is precisely the point at which we, in our own problem, 
 need relief. Here Locke had no recourse but the 
 'appeal to Heaven.' And we look in vain in any 
 subsequent writer or political device for the general 
 solution of our problem. 
 
 But Rousseau, approaching the problem from the 
 other end, that of protecting people from their own 
 idleness and ignorance, saw far more clearly than 
 Locke the conditions for finding just social standards. 
 "Li order to discover the social rules best suited to 
 peoples, a superior intelligence would be required, 
 which should behold all the passions of men without 
 experiencing any of them. This intelligence would 
 have to be wholly independent of our nature while 
 knowing it through and through. Its own welfare 
 would have to be secure apart from us; and yet it 
 must be ready to concern itself with our welfare. 
 And lastly, it would have to look forward in the march 
 of time to a distant consummation, and working in one 
 century be willing to put its enjoyment in the next. 
 It would take gods to give laws to man.'" Surpris- 
 ingly like what we thought necessary to protect men 
 from society is Eousseau's view of what is necessary 
 to protect men from themselves; and on the lips of 
 the supposed believer in absolute democracy, the 
 sentiment is striking. But if we ask what provision 
 Eousseau would make to secure this ideal giver of 
 
 2 The Social Contract, Book II, ch. vii. 
 
188 SOCIETY 
 
 laws we find no answer; for such a legislator is an 
 anomaly in Eonsseau's state, 'and if we may judge 
 from his words, in any state. It is but a fiction, called 
 upon to do the work of a reality. "This sublime 
 reason," he says, almost cynically, "far above the 
 range of the common herd, is that whose decisions the 
 actual legislator puts into the mouth of the immortals, 
 in order to constrain by (the pretence of) divine 
 authority those whom human prudence could not 
 move." Thus Rousseau also is driven to an appeal 
 to Heaven, but to a merely dramatic appeal. To 
 impute in this way an unreal divine quality to what 
 is after all but a humanly conceived standard of 
 behavior might well provide the needed force; but 
 unless we could also ensure the divine wisdom and 
 justice, this appeal would only deepen the tyranny, as 
 the course of history may show. 
 
 Nevertheless, the arrangement which is so difficult 
 from the standpoint of practical statecraft exists, 
 and has existed from time immemorial, in ordinary 
 social structure. It makes use of a common property 
 of the self-conscious mind, — the capacity of being, 
 while immersed in the stream of events, at the same 
 time reflectively aloof from them. The man who 
 recommends to others what were good to be done 
 without having to follow his own teaching, or being in 
 a position to do so, is not an unknown person, nor on 
 the whole an unwelcome person. And it has been 
 found possible to devise circumstances which give his 
 announcement of rules and ideals so much detachment 
 from the usual cares and fears of the casual disin- 
 
IDEALS AND THEIE BECOMMENDEKS 189 
 
 terested observer, that the "appeal to Heaven" 
 would be a phrase not wholly unwarranted in his case. 
 Society, in short, has never been without its pro- 
 fessional 'Recommenders'; and it has never failed 
 to accord them a position of such immunity that their 
 words are as nearly as possible the words of the freed 
 spirit. In ancient times, they were the elders, the 
 shamans, the medicine men, the prophets, the priests. 
 In latter days, these also, and with them all whose 
 work is the liberal reflection upon human life, — the 
 scholars, the men of letters and of art. Such men live 
 voluntarily both within the society and mentally 
 without it; in the theological phrase their mental 
 position is both immanent and transcendent. At times 
 they have lived in security and freedom both political 
 and economic; but always they have survived only so 
 far as men have found in them an actual per- 
 formance in some measure of the momentous function 
 of delineating the man who is at once fully himself 
 and fully the servant of the social order. They have 
 done their work more or less badly, turbidly, venally ; 
 but in spite of the men, mankind has valued the func- 
 tion. In so far as it tolerates them, organized society 
 bears witness to its own self-abnegation ; through them 
 it secures the unhampered force of its own severest 
 self -judgment. The original moral nature we found 
 attaching itself, as if by instinct, to its chosen ' ' Third 
 Parties"; these it finds naturally among the Eecom- 
 menders, and the powers they represent. From both 
 sides, then, that of society and that of the individual, 
 the Eecommender is an agent of progress in the 
 
190 SOCIETY 
 
 direction of realizing our postulate; and so far as it 
 can make use of this (free and unofficial) triadic 
 structure, society succeeds, as it were, in lifting itself 
 by its own bootstraps. The ideals under which men 
 perforce live thus tend to approximate the ideals they 
 would choose for themselves. 
 
 3. The particular advantage gained by the detach- 
 ment of Recommendership is the correction of the 
 interested ideal: but like every advantage, this one 
 also is bought with a price; and society needs always 
 to be saved from the besetting vice of its Eecom- 
 menders, that of abstraction. Since Aristotle drew his 
 sharp-cut pictures of the philosopher and the states- 
 man we have progressed far in the art of combining 
 the contrasting careers of reflection and action; but 
 we are still far from knowing how to be wholly im- 
 mersed in affairs and at the same time adequately to 
 reflect upon them. Hence we need protection from the 
 abstract ideal, as well as from the interested ideal. 
 
 Contemporary consciousness is keenly aware of this 
 need. We see that by the circumstances of their 
 origin our inherited magazine of standards is likely 
 to fit the men of fiction better than the men of reality ; 
 and there are many signs of the inclination to attribute 
 the difficulty to 'philosophy' or to 'idealism,' when it 
 is simply the difficulty of reflective self -consciousness 
 everywhere. Biography encounters it in the form of 
 an apparent dilemma: that between being on the one 
 hand realistic and disappointing, and on the other, 
 abstractly heroic and unreal. All history, all art, all 
 reflective description of mankind encounters it. 
 
IDEALS AND THEIR EECOMMBNDEKS 191 
 
 One of the class faults of the Recommender, an 
 expression of the penchant for keen and sensitive 
 listening that makes him useful, is an over-valuation 
 of the aesthetic elements in our necessary interests, — 
 the unmixed, the clear, the simple, the orderly, the 
 systematic, the 'pure." Our aversions to dirt or to 
 disorder are not profoundly natural, and in this case 
 nature may be partly right : certainly a highly success- 
 ful patternism and purism produce distrust by their 
 very clarity. Mature worldly wisdom is quick to 
 detect the shop-product of Eecommendership ; and not 
 uncommonly it adopts an indulgent superiority to the 
 whole business of 'ideals,' as a necessary but always 
 transitory incident in the process of growing-up. 
 
 But there is a natural corrective for the tyranny of 
 abstractions, less easy than this superior realism, but 
 more honest. It is found in the circumstance that 
 abstractions breed their own critics in opposing 
 abstractions ; so that individual judgment is summoned 
 to select between them or to combine them. The over- 
 burdened school mistress we were speaking of has, 
 no doubt, an abstract ideal. But the contrasting ideals 
 of the boys' gang, administered through that fear of 
 being thought afraid which makes the life of a small 
 boy with his fellows a chronic, if subconscious, hazing 
 party, — these ideals also, with all their flourish of 
 substantiality, are abstract. So, too, are all the 
 maturer realisms abstract. Whatever common sense 
 
 3 Sir Henry Maine's attitude toward the ideals of an equity based on 
 'natural law' well illustrates the revulsion from this defect. Ancient 
 Law, chs. iii and iv. 
 
192 • SOCIETY 
 
 any boy or man achieves as a guide of his life must 
 be won by composing for himself the half-truths of 
 his opposing abstract authorities. And in this process 
 of composing, he will be guided by that same mental 
 after-image which directs his individual experience/ 
 
 4. By the play of one authority against another, 
 authority thus sinks to its rightful place as an element, 
 a necessary element, in the circuits of individual 
 growth. But after all, what assurance have we that 
 this playing with authority is not simply a com- 
 promise? For the sake of living in society, I bargain 
 away, as by an implied contract, a certain amount of 
 liberty, that is to say, of myself. Recommenders help 
 to make the bargain less costly for me ; and their own 
 differences and competitions still further lower the 
 price of the social commodity. But is not the trans- 
 action at its best after all a sale, a relinquishment of 
 my free nature? 
 
 In fact we have not shown that our postulate can be 
 complied with; that any real identity of what I want 
 and what others want of me can be reached. The 
 missing link in the logic, however, may be supplied; 
 and perhaps conveniently by considering the anatomy 
 of admiration, from which sentiment any ideal must 
 come. 
 
 In the boy's desire to be a man, amounting at times 
 
 * It is in such situations that the dialectic of experience, at first of 
 the simple Platonic form, tends to fall into the Hegelian pattern, the 
 opposing Eecommenders standing as thesis and antithesis, while the self 
 undertakes to reinterpret their ideas in a synthesis of its own. Many of 
 Hegel's triads are fair formal accounts of social experience; fewer than 
 he thought express common or universal experience. 
 
IDEALS AND THEIE EBCOMMENDEKS 193 
 
 to a ruling passion, society finds the need upon which 
 many a hard bargain can be driven. If the Spartan 
 boy thinks that to be a man involves enduring much 
 pain without flinching, no theory of his interest will 
 prevent him from submitting to torture. He is gov- 
 erned not by ideals alone, but by his concrete admira- 
 tions. His principle might be stated: What I admire 
 in others I wish for myself (naturally with the under- 
 standing that what man has done man can do again). 
 It is logically impossible for him to detach his thought 
 of himself from his thought of others ; because in every 
 instance, including his own, consciousness shows him 
 at once the individual and the type. In every human 
 event, he is perceiving man. But this general prin- 
 ciple, that what one admires one admires universally, 
 applies also to the admirations of others : they cannot 
 emancipate their admirations from their experience. 
 Hence admiration is held within the scope of the 
 possible; and it tends to be true of all fundamental 
 values, that What others admire, I admire. The 
 connection with our postulate is therewith complete. 
 What others would admire in me tends to agree with 
 what I actually admire in them: and what I admire 
 in them I must admire (and wish for) in myself : hence, 
 what they would admire in me, I must wish for in 
 myself. 
 
 It is true that admiration is capable of drinking 
 up much sediment with its cup, imitation being the 
 most indiscriminate of all human proclivities. It is 
 also true that I cease in time to hope to realize in 
 myself all that I admire. I find that I can be neither 
 
194 SOCIETY 
 
 Lincoln, nor Napoleon, nor Plato. Yet in any such 
 relinquishment, I forgo only the detail and the degree ; 
 I persist in demanding of myself that I transplant 
 into my own work and upon my own scale, the most 
 general qxmlity of my admiration. For at bottom, 
 admiration is a form of appetite. Men can only 
 admire where they can have interest and possibility. 
 No amount of recommendation can make the ideals 
 of mediaeval art an object {in toto) of my desire for 
 myself: no hunger of mine leans that way. The 
 individual need is cared for by the spontaneous 
 emphasis of his admirations. I can admire what 
 others admire only so far as I do in reality belong to 
 their species and to their clan. But this organic basis 
 of desire for quality is perhaps the best security that 
 the authorities within one's own age and society will 
 be roughly the authorities meeting one's major needs. 
 In many simple passes of daily experience we 
 acknowledge clearly enough that the social eye intrudes 
 upon our own more private life not to alienate, but 
 to recall us to ourselves. Imagine, for example, that 
 in that wild place, that arena in which primitive 
 motives are free to appear and be wrestled with, — 
 imagine, I say, that in the family circle some explosion 
 of primitive wrath takes place. And suppose that by 
 inadvertence an honored guest becomes witness of the 
 scene. This accidental intrusion of the disinterested 
 eye is likely to come not as a disagreeable reminder 
 of a false convention; but as lending new vigor — 
 through the chagrin — to certain languishing maxims 
 of self-control which personal experience in the 
 
IDEALS AND THEIB EECOMMENDEES 195 
 
 dialectic of pugnacity had already suggested. Wliat 
 my friend wishes me to be, and what I would appear 
 to him to be, is without doubt what I also demand for 
 myself. In this instance, at least, I am recalled to my 
 own freedom. And this is the natural destiny of all 
 the arrangements by which society foists ideals upon 
 individual lives. 
 
CHAPTEE XXVIII 
 LAWS AND THE STATE 
 
 IN the making of ideals there is no necessary com- 
 promise of individual welfare. But in managing 
 the materials of existence, some compromise is inevi- 
 table. If men live together at all, especially if they 
 live close together like trees in a forest, what happens 
 to the trees will necessarily happen to the men also. 
 It is idle to suppose that their side branches can reach 
 full development. 
 
 The total burden of scarcity in room and wealth, 
 society in political form usually undertakes to dis- 
 tribute.' Apart from political rules and distinctions, 
 men usually adopt the plan of equal sharing if they 
 wish to preserve the peace : this is the thought-saving 
 justice of 'nature." Social rules try to secure first 
 the least total suffering, and then proportionate 
 suffering according to some usable principle of dis- 
 tribution. But all laws, rules, understandings, assume 
 some suffering, — an insufficiency of competitive goods, 
 'the consequent existence of unsatisfied instincts and 
 imperfect growth. 
 
 - Hear the anthropologist on this point : ' ' Among the savages of 
 the upper Orinoco, one of the most primitive of extant peoples, whatever 
 eatable is discovered by one of a pair is immediately divided, with much 
 care for eqnality of division, though there is no political authority 
 among them," etc. 
 
LAWS AND THE STATE 197 
 
 In this respect, then, the political condition obviously 
 takes the form of a bargain or contract. The much 
 maligned "social contract" has certainly no truth as 
 a description of political origins (and was never so 
 understood by its more distinguished expounders) ; 
 but as a formal expression for a natural preference 
 it is an entirely valid way of stating the case. Better 
 is partial hunger "and quietness therewith" than the 
 slim chance of a full stomach with hostility to all 
 neighbors. Security, peace, and their corollary, "a 
 calculable future," are worth to most men the sacrifice 
 of the fighter's chance together with the privilege of 
 free fighting itself : and this, to Hobbes, is the essential 
 preference which sanctions the political state. This 
 is, indeed, no adequate account of the two sides of the 
 bargain. The insurance aspect of social order has 
 been overdone in all these contract formulae; and is 
 still overdone in contemporary theories of the Sta,te.^ 
 The growth of cities shows, among other things, that 
 to most men the hazard of a large gain is still more 
 attractive than the assurance of a little; and the 
 weight of preference for unsalaried over salaried 
 occupations suggests as much. To all that Hobbes 
 sees of value in the civil condition, we must at least 
 add the disinterested satisfaction ^f social instincts 
 and of the insistent hunger for self-knowledge. But 
 whatever the terms of the exchange, the truth remains 
 
 2 As in Bagehot 's phrase just quoted, ' ' a calculable future " ; or 
 Eoyee, War and Insurance; or J. Kohler, Philosophy of Law, "It is 
 necessary for the progress of culture that chance be conquered" (p. 
 28). The conquest of chance is an important, but by no means the 
 primary, value of social order. 
 
198 SOCIETY 
 
 that we must surrender something for the sake of 
 being social; and so, in spite of the high polemic 
 against the historical reality and the legal status of 
 a social contract, no one really questions the psycho- 
 logical truth of its central idea.* The question is 
 always pertinent: "What is the cost of organized 
 society to its members?" and "Is such society worth 
 the cost?" 
 
 For our purposes it is necessary to estimate this 
 cost not in terms of pleasure and pain, as particular 
 satisfactions, but in terms of instinct and will and 
 their full development. 
 
 To Hobbes it seemed evident that our instincts are 
 doomed to be seriously hampered, inasmuch as "the 
 laws of Nature, as 'justice,' 'equity,' 'modesty,' 
 'mercy,' and in sum 'doing to others as we would be 
 done to' . . . are contrary to our natural passions, 
 that carry us to partiality, pride, revenge and the 
 like."* Here our study of the dialectic of pugnacity 
 comes to hand: we can state that "our natural pas- 
 sions" of their own motion carry us well beyond 
 revenge, and well into the region of justice, equity, 
 
 3 The discussion of the social contract theory from Hume to the 
 present is one of the least creditable chapters in modem scholarship. 
 It illustrates too often how seekers of Truth can "darken counsel" by 
 stooping to refute a position defined by thelnselves only. This is much 
 easier than attempting to discover what the opponent actually meant. 
 Even Kohler, who is everywhere substantial and wise, has allowed himself 
 to nod on this matter (Philosophy of Law, p. 10, Bng. tr.). 
 
 * Leviathan, ch. xvii. 
 
LAWS AND THE STATE 199 
 
 and even of mercy. This dialectic presupposes con- 
 tinuous social experience, and would not take place 
 apart from social order; but the point is, that given 
 the social order, such modifications of behavior 
 involve no curtailment of individual growth. The 
 same is true of many other repressions that begin 
 from the outside, and become adopted info the indi- 
 vidual constitution. Could we examine here the 
 dialectic of each several instinct we should find that 
 none come from their social-legal baptism unaltered, 
 or untaught. In general, law, which at first is con- 
 trary to the state of a person's will, brings about the 
 state of mind which justifies the law. In Rousseau's 
 judgment, it is at least possible that every human 
 impulse should submit to its social compression, be 
 "yielded up to the general will," and yet the individual 
 "still obey himself alone, and remain as free as 
 before." And to Hegel, the action of society is so 
 fundamentally informing and liberating, that social 
 mutilation is not so much as considered. Laws and 
 institutions act purely to interpret to each member 
 of the State his own deeper will. 
 
 But the rosy views of Eousseau and Hegel seem as 
 excessive on one side as the more savage views of 
 Hobbes on the other. While to Hobbes every social 
 repression is a pure loss, a necessary tax on natural 
 liberty, and none an ingredient of my own will, for 
 Hegel every such repression is a part of my will, and 
 none a pure loss. This latter position seems rather to 
 describe an ideal than an actual or possible social state. 
 If every privation incident to orderly social life, 
 
200 ' SOCIETY 
 
 including the loss of the liberty either to judge or to 
 avenge my own injuries, — ^if every such privation were 
 just what I, with full insight, would freely impose 
 upon myself for the sake of more inclusive and 
 significant ends, it would mean, would it not, that all 
 competitive relations in society had been transformed 
 or absorbefd into non-competitive relations? In so far, 
 for example, as the scramble for food becomes an 
 incident of a wholly non-competitive interest in im- 
 proving industrial technique, I can truly say that social 
 necessities are ministering to the freedom of my own 
 major desires and for so much of a spur I may be 
 grateful. The criterion, then, of an entirely free 
 social existence would be (and this we shall call our 
 second postulate) : 
 
 Every competitive interest must he so 
 transformed or interpreted as to he 
 non-competitive, or an ingredient in a 
 non-competitive interest. 
 
 And we must enquire, as before, how far social ar- 
 rangements facilitate, or make possible, the meeting 
 of this demand. 
 
 II 
 
 In the large we may say that the primary economic 
 needs, those for food, shelter, etc., are competitive and 
 always will be competitive; because the material 
 objects which they require exist in limited quantities 
 as compared with the demand, especially when quality 
 is taken into account. 
 
LAWS AND THE STATE 201 
 
 On the other hand, what we have called our neces- 
 sary interests are normally non-competitive. When 
 you satisfy your interest in unity or rhythm or order 
 you help to satisfy my interest in these same objects. 
 For these objects are neither limited in quantity nor 
 are they capable of being made private possession in 
 such wise that the more you have the less there is left 
 for me. In adding to your own wealth in these goods, 
 you add to a common fund. Taking the 'will to live' 
 as a typical necessary interest, it is true that there 
 are conceivable situations in which it is "Either your 
 life or mine," — chiefly situations in which life hangs 
 on some physical condition. But when I regard life 
 as a human life, i.e., as a process of thought, a constant 
 exchange of ideas and appreciations, the disjunction, 
 "Either your life or mine" becomes absurd: I can 
 have no such life unless you are there, and the more 
 you have, the more I have also. With such goods all 
 property runs to a common fund ; and in all exchange 
 both parties gain without losing. 
 
 Necessary interests may appear to be competitive if 
 made to simulate the economic pattern, as when one 
 claims a monopoly of an idea, and patents it. And 
 there are simple devices whereby economic needs are 
 made to appear non-competitive. They are arrange- 
 ments for simulating the common fund and the process 
 of exchange which are characteristic of the non- 
 competitive interest. If we oblige each member of 
 a group to get what he wants, not directly, but by way 
 of a common fund, it is evident that he will be con- 
 cerned to add as much as possible to this common 
 
202 SOCIETY 
 
 fund, and so seem to have common cause with all the 
 rest. And if we oblige members to pursue different 
 tasks, so that each can get what he wants only by 
 trading with somebody else, it is evident that each will 
 be concerned to produce as much as possible for the 
 use of the rest. But it is clear that these indirect 
 methods of getting are artificial and must be enforced : 
 they conceal but do not alter the competitive nature 
 of the underlying interest. 
 
 But social life must always be a union of both types 
 of interest. And the union is to this extent inseparable, 
 that there are no interests, however general, which do 
 not require the private and exclusive use of some 
 material objects, and so far take on the economic type. 
 The will to power will thus have competitive and non- 
 competitive ingredients. And the fate of our second 
 postulate will depend upon whether these competitive 
 ingredients can be subordinated to the non-competitive 
 ingredients. 
 
 "Power," as Hobbes has accurately pointed out, 
 quickly becomes the representative object of pursuit, 
 as a symbol for all economic goods. Instead of 
 working for them, we work first for power (or for 
 wealth, as its measure) as a means to them ; then as an 
 end in itself. In spite of the contumely heaped upon 
 the stock "miser," this is a valuable transformation 
 of crude instinct. "In itself," says Kohler, "the 
 instinct for food is brutal. . . . This state of things 
 does not change until the instinct for food is ennobled 
 by becoming the instinct for wealth, and a certain 
 system and order enter into the acquisition of materia] 
 
LAWS AND THE STATE 203 
 
 goods.'" But this transformation still leaves the 
 competitive quality dominant. Non-competitive rela- 
 tions are but simulated, as in the directer strife for 
 existence. I can gain power over a fish only by first 
 offering it a service; but the tender of a meal to the 
 fish is not an accurate index to my ultimate purpose. 
 In human society as well, power is best gained 
 indirectly, through proffers of service : you control 
 me, for the most part, only by controlling what I want, 
 or think I want. But the phrase "Ich dien" only 
 names the indirect route through which you mount to 
 ascendency. 
 
 Such power, in fact, is more essentially and more 
 unremittingly competitive than any othei: motive, 
 because while it is always finite in, amount, it has 
 no quantitative maximum. However much I have, 
 another may have more ; and indeed the best way for 
 him to get more, if I have much, is by controlling me. 
 Could he but be sure of this control, he would have 
 every interest to add to my own power; the greater 
 my power, the greater his, — just as the greater the 
 power of a tool or machine, the greater the power of 
 the owner. Thus the simulated identity of interests 
 might come as close as you please to an actual identity 
 in appearance, while, remaining as far as possible from 
 identity in actual motive. 
 
 And it is just at this point, as the quest of competi- 
 tive power grows without limit, that the simulated 
 identity may become an actual identity, and take on 
 a genuine non-competitive character. For clearly the 
 
 5 Philosophy of Law, p. 46. 
 
204 SOCIETY 
 
 only way in which a finite being can ride to infinite 
 or unlimited power is by finding that power in another 
 being, or an unlimited number of others like himself; 
 and the only way in which such an unlimited number 
 of others can be brought under his control, is that 
 they shall freely come under it because he can actually 
 serve them. And the only way in which he can serve 
 an unlimited number of others is by providing them 
 something unlimited in space and time, something of 
 the nature of idea rather than of matter for consump- 
 tion. One must perforce enter the field of necessary 
 interests, and of funds naturally common, in order to 
 win an infinite ascendency. But in entering this field, 
 not only, does his own power become potentially 
 infinite, but so also does the power of every other. 
 
 For every man has an idea, a view of things, which 
 distinguishes him by* birth from every other person; 
 and the value of that idea, or 'point of view,' to others 
 is his chief excuse for existence as a human being. 
 And while the work and thought of every man do in 
 fact leave so much less for other men to do, the sum 
 of things to be thought and done remains infinite, so 
 that there can be no competition for new ideas. It is 
 rare indeed that the workers in ideas so much as fancy 
 that another has usurped their territory and stolen 
 away their crown ; but if they fancy this, it is because 
 they have not yet discovered their own territory. In 
 terms of his idea, the power of each individual is 
 potentially infinite, and non-competitive. 
 
 The total accumulated power of mankind in terms 
 of 'ideas' (under which head we include conceptions 
 
LAWS AND THE STATE 205 
 
 of beauty and of utility and technique as well as of 
 scientific law and psychological insight) we call (now 
 somewhat diffidently) "culture." Any idea which you 
 or I may have wins its control by entering into this 
 growing body. And the exercise of any such power is 
 instantly reciprocal. For to say that your idea 
 controls me, and to say that I control your idea, are 
 but two ways of saying the same thing. Your power 
 is identically mine. Thus, so far as a substantial and 
 living culture exists, the will to power of any indi- 
 vidual may take on a non-competitive meaning. 
 
 Ill 
 
 But "culture" does not exist by spontaneous 
 generation, any more than history, — the mental con- 
 tinuity and totality of men, — exists by itself. Non- 
 competitive interests of course exist in some measure 
 wherever two or three are gathered together. But if 
 we seek for a non-competitive form of power which 
 shall be substantial and compelling enough to take up 
 into itself all the competitive forms as subordinate 
 ingredients, we can only find it if history and culture 
 are created, that is to say, if by some positive effort 
 the race is mentally held together. It is this necessity 
 which produces the political State. The State is the 
 objective condition through which a non-competitive 
 satisfaction of the will to power becomes possible. The 
 State is the condition under which alone our second 
 postulate can be satisfied. It is no psychological 
 accident, therefore, that the first business of the will 
 to power in the order of time has been the creation of 
 
206 SOCIETY 
 
 political rule, and therewith of history and culture. 
 By that deed, however violent, the crasser and com- 
 petitive forms of this will have paved the way for 
 their own subjugation under the more human forms. 
 It is not altogether surprising that men have been 
 somewhat mystified at the degree of importance which 
 they themselves have ascribed to political entities ; nor 
 that, becoming critical, they have often adopted, as 
 Tolstoy, skeptical or anarchistic conclusions. For 
 the deepest needs are the last to become completely 
 self-conscious; and States have satisfied needs far 
 deeper than the conscious purposes of their founders, 
 which have apparently been for the most part of the 
 competitive type, far deeper, too, than any economic 
 interest. The dialectic of the will might not, of itself, 
 have led to the creation of the State; for the State 
 must appear as a fact to many minds at once, and not 
 as a discovery of individual experience. But the State 
 having been made, the human will can recognize it as 
 that which it does in fact want: this subconscious 
 recognition is the feeling of patriotism. It is the 
 perception of necessary discontent with all ephemeral 
 satisfactions, of the hunger for a permanent effect, 
 and of the truth that the value of any human effect 
 is measured by the dignity and scope of the tradition 
 in which it lodges. Of themselves as units, men could 
 not create, but only receive such a tradition: history 
 and a culture are objects which no human being and 
 no simultaneous group of human beings can manu- 
 facture at will. Yet without them, their own worth 
 sinks below the human level. It is for this reason. 
 
LAWS AND THE STATE 207 
 
 whether they have known it or not, that they have 
 placed the value of the existence of the State above 
 the value of their own personal existence. To offer 
 one's life for the State is simply to make the existence 
 of the State one's first earthly business; it is to take 
 part, whether early or late, in the foun^dation of the 
 political entity, without which no man's will to power 
 can find fully human satisfaction. 
 
 Thus all men require the State, as a Third Being, 
 whose power is their power, whose immortality is their 
 immortality, whose total mind and appreciation is 
 theirs, and of their works. It is only through the 
 existence of such a Being that Weltgeschichte can in 
 any measure become das Weltgericht. It is only 
 through its existence that the race can come to com- 
 plete self-knowledge, and individuals to their own 
 through the self-knowledge of the race. It is not the 
 will to power alone, but every instinct, that apart from 
 the social order finds itself bewildered, not free. Its 
 controlling canopy of meaning is feeble. Habits 
 cannot take root and give way to habits better inter- 
 preting it. In any community, instinct may find itself 
 opposed to custom and law; but it still perceives its 
 own meaning, perhaps the clearer because of the 
 opposition. Destroy, however, the custom, the perma- 
 nence, the regularity, the social requirement, the force 
 of the authoritative dictum, "This is what you want 
 and mean," — destroy these, and instinct gropes in 
 emptiness, condemned to many futile hypotheses. In 
 a choice of evils, it is better to know yourself at odds 
 with your social order than not to know yourself at all. 
 
208 SOCIETY 
 
 The State, I say, is required by all men, as a neces- 
 sary object for the will to power, and therewith for 
 every instinct. It is the feeling of this necessity and 
 its logic, I take it, which makes man the zoon politikon: 
 this is the anatomy of his so-called political instinct. 
 
 I do not say that the State, and certainly not any 
 specific State, is a sufficient condition for such satis- 
 faction. For there are States enough which neither 
 welcome ideas nor admit the logic of non-competitive 
 power. It is the necessity, not the sufficiency, of the 
 State which I assert ; and thus a necessary preference 
 for life within a State rather than apart from a State. 
 
 And since . a preference which is necessary is 
 unanimous, we may translate the psychological neces- 
 sity, if we like, into a unanimity of decision, whether 
 self-consciously understood and admitted or not. And 
 herewith we have the answer to the fundamental 
 question of the social contract. All men must prefer 
 the State; all men are consenting to the existence of 
 the State. And the primary unanimity necessary to 
 the sanction of any majority is thus established. 
 
 IV 
 
 The existence of the State allows the competitive 
 form of the will to power to assume non-competitive 
 shape. And through this fact the transformation of 
 the more special desires from competitive to non- 
 competitive forms may begin. The economic struggle 
 for existence, and for better existence, becomes sub- 
 ordinated to what is now, not merely as a pious wish 
 but actually, of common concern, and is interpreted by 
 
LAWS AND THE STATE 209 
 
 it. Thus the division of labor and the process of 
 mutually gainful exchange cease to be purely me- 
 chanical advantages with egoistic background; they 
 become an opportunity for individuality and unique 
 talent and for thought-filled loyalties (Durkheim).® 
 Competition is not abolished: it cannot be dispensed 
 with, even as an instrument of my necessary interests 
 in self-knowledge and self-measurement. But if in 
 any contest for material goods, I fail, while you gain, 
 it now becomes possible for me to say, with some 
 degree of sincerity, "I will this result," on the same 
 principle that a sportsman, while preferring the 
 success of his own side may still wish, on the whole, 
 that the best side should win. The only condition 
 under which he or I can define our wish in this way is 
 that the dispelling of illusions has become significant : 
 there are real powers to be gained, and in order to 
 gain a real power, I can heartily wish the destruction 
 of all power of mine that is accidental and false. 
 And whatever I gain through any such system will 
 have a value beyond the fact that it satisfies an 
 
 6 The polyhedral limitation of man by neighboring men has long been 
 recognized as the condition in which the awareness of his ethical qualities 
 best springs up. "Eemember, " said the Stoic to himself when jostled 
 in the crowd, "Remember what it is that you want. At such price is 
 sold your freedom from perturbation." Eemember, we might add, in 
 the pinch of specialization, at this cost must be sold your own knowledge 
 of your destiny. Here again, the law brings about the situation that 
 justifies it, the distribution of tasks out of which contract can arise as 
 an expression of personal freedom. "Fpr human civilization is only 
 conceivable if there is a system among mankind that assigns each man 
 his part and sets him his task." Kohler, Philosophy of Law, p. 4, 
 Eng. tr. In America we might have written, "a system which incites 
 every man to find his part and to take up his task." 
 
210 
 
 SOCIETY 
 
 economic need; because it comes as a recognition of 
 my validity, of my being on the right track, of the 
 common consent to my enjoyment : it is interpreted in 
 terms of my non-competitive will to power/ 
 
 Such transformation, however, would be gradual in 
 an ideal State, — still more so in any actual State, 
 where the results of competition are still governed by 
 many factors irrelevant to personal worth. Where 
 the game retains the general character of "grab," 
 competition will keep its predominantly exclusive 
 quality and its primitive meaning: my gain is your 
 loss. Hence the deformity of human nature in the 
 State is not a myth : we can only say that it would be 
 still more deformed apart from it, and only by its aid 
 can it become less deformed. 
 
 7 In this way I should express Hegel 's meaning, in placing the stage, 
 of "Contract" in his system of right beyond the stage of "Property." 
 
CHAPTEE XXIX 
 INSTITUTIONS AND CHANGE 
 
 IDEALS and laws are fragments of institutions: 
 institutions are permanent clusters of ideals, 
 customs, laws. An institution, like a law, has to meet 
 two needs and not one only : it must be serviceable to 
 society ; it must also inform a groping individual wbat, 
 according to racial experience or national experience, 
 he wants, and hold him to that meaning. The insti- 
 tution of property must make clear to him the com- 
 pleter sense of his acquisitive and grabbing instincts. 
 The institution of the family must interpret to him his 
 instincts of sex and parenthood. Individuals do not 
 always take kindly to the discipline of the institution, 
 any more than to other discipline ; nevertheless, when 
 the postulates we have set up are complied with, the 
 hardships of this discipUne have a meaning : they are 
 part of the normal remaking of man. 
 
 But the postulates are never complied with. The 
 specific social arrangements we have described which 
 tend to hold our institutions to their rightful purpose 
 are but partially successful. We cannot say that 
 social strains as we find them are pre-eminently 
 informing and full of meaning. If it should be 
 whispered of our institution of property that the 
 results of competition and its hardships are largely 
 
212 SOCIETY 
 
 without human significance, I should not know how 
 to refute such a judgment. Hegel was never truer or 
 more illuminating than when he said that property 
 and contract are essential ingredients in development 
 of personality. Yet Hegel was surely a false prophet 
 when he said that personality has no interest in the 
 quantity of property a man has, its only concern being 
 in the fact of having some property.^ As long as 
 opportunity lurks in spots and is given chiefly to him 
 that hath; as long as there are dearths of common 
 mental food if not of other food ; as long as barrenness 
 and absence of beauty and the burning out of health 
 destroy spiritual hunger itself; as long as man power 
 can be reckoned as horse power, intellects and loyalties 
 flung into the hopper as trade assets, and women and 
 children weighed in the scales of their present efficiency 
 without regard to any future, not to say sacred or 
 immortal possibilities, — so long personality has a 
 stake in the amount of property one has and not in 
 the fact only. And one who calls for 'discipline,' in 
 the sense of a hearty "I accept the social universe" 
 and its rules, may find himself deservedly crying in • 
 the wilderness, if he blinks such residual deformations 
 of the social order. Social unrest and undiscipline 
 are founded on something more than untidiness of 
 mind; they are built upon a belief that what has 
 to be done had best be done by rebellion, overt or 
 syndicalized. 
 
 1 Eechtsphilosophie, $ 49. The whole attempt to eliminate quantity 
 from the realm of spirit, in which Bergson is at one with Hegel, seems 
 to me unequivocally mistaken. 
 
INSTITUTIONS AND CHANGE 213 
 
 But the worst enemy of a real grievance has always 
 been the sham grievance; and the important thing is 
 to aim our shaft at the right target. "We dare not 
 assert that these residual deformations are wholly 
 without meaning for the freedom of human nature. 
 It is a curiously distorted and unreal picture of human 
 instinct that appears when we imagine each craving 
 satisfied as it arises. Though such Utopias have often 
 been tried, and are the food and drink of our super- 
 ficial rebelliousness, the thing is — ^I do not say prac- 
 tically, but intrinsically — ^impossible. I venture the 
 statement that the chief evil of most of our social 
 hardships is not that they exist, but that they persist 
 beyond their time. They play their part in a process 
 which elicits the most subtle and most characteristic 
 aspects of human nature; we can only estimate this 
 nature rightly if we grasp this process in its entirety. 
 
 A satisfied man is certainly a man whose instincts 
 are satisfied; but yet we cannot satisfy a man by 
 satisfying his instincts in their severalty. History 
 is an immense laboratory for this experiment. The 
 cushioning of human nature is always proceeding 
 apace, according to the means and inventiveness of 
 a social order. It is accelerated by the high premiums 
 paid to one who finds new ways to minister to old 
 wants, or who finds new wants to cater to. Whoever 
 discerns a bump in the cushion, or what is as bad, a 
 point of non-support, is made wealthy ; and his device 
 
214 SOCIETY 
 
 swiftly runs the gamut from luxury to necessity. Thus 
 the self-consciousness of all tends to the level of the 
 most epicurean (though there is always a privileged 
 region of society which receives first aid in this 
 elimination of discomfort). The history of all this 
 careful study of ease is everywhere the same: the 
 more our satisfactions, the less we are satisfied. 
 
 Accordingly there is everywhere a contemporary 
 criticism of the results of this "progress," a criticism 
 taking many forms, — often of ascetic practice and 
 moralizing, or of a pessimistic denunciation of life 
 itself as an embodied illusion, a cosmic hoax. Or 
 another alternative dominates : the active satisfactions 
 of instinct are set up at odds with the enjoying end;" 
 a gospel of active rather than passive self-sacrifice is 
 preached, a gospel of work or of heroic Uebermensch- 
 lichkeit, a call for the strenuous life, for 'energism' 
 rather than hedonism, or even a clamor for war itself 
 as an opportunity for venting the energies of men. 
 The suggestions are many; but for us, one inference 
 is clear. 
 
 The human being is adapted to maladaptation. This 
 is perhaps his supreme point of fitness to survive on 
 this planet. We are better fitted to walk over rough 
 and rolling country than over the dead level of city 
 pavements; a day's continuous marching over this 
 artificially 'adapted' footing leaves us with a greater 
 fatigue than a day's tramp across country. Endur- 
 ance and patience are not in the first instance Christian 
 virtues, or even virtues at all: they are biological 
 
 2 As in Holt, The Freudian Wish, p. 132, etc. 
 
INSTITUTIONS AND CHANGE 215 
 
 qualities (closely related to the 'delayed response'), 
 fitting us for dealing with the unfit, A dog can hold 
 for a long time the memory of an injury, cherishing 
 without loss the unappeased impulse of revenge. 
 What is sporadic in the dog, is distinguished in man, 
 and applies to all his major passions. Man is the 
 animal that can wait, the animal fashioned for sus- 
 pended satisfaction. This power makes it possible 
 for him to live in an uncomfortable situation while 
 deliberately surveying it, and selecting the thrust 
 most fitted to remove it. The extent of this power 
 makes him in effect a divided being, who enjoys in 
 the present knowing his enjoyment to be partial, while 
 harboring a larger hunger, destined to indefinite 
 deferment, yet identified most closely with himself and 
 hence not suffered to decline.* The man is to be found 
 in his SehnsucM, his longing or yearning, rather than 
 in his accomplished ends. Were it not for this capacity 
 to retain wholeness of prospect in the midst of very 
 fragmentary satisfaction (aided by a large power for 
 vicarious enjoyment), it is hardly conceivable that we 
 could tolerate, still less take as a matter of course, the 
 actual suppressions of talent suffered in the ordinary 
 specialization of activity, or even in the necessity 
 (suffered by man alone) of choosing among many 
 possibilities of action merely because the narrow time- 
 channel is overcrowded with our plans. No being is 
 so domiciled in mutilations as man. Whatever shape 
 institutions must take to give completest vent to the 
 possibilities of his nature, it would certainly not be 
 
 3 See Brown 's poem, The Eoraan Women. 
 
216 soorETY 
 
 a shape whieli allowed him nothing to criticise or to 
 reform. His fitness for the unfit must have its scope. 
 
 2. A completer view of the meaning of this paradox 
 is gained, I believe, in what we have already learned 
 of the structure of human happiness. The happiness 
 of man consists in the satisfaction, not of his primary 
 instincts in their severalty, but of his total or central 
 will, — the will to power. And power, while it need not 
 be competitive, can only exist where there is some- 
 thing to push against, and will be in direct proportion 
 to such resistance. 
 
 Now the most humanly satisfying type of power, 
 so we thought, is the power of an idea, whether in 
 persuading other men or in shaping institutions. The 
 exercise of any such power presupposes that in insti- 
 tutions there are changes to be made; the same type 
 of maladjustment which might dispose us to pessimism 
 may, from this standpoint, appear as a necessary 
 condition of complete welfare. An unwitting, and 
 hence all the more cogent, testimony to this fact may 
 be found in the biography of pessimism, in the curious 
 circumstance that when pessimism becomes a doctrine 
 or propaganda, it brings with it the first stages of its 
 own cure. And for this reason. That wherever 
 pessimism assumes poetic or philosophic garb, it has 
 already lifted its head above its preoccupation with 
 instincts, and has begun a campaign in the world of 
 ideas, if only to decorate with a cosmic frame its own 
 sense-experiences, as did Omar Elayyam. The dis- 
 satisfied spirit has begun, in its fancy, to be a creator 
 of other worlds, having well shattered its own to bits, — 
 
INSTITUTIONS AND CHANGE 217 
 
 a creator of other polities, natural laws, monopolies, 
 markets, pieties, scenes, adventures. And as within 
 its.elf, the eternal Ideal plows up the field of a sodden 
 humanity, it discovers in the career of its own con- 
 demnation of life, as a form of thought, a life that is 
 worth clinging to. For the pessimist, it is just his 
 pessimism and its preaching that is of value. For this 
 is his edition of the will to power through ideas. 
 
 A world in which there were no institutional misfit 
 would be a world in which such a will to power, or 
 indeed any other, would he as nearly as possible 
 without human occupation; it might provide a type 
 of happiness bovine or angelic, but certainly not 
 human. 
 
 It would be natural, but still perverse, to infer from 
 this psychological truth the desirableness of preserv- 
 ing or courting or importing a degree of evil in order 
 that human nature may gain full satisfaction. Men 
 find, or once found, for example, a certain happiness 
 in war : war is one way of bringing the will to power 
 into operation against social evils, changing institu- 
 tions, or at least leaving one's mark upon them; and 
 there are occasions when because of abnormalities in 
 political growth, social construction must take, like sur- 
 gery, the paradoxical form of destruction. Yet no folly 
 could be blinder than that of prescribing or seeking war 
 as a remedy for the maladies of the human spirit : for 
 no war can act as such a remedy unless it is just ; and 
 no war is just unless it is inevitable. The place of a 
 just cause of war, or of any other evil, as a pou sto in 
 the process which makes our happiness, does not logi- 
 
218 SOCIETY 
 
 cally admit it to any other place. The knight errant 
 without a dragon or other foe may be a melancholy 
 figure ; but he must still kill the dragon when he meets 
 him, and not coddle him along to keep an exercise for 
 his mettle. Likewise with our social misfits : he who 
 should counsel others, or himself, to put up with such 
 an evil because it affords pleasing activity to contend 
 against it, is guilty of something more than a bull. 
 Evil has its own sources; and there is no cause for 
 anxiety lest there should be enough of it to make 
 permanent opportunity for the powers of all men. For 
 a large part of evil is an incidental product of social 
 progress itself. 
 
 Ill 
 
 The improvement of institutions, and social progress 
 generally, is responsible for a certain amount of our 
 awareness of misfit. For progress enhances sensitivity 
 and desire, and both of these bring an increase of 
 suffering. 
 
 'Everyone has noticed the ineffective efforts of 
 children to place and diagnose their own pains. They 
 are slightly cold ; they do not know that they are cold, 
 but only that they are "uncomfortable": an older 
 person must interpret to them their own restlessness. 
 If we think of the child as more sensuous than the 
 adult, we are mistaken. The adult is much more alive 
 to sensations ; he has keener discrimination and keener 
 enjoyment. Only an adult can be an epicure, or a 
 colorist, or a musician. The child is incapable of 
 being "dissolute" ; for nature entrusts only by degrees 
 
INSTITUTIONS AND CHANGE 219 
 
 the more poignant experiences of sense. The fitness 
 of the arrangement is that the appeal of sense should 
 increase only as the policy of the self develops to judge 
 that appeal. The adult is defined as the person who 
 can let things hurt, while keeping them subordinate to 
 his central will. On the march, knowing that water 
 is not to be had, one is able (as the child is not) to put 
 thirst out of mind; busy, one forgets his hunger; 
 conversing, bodily weariness drops away. Yet the 
 same sensations, when they get their hearing, have a 
 definition and force proportionate to the force of the 
 central will. Mature self-consciousness means that 
 every impulse of a many-stringed nature has a more 
 perfect individuality. The organism can afford to be 
 plural because (and only so far as) it is firmly one. 
 This is hardly a merely happy adaptation of unrelated 
 i^orces : it is more likely that the added mentality and 
 horizon are direct agents in promoting the keenness 
 of sense-experience.* 
 
 A similar relation holds good between earlier and 
 later stages of culture: the race is but gradually let 
 down into the pit of the knowledge of evil, for it is an 
 incident of the same process which, increasing goods 
 and their appreciation, we call progress. Primitive 
 culture is by definition a culture preoccupied in the 
 external struggle, hence little free to delve into itself. 
 The same changes of occupation that have brought 
 economic power, have brought separateness of interest 
 and the self -consciousness that is born of contrast: 
 
 4 This is in accord with our view of the nature of pleasure and pain. 
 See above, pp. 81 f . and 123, note. 
 
220 SOCIETY 
 
 herding and agriculture make occasion for setting my 
 labor and its products against your labor and its 
 products, bring private property with its relative 
 solitude and concentration upon self, generate the 
 scheming Jacob and the thieving Hermes, Division 
 of labor likewise means a relative privacy, in the midst 
 of the day's work, and promotes comparisons of value 
 and pains. Money, as a medium between production 
 and consumption, means the necessity of enquiring 
 into my wants before I set about purchase and enjoy- 
 ment. All these things together mean increased atten- 
 tion to pain and desire; quite apart from the similar 
 result of gathering wealth, leisure, and the hastening 
 of the cushioning-process above referred to, with its 
 inequity, bitterness, and reflection. Those who fall 
 behind in the uneven social movement are hardly worse 
 off in the physical life than in the wealth-less stages ; 
 for the most part they are better off — there is no new 
 suffering except in status and pride. But old physical 
 evils have now become social wrongs, and hurt with a 
 new pain; the social difference sharpens self -aware- 
 ness, and those who lose share as equals with those 
 who gain in the added consciousness of the risks of 
 fortune in goods and evils. Thus maladjustments 
 which were tolerable and relatively unnoticed, because 
 kept in the obscure margins of the mind, become 
 intolerable, and begin to press upon the shapes of 
 institutions. The very process by which discomforts 
 are relieved creates the capacity for new discomfort." 
 
 B This is the social form of that endless chain which Schopenhauer 
 found in the life of individual will. But it is not a treadmill. The 
 
INSTITUTIONS AND CHANGE 221 
 
 IV 
 
 The circumstance of the origin of a part of social 
 misfit, created as it is by growing social good, sug- 
 gests that at least this part of evil is such as human 
 nature is well fitted to cope with, and to take up into 
 the activity of its own will to power. And this will be 
 the case if institutions are plastic to the pressure upon 
 them. The very misfits of the social order will be 
 grist for human nature provided this postulate is 
 complied with: 
 
 Whatever in institutions tends at any time to 
 deform human nature shall be freely subject 
 to the force of dissatisfaction naturally 
 directed to change them. 
 
 Any residual dissatisfaction with social arrange- 
 ments may, in point of fact, be regarded as a constant 
 force acting upon these arrangements, and sure, in 
 the course of time, to have its effect upon them. There 
 is an old physical experiment in which one is to put 
 into a glass vessel a mixture of shot, com, sawdust, 
 iron filings, etc., and place the vessel on a window 
 stool subject to constant jarring by passing traffic. 
 In course of time the mixed contents stratify them- 
 selves in order, with the densest at the bottom. It 
 requires no great force, but only a constant force — 
 if there is sufficient motion — to ensure that any ten- 
 evils are in new places. And old issues — some of them — are perma- 
 nently settled. We have — as the flnx-phUosophers tell us — a perpetual 
 movement, self -renewed : but it is not as they suggest a meaningless and 
 directionless movement. 
 
222 SOCIETY 
 
 dency shall reach its goal. And so, wherever social 
 shiftings take place, there is the opportunity for the 
 edging forward of human nature. And as this chang- 
 ing and shifting has been going on for many ages, 
 the probability is great that all the coarser and more 
 serious maladjustments have been remedied, and that 
 we have in our present institutions a fit in sketch of 
 human nature in general. 
 
 If institutions have not always submitted themselves 
 to this pressure, it might seem that in our Western 
 world at any rate, where all complaint is legitimate, 
 every idea has a hearing, and the art of representative, 
 if not of popular, legislation has appeared, a miracle 
 and a godsend, legislation participated in by the 
 consumers thereof, — it might seem that all institutions, 
 after ages of cakedness had now finally reached a state 
 of sufficient flux. And in truth, the chief impediment 
 to a free human nature is now, not social unreadiness 
 to entertain remedies that are certain to cure, but 
 ignorance, — ^ignorance of its own desires and how to 
 secure them. 
 
 Legislation must, indeed, always lag behind the 
 market-place in its part of the cushioning process; 
 because its inventions, as distinct from the commercial 
 kind, must be so far thought through as to take their 
 place at once in an imposing system of ideas. The 
 Laws, and must be suited to universal and compulsory 
 consumption. In both cases we must get on by making 
 multitudes of experiments and selecting froni the 
 results; but experimenting with a law must always 
 be a graver thing than experimenting with a new 
 
INSTITUTIONS AND CHANGE 223 
 
 breakfast food. Law-making is a most philosophic 
 undertaking, — or should be. Otherwise it is either 
 entangled in its own technique, and becomes a sinecure 
 for all the self-interest and intellectual viciousness of 
 its promoters ; or else, thrown wide open to the direct 
 popular argument from sore to salve, it loses itself in 
 temporizing, inconsistency, and rudderless drifting. 
 Laws can only be competently perceived through 
 institutions, institutions through history, and history 
 through human nature. 
 
 Nevertheless, a radical with a conscience and an 
 intellect even moderately equal to his task has at this 
 hour the world before him, a world desirous as never 
 before to do justice through its institutions to all 
 human needs. This world requires to be convinced 
 only (1) that his remedies will remedy, and (2) that 
 they will not at the same time destroy more than they 
 create. And as a guarantee for this second and 
 greater interest, it will require in him an under- 
 standing of the history of institutions which sees in 
 them something greater than shifting arbitrariness or 
 rough expediency or folly and oppression, — which 
 appreciates their slow tendency to bring humanity into 
 the full birthright of its own freedom. 
 
 For if society is conservative, it is so, at least in 
 part, because it has something to conserve. 
 
 If nature could not allow the growth of sensitivity 
 in individuals apart from their growth in will, neither 
 
224 
 
 SOCIETY 
 
 can society, except at its peril, lend itself to the liberty 
 of clamorous desire unless there is sufficient substance 
 in men's grasp of what is necessary and common. 
 The license that has commonly followed sudden grants 
 of liberty* is no argument against grants of liberty; 
 but it has its argument. It shows that men had con- 
 ceived the restraint that was over them too inimically, 
 not perceiving how far the social order was, in 
 Eousseau's phrase, compelling them to be free. It 
 shows, then, that the protest was, in part, inconsiderate 
 and unjustified; and that the conservative party was, 
 to just that extent and no more, right in regarding the 
 liberals as rebels. 
 
 He who would change an institution or experiment 
 with it must know his own will far enough to see that 
 he wishes the innovation itself to be a conserved 
 and protected structure. The only value any experi- 
 ment can possibly have is that something may be 
 established. It is not an accident that the noisiest 
 criers for, tolerance, when they have secured free way 
 for their own idea, have commonly shown a wish to 
 enforce that new idea with the old intolerance. They 
 are but waking up to the logic of their own ambition ; 
 which was, not that institutions should weaken and 
 soften or disappear, but primarily that some particular 
 stubborn institution should yield, and the same good 
 force be spent on maintaining something worthier. 
 There is literally speaking no such thing as being too 
 conservative : but it is terribly easy to be conservative 
 of the wrong objects. Hence place must be made in 
 
 « See Arthur T. Hadley, Freedom and Eesponsibility, pp. 40 ff. 
 
INSTITUTIONS AND CHANGE 225 
 
 all our institutions for our common ignorance, our 
 need to learn through the free clash of convictions, — 
 this is the valid element in Mill's plea for social 
 liberty, the valid element in American experimentalism. 
 The principle is, that 
 
 Conserving force shall he proportionate to 
 certainty, — 
 
 certainty that the institution furnishes for the given 
 society the best solution so far proposed of its own 
 problem. This fourth postulate we must place beside 
 the last. 
 
CHAPTER XXX 
 EDUCATION 
 
 IN handing on to a new generation its notions of 
 what life means, of what the several instincts 
 mean, society is compelled to face itself, take stock of 
 its ideas, pass judgment upon itself. The advantage 
 of education, therefore, is not exclusively to the young. 
 Dealing with growing minds, society perforce domes- 
 ticates the principle of growth: for self -consciousness 
 is never purely complacent, least of all when its eyes 
 are the critical and questioning eyes of a child, a new 
 vital impulse, unharnessed and unbought. 
 
 It strikes us as notable — ^when we think how severe 
 is the effort of self-review, and how little satisfying — 
 that society has never been content simply to let its 
 young grow up. Unintentional suggestion might con- 
 ceivably have been left to do its work on a gregarious 
 and imitative human substance. To an unknown 
 degree children always educate themselves, and what 
 they thus do is well done. But from earliest visible 
 times, educating has been a deliberate process. Human 
 beings clearly like to educate: for better or worse this 
 activity is an especially human form of the parental 
 instinct. It looks at times as if the young serve simply 
 as a stimulus to an activity of the elders of which they, 
 the children, become the helpless objects, an activity 
 
EDUCATION 227 
 
 which tends to increase without limit as leisure and 
 the economic margin grow. Children create the neces- 
 sity, but also the exciting opportunity, for society's 
 effort to make vocal the sense of its ideals, customs, 
 laws, and (ominous word) to inculcate them. 
 
 But though a profound human interest, analytic 
 self -consciousness is difficult and slow of growth; and 
 as individual self -consciousness begins in the form of 
 memory, social self-consciousness begins in the form 
 of history. For this reason, society has always tried 
 to expound itself largely through the story of its own 
 past, its folklore, epic, and myth. But with history 
 there has been from the earliest times a demand for 
 images of that to which history leads, images of a more 
 completely interpreted mil such as have hovered 
 before the imaginations of dreamers, prophets, re- 
 formers. Thus in the work of educating, social self- 
 consciousness expands until it envisages more or 
 less darkly the entire tale of tribal destiny from its 
 beginnings to its goal. 
 
 Because education requires this self-conscious look- 
 ing before and after, a discussion of education in the 
 midst of a book on the remaking of human nature must 
 anticipate the end, and in some degree mirror the 
 entire undertaking. But deliberate educational effort 
 has its own specific part to play, more or less separable 
 from other parts of the remaking process. Bending 
 over the younger generation during the long years 
 before the full impact of law and institution is allowed 
 to reach them, transmitting its wishes through the 
 protecting (and no doubt refracting) media of family 
 
228 , SOCIETY 
 
 and school, speaking at least as mucli through, what it 
 is as through what it tries to say for itself, society in 
 educating is exercising a function whose purpose, like 
 that of most natural organs, we but gradually become 
 fully aware of. In our day education affects the 
 technical; it becomes highly doctrinaire; it is the 
 jousting place of all the new realisms, pragmatisms, 
 behaviorisms, psychologisms of all brands. "We need 
 to think anew of the nature of this organic function 
 and of its control. 
 
 There was a time when we might have defined educa- 
 tion as a continuation of the reproductive process. 
 Physical reproduction supplies more of the same 
 species : social reproduction supplies more of the same 
 tribe or nation. From the beginning of organized 
 social life, each people has regarded its own folkways 
 as an asset, distinctive and sacred; in imposing them 
 upon the new brood it has supposed itself to be con- 
 ferring its most signal benefit. And the newcomers, 
 most of them, seem to have adopted this view: they 
 have as little fancied it a hardship that the social order 
 should impose its type upon them as that their parents 
 should have given them their physical image. It has 
 simply completed the definition of what they are. 
 
 We have not outgrown this conception of education. 
 We stiU speak of it as a 'preparation for life,' under- 
 standing by 'life' a certain kind of life, that which 
 marks out our own group or nation. It still seems to 
 us the essential failure of education that our children 
 
EDUCATION 229 
 
 should find themselves a misfit in 'life'; so we steer 
 them toward the existing grooves of custom as a 
 matter of duty — I do not say of duty to society, but of 
 duty to the children themselves. Discussing the place 
 of classics in Prussian schools, Kaiser Wilhelm II said 
 (December, 1890), "It is our duty to educate young 
 men to become young Grermans, and not young Greeks 
 or Romans." And what do other nations expect of 
 their schools, if not to bring forth after their kind? 
 What are the facts of our own practice? 
 
 We certainly do not put all traditions on the same 
 level, any more than all languages or all sets of laws. 
 But neither we nor any other modern nation limits its 
 offering to its own type. We train our wards to some 
 extent to- become young Greeks, Romans, Britons, 
 Frenchmen, Germans, Asiatics, as well as young 
 Americans. We teach them history and geography, 
 not indifferently, but still to a liberal distance from 
 our own center of space and time. We pave the way 
 to literatures other than our own. We discreetly 
 announce the existence of other religions. Better than 
 this, we offer them at the outset the free and primitive 
 worlds of fairyland and legend where all desires find 
 satisfaction. We give them poetry and drama, dealing 
 with social orders invitingly different from the actual 
 order, such as must set tingling any cramped or 
 unused nerve in growing nature, and so give voice to 
 the latent rebel in our youth, or the latent reformer. 
 Our homes and schools habitually look out upon 'the 
 world' not as a decorous and settled place, but as a 
 comparatively perilous and unfinished place, calling 
 
230 SOCIETY 
 
 for much courage and chivalrous opposition, requiring 
 much change. The career of the hero who redresses 
 an untold number of wrongs still hovers as a wholly 
 accessible destiny before the fancies of our childhood. 
 To this extent, we warn our successors-to-be against 
 our own fixity, put the world before them, and set them 
 free from our type/ 
 
 And to this extent, we recognize that education has 
 two functions and not one only. It must communicate 
 the type, and it must provide for growth beyond the 
 type. It is not a mere matter of spiritual reproduc- 
 tion, unless we take reproduction in the wider sense 
 as an opportunity to begin over again and do better, 
 the locus not alone of heredity but of variation and of 
 the origin of new species. 
 
 But why insist at all upon the reproducing of the 
 old type? and why limit to "this extent" the scope of 
 the liberty of choice? Why do we not display with 
 complete equableness all views of the best way of life 
 and say, "Now choose; think out your course for 
 yourselves"? Instead of teaching our children our 
 molality, why not teach them ethical science? instead 
 
 1 Admitting all the abuses of mechanical and wholesale popular 
 schooling, I must decline to believe as the primary truth of any modern 
 nation that "It is not in the spirit of reverence that education is con- 
 ducted by States and Churches and the great institutions that are sub- 
 servient to them" (Bertrand Bussell, Principles of Social Eeconstruetion, 
 p. 158; reprinted in America under the misleading title, Why Men 
 Fight). I know of no society which fails to wish its children a better 
 life than its own. And especially at this moment, in the war-ridden 
 states of Europe a deep and pathetic tenderness toward childhood is 
 evident, as if to say, "We have made a mess of our world: yours must 
 be a better one. ' ' This spirit is making itself felt in thorough revisions 
 of the plan of education in France and England. 
 
EDUCATION 231 
 
 of religion, metaphysical criticism? instead of our 
 political faith, political philosophy? instead of our 
 manners, the principles of aesthetics? In short, why 
 not make thinkers of them rather than partisans? 
 Why not abolish the last remnant of that ancestor- 
 worship which dwarfs the new life by binding it to 
 the passing life? 
 
 The answer is, we have no right to aim at any 
 smaller degree of freedom than this, nor, for the most 
 part, do we: but before a completely free will can be 
 brought into being, it is first necessary to bring into 
 being a will. The manifest absurdity of asking a child 
 to choose his own moral code and the rest is due not 
 alone to the fact that he lacks the materials to choose 
 from, but still more to the fact that he does not know 
 what he wants. The first task of education is to bring 
 his full will into existence. And this can only be done 
 by a process so intimate that in doing it the type is 
 inevitably transmitted. The whole meaning of educa- 
 tion is wrapped up in this process of evoking the will ; 
 and apart from it nothing in education can be either 
 understood or placed. 
 
 II 
 
 The will can develop only as the several instincts 
 wake, up and supply examples of the goods and evils 
 of experience. To bring instincts into action, all that 
 any social environment need do (and almost all it can 
 do'') is to supply the right stimulus, together with an 
 
 2 Noting in passing that the exhibition of instinctive behavior often 
 acts by suggestion as a substitute for the direct stimulus; and in gre- 
 
232 SOCIETY 
 
 indication of what the stimulus means. A response 
 cannot be compelled ; for whatever is compelled is not 
 a response. No behavior to which we might drive a 
 child would be play: if playthings and playing com- 
 rades fail to bring out the play in him, we are all but 
 helpless. A response can only be e-duced. 
 
 If we were dealing with an organism whose instincts 
 we did not know, the educing process would consist 
 in exposing that organism, much as one would expose 
 a photographic plate, to various environments to see 
 which ones would elicit reactions. And in dealing with 
 a new human being, always unknown, the work of 
 educing his instincts would likewise consist in exposing 
 him to those stimuli which may appeal to him, — to 
 speech, to things graspable or ownable, to color, form, 
 music, etc., to the goods of cleanliness, truthfulness, 
 and the like. "What powers any child has of respond- 
 ing to these things, whether or how far they will take 
 in his case, neither he nor we can know until he has 
 been exposed — and perhaps persistently and painfully 
 exposed — to specific examples of these goods. 
 
 This exposure is the first work of education. 
 
 And the first peril of education is not that the 
 child's will will be overborne, but that through no 
 exposure or inadequate exposure to the objects that 
 would call out his best responses, he achieves only half 
 a will instead of a whole one, a will partly-developed 
 
 garious animals as an alternative stimulus. And further, just as artificial 
 respiration may lead to actual breathing, so a mechanical repetition of 
 instinctive behavior even under duress may sometimes work backward, 
 as if breaking a way though an occluded channel, to set an instinctive 
 impulse free. See above, p. 148, note. 
 
EDUCATION 233 
 
 and therefore feebly-initiative, casual, spiritless, unin- 
 terested. If I were to name the chief defect of con- 
 temporary education, it would not be that it turns out 
 persons who believe and behave as their fathers did — 
 it does not : but that it produces so many stunted wills, 
 wills prematurely grey and incapable of greatness, not 
 because of lack of endowment, but because they have 
 never been searchingly exposed to what is noble, 
 generous, and faith-provoking. 
 
 Mr. Bertrand Eussell voices a common objection to 
 immersing the defenceless younger generation in the 
 atmosphere of the faiths religious and political that 
 have made our nations.' Has he considered whether 
 in these faiths there lies anything more than the wilful 
 choice of an unproved theory, anything of human value 
 such as a growing will might, for complete liberation, 
 require exposure to? Politically guided education, he 
 feels, is dangerous, and so it is. But I venture to say 
 that the greatest danger of politically guided educa- 
 tion, particularly in democracies which feel themselves 
 obliged in their educational enterprises to cancel out 
 against one another the divergent opinions of various 
 parties, is that the best places will be left blanh, 
 because it is on the most vital matters that men most 
 differ. The pre-war experience of France in secu- 
 larized education has furnished a striking instance of 
 the principle that in education a vacuum is equivalent 
 to a negation. In one case as in the other, instinct is 
 robbed of its possibility of response. 
 
 Children have rights which education is bound to 
 
 3 Principles of Social Eeoonstruction, chapter on Education. 
 
234 
 
 SOCIETY 
 
 respect. The first of these rights is not that they be 
 left free to choose their way of life, i.e., to make bricks 
 without either straw or clay. Their first right is that 
 they be offered something positive, the best the group 
 has so far found. Against errors and interested 
 propaganda the groAving will has natural protection: 
 it has no protection against starvation, nor against 
 the substitution of inferior food for good food. No 
 social authority can make pain appear pleasure. No 
 social authority can make a stimulus of something 
 which has no value. But it is quite possible, through 
 crowding out the better by the worse, to produce a 
 generation which thinks "push-pin as good as poetry," 
 prefers bridge to sunsets, or worships the golden calf. 
 
 Ill 
 
 But there is a radical and obvious difference between 
 exposing a plate to the light and exposing a human 
 instinct to a possible stimulus. Anybody can expose 
 the plate, a machine can expose it: the operation and 
 the stimulus are alike mechanical. But for the human 
 being there is many a possible stimulus which lies 
 partly or wholly outside the world of physics.* In 
 these regions of experience, neither a machine nor any 
 random person can achieve an exposure. 
 
 It is true that for most of the 'units of behavior' 
 which men have in common with the rest of the animal 
 
 * As an example, the stimulus of the ' instinct of curiosity ' ; see p. 62, 
 above. It is important to bear in mind through this discussion that the 
 ' stimulus ' of an instinct is understood to be ' the perception of the end 
 as the meaning of the initial situation'; p. 42, above. 
 
EDUCATION 235 
 
 kingdom, the stimuli are strewn about in such profu- 
 sion that exposure takes place with little or no need 
 for social guidance. It is a commentary upon the 
 artificiality of our urban society that a Mme. Montes- 
 sori is required to remind us of the need (among other 
 things) of sufficient and varied tactile stimuli in early 
 years. Haphazard encounters with strings, stones, 
 and sticks, now kept carefully 'cleaned up' and out 
 of reach, aided by personal struggles with the more 
 exact weapons of toilet and table, once provided most 
 of the stimuli which we must now measure out with 
 psychological ingenuity. Hereby we are making no 
 doubt essential progress in self -consciousness ; but for 
 young children, country life and self-help are still 
 the unmatched educators of their primary instincts. 
 
 But for the specifically human developments of 
 instinct, the stimuli are commonly either non-existent 
 or imperceptible except through the behavior of other 
 human beings who are actively responding to them. 
 Of these, the principle holds that no one can expose a 
 child to that stimulus unless he himself appreciates it. 
 Imagine to what experience an unmusical person might 
 expose a child under the name of music. Consider 
 what it is to which many a human being has been 
 exposed under the name of mathematics. To many 
 the true statement that number is an object of pro- 
 found instinctive interest" would appear a mockery 
 because, having fallen into the hands of the Philistines 
 in the days of their initiation into the world of number, 
 
 s Ab an ingredient in the satisfaction of various central instincts ; 
 see above, p. 64. 
 
236 SOCIETY 
 
 they have never so much as come into view of its 
 peculiar beauties. 
 
 But it is especially with regard to those modes of 
 interpreting instinct which constitute our moral and 
 religious tradition that this principle becomes impor- 
 tant. For no one can so much as present the meaning 
 of an idea of this kind, — ^let us say of a particular way 
 of meeting pain or injustice, a Spartan way, a Stoical 
 way, or some other, — ^unless he himself finds satis- 
 faction in that idea. And then it follows, since sat- 
 isfaction and happiness are highly convincing states 
 of mind (understanding by happiness not tempera- 
 mental gaiety, but the subconscious and hence serious 
 affirmation of life as a whole by the will as a whole), — 
 it follows that children will tend to adopt the beliefs 
 of those whom they instinctively recognize as happy, 
 and of no others. 
 
 This is both a protection to children and a dagger. 
 A protection: for surely the child who has found no 
 hero in the flesh from among the supporters of the 
 existing order is in no danger of being overborne by 
 that order. If a tradition can get no great believers, 
 it will die a natural death. If the wilder people are 
 genuinely the happier, — Bohemians, declassees, gay 
 outlawry in general, — it is they who will convince and 
 be followed. If sobriety, self-restraint, all the "awful 
 and respectable virtues" have a value, whether as 
 necessary nuisances on the way to some great good, 
 or as goods on their own account, they will find a 
 following through the persons of those who are 
 
EDUCATION 237 
 
 enamored of those goods, so far as siicli persons 
 become known. 
 
 If the social group is simple, any genuine values it 
 has will be likely to find their way into new minds. 
 One of the most marvelous examples of social con- 
 servation has been the transmission of folksong; yet 
 if any tradition has been spontaneous and unforced, 
 this has been. But in our modern complex and 
 split-up societies, the chances grow large that many 
 children are never reached by our best ideas, trans- 
 mitted through an overworked and not markedly 
 happy teaching body.* 
 
 In any case, what is transmitted is that intangible 
 thing we call belief, the effective belief of the teaching 
 surface of society. And since the type of any society 
 
 8 If the chief excellence of teachers in a parsimonious democracy is 
 to spend much time, teach as many as possible, make neat reports show- 
 ing high averages of prize-made punctuality, and ' prepare ' their charges 
 for the enjoyment of something else than what is before them, we shall 
 produce and deserve little else than a constitutionally weary and common- 
 place citizenry. 
 
 The idea of ' preparation, ' an indispensable workshop notion for those 
 who consider educational systems as a whole, is a disease when it be- 
 comes prominent in the minds of the children. What children, and poets, 
 never forget is that "Life is now I the center of the universe is herel 
 the middle point of all time, this moment ! " If children are led, for 
 example, to read good writers in order that they may hereafter enjoy 
 good writers, their chance is lost. The only justifiable reason for putting 
 a good writer into their hand is that he is good and can be enjoyed then 
 and there. I do not say understood: for children have great powers of 
 living on a future understanding. 
 
 That the first qualification of a teacher is to be happy has perhaps 
 never been propounded as an educational doctrine. Yet it is a fair 
 question whether truth has been more harmed by those who are wrong 
 but happy (if there are any such) than by those who are right but 
 unhappy. 
 
238 SOCIETY 
 
 is chiefly defined by its prevalent beliefs, we see why 
 it is that the process of bringing a wiU into existence 
 inevitably tends, as we said, to reproduce the type. 
 
 Perhaps it is the best of our values that lead the 
 most perilous lives, are most easily lost or defaced in 
 the relay of the generations: but determination and 
 system will not save them. Ethics and religion must 
 be removed from set courses of public instruction 
 unless the believers are there ; for mechanical teaching 
 of these things is worse than none. Every society has, 
 beside its rebels who are frequently persons of great 
 faith, many members who have dragged themselves 
 barely to the edge of a creed ; what such persons trans- 
 mit is hardly that creed, but a pestilential belief in the 
 moral painfulness of one's intellectual duty. 
 
 But given the believer, the more vigorous and 
 affirmative his belief, the better. Life becomes worth 
 living according to the greatness of faith, not the lack 
 of it. If any element of a great faith proves wrong, 
 its greatness survives as a standard to be reached by 
 what displaces it. According to this measure will be 
 the dimension of the wills we develop. 
 
 IV 
 
 But beside the dimension of the will, the proportion 
 of the will is also a matter of importance ; and to this 
 end it is the business of education to see that none 
 of the more general instincts or groups of instincts 
 have an inadequate exposure. 
 
 There is in the human being, as we saw, a large 
 
EDUCATION 239 
 
 power of substitution among the instincts, and this 
 power increases as the central current of the will 
 grows strong. Hence as children get older it becomes 
 less and less important that all the possible 'units of 
 behavior' should be proportionately called forth. It 
 is a pity, to be sure, if the climbing period goes by 
 without a fair exposure to trees, fences, staircases, 
 shed roofs and the like; but the loss is not irremedi- 
 able. If however any of the more general instincts 
 lies long latent, as in the case of a delay in the use of 
 language which might retard the development of 
 sociability, the loss is more serious. Let me speak 
 of some of the questions of proportion which present 
 conditions of life more especially raise. 
 
 A fair balance ought to be kept between the instincts 
 that deal with persons and those that deal with things. 
 The small arts developed by handling, exploring, 
 controlling, making, and owning things must furnish 
 aU the themes for the give-and-take of primitive 
 sociability : only through the administering of such all- 
 important privileges as those of 'hollering down our 
 rain bar'l' or 'climbing our apple tree' can the various 
 shades of amity and hostility be realized. The child's 
 social life will run shallow unless his physical interests 
 are vigorous. It is true that the deeper his roots 
 strike into the material world and its mastery, the 
 more occasion there is for pugnacity, the more difficult 
 the personal problems aroused; but also, the more 
 significant the solutions when they qome. It is a mis- 
 take to try to impose a premature altruism upon these 
 concerns in mine and thine. The two sets of impulses. 
 
240 SOCIETY 
 
 competitive and non-competitive, must grow side by 
 side and to some extent independently before they 
 are ready to recognize their relationship. Meantime, 
 the instincts occupied with things indicate by their 
 strength the degree of mastery over nature we are 
 destined to ; and the qualities developed in their exer- 
 cise are the most primitive elements of 'character' 
 and the foundation of all likeableness.^ Thus what 
 these instincts seem to take from social quality, they 
 pay back again. 
 
 But between the possessive and masterful interest 
 in things and the friendly interest in persons there is 
 a middle term, most important in the proportioning 
 of the will. I mean a companionable interest in nature. 
 Being 'alone' has possibilities of occupation that 
 come not merely from hands and senses but from 
 thought and fancy. A child's fear of solitude is an 
 evidence that his imagination has already begun to 
 work in this direction; and what is needed in order 
 to reassure him is not that nature should be deper- 
 sonalized, but that his instinctive personifying trait 
 should be made a resource. The growing self, if it is 
 to acquire depth, has need of a region not intruded 
 upon by other human personalities, not even by such 
 as move across the stage of history and literature. 
 
 T What attracts us in another, old or young, is always the sign not of 
 animal vitality primarily but of validity, the quality of spirit which is 
 challenged and evoked in the elementary struggles with the inertia and 
 refractoriness of physical things: resourcefulness, persistence, grit, 
 integrity, fertility of design. Power over nature is the most summary 
 expression of what a spirit ought to have, and does have in proportion 
 to its degree of reality: it is this degree of reality which we most imme- 
 diately perceive in another, and which is the foundation of likeableness. 
 
EDUCATION 241 
 
 While lie is in this human company the initiative of 
 his own thoughts is perpetually broken: the impulses 
 of mental play, as sensitive as they are precious, 
 may easily be discouraged and weakened unless an en- 
 vironment is found which is at once an escape and a 
 stimulus. Our over-socialized city-bred children often 
 lose the capacity to be 'by themselves' without intol- 
 erable tedium. Normally, however, 'nature' means 
 much more than permission to ruminate : it is a posi- 
 tive educing force. For nature appears to humanity 
 everywhere, and early to children, as (more or less 
 cheerfully) enigmatic: it is deceptively quiescent, or 
 it is eventful but with invisible agency; it teases out 
 essays in interpretation. Society drives away the 
 muse, — it 'amuses' us: but in the presence of nature 
 the thread of our fancies is drawn at once into the 
 living fabric of the world, making connection in the 
 freest, and I believe not untruest way, with the spirit 
 that dwells there. Thus the foundations are being 
 laid for a thoughtfulness more than literal in its 
 quality, which may ripen in one direction into scien- 
 tific observation and hypothesis, in another toward 
 merging with the poetic and animistic gropings of the 
 race.^ In any case, since the imagination is actively, 
 not passively engaged, and the mental furniture is 
 
 8 In making this plea for the encouragement of an anthropomorphic 
 imagination, I am shamelessly favoring what Professor Thorstein Veblen 
 has called the " self -contamination of the sense of workmanship" (The 
 Instinct of Workmanship, pp. 52 fE.), a deliberate mixing of the per- 
 sonal and impersonal phases of the world which it may prove difficult 
 later on to resolve into a wholly naturalistic deadness of attitude toward 
 . the physical. I do so with my eyes open. 
 
 What and how much solitude may mean to any child cannot be told 
 
242 SOCIETY 
 
 one 's own, one returns to his social world a little more 
 than before a self. An individual I-think is growing 
 which in time may have its own contribution to the 
 We-think of the crowd. 
 
 But whether we thus deal with the 'I-think,' or as 
 above with the 'I-own,' it is clear that we are at the 
 same time dealing with the 'I-can.' The will to power, 
 because of its central position, is being educated in 
 all education. But this fact does not imply that the 
 will to power needs no distinct attention. It has its 
 own technique to acquire, and its own interpretation 
 to find: and everything in the child's further career 
 depends on how these problems are solved. Like all 
 the more particular forms of instinct the will to power 
 needs ,to be developed by deliberate exposure to its 
 own kind of stimulus, — difficulty, and to its own type 
 of good, — success. 
 
 Play, we have said, may be regarded ias practice in 
 success. The play obstacles are so chosen as to be 
 surmountable; the play-things oppose no ultimate 
 resistance to their owner. But that which seems the 
 
 in advance : education can only efiEect the exposure, not at first without 
 guidance, and certainly not without noting results. 
 
 Let me quote from a letter written by Sir Eabindranath Tagore to 
 Mr. Frederic Eose, Stockton Heath, England. "Mornings and evenings 
 (speaking of his school in Bolpur) fifteen minutes' time is given them 
 to sit in an open space, composing their minds for worship. We never 
 watch them and ask questions about what they think in those times, but 
 leave it entirely to themselves, to the spirit of the place and the time and 
 the suggestion of the practice itself. We rely more upon the subconscious 
 influence of Nature, of the association of the place and the daily life 
 of worship that we live than on any conscious effort to teach them. ' ' 
 The same principle in a different mood is found in John Boyle O'Eeilly's 
 poem "At School." 
 
EDUCATION 243 
 
 opposite of play, the set task, is needful to provide the 
 complete stimulus for this instinct. We need not open 
 the old debate whether the will is best trained through 
 what one spontaneously likes or is 'interested' in or 
 through the opposite. Kant and William James are 
 far apart on many matters; but in this they seem to 
 agree, that for the sake of habitual freedom from the 
 domination of feelings it is well to do voluntarily a 
 certain amount of what is hard or distasteful. But I 
 presume that they would equally agree that there is 
 little value in effort for effort's sake: there is as little 
 to be gained from pure difficulty as from pure ease. 
 The right stimulus for any instinct is 'the perception 
 of the goal as the meaning of the beginning' :° the right 
 stimulus of the will to power is the glimmer of a 
 possible success, which is another name for hope. The 
 only significant difficulties, for purposes of education, 
 are those accompanied by hope. It is thus as idle a 
 procedure to exhort the child halted by an obstacle 
 to "work it out for himself" as it is to do the work 
 for him : there is no more dehumanizing state of mind 
 than the perpetuation of directionless effort in a 
 despairful mood. Education in such a case consists 
 in supplying the halted mind with a method of work 
 and some examples of success. There are few more 
 beautiful miracles than that which can be wrought by 
 leading a despairing child into a trifling success : and 
 there are few difficulties whose principle cannot be 
 embodied in such simple form that success is at once 
 easy and revealing. And by increasing the difficulty 
 
 9 p. 42, above. 
 
244 
 
 SOCIETY 
 
 by serial stages, the small will, under the cumulative 
 excitement of repeated and mounting success, may find 
 itself far beyond the obstacle that originally checked it. 
 
 Such use of mental momentum is a practice which 
 I believe all instinctive teachers resort to. And it 
 shows incidentally how false a guide 'interest' may be 
 in education when taken as we find it. Lack of interest 
 in any subject depends, for children, far less on the 
 nature of the subject than on a persistent thwarting 
 of the will to power in dealing with it ; interest accom- 
 panies any task in which a mental momentum is estab- 
 lished. But momentum can be gained only when 
 difficulty can be indefinitely increased, so that the very 
 conditions which may discourage, drive away interest, 
 and even induce loathing of a subject, are conditions 
 which make great interest possible when the will to 
 power is called into lively action. We may put it 
 down as a maxim of education, so far as interest is 
 concerned, — Without difficulty, no lasting interest. 
 
 But after the education derived from play, and from 
 the set task with its relatively prompt conclusion, the 
 will to power has still to learn to deal with the situation 
 of indefinite delay. If it is hard to point out what 
 instinctive satisfaction can be found in a deferred 
 success, it would be hazardous to assert that there 
 is no such satisfaction, when we consider that the 
 greatest of human ends are such as are never finally 
 achieved. The imagination, the I-think, Avould be 
 cramped in any house narrower than infinity; and it 
 is through them that the will to power can be led to 
 its next stage of development. By the aid of imagi- 
 
EDUCATION 245 
 
 nation I can count it a success to have made a definable 
 approach to a distant end; and thus increasingly long 
 series of means that Ue between initial effort and 
 attainment can take on the meaning of continuous 
 successes. If our view of the State is right,^" it is only 
 as we become capable of taking an interest in perma- 
 nent and cumulative objects that the will to power 
 can subordinate its competitive to a non-competitive 
 character and so become thoroughly social. And it 
 must be seasoned to delay, before the problems with 
 which adolescence confronts instinct can be even fairly 
 well met. 
 
 The strain upon instinct at adolescence is due largely 
 to the delay imposed on the impulses of acquisition 
 and sex. The vigorous ways of primitive food-getting 
 and property-getting have to recognize their trans- 
 formed selves, if they can, in the devious routine of 
 labor and exchange. The sex-interest, under any set 
 of customs so far proposed, must learn to express 
 itself for a time in partial and sublimated forms. The 
 circumstance that children usually grow up in fami- 
 lies is nature's simple and effective device for im- 
 posing on the powerful current of sex-feeling its 
 presumptive meaning: every child starts life with a 
 prejudice to the effect that its affections will lead it 
 sooner or later to found a family resembling (with 
 improvements) the family from which it came. But 
 when sex-interest becomes a practical personal im- 
 
 10 p. 205, above. 
 
246 SOCIETY 
 
 pulse it outruns the restricted possibilities of family- 
 founding; it meets on every hand the unexplained 
 check, the unexplained inner compunction quite as 
 much as the unexplained social ruling. Inhibition and 
 prohibition alike mean delay; and the tendency of all 
 delay is to cast the energies of impulse upward into 
 the region of dream, romance, speculation, substitution. 
 
 Here the will to power should provide the great 
 natural resource ; and will do so if it has been linked 
 with imagination. Delay becomes supportable if 
 imagination gives the 'prolonged vestibule"^ the shape 
 of a conscious plan, with the many possible successes 
 of approach : and for the acquisitive impulses this may 
 at least ease the situation. But delay becomes more 
 than tolerable, it becomes significant, if it affords lee- 
 way for the creation of the plan itself, enlisting the 
 inexhaustible plan-making inipulses of the youthful 
 brain. Here the possibilities of the imaginative will 
 to power are so great that it may assume an actual 
 equivalence for the satisfaction of other instincts ; and 
 in particular the creative element in the sex-impulse 
 may be largely absorbed or 'sublimated' in the new 
 preoccupation. 
 
 For at adolescence there is at least one such task of 
 creation which the will cannot escape, that of construct- 
 ing one's philosophy. The youth finds himself, at his 
 own estimate, for the first time an equal among equals. 
 There is a change in the order of authority. Children 
 have an appetite for authority corresponding to their 
 mental unfinishedness and rapid growth; with ado- 
 
 11 p. 178, above. 
 
EDUCATION 247 
 
 lescence comes a sense of competence and a disposition 
 to be critical. The conceit of opinion in the adolescent 
 is not empty: it is based on a readiness to assume 
 responsibility, and on an actual assumption of respon- 
 sibility in the work of mental world-building if not of 
 physical world-building. He appreciates for the first 
 time that he has his own life to lead ; he finds himself 
 morally alone; he can no longer endure to see things 
 through the eyes of others. 
 
 In dealing with this readiness to assume respon- 
 sibility and with its accompanying conceit — the 'in- 
 stinct of self-assertion' as it is called by McDougall 
 and others — ^we commit some of our most serious 
 educational blunders. We customarily put the boy 
 into continued schooling where his powers of serious 
 action beat the air, and we rebuke his conceit by 
 external pressure: the first wrong brings the second 
 after it. Continued schooling is inevitable and not 
 necessarily unnatural ; but the only fair corrective for 
 the conceit, or rather the only right environment for 
 this new development of instinct, is the actual respon- 
 sibility it craves. Our school days and years have 
 their intervals ; and those intervals should be, at least 
 in part, intervals of earning a living. The boy who 
 passes his adolescence without knowing the feeling of 
 doing a day's work for a day's wages is risking not 
 only a warp in his instinctive make-up, but a shallow- 
 ing of all further work in school and college, because 
 of a loss of contact with this angle of reality at the 
 moment when his will was ripe for it. The mental 
 helplessness of many students who cumber the colleges 
 
248 SOCIETY 
 
 of this and other lands, the dispositional snobbery and 
 self -saving of many an over-confident and over-sexed 
 youth sent out as 'educated' to justify once more the 
 spirit of rebellion against the mental and moral in- 
 competence of those who assume to lead and govern, 
 has much of its explanation in our failure at this 
 point. The marvel is not that such misshapen births 
 occur ; the marvel is that young human nature, shows 
 such magnificent self-righting qualities when its will 
 to power is once thoroughly engaged. 
 
 But whether or not the concrete responsibility he 
 craves is permitted him, the responsibility for mental 
 world-building cannot be refused the adolescent, and 
 he will take it. This is the natural moment for tearing 
 down and rebuilding the beliefs absorbed during the 
 era of his subordination to authority. Youth is meta- 
 physical not because metaphysics is a youthful malady 
 .but because youth has metaphysical work to do ; it has 
 been attached to the universe through the mental veins 
 of its authorities; now it must win an attachment of 
 its own. The old structure of belief will not be wholly 
 abandoned, — it may not be so much as altered ; but it 
 must be hypothetically abandoned, surveyed from out- 
 side largely by the aid of the materials furnished the 
 imagination in early years, the young Greek, the young 
 Utopian we have implanted in the young modern. 
 That to which one returns is then no longer another's, 
 but one's own. Originality is not measured by the 
 amount of change, but by the depth of this re-thinMng. 
 
 It is originality of this sort, another name for 
 'individuality,' which is chiefly at stake during ado- 
 
EDXjCATION 249 
 
 lescence. If the will to power cannot take tMs meta- 
 physical direction, individuality will be curtailed in its 
 growth. If self-assertion takes the form of rebellion 
 against restraint of sex-impulse, individuality will be 
 the loser not the gainer. For sex-expression is the 
 merging of the individual in the currents of the genus ; 
 and early sex-expression signs away just the last and 
 highest reaches of individual development. It ensures 
 mediocrity, and by a curious paradox, conventionality 
 of mind: nothing is so uninventive as ordinary sex- 
 rebellion. Only deferment and sublimation can carry 
 individual self-consciousness to its own,*^ 
 
 VI 
 
 If the instinctive life of adolescence is to be domi- 
 nated by the will to power in the form of creative 
 thinking, the impulse and power to think must be well 
 grown; whereas originality of this sort is the rarest 
 product of our education. The abundant will of 
 childish curiosity which should now be brimming into 
 the channel of explorative thought, we are commonly 
 compelled to see running dry. Is it necessary to stand 
 helpless before this serious failure of the attempt to 
 educate ? 
 
 12 There is a similar loss through hasty self-assertion in the direction 
 of the acquisitive instincts. To win the early attention of the market 
 it is necessary to offer something new. Novelty is a natural product of 
 thought; but premature gathering of this crop has a biological reaction 
 on the root. The normal source of the new is not direct attention to the 
 new, but attention to the real; the novelty that comes as a result of the 
 painful quest for novelty will prove in the end to be a mere variation 
 of a conventional pattern, like the scenarios of our movies, and so in 
 time to pall by its tawdry repetition. 
 
250 SOCIETY 
 
 The difficulty does not lie primarily in the fact that 
 explorative thought is the most arduous way of meet- 
 ing life, whether for educator or educated. It is 
 certainly much simpler for both sides to accept classi- 
 fied solutions for classified situations, after the fashion 
 of the manuals of casuistry, than to discount every 
 actual hypothesis in favor of a possibly better one. 
 But the difficulty is that with the best of will, the power 
 of explorative thinking cannot be taught by direct 
 effort. In attempting to commimicate it, what we pass 
 on is a solution, never the mental process that reached 
 it. In our laboratories we undertake to teach scien- 
 tific method, the method by which Galileo and his 
 successors made their discoveries; but our typical 
 product still lacks something that was in Galileo. 
 Mr. Bernard Shaw has revealed to mankind the secret 
 of Rodin's art; yet no one takes Rodin's place. The 
 attempt to transmit originality, and the attempt to 
 transmit tradition are in the same case: if with the 
 tradition could be given the power that created it, 
 tradition would have few enemies. Imitation never 
 quite imitates; education never educes the most vital 
 power. Platonism produces no other Plato: Chris- 
 tianity yields no other Jesus nor Paul. If instead of 
 trying to conserve itself, every society and every 
 tradition put out all its efforts to make new prophets, 
 new iconoclasts, it would still find itself conserving the 
 husk, unless the spring of that unteachable power can 
 be touched. 
 
 It is here that we realize most keenly that education 
 in the last analysis must be on the part of the educator 
 
EDUCATIOlir 251 
 
 a study of self-elimination. It lias throughout a para- 
 doxical character. In those beginnings of independent 
 thought which we found in the 'companionable interest 
 in nature, ' the art of exposure involved the withdrawal 
 of society by socie'ty, a self-effacement which must 
 gradually become complete. It is the moments of 
 loneliness that are critical for the spontaneity of the 
 mind ; and they can be to some extent procured for the 
 growing self by increasing the opportunities for learn- 
 ing through one's own mistakes, through experiments 
 in opposition, and through attempts at the solitary 
 occupation of leadership. 
 
 But self -eliminating is not a purely negative pro- 
 cess ; for explorative thought has never been a purely 
 disconnected fact in the universe: it has had its 
 sources, and the last rite of the self -eliminating art 
 would be to point out those sources so far as we know 
 them. "We may at least conduct our youth to the 
 farthest point on our own horizon, to the point from 
 which all that is tentative is seen as tentative, all that 
 is small as small, all that is human as merely human. 
 **For each man," we may say to them, "there is a 
 region of consciousness more nearly just and free than 
 others, looking out toward absolute truth, if not seeing 
 it. In all ages men have sought out this region, and 
 have found there a promise of freedom from all 
 residual tyrannies of custom and education ; and from 
 this source innovations without number have made 
 their way into social life. What men have called their 
 religion has been the inertia-breaking, bond-breaking 
 power, the mother of much explorative thought. It 
 
252 SOCIETY 
 
 lias at times exercised a tyranny of its own, and this 
 is the most hideous of tyrannies because it invades the 
 region of most intimate freedom. But from it has 
 come the power for breaking these same shackles. 
 There you may find or recover the vision which nulli- 
 fies all imposture of the Established, the Entrenched, 
 of all the self-satisfied Toryisms, Capitalisms, Obscu- 
 rantisms of the world. And there you may find what 
 is not less necessary for originality : unity in the midst 
 of distraction, composure in the midst of necessary and 
 unnecessary flux, quiet confidence in your own eyesight 
 in presence of the Newest, the Noisiest, the Scientifi- 
 calest, the Blatantest, all the brow-beating expositions 
 of pseudo-Originality, pseudo-Progress. Your need is 
 not for novelty for its own sake, but for truth : out of 
 your personal relation to truth comes all the novelty 
 that can serve you, or mankind through you. This 
 personal relation to truth you must win for yourself ; 
 but you may be left with good hope to win it, for truth 
 is no dead thing, but is itself a spirit." 
 
 Society, I dare say, has never been wholly false to 
 this self -displacing conception of education: even its 
 most hide-bound orthodoxies have produced characters 
 capable of social and political resistance, revolution 
 if need be. And the modes of conduct which it has 
 attempted to transmit have been derived seldom 
 from a direct study of its own welfare, chiefly from 
 its own view of the dictates of this more absolute 
 consciousness. 
 
 For this reason, in our own study of society we have 
 given little attention to specific transformations of 
 
EDUCATION 253 
 
 instinct. If anything is discoverable more adequate 
 and final than a given stage of social transformation, 
 it is that which social education reaches toward, and 
 which alone can concern us, even as social beings. 
 But our view of society as an instrument of remaking 
 would be incomplete without some account of its nega- 
 tive action, its dealing with the rebel and the criminal. 
 
CHAPTER XXXI 
 THE RiaHT OF REBELLION 
 
 SOCIAL pressures are not unlike physical pres- 
 sures. They consist usually of a push and a pull 
 acting in concert — a vision of good and a fear of evil. 
 In a given society every member is subject to the same 
 general pressure, — and though some will be nearer the 
 fear of pain than others, all will be cognizant of, and 
 governed by, the prevalent social punishments. For 
 punishment is but the realization of the threat implied 
 in all pressure ; discipline and punishment are insepa- 
 rable and co-extensive in their domain. Whatever 
 justifies the one, justifies the other also. 
 
 Our position has been that social pressure, and 
 therefore punishment, is justified by the fact that it 
 tends to realize the individual's will as it could not 
 otherwise be realized, — ^i.e., in so far as our four 
 postulates are complied with. And if there were any 
 part of institutional life of whose value to individuals 
 society could be absolutely certain, it would be justi- 
 fied (by our last postulate) in conserving that part 
 with all possible force, i.e., in resisting with its whole 
 force any rebellion against it. 
 
 But taking our human ignorance and need of per- 
 petual experiment well into account, is there any part 
 of our institutional life which can claim such wholly 
 
THE BIGHT OF REBELLION 255 
 
 certain and irreplaceable value ? NotMng, unless what 
 is necessary to meet a necessary interest. Such a 
 necessity we have recognized in the simple existence 
 of a social order, and of a political form thereof. 
 But we cannot argue from this necessity^ that any given 
 society or state is necessary; it is only that some 
 particular state is necessary. Nevertheless, existence 
 in such matters is a great merit ; and under the condi- 
 tions we have named the existing society and state are 
 always the best, — ^the conditions, namely, that it is 
 willing to become the best and is offering itself in good 
 faith as agent for this becoming. 
 
 The good faith of the critic of society is tested, then, 
 by his willingness to use society as agent for its own 
 improvement; he is willing to criticise from within, 
 not from without. The individual bearer of progress 
 has always this in common with the enemy of man- 
 kind, that he attacks existing custom. But the vital 
 difference is that the former works through such 
 political good will as is extant, accepting in full the 
 obligation to replace what he rejects, — the latter 
 rejects the obligation with the custom. The former 
 knows that there may be one point of absolute worth 
 in a mass of evil, namely, good faith in abetting reform. 
 If this good faith does not exist, he might seem 
 justified in rebellion. 
 
 But the good faith assumed in this theory is not 
 found either in the social order or in its critics. On 
 both sides the interest in justice is mixed with what- 
 ever malice, greed, lust, and callousness still lurks in 
 
 1 The logical error of Hobbes ' theory of sovereignty lies here. 
 
256 SOCIETY 
 
 human character. The art of social life, and of 
 politics in particular, is to deal not with perfect beings, 
 but with fallible and defective wills. The question is 
 never simply. What exists? but rather. What can be 
 made to exist? And the issue of rebellion, and of its 
 treatment, is not simply, Does good faith exist? on 
 one side, or on the other. It is the presence or absence 
 of faith in a possible good faith that decides the issue. 
 This issue, by its very statement, lies in regions 
 inaccessible to observation. The last relations of 
 individuals and societies are found in the darkness of 
 solitary judgment. Here lies the perpetual and un- 
 avoidable opening for tragedy in history, the mutual 
 condemnation of wills who with like rectitude are 
 unable to reach either understanding or trust. It is 
 idle to suppose that any legal formula can be laid down 
 to determine when a rebellion is justified; it is equal 
 folly to infer from the absence of such a principle that 
 rebellion is always unjustifiable. The issue does not 
 lie within the legal order, but it is a definite issue. 
 Within myself I know whether I must condemn and 
 attack the order in which I live as an order so far 
 corrupt that no good will of mine can hope to mend it. 
 And my society, and my state, know likewise whether 
 they can still have hope of me, and whether, therefore, 
 they shall take my outbreak as a rebellion, or as a 
 common crime. 
 
CHAPTER XXXII 
 PUNISHMENT 
 
 IT is important to make this distinction between the 
 rebel and the criminal. The rebel is he who is 
 consciously and hopelessly hostile to the social order. 
 The criminal is he whose deed implies a rebellion ; but 
 this implication is not the conscious' and avowed 
 intention of the deed — the man has simply taken what 
 he wanted in disregard of socially declared rights.' 
 The act of the State, in each case, is to make the 
 external status correspond with the internal^ status. 
 The rebel by his overt deed has shown himself inwardly 
 condemning his society, and so external to it in will: 
 society makes the exclusion visible, and as final and 
 irrevocable as it conceives his will to be. It has not 
 first to enquire what the rebel's rights may be; for 
 he has rejected his rights under that order: the rebel 
 is the lost soul, and in excluding him society is but 
 dealing with facts, and pursuing its own duty of 
 conservation. As for the criminal, the act of society 
 is first to compel him to face the ignored element of 
 rebellion implied in his behavior: he is "arrested," — 
 i.e., at once checked in his policy and compelled to 
 
 1 To this extent all erimes come within the legal category of 'negli- 
 gence.' They have, of course, the psychological character of "sin" — 
 the rejection of meaning — but here the meaning in question is limited to 
 the idea involved in the defined "rights" of the social or legal person. 
 
258 
 
 SOCIETY 
 
 reflect and decide in full consciousness of tlie meaning 
 of Ms act. The social exhibition to the criminal of 
 the meaning of his act is 'punishment.' Punishment 
 is thus a hopeful policy; it argues 'faith in a possible 
 good faith.' It exceeds the criminal's right, in so far 
 as society might have insisted upon the implied 
 rebellion ; but it does not exceed the right of the human 
 being regarded as changeable. 
 
 The converse of this proposition is also true : the 
 only hopeful policy is a policy of punishment. It is a 
 prevalent sentiment that the treatment of crime should 
 aim only at the future, heal the disturbed mind, and 
 drop all thought of retribution, which looks vengefuUy 
 to the past. As if we could deal with the future of a 
 human mind except by dealing with its maxims; and 
 could deal with its maxims except by dealing with the 
 deeds which those maxims have produced! It is only 
 when we give up a person as hopeless that we cease 
 to take issue with the decisions that reveal him ; he then 
 becomes to us, in fact, a determined Thing, and is 
 excluded from our society as effectually as if by some 
 magic curse we had transformed him into an autom- 
 aton. By such self-contradictions false sentiment 
 never fails to reveal its own unreality. Punishment, 
 I repeat, is an expression of social hope — the hope of 
 remaking or saving the man, by revealing to him in 
 the language of deeds the meaning of his own deed. 
 Thus the typical punishment of crime takes the form 
 of simulating the treatment of the rebel, the rightless 
 man : it is an exclusion from society, within society, — 
 an incarceration, — an exclusion that may be revoked 
 
PUNISHMENT 259 
 
 when the argument has its effect. The argument is 
 clearer in proportion as the element of physical 
 suffering is minimized. The suffering of punishment 
 should reveal the worth of what the criminal has 
 ignored: his liberty, his free companionship and 
 friendship, his political powers, his ability to make 
 and execute plans in the community at large, his right 
 to build continuously on an achieved degree of power 
 and station, however modest. Discontinuity is a 
 sufficient argument, — ^if any argument is sufficient. 
 And if none is sufficient, the criminal is indeed the 
 rebel ; and must be so treated. The exclusion must be 
 as permanent as the unconvinced will. 
 
 The truth is that society cannot punish unless it can 
 create a "conviction." For as long as the criminal 
 retains the maxim of his deed, his suffering is a mere 
 hardship, — ^not an argument. The hardship becomes 
 punisliment only in so far as he perceives and accepts 
 its meaning. There can be no retribution without 
 reformation; this is the true principle underlying 
 modern changes in the treatment of delinquency and 
 crime. And the same principle reveals the inherent 
 difficulty in the whole theory of punishment, as an 
 incompletely transformed exhibition of social resent- 
 ment, or pugnacity. For society fails to convince, and 
 must always fail to convince, unless it actually has in 
 itself the good faith and good will of which it would 
 persuade him. It must be able to point beyond those 
 maladjustments which have borne hard on the indi- 
 vidual, and have made society itself a partner in his 
 crime, to the only pure and eternal element possible 
 
260 SOCIETY 
 
 in a human society, the will to correct with his help 
 its own errors. But punishment, having the external 
 shape of revenge, and administered by something less 
 than holy wills, runs counter to this revelation and 
 obscures it. The punishment of crime is, in form, 
 another crime. The act of punishing always contains 
 elements which tend to defeat its own intention. As 
 the executioner and the warrior, though their oflSces 
 were sanctified, have been counted unclean, and the 
 hands of those that have carried out the dead : so the 
 necessary meeting of evil seems attended with the 
 fatality of participating in the evil. 
 
 The same motives which in the dialectic of expe- 
 rience drove individual expression of pugnacity from 
 punishment to forgiveness thus have their force in 
 public action also; but the State cannot follow the 
 dialectic to this point. The State must punish. It 
 may and does exercise clemency; but clemency can be 
 effective only as following upon that conviction which 
 is the essence of punishment, and which involves 
 arrest and trial — or forced, discontinuity of action, 
 however brief. The State, speaking as it must to the 
 inner intention through the medium of deeds, has no 
 way of distinguishing a clemency prior to all punish- 
 ment from a meaningless passivity. Further, since the 
 criminal while possibly citizen, is also possibly rebel, 
 the State must recognize both possibilities. The State 
 must punish. 
 
 Further — and this aspect of the matter has not been 
 forgotten in theories of penology, but has seldom been 
 rightly placed — the criminal is not the only one who 
 
PUNISHMENT 261 
 
 is to be punished for his crime. We have said that 
 every member of a society is tinder the same pressure ; 
 we may now say that every member is under the same 
 punishment. The only justification for treating the 
 criminal by the educative method of punishment is 
 that he is, after all, of like mind with the rest of his 
 group; and they, in turn, are of like passions with 
 himself. It was this which, in primitive society, made 
 crime a common menace, calling for public, and not 
 merely for individual purification. The theory that 
 the gods must be propitiated was a mode of expressing 
 an actual condition. For in all minds, and not in a 
 few only, the goods which constitute a common culture 
 retain their persuasiveness only by perpetual contest 
 with the superior obviousness of the material goods 
 and the direct ways thereto. The deed of the unper- 
 suaded man, painted on the imagination of all who 
 know of it, conspires with the natural gravitation of the 
 human will. The relatively defenceless and vulnerable 
 fabric of the necessary good has been attacked in all 
 minds; the plague spot which appears must be taken 
 as symptomatic. A white slaver appears in a public 
 tribunal, and unblushingly expounds his occupation as 
 a form of business; and as I read his testimony his 
 'point of view' penetrates farther than my ears, and 
 I must take thought to revive the sources of my indig- 
 nation. "When thou sawest a thief, thou consentedst 
 with him and hast been a partaker with adulterers." 
 The community has thus a work to do which is not 
 limited to the person of the criminal. This work is 
 sometimes spoken of as "deterrent," — and so it is. 
 
262 SOCIETY 
 
 but this is a partial and an after-effect; in its imme- 
 diate force it is punitive, — it is the share of the entire 
 community in the suffering and purging which belong 
 to the thoughts of crime. It is not that the criminal 
 is suffering for the community; it is the community 
 which must suffer for and with him, must have its 
 sympathetic share in the argument of his punishment 
 because of its equally sympathetic share in his crime. 
 Hence the language of the State must be stern, unmis- 
 takable, public, and awakening ; the State must punish, 
 to remake the souls of all. 
 
 II 
 
 The Dialectic of Punishment 
 
 Dealing with crime thus involves a dilemma: it is 
 necessary to provide crime with its argument; yet in 
 doing so, society provides it with an unintended argu- 
 ment against itself. Whatever is defective in the 
 spirit of a community will show most clear in its 
 treatment of crime whether harsh, malicious, brutal, 
 sentimental, or simply callous. Public resentment 
 is never a holy reaction, unmixed with impatience, 
 contempt, and a desire to be undisturbed in its 
 own more decorous selfishness. The man who is 
 caught feels through the net the cunning eyes of 
 the uncaught. By a deep-wrought law of nature he 
 attracts the worst side of the social temper to himself : 
 the pursuer of crime adopts the arts of the pursued, 
 and becomes like him in quality and habit. It is hard 
 
THE DIALECTIC OP PUNISHMENT 263 
 
 to deal with evil except evilly. Even expletives of 
 condemnation vulgarize their users : one who employs 
 much vituperative language becomes assimilated to 
 the images he habitually invokes. In condemning the 
 vice that most tempts him, the hypocrite has commonly 
 found a subtle way of self-indulgence. The extreme 
 hostility provoked by crimes of sex is due in part to 
 the participation which their cognizance imposes, and 
 to the sense that resistance itself has forced an 
 unwilling consciousness upon their victims. As 
 administered by human beings, punishment contains 
 a self-defeating element. 
 
 The history of criminal law shows mankind early 
 aware of this difficulty, and devising various ways to 
 meet it. Blood vengeance, which speaks in the name 
 of the sacred spirit of the family, is an advance upon 
 individual vengeance. Something exalted and heroic 
 may enter into it; adversaries in feud may recognize 
 in each other the requirements of spirit and honor. 
 Yet the deed of honor fails to convince the family 
 spirit which is its victim; it simply transfers the 
 necessity of honor to the alternate member of the feud, 
 whom it has treated as an equal. Hence it fails to 
 punish. And it cannot punish, unless it can escape 
 from its simple opposition and equality into a region 
 inclusive of both members and their passions, a region 
 in which it can appeal to the criminal as endowed with 
 a right not alone to judge and punish, but to close the 
 argument by restoring the disturbed status. 
 
 Such a region was provided, by a true social instinct, 
 in the ancient places of asylum, which were not merely 
 
264^ 
 
 SOCIETY 
 
 places secured from violence, but also places whose 
 sanctity could overawe the minds and passions of both 
 accuser and accused. And that sanctity to which the 
 culprit might run for protection, having shown itself 
 so far beneficent to him, would be more nearly 
 convincing in its condemnation. The issue of such 
 an interval of security, with the advantage perhaps 
 of the passionless judgment of the guardians of 
 the place, would partake of the nature of a true 
 punishment. 
 
 But neither the interposition of asylum, nor of 
 judgment, nor of ordeal, nor of more rational trial 
 procedure,^ could offer the convicted person much hope 
 of restoration, at least as an intact individual, if given 
 over at last to the mercies of his accuser. To this 
 extent, another device, that of payment or compensa- 
 tion, to be accepted in lieu of death or mutilation, more 
 nearly conveyed the meaning of punishment. It also 
 tended to temper by reflection the passion of revenge ; 
 but this time by a calculating reflection instead of a 
 dominating religious dread. The spark of valid 
 resentment was certain to be somewhat diluted in the 
 desire of gain, and most patently to the accused, 
 whether the payment was taken over by the accuser, 
 or appropriated by the common or lordly purse. The 
 demand for a preliminary confession and apology, 
 while it mitigated the venality of the transaction and 
 
 2 It must be remembered that crimiBal procedure becomes a part of 
 punishment inasmuch as it determines the meaning and temper of the 
 punishment. It is the subject and verb of the 'sentence.' 
 
THE DIALECTIC OF PUNISHMENT 265 
 
 made the criminal a party to Ms own condemnation, 
 hardly secured the sincerity of the conviction. 
 
 The experience of the Greeks, embodied in their 
 legends, well shows the logic of the situation and 
 carries the problem a step farther toward solution. 
 The iniquity of vengeance would appear at its height 
 when crime broke out within the family, and so 
 involved the curse of repeated family crime, such a 
 curse as befell the ill-fated house of Atreus of Argos. 
 Atreus, the wronged husband (according to the version 
 of ^schylus), had no choice but to impose banishment 
 upon his brother TJiyestes. But Thyestes taking 
 refuge in the city sanctuary keeps alive by his 
 presence the element of rancor in Atreus; so that at 
 last the outraged spirit of family honor vents itself 
 in a counter-outrage upon the remaining spark of 
 sacred feeling in the outcast himself, his affection as 
 a father betrayed into eating the flesh of his slain 
 children. Thus Atreus, in punishing, injures that 
 which in punishing he seeks to preserve; and so with 
 each new step in the tragic history. Orestes alone, 
 driven rather by the command of Apollo than by 
 personal bitterness to the matricide which avenges his 
 father, seems to have acquired an honesty of spirit 
 that might reconcile Clytemnestra to her death. But 
 the deed of vengeance is greater than his consciousness 
 of it; its objective impiety he cannot overcome in an 
 adequate sense of its divine necessity; he, too, must 
 be tormented by the Furies. He has not been suffi- 
 ciently inspired to convince the guilty woman, hence 
 
266 SOCIETY 
 
 Ms attempt at punishnient is not free from guilt. 
 Apollo, apparently helpless, discharges his share of 
 responsibility by appeal to the guardian goddess of a 
 very human civilization, Pallas Athene. And she in 
 turn, finding the case "too passionate for a goddess," 
 still further humanizes the solution by instituting the 
 court of citizens, the court of the Areopagus, whose 
 first work will be the judgment of Orestes. Judging 
 as men, however, they can but find both for him and 
 against him: no act of human justice can solve the 
 riddle and discharge the Furies from their work. It 
 is Athene who must turn the scale, — and apparently 
 by an arbitrary touch, whose meaning remains a 
 mystery even in the work of -^schylus. She neither 
 sanctions the act of Orestes nor condemns it; she 
 regards it — so I interpret the legend — as an incident 
 of a faulty social structure from which no perfect 
 solutions can come. Orestes has the benefit of the 
 historic chance that he stands on the threshold of a 
 new order, which no merit of his could have created. 
 And what is the principle of this new order? It is the 
 dissolving of the family group, within which all pas- 
 sions are so strained that no guiltless punishment is 
 possible, in the political community. Under the 
 auspices of its divine protector, this community can 
 bring a perfect passionlessness into the judgment and 
 punishment of crime, and purge the process of the 
 barbarism of personal impulse. The wrong done to 
 the individual, and to the family, is sunk in the wrong 
 done to the city-state; and the city acts by reason 
 without wrath. The Furies are therefore freed from 
 
THE DIAIiECTIC OP PUNISHMENT 267 
 
 their mission and from their character; they become 
 henceforth the "gracious goddesses," enshrined 
 within the precincts of Athene's sacred hill. Punish- 
 ment at the hands of the State unites the solemnity 
 and refuge of the sanctuary with the rationality of 
 measure. Ought it not to convince the criminal, and 
 so solve the problem? 
 
 Our solutions are not fundamentally different from 
 those of the Greeks; and our experience in view of 
 these historic experiments may reveal the defect of 
 its principle. The great success of this political 
 process is that it localises the hurt, saving the accuser 
 from a further crime; it has shown no great power 
 to persuade the criminal. Indeed, the impetus of the 
 accuser's resentment is so far checked that the accused 
 seldom feels in public custody the element of asylum 
 which might provoke in him some sense of approval 
 toward the auspices which judge him. Perhaps this 
 resentment is too far impersonalized. Wherever 
 feeling runs high, there is still a tendency to evade the 
 circuit through the public court, and to appeal to the 
 "unwritten law" — ^which means the primitive pro- 
 cedure — or to the duel, or to the summary process of 
 Judge Lynch. The theory seems to be that the culprit 
 should not be spared the sting of feeling. The practice 
 is at odds with the theory, because conviction cannot 
 be produced in a medium of either fear or pride. But 
 the criticism points in the right direction: the State 
 has cut away too much of the meaning of ancient law : 
 it is passionless without spirit ; in becoming official it 
 
268 SOCIETY 
 
 has lost the co-operation of the presiding goddess. 
 The family could not be official : hence it must give way 
 to the State. But in losing the solemn concern of the 
 spirit of the family in the apathetic equanimity of 
 Pallas, that spark of feeling has been eliminated which 
 alone can positively persuade. 
 
 The State cannot import feeling into its procedure ; 
 though in its own dignity, if it has any, it may make 
 contact with the sources of feeling. The State must 
 use the language of the external deed. If this deed 
 is to become an argument, it must be interpreted by 
 the criminal himself; and he will so interpret it only 
 if he sees in it the deed of an august beneficence such 
 as commands his reverence as well as his fear. He 
 must see it as the deed of an ideal social order not 
 wholly identical with the order in which he finds 
 himself entangled. What the State alone cannot 
 command must be supplied by those free elements of 
 society which continue the motives of the ancient 
 family bond and the place of refuge.^ It is only 
 through a pervading activity of a consciousness 
 such as religion in times past has called out in 
 men, both accuser and accused, and working in con- 
 junction with the official procedure of the State, that 
 a genuine punishment, and hence a genuine restoration, 
 can be accomplished. 
 
 » Attempts are made to provide this missing element by personal 
 indulgence as a mitigation of punishment, in the hope of humoring 
 men back into good nature. This is a false hope, not in what it adds, 
 but in what it lets go. The test of success is that in the midst of punish- 
 ment, the State itself (and not an individual warden) commands respect 
 and good-will. 
 
THE DIALECTIC OV PUNISHMENT 269 
 
 Thus in the negative work of punishment as in the 
 positive work of education society in remaking human 
 nature seems to depend, for the last quasi-miraculous 
 touch of efficiency without which the rest of its work 
 has the ring of hoUowness and sham, upon an agency or 
 agencies beyond its own borders. To the quest of these 
 ulterior agencies of remaking we must now turn. 
 
PART VI 
 ART AND RELIGION 
 
CHAPTEE XXXni 
 VOX DEI 
 
 IN the transforming of man, society intends to 
 civilize Mm, religion to save him. In these terms 
 there is a suggestion that the work of society is more 
 or less superficial, that of religion more radical and 
 thorough. Man conforms his mind and habits to social 
 requirements and becomes 'polite': he submits his 
 soul to religion and becomes 'holy.' 
 
 But there is reason to question whether this tradi- 
 tional distinction can be maintained ; or whether there 
 is any legitimate distinction at all between the work 
 of society and the work of religioii on human nature. 
 To make man a social being, to lead him out of his 
 egoism and barbarity into the liberal interpretation 
 of his interests afforded by civic life and its destinies, 
 is not this to make him a religious being in the only 
 sense of religion that has valid meaning? 
 
 In the early days of human organization, the dis- 
 tinction between the social and the religious could not 
 have been drawn, not because all religion was social, 
 but because all social requirement was religious. The 
 setting-up of ideals, the defining of customs, the giving 
 of laws were understood as the voice of God to the 
 people. Vox populi had no other existence than in 
 vox Dei. If the interests of society were at all diver- 
 gent from those of religion, there was little oppor- 
 
274 
 
 ABT AND RELIGION 
 
 tunity to discover tlie fact : for when the ordering of 
 life is singly and simply from above, there is no 
 comparison of standards, and hence no rebellion in 
 the name of a social value. 
 
 But the time was bound to come when the two rules, 
 the sacred and the secular, should fall into contrast, 
 if only because of their diverse methods of origin, the 
 sacred relatively a priori, the secular relatively em- 
 pirical and pragmatic. And when this opposition has 
 occurred, history seems to show that the destiny of the 
 sacred is to yield to the secular. Tabus accumulated 
 beyond endurance; were long protected by faith and 
 fear ; but they have been swept away. Holy men fell 
 into the way of announcing counsels of perfection such 
 as would mutilate or destroy human nature, — the 
 sacred books are full of such counsels: for these, 
 practice provided an interpretation, such as all laws 
 need; and the interpretation quietly superseded the 
 announced ideal. The establishments and ordinances 
 of religion became extremely costly to society, in men 
 and time and treasure abstracted from social use, and 
 not infrequently too, in moral integrity : neither social 
 utility nor social ethics would sanction many ancient 
 forms of sacrifice. But the race has believed in its 
 social standards as against the oracles, and these 
 extravagances of religious requirement have dwindled 
 or disappeared. Today it is frequently asserted by 
 the exponents of religion themselves that our best 
 insight into the will of God is the verifiable welfare of 
 society. Our religion seems to become, in effect if not 
 in name, the religion of humanity. 
 
vox DEI 275 
 
 Thus the question has become acute whether the 
 reference to God is any longer significant. Is it more 
 than an imaginative widening of the horizon under 
 which the same acts and qualities are required, a 
 changing of names, as from 'goodness' to 'holiness,' 
 or from 'crime' to 'sin'? The tendency of history is 
 unmistakable. From "The voice of God is the voice 
 of the people" we have come to "The voice of the 
 people is the voice of God"; and it may well be that 
 the time has come to drop the "voice of God" as 
 otiose, frankly acknowledging our final insight into 
 human standards as "from below," i.e., from expe- 
 rience, socially transmitted. If we any longer main- 
 tain a separate place for religion in the work of trans- 
 forming human instinct, the burden of proof is upon us. 
 
 I accept the burden. And I begin by pointing out 
 an error in the logic of the argument we have just 
 reviewed. 
 
 The course of history seemed to show that the will 
 of God has tended to coincide with the weal of society ; 
 the inference was that the weal of society is the inde- 
 pendent fact, and hence the only fact that need be 
 considered. The inference is hasty. We may accept 
 the proposition, Nothing contrary to the welfare of 
 society can be accepted as the will of God. But the 
 postulate that A must not clash with B does not in the 
 least inform me what A is. I must plan my house so 
 as not to destroy the trees on my lot: this condition 
 does not supply me the plan of my house — ^would it 
 did! Eeligion must not tear down social values: — 
 
276 ABT AND BELIGION 
 
 this condition does not supply me with a religion. 
 What history suggests, at most, is that the welfare of 
 society has a negative or critical bearing on the inter- 
 pretation of the religious standard. We may be 
 negative pragmatists in the matter.^ But there is not 
 the slightest evidence, so far, that the will of God is 
 deducible from the good of society as an independent 
 fact. 
 
 And there is a large volume of evidence to the 
 contrary. Let us make the questionable admission that 
 we know and can define what social utility is ; it is still 
 true that the socially useful has never been reached 
 by directly aiming at it, but has always come as a 
 result of aiming at something else, as an independent 
 object. Social cohesion, loyalty, lawfulness are 
 dispositions upon which every social structure 
 depends, but which society cannot directly produce. 
 Already in the speculations of Plato and Aristotle we 
 find a deep anxiety as to what education, what myth, 
 what music, what lie if need be, will be likely to 
 generate the spirit from which socially useful be- 
 havior would naturally follow. Arguing from history, 
 it looks rather as if there could be no social good, 
 unless there is something more than social good &s a 
 primary object of pursuit. 
 
 In point of fact, society has always had its religion 
 in some form, — a principle of devotion which has 
 pervaded the social tissue, acting more or less like 
 an enzyme in furnishing energy and loyalty at points 
 
 1 For the meaning of the phrase 'negative pragmatism' see my book, 
 The Meaning of God, preface, pp. xiiif. 
 
vox DEI 277 
 
 needing support. Law-abiding behavior could not be 
 reached by the separate attention of each citizen to 
 each law: it has to be reached for the most part 
 through a disposition which of its own motion is "the 
 fulfilling of the law," or the major part of the law. 
 The man who measures each step by the law is not 
 the good citizen: he who watches the law, the law 
 needs to watch. There is a "spirit of the laws," 
 something which one might call a moral substance, 
 which shows itself in a spontaneous faith in current 
 institutions and ideals and fellow citizens, a willing- 
 ness to serve them and work with them, a spirit which 
 society can neither give nor take away, and yet 
 without which there is no society.^ 
 
 1 prefer to describe this spirit as a moral substance, 
 because when we look into it more closely it is not 
 simply a subjective temper but also a world of objects 
 engaging each individual's interest and will in logical 
 independence of his social entanglements ; and in this 
 world of objects we recognize the accumulated goods 
 of both religion and art. These goods do not arise 
 
 2 Mr. Graham Wallas has shown, in a fascinating study, how the 
 practical art of politics is concerned with what is instinctive and emo- 
 tional, not alone with what is reasonable or reasoned. He regards it 
 as somewhat ominous that this art betakes itself so frankly to ' ' exploit- 
 ing the irrational elements of human nature which have hitherto been 
 the trade secret of the elderly and disUlusioned " (Human Nature in 
 Politics, p. 177). The chief peril, as I see it, is not that political mana- 
 gers will address themselves to the unreasoned, but that they will make 
 a wrong guess as to the nature of the unreasoned sentiments they have 
 to deal with. When one leaves the rigorous path of influencing the will 
 of one 's fellows by argument alone, everything depends on what passions 
 one attributes to them. If with Bolingbroke (to use Mr. Wallas 's illus- 
 trations) one fancies himself dealing with 'that staring, timid creature. 
 
278 AET AND EELIGION 
 
 apart from social conditions, and are commonly reck- 
 oned as social products; but they appeal to the indi- 
 vidual as an independently appreciating being, as an. 
 original self. Because this substance has always per- 
 vaded society, its real relation to society is obscured; 
 and an attempt to define society apart from it would 
 be felt as a mutilation of society. But this circum- 
 stance only makes stronger the contention that social 
 good, defined apart from religion, is not self-sufficient. 
 And I shall try to indicate a method of comparing the 
 relative functions of each which will admit the 
 comparison with justice to both sides. 
 
 It is characteristic of the development of human 
 beings that the will to power tends to assume from time 
 to time the character of some leading interest, which 
 becomes the center of values for the whole life. This 
 leading interest may rise to the level of a passion. In 
 a boy's growth to maturity we can trace a series of 
 these absorbing concerns, seldom coincident with the 
 tasks set for him by his elders, but merging at last 
 (generally speaking) in an 'ambition' which at some 
 time or other struggles for supremacy with a personal 
 
 man, ' the result is likely to be supercilious and deceptive political action. 
 But if with Disraeli one realizes that 'Man is only truly great when he 
 acts from the passions, never irresistible but when he appeals to the 
 imagination,' there is room at least for a generous interpretation of the 
 unreasoned motive. Benjamin Kidd seems to have been near the ground 
 of experience in judging that the unreasoned element in politics, in its 
 last analysis, is a loyalty of religious character. The ebullition of 
 national feeling at the outbreak of the war showed, especially in France, 
 how politics in times of public stress tends to avow a lurking religions 
 ingredient, while patriotism tends to coincide for the moment with 
 religion. 
 
vox DEI 279 
 
 affection. To these two major passions, ambition and 
 love, correspond two major groups of institutions, 
 those of the public order and those of the private 
 order, as we shall name them. These together con- 
 stitute 'society' in so far as society has a definable 
 entity apart from religion and art. 
 
 Now what society does for human nature depends 
 on how completely it can satisfy the individual will. 
 A man can be said to be saved (to adopt the religious 
 terminology for the sake of our comparison) not alone 
 when he is reclaimed from rebellion or criminality; 
 he is saved in so far as he is not wasted, in so far as the 
 human material in him gets a chance at self-expression 
 and utilization. In this sense the question for society 
 is how much of each member it can save, not merely 
 how many it can preserve from disaffection and 
 rebellion. 
 
 Putting the question in this way, it is clear that 
 society never does save the whole man. In general, 
 society saves, or conserves, as much of a man as can, 
 at any time, find a valuation. It saves as much as it 
 knows how to use or esteem. The remainder is wasted. 
 And it may easily be that the better the case any set 
 of institutions can make out for itself as a whole, the 
 worse the plight of that portion of human nature (if 
 there is such a portion) which it cannot satisfy, because 
 it does not understand. 
 
 We shall attempt to estimate what part of human 
 nature can be thus * saved' by the public and the private 
 orders, at their best. 
 
CHAPTER XXXIV 
 
 THE PUBLIC ORDER AND THE 
 PRIVATE ORDER 
 
 POLITICAL and economic institutions we have 
 recognized as the particular playground and 
 home of the will to power, so far transformed that the 
 success of one does not necessarily mean the weakness 
 or defeat of another. These institutions may be 
 described as the 'public order'; and in this form, the 
 will to power may become the passion of 'ambition.' 
 To realize his ambition an individual must market his 
 talents, i.e., put them into a form in which they serve 
 other men, or seem to do so. Hence just in so far as a 
 man can be summed up in his marketable talents, he 
 can find satisfaction in the public order. 
 
 The world grows catholic in its power of appre- 
 ciation; a greater variety of talent finds its market. 
 The man who today may be a poet — and make a living 
 by it — ^might once have been by necessity a minstrel, 
 a priest, or a cobbler : the public order has not always 
 had a place for poets. Even now, the public judgment 
 of beauty is so far uncertain, and therefore imitative, 
 that the artist risks the fate of being either neglected 
 or lionized; there is not as yet a firm, discriminating, 
 and sober estimation of his worth. Apart from those 
 who despising the public refuse to join to their art 
 
THE PUBLIC OBDER AND PRIVATE ORDER 281 
 
 the effort to be intelligible (I am not speaking of that 
 vulgar inversion of motive which seeks advertisement 
 in conspicuous violence to common standards), there 
 are presumably always a number of lost poets, 
 prophets, philosophers "of whom the world was not 
 worthy": in the nature of the case, their existence 
 must be conjectural. It was not until Greek times that 
 the man whose gift for pure science was not conjoined 
 either with religious inspiration or an inherited fortune 
 could find a footing : and even now, for the most part, 
 he must unite this gift with the interest, or at least 
 the occupation, of teaching, — ^usually a natural and 
 most helpful union, sometimes a disastrous one. 
 
 Individuals may still go astray; but at least the 
 class has come to its own. We have names for 'poet,' 
 * artist, ' and the others ; we know the type of service, 
 and value it; almost we have conventionalized the 
 hardship and poverty once associated with it, as a 
 bungling penance. But what of the services for which 
 as yet no category exists? Is it clear, a priori, 
 that I must fit into any of these traditional rubrics, 
 "doctor, lawyer, merchant, chief"? If none of these 
 is tempting, the public order still bids me "choose" ; — 
 or invent and persuade. The category itself becomes 
 something of a menace through the type it attracts, a 
 type which may repel the finest quality in its own kind. 
 Francis Thompson was a poet by nature, if ever there 
 was a poet; yet not even his OAvn self -consciousness 
 could find its rightful certainty and pride until the 
 many judgments and pressures of the world had 
 harried him into a course of slow self-destruction. 
 
282 
 
 ART AND RELIGION 
 
 The marketable man is never the complete man in his 
 uniqueness; and conversely the whole man is never 
 marketable. 
 
 But where the pubUc order thus largely fails, the 
 private order wins a measure of success. The private 
 order comprises the institution of the family with the 
 quasi-institutions of friendship, amusement, and 
 society in the specific sense. Here it is anything but 
 a man's market-value .that determines his survival. 
 He is valued as much for what he cannot express as 
 for what he can. It is the 'pilgrim soul,' unarrived, 
 that is perceived and esteemed. The private order 
 has its dominant passion; it attempts to satisfy the 
 whole man by satisfying his sociability — or, more 
 particularly, his love. The instinct we call love, 
 whether in its special or more general forms, is mani- 
 fested in a craving which relates precisely to this 
 unexpressed, or 'subconscious' region of the will. Its 
 language is the language of signs and symbols rather 
 than of words ; and where it adopts words, it imposes 
 on them^ through poetry, the character of symbols, 
 with the task of carrying unreachable meanings. 
 
 This is the interpretation which society puts upon 
 the instincts of sex and parenthood. What love wants 
 is a mutuality of life in which each appreciates in the 
 other what he in substance is, rather than what he does. 
 
 Thus the private order is adapted to save much 
 that is lost in the public order. As the self of imme- 
 diate expression can reveal more than is seen in the 
 self of marketable technical expression, love does not 
 make its judgment or its choices primarily from what 
 
THE PUBLIC ORDER AND PRIVATE ORDER 283 
 
 it finds in the sphere of work; it looks to the self of 
 play, of art, of bodily beauty, of manner and, carriage, 
 emotion, aspiration, religious feeling. In the economic 
 virtues, the ability to endure hardship and to use 
 common sense, love is not unconcerned; negatively 
 speaking, the beloved person must not fall below the 
 average standard of prudence, competitive spirit, 
 persuasiveness, efficiency. For these are essential 
 parts of the definition of a human being ; they are, like 
 the courage expected by chivalry, a test of the quality 
 of the self of sentiment. It is for this reason that love 
 must be 'practical,' and takes ambition itself under 
 its control: but these things have no part in defining 
 the principle of selection itself. The family envisages 
 the public relations of its members within its own 
 inclusive understanding of them; it presupposes the 
 results of their activity there; it uses these results. 
 But it subordinates them to what it alone can see. 
 So far, the family is more inclusive, more satisfying 
 to human nature, and in this sense greater than the 
 State, together with all the professional and indus- 
 trial groups or guilds within it or beyond it. 
 
 But it is also less than the State, in so far as the 
 public order remains to it a mystery. The family is 
 unable wholly to follow in thought the self that is 
 valid in the public order, and estimate its achieve- 
 ments. The man who goes to work, goes 'out,' — and 
 into another sphere of thoughts and standards. What 
 the family grasps and uses of that self is its total 
 achievement, not the method and articulation of its 
 work. It is sometimes, in the complexer activities. 
 
284 AET AND BELIGION 
 
 unable to estimate even the moral quality of that 
 public person; we have grown used to the picture of 
 the crook who remains the moral hero of his family 
 circle and perhaps of his friends also. It tends to make 
 its own loyalties and amenities the measure of the 
 whole character. 
 
 Hence the public order sets up counter claims ; and 
 requires that all love shall show its value for 
 ambition or public service. It has its opinion of the 
 over domesticated man. The State has allowed the 
 family its great privacy and subconscious develop- 
 ment, less because of the satisfaction its members 
 found there, than because of the fact, noted by 
 Aristotle, that the strength of the private relation is 
 a measure of the possible strength of the public 
 interest, and that private intercourse brings certain 
 necessary contributions to the life of the State. 
 
 The direct question : Which is your more real self, 
 that of the public or that of the private order? most 
 persons would find it hard to answer. It may be that 
 the sexes differ in their natural finding of the dominat- 
 ing order. But for both men and women, both orders 
 are necessary to a complete personality, and in the 
 arrangements of life, each order, and each passion, 
 takes its turn at hegemony. The honors are divided 
 by alternation, and not by a disjunctive choice. 
 
 But this solution by alternation is not a solution of 
 the psychological problem: neither order is capable 
 of including the other, — are both together, in their 
 alternation, capable of freeing the entire man? 
 
CHAPTER XXXV 
 SOCIETY AND BEYOND SOCIETY 
 
 EVERYONE'S daily program falls into an alter- 
 nation between the public and the private order. 
 This is not a matter of convenience alone: it is a 
 psychological necessity. And the necessity is more 
 than a need of supplementation. It is true that each 
 order does, in the way we have described, compensate 
 the individual person for the lacks of the other order, 
 and forms a refuge from it. The life of the family 
 is narrow, over-personal, and subjective, and creates 
 a need which the public activity in some measure 
 appeases. The public order is hard, over-impersonal, 
 mechanical, superficial, relying overmuch on the suffi- 
 ciency of analytical intelligence : it drives back to more 
 complete and intimate realities. But the relations 
 between the two orders are deeper than this of supple- 
 mentation. For neither, without the other, can success- 
 fully do even its own part. Each to some extent pre- 
 supposes the other, — a fact which is not wholly ob- 
 vious, but which can be made evident by considering 
 what each order requires. 
 
 The tendency at present is to distinguish sharply 
 between a man's capacity for marketable service and 
 his private life. It is in the public order that the 
 maxim. Business is business, holds good : we ask what 
 
286 ART AND BELIGION 
 
 you can do, and if you do that well we ask no 
 further questions, and assume no further respon- 
 sibilities. There is a great relief and freedom in this ; 
 "toleration" wins more by it than by any other drift 
 of the time. Because of the cash-nexus, with its 
 impersonality, a man may now sell his labor, as 
 Arnold Toynbee pointed out, without selling himself. 
 Yet in all this it is not ignored, but assumed as under- 
 stood, that the success of any man's service depends 
 on a state of mind which the private order keeps alive. 
 I do not mean simply recreation and rest, though this 
 is part of it: I mean confidence, independence, and 
 originality of mind. What any man brings to market 
 is something which he, as a total and responsible agent, 
 can perform; he brings his inventiveness and powers 
 of discretion. The least of public servants is expected 
 to exercise a degree of mother-wit. If at any moment 
 the motive force of the public order should be reduced 
 to the momentum of its own definitions, its wheels 
 would stop.^ It is an undefined contribution, the life 
 conferred on the mechanism, including the power of 
 seeing things whole and judging them soundly which, 
 on the psychical side of the account, is exhausted in 
 the course of a day's work: and it is this which the 
 private order must be counted on to restore. Success 
 in the public order presupposes a state of mind given 
 by the private order. 
 
 1 1 am told that syndicalism la France and Italy knows a mode of 
 strike in which, instead of refusing to obey rules, all rules are literally 
 obeyed, — and no more: the employer, it may be the government, is 
 deprived of nothing it has contracted for, but only of judgment and 
 good will. 
 
SOCIETY AND BEYOND SOCIETY 287 
 
 But does success within the private order presup- 
 pose a state of mind given in turn by the public order? 
 What corresponds to success in the private order is 
 simply the winning of love, i.e., being acceptable or 
 prized as a companion. And in judging acceptability 
 the private order is indeed likely to ask few questions 
 about the nature of the day's work. Yet acceptability 
 builds on that work with the same tacit understanding. 
 Here again I do not refer to the visible or invisible 
 "means of support" which the private order con- 
 sumes : I mean, again, independence and reality of 
 mind. Although instinctively one expects that his own 
 liking will find response, one is always more or less 
 aware that this response is conditional. It is not an 
 axiom that one must have any friend at all. If such 
 fortune comes, it has a kind of corroborative force : to 
 be loved is a high order of validation." And if this 
 private world of mine does not respond, I am left 
 curiously uncertain of myself, as if I were somehow 
 unreal, and for that reason unable to love rightly. 
 Love ought to be a form of the will to power ; and my 
 love has no power. I find myself willing to suffer 
 anything, forgo anything for the sake of that accept- 
 ance : I am willing to forgo anything except just that 
 companionship. Yet this state of mind is the symptom 
 of false instinct. I should know, and if I were a real 
 
 2 Current speech has phrases which suggest more or less vaguely that 
 some objefitive affirmation is contained in the sentiment of personal 
 liking. Perhaps the vaguer ones are more nearly accurate, as "There 
 is something to him. ' ' The prestige of soldierdom in the eyes of maiden- 
 hood is of course the most conspicuous instance of the psychological 
 principle. 
 
288 ABT AND RELIGION 
 
 person would know, that the companionship I value 
 must come as a result of first being independently real. 
 Hence I cannot have it except at the price of being 
 independent of it. I must be in truth, and not in atti- 
 tude simply, "free as an Arab" of my beloved. And 
 this independence can only come through having an 
 object sufficiently absorbing and responsive, a valid 
 power in the public order. 
 
 We are speaking of the logic of our commonest social 
 attitudes, a logic which we breathe, not analyze. Its 
 sum is this : that each order accepts and uses persons 
 who are assumed, and must be assumed, complete and 
 real in their lives in the other order. The alternation 
 into which life falls means not alone that we are finding 
 a freedom in each order not found in the other; it 
 means also that we are becoming in each order what 
 is necessary that we may have any right in the other. 
 This is a highly effective alternation; and, so far as 
 we can sustain ourselves in this world with becoming, 
 rather than being, it is a self-sufficient routine, pro- 
 viding within itself for all its own necessities, — and 
 also for its own growth. To this extent, society is an 
 organism. 
 
 But the same analysis will show where the organism 
 fails. The fact of perpetual alternation is itself 
 ominous: it confesses not alone the constant under- 
 mining of satisfaction that Schopenhauer pointed out ; 
 it confesses the persistent crumbling of our qualifica- 
 tion; — that qualification we must renew by returning 
 to its source. And at its best this qualification is, as 
 
SOCIETY AND BEYOND SOCIETY 289 
 
 we said, mainly a hope and a becoming. Your guest 
 appears in your circle as one who presumably has 
 done his day's work, and has done it well. You intro- 
 duce him as Mr. Blank, engineer, or as Herr Ge- 
 heimrat, Dr. So-and-so : he at once receives credit for 
 all that engineers or Greheimrats are supposed to be. 
 These categories have their function: they impose 
 upon individuals typical characters which may fit so 
 loosely as to amount to caricatures, but they also im- 
 pose upon them ideals which they find themselves 
 bound to serve. No sooner is it understood that M. is 
 a 'scientist' than the imagination of his new acquaint- 
 ance finishes the picture, surrounds him with records 
 and apparatuses, adjusts the symbolic microscope to 
 his eye, and spreads upon the pages of learned journals 
 the announcements of his discoveries. And he, how- 
 ever exasperated or amused by the inept trappings of 
 this vision, finds himself obliged to respond to the 
 essence of the faith it represents : he sees that it is in 
 substance an appeal to his good faith as a member of 
 that social world. Whatever is vague, idly classifica- 
 tory, and vain in that picture may be corrected or 
 ignored ; it still searches out what is merely empty or 
 merely promissory in himself. He has no right in that 
 place unless somewhere he has some stable character, 
 founded on achievement not merely accepted as such, 
 but real. He must bring to that social life a validation 
 of spirit which not even the public order can furnish 
 him, dealing as this order does partly in coin and 
 partly in approximations and hopes. He has need of 
 an absolute. 
 
290 ABT AND BELIGION 
 
 I conclude that in two ways the social world, at its 
 best, fails to satisfy, and hence to release or save the 
 human being. It fails to provide within its own 
 resources the reality and independence which it de- 
 mands, and in fact uses ; it is living upon borrowed 
 capital. And given this capital, it still fails to satisfy; 
 because while the public order lends to the private 
 order a scope and expression that the private order 
 lacks, it does not provide scope and expression for just 
 that part of the human being wherein the private order 
 supplements the public order. What the public order 
 fails to see is perceived and appreciated in the 
 family, — ^that is true : but the family is unable to give 
 this part its needed currency, or set it to work in the 
 world. This residue, perhaps an infinite residue, is 
 hence imperfectly set free. 
 
 And we may also see the conditions under which 
 these defects could be made good. As the instinctive 
 life of man everywhere demands an environment 
 within which it can be active, and as the rule prevails 
 that the most inward and hidden capacities demand 
 and respond to the widest environment,^ there must 
 be an objective arena of unlimited scope for the lost 
 powers. And this arena must be one in which a veri- 
 table and unqualified success of some sort is possible — 
 a sufficient guarantee of reality; and such a success as 
 might enlist a more comprehensive passion than either 
 the public or the private order calls forth — hence a 
 genuine independence. There must be, in brief, an 
 
 s Of. The Philosophical Eeview, May, 1916, p. 490. 
 
SOCIETY AND BEYOND SOCIETY 291 
 
 adequate and attainable object for the human will to 
 power. 
 
 And in two ways also, experience has attempted to 
 supply such an arena and such an object. First, there 
 are parts of the world more plastic than others, more 
 amenable to wish and fancy ; in these, men have learned 
 to create a career both of sense and of idea, in which 
 their desires at once chained to the real and expanding 
 into the infinite fihd rest in the midst of their own 
 motion. Play first opens this vista, giving as we have 
 said the habit of success : and then play is transmuted 
 into art as the growth of idea outruns the literal 
 possibilities of the material. Art is the region which 
 man has created for himself, wherein he can find scope 
 for unexpressed powers, and yet win an absolute 
 success, in testimony of his own reality. One who 
 merely conquers a world may still wish for more 
 worlds to conquer; but if, as artist, one has created 
 a world, the will to power has reached an ultimate goal. 
 
 Second, religion, whose mission is continuous with 
 that of art and which some conceive as a developed 
 poetry. But religion intends to transcend the imagi- 
 nation, and to reveal a world which has an independent 
 reality; herein it exceeds the scope of art. More 
 completely than any part of the private order, religion 
 promises to recognize all the resources of subconscious 
 capacity: "All men ignored in me. That I was worth 
 to God." It intends to save the entire man, without 
 remainder; and if it can offer to this entire self the 
 kind of scope, actuality, and permanence afforded by 
 the State, it may fulfil its promise. 
 
292 ART AND RELIGION ' 
 
 Art and religion have their own institutions, and are 
 commonly included, as we said, among the resources 
 of 'society.' But both appeal primarily and directly 
 to the exploring and originative self which social 
 inheritance, authority, and imitation can help only 
 'after it has engaged for itself with its own realities. 
 Art and religion are always in this sense 'beyond 
 society'; and dealing with them, the individual also 
 (not in his private capacity) is beyond society and 
 beyond the State. 
 
CHAPTEE XXXVI 
 THE WORLD OF REBIRTH 
 
 IT would be a mistake to think of religion and art 
 as arriving late upon the scene of history, as high 
 and last products of evolution, to take care of those 
 fragments of human nature left unsatisfied by the 
 social order. We would better not try to date their 
 arrival unless we are prepared to date the rise of 
 reason; but in any event, they arrive early: as soon 
 as man is ready to contemplate his experience 'as a 
 whole ' they are there. They undertake to provide for 
 the whole creature not for remainders: and as the 
 various social interests and institutions set up inde- 
 pendent menages, religion and art take care of 
 residues simply because they continue to be responsible 
 for the whole. And while in their earliest identifiable 
 fornis they may seem simply to be playing about the 
 horizon of consciousness like so much heat lightning, 
 it is because the forces at work everywhere within the 
 horizon become visible there. The rim contains all 
 that is inside; and if the human world-picture or the 
 scheme of human purposes has a conceptual rim, it is 
 their work. 
 
 I say their work, because at first religion and art 
 co-operaie in providing that "objective arena" we 
 were calling for, — an arena adequate for the whole 
 
294 ABT AND BBLIGION 
 
 human spirit, and so by implication for any possible 
 lost powers. Myth, for example, is snch a joint 
 product, neither pure art nor pure religion, repre- 
 senting a domain largely imaginary and yet partly 
 coincident with reality supersensible and super-social ; 
 and in the world of myth the human mind may be 
 regarded as occupied in staking out cosmic claims 
 wherein desire and hope can expand without limit. 
 But myth affords a rather meager diet for the will; 
 and although it contains in symbol the promise of the 
 literal achievement of the future, it would hardly have 
 flourished as it did had there not been a more concrete 
 satisfaction behind it. This more concrete satisfaction 
 was found in the direct regulation of social life from 
 above by conceptions whose origin was at once reli- 
 gious and aesthetic, conceptions in which every man 
 could share as he could share in the ideas of the sacred 
 epic, but in this case he could share actively, and not 
 only as one regulated, but also as regulator. 
 
 I am thinking of the stage in which all custom was 
 sacred custom and all law sacred law. And I am think- 
 ing of the fact that these bodies of regulation were 
 not simply as we commonly picture them a mould cast 
 over men's lives, but a career for their wills. As a 
 matter of course the law is something which men in 
 general obey, for the law has power behind it; but 
 then, law is also something which men transmit and 
 interpret, even if they do not make it, and so far every 
 man shares in the wielding of that power whatever it 
 may be. Now when the power behind the law is a 
 religious power; when as the divine 'word' the law 
 
THE WORLD OF BEBIBTH 295 
 
 has mana in it; when learning it has the value of 
 communion with the divine thinker, and sometimes 
 confers the power to work miracles by the sacred 
 syllables alone, then to stand at the source of the law, 
 whether as authors or transmitters, is to touch an 
 instrument of unmeasured potency. There was a time 
 when every man was expected to assume this position, 
 though there were also specialists in the law; and to 
 this end, every man must receive a legal education, — 
 he must be 'initiated' into the sacred traditions of his 
 tribe. As compared with our own, this educational 
 process was brief, solemn, and intense; and further, 
 it left an abiding mark. The boy emerged from it a 
 man. It was his second birth.^ He was coming into 
 his social powers ; but he was coming into them through 
 first reaching a more ultimate power. 
 
 Looking upon the law as we now do, it might not be 
 wholly easy to see in it a sphere for a passionate 
 ambition transcending that of the social order. Still 
 less, if we adopt the prevalent view of early law as 
 a thing dealing chiefly with terrors, consisting for 
 the most part of tabus, prohibitions accompanied by 
 
 1 The conception of rebirth first appears in history in celebration 
 of this event. In the law books of India we have the developed account 
 of a conception already ancient. "Their first birth," says the 
 Vasishtha Dharmasastra speaking of the three upper castes, "is from 
 their mother; their second from their investiture with the sacred girdle. 
 In that second birth, the Savitri (verse of the Kig Veda) is the mother, 
 but the teacher is said to be the father. Through that which resides 
 above the navel his offspring is produced when he initiates Brahmanas, 
 when he teaches them, when he causes them to offer oblations, when he 
 makes them holy." (Sacred Books of the East, xiv, p. 9.) 
 
296 AET AND EELIGION 
 
 threats, and consistent with the theory that religion 
 arises in the instinct of fear. But it is not alone in the 
 Hebrew songs that we find declarations of love for and 
 delight in the law inexplicable by any such views, yet 
 seeming to have something more than a rhetorical 
 basis. We have to remember that this initiation con- 
 centrated into itself all the new vistas and liberties 
 that come with the advent of maturity. The physical 
 transition of puberty is, in warmer countries, com- 
 monly much rapider than with us ; the mental liberation 
 is felt with corresponding keenness. But the expe- 
 rience is not merely subjective. Law presupposes a 
 very substantial form of human self-contemplation. 
 The learner's eyes are opened: he looks out into a 
 world of objects which have always been around him, 
 but uncomprehended, — ^the shapes of tribal life in its 
 cycle of generations, and the principles of its structure, 
 not tangible and transitory but intelligible and perma- 
 nent. He sees himself a responsible agent in a tribal 
 destiny which may have had a beginning in the dawn 
 of time but which has no terminable future. And he 
 is an irresistible agent so far as he himself can give 
 birth to thoughts such as all members of this undying 
 community are bound to worship and obey. He finds 
 himself emerging into the only domain in which 
 unlimited power is possible to a finite being, the world 
 governed by ideas. Through the weakest and dimmest 
 part of his nature he is becoming strong, because he is 
 becoming partner with his gods and perceives, though 
 faint and far-off, the principle of their omnipotence. 
 
THE WORLD OP EEBIETH 297 
 
 It is thus not wholly without reason that he claims to 
 have found in the law a moment of absolute satis- 
 faction. His second birth as contrasted with his first 
 may with some justification be described as "real, 
 exempt from age and death." (Manu, S. B. E., xxv, 
 p. 57.) 
 
 This transition is in substance the same as that which 
 we now often speak of as conversion. In all ages, 
 adolescence, recapitulating race history, finds religion 
 betimes on the scene, offering its own career to the 
 will in terms of a law of life that runs deeper than the 
 law of the land. Conversion, let us note, is possible 
 only when one can get a reflective view of human 
 existence in its natural round, its cost in labor, thought, 
 and pain, and its margin of aspiration. It comes to 
 adolescence because adolescence has for the first time 
 the data for this reflection and the capacity of full 
 self-consciousness.^ To be mature is to see the 
 pleasure of life in the setting of its labors; to be 
 adolescent is to have sufficient vigor to welcome it all. 
 To be converted is to achieve this welcome, to catch 
 the spirit of the world in full view of both its hardships 
 and its allurements. It is to perceive the law of the 
 whole process in such a light that to live by it and to 
 promote it takes immediate precedence of every other 
 
 2 This is just about all the truth there is in that dictum of Paulseu 's 
 that conversion presupposes the world-weariness of a blasfi civilization, — 
 with the conclusion that the Germanic peoples have never been truly 
 converted. Ethics, Book I, ch. iv. He was speaking, however, of eon- 
 version to Christianity, a somewhat different matter, of which more 
 later on. What conversion presupposes is the power of self-conscious 
 reflexion on human destiny. 
 
298 ABT AND KELIGION" 
 
 satisfaction, and especially of love and ambition, the 
 passions of the social order. 
 
 We may still learn something of the nature of our 
 'moral substance' from early forms in which this law 
 was cast. 
 
CHAPTER XXXVII 
 THE SACRED LAW 
 
 A RANDOM page or two is sufficient to convince 
 any reader that the flavor of the sacred law 
 books of the world is unique, whether or not it is to 
 his relish. As compared with any modern statute 
 book, one is impressed by the mixture of the solemn 
 and the trivial, and by the absence of reference either 
 to individual rights or to social welfare as deliberate 
 ends. The modern law is largely an embodiment of 
 the social motives: the ancient law is largely an 
 embodiment of that wherein religion and art differ 
 from society in their appeal to the will. It is just 
 this which makes it particularly valuable for our 
 present enquiry. 
 
 As typical of what to our consciousness are the least 
 profitable elements in the sacred law, let us take this 
 list of the duties of a Snataka, a twice-born man who 
 has finished his studentship : 
 
 Let him not beg from anybody, except from a king and 
 a pupil ; 
 
 Let him not dwell together with a person whose clothes 
 are foul; 
 
 Let him not step over a stretched rope to which a calf is 
 tied; 
 
 Let him not spit into water ; 
 
300 AKT AND EELIGION 
 
 Let him eat his food facing the east ; silently let him swallow 
 the entire mouthful, taking it up with four fingers and a 
 thumb; and let him not make a noise while eating; 
 
 Let him not dine together with his wife, else his children 
 will be destitute of manly vigor; 
 
 Let him not ascend a tree ; let him not descend into a well ; 
 let him not blow the fire with his mouth ; 
 
 Let him not ascend an unsafe boat, or any unsafe convey- 
 ance; 
 
 Let him disdain assemblies and crowds ; 
 
 Let him not pass between the fire and a Brahmana, nor 
 between two fires, nor two Brahmanas ; 
 
 Let him not cross a river swimming ; 
 
 Let him not set out on a journey when the sun stands over 
 the trees; 
 
 When he has risen in the last watch of the night and has 
 recited the Veda, he shall not lie down again. 
 
 It might be straining a point to call this a mixture 
 of the solemn and the trivial. Apart from sporadic 
 traces of ancient tabus, it belongs to the later, metic- 
 ulous stages of law-making, and the gravamen of 
 profound human issues is lacking. The primitive 
 decalogue, or the Twelve Tables of Eome, would give 
 us a different proportion; but in no case would we 
 find a basis of social utility. 
 
 Most certainly, religion was regarded as highly 
 useful : it offered itself as a means to the ' ' great prac- 
 tical ends" of life, — subsistence, tribal increase, suc- 
 cess in war and other enterprises : any god worth the 
 name would be of help in such matters. Eeligion had 
 no scorn for utility. Yet I repeat my belief that the 
 sacred law books of the world are closed with seven 
 seals to those who try to see in them social instru- 
 
THE SACKED LAW 301 
 
 ments, however crude, for reaching social goods. 
 Religion had ends of its own : its utility was a conse- 
 quence. All the social, even the physical ends of life, 
 once caught in the perspective of the sacred concerns 
 remain incidents in the profounder economy. When 
 eating and food-getting have once become implicated 
 in the circuits of mana, they never quite return to the 
 status of simple physical satisfaction.^ Religion 
 undertakes not to disregard utility, nor yet to follow 
 it, but rather to give laws to utility, by conferring upon 
 all subordinate ends the quality of its own inter- 
 pretation of the will to power. 
 
 What this interpretation is, early religion itself had 
 no perfect way of expressing. When it tries to give 
 reasons for obedience, it commonly presents its case 
 in highly utilitarian fashion: as a system of rewards 
 and punishments often frankly material in quality, 
 religious law not infrequently proclaims the advan- 
 tages of holiness as the best-found way to social goods 
 (and especially to esteem) or to the joys of heaven, 
 
 1 The same may be said of evils and wrongs as of goods. A crime 
 does not lose its basis in physical injury, nor does the punishment of 
 crime cast loose from the feeling of resentment; but the whole situation 
 acquires a wider meaning when the interest of the deities is involved. 
 Speaking of the sacred law of early Bome, Professor Henry Goudy says: 
 "It punished murder, for it was the taking of a god-given life; the 
 sale of a wife by her husband, for she had become his partner in all 
 things human and divine; the lifting of a hand against a parent, for 
 it was subversive of the first bond of society and religion, — ^the rever- 
 ence due by a child to those to whom he owed his existence; incestuous 
 connexions, for they defiled the altar; the false oath and the broken 
 vow, for they were an insult to the divinities invoked; the displacement 
 of a boundary or a landmark, not so much because the act was provoca- 
 tive of feud as because the march-stone itself, as the guarantee of peace- 
 ful neighborhood, was under the guardianship of the gods." 
 
302 ABT AND RELIGION 
 
 or to both. From the standpoint of a wise social 
 philosophy it seems obvious enough that the sacred 
 law is but making a shrewd appeal to the ingrained 
 love of approval to drive with the developing indi- 
 viduality of the self-conscious animal a good social 
 bargain; it is arranging that his egoism and vanity 
 shall turn the social mill. 
 
 I shall not debate the matter at lei^gth. But I may 
 point out that in the midst of the welter of banal 
 motives, it is clear that transposing the prospect of 
 reward to the transcendent alters its psychological 
 quality. One who daily recites the Savitri verse during 
 three years, untired, is assured by Manu that he "will 
 enter after death the highest Brahman, move as free 
 as air, and assume an ethereal form"; the pitiable 
 bathos and inadequacy of this dazzle of supernatural 
 potency stamp it as an attempt less to describe a literal 
 result than to encourage an adherent germ of some- 
 thing different from the visible and material satis- 
 faction. And while the esteem of the multitude seems 
 to have been in the eyes of the Eastern saint a most 
 impressive reward, so much so that his type names, 
 the "princely man" of Confucius, the Aharat, etc., 
 were names of social distinction as well as of religious 
 attainment, the law occasionally hits upon a clear 
 statement to the effect that it aims less to provide 
 respect than to make men worthy of respect. "He 
 who knows and follows the law is a righteous man: 
 he becomes most worthy of praise in this world and 
 after death gains heaven." Such is the opening and 
 wholly typical appeal of the Vasishtha Dharmasastra. 
 
THE SACKED LAW 303 
 
 II 
 
 If any evidence of tlie non-utilitarian basis of the 
 sacred law were needed beyond the character of the 
 laws themselves, it might be found, together with some 
 positive light upon the religious end, in certain inklings 
 of its psychological origin. The law is sometimes 
 said to have its source (or organ of reception) in the 
 'soul' as distinct from the prudential reason. Now 
 the human being, if we bring together the testimony 
 of ancient religions, is provided with a great variety 
 of souls. But in general, the soul is that part of a man 
 which holds conversation with the supersensible world : 
 and only a being with a soul can either receive the law, 
 whose origin is in heaven, or appreciate and be 
 governed by it. One of the best literary instances of 
 the soul engaged in devising and promulgating the law 
 is found in the sayings of Ptah Hotep. For Egypt 
 had an especially usable development of the soul-idea 
 (and it would be hard to say how much of moral 
 progress depends on the discovery of usable concep- 
 tions). Among the Egyptian souls there was one, the 
 ha^ which was particularly concerned with moral and 
 assthetic discrimination. To "offend the ka" was 
 about the same as, with us, "to offend the finer feel- 
 
 2 The Tea is defined as the immaterial self or double, having the form 
 of the body, but being without the power of acting upon matter. Its 
 action therefore must be wholly persuasive or advisory, and perhaps 
 for this reason it was at the same time the object of a somewhat chival- 
 rous regard, and a source of the degree of chivalry attained (if I may 
 be allowed the anachronism) by the ancient Egyptians. The personal 
 affections centered about the Tea, and it received the chief tendance after 
 death. 
 
304 AET AND BBLIGION 
 
 ings"; and reverence for the ha implied a careful 
 listening to the dictates of a religiously sensitized 
 conscience. The ha takes under its protection the 
 otherwise defenceless rights of persons and occasions, 
 even to the requirements of courtesy. For example, 
 Ptah Hotep, not himself a priest but a wholly com- 
 petent interpreter of the moral tradition of Egypt, 
 gives instructions to his son thus : 
 
 Do not pierce the host at table with many glances : it is an 
 abomination to the Tta for them to be directed at him. . . . 
 
 Diminish not the time of following the heart (i.e., of 
 recreation) for that is an abomination to the Tta, that its 
 moment should be disregarded. . . . 
 
 The washing of the heart shall not be repeated: it is 
 abomination to the ha. . . . (The washing of the heart being 
 words uttered to give vent to feelings angry or otherwise.) 
 
 It is the ha that openeth the hands of the host. . . . 
 
 It is evident that the ha is the guardian not alone of 
 the uncodified obligations of loyalty, but also of the 
 generous and outgoing impulses, and of the more 
 intangible demands of the relation of guest to host, 
 etc. It is clearly, too, a function which can be appealed 
 to only with some maturity of experience. Yet it acts 
 dogmatically; it judges the quality of an act without 
 regard to its experienced utility; the standard of 
 judgment seems to be at once religious and aesthetic, — 
 an undistinguished union of the two in which now one 
 and now the other is predominant. 
 
 This is not a type of judgment with which we are 
 unfamiliar. For good or ill, this ancient religious 
 legislation is the first great extension over human life 
 
THE SACKED LAW 305 
 
 of the sway of a priori reason, — ^that is to say, the 
 assertion of thought, in advance of trial and error, that 
 something will necessarily be found true or valuable 
 within experience. If anything is true a priori, it is, 
 of course, true for all time and in all circumstances. 
 Accordingly, a sense of unrestricted validity enters 
 into this legislation, and accompanies it unflinchingly 
 into its profoundest absurdities. Questions of scope 
 aside, it must be agreed that if the human will is to 
 find any spot of complete mastery, it can only be 
 possible through some such grasp of values that 
 endure: to adapt a phrase of John Locke's, men can 
 only be born free as they are born thus rational and 
 prophetic. Whether we can grasp any such durable 
 principles is a question of fact not here in debate. 
 But it is clear that so far as a people had in common 
 the same type of sensitivity, the same ka, the same 
 necessary interests at the basis of the sesthetic judg- 
 ments therein uttered, the pronouncements of any 
 healthy ka would tend to be good for all others. And 
 a prevalent respect for such utterances would tend 
 to make people plastic toward them, and so to lend 
 to one who spoke authentically in the name of the ka 
 the power of an artist over his material. The life- 
 forms of a social group under these conditions would 
 become the medium for an art in which nothing desir- 
 able could be excluded as impossible, and in which 
 everything desirable could be expected to last. 
 
 Such seems, in fact, to have been the position 
 assumed for itself by the sacred law. And in Ptah 
 Hotep himself I find the most ancient expression of 
 
306 ABT AND RELIGION 
 
 the prophetic consciousness with regard to his own 
 precepts. "The quality of truth," he said, "is among 
 their excellences. Nor shall any word that hath here 
 been set down cease out of this land forever." 
 
 Ill 
 
 In the amenity and chivalry of the Egyptian spirit 
 it would be hard to say whether the aesthetic or the 
 moral motive is dominant. But in the laws of Persia 
 and of India there are frequent passages in which the 
 aesthetic sense, the regard for decorum, the desire for 
 purity amounting at times to inconceivable squeamish- 
 ness, is in control. The list of duties of a Snataka 
 above quoted is an example of such almost purely 
 (Esthetic apriorism. These alleged duties are largely 
 dictates derived from a notion of personal dignity, a 
 form of art which decrees what external carriage shall 
 be taken as a symbol of an internal ascendency. To 
 step over a stretched rope to which a calf is tied will 
 be admitted hazardous if dignity is to be preserved; 
 and perhaps an exceptionally holy man would need 
 to be reminded of the contingency. Such rules would 
 have the incidental utility of keeping countenance with 
 the bystanders; but as is always the case in aesthetic 
 judgments, the feelings of the bystanders have a dis- 
 coverable and defensible basis. By undertaking some- 
 thing beyond his physical powers the holy man brings 
 discredit both upon himself and upon his office; for 
 nothing more quickly disproves the divine quality than 
 an inability to recognize one's own sphere of validity 
 and its limits. Climbing trees, swimming rivers. 
 
THE SACKED LAW 307 
 
 ascending unsafe boats and the like, are for the 
 experimental stages of youth, not for high-caste house- 
 holders with a tradition to sustain. With us, dignity 
 is a far less vulnerable essence and so requires no such 
 scrupulous protection ; but we have had the advantage 
 of learning from the Stoics that "freedom from per- 
 turbation" may be a purely internal accomplishment. 
 These beginnings had their own justification. 
 
 But they were justified also in another way. The 
 aesthetic standard has a hospitable nature and protects 
 the early stages of many another budding ideal. To 
 exclude the jarring and unfit is to give every voice of 
 inner protest, from whatever source, a chance to be 
 heard. 
 
 And after all, it is not a matter of surprise that 
 the first efforts in law should have been innocent of 
 the argument from effect to cause as we understand 
 it : legislation based on social utility is not yet a fully 
 accepted practice. The surprise is rather that, 
 referring itself to independent principles, this ancient 
 law should so frequently have hit upon the useful. 
 Without declining to recognize in men only a few 
 centuries earlier than ourselves a kindred common 
 sense, it seems fair to judge with most recent students 
 of the history of law that the rules regarding purity 
 and purifications, in the midst of much that is over- 
 drawn, have unwittingly anticipated important prin- 
 ciples of general sanitation. Esthetic regard for 
 'decency' has always been an important factor in 
 racial health and soundness. (But let me say in 
 passing that it seems to me an open question whether 
 
308 ABT AND RELIGION 
 
 the aesthetic standard in the conduct of sex-behavior 
 does not to this day contain more truth and meaning 
 than the hygienic and eugenic utilities so commonly 
 regarded as ultimate tests; — to my mind these tests 
 fall into the logical position of 'negative pragmatism'.) 
 The significant tabus which center about the feeling 
 that blood is a substance of mysterious potency have 
 probably an aesthetic basis; but they have had an 
 immense utility, as in fixing social attitudes toward 
 murder and suicide, in the treatment of blood-kinship, 
 in the care of women, and in the treatment of disease. 
 A great deal of disutility has accompanied this utility 
 and in time outweighed it. But this fact does not 
 cancel the primary fact that the aesthetic judgment 
 tends to find the useful long before the power of causal 
 reasoning is sufficiently developed to find it. It must 
 be remembered, too, that these utilities were not 
 superficial, but the radical utilities of human life. If 
 the struggle for existence has eliminated the groups 
 which lacked this happy correspondence of intuition 
 with vital expediency, the fact remains that in those 
 that survived the intuition itself has operated as an 
 independent organ of judgment. 
 
 Even when the causal connection is invoked in the 
 sacred law, it is frequently a postulate of the fitness 
 of things rather than a result of empirical observa- 
 tion. Certain types of behavior ought to have certain 
 results; and such results are forthwith ascribed to 
 them. ThuSj upper castes may marry only upper 
 castes; otherwise, "the degradation of the family 
 certainly ensues, and after death, the loss of heaven." 
 
THE SACEED LAW 309 
 
 Buying a wife is an undesirable way of acquiring one, 
 because *'sbe who has been bought by her husband 
 afterward unites herself with strangers." And, as 
 in the rules already quoted, if one dines with one's 
 wife, "his children will be destitute of manly vigor." 
 Causality of this sort implies crediting the objective 
 world with a structure akin to one's own principles 
 of preference. The idea of karma is the most complete 
 expression of this trait: for karma means that the 
 world is at bottom a moral order in which whatever 
 ought to result does result. Here the aesthetic 
 apriorism gives way to an ethical apriorism. 
 
 IV 
 
 In the demands or supposed demands of fitness it 
 is never easy to detect the point at which the aesthetic 
 disappears in the ethical. The many rules which dis- 
 tinguish lawful from unlawful occupations, or clean 
 from unclean foods, may have little behind them apart 
 from the whims of feeling except historical attitudes 
 associated with the several materials dealt with. If 
 the Brahmana trades he must not sell stones, salt, 
 hempen cloth, etc., through a long list; nor must he 
 lend "like a usurer," But to this last named rule 
 there is an exception which introduces a new element. 
 The Brahmana must not lend "unless he to whom he 
 lends is exceedingly wicked, neglecting his sacred 
 duties." There is some justification, it appears, for 
 dealing foully with the foul if one deals with them at 
 all. The principle of balance here is no longer pri- 
 
310 AKT AND BELIGIOK 
 
 marily aesthetic, the elements of the picture are the 
 wills of free men in noetic interplay, and appeal is 
 made to a sentiment of a priori justice. Upon such a 
 sentiment of ethical balance early equity was built. 
 
 The symmetry of the lex talionis rides rough-shod 
 over the psychological differences of actions outwardly 
 similar. It ignores intentions and circumstances. Its 
 simplicity is thus specious ; and with all 'natural right' 
 it must fall under the suspicion of historically minded 
 thinkers like Sir Henry Maine. But the psychological 
 observer sometimes forgets that the main facts in the 
 psychology of any situation are the facts which to the 
 minds concerned seem objective. We dare not forget 
 that the force of a law is in the mind that interprets 
 it, not in the actual circumstances or motives which 
 breed the occasion. Ideally speaking, the only real 
 situation is the situation as felt and understood by 
 those that take part in it; and simple minds will con- 
 ceive their own deeds and interests simply. The 
 symmetry of early law is the very quality which, by 
 its obvious give and take, is fittest to serve as a lan- 
 guage. The punishment which has the saving grace 
 of fitting the crime as the perpetrator conceives it is 
 the only punishment which has any chance of seeming 
 right to him. He can be reconciled if at all only by a 
 reaction which he can read at once as meaningful. 
 The sacred law may well have had in this respect a 
 literal 'saving grace' such as more carefully studied 
 measures might wholly miss. 
 
 This primitive equity of balance is not incapable of 
 progress. Any growth in understanding the nature 
 
THE SACKED LAW 311 
 
 of the act to be balanced will be echoed in the treat- 
 ment; hence primitive equity, so far from being fixed, 
 is highly variable. According to the Jewish law, if 
 a son were to strike his father, he must be put to 
 death (Exodus 21. 15) ; the code of Hammurabi pre- 
 scribes that he must lose his hand. Fitness may be 
 claimed for each rule; the deciding factor is to be 
 found in the conception of the offence, and this con- 
 ception is capable of indefinite refinement. 
 
 And I doubt whether any degree of progress will 
 do more than perfect this refinement. The principle 
 of equity we shall not outgrow. Deficient as the sacred 
 law is in legal insight, it was not astray in its first 
 principles. Indeed its special and only proper function 
 was the finding of first principles ; and it may be well 
 to attempt a summary of what is permanently valid in 
 its work. 
 
 The sources of value are to he preferred above all 
 specific values that flow from them. This is not a 
 maxim of prudence, dictating a wise regard as for the 
 goose that lays the golden eggs. It is rather a prin- 
 ciple of value-experience. It shows itself not only in 
 the recurrent demands for the honoring of the gods, 
 the ancestors, the father and mother, but also in the 
 claims for reverence toward the sacred law itself, and 
 its trustees. It is sometimes thought that the law of 
 sacrilege, containing much interested legislation and 
 offering the best foothold for priestly corruption, is 
 pre-eminently the outgrown element in ancient law. 
 But this will not be the case until the sentiment of 
 national honor, an object of vague, frequently fanati- 
 
312 ABT AND RELIGION 
 
 cal, but essentially religious devotion, and the idea of 
 regard for parents as a fundamental duty are out- 
 grown. Respect for law is still deeper in the human 
 consciousness than interest in any particular law. 
 And no advantage could compensate any community 
 for the vanishing of the spirit of reverence out of 
 which all justice and all culture must come. This 
 principle of the ancient law is still valid. 
 
 Personality is to he set above property. This might 
 be regarded as a corollary of the above principle, if 
 we assume that the value of property depends in any 
 respect upon personality. That this is the case is 
 broadly hinted in various passages of sacred law, thus : 
 "Whatever exists in the world is the property of the 
 Brahmana; on account of the excellence of his origin 
 the Brahmana is, indeed, entitled to it all." (Manu, 
 I, 100.) But apart from the somewhat over-simple 
 theory of distributive justice here promulgated, the 
 meaning of the principle is seen especially in three 
 ways : the regard for the dignity of the person as worth 
 every necessary sacrifice of utility; the indisposition 
 to accept a compounding for personal injury by fines 
 alone, so long as the law remained sacred law ; and the 
 attempt, in the clash of personal interests, to ignore 
 property differences as irrelevant. When a sufficient 
 number of differences among men have been set aside 
 as irrelevant to the concerns of justice, the principle 
 here stated will blossom out in the form of a theory 
 of equality before the law, — in which form, the ancient 
 principle vigorously survives. And we have had 
 recent occasion to reaffirm the judgment that crimes 
 
THE SACRED LAW 313 
 
 against property are not to be weighed off with crimes 
 against persons and against humanity. , 
 
 In such ways as these the sacred law makes good 
 its claim that there is a rule of life which gives laws 
 to utility. It is always true, human nature being what 
 it is, that nothing can be useful which fails to satisfy 
 equity, personality, honor. So long as Russian peas- 
 ants believe as they have believed about methods of 
 agriculture, it is not a useful procedure to introduce 
 mechanical reapers and binders among them: dissi- 
 pate these beliefs and a new market is open to the 
 world ; but in no case is utility freed to stand as some- 
 thing independent of the preferences and faiths of 
 human nature, whether true or false. And so long as 
 we hold the belief that a man is worth more than his 
 property, it will be impossible not alone to compensate 
 murder with a money-payment, but to hold slaves, or 
 to equate man-power with horse-power, however 
 advantageous the procedure from the purely economic 
 standpoint. 
 
 Hence it is not true as Maine asserts that the in- 
 fluence of theocratic legislation disappears with the 
 advent of kings. But it is true that with the advent 
 of kings another type of judgment must enter as 
 co-operative with this one. 
 
 The abuses and crudities of the sacred law are so 
 much in evidence that they almost usurp the attention 
 of observers ; and it is necessary here to advert to them 
 
314 ABT AND RELIGION 
 
 only for the sake of due proportion. Those who 
 regard the connection of religion with morals as on 
 the whole unfortunate for morals — and there are many 
 such — ^have in mind the insistence on a blind obedience, 
 the diversion of thought from the experiential and 
 social basis of righteousness, and the tendency to con- 
 done the humanly pernicious if the religiously correct 
 is preserved. These are grave evils. 
 
 The nature of them might be comprehended, per- 
 haps, in the statement that religion is prone to exag- 
 gerate its primacy into a separation. It finds a true 
 absolute, but is apt to set it up as exclusive of the 
 relative and pragmatic instead of including and 
 co-operating with them. In artificial restrictions upon 
 human intercourse, in the cultivation of mistrust and 
 aversion toward the unbeliever, in depriving heretics 
 of privileges and even of fair play, in inculcating an 
 artificial terror of the beyond so great as to obscure 
 every useful motive and so to retain intact the most 
 preposterous customs, in hostility to novelty, the 
 custodians of the sacred law have done incalculable 
 , harm both to mankind and to religion itself. In face 
 of all this, it may be said that if mankind could have 
 won its hold upon a region of absolute satisfaction 
 only at this cost, it was worth tjie sacrifice.^ 
 
 But human nature outgrows the need of any such 
 sacrifice. Indeed these abuses are incidents of a 
 middle stage in the development of law, the struggle 
 
 3 1 may remind the reader of the remark of Walter Bagehot 's that at 
 a critical point in the development of human societies it was more im- 
 portant that there should be law, than that there should be good law. 
 It was the religious temper that made law possible. 
 
THE SACBBD LAW 315 
 
 of the secular principle to secure recognition. Tlie 
 original tendency of the sacred law is not to reject 
 the aid of secular principles but to make place for 
 them. The jus of the Eoman comitia was regarded 
 as under divine auspices, and a natural supplement to 
 the sacred fas. Likewise under the wing of theocratic 
 law there grew up in many regions a body of worldly 
 wisdom based on experience and taking the form of 
 proverb or fable, the first humanizations of ethics, so 
 little conscious of antagonism of principle that the 
 sayings of Solomon could find their way into the sacred 
 canon. The antagonism existed however, and was 
 bound to appear because the a priori vision of the 
 human mind cannot safely proceed much farther than 
 first principles; the detail of the law, like the detail 
 of the body of science, has to be built by the aid 
 of pragmatic considerations. The rubbish of over- 
 wrought sestheticism had to give way to the pressing 
 utilities. Eeligion had to learn the lesson of content- 
 ing itself with the right of giving to all second prin- 
 ciples their final meaning. We shall have recovered 
 the original and normal relation between the secular 
 and the sacred when we can treat murder, adultery, 
 perjury, breach of contract, etc., on the ground of 
 social expediency without feeling the need to deny 
 that they are also "abominations to the Jca" and "to 
 the Lord." 
 
 Meantime religion and art, relieved of social burdens 
 to which they were only partly fitted, were free to 
 assert to the full their specific natures. To these we 
 now turn. 
 
CHAPTEE XXXVIII 
 ART AND HUMAN NATURE 
 
 UNSATISFIED wishes press in all directions, and 
 seize on every promising object. They find the 
 stuff of dreams and day-dreams most accessible and 
 yielding : the imagination is the infinite space in which 
 endless flimsy exploits occur at will, pictures and 
 promises of the unrealized satisfaction. 
 
 But apart from their lack of substantiality, these 
 easy private conquests have the disadvantage which 
 always attends non-resistance. They fail to mark the 
 distinction between a passing fancy and a profound 
 need. They fail to leave the marks of a genuine 
 experience; they arouse inadequate after-images, and 
 so give little aid in learning what our real as opposed 
 to our apparent wishes are. Hence in the world of 
 dreams^ taken by itself, primitive expressions of 
 instinct flourish, interpreting power flags, and the 
 unsatisfied will necessarily remains unsatisfied. For 
 where every desire is appeased as it arises, or where 
 every impulse assumes full sway, at least one large 
 human need must be permanently repressed, the need 
 for self-knowledge. In dreams, individual personality 
 is at a minimum. The will to power requires a stiffer 
 medium for even so much as a picture of its residual 
 need. 
 
ART AND HUMAN NATXJBB 317 
 
 Sucli a medium it can only find in that same physical 
 world which, by hypothesis, is refusing literal satis- 
 faction. If the will cannot enjoy, it can still depict 
 enjoyment: and the effort to depict gives substance 
 and consistency to the dream. And as in remembering 
 an experience, one contemplates one's self engaged 
 in the experience, so in depicting enjoyment one de- 
 picts one's self enjoying. The war dance which 
 dramatizes the victory not yet won is not a mere 
 representation of fighting and winning: it is a self- 
 portrait of man as victor. It is a real experience, and 
 may be the basis for progress in interpreting the 
 wiU. Such physically embodied dreams are 'works of 
 art.' The work of art is the dream made objective, 
 permanent, self-conscious, mutual.^ 
 
 The work of art is mutual or social partly because 
 as a physical object it cannot help being public, open 
 to common judgment. But it is social also because it 
 intends to exert a power of its own. It may or may 
 not be the conscious intention of the artist to annoimce 
 any new gospel regarding the human will, though he is 
 quite as likely to be the rebel or the prophet as to be 
 the spokesman of any established social order. His 
 art is 'beyond society' inasmuch as its source is in his 
 
 1 The Freudian view of art is composed of an axiom and an untruth. 
 The axiom is that repressed wishes express themselves in art forms. For 
 if man makes anything at all, how should he make except in such wise 
 as to satisfy himself? The work of his hand will necessarily reveal any 
 craving analyzed or not which is given liberty to assert itself in that 
 work. The untruth is in the answer to the question, What wish is 
 expressed in art forms? The Freudian answer is perverse in its empha- 
 sis. The true answer is. Not any one wish, but the total wish of man, — 
 the will. 
 
318 ABT AND EELIGION 
 
 private dream of precisely that good wMch society 
 so far fails to supply.^ But he intends none the less 
 through his art to speak across to the similarly unsat- 
 isfied wishes of his kind. In displaying his work, it 
 is as if he said, ' * This is my wish, — Is it yours also ? — 
 Has it man in it?" 
 
 The satisfaction offered by art is symbolic, not 
 actual; hence the power of art to satisfy is limited 
 by the scope of symbol. Yet the region which art opens 
 to the will is not one of pure fancy or illusion. As 
 the unrealized wish is a wish for something veritable, 
 the art which appeases it is bound to convince, not to 
 mock. It conveys to the mind some account of reality ; 
 it is never the mere projection of the subjective 
 longing. The tie between art and reality is seen in 
 the path which leads from imitation to certain forms 
 of art. Imitation is not art, but the imitation of 
 selected parts of reality may be the beginning of art, 
 as narration at first accurate may, by a well-kno^vn 
 process, insensibly grow into fiction under the pressure 
 of the idea of the happening, as one would have had 
 it transpire. To find its subjects in a world of common 
 experience is a necessity for an undertaking which, 
 hke art, proposes to be commonly understood; but it 
 chooses from the world of actuality such parts as 
 
 2 For this reason I must dissent in principle from one of the most 
 living and fundamental of contemporary views of the function of art, 
 that of Mr. Balph Adams Cram. The era of individualism in art which 
 he deplores is not a pure retrogression, it is a necessary 'awkward 
 period' on the way to better things. Art must be democratic and win 
 its own elientfele of free admirers; it must never again be the mere out- 
 growth of an authoritatively united community spirit. It must serve 
 as one of the main paths to the future and the unborn. 
 
ABT AND HUMAN NATUBB 319 
 
 foreshadow a happy solution of some problem of evil 
 or of resistance to will. It picks out objects or situa- 
 tions in which we can see or surmise the raison d'etre 
 of ordinary and challenging facts, — of inertia, in the 
 repose of a majestic peak; of flesh, in the face of a 
 girl; of human bonds, in the Madonna; of suffering 
 itself, in tragedy and music. Bergson was essentially 
 right in saying that the artist like the metaphysician 
 must, through the disinterested vision of sympathy, 
 perceive the real. The objects which art portrays are 
 individual objects with a penumbra of universal 
 meaning; they are objects which admit us to a per- 
 ception of the way in which reality, while resisting our 
 wishes, may yet satisfy the will. 
 
 The original intention of art may well be, not to 
 satisfy the will, but to prefigure its satisfaction. As 
 in mimetic dances, which are at the same time prayers, 
 art may serve as a sort of first aid to thought, giving 
 a more vivid grasp of the goal of desire. Such art is 
 frequently a collective activity; collectivity heightens 
 emotion ; and heightened emotion intensifies the imagi- 
 native presentation of the objects wished for. 
 
 But the characteristic thing about art is that in this 
 process of imaginative presentation, it discovers a 
 secondary satisfaction which eclipses the first. The 
 one who contemplates and enjoys a work of art may 
 equally with the artist find his insight aided; but the 
 artist has found the joy of authorship in an object 
 which partakes of his own ideal. There are many 
 objects which can hardly be enjoyed except by physical 
 
320 AET AND BBLIGION 
 
 possession : to the hungry man, a picture of food would 
 bring little pleasure whether painted by himself or 
 some other. But art, whose mission is to the unsat- 
 isfied wishes, may safely assume that it has to do with 
 the hungry man only in so far as he is also a hungry 
 soul. The objects which it has to present are objects 
 whose nature is to elude physical possession. The 
 most general name for the specific objects of art is 
 the beautiful; and the beautiful may be defined as that 
 which demands to he possessed hy reproduction. 
 
 It has often been said that the contemplation of 
 beauty is quieting to the will; that it must be disin- 
 terested, free from the clamor for personal enjoyment. 
 And this is true with regard to every activity within 
 the private or the public order: for beauty is the 
 presence in a particular object of a value which cannot 
 be possessed by any social instinct. But the cessation 
 of these activities is the initiation of another. The 
 perceiver of beauty, quite unreflectively, begins the 
 effort to produce it out of himself, as one who has 
 heard music he enjoys may find himself trying' to 
 whistle it. Nothing can be consciously reproduced 
 unless it has been thought through; and as the pos- 
 session of beauty must be a possession by conscious 
 thought, the work of reproduction may be regarded as 
 the act of taking complete possession. Art could thus 
 be described as the completion of the possession of the 
 beautiful. 
 
 And so far as the element of value in beauty is a 
 metaphysical element, a solution in idea of some 
 problem of evil, it is in actuality, and not in sjTnbol 
 
AET AND HUMAN NATURE 321 
 
 only, a finished satisfaction. The will reaches in art 
 an absolute goal. Hence it is that art opens to some 
 minds a career whose passion is capable of replacing 
 all other passions. The artist has all that the meta- 
 physician can give him, though he has it not in con- 
 ceptual form. He has all that ambition and love can 
 give him, though he has it not in the coin of actual 
 recognition and affection. As a man he will need to 
 possess his object also through the way of concepts 
 and words, and of recognition and personal attach- 
 ment ; but as an artist he has already stood at the end 
 of these paths: he has anticipated the attainment of 
 his will. And whether or not he is 'indifferent to the 
 public' — his immediate public — ^he is conscious in his 
 achievement of the necessary and permanent per- 
 suasive power of a vital idea. 
 
 II 
 
 If this is a true account of the nature of art, we can 
 understand its twofold effect upon human instinct. 
 Since, in its first intention, it presents the objects of 
 desire with added vividness, it strengthens the im- 
 pulses to possess, is capable of heightening the pas- 
 sions, social and unsocial. Upon the spectator, the 
 first effect of the enjoyment of art is the enlivening of 
 his wishes, restoring a perhaps jaded faith in their 
 achievableness and in the general worth of living. 
 And since he has been led into a world in which success 
 is not alone possible but actual, immersion in that 
 world as a spectator might easily tend simply to 
 
322 ART AND EBLIGION 
 
 heighten the rate of living, to increase eagerness and 
 demand, while lowering patience with the restraint and 
 postponement imposed by the slow processes of the 
 social order. It is not an accident that communities 
 of artists and art-lovers tend to develop occasional 
 antinomian or Bohemian traits. 
 
 But while every artist is a spectator, every spectator 
 is also at least an incipient artist; and to that extent 
 the first effect of art is superseded by the second, — 
 the heightened energies of action are transmuted into 
 energies of creativity. The full and normal effect of 
 art is to turn all impulses into the channel of the 
 creation of persuasive beauty, making this form of the 
 will to power their ultimate meaning. 
 
 In this role of interpreting instinct, the passion for 
 art is likely to find itself in partial opposition to the 
 passion of the public order. Concern for the quality 
 and beauty of an industrial product is not always com- 
 patible with concern for maximum quantity or ex- 
 change value: one finds in France today a dread of 
 the transformation of national life which may be 
 imposed by a new-born pressure for 'efficiency' as a 
 result of the war. With the passion of the private 
 order there is no such opposition. Sex-love in particu- 
 lar parallels and in part fuses with the impulse of art- 
 production; for sex-love includes within its meaning 
 an impulse to take possession of the beautiful by 
 reproducing it, though this meaning does not rise to 
 the same level of consciousness as in art. And art 
 may be regarded as a mode of creativity, in which the 
 will to power not alone controls its object, but 
 
AET AND HUMAN NATURE 323 
 
 fashions its very substance and form. Hence no form 
 of activity so completely and directly sublimates the 
 awakening instinct of sex as activity in creative 
 imagination. Art is particularly fitted to introduce 
 the instinct of sex to the central element of its own 
 meaning.^ 
 
 Ill 
 
 But beside the direct effect of art on instinct by 
 interpreting it, there is another and reflexive effect 
 upon the form of all instinct-expression. 
 
 The artist does not intentionally generalize the 
 beauty which he finds in a particular object and depos- 
 its in another. But the meaning of beauty is universal, 
 and cannot be confined within any one object, nor 
 within any one medium. Beauty transfers itself, within 
 the mind, from one medium to another ; its tendency is 
 to impose its principle upon every output of the person. 
 It may not be true that every painter some time writes 
 a poem. But behavior, the continuous product of the 
 will, cannot escape the impress of the spread of the 
 impulses of art. Through art the force of analogy in 
 the mind is immensely increased. It has become a 
 prevalent doctrine in educational theory that skill 
 acquired in one department of knowledge is not trans- 
 
 s Miss Jane Harrison relates that ' ' an artist deeply in love with his 
 friend's wife once said, 'If only I could paint her and get what I want 
 from her, I could bear it. ' . . . He saw that through art, through vision, 
 through detachment, desire might be slain, and the man within him find 
 peace." Should we not rather say that desire might thus find its own 
 meaning, not so much through detachment as through creative possession, 
 and the entire will of him find what it wanted? Art and Eitual, p. 238. 
 
324 AET AND RELIGION 
 
 ferable to another; and this is likely to be true if we 
 deprive the mind of all aesthetic interest in the activity 
 in question. But interest in beauty reaches the central 
 current of the will, and when this interest is awakened 
 all transference of skill and discipline becomes natural. 
 It is the nature of beauty to overflow departments and 
 to make the man of one piece. 
 
 Hence it is that the most common impressions of 
 physical form are translated (so naturally that we 
 seldom think of the metaphor) into expressions of 
 character types, — straight, crooked, upright, sharp, 
 square, devious, etc. The words rude and refined, 
 taken over from artisanry, summarize the series of 
 these indirect effects of art on the expression of 
 instinct. It would be possible to particularize these 
 effects for each of the instincts and passions; but a 
 few sketchy outlines must suffice. 
 
 1. Since art trains enthusiasm to the performance 
 of definite work, it illustrates the paradox of force 
 acquired through restraint, to the direct advantage of 
 all social life. The subordination of dancers to the 
 common rhythm and music is a condition of their free 
 self-expression; and public life if it presents a more 
 complex subordination may yet benefit by the analogy. 
 The will to power is easily led, in simple community 
 life, by the subtle argument of 'harmony' into the 
 assumption of a permanent identity of interest between 
 the individual person and the State. This assumption, 
 as was natural in a people so deeply steeped in beauty, 
 was the genius of Greek social life. Increasing con- 
 sciousness of individual self-interest must always 
 
ABT AND HXIMAN NATUBB 325 
 
 come into such a scheme as a disturbing element ; and 
 once the central harmony is broken, no good will of 
 separate individuals could restore the identity of 
 interest. The principle is not a sufficient bond for 
 political life, as the tragedy of Greece may show, but 
 the appeal to a common consciousness of beauty is an 
 aid which our bald democracies cannot afford to ignore. 
 Public architecture, public pageantry and masque, 
 the reverence for beauty in all public enterprises, 
 furnish an indirect argument for public solidarity of 
 incalculable scope. 
 
 2. In private relations, the interest in beauty has 
 something more than decency to demand. It tends of 
 its own accord to invite an equality between the part- 
 ners, since harmohy is disturbed by the weakness or 
 suppression of one of the voices. Society in the 
 narrower sense of the term may be regarded as human 
 intercourse carried on under the dominance of the 
 demand for beauty, as the most complex of the 
 improvisatory arts. And all society creates for its 
 own purposes a limited world from which extremes 
 of inequality are excluded. But the standard of 
 beauty demands no permanence in any human relation- 
 ship. Art embodies its meaning within finite and 
 framable objects; and it has no other disposition for 
 the history of love. The tale will find its end: its 
 passing may have its own melancholy beauty. Taken 
 by itself the standard of art would make for temporary 
 unions. 
 
 It is not reasonable to expect from this indirect and 
 formal bearing of art on instinct a sufficient guidance 
 
326 ABT AND EBLIGION 
 
 of life. Taken alone it would subordinate the matter 
 of behavior to its manner, preferring to believe that 
 "All vertus be closyde in curtasy." It would insist 
 on suavity when the situation might well demand 
 indignation or even conflict. It has no place for the 
 prophet, the revolutionist, the reformer; and it has 
 but feeble contact with the more pressing problems 
 of the 'common man.' It fits no one for dealing with 
 the as yet unharmonizable aspects of experience.* Its 
 tendency would be to seclude itself, build for itself 
 high garden walls, and in the midst of a world small 
 enough to be perfectly controlled, forget the ugly, the 
 squalid, the disordered, the just causes for warfare 
 and rebellion. 
 
 If made an exclusive object of devotion, beauty 
 would fail at length to satisfy the capacity for mal- 
 adaptation. When it so far assumes leadership in 
 the mind as to dominate the religious consciousness, 
 it loses its power. The gods themselves become 
 plastic figures and lend themselves to the fabrications 
 of myth and legend. Their severity wanes in an 
 Olympian sunshine; and the gibe of Epicurus holds 
 good, that these gods can no longer be supposed to 
 wrinkle their brows in concern for human affairs. 
 To exclude in this way the cruelty and hardness of 
 fact from the view of an aesthetized consciousness is 
 but to invite the day of wrath, when reality will burst 
 
 * There is probably nothing to be done in the world which cannot be 
 done with entire decorousness, ideally speaking, but for men of imperfect 
 skin, promptitude, and invention it is sometimes necessary to choose 
 between decorum and the demand of an occasion, between futility, even 
 dishonor, and rudeness. 
 
ART AND HUMAN NATUBB 327 
 
 down those walls and turn the unearned paradise to 
 a place of loathing. 
 
 The real artist knows that to yield to the aristocratic 
 impulse in the assthetic consciousness is to cut off the 
 sources of his own art. For beauty, let me repeat, is 
 reality offering a glimpse of the solution of its own 
 problems of evil : its soil is in experience. It must lean 
 against its own luxury, its sensitiveness and finesse. 
 It must return from time to time to the school of 
 asceticism and religion. 
 
CHAPTEE XXXIX 
 EELIGION PEE SE 
 
 AS art becomes secular and declares independence, 
 and as law becomes civil and increasingly 
 chary of the remnants of priestly jurisdiction, religion 
 is left with the sphere of the supernatural as its 
 special province. It deals with what is behind, beyond, 
 beneath, and within the world; standing in contrast 
 with all that is apparent, finite, and controllable by 
 systematic thought. 
 
 When the divine element, formerly fused with science 
 as sacred lore, with law as sacred custom and precept, 
 and with art as sacred rite, song, and story, is thus 
 set forth in its separate character, it seems a strangely 
 empty essence, a mystery, a mere nothing, — for which 
 nevertheless, the most extravagant claims are made. 
 When an attempt is made to describe or deal with it, 
 it is necessary to fall back on fragments of thought, 
 command, and symbol, and yet to deny that these con- 
 tain what is intrinsically uncontainable in such vessels. 
 
 With better understanding it becomes known that 
 these words of contrast, "behind, beyond," etc., indi- 
 cate the relation of a life to its manifestations ; as the 
 life of an animal might be said to be behind its 
 behavior the invisible and elusive source of its mani- 
 festations. The divine is empty as the self apart from 
 
EELIGION PEK SE 329 
 
 its 'experience' is empty. The domain of religion in 
 fact is a divine self, a Spirit which is as Subject to all 
 finite things, persons, and arts as Object, and presum- 
 ably to much else that these categories do not include. 
 The. significance of religion comes from the assumption 
 that all the forces of the world are drawn together in 
 foci which we call personalities or spirits; and these 
 ultimately into one. It would be possible to deal with 
 the whole of force, the Supreme Power, as religion 
 proposes to deal with it only if this immense reality 
 had its simple center, its I-am and I-will. In religion 
 the will of man seeks union with the simple center of 
 power. which is 'beyond' and 'within' the world as the 
 will of the world. 
 
 The extravagant claim of religion has been that 
 union with God is itself a good, and indeed, the 
 supreme and sufficient satisfaction of the will. But 
 even if we can catch some hint of the metaphysical 
 mystery of the religious domain, this claim is a new 
 mystery. It is not obvious that union with anything 
 is a supreme good, unless union means an alliance with 
 the power therein vested. But religion has set its 
 good in opposition to all other goods; it has turned 
 its back upon the world in which the power of the gods 
 themselves is manifested. It has renounced the world ; 
 and it has testified to the literalness of its intention 
 by the most thorough asceticism. In its separation 
 from art and from society, religion appears as the 
 hostile critic of both, competing with them for the 
 centering of human affections. Despite all this, some 
 human beings have found in religion, as others have 
 
330 ABT AND EELIGIOlir 
 
 found in art, a career animated by a passion able to 
 displace all otters. 
 
 It is of course impossible for any one to live in the 
 world and maintain a complete enmity toward the 
 goods of the world, the natural objects of his instinctive 
 wishes. To live, hating life, even if for duty's sake 
 one continued to eat, would be a slow suicide. There 
 is strictly no such thing as 'thorough asceticism.' 
 Externally, the position of the religious devotee is 
 anomalous : he renounces society, family, the State, 
 yet he enjoys the wealth, the friendship, the peace, 
 provided by others. His position has therefore been 
 called parasitic and insincere. On Kantian grounds 
 he is immoral — so it might appear — for he cannot 
 universalize his own maxini. 
 
 So it appears; but the appearance is mistaken. It 
 is plausible only because one forgets that all living 
 things have to renew their life from time to time by 
 turning away from life, as one turns from waking to 
 sleeping for the sake of being the more awake. If it 
 is true that art and all social activities make use of a 
 kind of capital whose source lies outside themselves, 
 it would follow that one who had no other interest at 
 heart than these would still be obliged by the nature 
 of things alternately to pursue them and turn away 
 from them.^ Not alone individuals, but all art and all 
 institutions must save their lives by losing them. And 
 
 1 The theory of this necessary alternation is worked out more fully 
 in "The Meaning of God," chapters xxviii, xxxi, xxxii. See also E. 0. 
 Cabot, What Men Live By, part IV, Worship. 
 
BBLIGION FEB SB 331 
 
 he that apparently renounces them all may be the 
 one who is doing most for their conservation.^ 
 
 As for art, we have already seen that it depends 
 upon an eye for realities. The artist lives by what 
 he can truly see; and his eye for reality needs to be 
 quickened now and again, not by gazing harder into 
 his work, but by turning to a region in which the 
 perception of reality is simple and immediate. Such 
 a region the individual artist is likely to find in social 
 intercourse; for the most part, persons are the rela- 
 tively real and relatively available sources of all 
 restoring of vision. But personal intercourse itself 
 wears thin and shallow unless it reverts to its own 
 basis; all harks back at length to the absolute, to 
 religion. Whether at first or second hand, the artist 
 is pensioner upon the bounty of the mystic, and not 
 vice versa. The great ages of religion have preceded 
 the great ages of art, and of science also, for they were 
 attending to the fertilization of the ground. 
 
 As for society and the State, it is the death of every 
 institution when it begins to regard itself as self- 
 sufficient or worthy of devotion in its own right. The 
 only State that has a chance to survive upon this planet 
 is the State that knows that its power is not in itself, 
 nor its right. If the Sabbath was made for man, so is 
 the State. And the only obedience that can serve any 
 
 2 The argument is that there must be a distinct place in the economy 
 of life for the cult of the absolute in its contrast with life, and if 
 religion is the name of this place, the instinctive motive of religion 
 ■would be a specific craving due, whether so understood or not, to the 
 atrophy of social and aesthetic values, a craving for the restoration of 
 creative power. 
 
332 ABT AND RELIGION 
 
 State well is the obedience of men who are servants 
 of a Greater. If religion taught men how to be 
 independent of the State, in an age when the State was 
 everything, it might well appear anti-political ; and yet 
 from the spoils of this rebellion it has generated the 
 modern State, the State of free individuals, which is 
 a far greater thing. The Roman type of State has 
 lost its life in trying to assert it, as such States always 
 will — but the State lives — ^the State that has learned 
 to subordinate its sovereign I-will to the will of God, 
 which under certain conditions may be discerned in 
 the will of the people. 
 
 For let us not mistake the meaning of liberalism 
 and democracy: they do not mean that atomic indi- 
 viduals and their inherent rights are to be put above 
 the community and its welfare, nor that any and every 
 majority is right. They mean that the individual who 
 finds and worships his God stands at the source of the 
 community and its welfare. It is to the God-fearing 
 individual and no other that the State must defer. 
 And conversely, democracy without religion is neither 
 a true nor a secure principle of social structure. 
 
 We thus recognize that religion, just in so far as it 
 understands its own business, must insist on its con- 
 trast with all social goods, must have its asceticism 
 and other-worldliness, can never come in the guise of 
 a social code. Those who accuse Christianity, for 
 example, of having no social code, may be bearing 
 indirect witness to the fact that it knows the proper 
 work of religion per se. Eeligion has no choice but to 
 place the child in man, the total unexpressed self, 
 
BELIGION PEE SE 333 
 
 above the institution; and to provide for that self a 
 kingdom not of this world. For, after all, this Child 
 is the strongest thing in the world, and no human 
 interest can be strong or even safe which does not first 
 do it reverence. The sacred law already perceived 
 that the weak in man must control society. Eeligion 
 cast loose from the law singles out this divine spark 
 as that upon which every human value depends for 
 its life. 
 
 It is because of this relation to creativity that 
 religion, in the mere 'union with God,' has been able 
 to satisfy the will to power in those who have under- 
 stood its paradox. And for the most part asceticism 
 while renouncing power of one sort has been regarded 
 as a way to power of another sort. It has been a 
 repression of partial expressions of the will in the 
 interest of the whole; hence its total effect has been 
 one of sublimation, not of repression of the will to 
 power. In the history of religious asceticism this fact 
 has been more or less clearly perceived: the devotees 
 are not historically describable as men devoid of 
 ambition; they have aimed at that supreme sort of 
 power which works without tools, without violence, 
 without self-assertion or competition, yet irresistibly, 
 because all other powers are derivative or relatively 
 unreal. 
 
 Thus in Vedantism. Brahmanism in this form 
 abandons its interest in the deed and the law, and, as 
 in the religion of Spinoza, empties all passion into 
 the will to know. But the will to know is, in this form 
 
334 , ABT AND BELIGION 
 
 of religion, equivalent to the will to power; for, as it 
 teaches, there is no power in the world save the power 
 of. knowledge sub specie ceternitatis, the power of 
 knowledge that I (and every particular being) am 
 Brahm. This is the power that can strike off the 
 chains of reincarnation; in it all lesser powers are 
 believed to be included. 
 
 Buddhism still more completely and subtly defines 
 the goal of all passion as a passionless transparency 
 of seeing. It attacks the self-element in all desire, 
 demanding that the individual organism shall become 
 the instrument of a perfect universality of indiffer- 
 ence, to which neither existence nor yet non-existence 
 shall appear as an object of strife. For even in the 
 determined rejection of existence by the Brahmanic 
 ideal a love for being lies concealed. It is evident 
 nevertheless that this position is attractive to the 
 Buddhist because of the initiation which it represents 
 into the very moving principles of the cosmos; the 
 love of power has not disappeared into something else, 
 but has taken the form of an aspiration for meta- 
 physical status with all the power over one's own 
 destiny (and over other men's minds) therein implied. 
 
 MediaBval asceticism is at once less philosophic and 
 more self-conscious. It has classified its own enemies — 
 its tempters — ^with greater social insight, if not with 
 keener psychological discrimination. It is driven to 
 its aloofness neither by Paul nor by Plato, but by its 
 own original self-scrutiny as we find it, for example, 
 in Augustine. It was bound to declare war on the 
 lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of 
 
EELIGION PEB SE 335 
 
 life, because of its own knowledge of the inadequacy 
 of these goods to define the good of their own spirits. 
 And if we may venture to interpret the recesses of 
 the consciousness of the mediaeval saints, as they 
 made their painful and glorious itinerarium mentis in 
 Deum, it was not without its own form of the will to 
 power. Francis of Assisi has admitted us far into 
 the mystery of sainthood in his confession of his 
 unwillingness to find any beggar more poor than he. 
 For he was the jealous lover of his lady Poverty ; and 
 through this devotion he claimed the" devotion of 
 others. Asceticism for these men, as for the ascetics 
 of all ages, had the value of a demonstration in which 
 the surrounding souls were necessary adjuncts. It 
 intended to demonstrate that the religious satisfaction 
 is an adequate substitute for all others ; and therewith 
 to announce a power of which the conquest of ordinary 
 desire is a natural expression. To be able to endure 
 is the badge of the entrance of the divine into the life 
 of the flesh; it was a symptom of a metaphysical 
 achievement which carried with it an ascendency over 
 the spirits of men. 
 
 This ideal is sufficiently discredited ; what we need to 
 point out is that its errors are errors of insufficiency, 
 not of a false direction. So far as human lust, greed, 
 pugnacity, and the quest of social power were con- 
 cerned, the religious ascetic has moved as one not 
 seeing them in others, not admitting them into him- 
 self, and so not solving the problems which they 
 raised. In the community which punished guilt he 
 could with difficulty play his part, for the logic of 
 
336 ABT AND RELIGION 
 
 pugnacity h.ad been put behind him and forgotten. 
 His religion had too far lost the sense of the insti- 
 tution and of the law to have part in their development. 
 Hence religion in his form alone could neither leaven 
 the community nor sustain itself; and so it largely 
 failed of the power which was its own inward nerve 
 and passion. 
 
 It did not entirely fail. In the forms we have 
 mentioned, it has afforded much of the independent 
 reality and freedom which the will needs; it has 
 not been infertile. But worked-in as it has always 
 been with the social life it has rejected, its organic 
 relations thereto have been obscure, its 'moral sub- 
 stance' thin, and the 'objective arena' for the will to 
 power evanescent. It is an essential part of religion, 
 religion per se in its contrast with the rest of life: it 
 is not the whole of religion. What religion may mean 
 for the transformation of instinct must be sought in 
 a more positive religious type. 
 
PART VII 
 CHRISTIANITY 
 
CHAPTEE XL 
 WHAT CHEISTIANITY EEQUIRES 
 
 MOST rules of life, secular or sacred, undertake 
 to regulate behavior: they are addressed to 
 the expression of instinct in action. But when original 
 Christianity sums up its rule of life, it addresses itself 
 to the feelings or affections. Its language is, Thou 
 shalt love . . . ; or, If any man come to me, and hate 
 not his father . . . yea, and his own life also, he 
 cannot be my disciple. Men are enjoined to 'abhor 
 that which is evil,' to 'set their affections on things 
 above.' It attacks what McDougall calls the second, 
 or middle, region of instinct, not the third: the 
 emotion, not the response. 
 
 The command of love to God and to neighbor is not 
 new in Christianity : it is taken over from the code of 
 Deuteronomy, where it occurs among many other 
 precepts. What is new is the selective principle which 
 lighted upon this requirement as the central and 
 essential thing. And such a change of focus is a new 
 moral venture ; for one is committed to all the corolla- 
 ries that can be drawn from one's first principle, and 
 it is in them that its novel power and bearing will first 
 appear. 
 
 The sermon on the mount may be regarded as a mass 
 of such corollaries. Many of these sayings deal 
 
340 OHEISTIANITT 
 
 directly with expressions of pugnacity, others with the 
 love of the sexes, others with ambition. And they 
 retain, for the most part, the peculiarity of the first 
 principle; their author regards himself as departing 
 from tradition precisely in this, that the requirement 
 is transferred from the outward appearance to the 
 heart. Adultery is defined not in terms of conduct, 
 but in terms of wish; murder is defined in terms of 
 anger. And by way of hedging off the instinctive 
 tendency to evade self-examination by relying on social 
 approval, it is particularly enjoined that all supposed 
 righteousness be kept hidden from the admiring eyes 
 of men, — ^including oneself. It is commonly taken as 
 characteristic of Christianity that it is concerned first 
 of all for the 'inside of the cup.' 
 
 But there is something psychologically awry in a 
 command to feel. It may be taken as evident that a 
 person cannot at will love his neighbor, still less, his 
 enemy. My feelings, of course, are my own, my most 
 intimate property, and most property I can exchange 
 or revise: but these possessions are not alienable nor 
 directly alterable; they are closely identical with what 
 I am, and hence appear to me as something given, 
 inevitable. What I dislike, I dislike, and there is no 
 help for it. Spencer accepts this fact as marking the 
 limit of human freedom. If freedom means doing as 
 we please, then we have freedom without limit; the 
 trouble is (as we see when we reflect) we can do 
 nothing else, — and we cannot please as we please. 
 Hence a command to hate or to love seems, taken 
 literally, to require the impossible. 
 
WHAT CHBISTIANITY EEQUIBES 341 
 
 The interpreters commonly surmount this difficulty 
 by giving the words for feeling a practical meaning. 
 To love one's neighbor, it is said, has nothing to dp 
 with subjective or pathological states; we are simply 
 called upon to perform those acts and assume those 
 attitudes which would express good-will if we had it. 
 We are to behave *as if we loved our neighbor. The 
 rule of love is a rule of service. . If I want to know 
 what love would do in any case, the golden rule sup- 
 plies complete directions without calling upon any 
 feelings except those of natural egoism: let me think 
 what I would want; then imaginatively reverse the 
 situation and act accordingly, "for this is the law and 
 the prophets." Thus the new principle becomes, like 
 the old, a matter of conduct: the stroke of genius lies 
 in the induction which finds the single simple principle, 
 and establishes it in supreme control. It is through 
 this philosophic mastery and sweep that the new 
 righteousness exceeds the righteousness of the scribes 
 and Pharisees. Thus the law of love is interpreted 
 pragmatically; love is as love does. 
 
 Is it possible that this pragmatic interpretation may 
 exactly miss the characteristic thing about Chris- 
 tianity by pouring back into behavior that which the 
 new idea proposed to lift out of it? Can I with any 
 great success assume toward my neighbor a type of 
 action in independence of my feeling? Granting the 
 James-Lange theory of emotion its utmost, I may 
 acquire a genial and kindly habit of mind which will 
 serve to overcome social friction; but I should fear 
 
342 CHBISTIASriTY 
 
 tlie moral result of a determined benevolence of bear- 
 ing. Have we not seen enough of the officialized 
 Christian manner? Certainly, in the extreme case, to 
 force a mould of philanthropic action over a rebellious 
 gorge could hardly claim for itself the sublime spon- 
 taneity of soul which is represented as saying in 
 surprise, "Lord, when saw we thee an hungered and 
 fed thee?" Strangely enough, this whole pragmatic 
 interpretation smacks rather of Kant than of the sage 
 of Nazareth. What if the demand of Christianity were 
 intentionally and literally addressed to the affections ? 
 The apparent psychological impossibility, I confess, 
 seems to me quite in harmony with the general temper 
 of this religion. Under the guise of extreme simplicity, 
 it repeatedly demands the unattainable. Thus in order 
 to enter the kingdom of heaven, one has but to become 
 as a little child. Eebirth, or conversion, for Chris- 
 tianity, means a recovery of something which children 
 have not yet lost. It might not occur to us to regard 
 a child as a lover either of Grod or of man, but the child 
 is certainly not a pragmatic servant : what can be said 
 of him is that he has not crossed the Eubicon of that 
 analytic and utilitarian intelligence which can think 
 of persons as means and means only, — with all his 
 puny self-assertion, his original sympathy with his 
 enveloping personal world has not been broken. But 
 we have crossed that Rubicon, and to recover the 
 directness of relation of the child is not more easy 
 than to 'love' in any other sense. It is hardly more 
 easy than to be perfect, — and it is written, "Be ye 
 therefore perfect." 
 
WHAT CHRISTIANITY BEQUIBES 343 
 
 As I understand Christianity, it needs little inter- 
 pretation, for it means as nearly as possible what it 
 says. It intends to state its requirement in terms of 
 a complete transformation of the instincts; it is on 
 this account that it has for us an extreme theoretical 
 interest. We shall consider how it proposes to deal 
 with the major passions of the private and the public 
 orders. 
 
CHAPTER XLI 
 CHEISTIANITY AND PUGNACITY 
 
 THEEE is no better test of any rule of life than 
 its way of settling accounts with pugnacity. 
 For pugnacity is the instinctive agent of readjust- 
 ment, especially of the deeper and abrupter readjust- 
 ments : if human nature were so far transformed that 
 there were no more readjustments to be made, within 
 or without, pugnacity would of necessity disappear. 
 The last conquest of pugnacity, before reaching the 
 ideal state, would be the conquest of itself. 
 
 In society as we find it, the dialectic of experience 
 has made a certain level of transformation of pug- 
 nacity habitual. It was only as the disposition to rush 
 into strife was tamed that society on an ample scale 
 became possible. And society abets this dialectic both 
 by its rules and by making an adequate provision for 
 all. Where there is plenty, men may be persuaded to 
 accept their allotment in peace (so long as they have 
 faith in the fairness of the allotment) ; but where there 
 is scarcity or the suspicion of injustice, there is a ten- 
 dency to revert to the primitive methods, with their 
 risks and hopes. But the most orderly and successful 
 society is still surcharged with pugnacious behavior 
 in various 'moral equivalents.' Apart from competi- 
 tion, discussion, and various sorts of peaceful rivalry, 
 
CHRISTIANITY AND PUGNACITY 345 
 
 there is tlie pervasive activity of the critical judgment. 
 Wrath against defective persons and institutions, by 
 being circuited through the processes of conceptual 
 thought, is made over into an energy for their repair 
 rather than their destruction. Criticism, armed with 
 various weapons of peaceful efficiency, is the social 
 ultimate in the transforming of pugnacity. 
 
 I say the social ultimate, for the injunction of Chris- 
 tianity, "Judge not," cannot be observed in human 
 society. Not alone because progress depends on the 
 perpetual work of this negative impulse, with others; 
 but also because to be accurately judged and measured 
 is a vital interest of every self-conscious being. He 
 who wants power wants self-knowledge; and he who 
 wants self-knowledge wants criticism, whether or not 
 he likes it. It is an essential ingredient of that craving 
 for intercourse with our kind which we sometimes dub 
 the 'instinct of sociability' that we anticipate this 
 mutual appraisal, "sizing up," incipient locking of 
 horns, the Carlylian question, ' * Can I kill thee or canst 
 thou kill me? " ; though all such valuing and appraising 
 implies placing in a series, a denial of absolute worth 
 in the respect measured, reduction from an end to a 
 means. 
 
 It is in the 'hard' public order that the activity of 
 the critical judgment is most evident; for there the 
 standards are most objective and definite. But the 
 critical judgment of the private order is most search- 
 ing. Here it takes a form which, for lack of a general 
 name, we may call education in its widest sense. 
 Education, in this sense, is not simply a deliberate 
 
346 CHEISTIANITY 
 
 transaction wMcli takes place between one generation 
 and another. It occurs whenever two hnmah beings 
 are associated, and without necessary intention. It 
 is the transaction through which, by a hundred 
 avenues of expression, A's total consciousness of B 
 becomes a part of B 's self -consciousness. This trans- 
 action is always selective, always critical, and always 
 mutual. 
 
 Ideals of education are held before us in which no 
 adverse criticism should appear, but all be positive and 
 encouraging. And so far as the expressing of our 
 judgment is concerned, it is a principle of the greatest 
 use (because it is nearer the truth) to dwell on what 
 persons are rather than on what they are not. It is 
 also a valuable principle to express few judgments 
 rather than many. But these are questions of art, not 
 of substance: and in regard to the substance of the 
 social judgment, it is vain to evade the negative 
 element, however it is conveyed. For the negative 
 element is there; we must be true to our own aversions. 
 And further, we cannot outwit the need of it in the 
 dynamics of education: to be conscious, sometimes 
 acutely, of what we are steering from, is a part of our 
 knowledge of what we are steering to; and the ele- 
 mental spurs of fear and rue and pain are the ever 
 present obverses of our hope and confidence. An 
 assumed uncondemning or wholly beaming attitude, 
 unless it retains the permanent possibility of instant 
 challenge, becomes an affectation of the godlike which 
 departs more or less from the veritable and evokes a 
 
CHBISTIANITY AND PUGNACITY 347 
 
 like departure in the addressee, robbing intercourse 
 of reality and minimizing the meaning of all language. 
 The most effective educating agencies known to us 
 are free from all conscious scruples on the score of 
 criticism. They are the spontaneous activities of those 
 who have just emerged from some stage of relative 
 defect, and take a corresponding intensity of interest in 
 denouncing that stage in others. The boy who has just 
 now learned to swim cannot sufficiently emphasize the 
 contrast between himself and those who still flounder 
 in the water. Without this temper and its sting, the 
 world of boys would be robbed of its immense develop- 
 ing power, and at the same time, of its attraction: it 
 is this temper that creates around the horizon of effort 
 a surcharged sense of the importance of just this 
 achievement. Under this pressure the latent powers 
 rise sufficiently high to leap the barrier: a little less 
 concern may mean permanent failure to meet the last 
 inch of the requirement, and hence to find what one's 
 powers actually are. Nowhere could society afford to 
 dispense with the zeal of recent converts, with their 
 unsullied sense of the magnitude of their achieve- 
 ment. Their estimate is probably truer than ours 
 who look on from a greater distance; for who most 
 justly appreciates the length of a mile, — ^he who 
 remembers it after a day's rest, or he who has just 
 finished the last of twenty? We cannot always secure 
 for our own efforts the notable spur of necessity, nor 
 do we forever need it; but if we are deprived of the 
 lash of a sufficiently critical social judgment, we 
 instinctively try to replace it by invented task-masters 
 
348 CHBISTIANITY 
 
 witMn ourselves. And until we shall have finished our 
 education to the extent of ceasing to be social beings, 
 this replacement is never quite complete. 
 
 Thus society expects its members to be critical of 
 one another, both in personal and official relations, 
 while conscious of the dominant power of the positive 
 social bond. The health of social movement depends 
 on the maintenance by individual wills of a certain 
 distance or alienation from all that invites to total 
 acquiescence, or absolute social satisfaction.^ Nor is 
 there any necessary kinship between an aliveness to 
 defect, which is the very engine of personal growth, 
 and a cynical temper. But it remains true that the 
 critic feels himself to some extent, and somewhere, 
 criticised by his own criticism. It is only in the 
 ironical mockery of a Socrates or in the denunciations 
 of a Christ that the separative judgment loses the 
 quality of a cry of pain. This is not the final trans- 
 formation of pugnacity. We may well long for a 
 world in which "Judge not" were possible. 
 
 II 
 
 Christianity reveals no solicitude for the neces- 
 sities of the social order. Its precepts are explicit, 
 
 1 No account of the philosophy of change is complete which refers 
 it alone to the 61an vital with its perpetual creativity, nor yet to the 
 Unmoved Mover that beckons all men to its absolute good. To these 
 must be added the driving power of the standards and systems which 
 are due to the action of human analysis and concept-making; and which 
 by ceaselessly reminding man of what he is not, through criticism, 
 exclusion, and negation, spur him in infinite sequence toward their own 
 
CHRISTIANITY AND PUGNACITY 349 
 
 and Tolstoy understood them : resist not evil, love your 
 enemy, judge not, recompense evil with good. These 
 precepts define not so much a transformation of 
 pugnacity as an abolition of it, together with the 
 whole process of social measurement and of justice 
 itself. And so far as these commands are provided 
 with a commentary, they seem not alone to admit but 
 to assert an abandonment of justice. For the com- 
 mentary explains that these principles are one aspect 
 of the perfection of "your Father which is in heaven," 
 which perfection we are summoned to make our own: 
 and this perfection on God's part is manifest in this, 
 that "He maketh his sun to rise on the evil and the 
 good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust." 
 In other words, that which to some minds appears as 
 the total moral indifference of mechanical nature is 
 here held up as the perfection of God. What is this 
 but to make the absence of justice, the indiscriminate 
 treatment of good and evil, the supreme law of the 
 spiritual world? 
 
 To argiie thus is to forget that what is mechanical 
 behavior in the inorganic realm is no longer mechani- 
 cal in the realm of stimulus and response. The ocean 
 responds neither to the blandishments nor to the 
 threats of Xerxes; but the mechanisms of his own 
 menials would react to the one by smiles and to the 
 other by signs of terror. So the response of amiable- 
 ness to the amiable approach, and the response of 
 enmity to the inimical approach, while it has the 
 semblance of justice, and the sanction of the aesthetic 
 sacred law, is the type of a moral mechanism. And 
 
350 CHEISTIANITY 
 
 to refuse to respond in kind, while it may seem to 
 return to the indifference of nature, may he the precise 
 opposite of a mechanical attitude. The attacker 
 expects your resistance; if you do not resist, your 
 rejection of his challenge may enter the situation with 
 the force of a new idea. 
 
 Like all surprises, the absence of resistance where 
 resistance was expected, would necessarily arouse 
 some new idea in the aggressor by way of reviewing 
 the situation in his mind. His new idea, however, 
 might be one of several: he might conclude that you 
 were too dead to fight, or that you were too much alive 
 to fight. Christianity depends on the possibility of 
 putting significance into the latter idea. And the 
 persistent refusal to criticise or to retaliate can be a 
 sign of more life, rather than less, only when it is a 
 response to a greater degree of truth. It must mean 
 that the self which has defects or which does injury 
 is seen to be other than the real self; and the non- 
 resistance constitutes an appeal from the apparent 
 self to the real self, or from the actual self to the self 
 that may be. In this case, it is not injustice, but it is 
 justice to the living and changeable. It is a type of 
 justice undiscovered by the Greek, for it is based 
 neither on equity nor on proportionality to any self 
 that exists. Greek justice, distributive or retributive, 
 took men statically, as they presented themselves. 
 This type of justice refuses to take a man at his own 
 estimate of himself; it insists on the self of a more 
 nearly absolute estimate, the self that must he, and 
 which this resolve of the non-resisting will will help 
 
CHBISTIANITY AND PUGNACITY 351 
 
 to bring into being. It is a justice done for tbe first 
 time to tbe plasticity and responsiveness of buman 
 nature toward our ovra wills: it is an absolute, or 
 creative, justice. 
 
 And tbis is tbe only type of response tbat can finally 
 satisfy pugnacity itself. For wbat pugnacity wants 
 is not simply tbe destruction of evil : it wants tbe evil 
 will to bate and destroy its own evil. Tbe element 
 of bate in figbting and punisbment and criticism is 
 directed toward making tbe guilty consciousness con- 
 sume its own iniquity; and to tbis end tbe instinctive 
 ferocity of gesture and grimace make for forcing tbe 
 evil-doer by suggestion into a momentary abborrence 
 and fear of bis own crime. But tbe evil will will not 
 hate itself, unless it first becomes tbe good will : bence 
 pugnacity is not satisfied unless tbe replacement of 
 tbe evil by tbe good takes place. And wben it takes 
 place, tbat wbicb was to be bated bas disappeared. 
 Hence, wbat pugnacity wants is to make the man over: 
 it wants to create tbe conditions for tbe free self- 
 rejection of tbe evil. And for tbis act of creation, tbe 
 absolute justice of "Love your enemies" is a necessary 
 demand. 
 
 Ill 
 
 Cbristianity intends to impose upon pugnacity tbe 
 interpretation of a creative impulse. Tbis is its final 
 transformation. And if we bave rigbtly discerned tbe 
 meaning of these precepts, we are in a position to judge 
 whether they intend to do away at once with social 
 criticism, or social justice, or war. Let me mention 
 
352 CHRISTIANITY 
 
 two or three principles which will govern our decision 
 on these questions. 
 
 1. The forgiving, or non-resisting, or enemy-loving 
 attitude has its entire justification in the 'new idea' 
 which it conveys to the wrong-doer. It is a language : 
 and the whole virtue of a language is that it is under- 
 stood. The attitude itself, we saw, was outwardly 
 indistinguishable from apathy or indifference : it must 
 by all means distinguish itself from apathy or indif- 
 ference, or it is a failure. He who so uses non- 
 resistance that it is mistakable for passivity, weakness, 
 cowardice, or folly, uses it unworthily; and shows 
 thereby that he knows not what it means. 
 
 Letting myself be cheated or abused through 
 lethargy or lack of time or courage to make an issue 
 cannot be claimed as an exhibition of divine perfection. 
 Unless I am, as a fact, so much a seer as to be a lover 
 of my enemy, it is both futile and false to assume the 
 behavior of love: we can generally rely on the enemy 
 to give such conduct its true name. And love of this 
 sort is seldom possible in the more transitory and 
 impersonal relations of life: it is in the quieter 
 contacts of man with man that this creative language 
 has its best chance of being heard. In the dealings of 
 a composite national mind with another composite 
 national mind, I believe that there is a possibility of 
 using the language of creative good will: but the 
 conditions are harder to realize, and the penalties 
 for an enforcement of falsely affectionate conduct 
 deservedly severe. 
 
 2. Not only must the user of this language consider 
 
CHRISTIANITY AND PUGNACITY 353 
 
 "whetlier he can use it honestly; he must consider also 
 whether he has a listener. It is sometimes necessary 
 to induce a quiescent frame of mind in the other before 
 any language can 'get across.' There is such a thing 
 in the world as persistent and self-assured cynicism; 
 and there is such a thing as determined bad will. It 
 is chiefly these which make wars necessary. War is 
 not to be understood as necessarily a negation of the 
 principle of Christianity; a just war is an attempt to 
 create the conditions under which the opponent is 
 disposed to listen to the language of the still, small 
 voice. 
 
 3. The creative attitude is not meant to displace 
 but to subordinate the critical attitude, and its 
 varieties, the competitive, the punitive, the warlike 
 attitudes. 
 
 Antagonism is not an intrinsic evil ; it is an evil only 
 when it is not included within a fundamental agree- 
 ment. If it is understood that the contestants have 
 shaken hands, they may attack each other with entire 
 good will. What would become of the game of chess 
 under the rule, "If any one would take away your 
 castle, give him your queen also"? If an abstractly 
 devised era of good-feeling destroys the era of good 
 chess, or of any more serious competition wherein men 
 are fairly tested, it will not long remain an era of good 
 feeling. Politeness may be regarded as an artful 
 assumption of universal benevolence for the purpose 
 of a restricted social undertaking : it does not rule out 
 all contests, but it rules out those that would disturb 
 the predominantly aesthetic character of the limited 
 
354 CHRISTIANITY 
 
 occasion. Just in so far as politeness oversteps its 
 sphere, it becomes the covering of the bitterest hos- 
 tility, that which fences from beneath the cloak of 
 formal friendliness. Amenity without opposition 
 becomes empty; even lovers weary of it. The force 
 of the rule of love in common social interchange is 
 directed, not to eliminating the critical judgment, but 
 rather to making firm that prior understanding 
 according to which we unite in the will to stand or fall 
 by the rules of the proposed contest. 
 
 Thus, the world must have both systems. Contest 
 is a peril to the soul; criticism cannot exist without 
 some self-condemnation: but the salvage of human 
 nature lies not in abandoning them, but in giving them 
 the true setting. Religion has the office of referring 
 men to the absolute; not the absolute which removes 
 them from the relative, but the absolute which by 
 establishing a point of rest within the flux of change, 
 gives all change, with its effort, and its hostilities, its 
 total meaning. 
 
 For this reason I cannot agree with those inter- 
 preters of Christianity who say that Christianity sets 
 up an ideal for an ideal state of society, not for the 
 present. Christianity is never more clearly a rule for 
 immediate adoption than in its dealing with pugnacity. 
 It expresses the final satisfaction of the will of the 
 fighter in the midst of every good fight. 
 
CHAPTER XLII 
 CHRISTIANITY AND SEX-LOVE 
 
 NOT a few lovers of peace are now reminding us 
 of the doctrine of non-resistance in Christianity, 
 urging us in its name to forget the arts of war. It 
 hardly occurs to these persons to carry the same logic 
 into the region of sex-morality. The more consistent 
 abstractionists, like Tolstoy, perceived that the letter 
 of the new law is not less hostile to the family and to 
 the State than to the use of force. If pacifism quotes 
 Christianity, it may well learn from Tolstoy either to 
 renounce sex-love together with physical resistance, or 
 to find a place for both. 
 
 On the meaning and destiny of sex-love Christianity 
 has little to say. But if we read together with the 
 documents the tendencies that worked themselves out 
 in the early communities, there can be no question of 
 its preference for virginity. The monastic ideal is 
 implicit in its standards. The sword which it brought 
 was to divide between a man and his family as well 
 as his possessions: "Leave all" for the sake of the 
 new kingdom, — ^this injunction was meant and taken 
 in deadly earnest, and without this intense singleness 
 of purpose early Christianity would not have done its 
 work in the world. It would not be untrue to the sense 
 of Christianity to set up beside the "Judge not," i.e., 
 
356 CHRISTIANITY 
 
 Know not enmity or defect, a corresponding precept, 
 "Know not sex," i.e.. Regard all persons as persons, 
 and never as men or women. 
 
 "We cannot say in advance that it is impossible to 
 comply with such a precept. The life of sex, in the 
 social order, is hardly as inevitable for the individual 
 as is pugnacity: there are those, and their number 
 increases, who seem to make out a complete life without 
 it. It is true that the psychological function of the 
 family must somehow be performed if men and women 
 are to retain their normal balance. Biit it is not at all 
 obvious that this function must be performed hy sex- 
 love itself; for while sex is the deepest of the hungers, 
 it is also the most versatile in its capacity for substi- 
 tution or sublimation. The Freudians are doubtless 
 right in saying that such a need cannot safely be re- 
 pressed. But we want to know what it is that may not 
 he repressed. "We would do well to enquire more care- 
 fully what sex-love in its own natural self -teaching, or 
 dialectic, means. 
 
 It would seem the first point of wisdom in dealing 
 with this question to be clear that the need which 
 we call sex-love has a meaning, like every other 
 instinct; and that to find this meaning requires an 
 effort of interpretation. The use of the word 'instinct' 
 here is likely to carry with it the greatest volume of 
 sophistry; for it is so easy to assume and so far from 
 the truth that we know off-hand what an instinct wants. 
 It is impossible to read the psychological meaning of 
 
CHRISTIANITY AND SEX-LOVE 357 
 
 any instinct in its biological context, and more par- 
 ticularly the instinct of sex. The biological meaning 
 is more likely to be found from the psychological end. 
 
 What the psychological function of sex-love is we 
 have already vaguely outlined in describing it as the 
 passion of the private order, corresponding to ambi- 
 tion in the public order. It is the life of the residual 
 self, unexpressed in the public order. The sexes are 
 fitted to recognize more of the subconscious and grow- 
 ing in one another than can ordinarily be appreciated 
 between members of the same sex ; they are drawn into 
 a protective attitude toward whatever is groping and 
 'unsaved' in the other self. An extension of 'sym- 
 pathy,' love appears as a premonition of a power to 
 confer and to receive life at a profounder level than 
 that of words and services. Thus the craving of sex 
 on its psychological side might be roughly described 
 as a craving for subconscious respiration. 
 
 In this respiration, the quest of power, visible as an 
 impulse toward bringing the ineffective self into effect, 
 is paradoxically mingled with an impulse toward com- 
 plete self-abandonment. Passion always means the 
 reference of the whole of life to a new focus, and hence 
 a thoroughgoing abandonment of rival foci ; but in the 
 case of love, the distinctive joy of abandonment is pre- 
 pared by a recurrent need which no one escapes. I 
 mean the need to denounce from time to time the 
 expression one finds, not alone in public service, but 
 in all social activity and in the language of all conven- 
 tions and of all intellectual concepts, — to denounce 
 these not as false but as inadequate, and to break 
 
358 CHBISTIANITY 
 
 through into a region of expression which is imme- 
 diate and entire, and yet a language, a communion 
 with another self. Such a subordination of the rela- 
 tively futile to a relatively adequate language, the life 
 of sex with its symbols seems to promise. Intimacy 
 and the symbols of intimacy, the throwing together 
 of all concrete fortunes, — the fortunes of thought, of 
 the plans, labors, and economies of life, and of the 
 physical being also, — radicalism of this sort offers a 
 prospect of complete release for that deeper will which 
 is forever brooding over its visible career and finding 
 it vanity and vexation of spirit, — as taken alone, it is. 
 
 This prospective release of the deeper strata of 
 personality in the lover is due to a discovery — the 
 'stimulus' of his love — an item of knowledge, if you 
 will; for like all instinct, love has at its core a char- 
 acteristic perception or intuition. This knowledge is, 
 in the first place, simply his own newly awakened 
 perception, his 'sympathetic intelligence' of what the 
 beloved being, apart from all acquired excellences, is. 
 This knowledge is presumably not scientifically new, 
 except in so far as it is a knowledge of that unique 
 individual. What makes the experience one of love 
 is that this unique acquisition of the gift of sight with 
 reference to that unique person is simply the lover's 
 initiation into an old and well-known mystery. What 
 is it, then, that he sees? 
 
 The answer, so far as it is general, may be found 
 in asking what, after all, that being, or any other con- 
 scious being, is. And what is such a being if not a 
 process of thoughtful and active intercourse with its 
 
CHBISTIANITY AND SEX-LOVE 359 
 
 own environment? To perceive sucli a being would 
 be to perceive a process of dealing with tlie world, and 
 thus to see the world through that being. What love 
 sees does not stop short of the realities: its horizon, 
 its stimulus, is metaphysical. The truth seems to be 
 that the minds of men and women are so made that 
 each, by the aid of the other, may see farther into the 
 universe than either can see by itself or by the aid of 
 others of its own kind. And what one seems to see in 
 the other is largely seen through the other : what ap- 
 pears to be a quality of the individual turns out to be 
 a quality of the world. This is not to deny these 
 qualities of the individual, however; for the beauty 
 and worth of a person are not separable from the world 
 of objects into which that person habitually looks. 
 
 But whatever the content of this half -personal, half- 
 metaphysical vision, the first impulse and meaning of 
 love, like that of art in response to the beautiful, is to 
 possess what it has seen by reproducing it. It under- 
 takes to edit, portray, proclaim, give out in some way 
 its discovery, and preferably to a worthy rather than 
 to an unworthy audience, hence (with the character- 
 istic inward-turning of love) commonly to the beloved 
 person himself. Thus the will to power seems reduced 
 and tamed to the idle form of praise, and spends the 
 energy that might have moved the world in adorn- 
 ment, idealization, and numerous busy offices called 
 into being not for their utility, but solely for the ele- 
 ment of praise which they embody. But praise, it may 
 be noted, under the guise of service, is still a subtle 
 taking-possession, an assertion of comprehension and 
 
360 CHRISTIANITY 
 
 right. And all taking-possession in the progress of 
 love may (with allowance for feeble terms where all 
 terms are feeble) be described as a development of 
 praise: with increasingly intimate care and service 
 there is consistent enlargement of that assumed right 
 until it ventures to include in its scope the entire gamut 
 of the being of the beloved, from thought to immediate 
 existence, and to render back this entire gamut as 
 something known, comprehended, praised, — and yet 
 with the imprint upon it of that once alien will, the 
 consciousness of the lover and knower. 
 
 Especially in dealing with the meaning of love, the 
 notion of 'power' threatens to become inept. For it 
 is precisely in love that the whole conscious interest in 
 power seems neutralized and rendered latent by the 
 dominant interest in mutuality, in getting rid of all 
 distance and otherness. No doubt the lover comes into 
 a kind of incidental power or confidence toward the 
 world at large — ^if he is accepted ; he may even be said 
 to taste greatness : but the greatness is conferred upon 
 him, the power is borrowed rather than his own. 
 Between the lovers, also, there is a wholly mutual sense 
 of dignity which comes from the awareness of validity : 
 with their other metaphysical knowledge, the lovers 
 also know that between them — ^not in either of them — 
 the tribe is present; the promise and potency of 
 humanity as a self-continuing stream of conscious life 
 is, if not in their keeping, still within reach of their 
 conjuring. But what thus seems their power is not 
 their own : it is the power of nature and of society. 
 
 But I would still say that just because of this vica- 
 
CHRISTIANITY AND SEX-LOVE 361 
 
 riousness and latency, the will to power here notably 
 comes to its own. For power is realized not primarily 
 in self-assertive exertion, but rather in taking advan- 
 tage of the hierarchical arrangement of the powers of 
 the world, affecting large issues by touching their 
 springs. The technique and strategy of love is just 
 this, that it works back, so to speak, toward the focus 
 of the world's forces, the tilting point of the avalanche. 
 It touches the curve of life at the moment of its bend- 
 ing from the rise to the decline, where but an increment 
 of strength suflSces to work the miracle and hold life 
 away from the gravitation of mortality. Thus, in- 
 stinctively, love finds itself assuming for a brief mo- 
 ment the actual work of a god: it undertakes, while 
 acting as a channel for universal life, to be an original 
 maker of life. 
 
 II 
 
 These undertakings, I say, are incipient in the first 
 impulse of love. But in carrying out its primary 
 ambitions, love finds subjective satisfactions and 
 pleasures, and on account of these, love, as a matter 
 of racial and typical if not of universal experience, 
 suffers a fall. The fall is that it adopts as an end the 
 subjective joy that it has discovered. It limits its 
 horizon; and mingling an overweight of sense in its 
 meaning, it becomes selfish. It draws circles, creates 
 an imaginary world of two, and thinks that all the 
 sufficiencies of the universe are contained within it. 
 No love begins by seeing in love primarily a natural 
 
362 CHEISTIANITY 
 
 desire ; but some loves end that way, and most at some 
 time or other tend to. 
 
 What forces love out of this circle as a rule is not 
 abstract idealism but simply the experience of self- 
 defeat, i.e., the natural dialectic. It finds that it cannot 
 retain even its own narrow type of satisfaction, because 
 it has mistaken its meaning. It is forced to break out 
 of that circle for the very breath of life it sought there. 
 This is a critical juncture iii the adventure of love. 
 For while love now knows beyond peradventure that 
 it has been disappointed, it may not see clearly where 
 the repair of its fortunes lies. One of the most 
 inviting of hypotheses is that it has chosen the wrong 
 individual as an object of devotion. What it thought 
 it saw in that person is clearly not there. It may ac- 
 cordingly betake. itself to wandering , as a cure for its 
 confinement in what is subjective" and poor of meaning. 
 Fickleness is right and 'natural' in all that it denies, — 
 it denies that that was satisfying. But fickleness is 
 more than likely to be false in what it affirms. It has 
 a negatively pragmatic value in the course of the 
 dialectic of experience: that which does not work, is 
 not the real thing. 
 
 Ill 
 
 It is at this point that social pressure comes to the 
 rescue. The office of social pressure is to force dis- 
 illusioned love into another inference than that of 
 natural wandering. Its satisfaction was lost, not 
 because its first vision was deceptive, but because it 
 has by its own self-will obscured that first vision. 
 
CHEISTIANITY AND SEX-LOVE 363 
 
 What it first saw was an independent soul; and .that 
 soul has now been reduced to dependence upon itself. 
 What one has wearied of is the limited and clinging 
 lover, having no independent grasp on absolute reality 
 and value, and therefore opaque to what was once 
 visible through him. To that first spirit it could 
 minister with pleasure, or rather, by necessity; to the 
 present being it can bring only requests for its own 
 satisfaction. It is not that the person has changed, 
 but that the horizon, from which all personal worth is 
 derived, has shrunk. The only being you can love is 
 the being who has an independent object of worship, 
 and that holds you out of your self-indulgence to a 
 worship of that same object. The health and meaning 
 of love depend on that common devotion to a common 
 divinity. Now society insists on a part of this horizon ; 
 it reminds marriage of its responsibility to the public 
 order; it takes hostages against too easy wandering, 
 providing that any retreat shall be as public and as 
 well considered as the original commitment. It thus 
 compels a fickle impulse at least to re-examine its 
 theory of the case, and so provides for a time the ex- 
 ternal form of loyalty, in the good hope that the pair 
 will supply the substance thereof from their own living 
 resources. But of itself, society cannot provide this 
 substance, and its pressure in favor of its conventional 
 family life, helpful to great majorities in the quest of 
 their own individual meanings, leaves the few without 
 a guide and empty, mere rebellious conformists, or non- 
 conformists. Society cannot revive a dead or comatose 
 
364 CHBISTIANITY 
 
 affection; it cannot so much, as explain to tlie arid ex- 
 lover what it is that he wants. 
 
 Such explanation is the work of the philosopher ; and 
 Plato came nearer to fulfilling this office than most 
 other thinkers of ancient or modern times. All love, 
 said he, as it becomes aware of its meaning, is a 
 demand for immortality through "creation in the 
 medium of beauty." Ignorant love forgets that its 
 horizon is immortality: enlightened love realizes that 
 its meaning is only completely found when personal 
 and family relations are left behind; it is found in 
 that metaphysical element which all love more or less 
 dimly reveals, in the quest and transmission by teach- 
 ing of the knowledge of what is absolutely real. It 
 is in the giving of that second birth of which the 
 Brahmans taught, rather than in the giving of the 
 first birth, that the full satisfaction of love is to be 
 found. Thus sex-love, completely understood, has no 
 psychological need of physical relationship nor of 
 marriage; and Plato seems to speak in total accord 
 with the voice of early Christianity. 
 
 But there are few today who accept the interpre- 
 tation of Plato as complete. Nor does it seem to me 
 complete, nor equivalent to the purport of Christianity. 
 
 IV 
 
 To reach a completer view of the meaning of love, 
 I must recall that in that stage of the dialectic which 
 we described as the 'fall of love,' there is a gain as 
 well as a loss of meaning. And the element of meaning 
 here gained is not included in Plato's interpretation. 
 
CHRISTIANITY AND SEX-LOVE 365 
 
 For when, by Self-indulgence, the circle of love 
 narrows, the beloved is at times within the circle, a 
 fellow conspirator in the limitation; and at times 
 outside the circle. And when the eye tempered by 
 self-interest sees the other in this external fashion, it 
 sees him impersonally and critically. His defects are 
 visible, not at all for the first time (for love is not 
 blind, it is merely confident), but in the new light of 
 a problem, — a problem which the private order must 
 share with the pubhc order. These defects are likely 
 to become the object of a suffering criticism, the tjrpe 
 of criticism which condemns the critic, but which, none 
 the less, has its own measure of truth. In brief, the 
 evolution of love begins to include within itself, more 
 or less unavowedly, a segment of the development of 
 pugnacity. And pugnacity always deals with the 
 concrete; it is a highly contemporaneous and indi- 
 vidualizing impulse. It does not permit the growth 
 of love to take a Platonic direction from the more 
 material to the more ethereal objects of contemplation. 
 It reminds it of its highly particular historic task. 
 Whatever its meaning, it must include all that a com- 
 pletely transformed pugnacity means: it must learn 
 the art of recovering in the other the absolute self 
 disposed to reject its own imperfection. 
 
 Love is the best agent for the instruction of pug- 
 nacity; but pugnacity, in turn, is (in some form or 
 other) a very fit agent for the instruction of a flagging 
 love. What it has to teach is no more than what love 
 all along knew, namely, its own interest in the removal 
 of defects from the beloved, its uncompromising 
 
366 CHRISTIANITY 
 
 jealousy of all such defects, its wholly sufficient power 
 to overcome them. This is love's responsibility; but 
 let me say that in the integrity of the natural impulse 
 of love, it is an ingredient of love's enthusiasm. Love 
 does not want a perfect object: it wants an object to 
 be, made over, fit for its own power of re-creation. 
 The meaning of the great passion is not found pri- 
 marily in bringing forth a race of new beings who 
 shall realize in time all that was lacking to their 
 progenitors. Its meaning like that of religion itself 
 is a claim upon present experience. It means nothing 
 less than the destruction of what is recognized as 
 mortal — :I do not say in the other, but in both, and in 
 their mutual life — and its re-creation in the light of 
 whatever beauty it has seen. But its impulse to de- 
 stroy that mortality and to reproduce that beauty is 
 no more one of abstract immortalization than is the 
 work of an artist: it is a very concrete and present 
 aim. More than this, such a transformation is what 
 love actually, though subconsciously, and more or less 
 permanently, achieves. 
 
 Thus the dialectic of love reaches an interpretation 
 more active than Platonic and more absorbing of the 
 entire soul-and-body entity. Love is that region of 
 life which exists in giving life ; and this means develop- 
 ing the possibilities of a mutual existence both of sense 
 and of idea. It is satisfied only when its power can 
 work in a completely historic form. It ministers to 
 the soul, but always by way of body and estate. Its 
 first impulsive certainty of power it must replace by 
 a more conscious and responsible certainty. But if the 
 
CHRISTIANITY AND SEX-LOVE 367 
 
 interest in life-giving sinks into tolerance and habitual 
 modus Vivendi, love is hibernating or dead. It is 
 better that it should remain consciously critical. For 
 love is by necessity aggressive and originative. 
 
 V 
 
 Christianity sets itself at the goal of this dialectical 
 development, careless as always of the relations of 
 the goal to the usual social process. It sets an absolute 
 standard for the relations of men and women; but it 
 hardly suggests that this standard is to be reached 
 through any such course of experience as we have 
 depicted, still less through the ascent of the Platonic 
 ladder. Its teaching may be stated somewhat as 
 follows : 
 
 1. By assuming, as Christianity does, the non- 
 necessity of marriage for complete satisfaction of the 
 will, it teaches by implication that love is capable of 
 complete 'sublimation.' But it is noteworthy that in 
 the typical transformations of love adopted by Chris- 
 tianity, the element of physical 'ministration' is never 
 lost. It is through the washing of feet, the tendance 
 of the injured, the breaking of the box of ointment 
 (not in any sense a useful social service), the cup of 
 cold water, that the repressed wish finds an outlet. 
 As a matter of history, the notable trend of Christian 
 energies into philanthropic efforts during the first few 
 centuries is the manifestation of a humanitarian 
 passion sufficiently profound to drain the entire life 
 of affection into its channel; and philanthropy is not 
 Platonism. 
 
368 CHBISTIANITY 
 
 But it is likewise characteristic of Christianity that 
 the personal ministration was never allowed to shrink 
 to the level of purely objective and useful service. 
 The cup of cold water is given 'in the name' of some- 
 thing believed to be of cosmic importance and impera- 
 tive upon the completer will of the person served. The 
 situation is given its own horizon of meaning, unob- 
 trusively in the main, by a sign, by the wearing of a 
 uniform, or by nothing visible at all ; but the purpose 
 is never relinquished of remaking the mind while 
 remaking the body. Love, to Christianity as to Plato, 
 means the will to confer immortality. And apart from 
 that intent, the legacy of 'charity' imposed upon our 
 present social order begins to appear as a wretched 
 substitute for justice, and a mockery of all honest love. 
 The justification, and the only justification, of charity 
 is its metaphysical import. The future lies rather with 
 the useless gift, the box of ointment, i.e., with the 
 increasingly adequate sublimation of love in art, the 
 disinterested, but yet physical, tendance of the im- 
 mortal in man. 
 
 Philanthropy and the production of beauty, both 
 creative activities, are the two chief social equivalents 
 of sex-love. But Christianity proposes them as com- 
 plete equivalents only when they are elements in its 
 own form of the religious life. This form is one which 
 involves a concrete union of 'ministry' with worship, 
 and an alternation between the two. In the usual 
 treatment of the subject by psychologists of religion 
 it is commonly assumed that the ministry is the sub- 
 stantial, and worship the insubstantial, idle, and 
 
CHEISTIANITY AND SEX-LOVE 369 
 
 perhaps harmful element. But without worship, both 
 philanthrophy and art merge too completely with the 
 public order. Worship is the recollection of the spirit 
 and the renewal of that consciousness of meaning 
 which is to be carried into the ministration. It is an 
 effort to shake off the dust and illusion of a partly 
 secularized consciousness, and to recover a sense (not 
 a 'mere idea') of the quality of value, of beauty 
 perhaps, in the ultimate reality of the world. It has 
 no other object than that same metaphysical truth that 
 love catches glimpses of — ^this objective truth is the 
 primary bond of identity between them. And if wor- 
 ship attains its end, it is the realization of what love 
 through its symbols perpetually seeks. 
 
 Thus we confirm the existence of an analogy of the 
 life of religion with the life of sex, which has been much 
 dwelt upon of late as though it were a new discovery. 
 But what it means is a very ancient insight ; and that 
 insight is not that religion is nearly identical with sex, 
 but that sex, as it finds its own meaning, approaches 
 identity with religion. The same is obviously true of 
 patriotism, and only less obviously true of ambition 
 and of every other positive human impulse; but the 
 relationship is particularly direct in the case of sex- 
 love, first because of its occasionally clear and con- 
 fessed metaphysical horizon, and second because of 
 the natural rhythm or alternation in its life, akin to 
 that of religion just pointed out. 
 
 A right understanding of this truth has distinct 
 social importance at present, when marriage as a 
 career is increasingly a matter for deliberate choice 
 
370 CHBISTIANITY 
 
 or rejection, and still the absence of marriage is felt 
 as a loss of selfhood. The right understanding seems 
 to me to be contained in this simple proposition : that 
 the only thing about a human will that needs to be 
 satisfied is the whole will; and that religion is the 
 satisfaction of the whole will, the will to power in its 
 inclusive form. Apart from this fact, one can under- 
 stand that it might become a social theorem claiming 
 psychological support that no substitution for the life 
 of sex is possible, and that the social evil or evils are 
 necessarily always with us. With this fact, the con- 
 sideration of any desirable social changes is at once 
 freed from the false and intrusive note of 'necessity.' 
 It may be remarked in passing that particularly in 
 this matter what we imagine to be necessary is the 
 chief agent in creating a necessity; and conversely a 
 presumption of non-necessity, supported by a psycho- 
 logical understanding of the principle of 'interpreta- 
 tion,' may well be the first step to emancipation. 
 
 2. But the absolute which Christianity prescribes 
 in this field, like its other absolutes, intends to live 
 with the relative, not to displace it. The final meaning 
 of sex-love is one which is to be held within marriage, 
 and within all the other relations of men and women. 
 There are a few religions (think of the religion of 
 Schopenhauer, of the Shakers, of Tolstoy's later days) 
 that have attempted to exclude the life of sex; but 
 Christianity is not among them. The possibility of 
 sublimation which it asserts is such as to set indi- 
 viduals free to choose their own destiny, celibate or 
 
OHBISTIANITY AND SEX-LOVE 371 
 
 not, as otherwise they would hardly be free. It is 
 certainly not such as to prescribe either type of destiny. 
 In the relations of men and women, what Chris- 
 tianity explicitly demands is not defined in terms of 
 any given type of behavior; it is the meaning it is 
 concerned with. It is a question of how one "looketh 
 upon a woman." And the sense of its legislation 
 seems to be this : that any behavior is right behavior 
 which is consistent with looking upon her as a person 
 having a destiny of her own to work out, a possibility 
 of immortality which depends in part upon your own 
 attitude. Any behavior is right which is consistent 
 with this : no social constraint need deflect the conduct 
 of one who sees always as far as the "pilgrim soul" 
 in the person of his neighbor. But an attempt to bring 
 this meaning into the relationship will quickly exclude 
 many varieties of behavior. There is more room for 
 self-deception here than in most other regions of 
 behavior in declaring freedom from particular social 
 rules for the sake of an alleged general meaning or 
 spirit. But the meaning proposed by Christianity 
 supplies a test with a cutting edge.if one is disposed 
 to use it. All of love is right when it takes for its 
 meaning the giving of life, i.e., such life as can satisfy 
 a himian will. 
 
CHAPTER XLIII 
 CHRISTIANITY AND AMBITION 
 
 EARLY Christianity had no overt hostility to the 
 regular business of State life. It paid its taxes 
 and its debts, observed the civil laws, baptized centu- 
 rions and magistrates without expecting them to 
 abandon their callings, and on occasion appealed to 
 Caesar. As to the public corvees, it proposed that if 
 any man, i.e., an officer, compel you to go with him one 
 mile, the proper spirit would pay a double stint. 
 
 Yet it would be vain to read into these occasional 
 signs of acquiescence any adoption of the purposes 
 of the public order. Whatever are the ordinary 
 objects of ambition, — ^precedence, wealth, office, public 
 power, — they are relegated with an almost contemp- 
 tuous gesture to the unimportant: "for after all these 
 things do the Gentiles seek." 
 
 A new ambition, however, enters upon the heels of 
 the old. The spiritual hfe of the universe has its own 
 structure, its own focus, and as it were its own court 
 and order of nobility. And for him who would be first 
 in that realm there is a maxim : let him be servant of 
 all. Ambition is recognized, and in the same breath 
 annulled. It is by lighting on the existing paradoxes 
 of the will (not by inventing them) that Christianity 
 was able to carry the art of life beyond the Greek level. 
 
CHRISTIANITY AND AMBITION 373 
 
 Ambition faced with this reversal of its natural aim 
 is compelled to undergo a metamorphosis and acquire 
 a more stable meaning. 
 
 But does the change amount to anyihing more than 
 translating into another world the essential aims of 
 the present? A longer aim may easily reverse a 
 present policy. Treasures are to be laid up, as usual, 
 but in a safer place. One is to become cosmically 
 intelligent and therefore cosmically prudent, A motive 
 in which one detects strands of instinctive self- 
 assertion and instinctive fear, stirred by perceiving 
 the perishableness of all finite goods, is to lead men 
 to seek in an imperishable good the absolute security 
 of the soul. I am not among those who find prudence 
 an objectionable virtue ; nor who reject the interest in 
 personal survival as unseemly in a mortal. One who 
 loves life at all is forever becoming more deeply 
 involved in it; and the self-conscious lover of life 
 cannot otherwise than will his own continuous exist- 
 ence. To desire the saving of one's soul in this sense 
 is a necessary desire ;^ and under these circumstances, 
 it is no high merit to remain indifferent regarding 
 ways and means. 
 
 But prudence is not the noblest of the virtues, nor 
 the last word of Christianity. Buddhism had long ago 
 detected the moral danger of an indulgent heaven- 
 quest, and had sought to make ambition commit 
 
 1 A fact which is not altered by the results of any questionnaire, 
 especially of a questionnaire circulated among the more sophisticated 
 and self -challenging members of the community, as in the enquiry by 
 Professor James H. Leuba, reported in "The Belief in God and 
 Immortality. ' ' 
 
374 CHRISTIANITY 
 
 suicide in a selflessness without desire. It sought 
 dispassion; and it, sought it by way of compassion, 
 because thereby the root of individuality was best 
 killed. But it is no easy task to destroy in oneself all 
 desire, or all the sJcandhas that attach to individual 
 existence ; and if one enters upon and persists in this 
 noble and arduous 'eightfold path,' it must be through 
 some powerful impulsion. In truth, ambition is the 
 essence of religion. There is always possible to men 
 a life of least resistance, taking oneself and the world 
 as one finds them, accepting the horizon of nature. If 
 one repudiates this and takes upon himself the pains 
 of a Buddha, it is through some deep-laid passion, 
 which the goal of Buddhism, as defined to our Western 
 ears, hardly explains. If religion destroys ambition, 
 it destroys itself. 
 
 The solution of Christianity perceives this prin- 
 ciple. It recognizes as does Buddhism the faultiness 
 of heaven-seeking; but it seeks to remedy that fault 
 by proceeding in the opposite direction, — ^by carrying 
 ambition to the limit of its own meaning, giving a final 
 answer to the question. What does ambition want? 
 
 The dialectic of experience has shown us from many 
 angles how the quest for power tends to revise its aim ; 
 how the pursuit of power-over becomes the pursuit of 
 power-for. As power must have its object, it is so far 
 dependent upon the existence of the object, and must 
 seek its welfare. At the limit, the exercise of power 
 is indistinguishable from service; it consists in giving 
 or in adding to the being of another. Christianity 
 places itself at this point and defines, as the goal of 
 
CHEISTIANITY AND AMBITION 375 
 
 the transformation of ambition, the conferring of 
 spiritual life. The compassion which in Buddhism is 
 the corrective of the self-centered bent of the will is 
 present here also, but with a different meaning. The 
 compassion of Buddha looks on the world of men as 
 caught in the error of individuality and its consequent 
 suffering, and in releasing them wins its own release. 
 The compassion of Christianity looks on a world of 
 men as lacking individuality and hence unable to meet 
 suffering, and in confirming their selfhood confirms 
 its own. 
 
 Ambition in this form is the most characteristic 
 product of Christianity in the field of behavior. It 
 is the passion for the historic spread of the new com- 
 munity, or in more personal form, the "passion for 
 souls. " Nothing is more dominant in the early history 
 of this cult than the willingness to suffer, to be 
 despised, to endure all things, if by any means some 
 could be persuaded to become members of the com- 
 munity, the kingdom of heaven in the guise of a 
 militant church on earth. 
 
 In this transformation, ambition does not lose the 
 other-worldly sweep of the transcendental prudence 
 we were speaking of. It is still laying hold on that 
 other world, but with more radical power than is 
 implied in simply attaining future status there. It is 
 indeed far more ambitious. It lays hold on that world 
 with the intent of so much present mastery of its 
 quality and principle as to weave them into the fabric 
 of human history. 
 
 This passion for souls we have described as the final 
 
376 CHBISTIANITY 
 
 transformation of the ambition of the public order; 
 but it is evidently more than that. It is the same form 
 of will as that which gave the final meaning to human 
 love, the will to confer immortal life. It is likewise the 
 last transformation of pugnacity, the will to displace 
 evil with good. It is, in truth, the point in which the 
 meanings of all instincts converge. It is the positive 
 meaning given by Christianity to the human will as 
 a whole. 'Saving one's soul,' so far as psychology ca,n 
 deal with the matter, is the achieving of this passion. 
 'Conversion,' or the second-birth, means the trans- 
 lation of natural impulses into terms of this form of 
 the will to power. It is this change which gave Words- 
 worth his maturity in that moment when he became a 
 'dedicated spirit.' It is visible, in more or less veiled 
 form, in the final insights of G-oethe's Faust, of 
 Browning's Paracelsus. But it is in more literal and 
 potent fashion the force behind the careers of Jesus 
 and Paul, and, apart from their unfinished meta- 
 physics, of Buddha and of Socrates. And it is more 
 or less obscurely the motive of all our more honorable 
 efforts in education, social reform, and other expres- 
 sions of parental instinct. 
 
 The fact that these several instincts come together 
 in this meaning is circumstantial evidence that the 
 meaning is a true interpretation and final for them all. 
 And as tested by experience, it has been a successful 
 interpretation. It has become for many men an 
 absorbing and satisfying purpose. And from the 
 standpoint of those who look on and estimate the 
 results in terms of character, there is little disposition 
 
CHBISTIANITY AND AMBITION 377 
 
 to question that in those men who have most embodied 
 this passion human nature has touched its highest 
 points. 
 
 But unless the direction of this passion had been 
 concrete and historical, it would not have been success- 
 ful in winning ascendency in a human will. It is 
 successful only because and so far as it retains all that 
 respect for the circumstances of the physical and 
 social being that we saw to be characteristic of affec- 
 tion and of pugnacity. The community with which it 
 concerns itself is never merely an invisible church of 
 all the loyal, such as Professor Royce had in mind as 
 the "beloved community." It is this ; but it is also an 
 institution among institutions, having its own work 
 in the world and its own aims. It is among other 
 institutions somewhat as the State is among them, 
 while in its purposes it includes them and reflects upon 
 all of them. Its purpose is to hold out precisely this 
 interpretation of their wills to all men as being the 
 adequate interpretation; to bring all plans and goods 
 into subordination to this; and thus, while nominally 
 undermining all other institutions, to pave the way for 
 the most subtle of common understandings, the inter- 
 racial and international understandings which are 
 crystallizing in the shape of a world culture and an 
 international law. Thus Christianity becomes a cor- 
 porate body having an ambition of its own : it becomes 
 a propaganda, breaks across the provincial boundaries 
 of its origin, and aspires to universality. Like Bud- 
 dhism it is by its own principle a missionary religion. 
 And if by being 'true' we mean among other things 
 
378 CHRISTIANITY 
 
 being awake to the nature of one's business in this 
 world, we may say that no religion is a true religion 
 which does not in this way aspire to be corporate and 
 universal. 
 
 For the most part, it is the Catholic Church, rather 
 than the Protestant Church, which has kept to the 
 concrete view of its undertaking : it has more consist- 
 ently approached the soul through its physical and 
 social entanglements. Protestantism has been more 
 intellectual and abstract. But there are not a few men 
 in whom both types are united, as in the work of 
 Livingstone, or in that of Dr. Grrenfell, in whom the 
 medical mission and the community mission are 
 combined. All tendencies at present make for this 
 conereter conception of the undertaking in which, when 
 it completely understands itself, aU human ambition 
 culminates. 
 
CHAPTEE XLIV 
 THE CRUX OF CHRISTIANITY 
 
 IT must be said, however, that the growing concrete- 
 ness in the form of missionai^y effort among 
 Protestants is not due wholly to a deepening percep- 
 tion of the meaning of the enterprise. It is due in part 
 to a sort of embarrassment in the intellectual preach- 
 ing of religion as propaganda. The mission begins 
 to be regarded rather as an educational or philan- 
 thropic than as a religious undertaking, as it were a 
 gift of culture, sustained mainly by the desire to be 
 serviceable in a pioneering way. The attitude of the 
 prophet or evangelist, keenly conscious of the vital 
 import of religious differences, is felt to be less natural 
 of late, as if the human spirit had entered upon a new 
 phase of self-consciousness. 
 
 The causes of this change are many, but among them 
 I believe we may recognize an element of diffidence in 
 assuming the role of the propagator of religion, as if 
 that role were somehow presumptuous. And is not 
 this the case ? 
 
 Is it not true that this entire interpretation of 
 instinct as a will to power, and of the will to power 
 as a will to save souls, or to re-create or reform or 
 educate mankind, has in it more than a trace of pre- 
 sumption? What it amounts to seems to be this, that 
 
380 CHEISTIANITY 
 
 if the complete salvation of an individual will requires 
 tlie transformation of all its instincts into the will to 
 save others, we must be saved hy saving; and it is very- 
 doubtful whether in our unsaved condition we have 
 any right to suppose ourselves competent to save. We 
 might as well assume the right to forgive sins. For 
 when in our current criticism we recognize sin, and 
 when we subordinate this criticism (as we thought we 
 should) to a spirit of creative justice, what is this but 
 an attempt to displace a will defined by us as evil by 
 a good will likewise of our own definition? But can 
 we be certain either that that evil is really evil, or that 
 which seems good to us is absolutely good? 
 
 An attitude in which one detects himself subtly 
 usurping the functions of Deity, while wholly vigorous 
 and unblushing in the activities of an earlier genera- 
 tion, has become all but impossible to a large part of 
 our contemporary self-consciousness. There is an 
 evident disinclination to walk out very far on any 
 venture of moral judgment, through a sense that this 
 judgment is most likely to mislead when it is most 
 conscious. There is a preference to acknowledge quite 
 frankly the tendencies of the less ethically effortful 
 self, to confess one's egoisms, one's ambitions, one's 
 enjoyment of praise, to let one's tempers, dislikes and 
 affections have their say, because after all one must 
 be sincere and what one is does the talking in any case. 
 In all speculations about what human beings finally 
 want, our formulae are likely to do violence to hidden 
 impulses while they satisfy the obvious ones. And 
 this moral self -propagation which we have reached as 
 
THE CBUX OF OHEISTIANITY 381 
 
 the best meaning of the will seems to do violence to an 
 intuitive hesitation to regard one's moral self as ever 
 quite worthy of being propagated. 
 
 We have not, however, been asserting that our ideal 
 is practicable ; we have been asserting that it is what 
 Christianity demands, and that if it could be attained 
 it would satisfy the will. The difficulty we have just 
 encountered affords additional evidence that our 
 interpretation of Christian requirements is the true 
 one. For original Christianity encountered precisely 
 the same criticism of its aims, namely, that they are 
 presumptuous. Was it not this very charge that led 
 to the crucifixion, and from the point of view of the 
 judges perhaps justly so? For did not this man pro- 
 fess to forgive sins, and in other ways make himself 
 equal with God? And did he not hand over the keys 
 of heaven and hell to his followers? He professed to 
 save others, and it was a pointed gibe, regarded as 
 equivalent to a refutation, that he could not save 
 himself. In political translation, the offence of the 
 man was in his pretended kingship, the true substance 
 of which was his self -asserted mastery over the souls 
 of men. Historically speaking, the crux of Christianity 
 is its element of presumption. 
 
 For the same reason Christianity aroused the 
 antagonism of the Eoman State, hospitable to nearly 
 every foreign cjult. For the Christiaai community 
 regarded itself in a wholly unique and arrogant light : 
 it presumed to provide a salvation which made salva- 
 tion in the State unnecessary, and supreme devotion 
 to the State impossible. It claimed to be a kingdom 
 
382 CHRISTIANITY 
 
 in which the whole world could, and eventually would, 
 find refuge. It compelled choices, and announced a 
 competition *for allegiance, whereas other religions 
 were content with combined loyalties. In brief, it 
 assumed to be right, to possess the "Way; and the 
 pretense of divine right implied in its passion for souls 
 was as little palatable to Rome as it is to the ethical 
 diffidence of the present hour. 
 
 There would be little or no fault to find with the 
 standard set up by Christianity, if it were only re- 
 served from being professed and administered by 
 human beings. Eeligion can hardly do less, perhaps, 
 than demand the complete transformation of instinct ; 
 and the definition of the goal of human nature is not 
 refuted by the feeling that no human being is quite 
 qualified to adopt it. And further (if we are right) 
 it is not Christianity alone, but the dialectic of our own 
 experience, that leads to the requirement we have 
 stated. The only thing we can justly demand of 
 Christianity, if it makes itself responsible for this 
 ideal, is an answer to the question. How is this 
 transformation possible? 
 
CHAPTEE XLV 
 THE THEORY OF PARTICIPATION 
 
 USAGE has identified the word Christianity with 
 a type of disposition, — one whose main ingre- 
 dient is a sentiment of human charity, embedded in a 
 metaphysical faith a;nd hope. And when scholars 
 began to address themselves to the question, What is 
 the essence of Christianity? many of them accepted 
 this usage and assumed that the essence in question 
 is to be sought in some standard for human character 
 such as we have been considering. 
 
 But if this assumption were true it would be hard 
 to find a sufficient reason why the ideal in question 
 should be called by the special name of Christianity. 
 For quite apart from the historic fact that many 
 elements of the Christian ideal have been found in 
 other places and traditions, there is no good reason 
 why the ideal in its general form should not become 
 a common possession of psychology. So far as it is 
 the outcome of the dialectic of experience, which is 
 the same everywhere, it must in time become such 
 a common possession, enriched indeed by the 
 various historic modes of approach and expression, 
 but the better domesticated in the human family for 
 
384 CHEISTIANITY 
 
 being, in substance, free from any special channel of 
 communication.^ 
 
 It is not in any set of moral precepts, nor in any 
 view of the transformation of instinct, that the essence 
 of Christianity is to be found, but rather in its answer 
 to the question, How is this transformation possible? 
 Or, to put the question in Kantian form, How is 
 ethical experience possible? Every religion makes 
 its demands; but its special obligation, as a religion, 
 is to show how these demands may be met. The 
 religion is to be identified not by its ethics but by its 
 theory of salvation and by its actual provision for 
 saving human individuals in their historic context. 
 
 The necessity for such a theory lies in the fact that, 
 as we have seen, the demands themselves involve a 
 practical dilemma. This dilemma, the fundamental 
 problem of Christianity, we may restate somewhat 
 formally as follows. We cannot satisfy our wills, nor 
 the demands upon them, without adopting the attitude 
 of creative artist toward our milieu. This attitude, 
 however, for human beings, is presumption. It is such 
 an attitude as only a divine being would be fully 
 justified in taking. As for us, no demand could be 
 more reasonable than that we should first cast the beam 
 
 1 It has been said, as by Professor G. B. Foster, that the characteristic 
 thing about Christianity is not its stateable ideal, but the embodiment 
 of this ideal in a person. And it is certainly true that such embodiment 
 makes any type of disposition more available and impressive than any 
 possible theoretical statement could be. But what this personality means 
 to men is in any case a universal, and one which the founder of Chris- 
 tianity tried to state as well as to exemplify; and any such universal 
 meaning must be capable of theoretic statement and verification and so, 
 in the end, be detached from the accident of its historic emergence. 
 
THE THBOEY OF PAETICIPATIOlSr 385 
 
 out of our own eye, before undertaking to give liglit to 
 others. But the difficulty is that we can only get rid of 
 the beam through this very undertaking. To be dis- 
 posed to save others, we must first be saved ourselves ; 
 yet to be saved ourselves we must be disposed to save 
 others. On the ground of the moral order alone there 
 is no way out of this circle. 
 
 But Christianity proposes a way out. It relieves the 
 individual at once of the burden of supposing that it 
 is through any merit or power of his own that he can 
 save others ; the power is conferred upon him by way 
 of a loan. It is nothing inherent in us that is to do 
 the work, but something in which we participate. 
 What this means may appear through analogies from 
 the field of knowledge. 
 
 One who knows an object becomes to some degree a 
 partaker in the qualities of the object. Knowledge has 
 for its special business the reaching across from self 
 to what is not-self, and making that not-self, so far 
 as its qualities can be appreciated, an appurtenance 
 of the self. What I know of any real object is never 
 the object in full, but a selection of my own: I know 
 as much of it as I can 'take in,' — ^the phrase is accurate. 
 Any quality which I appreciate enough to remember 
 and name has already begun to be a permanent source 
 of change in me ; but even if I merely gaze on an object, 
 all that I succeed in taking in is at that moment an 
 element in my being. What we call an 'idea' is a 
 quality of an object in so far as it has become a 
 property of a self. Participation of this kind^ is par- 
 
 2 In the Platonic theory of participation, it is the object that par- 
 ticipates in the ideas. According to the view here proposed it is the 
 
386 CHRISTIANITY 
 
 ticularly natural and direct in tlie case of personal 
 qualities and values. I may witness an heroic deed 
 and be no hero nor become one: but if I appreciate 
 its heroism I become at least momentarily a partaker 
 of its quality. The psychology of masses and of 
 political movements frequently exhibits this principle, 
 which is more fundamental than that of imitation. 
 Mazzini gave Italy an army of heroes; but their valor 
 was not at first an intrinsic quality of themselves. It 
 was a quality of their leader, and became theirs 
 through their knowledge of him. With another leader 
 it might well have remained not alone latent, but non- 
 existent. Much of the hope of democracy lies in the 
 fact that no set of psychological tests can ever tell 
 what any man or body of men is capable of. All men 
 rise to the level of their leaders in so far as they under- 
 stand them and believe in them.' 
 
 Through this participation of the self in its object 
 there arises the paradox that the same act of appre- 
 ciation which confers greatness upon a self reveals to 
 that self its habitual littleness. It was Socrates who 
 burned into our memories the truth that the beginning 
 of wisdom may be the knowledge of our ignorance. 
 
 self which through the idea participates in the object, without enquiring 
 whether the object itself has an original or a communicated being. 
 Ideas in this sense are not conceived as eternal patterns but as living 
 processes of osmosis between self and not-self. 
 
 8 It is this factor of belief, with the implied act of affirmation, that 
 marks the distinction between the effect of knowing the good and 
 knowing the evil qualities of things. There is a degree of participation 
 involved in the knowledge of evil, even for scientific purposes. But 
 the non-consent that goes with such knowledge, if deep enough to remain 
 in subconsciousness with it, limits the area of its remaking of the self. 
 
THE THEORY OP PARTICIPATION 387 
 
 But in another form this same truth has been the 
 common possession of all the mystics. For their 
 insistence upon the inadequacy of concepts and defini- 
 tions is another way of saying that a true knowledge 
 of reality makes all prior ideas appear as so many 
 limitations or negations. Likewise in the world of 
 the will: if one finds and appreciates anything holy 
 in the world, the participation in that holiness is at 
 the same time a destruction of moral conceit. And 
 this, I believe, explains the emphasis of Christianity 
 upon humility. Humility is not a virtue; but it is a 
 condition without which the kind of virtue demanded 
 by Christianity is not possible : it is an infallible result 
 of perceiving in any adequate way what kind of will it 
 is that is needed to do a man's work in the world. It 
 is a result of beginning to participate in that will. 
 
 Now to possess goodness in this participatory 
 fashion is not to be good, but only to begin being good. 
 But as long as the appreciation is alive (and this is 
 vital to the whole matter) the incipient possession of 
 goodness may do the work of goodness itself. What 
 the man sees becomes the working part of the man. 
 This principle explains and justifies the tendency 
 which we found general in society of taking men on 
 the basis of their hopes rather than of their achieve- 
 ments : what men reach out to will do some part of its 
 proper work through them, if not by them. This is 
 especially true of those who labor, as poets do, to bring 
 to earth an insight which is still marginal and vague 
 to themselves. The men who dimly perceived 
 "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity," had their effect in 
 
388 CHBISTIANITY 
 
 spite of the haziness of their vision: this effect was 
 certainly not due to the haze, nor much helped by it, 
 but neither was it delayed until their insight was 
 perfectly defined. There is some ground for thinking 
 that no idea is wholly definite until it is dead^. Those 
 books and writers appear greatest to us who make 
 connections with the surmises of our minds, because 
 they have been able to give substance to the surmises 
 of their own: we can only on this ground understand 
 the effect, not alone of most of the great seers and of 
 most of the bibles, but of many a writer within the 
 period of the world's "enlightenment," of Bunyan, 
 of Locke, of Kant, of William James. In this there is 
 no glorification of an obscure idea because it is 
 obscure; for the only justification any idea can have 
 is that it makes connection with objects as they are. 
 But it suggests that waiting for finished neatness may 
 have something unduly cautious about it. The appre- 
 ciations we have should begin their active march when 
 those appreciations arise as convictions within the 
 mind. There is an element of vanity in waiting until 
 we think we are all that we admire before we allow 
 ourselves to communicate our admiration. To know 
 that we work less through what we are than through 
 what we worship is a great economy of pride. 
 
 And it is also an economy of time. For to wait for 
 fitness would mean in most cases to wait till the end 
 of eternity. The only indispensable fitness is the 
 capacity for appreciating or reverencing the object — 
 as the greatness of a Boswell or a Tolstoy lies less in 
 personal force than in what we are pleased to call 
 
THE THEORY OF PAKTICIPATION 389 
 
 ionneiise "objectivity" — and this capacity for rever- 
 ence is often greatest in tlie newest or remotest 
 initiate. This is at least part of the meaning of the 
 doctrine of the Incarnation. The perfect dwells in 
 the impeTtectnow, in so far as the imperfect takes the 
 perfect for an object, and it does now the work of the 
 perfect. 
 
 Thus, the fact of participation makes it possible to 
 act as gods without presumption. With every element 
 of self-assertion in the work of education, or propa- 
 gating a national type of mind, or laboring for any 
 causes such as involve persuading men, or loyally 
 holding to instead of turning away from someone 
 whose fault has become patent, or with whatever other 
 form of saving human nature, comes in the same in- 
 stant its antidote: "Yet not I, but whatever I have 
 found visibly divine in the world, worketh in me. ' ' If 
 the reader has found himself irked by our constant 
 (and admittedly faulty) use of the phrase 'will to 
 power,' the sting of that term is now finally drawn. 
 There is power in the world, and such power as I must 
 wield if I am to find what I mean by living; but that 
 power, even if it resides in me for a moment, is very 
 little mine. Far from a testimony to my ability if I 
 accomplish something with it, it is a comment on my 
 .culpable lack of faith if I fail to work miracles with it. 
 
 But while this principle furnishes a partial answer 
 to our question, How is this transformation possible? 
 it is not a complete answer. For to participate in the 
 nature of God, it is, by this principle, first necessary 
 
390 CHRISTIANITY 
 
 to see God. And it is only those who are already pure 
 in heart that can see God. Participation would remove 
 imperfection, or begin the removal; but the imper- 
 fection obscures my vision, and so bars effective par- 
 ticipation. 
 
 This dilemma is not one that we can banish by 
 ignoring it, or living complacently with it in our 
 ordinary will-to-muddle-through. We have said that 
 ambition is the stuff of which religion is made; it is, 
 if you like, the instinct to do one's living well. It is 
 characteristic of animal life to live in accommodations, 
 and piece out by 'vitality' the inconsistencies of ideas : 
 it is characteristic of religion to seek out all rankling 
 roots of dissatisfaction and clash of meaning, to drive 
 latent problems out from cover rather than cloak them, 
 to declare relentless hostility to our animal and 'vital' 
 ease.* It is religion that compels us to face this logical 
 impasse. 
 
 Nor can we escape the difficulty by placing the vision 
 of God, as Plato does, at the end of a long ascent in 
 the dialectic ladder, with a fine gradation in the stages 
 of the journey. For at each stage the dilemma, in 
 
 ■4 One of the most unfortunate results of letting ' life ' take eare of 
 this particular puzzle is the adoption of a properly humble attitude 
 toward all enterprises which might imply faith in one's own type of 
 mind, i.e., faith in one's faith. This type of humility is seldom socially 
 obnoxious, because it is for the most part amiable; it is not often 
 observed that by its irresponsibility it is the dry rot of all democracy. 
 When it appears in excess, we recognize in Uriah Heep the epitome of 
 all that Nietzsche properly hates, and mankind with him. But whether 
 or not in excess, the moral and logical fault is the same. To take 
 humility as the essence of Christianity is to mistake its symptom for its 
 essence, and to fancy that because the poor in spirit are blessed, one can 
 become poor in spirit at will. The true relation of things is that the 
 
THE THEORY OF PARTICIPATION 391 
 
 principle, recurs. The next step in approaching the 
 vision of the Good, wherever you now stand, requires 
 as its precondition that very purity which is its own 
 natural result, and which the relatively impure will 
 cannot put on for itself. The question is the ancient 
 one. How can a man know God? 
 
 pure in heart cateh a glimpse of God, and they who see God become 
 humble. All other humility is hypocrisy. And the problem then recurs, 
 How can the imperfect mind see God? This problem is not escaped by 
 letting it heal over. 
 
CHAPTEE XLVI 
 THE DIVINE AGGRESSION 
 
 LET me resume the logic of our situation in terms 
 of an experience common in principle. In recent 
 years playwrights have once more ventured to bring 
 upon the stage the miracle-working divine character; 
 and the reception accorded such plays as "The Servant 
 in the House," "The Passing of the Third Floor 
 Back," shows that human nature is ready to recognize 
 and respond to its natural destiny. What one sees 
 there one admits without parley as the strongest thing 
 in the world; and further, in so far as one is moved 
 by it, one is for the moment participating in that type 
 of power. Suppose that the conviction were deep 
 enough to disarm the habitual playgoer's defences, 
 and to persist into the life of the next day. It would 
 meet certain obstacles which the playwright had not 
 included in the difficulties, let us say, of the Servant 
 in the House. For in the first place this Servant is 
 steadily in the right, and knows himself for what he 
 is ; but when criticism must both be given and received, 
 the role of the divine can with difficulty be sustained. 
 This is one pf the embarrassments I should encounter. 
 But looking deeper, I should find the fundamental 
 difficulty to be this : that I do not, as a fact, care enough 
 for either God or men to play this part with success. 
 
THE DIVINE AGGEESSION 393 
 
 I certainly do not see them in a light that compels my 
 complete affection. This is due to the fact that, being 
 what I am, I find in my dealings with the world 
 hindrance, deprivation, pain, to an extent that leaves 
 me highly unreconciled and at heart protesting. Being 
 what I am, I say, — ^because it may well be that if my 
 instincts were completely transformed I should judge 
 things differently. If I could love God, I might over- 
 come or understand deprivation and suffering; and 
 if I could accept deprivation and suffering I might 
 love God. But as it is, I remain a critic of the divine 
 economy and hence of God himself; and the vision 
 that might transform me is closed to me. It is the 
 unresolved problem of evil that stands in the way of 
 the saving of my soul. I am unable to see the divine 
 as an object of admiration, not to say adoration. God, 
 if there is a God, is a blunderer, or a malicious play- 
 maker, or finite and helpless, or callous, or blind. 
 Such is the summary value-judgment that without 
 consulting any deliberate thought of mine my instincts, 
 in their present state, are incessantly reaffirming. 
 
 And apart from what our lips or our theories tell us, 
 this is perhaps the commonest of commonplace atti- 
 tudes toward the universe. The socialized human 
 being looks with a natural skepticism upon any propo- 
 sition to the effect that there is a wholly good God. 
 So far as we can see into the structure of the world, it 
 is a place in which our instincts are not alone unsat- 
 isfied, but unsatisfiable. If religion has been blind to 
 this situation, religion might as well quit the stage. 
 
394 CHRISTIANITY 
 
 But religion is not blind to this situation ; it is the 
 first to announce that there is nothing in the world 
 of men or nature, as we naturally see it, that can 
 justly claim a complete allegiance. It sides completely 
 with our civilized skepticism on this point ; and it not 
 only admits, but asserts, that of ourselves we cannot 
 see things in any other way. It adds, simply, that 
 what we cannot do for ourselves another must do for 
 us; our reconciliation with reality must be brought 
 to us from outside. The salvation of a soul requires 
 a divine intervention. 
 
 II 
 
 The idea of salvation from outside is offensive to 
 our sentiment of moral independence. It is offensive, 
 however, chiefly when we think of righteousness as a 
 course of right action or decision such as every man 
 must effect for himself, rather than as a state of right 
 valuing such as no man by solitary effort can reach. 
 Experience should throw some light on what men need 
 and can use in 'working out their salvation.' The 
 experience of India is especially worth considering, 
 because it is in India that the greatest religions of 
 self-help, Brahmanism and early Buddhism, have run 
 their course. It is not without meaning that while on 
 the soil of India Brahmanism has declined and Bud- 
 dhism has largely disappeared in favor of religions 
 teaching divine help and human dependence, both have 
 taken on as it were departments of supernatural aid 
 
THE DIVINE AGGEESSION 395 
 
 foreign to their original logic.^ And farther West, 
 from the sixth century B. C. onward, the spread of the 
 private mysteries whose purport was to bring the 
 initiate through various sacraments into effective 
 ■ union with a god who had suffered and was disposed 
 to redeem his soul, may be read in the same light. The 
 vogue and earnestness of many of these mysteries 
 certainly imply a development of individual self- 
 consciousness and cosmic anxiety such as the corporate 
 national religions were no longer able wholly to 
 appease; the race was then beginning to recognize in 
 a groping fashion that the self, so far as society could 
 help it to its own, was inadequately helped and in much 
 danger of being lost; it had begun to define the prob- 
 lem which religion in its distinction from the national 
 life had to solve. And we may regard Christianity as 
 
 1 Professor J. E. Carpenter quotes a modeTn Hindu prayer which 
 shows well the spirit of the predominant piety of Hinduism, — the bhakti- 
 piety, which seeks an influx of divine power such as endows the soul 
 with mastery over its earthly nature not essentially different from the 
 mana of aboriginal and eternal human piety except in its primarily 
 moral impact: "O Lord of the Universe, O All-Consciousness, presiding 
 Deity of all, Vishnu, at thy bidding and to please thee alone I rise this 
 morning and enter on the discharge of my daily duties. I know what 
 is righteous, yet I feel no attraction for it; I know what is not righteous, 
 yet I have no repulsion from it. O Lord of the senses, O Thou seated 
 in the heart, may I do thy commands as ordered by thee in my con- 
 science. " (Comparative Eeligion, p. 158.) The Krishna of the 
 Bhagavad-Gita may be regarded as the Brahmanical form of the divine- 
 human deliverer from passion and all earthly attachments. And 
 Buddhism has produced such conceptions as that of Avalokitegvara, who 
 made a vow not to accept his own release untU the demons themselves 
 as well as all men should be enlightened and saved, the Amith§,bha 
 Buddha "of boundless Light," who, carried to China and Japan, be- 
 comes the holy Amida, by whose exertions alone new hearts are conferred 
 upon men. 
 
396 CHRISTIANITY ' 
 
 one of the latest of the solutions of this problem, 
 containing the kernel of all the other mysteries, and 
 surviving them because it was fit to survive. Read 
 in this way, religious experience gives strong support 
 to the view that salvation from outside is needed. 
 
 But we may also read all this, as Professor Gilbert 
 Murray is inclined to read it, as a symptom of political 
 disintegration and a colossal and widespread "failure 
 of nerve." The facts of history never yield a con- 
 clusive principle for their own judgment. For such 
 a principle we must look to psychology, — ^that is, to 
 our own knowledge of ourselves. 
 
 And certainly the idea of salvation from outside is 
 not without psychological support, or for that matter, 
 biological support. For life itself, so far as experience 
 yet shows, always comes fro'm outside, from prior life, 
 as something conferred, not acquired.^ It is not out 
 of natural order that certain parts or ingredients of 
 life should come in the same way, as by a mental 
 epigenesis. Such an addition from without can fre- 
 quently be verified in the transition from one level of 
 value to another, at times when a person seems unable 
 to accomplish that transition for himself. For 
 example, I am told to cheer up and take things with 
 a grain of humor. But how is humor possible to me, 
 if as a fact I am morose? Probably it is not possible 
 by any solemn effort I may make for it ; but there are 
 
 2 Fichte, for whom the moral will is the supreme reality, tried to 
 explain the emergence of a personal self into existence as an act of its 
 own freedom; but not even Fichte 's ingenuity succeeded in giving the 
 hypothesis a footing. 
 
THE DIVINB AGGEESSION 397 
 
 persons whose entrance can make it possible, and all 
 but force it upon me. Or, how is confidence possible, 
 if as a fact I am afraid? It is not possible, and my 
 efforts to reassure myself, by confessing my fears, 
 confirm them. But I can do a great deal to 'take' 
 heart at the summons of one who has it, or even at the 
 memory of a voice that is charged with it. These 
 processes may be processes of participation ; but they 
 are frequently of a more active sort on the part of the 
 other mind, like an intentional and aggressive imposing 
 of a state of mind upon me.' They appeal to the con- 
 sent of the self -to-be rather than to the consent of the 
 present self, though unless something in that present 
 self gave consent the state could not be imposed. 
 
 These facts imply that the self is not a closed monad 
 in its moral life any more than in its mental and 
 physical life. Just as there is a mental hunger for 
 new data to be ingested into our mental substance, a 
 hunger which we sometimes call 'curiosity,' and some- 
 times the 'empirical attitude' of mind, so there is a 
 moral appetite which has as yet no name, but which 
 makes a part of our social appetite. For in social 
 intercourse we receive here and there not alone new 
 data, but new inductions already well grown, new 
 ideas ready to transplant and mature, new attitudes 
 toward experience as a whole, — almost, one might say, 
 new selfhood. We remain ourselves in all this, 
 because we choose what we admit; but we become as 
 it were the spirit of a living society of included selves, 
 
 8 This process is doubtless akin to suggestion, but it is more direct 
 and avowed to the subject than suggestion is. 
 
398 CHEISTIANITY 
 
 receiving constant accessions not alone by germination 
 from within but also by adoption from without. It 
 is because of this openness of mind on their part that 
 our neighbors, if we were competent, might be saved 
 by us (as we have all along assumed) ; and it is by 
 this same openness of mind that we, if there were a 
 competent other, might be saved. The question, How 
 is love to God or to men possible if as a fact I do not 
 have it? would be answered if there were, as the 
 moving spirit of the world, an aggressive lover able 
 and disposed to break in upon my temper of critical 
 egoism and win my response. This would seem to be 
 a necessary, if not a sufficient, condition of 'salvation' ; 
 and thus far psychology lends support to our reading 
 of the history of religion, namely, that in the develop- 
 ment of the private mystery, religion was finding its 
 way to a knowledge of the actual needs of men. How 
 Christianity proposes to meet those needs we may 
 state in our own way. 
 
 Ill 
 
 Plato and Aristotle represented God as that abso- 
 lute good which, unmoving and changeless in itself, 
 the soul pursues and longs for. To Christianity, it is 
 the soul that is pursued ; and God is forever restless, 
 in quest of what to him is lost. The God of the 
 Christian is one who invades the earth in order to 
 bring men to themselves: to every soul of man he 
 'stands at the door and knocks.' He does not forgo 
 the power of silent attraction found in the non- 
 
THE DIVINE AGGEESSION 399 
 
 assertive Tao of Lao Tze, or in Brahm, or in the 
 Unmoved Mover of the Greek ; but it is as one who has 
 known finitude and is 'lifted up from the earth' that 
 he will draw all men unto him. He disguises himself, 
 takes the form of a servant; he comes to his own and 
 his own know him not ; he is despised and rejected and 
 done to death. And all this is the foil and background 
 of his great joy. For he has his moment when to some 
 mind, more honest than usual to its own need, there 
 comes a presentiment of recognition, and the awed 
 question, Who art thou, Lord? — to which he answers, 
 I am he whom thou persecutest. 
 
 No assertion could be more empty than the Christian 
 saying that God is love, if that love were simply a 
 subjective disposition on the part of a being forever 
 inactive and unseen. If God exists as a good will, that 
 will must do its work in the world of time and event 
 as a will to power not wholly unlike our own, and so 
 coming to itself as we must, through the saving of 
 others. Christianity is right in holding that such a 
 God, if he exists, must somehow appear in the temporal 
 order. And it seems to me that it is also right in 
 saying that he must suffer; and not alone with us (as 
 any god must who knows what is going on) but also 
 for us, and at our hands. For the 'hardening of our 
 hearts,' i.e., their alienation from reality, due to our 
 preoccupation with our own suffering, could hardly 
 be overcome except by seeing that in the actual mesh 
 of our own experience the brunt of our selfishness has 
 fallen upon Mm, and that he, in this sense, bears our 
 sin in his own body. It is such a god, active in history 
 
400 CHBISTIANITY 
 
 and suffering there, that Christianity declares as the 
 most important fact about the world we live in. 
 
 To believe in such a god would give history a mean- 
 ing over and above any visible or experimental 
 meaning it may have : it would have to be read as the 
 drama of God's life, his making and remaking of men. 
 His concern for them would have to be thought as 
 literal and individual as they themselves are literal 
 and individual. Love, as Royce has said, individuates 
 its object ; but it is equally true that it individuates its 
 subject: it takes an individual to be a lover. And 
 every human being, if these things are true, must be 
 able to discover as the sense of his entire experience 
 a direct address of the absolute being to him, as if 
 the world were made for him alone. The universe 
 becomes suddenly, not ego-centric, but multi-centric. 
 Just as in infinite space, the center of reference may 
 be assumed in any point ; so in history, as Christianity 
 must see it, the center of the universe is everywhere 
 that the divine interest finds a person. "Whoever 
 you are, now I place my hand upon you that you be 
 my poem": this is the point of tangency between 
 Whitman's semi-pagan genius and the spirit of Chris- 
 tian history. Without excluding a movement in 
 history toward a goal or toward many goals, there is 
 in this picture no meager one-way teleology, but loss 
 and supreme attainment are everywhere. It is not 
 unlike the world of the child, who has not yet learned 
 to doubt that all things exist for his sake ; and to the 
 end it requires something of the spirit of a child to 
 enter the world of Christianity. The strain on belief 
 
THE DIVINE AGGRESSION 401 
 
 is at a maximum ; and tMs religion does nothing to 
 relieve it. 
 
 Judicious heads, having seen much of the world's 
 actual indifference, might incline to ease the burden of 
 so much faith by reducing God's alleged love to a 
 general disposition, a kindly wish and effort toward 
 a far-off good available to the ultimate denizens of 
 time. A finite or mildly benevolent power, struggling 
 as a sort of elan of life against the perpetual resist- 
 ance of matter, and like a cosmic council of war so lost 
 in vast designs that the private fades before its view 
 into the mass, seems much more probable to those 
 whose metaphysics is a distillation of the mixed 
 essences of experience. But probability has no place 
 in metaphysics; and the probable God is a very 
 unlikely God, in the sense that he solves no problems. 
 Whether the world we live in is or is not the world of 
 Christianity is a question of fact. 
 
CHAPTER XLVII 
 THE LAST FACT 
 
 I DOUBT whether philosophy can afl&rm the exist- 
 ence of this fact. It can show that if such a fact 
 were extant our dilemma would be solved. It can 
 show, further, that certain characters of the world are 
 in harmony with such a fact. Thus, the dialectic of 
 experience, as we look back upon it, may be understood 
 as a part of the strategy of "The Hound of Heaven." 
 The world is so devised that "All things betray thee, 
 who betrayest me": the will, apparently driven by 
 dissatisfaction in its own false definitions of good, 
 may to a deeper knowledge be seen as driven by the 
 wind of a god's desire. And as for all the irregularly 
 distributed individual deprivation, it is at least con- 
 ceivable that it is part of the individual appeal of that 
 same god : 
 
 All which I took from thee, I did but take 
 Not for thy harms, but just that thou 
 Mightst seek it in my arms. . . . 
 I am he whom thou seekest. 
 
 But the power of so understanding the dialectic, or 
 so interpreting evil, is retrospective. The force which 
 could lift the mind into a position from which this 
 reading seems the truth does not lie in the dialectic 
 itself. It must come as a positive datum, something 
 
THE LAST FACT 403 
 
 itself personally experienced or 'revealed.' It is here 
 that religion takes the issue out of the hands of 
 philosophy. 
 
 For religion in its historical forms is empirical: it 
 appeals to the realistic temper: it deals with facts. 
 Its function is not to prove God but to announce God. 
 For this reason, its doctrine is stated as dogma; and 
 the fundamental dogma of religion is Ecce Deus, 
 Behold, This is God. Such a dogma certainly appeals 
 to the reason of every man, for it can mean nothing 
 to any one except in so far as he is capable of under- 
 standing his own needs; but beyond that, it appeals 
 to his power to recognize what he needs in what is 
 real. Eecognition is an act of the mind which thought 
 can lead up to, but never quite enforce. Hence religion 
 calls upon every man for an individual and ultimate 
 "I believe," which means, "I recognize this to be the 
 fact," or, more simply, "I see." 
 
 In the last resort, it is by his own vision that every 
 man must live : — ^when we call a man an individual, we 
 are thinking of the solitude of his ultimate relation to 
 reality. He must live by what he, for himself, can 
 recognize ; and his power of recognizing is an integral 
 part of his instinctive equipment. 
 
 For as hunger may be trusted, for the most part, to 
 recognize what will serve as food, so all instinct may 
 be trusted to recognize what it needs in the world, if 
 what it needs is there. Animal instinct will recognize 
 
404 CHKISTIANITY 
 
 its needed physical facts, human instinct its needed 
 physical and metaphysical facts, — if they exist. 
 
 Conversely, whatever beliefs, or metaphysical find- 
 ings, men have lived by are to some extent corroborated 
 (certainly not by 'general consent,' but) by the cir- 
 cumstance that they have formed part of the vital 
 circuit of human instinct, have been the feeders and 
 shapers of instinct. The more durable of these beliefs 
 are not wholly illusory : 'Taction ne saurait se mouvoir 
 dans I'irreel." 
 
 But in the composition of these working beliefs, 
 fiction and mere hopefulness may mingle with positive 
 metaphysical finding in unknown proportion. The 
 mystic in man, the original seer of ultimate things, 
 learns but slowly to discriminate between his percep- 
 tions and his dreams. The critic in man, the judgment 
 based on experience and self-conscious reason, rises 
 but slowly to the task of releasing what is significant 
 and true in dogma from what is irrelevant and false, — 
 condemning sometimes too little, quite as frequently 
 too much. 
 
 The individual, then, who realizes that his meta- 
 physical questions are questions of life and death for 
 instinct and will, can give no exclusive credence either 
 to the mystic in himself or to the critic ; he will require 
 them to act in co-operation. He will be satisfied 
 neither with pragmatic beliefs, chosen for their prom- 
 
THE LAST FACT 405 
 
 ise of satisfaction (ghosts of human desires offered 
 as substantial food to these same desires), nor with 
 true general ideas (entities which taken alone make no 
 difference and do no work). 
 
 He will realize that his instinctive appetite for 
 knowledge is an honorable appetite. It is in the exist- 
 ing world that instinct must grow and work out its 
 meaning; and the existing world is distinguishable 
 both from pragmatic dreams and from true general 
 ideas: it is a union of general ideas with matter of 
 fact in a living fabric of historical movement and 
 change. It is to this living mesh that mystic and critic 
 must direct their vision. Whatever is real and signifi- 
 cant for instinct must in some way exist in the active 
 surface of history, — some of it no doubt built into 
 history at various points of the wdrMng edge of time 
 in such wise that we could not now unbuild it if we 
 would. 
 
 As an inseparable part of the question. What sort of 
 world is it that we live in? he will thus be driven to 
 enquire, What sort of world have we been living in? 
 What have been the metaphysical foundations, real or 
 supposed real, for those qualities, those instinct- 
 shapes, which characterize our present human type? 
 
 The qualities which have made and are making our 
 contemporary civilization are not qualities of intellect 
 more than qualities of character : they are such quali- 
 ties as integrity, reliability, legality, practical force, 
 love of liberty. At the root of them is a capacity for 
 
406 CHBISTIANITY 
 
 facing and absorbing the increasing pain wMch is 
 incident to increasing contact with objective reality. 
 To surrender ourselves without flinching to the find- 
 ings of natural science is something we have had to 
 learn by painfully slow degrees ; to accept the unflat- 
 tering position of man in the Copemican world and in 
 the evolutionary scheme ; to regard and burrow deeper 
 into the human mind as an object in nature ; to submit 
 to the hardship involved in making a social order on 
 the principle of a thoroughly objective impersonal 
 justice, — all this has required the 'virtue' of Eome, 
 together with a sympathy and sensitiveness to what 
 is not-ourselves that has not come from Rome. Our 
 civilization is one which has once for all put away 
 vested interest in illusions, and has dared to stand 
 naked before the last facts so far as it could find them. 
 In this there is much of the plain 'grit' such as Joseph 
 Conrad loves to celebrate: but grit is not necessarily 
 attentive to the weak, the incipient, the minute, the 
 growing, — and it is here that our peculiar strength and 
 promise lie. It is a union of strength and tenderness 
 which has brought us to the best we have so far found. 
 The strength that we have is not the strength of 
 physical instinct; nor has it ever been for mankind 
 'pure' grit. In former times, with the zest of original 
 pugnacity and the conviction of mounting passion, 
 men could throw themselves without reserve into the 
 issues of battle; and battle became for them a quasi- 
 religious orgy in which the spirit of the fathers and 
 of the tribe drew near almost to touching and filled 
 the frame with unwonted power. Grit and enthusiasm 
 
THE LAST FACT 407 
 
 went together. And now without the aid of primitive 
 feeling or hope of individual glory men of more 
 sensitive mould go simply to a mill of war whose 
 portent of possible suffering is incomparably more 
 intense. What do these men stand on? Not on any 
 consciousness of the heroic, but on the plain sense of 
 what is necessary; and they profess thereby a faith 
 of some kind that facing what is necessary is better 
 than muffling the head in a lying dream. Effectively 
 and actually men care more for reality than ever 
 before, and behind that confidence lies some kind of 
 creed, or let me say, some kind of contact with the 
 spirit of the world. 
 
 Neither is the tenderness we have the tenderness of 
 physical instinct. We tend, we teach, we legislate, we 
 try our hand at justice and reform. We do this not 
 from any pure outflow of kindness: we do it with a 
 certain joy of power which is at the same time fully 
 awake to the defect of our performance. The parent 
 who deals with his son and the publicist whose thought 
 becomes the rule for millions are well aware in these 
 days of the human equation in their judgments. We 
 are democratic: no authorities among us dare set up 
 as absolute. They live, we all live, at the requirement 
 of the movement of things over a gap unbridged by 
 our own competence. Earlier men acted thus instinc- 
 tively, with the confident affection and protectiveness 
 of the animal parent or leader. But if we act thus it 
 is because, while self -doubts emerge and continue to 
 emerge, they have seemed to receive from the world 
 we live in assurances that satisfy, as if at least the 
 
408 CHBISTIANITY 
 
 kindlier enterprises of living were, or miglit be, a part- 
 nership with power more intimately attuned than our 
 own to the iniier facts of history, capable of reaching 
 its goal in the midst of our inadequacies. 
 
 If the spirit of the world is actually such as to justify 
 to the growingly self-conscious being this kind of con- 
 fidence and sensitiveness, we should doubtless, as with 
 all pervasive utilities, better recognize the ingredient 
 which does this work if it were experimentally with- 
 drawn. 
 
 And as it happens, such aid to vision is not wholly 
 lacking at this moment. A calamity having the force 
 of a ghastly experiment occurs, vivisection of this 
 vaunted Western life, with all its sources, material and 
 otherwise, putting a harsh end to all mere momentums 
 of belief, to all complacencies, sanctimonies, and in- 
 fallible prescriptions, to all sleepy tugging at dry paps. 
 How much can you do without and still live? — this 
 searching experimental question war presses home to 
 soul and body, abolishing stroke by stroke gross quan- 
 tities of wealth, gross quantities also of life, beauty, 
 happiness, personal and public. But with all these 
 abolitions spreads another, — the swift and easy aboli- 
 tion of that supposed 'sanctity of human life' together 
 with other sanctities formerly potent : this, too, we are 
 called upon to do without if we can, or perhaps rather 
 to see it for what it was, — a glamor of some sort, a 
 conspiracy to hold high the level of self-esteem, mutual 
 palaver of polite society, valid enough so long as no 
 
THE LAST FACT 409 
 
 serious business is on, no occasion for telling one 
 another cold truth. 
 
 Cold truth being now in order, we measure humanity 
 in the mass as so much force, resistance, morale ; feed 
 it into the hopper by regiments, brigades. A comrade, 
 a friend, changes in an instant into debris, so much 
 wreckage to be cleared away. Once more we see man 
 in terms of his yield : er ist was er isst; and that will of 
 his, that morale and mentality, is a bit of equipment, 
 an appareil, working best when nearest the ground, fit 
 for short flights, better avoiding Jong ones and cer- 
 tainly all infinite flights. 'Infinite value'? Infinite 
 conceit ! 
 
 When this sentiment about human value is thus un- 
 sentimentally challenged, we perceive that it has had 
 m^ch to do with sustaining those qualities of confidence 
 and tenderness which we thought distinctive of our 
 civilization. It is not itself a metaphysical belief, but 
 a by-product of such a belief, doubtless the belief of 
 which we are in search, and whose character we may 
 now dimly make out. 
 
 There is an instinct in us as yet unnamed by psychol- 
 ogy, perhaps the deepest instinct of all : it is the total 
 infantile response to the maternal impulse. This in- 
 stinct knows what kind of metaphysic it needs, namely, 
 a world maternal not in part only, but altogether. 
 What has happened, then, is obvious, is it not? That 
 benevolent god with a trillion equally dear children, 
 that picture of world-family-dom, or of world-shep- 
 
410 CHEIBTIANITY 
 
 herd-hood, that impossible Absolute engaged in count- 
 less simultaneous 'seeking and saving' enterprises, — 
 all of this is but the poetry of childhood, valid there in 
 fact, and holding over into the more sheltered corners 
 of mature hopefulness, lingering to comfort minds 
 that insist on being comforted, minds incapable of 
 genuine maturity, — or perhaps even to protect certain 
 subjectivities and prides, personal, racial, genealogi- 
 cal, remnants of stale human provinciality liking to 
 believe itself the chosen strain. This persistent meta- 
 physics of the motherhood of history or grandmother- 
 liness of history, — ^is it not the most palpable of prag- 
 matic fictions, or instinct-beliefs ? And if so, it can no 
 longer serve us, having been found out. 
 
 But what becomes, then, of these contemporary 
 qualities of justified strength and tenderness? They 
 do not disappear; they are merely replaced by more 
 elemental editions of themselves, suited rather to 
 a world aloof, preoccupied, or indifferent than to a 
 parental world. 
 
 If 'justified confidence' is unavailable, there is al- 
 ways a well of instinctive confidence to fall back upon, 
 the simplest, least-borrowed thing in human nature, 
 least needing to be justified, — the now admittedly pure 
 grit of man at bay in a world neither his own nor any- 
 one 's; confidence original, titanic, defiant; confidence 
 ueherhaupt. There is an attitude needing no meta- 
 physics, an attitude, well so-called, which few are in- 
 
THE LAST FACT 411 
 
 capable of striking if necessary. We can always act 
 as if men, or some men, were worth wHle, and had 
 rights, ourselves included. For the human life authen- 
 tically valued by an absolute valuer, substitute the 
 instinctive self-valuation of the human animal, par- 
 ticularly the masculine animal; and for the deference 
 due to beings objectively worthy of reverence, substi- 
 tute the warmth of a maternal sympathy spreading 
 from the center outward as the vital economy permits. 
 Give these well-founded sentiments an artificial exten- 
 sion by the device called the State ; so that a degree of 
 parenthood enters into an entire community in its 
 relations to its own members, — competing and warring 
 from time to time with similar sentiments of parent- 
 hood on the part of other communities; and as there 
 is no real parent, parenthood may be said to exist just 
 so far as it can forcibly make itself valid in the world. 
 This is the alternative into which we may seem 
 driven by the disillusionments, the down-crashing of 
 all current sentiments, in this day of reckoning. And 
 in that case, we see the statesmen of the Prussia of 
 1914 as the prophets of the coming age; and history, 
 having reached its summit, turns downward. 
 
 Let it be clearly understood that this reversal of 
 direction is involved in the proposed change. For 
 animal confidence can no longer sustain a fully human 
 effort as we have come to understand it, not even a 
 human war. 
 
 The flame of war can leap into life among common 
 
412 CHKISTIANITY 
 
 people only because of tlie presence there of a meta- 
 physical outlook that seems to make a number of things, 
 including human life, objectively valuable and 'sacred.' 
 If the aims of war, or the activities of war, contradict 
 this belief ; or if self -consciousness ia the midst of the 
 carnage is driven to press its questions. Do I matter? 
 Does any deed or thought of mine matter? Does any 
 other deed or thought or interest or life matter? Does 
 the 'cause' itself finally matter, or the nation and all 
 its wars, holy or unholy? — ^the spirit inevitably seeps 
 out of the fighting. It is possible for fighting to under- 
 mine one's sense of the only things worth fighting for. 
 
 And what is true of war is true to an even greater 
 degree of the long upbuilding effort of the creative 
 arts. If 'progress' must bring disillusionment and the 
 harsh daylight of a denying realism, progress is 
 destined to devour its own children. 
 
 Values, human values, can survive, only if, reaching 
 out toward a metaphysical condition which their 
 dream-shapes foreshadow, they find it. They need 
 reality to climb on ; they need a reality they can cUmb 
 on. They want an independent source of standards, 
 a mooring outside of nature, such as we surmised at 
 the beginning of our study. Their own poussee vitale 
 droops, half-grown, unless it meets an equivalent 
 attrait vital streaming into its environment from some 
 pole outside itself. 
 
 And thus this experiment, this world-surgery, begins 
 to make so much unmistakable : That what human 
 
THE LAST FACT 413 
 
 nature has been responding to is not its own instinctive 
 self-esteem, codified in institutions, or uncodified, but 
 a valuation believed real and objective, supposedly 
 hailing from beyond nature, authoritatively requiring 
 of man that self -honor and that honor of his kind which 
 his own impulse achieves but fitfully and from the 
 center outward. 
 
 And this valuation, be it noted, has appeared to him 
 hot as a proclaimed theorem regarding human value 
 in the abstract, but as actual valuedness, i.e., valuation 
 acted upon in multitudes of deeds, struggles for human 
 rights and guarantees thereof, sacrifices and martyr- 
 doms without number; in all of which an authentic 
 divine will and activity were supposed discernible by 
 those having eyes to see. To many of these human 
 doers their own deeds appeared to be utterances not 
 alone of their private wills but also of the ultimate 
 wiU of the world. In brief, we of this age have been 
 living on an aggressive valuation, built into history, 
 and supposed whether wisely or not to transmit an 
 absolute judgment. 
 
 And not strangely, mankind seems to have counted 
 most on the costliest of such deeds, the most deliber- 
 ately defiant of the natural appearance. As at this 
 moment, so it has always been: it is the negation by 
 the brute forces of the world, the negation and con- 
 tempt of what humanity has held most precious, which 
 has split opinion into its concealed extremes. 
 
 For it is just such negation which creates the oppor- 
 
414 CHRISTIANITY 
 
 tunity for deeds most audaciously experimental, deeds 
 of self-immolation of which the onlooker must say 
 that they embody either the wisdom of the gods, or 
 else infra-human unwisdom. It is upon the great 
 experimental sacrifices of history that men have 
 climbed to their positive metaphysical insights; or 
 to what they have taken to be such, be it only their 
 passionate assertions that such sacrifices, such blot- 
 tings out of man's evident best, cannot have been folly, 
 and shall not have been vain. 
 
 It is not for us, here, to assert or deny, either pas- 
 sionately or otherwise; but as students of human 
 nature and its destiny to state deliberately the connec- 
 tions of cause and consequence, and face our alterna- 
 tives. Our metaphysical finding, our last fact, may be 
 such as to release and encourage the growth of in- 
 stinctive meaning, warming out its inner logic and 
 wider linkages ; it may be (as with Schopenhauer) such 
 as to wither and repel it; it may be no finding at all, 
 but an enigmatic silence of a non-committal world 
 which denies only by refusing to afl&rm. In no case is 
 it indifferent. 
 
 Absence of belief that the world as a whole has an 
 active individual concern for the creatures it has pro- 
 duced need neither destroy happiness nor the morality 
 of compassion. Life would always be worth living 
 and worth living well, so long as free from the major 
 torments. Instinct has its satisfactions in an unin- 
 terpreted or partly interpreted condition : it wiU reach 
 
THE LAST PACT 415 
 
 some accommodation to the world that is. Nothing 
 would necessarily be destroyed or lost from the good 
 life which some at least of the human race now know 
 and many hope for, — nothing except the higher reaches 
 of curiosity and sympathy, and the wisdom of develop- 
 ing them. It is only the enthusiasts for a far-off good, 
 for an endlessly progressive humanity, for a profound 
 and logical love of life, that would be cut off ; it is only 
 the martyrs that have played the fool; only to saints 
 and sages the world has lied. 
 
APPENDED NOTE 
 THE SOUECE OF OBLIGATION 
 
 IN our account of sin titer fe is a missing element. It 
 is the missing element, but the implied element, 
 iu all psychology, namely, the outer world. We have 
 described the moral undertaking as a struggle within 
 self-consciousness, the effort of a self to pull itself 
 together, as it were, from the midst of a mass of 
 would-be independent impulses, — ^to find its own 
 meaning and to make every instinct share in that 
 meaning. Sin we described simply as the deliberate 
 suppression of meaning, the treason of self -conscious- 
 ness to its own most vital effort. In all this the outer 
 world has been in abeyance; but it has not been 
 forgotten. An "impulse" is but an abbreviated name 
 for an "impulse to this or that action, and for the sake 
 of this or that objective good." All psychological 
 terms are just such abbreviations, naming a relation 
 to reality from the inner end. Our term, the will to 
 power, carries the external reference on its face. And 
 so, while we have spoken of obligation as the debt of 
 a partial impulse to a total will, a relation wholly 
 within the mind, we have not been unmindful of the 
 corresponding relation in the world of objects, that 
 between a partial good and a total good. 
 
 But if this total good, the object of my total will, 
 
418 APPENDED NOTE 
 
 is thought of simply as my own good, we have not 
 reached the center of the idea of 'obligation.' Obliga- 
 tion descends upon me from a region beyond anything 
 that I can call mine ; it has its source in the interest 
 of some being other than myself in my conduct. My 
 duty is the inner angle of that other being's right. 
 The nature of sin may be understood on the ground of 
 psychology, but the degree of importance attached to 
 sin and righteousness cannot be understood without a 
 study of the external source of obligation. 
 
 The most natural, and popular, view of the case is 
 that I owe obligation primarily to my neighbor: any 
 and every other man is the repository of some right in 
 relation to me. The essence of wrong is the disregard 
 of these rights ; and sin, on its practical side, is there- 
 fore simply selfishness. Or if 'selfishness' is too 
 limited a term — ^too naive possibly, or merely indulgent 
 or passive, then join with it 'self-will,' which may be as 
 vigorous and determined as you please. Sin is wilful, 
 unfriendly, or unsocial conduct. 
 
 This view covers most of the ground, if we can think 
 of the moral aspect of behavior in terms of areas. 
 Most sins are unsocial acts. In most cases, the wider 
 thought-system which I ought to consider is one which 
 takes in more of the minds of other persons. This is 
 a good rule of thumb, especially for the public phases 
 of moral questions. But our question is not whether 
 most sinful acts are unsocial acts: it is whether any 
 act is sinful because it is unsocial or unneighborly. 
 
THE SOUKCE OP OBLIGATION 419 
 
 If you define a world with two wills in it, and with 
 an insufficient supply of goods and consequent unsat- 
 isfied wants, it is not obvious that either will ought 
 to give way to the other, or that each should do so. 
 So long as they are two wills, related in such wise that 
 the altruism of one is the egoism of the other, the idea 
 of obligation cannot be extracted from the situation. 
 I cannot find it in the simple fact of my neighbor's 
 existence nor of his want. 
 
 Nor am I convinced, though I may be overawed, 
 when you multiply and organize and perpetuate this 
 needy neighbor, and call it society, or the State. 
 Professor E. A. Eoss represents a large body of 
 opinion when he makes the egoism of society the 
 proper object of my altruism and self-sacrifice.^ But 
 who is this social ego, that I should thus indulge it? 
 I am inclined by many natural impulses to accept sug- 
 gestions from a social group and to deal sympatheti- 
 cally with its members ; but this is something short of 
 accepting the group as a final authority for my defer- 
 ence. The moral quality of the behavior of Socrates 
 or of John Brown is not decided by the circumstance 
 that it both antagonized and tended to dissolve the 
 
 1 Social Control, p. 67. Professor Eoss would scorn the idea that he has 
 dealings with the absolute; yet I must accuse him of setting up an 
 absolute in the form of this social ego. And many others today who 
 think that 'absolute' is a bad word, calling themselves pragmatists, and 
 saying that right must be relative to the stage of social progress and 
 to the social good at any stage, are in the same position. For whatever 
 thing is stated as the thing to which other things are relative, is by 
 definition their absolute. The pragmatic moralists, for the most part, 
 have simply chosen a social absolute instead of some other. Their 
 question should be not whether there is an absolute in morals, but 
 whether they have the right one. 
 
420 APPENDED NOTE 
 
 society in which it appeared. If you answer, in view of 
 these examples, that it is not what men actually want, 
 but what they rightfully want, that is authoritative 
 over me, you abandon the case. If another mind, 
 single or collective, is a source of obligation only when 
 it desires what it ought to desire, the implication is 
 that I have an 'ought' only when the other mind has 
 an 'ought,' and we are as far from the source of 
 obligation as before. . 
 
 This is not a mere logical quibble : like all good logic, 
 it is but the briefest expression of what experience, 
 at great length, teaches. That I have an 'ought' to 
 another only when the other has an 'ought' also, is 
 quite plainly a result of experience. We do not find 
 ourselves moved by respect toward others on the 
 ground of their existence, their force or their prowess, 
 but only as they themselves show respect to something 
 beyond. Need itself would not move us if need were 
 arrogant rather than earnest. It is pure futility to 
 attempt deriving the sentiment of reverence from any 
 mixture of fear, awe, self-abnegation, etc. •?■ reverence 
 goes to the reverent, and to no others. This is the 
 main part of the answer to the occasional anxious 
 question, What can be done for the sobering of an 
 irreverent younger generation?: the secular-minded 
 person, society. State, receives and deserves slight 
 deference; it is man at worship who alone becomes 
 worshipful, and no pedagogical finesse can outleap this 
 principle. Whenever men defer to each other, admit 
 duties to the other's rights, it will be found that there 
 
 2 McDougall, Social Psychology, p. 132. 
 
THE SOXJECB OF OBLIGATION 421 
 
 is a twofold deference: each is deferring to a third 
 entity, dimly discerned as a mutual object of respect, 
 and not to the other as individual. Is it not in some 
 such relatively abstract third that we find the real 
 source of obligation? Such is the view of Kant, who 
 defines right not in terms of society, but in terms of 
 a law, which is over all alike. 
 
 II 
 
 In setting up a law as the supreme object of respect, 
 Kant seems almost to abandon the outer world and 
 to leave the individual alone once more with the 
 workings of his own reason. This law is occupied 
 entirely with what we have called the "meaning" of 
 an action. Every decision, thinks Kant, is made upon 
 some general principle or "maxim" : this is my reason, 
 or excuse, for the act, — ^it is what the act means to me. 
 The requirement of duty is simply that I shall be 
 willing to stand by these meanings, when I think of 
 them as being universally adopted. ' '^ Admit into your 
 conduct only such meaning as you would willingly see 
 universal" — such is the essence of Kant's law. 
 
 To apply this law, I must use both imagination and 
 logic. I must imagine my motive made universal; I 
 must conceive every act as conveying a tacit recom- 
 mendation of its 'maxim' for general use: and I must 
 consider whether, in all logic, I can stand by it. liike 
 a marksman, the moral being has a 'picture' to which 
 it is imperative he should adjust his sight, — that of 
 perfect consistency of policy throughout a rational 
 
422 APPENDED NOTE 
 
 universe. When his act presents him this picture, he 
 may release it, — ^it is right. This picture, and nothing 
 more concrete, is the object of his obligation. 
 
 One must use imagination, I say, to apply Kant's 
 law; yet it would be highly unjust to represent this 
 law as a purely imaginary object of devotion. The 
 tendency of our maxims, or meanings, to propagate 
 themselves is real enough. Acts, we say, tend to 
 establish habits, — a very crude bit of psycho-physics 
 and only half true. For no one can tell from the 
 mechanics of an act what habit it tends to establish. 
 I give a penny to a beggar : what habit does this leave 
 behind ? If I give it from pity, one habit ; if for display, 
 another habit ; if for getting rid of the beggar, a third. 
 Everything depends on the meaning: it is this alone 
 that universalizes itself. Self -propagation of maxims 
 both within and without an individual life is no mere 
 f£|,ncy; and sin, from Kant's point of view, appears as 
 the refusal to accept the very real legislative respon- 
 sibility of an act for its maxim. 
 
 It must be admitted, too, that Kant's theory agrees 
 closely with moral experience. When men refrain 
 from breaches of the peace, or of contract, is it not 
 because they perceive quite beyond any actual conse- 
 quences that that kind of principle will not do for 
 general use? And if they go out of their way for 
 mutual aid, or for the service of a nation, is there not, 
 behind the personal or patriotic sympathies invoked, 
 a sense that the principle of refusal means ruin to a 
 certain spiritual structure which has been an object 
 of unspoken faith? What one instinctively holds to, 
 
THE SOUBCB OP OBLIGATION 423 
 
 and tries to preserve, is not 'society,' as an eating and 
 breeding entity (otherwise our minds would be attuned 
 as pragmatically as our language often sounds) ; it is 
 the world as a place of consistent, thoughtful meanings, 
 the home of universal law. 
 
 The error of Kant's idea is not that his law is too 
 formal and empty, nor that it is too vigorous and 
 unbending. These two criticisms may be left to cancel 
 one another; for a law so abstract as to command 
 nothing at all can hardly be so rigid as to allow no 
 room for individuality and growth. Kant's law stands 
 near to that critical point which a perfect test of right 
 and wrong must hold : it is abstract enough to free the 
 mind from all tyranny of concrete absolutes (as the 
 ten commandments) ; it is not so abstract as to be 
 devoid of meaning. 
 
 The trouble with the Kantian theory is that the law 
 in question is just a test or criterion of right and 
 wrong; it is not itself the source of obligation. A 
 criterion must be abstract — it would be absurd to 
 criticise a thermometer as a test of fever because a 
 thermometer is not itself a temperature. But no 
 abstraction can be a source of obligation. Kant's 
 notable utterance of reverence for the moral law 
 involves attributing to that law a substantial reality, 
 like that of the "starry heavens," and more so. It is 
 only because the law was to Kant the point of contact 
 between experience and a world metaphysical, 'intel- 
 ligible,' and total that it could seem to command the 
 allegiance of practical reason. 
 
424 APPENDED NOTE 
 
 III 
 
 The source of obligation must be something that 
 unites the living reality of fellow men and society with 
 the totality and finality of the Kantian law. If we 
 have no conception at hand which promises at once to 
 unite these characters, the schoolmen certainly had, 
 and we may still learn something from them. 
 
 Thomas Aquinas was already familiar with the idea 
 that the moral law should be followed for the sake of 
 the moral law; and he had already pronounced this 
 view, in so many words, to be unmoral.' For the law 
 exists only for the sake of a goal or destiny of human 
 life, — our real obligation is to that destiny.* We have 
 a particular interest in the views of St. Thomas, since 
 he has stated his idea of obligation in connection with 
 a theory of instinct. *• 
 
 The lower animals, he thinks, are governed by 
 instinct, and especially by a fundamental life-instinct 
 which controls all lesser instincts. In man there is 
 something which corresponds to this central life- 
 instinct, indicating to him his destiny: it is his 
 ' synderesis.' It is defined as a desire or longing which 
 presents to us our total possible good in the form of 
 an anticipatory vision." Its claim upon our duty lies 
 in part in the fact that it presents to us our possible 
 blessedness; it commands us to live according to 
 
 8 Summa, I, d. 1, q. 2, a. 1, ad. 3. 
 i Summa, I, 2, q. 71, a. 6, ad. 3. 
 
 5"Inehoatio boni"; in another phTase, "desiderium naturale, vol- 
 untas ut natura. " 
 
THE SOURCE OP OBLIGATION 425 
 
 reason, but that means to St. Thomas, using the 
 behavior which reason shows as means to blessedness. 
 
 Sin, from this view, is a rejection of one's own 
 blessedness; but it is sin because that rejection con- 
 cerns another than ourselves, namely, the appointer 
 of destiny, the real being. The interest of Grod in our 
 realization of our destiny is not simply that of one 
 who has devised that destiny; it is the interest of one 
 who is to participate in it. For blessedness, according 
 to Aquinas, is found in union with God: such union 
 is at the same time a fulfilment of God's will and of 
 our own. 
 
 I am not concerned here to discuss the accuracy of 
 these metaphysical ideas : I only wish to point out that 
 our moral experience gives much weight to this account 
 of the source of obligation. Unless the universe has 
 a central and unified life in which our destinies are 
 involved, and which gives these destinies a higher 
 importance than they can have for our own finite 
 vision, the notion of obligation loses the degree of 
 dignity which we, in fact, ascribe to it. When we speak 
 of the rights of man and the duties of man, the respect 
 we accord them is measured by our belief that they 
 belong to man as a metaphysical entity, a ward of 
 the universe. The work these "rights" have done in 
 history may testify to the truth of this statement. 
 
 And our interest in our destiny is at the same time, 
 as Aquinas says, an interest in a possible blessedness ; 
 though not simply in a far-off divine event. For the 
 destiny of the human will is to co-operate, in some 
 degree of present awareness, with the central power 
 
426 APPENDED NOTE 
 
 of the world; and so far to perceive in present expe- 
 rience the quality of "union with God." In their 
 complete meaning, our human actions are not only 
 lawgiving in an ideal world, — they are creative in an 
 actual, but unfinished world. Acting as artists and 
 originators, every deed may be more than a conformity 
 to a rule, or a subsumption under a preconceived good : 
 it may be also an invention, a new fact. It may assume 
 in its own degree a will to power which is not inter- 
 preted adequately as a suggesting of maxims for 
 general use, but rather as a contribution through our 
 thought to the spiritual substance of the world. Thus 
 to conceive each deed is the best privilege of human 
 nature. Our obligation is, in its ultimate interpre- 
 tation, to achieve such blessedness. And from the 
 same position we reach the completest expression of 
 what we are to understand by sin. 
 
 If right action is action so interpreted that I assume 
 the place of creator to my own destiny and that of 
 others, wrong action appears as a false assumption of 
 this same place. But the false claim to be doing the 
 work of a god in the world is precisely what the Greeks 
 called 'ubris and the Romans superba; and we, with 
 hardly equivalent force, presumption. Inasmuch as 
 it is not usual for us to conceive our deeds consciously 
 sub specie aeternitatis, at least not one by one, this may 
 appear as a somewhat imaginative extension of the 
 meaning of sin. Nevertheless, with the right of inter- 
 preting which we have no choice but to use, the 
 ordinary courage of men who daily face their own 
 destiny as an entire metaphysical fact involves just 
 
THE SOUECE OF OBLIGATION 427 
 
 tMs will to stand in loco Dei to the circumstances with 
 which they deal. Inasmuch as they are human they, 
 in turn, have no choice but to see things whole, and as 
 nearly as possible as they are. What an act conveys in 
 meaning is not the work of a special conscious judg- 
 ment : it is, as we have said, the sense imposed upon it 
 by its total context. And thus, whether we will or not, 
 our acts have for us a metaphysical meaning. But 
 there is this difference between the Greek conception 
 and our own. To the Greeks the sin of arrogance, 
 'ubris, consisted in forgetting to think as mortals ; and 
 its punishment was like the punishment of Babel, a 
 dizziness, bewilderment, madness, such as must come 
 to those who are out of their own element. To us, 
 sin consists equally in forgetting to think as gods. 
 It was Aristotle who, in replying to the charge that 
 philosophical thought was itself arrogant, uttered the 
 proud word, "Let us live, then, as if divinity (immor- 
 tality) were our share." We would add only: This is 
 man's native element. It is his destiny so to live. 
 His sin is to neglect that destiny — or to assume it 
 unworthily. 
 
 We have here, too, perhaps the best illustration of 
 the principle we have noted from time to time; that 
 of the descriptive identity of sin and virtue. In the 
 higher reaches of self-consciousness, the difficulty of 
 decision often lies here. If anyone assumes a position 
 of moral leadership, and therefore of moral solitude, 
 he cannot wholly avoid fearing his own audacity ; hence 
 the conflict which we know to have taken place in the 
 minds of such men as Mazzini, Luther, Lincoln, — the 
 
428 APPENDED NOTE 
 
 conflict of determining the narrow margin between the 
 true and the false presimaption. The reported tempta- 
 tion of Jesus seems to be a symbolical account of an 
 inner struggle such as could occur only to one who 
 had gone far on the way to a great cast of cosmic bold- 
 ness. To presume so much was to "make himself equal 
 with Grod"; to presume less was to be false to his 
 own genius. 
 
INDEX 
 
 Absolute, 26, 289, 331, 350, 354, 
 
 367. 
 Acquisition, instinct of, 50, 60, 95, 
 
 245. 
 Activity, general instinct to, 53 f. 
 Admiration, 192. 
 Adolescence, 245 ff., 296, 297. 
 Aeschylus, 265 f. 
 Aesthetic experience (see also Art), 
 
 49, 64, 191, 304, 306 f., 315, 
 
 353 f., 368. 
 After-image, mental, 160 f., 171, 
 
 316. 
 Alternation, ehs. XXXIV, XXXV, 
 
 esp. p. 288, and pp. 330 f., 368 f. 
 Altruism, 89, 183, 185, 226 f., 419. 
 Ambition, ch. XLIII and pp. 143, 
 
 174, 278, 280^ 322, 380, 390. 
 America, 21, 225. 
 
 Anger (v. pugnacity), 45, 49, 117. 
 Animism, 241. 
 Anxiety-neurosis, 20, 141 f. 
 A priori, 305, 309, 315. 
 Aquinas, Thomas, 424 fif. 
 Aristotle, 871, 111, 139, 183, 184, 
 
 229, 276, 284, 398, 427. 
 Art (v. aesthetic experience), ch. 
 
 XXXVIII, p. 316, and also pp. 
 
 3, 74, 80, 108, 189, 229, 291, 331. 
 Asceticism (v. saintly ideal), 214, 
 
 327, 329 flE., 355 ff. 
 Atonement, 381, 395, 414 f. 
 Augustine, 139, 334. 
 Authority (v. recoramenders), 97, 
 
 130 f., 192, 246. 
 
 Babbitt, I., 28 n. 
 Bagehot, W., 197 n., 314 n. 
 
 Balance of instincts, 48, 53, 179. 
 Beautiful, The, 320. 
 Behavior-ism, 38 f., 79, 341. 
 Belief, 237. 
 Bergson, H., 2, 46, 76 n., 212 n., 
 
 319, 412. 
 Blame (v. Justice), 140, 141 n. 
 Bohemia, 1081, 236. 
 Bosanquet, B., 16. 
 Brahmanism, eh. XXXVII passim, 
 
 and also pp. 333, 394 ff. 
 Buddha, Buddhism, 17, 75, 111, 
 
 334, 373 ff., 394 ff. 
 Burke, Edm., 261, 129, 181. 
 
 Cabot, S. C, 330 n. 
 
 Calvinism, 103. 
 
 Carpenter, J. E., 395 n. 
 
 Carver, T. N., 20 n. 
 
 Catholicism (v. Church), 378. 
 
 Causality, 158 ff. 
 
 Central instincts, ch. X, p. 61, and 
 
 also pp. 49, 55, 71 f., 115. 
 Chadbourne, 46, 57. 
 Character, 101, 138, 148, 148 n., 
 
 324. 
 Chesterton, G. K., 123 n. 
 Christianity, Part VII, p. 337, and 
 
 also pp. 22, 28, 31, 214, 332, 381, 
 
 399, 428. 
 Church, 375, 377. 
 Civilization, 405 ff. 
 Climbing instinct, 51, 239. 
 Coenesthesia, 159. 
 Cognition (as ingredient in value), 
 
 641, 801, 219. 
 Competitive and non-competitive 
 
 interests, 74, 181, 200, 2391 
 
430 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Conscience, Part III, p. 85, and 
 also pp. 20, 304. 
 
 Consciousness (v. self-conscious- 
 ness, behavior), 2, 9, 41, 104. 
 
 Conservatism, 223 f., 228, 254. 
 
 Contract, social (v. State, Poli- 
 tics), 192, 197, 208. 
 
 Convention (v. Custom), 173, 357. 
 
 Conversation, 6 n., 184. 
 
 Conversion (v. Eebirth), 22, 31, 
 297, 342, 376. 
 
 Cram, Salph Adams, 318 n. 
 
 Crime, 257. 
 
 Criticism, 3, 5, 345 f . 
 
 Culture, 205, 219, 261. 
 
 Curiosity, instinct of, 27, 51, 55, 
 61 f., 69, 88, 155, 249, 397, 415. 
 
 Custom (v. Convention), 98, 107, 
 122, 181, 273. 
 
 Cynicism, 353. 
 
 Darwin, Ch., 46. 
 
 Democracy, 72, 222, 318 n., 325, 
 
 332, 386, 390, 407. 
 Desire (v. Feeling), 42, 80, 81 n., 
 
 218. 
 Dialectic, 163, 171, 206, 207, 260, 
 
 344, 356 ff., 362, 374, 402. 
 Dignity, 306. 
 
 Dilemmas, moral, 127, 262. 
 Discipline, chs. IV- VI, and pp. 17, 
 
 254 f. 
 Discrimination, 180, 218. 
 Dreams, 316. 
 VurTcheim, E., 209. 
 Duty, 417 flf. 
 
 Economics, 7, 20, 200 fE., 208, 219, 
 
 313. 
 
 I Education, ch. XXX, p. 226, and 
 also pp. 3, 30, 93, 148 n., 149, 
 
 161, 171, 295, 323, 345 ff., 420. 
 
 Energism, 214. 
 
 Energy, 78. 
 
 Environment, 1. 
 
 Equality, 13, 312, 325. 
 
 Equity (v. Justice). 
 
 Eugenics, 13. 
 
 Evil, 6, 31, 107, 129, 135, 214 flf., 
 260, 263, 319, 393, 402. 
 
 Experience (v. Dialectic, Dilemma, 
 Logic, Pragmatism), Part IV, 
 p. 145, and also pp. 14, 29, 33, 
 70 f., 148, 315, 316, 317. 
 
 Experimentalism (v. Praginatism, 
 Experience), 222, 223, 224, 225, 
 408, 414 f. 
 
 Family (v. also Private Order), 
 
 194, 211, 265 {., 282 f., 325. 
 Fear (and flight), instinct of, 43, 
 
 47, 49, 52 ff., 61, 69 n., 73, 92, 
 
 152, 268, 373. 
 Feeling (v. Desire, Cognition), 42, 
 
 80 f., 268, 339 f. 
 Fichte, J. O., 396 n. 
 Food-getting instinct, 27, 51, 72, 
 
 172, 178, 301. 
 Foster, G. B., 384 n. 
 Freedom (v. Liberty, Right), ch. 
 
 Ill, p. 9, and also pp. 25, 91 n., 
 
 125 flf., 147, 194, 340. 
 Freud, S., Freudism, 19, 75 ff., 
 
 317 n., 356. 
 
 General instincts, 151, 152. 
 God, 20, 529, 393, 398 f., 401. 
 Gregariousness, instinct of (v. 
 
 Sociability), 27. 
 Grotms, H., 47. 
 
 Habit, 41, 148, 153, 422. 
 
 Hadley, A. T., 224 n. 
 
 Eall, Stanley, 111. 
 
 Hate (v. also Pugnacity), 351. 
 
 Happiness, 216, 236. 
 
INDEX 
 
 431 
 
 Hedonism, 162, 214. 
 
 Kegel, G. W. F., 25, 181, 192 n., 
 
 199, 210 n., 212. 
 Holies, Thomas, 37, 47, 123 n., 
 
 133, 181, 197, 198, 199, 202. 
 Holt, E. B., 19, 25, 68, 171, 214. 
 Hume, David, 198 n. 
 Hunger (v. Food-getting instinct), 
 
 47. 
 
 Idea (v. Cognition, Intelligence), 
 
 142, 204, 320, 350, 358, 368, 385, 
 
 388. 
 Ideals, 16 f., 29 n., 181, 183 S., 211, 
 
 354. 
 Imitation (v. Admiration, Author- 
 ity), 193, 318. 
 Immortality, 142, 207, 364, 366, 
 
 373. 
 Incarnation, 389. 
 Individualism, 149, 166 f., 171, 176, 
 
 182, 184, 204, 248 f., 254 f., 
 
 324 f. 
 Individuality, 403. 
 Instinct, chs. VII fif., and also p. 
 
 24, 409. 
 Institution, 3, 181, 211 ffi., 280, 333. 
 Insurance, 197. 
 Intelligence, 1511, 157 f. 
 Interpretation (v. Meaning), 62, 
 
 71, 116, 301 f., 322, 356, 370, 
 
 380. 
 Intuition, 9, 11, 308, 358. 
 
 James, Wm., 46, 57, 58, 243, 341. 
 
 Judaism, 339. 
 
 Jung, C. G., 76. 
 
 Jury, 106. 
 
 Justice (v. Blame, Eight, Law), 
 
 87, 142, 196, 258, 310, 349 fE., 
 
 368. 
 
 Kant, I., 25, 243, 330, 342, 384, 
 421 f. 
 
 Karma, 309. 
 
 Knowledge (v. Cognition, Self- 
 
 consciousness, Beason). 
 KoUer, J., 134 n., 197 n., 198 n., 
 
 202, 209 n. 
 
 Labor (v. Economic^ Food-get- 
 ting), 183, 220, 247. 
 
 Language, 3, 16, 89 n., 94 n., 352, 
 357. 
 
 Law, Legislation (v. Polities, Jus- 
 tice, State), 3, 12, 18, 120, 186 f., 
 196 f., 222, 294 f., 299 ff., 421. 
 
 Learning, curve of, 126. 
 
 Lee, Joseph, 65. 
 
 Leilnis, 78. 
 
 Leula, James H., 373 n. 
 
 Liberalism, 7, 17. 
 
 Liberation, Liberators, ch. IV ff. 
 
 Liberty (v. Freedom, Eight), 21, 
 24, 172, 222, 230. 
 
 Lippert, J., 95. 
 
 Loelce, J., 186, 305. 
 
 Locomotion, instinct of, 51 f. 
 
 Logic in psychology, 75, 82, 104, 
 119, 193, 420 f . 
 
 Love (v. Parental instinct. Altru- 
 ism, Sex, Sociability), 47, 51, 75, 
 140, 282, 287, 341 f., 351, 354. 
 
 McDougall, William, 46, 54, 58 f., 
 62, 63, 90, 118, 152 n., 247, 339, 
 420 n. _ 
 
 Machiavelli, N., 12. 
 
 Maine, Sir Henry, 191 n., 310, 313. 
 
 Maladaptation, 214 f. 
 
 Martyrdom, 413 ff. 
 
 Meaning (v. Interpretation), 42, 
 70, 120 f., 164, 180, 258. 
 
 Mediaeval, 318 n., 334 f. 
 
 Metaphysics, 78, 99, 138 f., 147, 
 248, 320, 329, 358 f., 400, 403, 
 404, 414 f . 
 
432 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Mill, J. S., 225. 
 
 Mind (v. Self, Will, Personality). 
 
 Momentum, mental, 244. 
 
 Montesquieu, 47. 
 
 More, Paul Elmer, 21 n. 
 
 Morgan, Lloyd, 90, 159. 
 
 Murray, Gilbert, 396. 
 
 Mysticism, 20, 328, 387, 395, 404. 
 
 Myth, 294. 
 
 Necessary interests, 64, 64 n., 118, 
 143, 201, 208, 255. 
 
 Negative Pragmatism (v. Pragma- 
 tism). 
 
 Nietesche, Fr., 18, 21 f., 27 f ., 74, 
 78, 390 n. 
 
 Obligation, 417 ff. 
 Originality, 135, 249. 
 
 PaciBsm, 133, 351 ff., 355. 
 
 Pain, 156 ff., 173, 219. 
 
 Parental instinct, 27, 89, 226, 407/ 
 
 411. 
 Parsons, Elsie Clews, 176 n. 
 Passion, 43, 118 f., 278, 321, 357. 
 Patriotism, 206. 
 Peirce, Charles, 82. 
 Penology (v. Punishment), esp. ch. 
 
 XXXII. 
 Perry, S. B., 64, 66. 
 Personality, - 78, 212, 248 f., 312, 
 
 316, 345. 
 Pessimism, 12, 13, 214, 216. 
 Philosophy, 3. 
 Plato, 11, 30, 192 n., 276, 364, 
 
 385 n., 390, 398. 
 Play, instinct of, 10, 55, 55 n., 73, 
 
 155, 242, 291. 
 Pleasure, 81 f., 121, 122 n., 156 f., 
 
 219. 
 Politics (v. State), 3, 7, 87, 129, 
 
 186, 256. 
 
 Postulates, 185, 200, 221, 225. 
 Power (v. Will to power), 43, 99, 
 
 202 fE., 216. 
 Pragmatism, 137 f., 276, 300 f,, 
 
 308,^314, 315, 341, 362, 404, 405, 
 
 410. 
 Progress, 412. 
 Property (v. Economics, Labor, 
 
 Acquisition), 175, 210 n., 211 f., 
 
 220, 312. 
 Prophetic Consciousness (v. Will to 
 
 Power), 305, 306, 321. 
 Protestantism, 378, 379. 
 Prudence, 162. 
 Psychoanalysis (v. Freud). 
 Psychology (in relation to biology, 
 
 V. Consciousness, Behavior), 4, 
 
 83, 87, 179, 356 f., 386, 417. 
 Ptah Botep, 303. 
 
 Public and Private Orders, 289 f. 
 Pugnacity, instinct of (v. Anger), 
 
 chs. XXIV, XXVIII, XXXI, 
 
 XXXII, XLI, and also pp. 47, 
 
 49, 51, 54, 55, 61, 89, 95, 112 f ., 
 
 114, 117, 119, 1311, 161, 259, 
 
 365, 376, 406. 
 Punishment, ch. XXXII, p. 257, 
 
 and also pp. 3, 142 f., 165, 173, 
 
 254 f., 310. 
 Putnam, J. J., 76 n. 
 
 Quantity, in psychology, 2, 18, 212. 
 
 Badicalism, 223. 
 
 Bealism (moral), 191, 318. 
 
 Season (v. Cognition, Intelligence), 
 25, 174. 
 
 Bebellion, ch. XXXI, p. 254, and 
 also pp. 212, 238, 248, 252. 
 
 Eebirth, Regeneration (v. Conver- 
 sion), 20, 295, 364. 
 
 Recognition, 206. 
 
INDEX 
 
 433 
 
 Recommendera (v. Authority) , 
 
 183 ff. 
 ReTerenee, 420. 
 
 Eeligion, Parts VI and VII, and 
 also pp. 3, 6, 13, 20, 97, 143, 
 251, 269, 273 f., 291, 314, 331 n., 
 369, 374, 390, 403. 
 
 Repression, 19, 109, 199. 
 
 Revenge, 164 f., 260, 263 f. 
 
 Reverence, 312. 
 
 Rhythm, 64. 
 
 Right (v. Liberty, Justice), 184, 
 
 184 n., 234, 257, 310, 418, 424. 
 Romanticism, 21, 25. 
 
 Boss, 'E. a., 174, 419. 
 
 Boiisseaw, 18, 22, 24 f., 37, 187 f., 
 
 199. 
 Boyce, J., 197 n., 377, 400. 
 Rue, Ruing, 135, 399. 
 Bussell, Bertrand, 149, 230 n., 233. 
 
 Sacrifice, 414 f . 
 
 Sacrilege, 311. 
 
 Saintly ideal (v. Asceticism), 14 f., 
 333 ff. 
 
 Salvation, Saving, 273 f., 279, 373, 
 380, 384, 394. 
 
 Sanctions (v. Pain, Punishment). 
 
 Schneider, G. S., 54, 58, 76. 
 
 Schopenhauer, 220 n., 288, 371, 414. 
 
 Seli, unity of (v. Personality, 
 Will), 42, 43, 44, 69 ff., 154, 219, 
 240 ff., 397. 
 
 Self-assertion and self-abasement, 
 instincts of (v. Ambition, Fear), 
 50, 69, 247, 342, 357, 406, 410, 
 411, 418. 
 
 Self-consciousness (v. Conscious- 
 ness, Conscience), 2 f ., 43, 92, 
 98, 147, 187 f., 190, 214, 219, 
 226 f., 297, 315, 317, 345. 
 
 Self -elimination, social (v. Indi- 
 vidualism), 189, 251. 
 
 Self-preservation, instinct of (v. 
 
 Wm to live), 65, 66, 69, 75 n. 
 Self -regarding sentiment, 92. 
 Sensitivity, 218. 
 Sex, instinct of (v. Love), eh. 
 
 XLII, p. 355, and also pp. 27, 
 
 49 f., 53, 56, 76 f., 95, 112 f., 
 
 114, 179, 211, 245 f., 249, 263, 
 
 308, 322 f., 325, 376. 
 Shaw, Bernard, 250. 
 Sin, chs. XVI ff., Appended Note, 
 
 p. 417 ff., and pp. 381, 399. 
 Sin, original, eh. XX, p. 137, and 
 
 also pp. 6f., 13, 103, 1111, 
 
 113 n., 261. 
 Sociability, instinct of (v. Gre- 
 
 gariousness), 30, 65, 72, 88, 97, 
 
 1281, 240 n., 345, 397. 
 Social contract (v. Contract). 
 Socrates, 348, 386. 
 Soul, 303. 
 Sovereignty (v. Individualism, 
 
 State), 208, 2551 
 Spencer, E., 18, 95, 171 n., 340. 
 Spimoea, 32, 333 f. 
 State, the (v. Politics, Right, Law 
 
 and Legislation, Public Order), 
 
 89, 205 ff., 245, 257, 283, 284, 
 
 324, 3311, 381, 411, 419. 
 Stimulus, 42, 62, 65, 235, 243. 
 Substance, 2771 
 Supernatural, 328. 
 Synderesis, 424. 
 Syndicalism, 212, 286 n. 
 
 Tabu, 300, 308. 
 
 Teleology, 400. 
 
 Tenderness (v. Parental Instinct). 
 
 Thomdike, E. L., 59, 79, 89 n., 90, 
 111, 153 n., 158. 
 
 Thought (v. Idea, Cognition, In- 
 telligence). 
 
434 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Tolstoy, 206, 349, 355. 
 
 Toynbee, A., 286. 
 
 Triadic structure, 190, 192 n. 
 
 Units of behavior, 51, 234, 239. 
 Universal and particular, 151, 193, 
 
 258. 
 Utility, 300 fE., 359, 367. 
 
 Value, 42, 44, 311, 408, 409, 411, 
 
 413. 
 Value, theory of, 32 f., 46, 48, 
 
 81 n., 174 f. 
 Veblen, T., 241. 
 Vedantism,- 333. 
 Vestibule of satisfaction, 178. 
 Vicariousness, 215. 
 
 Waiting capacity, 179, 215, 219, 
 244. 
 
 Wallas, Graham, 69 n., 277 n. 
 
 War in general (v. Pacifism, Pug- 
 nacity), 214, 217, 351 ff. 
 
 War, the, 21, 406 ff., 408, 411. 
 
 Watson, J., 154 n. 
 
 Westermarck, 89 f. 
 
 Whitman, Walt, 102, 401. 
 
 Will, ch. XI, p. 68, and also pp. 
 116, 151, 231. 
 
 Will to live (v. Self-preservation), 
 65, 66, 73, 201. 
 
 Will to power (v. Power, Will), 
 65, 72 f., 89, 99, 115, 143, 242, 
 316, 333, 360 f., 389. 
 
 Wollaston, 122. 
 
 Worship, 319, 368 f.