HUSH I 
 
 
 
 I 
 
 lit* 
 
THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 IN MEMORY OF 
 
 PROFESSOR WILLIAM MERRILL 
 
 AND 
 
 MRS. IMOGENE MERRILL 
 
First and Last Things 
 
 A Confession of Faith and a 
 Rule of Life 
 
 By 
 
 H. G.Wells 
 
 Author of " New Worlds for Old," " The Time Machine," 
 
 " The War of the Worlds," " The Future 
 
 in America," etc. 
 
 G. P. Putnam's Sons 
 New York and London 
 Gbe Imfcfcerboc&ec press 
 
GIFT % v 
 
 Copyright, igo8 
 
 BY 
 
 H. G. WELLS 
 
 Ube Tknicfcerbochcr press, flew J?orft 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 Introduction ..... 
 
 BOOK THE FIRST. 
 metaphysics. 
 The Necessity for Metaphysics . 
 The Resumption of Metaphysical Enquiry 
 The World of Fact 
 Scepticism of the Instrument 
 
 The Classificatory Assumption 
 
 Empty Terms 
 
 Negative Terms . 
 
 Logic Static and Life Kinetic 
 
 Planes and Dialects of Thought 
 
 Practical Conclusions from these Consid 
 erations ..... 
 
 Beliefs ...... 
 
 Summary ...... 
 
 iii 
 
 PAGE 
 
 I 
 
 9 
 
 13 
 15 
 19 
 22 
 
 3i 
 33 
 37 
 39 
 
 44 
 55 
 59 
 
 Mcoor;^ 
 
IV 
 
 Contents 
 
 BOOK THE SECOND. 
 
 of belief. 
 
 My Primary Act of Faith . 
 
 On Using the Name of God 
 
 Free- Will and Predestination . 
 
 A Picture of the World of Men. 
 
 The Problem of Motives the Real Problem 
 of Life ..... 
 
 A Review of Motives .... 
 
 The Synthetic Motive 
 
 The Being of Mankind 
 
 Individuality an Interlude 
 
 The Mystic Element .... 
 
 The Synthesis ..... 
 
 Of Personal Immortality . 
 
 A Criticism of Christianity 
 
 Of Other Religions .... 
 
 65 
 68 
 
 7i 
 
 74 
 
 78 
 81 
 
 87 
 
 9 1 
 96 
 
 104 
 107 
 109 
 112 
 120 
 
 BOOK THE THIRD. 
 of general conduct. 
 Conduct Follows from Belief > 
 What Is Good .... 
 Socialism ..... 
 
 125 
 127 
 
 129 
 
Contents 
 
 A Criticism op Certain Forms of Socialism 
 
 Hate and Love ..... 
 
 The Preliminary Social Duty 
 
 Wrong Ways of Living 
 
 Social Parasitism and Contemporary In 
 justices ..... 
 
 The Case of the Wife and Mother 
 
 Associations ..... 
 
 Of an Organised Brotherhood . 
 
 Concerning New States and New Religions 
 
 The Idea of the Church 
 
 Of Secession 
 
 A Dilemma . 
 
 A Comment 
 
 War .... 
 
 War and Competition 
 
 Modern War 
 
 Of Abstinences and Disciplines 
 
 On Forgetting, and the Need of Prayer 
 Reading, Discussion and Worship 
 
 Democracy and Aristocracy 
 
 On Debts of Honour . 
 
 • 1 33 
 
 142 
 
 . 148 
 
 • 154 
 
 - 
 
 • 157 
 
 162 
 
 167 
 
 • 173 
 
 189 
 
 . 194 
 
 202 
 
 207 
 
 211 
 
 . 213 
 
 217 
 
 . 223 
 
 . 228 
 
 • 234 
 
 • 2 39 
 
 • 244 
 
VI 
 
 Contents 
 
 The Idea of Justice . 
 
 Of Love and Justice . 
 
 The Weakness of Immaturity 
 
 Possibility of a New Etiquette 
 
 Sex 
 
 The Institution of Marriage 
 
 Conduct in Relation to the Thing that Is 
 
 Conduct towards Transgressions 
 
 BOOK THE FOURTH. 
 
 SOME PERSONAL THINGS. 
 
 Personal Love and Life 
 
 The Nature of Love .... 
 
 The Will to Love .... 
 
 Love and Death ..... 
 
 The Consolation of Failure 
 
 The Last Confession .... 
 
 PAG* 
 247 
 
 252 
 
 2 55 
 
 2 59 
 
 261 
 
 265 
 
 277 
 280 
 
 285 
 288 
 296 
 298 
 303 
 305 
 
First and Last Things 
 
First and Last Things. 
 
 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 Recently I set myself to put down what I 
 believe. I did this with no idea of making a 
 book, but at the suggestion of a friend and to 
 interest a number of friends with whom I was 
 associated. We were all, we found, extremely 
 uncertain in our outlook upon life, about our 
 religious feelings and in our ideas of right and 
 wrong. And yet we reckoned ourselves people 
 of the educated class and some of us talk and 
 lecture and write with considerable confidence. 
 We thought it would be of very great interest to 
 ourselves and each other if we made some sort 
 of frank mutual confession. We arranged to 
 hold a series of meetings in which first one and 
 then another explained the faith, so far as he 
 understood it, that was in him. We astonished 
 ourselves and our hearers by the irregular and 
 
2 First and Last Things 
 
 fragmentary nature of the creeds we produced, 
 clotted at one point, inconsecutive at another, 
 inconsistent and unconvincing to a quite unex- 
 pected degree. It would not be difficult to 
 caricature one of those meetings; the lecturer 
 floundering about with an air of exquisite illumi- 
 nation, the audience attentive with an expression 
 of thwarted edification upon its various brows. 
 For my own part I grew so interested in planning 
 my lecture and in joining up point and point, 
 that my notes soon outran the possibilities of the 
 hour or so of meeting for which I was preparing 
 them. The meeting got only a few fragments of 
 what I had to say, and made what it could of 
 them. And after that was over I let myself 
 loose from limits of time and length altogether 
 and have expanded these memoranda into a 
 book. 
 
 It is as it stands now the frank confession of 
 what one man of the early Twentieth Century 
 has found in life and himself, a confession just 
 as frank as the limitations of his character per- 
 mit; it is his metaphysics, his religion, his moral 
 standards, his uncertainties and the expedients 
 with which he has met them. On every one of 
 these departments and aspects I write — how 
 shall I put it? — as an amateur. In every section 
 
Introduction 3 
 
 of my subject there are men not only of far 
 greater intellectual power and energy than I, 
 but who have devoted their whole lives to the 
 sustained analysis of this or that among the 
 questions I discuss, and there is a literature so 
 enormous in the aggregate that only a specialist 
 scholar could hope to know it. I have not been 
 unmindful of these professors and this literature; 
 I have taken such opportunities as I have found, 
 to test my propositions by them. But I feel 
 that such apology as one makes for amateurish- 
 ness in this field has a lesser quality of self-con- 
 demnation than if one were dealing with narrower, 
 more defined and fact-laden matters. There is 
 more excuse for one here than for the amateur 
 maker of chemical theories, or the man who 
 evolves a system of surgery in his leisure. These 
 things, chemistry, surgery and so forth, we may 
 take on the reputation of our expert, but our 
 fundamental beliefs, our rules of conduct, we 
 must all make for ourselves. We may listen 
 and read, but the views of others we cannot 
 take on credit; we must rethink them and "make 
 them our own." And we cannot do without 
 fundamental beliefs, explicit or implicit. The 
 bulk of men are obliged to be amateur phi- 
 losophers, — all men indeed who are not special- 
 
4 First and Last Things 
 
 ised students of philosophical subjects, — even 
 if their philosophical enterprise goes no further 
 than prompt recognition of and submission to 
 Authority. 
 
 And it is not only the claim of the specialist 
 that I would repudiate. People are too apt to 
 suppose that in order to discuss morals a man 
 must have exceptional moral gifts. I would 
 dispute that naive supposition. I am an in- 
 genuous enquirer with, I think, some capacity 
 for religious feeling but neither a prophet nor 
 a saint. On the whole I should be inclined to 
 classify myself as a bad man rather than a good ; 
 not indeed as any sort of picturesque scoundrel 
 or non-moral expert, but as a person frequently 
 irritable, ungenerous and forgetful, and inter- 
 mittently and in small but definite ways, bad. 
 One thing I claim, I have got my beliefs and 
 theories out of my life and not fitted them to its 
 circumstances. As often as not I have learnt 
 good by the method of difference, by the taste of 
 the alternative. I tell this faith I hold as I hold 
 it and I sketch out the principles by which I am 
 generally trying to direct my life at the present 
 time, because it interests me to do so and I think 
 it may interest a certain number of similarly 
 constituted people. I am not teaching. How 
 
Introduction 5 
 
 far I succeed or fail in that private and personal 
 attempt to explain has nothing to do with the 
 matter of this book. That is another story, a 
 reserved and private affair. I offer simply in- 
 tellectual experiences and ideas. 
 
 It will be necessary to take up the most ab- 
 stract of these questions of belief first. It may 
 be that to many readers the opening sections 
 may seem the driest and least attractive. But 
 I would ask them to begin at the beginning and 
 read straight on, because much that follows this 
 metaphysical book cannot be appreciated at its 
 proper value without a grasp of these preliminaries. 
 
Book the First. 
 
 Metaphysics. 
 
1 1. 
 
 The Necessity for Metaphysics. — As a pre- 
 liminary to that experiment in mutual confession 
 from which this book arose, I found it necessary 
 to consider and state certain truths about the 
 nature of knowledge, about the meaning of truth 
 and the value of words; that is to say I found I 
 had to begin by being metaphysical. In writing 
 out these notes now I think it is well that I 
 should state just how important I think this 
 metaphysical prelude is. 
 
 There is a popular prejudice against meta- 
 physics as something at once difficult and fruit- 
 less, as an idle system of enquiries remote from 
 any human interest. I suppose this odd mis- 
 conception arose from the vulgar pretensions of 
 the learned, from their appeal to ancient names 
 and their quotations in unfamiliar tongues, and 
 from the easy fall into technicality of men strug- 
 gling to be explicit where a high degree of ex- 
 plicitness is impossible. But it needs erudition 
 and an accumulated and alien literature to make 
 metaphysics obscure, and some of the most 
 
 9 
 
io First and Last Things 
 
 fruitful and able metaphysical discussion in the 
 world was conducted by a number of unhampered 
 men in small Greek cities, who knew no language 
 but their own and had scarcely a technical term. 
 The true metaphysician is after all only a person 
 who says, "Now let us take thought for a mo- 
 ment before we fall into a discussion of the broad 
 questions of life, lest we rush hastily into im- 
 possible and needless conflict. What is the exact 
 value of these things we are thinking and these 
 words we are using?" He wants to take thought 
 about thought. Those other ardent spirits, on 
 the contrary, want to plunge into action or con- 
 troversy or belief without taking thought; they 
 feel that there is not time to examine thought. 
 "While you think," they say, "the house is 
 burning." They are the kin of those who rush 
 and struggle and make panics in theatre fires. 
 
 Now it seems to me that most of the troubles 
 of humanity are really misunderstandings. Men's 
 compositions and characters are, I think, more 
 similar than their views, and if they had not 
 needlessly different modes of expression upon 
 many broad issues, they would be practically at 
 one upon a hundred issues where now they 
 widely differ. 
 
 Most of the great controversies of the world, 
 
Metaphysics 1 1 
 
 most of the wide religious differences that keep 
 men apart, arise from this, from differences in 
 their way of thinking. Men imagine they stand 
 on the same ground and mean the same thing 
 by the same words, whereas they stand on 
 slightly different grounds, use different terms 
 for the same thing and express the same thing 
 in different words. Logomachies, conflicts about 
 words, into such death-traps of effort those ardent 
 spirits run and perish. 
 
 This is now almost a commonplace, it has been 
 said before by numberless people. It has been 
 said before by numberless people, but it seems 
 to me it has been realised by very few — and 
 until it is realised to the fullest extent, we shall 
 continue to live at intellectual cross purposes 
 and waste the forces of our species needlessly 
 and abundantly. 
 
 This persuasion is a very important thing in 
 my mind. 
 
 I think that the time has come when the 
 human mind must take up metaphysical dis- 
 cussion again — when it must resume those sub- 
 tle but necessary and unavoidable problems 
 that it dropped unsolved at the close of the 
 period of Greek freedom, when it must get to a 
 common and general understanding upon what 
 
12 First and Last Things 
 
 its ideas of truth, good and beauty amount to, 
 and upon the relation of the Name to the Thing, 
 and of the relation of one Mind to another Mind 
 in the matter of resemblance and the matter of 
 difference — upon all those issues the young science 
 student is apt to dismiss as Rot, and the young 
 classical student as Gas, and the austere student 
 of the science of Economics as Theorising, un- 
 suitable for his methods of research. 
 
 In our achievement of understandings in the 
 place of these evasions about fundamental things 
 lies the road, I believe, along which the human 
 mind can escape, if ever it is to escape, from the 
 confusion of purposes that distracts it at the 
 present time. 
 
§2- 
 
 The Resumption of Metaphysical Enquiry. 
 — It seems to me that the Greek mind up to the 
 disaster of the Macedonian Conquest was elabo- 
 rately and discursively discussing these questions 
 of the forms and methods of thought and that 
 the discussion was abruptly closed and not nat- 
 urally concluded, summed up hastily as it were, 
 in the career and lecturings of Aristotle. 
 
 Since then the world never effectually reopened 
 these questions until the modern period. It went 
 on from Plato and Aristotle just as the art of the 
 seventeenth and eighteenth centuries went on 
 from Raphael and Michael Angelo. Effectual 
 criticism was absolutely silent until the Renais- 
 sance, and then for a time was but a matter of 
 scattered utterances having only the slightest 
 collective effect. In the past half century there 
 has begun a more systematic movement to affect 
 the general mind, a movement analogous to the 
 Pre-Raphaelite movement in art — a Pre-Aristo- 
 telian movement, a scepticism about things 
 
 supposed to be settled for all time, a resumed 
 
 13 
 
14 First and Last Things 
 
 enquiry into the fundamental laws of thought, a 
 harking back to positions of the older philosophers 
 and particularly to Heraclitus so far as the sur- 
 viving fragments of his teaching enable us to 
 understand him, and a new forward movement 
 from that recovered ground. 
 
§3- 
 
 The World of Fact. — Necessarily when one 
 begins an enquiry into the fundamental nature 
 of oneself and one's mind and its processes, one 
 is forced into autobiography. I begin by asking 
 how the conscious mind with which I am prone 
 to identify myself, began. 
 
 It presents itself to me as a history of a per- 
 ception of a world of facts opening out from an 
 accidental centre at which I happened to begin. 
 
 I do not attempt to define this word fact. 
 Fact expresses for me something in its nature 
 primary and unanalysable. I start from that. 
 I take as a typical statement of fact that I sit 
 here at my desk writing with a fountain pen on a 
 pad of ruled scribbling paper, that the sunlight 
 falls upon me and throws the shadow of the 
 window mullion across the page, that Peter, my 
 cat, sleeps on the window-seat close at hand 
 and that this agate paper-weight with the silver 
 top holds my loose memoranda together. Out- 
 side is a patch of lawn and then a fringe of winter- 
 bitten iris leaves and then the sea, greatly wrinkled 
 
 15 
 
16 First and Last Things 
 
 and astir under the south-west wind. There is 
 a boat going out which I think may be Jim Pain's, 
 but of that I cannot be sure. . . . 
 
 These are statements of a certain quality, a 
 quality that extends through a huge universe 
 in which I find myself placed. 
 
 I try to recall how this world of fact arose in 
 my mind. It began with a succession of limited 
 immediate scenes and of certain minutely per- 
 ceived persons; I recall an underground kitchen 
 with a drawered table, a window looking up at a 
 grating, a back-yard in which, growing out by 
 a dust-bin, was a grape-vine, a red-papered room 
 with a bookcase over my father's shop, the dusty 
 aisles and fixtures, the regiments of wine-glasses 
 and tumblers, the rows of hanging mugs and 
 jugs, the towering edifices of jampots, the tea 
 and dinner and toilet sets in that emporium, its 
 brighter side of cricket goods, of pads and balls 
 and stumps. Out of the window one peeped at 
 the more exterior world, the High Street in 
 front, the tailor's garden, the butcher's yard, the 
 churchyard and Bromley church tower behind; 
 and one was taken on expeditions to fields and 
 open places. This limited world was peopled with 
 certain familiar presences, mother and father, 
 two brothers, the evasive but interesting cat, 
 
Metaphysics 1 7 
 
 and by intermittent people of a livelier but more 
 transient interest, customers and callers. 
 
 Such was my opening world of fact, and each 
 day it enlarged and widened and had more things 
 added to it. I had soon won my way to speech 
 and was hearing of facts beyond my visible world 
 of fact. Presently I was at a Dame's school and 
 learning to read. 
 
 From the centre of that little world as primary, 
 as the initiatory material, my perception of the 
 world of fact widened and widened by new sights 
 and sounds, by reading and hearing descriptions 
 and histories, by guesses and inferences; my curi- 
 osity and interest, my appetite for fact, grew by 
 what it fed upon, I carried on my expansion of 
 the world of fact until it took me through the 
 mineral and fossil galleries of the Natural His- 
 tory Museum, through the geological drawers of 
 the College of Science, through a year of dissec- 
 tion and some weeks at the astronomical telescope. 
 So I built up my conceptions of a real world out 
 of facts observed and out of inferences of a nature 
 akin to fact, of a world immense and enduring 
 receding interminably into space and time. In 
 that I found myself placed, a creature relatively 
 infinitesimal, needing and struggling. It was 
 clear to me, by a hundred considerations, that I 
 
1 8 First and Last Things 
 
 in my body upon this planet Earth, was the out- 
 come of countless generations of conflict and 
 begetting, the creature of natural selection, the 
 heir of good and bad engendered in that struggle. 
 So my world of fact shaped itself. I find it 
 altogether impossible to question or doubt that 
 world of fact. Particular facts one may ques- 
 tion as facts. For instance, I think I see an 
 unseasonable yellow wallflower from my windows, 
 but you may dispute that and show it is only a 
 broken end of iris leaf accidentally lit to yellow. 
 That is merely a substitution of fact for fact. 
 One may doubt whether one is perceiving or 
 remembering or telling facts clearly, but the 
 persuasion that there are facts, independent of 
 one's persuasion and obdurate to one's will, re- 
 mains invincible. 
 
4- 
 
 Scepticism of the Instrument. — At first I 
 took the world of fact as being exactly as I per- 
 ceived it. I believed my eyes. Seeing was be- 
 lieving I thought. Still more did I believe my 
 reasoning. It was only slowly that I began to 
 suspect that the world of fact could be anything 
 different from the clear picture it made upon 
 my mind. 
 
 I realised the inadequacy of the senses first. 
 Into that I will not enter here. Any proper 
 text-book of physiology or psychology will supply 
 a number of instances of the habitual deceptions 
 of sight and touch and hearing. I came upon 
 these things in my reading, in the laboratory, 
 with microscope or telescope, lived with them 
 as constant difficulties. I will only instance one 
 trifling case of visual deception in order to lead 
 to my next question. One draws two lines 
 strictly parallel; so 
 
 *9 
 
20 First and Last Things 
 
 Oblique to them one draws a series of lines; so 
 
 and instantly the parallelism seems to be dis- 
 turbed. If the second figure is presented to any- 
 one without sufficient science to understand this 
 delusion, the impression is created that these lines 
 converge to the right and diverge to the left. 
 The vision is deceived in its mental factor and 
 judges wrongly of the thing seen. 
 
 In this case we are able to measure the dis- 
 tance of the lines, to find how the main lines 
 looked before the cross ones were drawn, to bring 
 the deception up against fact of a different sort 
 and so correct the mistake. If the ignorant 
 observer were unable to do that, he might re- 
 main permanently under the impression that the 
 main lines were out of parallelism. And all the 
 infirmities of eye and ear, touch and taste are 
 discovered and checked by the fact that the 
 erroneous impressions presently strike against 
 fact and discover an incompatibility with it. If 
 they did not we should never have discovered 
 them. If on the other hand they are so incom- 
 
Metaphysics 21 
 
 patible with fact as to endanger the lives of the 
 beings labouring under such infirmities, they 
 would tend to be eliminated from the species. 
 
 The presumption to which biological science 
 brings one is that the senses and mind will 
 work as well as the survival of the species may 
 require, but that they will not work so very much 
 better. There is no ground in matter-of-fact 
 experience for assuming that there is any more 
 inevitable certitude about purely intellectual 
 operations than there is about sensory percep- 
 tions. The mind of a man may be primarily 
 only a food-seeking, danger-avoiding, mate-find- 
 ing instrument, just as the mind of a dog is, just 
 as the nose of a dog is, or the snout of a pig. 
 
 You see the strong preparatory reasons there 
 are for entertaining the supposition that; — 
 
 The senses seem surer than they are. 
 
 The thinking mind seems clearer than it is 
 and is more positive than it ought to be. 
 
 The world of fact is not what it appears to be. 
 
Ss- 
 
 The Classificatory Assumption. — After I 
 had studied science and particularly biological 
 science for some years, I became a teacher in a 
 school for boys. I found it necessary to sup- 
 plement my untutored conception of teach- 
 ing method by a more systematic knowledge 
 of its principles and methods and I took 
 the courses for the diplomas of Licentiate 
 and Fellow of the London College of Pre- 
 ceptors which happened to be convenient for 
 me. These courses included some of the more 
 elementary aspects of psychology and logic and 
 set me thinking and reading further. From 
 the first, Logic as it was presented to me 
 impressed me as a system of ideas and 
 methods remote and secluded from the world 
 of fact in which I lived and with which I 
 had to deal. As it came to me in the ordin- 
 ary text-books, it presented itself as the 
 science of inference with the syllogism as its 
 principal instrument. Now I was first struck 
 by the fact that while my teachers in Logic 
 
 22 
 
Metaphysics 23 
 
 seemed to be assuring me I always thought in 
 this form ; — 
 
 MisP 
 S isM 
 S isP 
 
 the method of my reasoning was almost always 
 in this form; — 
 
 S, is more or less P. 
 
 S 2 is very similar to S,. 
 
 S a is very probably but not certainly more or less P. 
 
 Let us go on that assumption and see how it 
 works. 
 
 That is to say I was constantly reasoning by 
 analogy and applying verification. So far from 
 using the syllogistic form confidently, I habitually 
 distrusted it as anything more than a test of 
 consistency in statement. But I found the text- 
 books of logic disposed to ignore my customary 
 method of reasoning altogether or to recognise 
 it only where S x and S 2 could be lumped to- 
 gether under a common name. Then they put it 
 something after this form as Induction; — 
 
 S„ S 2 , S 3 , and S 4 are P. 
 
 S x + S, + S 3 + S 4 + . . . are allS. 
 
 All S is P. 
 
 I looked into the laws of thought and into the 
 
24 First and Last Things 
 
 postulate upon which the syllogistic logic is based, 
 and it slowly became clear to me that from my 
 point of view, the point of view of one who seeks 
 truth and reality, logic assumed a belief in the 
 objective reality of classification of which my 
 studies in biology and mineralogy had largely 
 disabused me. Logic, it seemed to me, had taken 
 a common innate error of the mind and had em- 
 phasised it in order to develop a system of reason- 
 ing that should be exact in its processes. I turned 
 my attention to the examination of that. For 
 in common with the general run of men I had 
 supposed that logic professed to supply a trust- 
 worthy science and method for the investigation 
 and expression of reality. 
 
 A mind nourished on anatomical study is of 
 course permeated with the suggestion of the 
 vagueness and instability of biological species. 
 A biological species is quite obviously a great 
 number of unique individuals which is separable 
 from other biological species only by the fact 
 that an enormous number of other linking in- 
 dividuals are inaccessible in time — are in other 
 words dead and gone — and each new individual 
 in that species does, in the distinction of its own 
 individuality, break away in however infinitesimal 
 degree from the previous average properties of 
 
Metaphysics 25 
 
 the species. There is no property of any species, 
 even the properties that constitute the specific 
 definition, that is not a matter of more or less. 
 
 If, for example, a species be distinguished by 
 a single large red spot on the back, you will find 
 if you go over a great number of specimens that 
 red spot shrinking here to nothing, expanding 
 there to a more general redness, weakening to 
 pink, deepening to russet and brown, shading 
 into crimson, and so on and so on. And this is 
 true not only of biological species. It is true of 
 the mineral specimens constituting a mineral 
 species, and I remember as a constant refrain 
 in the lectures of Professor Judd upon rock classi- 
 fication, the words, "they pass into one another 
 by insensible gradations." It is true, I hold, of 
 all things. 
 
 You will think perhaps of atoms of the ele- 
 ments as instances of identically similar things, 
 but these are things not of experience but of 
 theory, and there is not a phenomenon in chem- 
 istry that is not equally well explained on the 
 supposition that it is merely the immense quan- 
 tities of atoms necessarily taken in any experiment 
 that masks by the operation of the law of aver- 
 ages the fact that each atom also has its unique 
 quality, its special individual difference. 
 
26 First and Last Things 
 
 This ideal of uniqueness in all individuals is 
 not only true of the classifications of material 
 science; it is true and still more evidently true 
 of the species of common thought, it is true of 
 common terms. Take the word Chair. When 
 one says chair, one thinks vaguely of an average 
 chair. But collect individual instances, think of 
 arm-chairs and reading-chairs and dining-room 
 chairs, and kitchen chairs, chairs that pass into 
 benches, chairs that cross the boundary and 
 become settees, dentists' chairs, thrones, opera 
 stalls, seats of all sorts, those miraculous fungoid 
 growths that cumber the floor of the Arts and 
 Crafts Exhibition, and you will perceive what 
 a lax bundle in fact is this simple straightforward 
 term. In co-operation with an intelligent joiner 
 I would undertake to defeat any definition of 
 chair or chairishness that you gave me. Chairs 
 just as much as individual organisms, just as 
 much as mineral and rock specimens, are unique 
 things, — if you know them well enough you will 
 find an individual difference even in a set of 
 machine-made chairs — and it is only because we 
 do not possess minds of unlimited capacity, 
 because our brain has only a limited number of 
 pigeon-holes for our correspondence with an un- 
 limited universe of objective uniques, that we 
 
Metaphysics 27 
 
 have to delude ourselves into the belief that there 
 is a chairishness in this species common to and 
 distinctive of all chairs. 
 
 Classification and number, which in truth 
 ignore the fine differences of objective realities, 
 have in the past of human thought been imposed 
 upon things. . . . 
 
 Greek thought impresses me as being over- 
 much obsessed by an objective treatment of 
 certain necessary preliminary conditions of human 
 thought — number and definition and class and 
 abstract form! But these things, number, defini- 
 tion, class and abstract form, I hold, are merely 
 unavoidable conditions of mental activity — re- 
 grettable conditions rather than essential facts. 
 The forceps of our minds are clumsy forceps and 
 crush the truth a little in taking hold of it. . . 
 
 Let me give you a rough figure of what I am 
 trying to convey in this first attack upon the 
 philosophical validity of general terms. You 
 have seen the result of those various methods of 
 black and white reproduction that involve the 
 use of a rectangular net. You know the sort 
 of process picture I mean — it used to be em- 
 ployed very frequently in reproducing photo- 
 graphs. At a little distance you really seem to 
 have a faithful reproduction of the original 
 
28 First and Last Things 
 
 picture, but when you peer closely you find not 
 the unique form and masses of the original, but 
 a multitude of little rectangles, uniform in shape 
 and size. The more earnestly you go into the 
 thing, the closelier you look, the more the picture 
 is lost in reticulations. I submit the world of 
 reasoned enquiry has a very similar relation to 
 the world of fact. For the rough purposes of 
 everyday the net-work picture will do, but the 
 finer your purpose the less it will serve, and for 
 an ideally fine purpose, for absolute and general 
 knowledge that will be as true for a man at a 
 distance with a telescope as for a man with a 
 microscope, it will not serve at all. 
 
 It is true you can make your net of logical 
 interpretation finer and finer, you can fine your 
 classification more and more — up to a certain 
 limit. But essentially you are working in limits, 
 and as you come closer, as you look at finer and 
 subtler things, as you leave the practical purpose 
 for which the method exists, the element of error 
 increases. Every species is vague, every term 
 goes cloudy at its edges, and so in my way of 
 thinking, relentless logic is only another name 
 for a stupidity — for a sort of intellectual pig- 
 headedness. If you push a philosophical or 
 metaphysical enquiry through a series of valid 
 
Metaphysics 29 
 
 syllogisms — never committing any generally recog- 
 nised fallacy — you nevertheless leave behind you at 
 each step a certain rubbing and marginal loss of 
 objective truth and you get deflections that are 
 difficult to trace, at each phase in the process. 
 Every species waggles about in its definition, 
 every tool is a little loose in its handle, every scale 
 has its individual error. So long as you are 
 reasoning for practical purposes about finite 
 things of experience, you can every now and then 
 check your process and correct your adjustments. 
 But not when you make what are called philo- 
 sophical and theological inquiries, when you turn 
 your implement towards the final absolute truth 
 of things. 
 
 This real vagueness of class terms is equally 
 true whether we consider those terms used ex- 
 tensively or intensively, that is to say whether in 
 relation to all the members of the species or in 
 relation to an imaginary typical specimen. The 
 logician begins by declaring that S is either P 
 or not P. In the world of fact it is the rarest 
 thing to encounter this absolute alternative; Si 
 is pink, but S 2 is pinker, S3 is scarcely pink at all, 
 and one is in doubt whether S4 is not properly to 
 be called scarlet. The finest type specimen you 
 can find simply has the characteristic quality a 
 
30 First and Last Things 
 
 little more rather than a little less. The neat 
 little circles the logician uses to convey his idea 
 of P or not P to the student are just pictures of 
 boundaries in his mind, exaggerations of a natural 
 mental tendency. They are required for the 
 purposes of his science, but they are departures 
 from the nature of fact. 
 
§6. 
 
 Empty Terms. — Classes in logic are not only 
 represented by circles with a hard firm outline, 
 whereas in fact they have no such definite limits, 
 but also there is a constant disposition to think 
 of all names as if they represented positive 
 classes. With words just as with numbers and 
 abstract forms there have been definite phases 
 of human development. There was with regard 
 to numbers the phase when man could barely 
 count at all, or counted in perfect good faith and 
 sanity upon his fingers. Then there was the 
 phase when he struggled with the development 
 of number, when he began to elaborate all sorts 
 of ideas about numbers, until at last he developed 
 complex superstitions about perfect numbers and 
 imperfect numbers, about threes and sevens and 
 the like. The same was the case with abstract 
 forms and even to-day we are scarcely more 
 than heads out of the vast subtle muddle of 
 thinking about spheres and ideally perfect forms 
 and so on, that was the price of this little neces- 
 sary step to clear thinking. How large a part 
 
32 First and Last Things 
 
 numerical and geometrical magic, numerical and 
 geometrical philosophy has played in the history 
 of the mind! And the whole apparatus of lan- 
 guage and mental communication is beset with 
 like dangers. The language of the savage is I 
 suppose purely positive; the thing has a name, 
 the name has a thing. This indeed is the tradi- 
 tion of language, and to-day even, we, when we 
 hear a name are predisposed — and sometimes it 
 is a very vicious disposition — to imagine forthwith 
 something answering to the name. We are disposed 
 as an incurable mental vice, to accumulate intension 
 in terms. If I say to you Wodget or Crump, 
 you find yourself passing over the fact that these 
 are nothings, these are, so to speak, mere blanket y 
 blanks, and trying to think what sort of thing a 
 Wodget or a Crump may be. You find yourself 
 led insensibly by subtle associations of sound and 
 ideas to giving these blank terms attributes. 
 
 Now this is true not only of quite empty terms 
 but of. terms that carry a meaning. It is a mental 
 necessity that we should make classes and use gen- 
 eral terms, and as soon as we do that we fall into 
 immediate danger of unjustifiably increasing the 
 intension of these terms. You will find a large 
 proportion of human prejudice and misunderstand- 
 ing arises from this universal proclivity. 
 
§7- 
 
 Negative Terms. — There is a particular sort 
 of empty terms that has been and is conspicuously 
 dangerous to the thinker, the class of negative 
 terms. The negative term is in plain fact just 
 nothing; "Not-A" is the absence of any trace of 
 the quality that constitutes A, it is the rest of 
 everything for ever. But there seems to be a 
 real bias in the mind towards regarding "Not-A" 
 as a thing mysteriously in the nature of A, as 
 though " Not-A" and A were species of the same 
 genus. When one speaks of not-Pink one is apt 
 to think of green things and yellow things and 
 to ignore anger or abstract nouns or the sound 
 of thunder. And logicians, following the normal 
 bias of the mind do actually present A and Not-A 
 
 in this sort of diagram ignoring altogether the 
 difficult case of the space in which these words 
 
 3 33 
 
34 First and Last Things 
 
 are printed. Obviously the diagram that comes 
 nearer experienced fact is 
 
 Not ® A 
 
 with no outer boundary. But the logician finds 
 it necessary for his processes 1 to present that 
 outer Not- A as bounded, and to speak of the 
 total area of A and Not-A as the Universe of 
 Discourse and the metaphysician and the common- 
 sense thinker alike fall far too readily into the 
 belief that this convention of method is an ade- 
 quate representation of fact. 
 
 Let me try and express how in my mind this 
 matter of negative terms has shaped itself. I 
 think of something which I may perhaps best 
 describe as being off the stage or out of court, or 
 as the Void without Implications, or as Nothing- 
 ness, or as Outer Darkness. This is a sort of 
 hypothetical Beyond to the visible world of 
 human thought, and thither I think all negative 
 terms reach at last, and merge and become 
 nothing. Whatever positive class you make, 
 whatever boundary you draw, straight away from 
 that boundary begins the corresponding negative 
 
 1 Vide e.g. Kayne's Formal Logic re Euler's diagrams and 
 Immediate Inferences. 
 
Metaphysics 35 
 
 class and passes into the illimitable horizon of 
 nothingness. You talk of pink things, you ig- 
 nore, as the arbitrary postulates of Logic direct, 
 the more elusive shades of pink, and draw your 
 line. Beyond is the not-pink, known and know- 
 able, and still in the not-pink region one comes 
 to the Outer Darkness. Not blue, not happy, 
 not iron, all the not classes meet in that Outer 
 Darkness. That same Outer Darkness and no- 
 thingness is infinite space and infinite time and 
 any being of infinite qualities, and all that region 
 I rule out of court in my philosophy altogether. 
 I will neither affirm nor deny if I can help it about 
 any not things, I will not deal with not things at 
 all, except by accident and inadvertence. If I 
 use the word "infinite" I use it as one often uses 
 "countless," "the countless hosts of the enemy" 
 — or "Immeasurable" — "immeasurable cliffs" — 
 that is to say as the limit of measurement, as a 
 convenient equivalent to as many times this 
 cloth yard as you can, and as many again and 
 so on and so on. 
 
 Now a great number of apparently positive 
 terms are, or have become, practically negative 
 terms and are under the same ban with me. A 
 considerable number of terms that have played 
 a great part in the world of thought, seem to me 
 
36 First and Last Things 
 
 to be invalidated by this same defect, to have no 
 content or an undefined content or an unjusti- 
 fiable content. For example, that word Omni- 
 scient, as implying infinite knowledge, impresses 
 me as being a word with a delusive air of being 
 solid and full, when it is really hollow with no 
 content whatever. I am persuaded that knowing 
 is the relation of a conscious being to something 
 not itself, that the thing known is defined as a 
 system of parts and aspects and relationships, 
 that knowledge is comprehension, and so that 
 only finite things can know or be known. When 
 you talk of a being of infinite extension and 
 infinite duration, omniscient and omnipotent and 
 Perfect, you seem to me to be talking in nega- 
 tives of nothing whatever. 
 
§8. 
 
 Logic Static and Life Kinetic. — There is 
 another infirmity of the mind to which atten- 
 tion has been called recently by an able 
 paper read to the Cambridge Moral Science 
 Club by my friend Miss Amber Reeves. In 
 this she has developed a suggestion of Mr. 
 F. C. S. Schiller's. The current syllogistic 
 logic rests on the assumption that either A 
 is B or it is not B. The practical reality, 
 she contends, is that nothing is permanent; 
 A is always becoming B more or less or ceas- 
 ing to be B more or less. But it would seem 
 the human mind cannot manage with that. 
 It has to hold a thing still for a moment be- 
 fore it can think it. It arrests the present 
 moment for its struggle as Joshua stopped 
 the sun. It cannot contemplate things con- 
 tinuously and so it has to resort as it were 
 to a series of static snapshots. It has to kill 
 motion in order to study it as a naturalist 
 kills and pins out a butterfly in order to 
 study life. 
 
 37 
 
38 First and Last Things 
 
 You see the mind is really pigeon-holed and 
 discontinuous in two respects; in respect to time 
 and in respect to classification, where one has 
 a strong persuasion that the world of fact is 
 unbounded or continuous. 
 
§9- 
 
 Planes and Dialects of Thought. — Finally 
 the Logician, intent upon perfecting the certitudes 
 of his methods rather than upon expressing the 
 confusing subtleties of truth, has done little to 
 help thinking men in the perpetual difficulty that 
 arises from the fact that the universe can be seen 
 in many different fashions and expressed by many 
 different systems of terms, each expression in its 
 limits true and yet incommensurable with expres- 
 sion upon a differing system. There is a sort of 
 stratification in human ideas. I have it very 
 much in mind that various terms in our reasoning 
 lie, as it were, at different levels and in different 
 planes, and that we accomplish a large amount 
 of error and confusion by reasoning terms together 
 that do not lie or nearly lie in the same plane. 
 
 Let me endeavour to make myself a little less 
 obscure by a flagrant instance from physical 
 things. Suppose someone began to talk seriously 
 of a man seeing an atom through a microscope, 
 or better perhaps of cutting one in half with a 
 knife. There are a number of non-analytical 
 
 39 
 
40 First and Last Things 
 
 people who would be quite prepared to believe 
 that an atom could be visible to the eye or cut 
 in this manner. But anyone at all conversant 
 with physical conceptions would almost as soon 
 think of killing the square root of 2 with a rook 
 rifle as of cutting an atom in half with a knife. 
 One's conception of an atom is reached through 
 a process of hypothesis and analysis, and in the 
 world of atoms there are no knives and no men 
 to cut. If you have thought with a strong con- 
 sistent mental movement, then when you have 
 thought of your atom under the knife blade, your 
 knife blade has itself become a cloud of swinging 
 grouped atoms, and your microscope lens a little 
 universe of oscillatory and vibratory molecules. 
 If you think of the universe, thinking at the level 
 of atoms, there is neither knife to cut, scale to 
 weigh, nor eye to see. The universe at that plane 
 to which the mind of the molecular physicist descends 
 has none of the shapes or forms of our common 
 life whatever. This hand with which I write 
 is in the universe of molecular physics a cloud of 
 warring atoms and molecules, combining and 
 recombining, colliding, rotating, flying hither and 
 thither in the universal atmosphere of ether. 
 
 You see, I hope, what I mean when I say that 
 the universe of molecular physics is at a different 
 
Metaphysics 41 
 
 level from the universe of common experience; 
 — what we call stable and solid is in that world 
 a freely moving system of interlacing centres of 
 force, what we call colour and sound is there no 
 more than this length of vibration or that. We 
 have reached to a conception of that universe of 
 molecular physics by a great enterprise of organ- 
 ised analysis, and our universe of daily experi- 
 ences stands in relation to that elemental world 
 as if it were a synthesis of those elemental things. 
 
 I would suggest to you that this is only a very 
 extreme instance of the general state of affairs, 
 that there may be finer and subtler differences of 
 level between one term and another, and that 
 terms may very well be thought of as lying 
 obliquely and as being twisted through different 
 levels. 
 
 It will perhaps give a clearer idea of what I 
 am seeking to convey if I suggest a concrete 
 image for the whole world of a man's thought and 
 knowledge. Imagine a large clear jelly, in which 
 at all angles and in all states of simplicity or 
 contortion his ideas are imbedded. They are all 
 valid and possible ideas as they lie, none incom- 
 patible with any. If you imagine the direction 
 of up or down in this clear jelly being as it were 
 the direction in which one moves by analysis or 
 
42 First and Last Things 
 
 by synthesis, if you go down for example from 
 matter to atoms and centres of force and up to 
 men and states and countries — if you will imagine 
 the ideas lying in that manner — you will get the 
 beginnings of my intention. But our Instrument, 
 our process of thinking, like a drawing before 
 the discovery of perspective, appears to have diffi- 
 culties with the third dimension, appears capable 
 only of dealing with or reasoning about ideas by 
 projecting them upon the same plane. It will 
 be obvious that a great multitude of things may 
 very well exist together in a solid jelly, which 
 would be overlapping and incompatible and 
 mutually destructive, when projected together 
 upon one plane. Through the bias in our Instru- 
 ment to do this, through reasoning between terms 
 not in the same plane, an enormous amount of 
 confusion, perplexity and mental deadlocking 
 occurs. 
 
 The old theological deadlock between pre- 
 destination and free-will serves admirably as an 
 example of the sort of deadlock I mean. Take 
 life at the level of common sensation and common 
 experience and there is no more indisputable fact 
 than man's freedom of will, unless it is his complete 
 moral responsibility. But make only the least 
 penetrating of scientific analyses and you perceive 
 
Metaphysics 43 
 
 a world of inevitable consequences, a rigid suc- 
 cession of cause and effect. Insist upon a flat 
 agreement between the two, and there you are! 
 The Instrument fails. 
 
 So far as this particular opposition is concerned, 
 I shall point out later the reasonableness and con- 
 venience of regarding the common-sense belief in 
 free-will as truer for one's personal life than 
 determinism. 
 
§ io. 
 
 Practical Conclusions from these Con- 
 siderations. — Now what is the practical out- 
 come of all these criticisms of the human mind? 
 Does it follow that thought is futile and discussion 
 vain? By no means. Rather these considera- 
 tions lead us toward mutual understanding. 
 They clear up the deadlocks that come from the 
 hard and fast use of terms, they establish mutual 
 charity as an intellectual necessity. The common 
 way of speech and thought which the old system 
 of logic has simply systematised, is too glib and 
 too presumptuous of certainty. We must needs 
 use language, but we must use it always with the 
 thought of its unreal exactness, its actual habitual 
 deflection from fact in our minds. All proposi- 
 tions are approximations to an elusive truth, and 
 we employ them as the mathematician studies 
 the circle by supposing it to be a polygon of a 
 very great number of sides. 
 
 We must make use of terms and sometimes of 
 provisional terms. But we must guard against 
 such terms and the mental danger of excessive 
 
 44 
 
Metaphysics 45 
 
 intension they carry with them. The child takes 
 a stick and says it is a sword and does not forget, 
 he takes a shadow under the bed and says it is 
 a bear and he half forgets. The man takes a set 
 of emotions and says it is a God, and he gets 
 excited and propagandist and does forget, he is 
 involved in disputes and confusions with the old 
 gods of wood and stone, and presently he is 
 making his God a Great White Throne and fitting 
 him up with a mystical family. 
 
 Essentially we have to train our minds to think 
 anew, if we are to think beyond the purposes for 
 which the mind seems to have been evolved. We 
 have to disabuse ourselves from the superstition 
 of the binding nature of definitions and the 
 exactness of logic. We have to cure ourselves 
 of the natural tricks of common thought and 
 argument. You know the way of it, how effec- 
 tive and foolish it is; the quotation of the 
 exact statement of which every jot and tittle 
 must be maintained, the challenge to be 
 consistent, the deadlock between your terms 
 and mine. 
 
 More and more as I grow older and more settled 
 in my views- am I bored by common argument, 
 bored not because I am ceasing to be interested 
 in the things argued about, but because I see 
 
46 First and Last Things 
 
 more and more clearly the futility of the methods 
 pursued. 
 
 How then are we to think and argue and what 
 truth may we attain? Is not the method of the 
 scientific investigator a valid one and is there not 
 truth to the world of fact in scientific laws? De- 
 cidedly there is. And the continual revision 
 and testing against fact that these laws get is 
 constantly approximating them more and more 
 nearly to a trustworthy statement of fact. Never- 
 theless they are never true in that dogmatic 
 degree in which they seem true to the unphilo- 
 sophical student of science. Accepting as I do 
 the validity of nearly all the general propositions 
 of modern Science, I have constantly to bear in 
 mind that about them too clings the error of 
 excessive claims to precision. 
 
 The man trained solely in science falls easily 
 into a superstitious attitude; he is overdone with 
 classification. He believes in the possibility of 
 exact knowledge everywhere. What is not exact 
 he declares is not knowledge. He believes in 
 specialists and experts in all fields. 
 
 I dispute this universal range of possible scien- 
 tific precision. There is a certain not too clearly 
 recognised order in the sciences which forms the 
 gist of my case against this scientific pretension. 
 
Metaphysics 47 
 
 There is a gradation in the importance of the 
 individual instance as one passes from mechanics 
 and physics and chemistry through the biological 
 sciences and economics and sociology, a grada- 
 tion whose correlations and implications have not 
 yet received adequate recognition, and which 
 do profoundly affect the method of study and 
 research in each science. 
 
 Let me repeat in slightly altered terms some 
 of the points raised in the preceding sections. I 
 have doubted and denied that there are identi- 
 cally similar objective experiences; I consider all 
 objective beings as individual and unique. It 
 is now understood that conceivably only in the 
 subjective world, and in theory and the imagina- 
 tion, do we deal with identically similar units, 
 and with absolutely commensurable quantities. 
 In the real world it is reasonable to suppose we 
 deal at most with practically similar units and 
 practically commensurable quantities. But there 
 is a strong bias, a sort of labour-saving bias in 
 the normal human mind to ignore this and not 
 only to speak but to think of a thousand bricks 
 or a thousand sheep or a thousand sociologists as 
 though they were all absolutely true to sample. 
 If it is brought before a thinker for a moment that 
 in any special case this is not so, he slips back to 
 
48 First and Last Things 
 
 the old attitude as soon as his attention is with- 
 drawn. This type of error has, for instance, 
 caught many of the race of chemists and atoms 
 and ions and so forth of the same species are 
 tacitly assumed to be similar to one another. Be 
 it noted that so far as the practical results of 
 chemistry and physics go, it scarcely matters 
 which assumption we adopt, the number of units 
 is so great, the individual difference so drowned 
 and lost. For purposes of enquiry and discussion 
 the incorrect one is infinitely more convenient. 
 
 But this ceases to be true directly we emerge 
 from the region of chemistry and physics. In the 
 biological sciences of the eighteenth century, 
 common-sense struggled hard to ignore individ- 
 uality in shells and plants and animals. There 
 was an attempt to eliminate the more conspicuous 
 departures as abnormalities, as sports, nature's 
 weak moments, and it was only with the estab- 
 lishment of Darwin's great generalisations that 
 the hard and fast classificatory system broke 
 down and individuality came to its own. Yet 
 there had always been a clearly felt difference 
 between the conclusions of the biological sciences 
 and those dealing with lifeless substance in the 
 relative vagueness, the insubordinate looseness 
 and inaccuracy of the former. The naturalist 
 
Metaphysics 49 
 
 accumulated facts and multiplied names, but he 
 did not go triumphantly from generalisation 
 to generalisation after the fashion of the chemist 
 or physicist. It is easy to see therefore how it 
 came about that the inorganic sciences were re- 
 garded as the true scientific bed-rock. It was 
 scarcely suspected that the biological sciences 
 might perhaps after all be truer than the experi- 
 mental, in spite of the difference in practical value 
 in favour of the latter. It was, and is by the 
 great majority of people to this day, supposed to 
 be the latter that are invincibly true ; and the for- 
 mer are regarded as a more complex set of prob- 
 lems merely, with obliquities and refractions that 
 presently will be explained away. Comte and 
 Herbert Spencer certainly seem to me to have 
 taken that much for granted. Herbert Spencer 
 no doubt talked of the unknown and unknowable, 
 but not in this sense as an element of inexactness 
 running through all things. He thought, it seems 
 to me, of the unknown as the indefinable be- 
 yond to an immediate world that might be quite 
 clearly and definitely known. 
 
 There is a growing body of people which is be- 
 ginning to hold the converse view — that counting, 
 classification, measurement, the whole fabric of 
 mathematics, is subjective and untrue to the 
 
So First and Last Things 
 
 world of fact, and that the uniqueness of individu- 
 als is the objective truth. As the number of units 
 taken diminishes, the amount of variety and 
 inexactness of generalisation increases, because 
 individuality tells more and more. Could you 
 take men by the thousand billion, you could 
 generalise about them as you do about atoms, 
 could you take atoms singly, it may be you would 
 find them as individual as your aunts and cousins. 
 That concisely is the minority belief, and my 
 belief. 
 
 Now what is called the scientific method in 
 the physical sciences rests upon the ignoring of 
 individualities; and like many mathematical con- 
 ventions, its great practical convenience is no 
 proof whatever of its final truth. Let me admit 
 the enormous value, the wonder of its results in 
 mechanics, and all the physical sciences, in chem- 
 istry, even in physiology, — but what is its value 
 beyond that ? Is this ' ' scientific method ' ' of value 
 in biology? The great advances made by Darwin 
 and his school in biology were not made, it must 
 be remembered, by the scientific method, as it is 
 generally conceived, at all. His was historical 
 research. He conducted a research into pre- 
 documentary history. He collected infcrmation 
 along the lines indicated by certain interrogations, 
 
Metaphysics 51 
 
 and the bulk of his work was the digesting and 
 critical analysis of that. For documents and 
 monuments he had fossils and anatomical struc- 
 tures and germinating eggs too innocent to lie. 
 But on the other hand he had to correspond with 
 breeders and travellers of various sorts, classes 
 entirely analogous, from the point of view of evi- 
 dence, to the writers of history and memoirs. I 
 question profoundly whether the word "science," 
 in current usage anyhow, ever means such patient 
 disentanglement as Darwin pursued. It means the 
 attainment of something positive and emphatic 
 in the way of a conclusion, based on amply re- 
 peated experiments capable of infinite repetition, 
 "proved" as they say, "up to the hilt." 
 
 It would be of course possible to dispute 
 whether the word "science" should convey this 
 quality of certitude, but to most people it certainly 
 does at the present time. So far as the move- 
 ments of comets and electric trams go, there is 
 no doubt practically cock-sure science ; and Comte 
 and Herbert Spencer seem to me to have believed 
 that cock-sure could be extended to every con- 
 eeivable finite thing. The fact that Herbert 
 Spencer called a certain doctrine Individualism 
 reflects nothing on the non-individualising quality 
 of his primary assumptions and of his mental 
 
52 First and Last Things 
 
 texture. He believed that individuality (hetero- 
 geneity) was and is an evolutionary product from 
 an original homogeneity, begotten by folding 
 and multiplying and dividing and twisting it, and 
 still fundamentally it. It seems to me that the 
 general usage is entirely for the limitation of the 
 word "science" to knowledge and the search 
 after knowledge of a high degree of precision. 
 And not simply the general usage; "Science is 
 measurement," Science is "organised common- 
 sense," proud in fact of its essential error, scorn- 
 ful of any metaphysical analysis of its terms. 
 
 Now my contention is that we can arrange 
 the fields of human thought and interest about 
 the world of fact in a sort of scale. At one 
 end the number of units is infinite and the methods 
 exact, at the other we have the human subjects in 
 which there is no exactitude. Sociology stands at 
 the extreme end of the scale from the molecular 
 sciences. In these latter there is an infinitude of 
 units; in sociology, as Comte perceived, there is 
 only one unit. It is true that Herbert Spencer, 
 in order to get classification somehow, did, as 
 Professor Durkheim has pointed out, separate 
 human society into societies and made believe 
 they competed one with another and died and 
 reproduced just like animals, and that economists 
 
Metaphysics 53 
 
 following List have for the purposes of fiscal con- 
 troversy discovered economic types; but this is 
 a transparent device, and one is surprised to 
 find thoughtful and reputable writers off their 
 guard against such bad analogy. But indeed it 
 is impossible to isolate complete communities of 
 men, or to trace any but rude general resemblances 
 between group and group. These alleged units 
 have as much individuality as pieces of cloud; 
 they come, they go, they fuse and separate. 
 And we are forced to conclude that not only is 
 the method of observation, experiment and veri- 
 fication left far away down the scale, but that 
 the method of classification under types, which 
 has served so useful a purpose in the middle group 
 of subjects, the subjects involving numerous 
 but a finite number of units, has also to be aban- 
 doned here. We cannot put Humanity into a 
 museum or dry it for examination; our one single 
 still living specimen is all history, all anthropo- 
 logy, and the fluctuating world of men. There is no 
 satisfactory means of dividing it and nothing else 
 in the real world with which to compare it. We 
 have only the remotest ideas of its "life-cycle" 
 and a few relics of its origin and dreams of its 
 destiny. 
 
 This denial of scientific precision is as true of 
 
54 First and Last Things 
 
 all the subjects of general human relations and 
 attitude, as it is of sociology. And in regard to 
 all these matters affecting our personal motives, 
 our self-control and our devotions, it is much 
 truer. 
 
 From this it is an easy step to the statement 
 that so far as the clear-cut confident sort of 
 knowledge goes, the sort of knowledge one gets 
 from a time-table or a text-book of chemistry, 
 or seeks from a witness in a police court, I am, 
 in relation to religious and moral questions, an 
 agnostic. I do not think any general propositions 
 partaking largely of the nature of fact can be 
 known about these things. There is nothing 
 possessing the general validity of fact to be 
 stated or known. 
 
§ II. 
 
 Beliefs. — Yet it is of urgent practical neces- 
 sity that we should have such propositions and 
 beliefs. All those we conjure out of our mental 
 apparatus and the world of fact dissolve and 
 disappear again under scrutiny. It is clear we 
 must resort to some other method for these 
 necessities. 
 
 Now I make my beliefs as I want them. I do 
 not attempt to go to fact for them. I make 
 them thus and not thus exactly as an artist makes 
 a picture so and not so. I believe that is how 
 we all make our beliefs, but that many people do 
 not see this clearly and confuse their beliefs with 
 perceived fact. 
 
 I draw my beliefs exactly as an artist draws 
 lines to make a picture, to express my impression 
 of the world and my purpose. 
 
 The artist cannot defend his expression as 
 a scientific man defends his, and upon any 
 given assumptions demonstrate that they are 
 true. Any loud fool may stand in the front of a 
 picture and call it inaccurate, untrustworthy, 
 
 55 
 
56 First and Last Things 
 
 unbeautiful. That last, the most vital issue of 
 all, is the one least assured. Loud fools always 
 will do that sort of thing. You take quite ig- 
 norant people before almost any beautiful work 
 of art and they will laugh at it as absurd. If one 
 sits on a popular evening in that long room at 
 South Kensington which contains Raphael's car- 
 toons, one remarks that perhaps a third of those 
 who stray through and look at all those fine efforts, 
 titter. If one searches in the magazines of a little 
 while ago, one finds in the angry and resentful 
 reception of the Pre-Raphaelites another instance 
 of the absolutely indefensible nature of many of 
 the most beautiful propositions. And as a still 
 more striking and remarkable case, take the on- 
 slaught made by Ruskin upon the works of 
 Whistler. You will remember that a libel action 
 ensued and that these pictures were gravely 
 reasoned about by barristers and surveyed by 
 jurymen to assess their merits. . . . 
 
 In the end it is the indefensible truth that lasts \ 
 it lasts because it works and serves. People come 
 to it and remain and attract other understanding 
 and enquiring people. 
 
 Now when I say I make my beliefs and that I 
 cannot prove them to you and convince you of 
 them, that does not mean that I make them 
 
Metaphysics 57 
 
 wantonly and regardless of fact, that I throw 
 them off as a child scribbles on a slate. Mr. 
 Ruskin, if I remember rightly, accused Whistler 
 of throwing a pot of paint in the face of the public, 
 that was the essence of his libel. The artistic 
 method in this field of beliefs, as in the field of 
 visual renderings, is one of great freedom and 
 initiative and great poverty of test, that is all, 
 but of no wantonness ; the conditions of Tightness 
 are none the less imperative because they are 
 mysterious and indefinable. I adopt certain 
 beliefs because I feel the need for them, because 
 I feel an often quite unanalysable Tightness in 
 them; because the alternative of a chaotic life 
 distresses me, because they are right. My belief 
 in them rests upon the fact that they work for 
 me and satisfy a desire for harmony and beauty. 
 They are arbitrary assumptions if you will, that 
 I see fit to impose upon my universe. But 
 though they are arbitrary, they are not 
 necessarily individual. Just so far as we all 
 have a common likeness, just so far can we 
 be brought under the same imperatives to 
 think and believe. 
 
 And though they are arbitrary, each day they 
 stand wear and tear and each new person they 
 satisfy, is another day and another voice towards 
 
58 First and Last Things 
 
 showing they do correspond to something that is 
 so far fact and real. 
 
 This is Pragmatism as I conceive it, the aban- 
 donment of infinite assumptions, the extension of 
 the experimental spirit to all human interests. 
 
§ 12. 
 
 Summary. — In concluding this First Book let 
 me give a summary of the principal points of 
 what has gone before. 
 
 I figure the mind of man as an imperfect being 
 obtaining knowledge by imperfect eyesight, im- 
 perfect hearing and so forth, who must needs walk 
 manfully and patiently, exercising will and mak- 
 ing choices and determining things between the 
 mysteries of external and internal fact. 
 
 Essentially man's mind moves within limits 
 depending upon his individual character and 
 experience. These limits constitute his circle of 
 thought, and they differ for everyone. 
 
 That briefly is what I consider to be the case 
 with my own mind, and I believe it is the case 
 with yours. 
 
 Most minds, it seems to me, are similar, but 
 none are absolutely alike in character or in 
 contents. 
 
 We are all biassed to ignore our mental im- 
 perfections and to talk and act as though in 
 our minds we had exact instruments, something 
 
 59 
 
60 First and Last Things 
 
 wherewith to scale the heavens with assurance, 
 and to believe as if, except for perversity, all our 
 minds work exactly alike. 
 
 Man, thinking man, suffers from intellectual 
 over-confidence and a vain belief in the universal 
 validity of reasoning. 
 
 We all need training, training in the balanced 
 attitude. 
 
 Of everything we need to say this is true, but it 
 is not quite true. 
 
 Of everything we need to say, this is true in 
 relation to things in or near its plane but not 
 true of other things. 
 
 Of everything we have to remember, this may 
 be truer for us than for other people. 
 
 In disputation particttlarly we have to re- 
 member this and most with our antagonist, 
 that the spirit of an utterance may be better 
 than the phrase. 
 
 We have to discourage the cheap tricks of 
 controversy, the retort, the search for incon- 
 sistency. 
 
 We have to realise that these things are as 
 foolish and ill-bred and anti-social as shouting 
 in conversation or making puns, and we have 
 to work out habits of thought purged from 
 the sin of assurance. We have to do this for 
 
Metaphysics 61 
 
 our own good quite as much as for the sake of 
 intercourse. 
 
 All the great and important beliefs by which 
 life is guided and determined are less of the nature 
 of fact than of artistic expression. 
 
Book the Second. 
 Of Belief. 
 
 63 
 
§1. 
 
 My Primary Act of Faith. — And now having 
 stated my conception of the true relationship 
 of our thoughts and words to facts, having 
 distinguished between the more accurate and 
 frequently verified propositions of science and 
 the more arbitrary and infrequently verified 
 propositions of belief and made clear the spon- 
 taneous and artistic quality that inheres in all 
 our moral and religious generalisations, I may 
 hope to go on to my confession of faith with 
 less misunderstanding. 
 
 Now my most comprehensive belief about the 
 external and the internal and myself is that they 
 make one universe in which I and every part are 
 ultimately important. That is quite an arbi- 
 trary act of my mind. It is quite possible to 
 maintain that everything is a chaotic assembly, 
 that any part might be destroyed without affecting 
 any other part. I do not choose to argue against 
 that. If you choose to say that, I am no more 
 disposed to argue with you than if you choose to 
 
 wear a mitre in Fleet Street or drink a bottle of 
 
 65 
 
66 First and Last Things 
 
 ink, or declare the figure of Ally Sloper more dig- 
 nified and beautiful than the head of Jove. There 
 is no Q.E.D. that you cannot do so. You can. 
 You will not like to go on with it, I think, 
 and it will not answer, but that is a different 
 matter. 
 
 I dismiss the idea that life is chaotic because 
 it leaves my life ineffectual, and I cannot contem- 
 plate an ineffectual life patiently. I am by my 
 nature impelled to refuse that. I assert that it 
 is not so. I assert therefore that I am important 
 in a scheme, that we all are important in that 
 scheme, that the wheel-smashed frog in the road 
 and the fly drowning in the milk are important 
 and correlated with me. What the scheme as a 
 whole is I do not know; with my limited mind I 
 cannot know. There I become a Mystic. I use 
 the word scheme because it is the best word 
 available, but I strain it in using it. I do not 
 wish to imply a schemer, but only order and co- 
 ordination as distinguished from haphazard. " All 
 this is important, all this is profoundly signifi- 
 cant." I say it of the universe, as a child that 
 has not learnt to read might say it of a parchment 
 agreement. I can't read the universe, but I can 
 believe that this is so. 
 
 And this unfounded and arbitrary declara- 
 
Of Belief 67 
 
 tion of the ultimate lightness and significance of 
 things I call the Act of Faith. It is my funda- 
 mental religious confession. It is a voluntary 
 and deliberate determination to believe, it is a 
 choice made. 
 
§2. 
 
 On Using the Name of God. — You may say 
 if you will that this scheme I talk about, this 
 something that gives Importance and correlation 
 and significance, is what is meant by God. You 
 may embark upon a logical wrangle here with me 
 if you have failed to master what I have hitherto 
 said about the meaning of words. If a Scheme, 
 you will say, then there must be a Schemer. 
 
 But I repeat, I am using scheme and importance 
 and significance here only in a spirit of analogy 
 because I can find no better words, and I will not 
 allow myself to be entangled by an insistence 
 upon their implications. 
 
 Yet let me confess I am greatly attracted by 
 such fine phrases as the Will of God, the Hand of 
 God, the Great Commander. These do most 
 wonderfully express aspects of this belief I choose 
 to hold. I think if there had been no gods before, 
 I would call this God. But I feel that there 
 is a great danger in doing this sort of thing 
 unguardedly. Many people would be glad for 
 rather trivial and unworthy reasons that I should 
 
 68 
 
Of Belief 69 
 
 confess a faith in God and few would take offence. 
 But the run of people even nowadays mean some- 
 thing more and something different when they 
 say "God." They intend a personality exterior 
 to them and limited, and they will instantly con- 
 clude I mean the same thing. To permit that 
 misconception is, I feel, the first step on the 
 slippery slope of meretricious complaisance, is to 
 become in some small measure a successor of 
 those who cried, "Great is Diana of the Ephe- 
 sians." Occasionally we may best serve the God 
 of Truth by denying him. 
 
 Yet at times I admit the sense of personality 
 in the universe is very strong. If I am confessing, 
 I do not see why I should not confess up to the 
 hilt. At times in the silence of the night and in 
 rare lonely moments, I come upon a sort of com- 
 munion of myself and something great that is not 
 myself. It is perhaps poverty of mind and 
 language obliges me to say then this universal 
 scheme takes on the effect of a sympathetic 
 person — and my communion a quality of 
 fearless worship. These moments happen and 
 they are the supreme fact in my religious life 
 to me, they are the crown of my religious 
 experiences. 
 
 None the less, I do not usually speak of God 
 
70 First and Last Things 
 
 even in regard to these moments, and where I do 
 use that word it must be understood that I use 
 it as a personification of something entirely 
 different in nature from the personality of a 
 human being. 
 
§3- 
 
 Free-Will and Predestination. — And now 
 let me return to a point raised in the first part in 
 § 9. Is the whole of this scheme of things settled 
 and done? The whole trend of Science is to that 
 belief. On the scientific plane one is a fatalist, 
 the universe a system of inevitable consequences. 
 But as I show in that section referred to, it is quite 
 possible to accept as true in their several planes 
 both Predestination and Free-Will. 1 If you ask 
 me, I think I should say I incline to believe in 
 predestination and do quite completely believe 
 in free-will. The important belief is free-will. 
 
 But does the whole universe of fact, the external 
 world about me, the mysterious internal world 
 from which my motives rise, form one rigid and 
 fated system as Determinists teach? Do I be- 
 lieve that had one a mind ideally clear and power- 
 ful, the whole universe would seem orderly and 
 absolutely predestined? I incline to that belief. 
 
 » I use Free-Will in the sense of self-determinism and not 
 as it is defined by Professor William James, and Predestina- 
 tion as equivalent to the conception of a universe rigid in 
 time and space. 
 
 71 
 
72 First and Last Things 
 
 I do not harshly believe it, but I admit its large 
 plausibility — that is all. I see no value whatever 
 in jumping to a decision. One or two Pragma- 
 tists, so far as I can understand them, do not hold 
 this view of Predestination at all. But as a pro- 
 visional assumption it underlies most scientific 
 work. 
 
 I glance at this question rather to express a 
 detachment than a view. 
 
 From me as a person this theory of predestina- 
 tion has no practical value. At the utmost it is 
 an interesting theory like the theory that there 
 is a fourth dimension. There may be a fourth 
 dimension of space, but one gets along quite 
 well by assuming there are just three. It may 
 be knowable the next time I come to cross-roads 
 which I shall take. Possibly that knowledge 
 actually exists somewhere. There are those who 
 will tell you they can get intimations in the matter 
 from packs of cards or the palms of my hands, or 
 see by peering into crystals. Of such beliefs I 
 am entirely free. The fact is I believe that neither 
 I know nor anybody else who is practically con- 
 cerned knows which I shall take. I hesitate, I 
 choose just as though the thing was unknowable. 
 For me and my conduct there is that much wide 
 practical margin of freedom. 
 
Of Belief 73 
 
 I am free and freely and responsibly making 
 the future — so far as I am concerned. You others 
 are equally free. On that theory I find my life 
 will work, and on a theory of mechanical pre- 
 destination nothing works. 
 
 I take the former theory therefore for my every- 
 day purposes, and as a matter of fact so does 
 everybody else. I regard myself as a free respon- 
 sible person among free responsible persons. 
 
§4- 
 
 A Picture of the World of Men. — Now I 
 have already given a first picture of the world 
 of fact as it shaped itself upon my mind. Let 
 me now give a second picture of this world in 
 which I find myself, a picture in a rather different 
 key and at a different level, in which I turn to 
 a new set of aspects and bring into the foreground 
 the other minds which are with me in the midst 
 of this great spectacle. 
 
 What am I? 
 
 Here is a question to which in all ages men 
 have sought to give a clear unambiguous answer, 
 and to which a clear unambiguous answer is mani- 
 festly unfitted. Am I my body? Yes or no? It 
 seems to me that I can externalise and think of 
 as "not myself" nearly everything that pertains 
 to my body; hands and feet, and even the most 
 secret and central of those living and hidden 
 parts, the pulsing arteries, the throbbing nerves, 
 the ganglionic centres, that no eye, save for the 
 surgeon's knife, has ever seen or ever will see 
 until they coagulate in decay. So far I am not 
 
 74 
 
Of Belief 75 
 
 my body, and then as clearly, since I suffer 
 through it, see the whole world through it and 
 am always to be called upon where it is, I am it. 
 Am I a mind mysteriously linked to this thing 
 of matter and endeavour? So I can present 
 myself. I seem to be a consciousness, vague and 
 insecure, placed between two worlds. One of 
 these worlds seems clearly "not me," the other 
 is more closely identified with me and yet is still 
 imperfectly me. The first I call the exterior 
 world and it presents itself to me as existing in 
 Time and Space. In a certain way I seem able 
 to interfere with it and control it. The second 
 is the interior world, having no forms in space 
 and only a vague evasive reference to time, from 
 which motives arise and storms of emotion, which 
 acts and reacts constantly and in untraceable 
 ways with my conscious mind. And that con- 
 sciousness itself hangs and drifts about the region 
 where the inner world and the outer world meet, 
 much as a patch of limelight drifts about the 
 stage, illuminating, affecting, following no mani- 
 fest law except that usually it centres upon the 
 hero, my Ego. 
 
 It seems to me that to put the thing much 
 more precisely than this is to depart from the 
 reality of the matter. 
 
76 First and Last Things 
 
 But so departing a little, let me borrow a 
 phrase from Herbart and identify myself more 
 particularly with my mental self. It seems to 
 me that I may speak of myself as a circle of 
 thought and experience hung between these two 
 imperfectly understood worlds of the internal 
 and the external and passing imperceptibly into 
 the former. The external world impresses me as 
 being, as a practical fact, common to me and 
 many other creatures similar to myself; the in- 
 ternal I find similar but not identical with theirs. 
 It is mine. It seems to me at times no more 
 than something cut off from that external world 
 and put into a sort of pit or cave, much as all the 
 inner mystery of my body, those living, writhing, 
 warm and thrilling organs are isolated, hidden 
 from all eyes and interference so long as I remain 
 alive. And I myself, the essential me, am the 
 light and watcher in the mouth of the cave. 
 
 So I think of myself, and so I think of all other 
 human beings, as circles of thought and ex- 
 perience, each a little different from the others. 
 Each human being I see as essentially a circle of 
 thought between an internal and an external 
 world. 
 
 I figure these circles of thought as more or 
 less imperfectly focussed pictures, all a little askew 
 
Of Belief 77 
 
 and vague as to margins and distances. In the 
 internal world arise motives and they pass out- 
 ward through the circle of thought and are modi- 
 fied and directed by it into external acts. And 
 through speech, example and a hundred various 
 acts one such circle, one human mind, lights and 
 enlarges and plays upon another. That is the 
 image under which the interrelation of minds 
 presents itself to me. 
 
§5- 
 
 The Problem of Motives the Real Problem 
 of Life. — Now each self among us for all its 
 fluctuations and vagueness of boundary, is, as I 
 have already pointed out, invincibly persuaded 
 of Free-Will. That is to say it has a persuasion 
 of responsible control over the impulses that teem 
 from the internal world and tend to express them- 
 selves in act. The problem of that control and 
 its solution is the reality of life. "What am I to 
 do?" is the perpetual question of our existence. 
 Our metaphysics, our beliefs are all sought as 
 subsidiary to that and have no significance with- 
 out it. 
 
 I confess I find myself a confusion of motives 
 beside which my confusion of perceptions pales 
 into insignificance. 
 
 There are many various motives and mo- 
 tives very variously estimated — some are 
 called gross, some sublime, some — such as 
 pride — wicked. I do not readily accept these 
 classifications. 
 
 Many people seem to make a selection among 
 
 78 
 
Of Belief 79 
 
 their motives without much enquiry, taking 
 those classifications as just; they seek to lead 
 what they call pure lives and useful lives and 
 to set aside whole sets of motives which do 
 not accord with this determination. Some 
 exclude the seeking of pleasure as a permissible 
 motive, some the love of beauty, some insist 
 upon one's "being oneself" and prohibit or 
 limit responses to exterior opinions. Most of 
 such selections strike me as wanton and hasty. 
 I decline to dismiss any of my motives at all 
 in that wholesale way. Just as I believe I am 
 important in the scheme of things, so I believe 
 are all my motives. Turning one's back on any 
 set of them seems to me to savour of the head- 
 long actions of stupidity. To suppress a pas- 
 sion or a curiosity for the sake of suppressing 
 a passion is to my mind just the burial of a 
 talent that has been entrusted to one's care. 
 One has, I feel, to take all these things as 
 weapons and instruments, material in the ser- 
 vice of the scheme; one has to take them in 
 the end gravely and do right among them un- 
 biassed in favour of any set. To take some 
 poor appetite and fling it out is to my mind 
 a cheap and unsatisfactory way of simplifying 
 one's moral problems. One has to take these 
 
80 First and Last Things 
 
 things in oneself, I feel — even if one knows them 
 to be dangerous things, even if one is sure they 
 have an evil side. 
 
 Let me however in order to express my attitude 
 better make a rough grouping of the motives I 
 find in myself and the people about me. 
 
§6. 
 
 A Review of Motives. — I cannot divide them 
 into clearly defined classes, but I may perhaps 
 begin with those that bring one into the widest 
 sympathy with living things and go on to those 
 one shares only with highly intelligent and com- 
 plex human beings. 
 
 There come first the desires one shares with those 
 more limited souls the beasts, just as much as one 
 does with one's fellow-man. These are the bodily 
 appetites and the crude emotions of fear and 
 resentment. These first clamour for attention 
 and must be assuaged or controlled before the 
 other sets come into play. 
 
 Now in this matter of physical appetites I do 
 not know whether to describe myself as a sensualist 
 or an ascetic. If an ascetic is one who suppresses 
 to a minimum all deference to these impulses, 
 then certainly I am not an ascetic; if a sensualist 
 is one who gives himself to heedless gratification, 
 then certainly I am not a sensualist. But I find 
 myself balanced in an intermediate position by 
 something that I will speak of as the sense of 
 
 6 81 
 
82 First and Last Things 
 
 Beauty. This sense of Beauty is something in 
 me which demands not simply gratification but 
 the best and keenest of a sense or continuance of 
 sense impressions and which refuses coarse quan- 
 titive assuagements. It ranges all over the senses 
 and just as I refuse to wholly cut off any of my 
 motives, so do I refuse to limit its use to the plane 
 of the eye or the ear. 
 
 It seems to me entirely just to speak of beauty 
 in matters of scent and taste, to talk not only of 
 beautiful skies and beautiful sounds but of beauti- 
 ful beer and beautiful cheese! The balance as 
 between asceticism and sensuality comes in, it 
 seems to me, if we remember that to drink well 
 one must not have drunken for some time, that 
 to see well one's eye must be clear, that to make 
 love well one must be fit and gracious and sweet 
 and disciplined from top to toe, that the finest 
 sense of all — the joyous sense of bodily well-being 
 — comes only with exercises and restraints and 
 fine living. There I think lies the way of my dis- 
 position. I do not want to live in the sensual sty, 
 but also I do not want to scratch in the tub of 
 Diogenes. 
 
 But I diverge a little in these comments from 
 my present business of classifying motives. 
 
 I perceive hypertrophied in myself and many 
 
Of Belief 83 
 
 sympathetic human beings, a passion that many 
 animals certainly possess, the beautiful and fear- 
 less cousin of fear, Curiosity, that seeks keenly for 
 knowing and feeling. Apart from appetites and 
 bodily desires and blind impulses, I want most 
 urgently to know and feel for the sake of knowing 
 and feeling. I want to go round corners and see 
 what is there, to cross mountain ranges, to open 
 boxes and parcels. Young animals at least have 
 that disposition too. For me it is something that 
 mingles with all my desires. Much more to me 
 than the desire to live is the desire to taste life. 
 I am not happy until I have done and felt things. 
 I want to get as near as I can to the thrill of a 
 dog going into a fight or the delight of a bird in 
 the air. And not simply in the heroic field of 
 war and the air do I want to understand. I want 
 to know something of the jolly wholesome satis- 
 faction that a hungry pig must find in its wash. 
 I want to get the fine quintessence of that. 
 
 I do not think that in this I confess to any un- 
 usual temperament. I think that the more closely 
 mentally animated people scrutinise their motives 
 the less is the importance they will attach to mere 
 physical and brute urgencies and the more to 
 curiosity. 
 
 Next after Curiosity come those desires and 
 
84 First and Last Things 
 
 motives that one shares perhaps with some social 
 beasts, but far more so as a conscious thing with 
 men alone. These desires and motives all centre 
 on a clearly apprehended "self" in relation to 
 "others," they are the essentially egotistical 
 group. They are self-assertion in all its forms. 
 I hav<; dealt with motives toward gratification 
 and motives toward experience, this set of motives 
 is for the sake of oneself. Since they are the most 
 acutely conscious motives in unthinking men, 
 there is a tendency on the part of unthinking 
 philosophers to speak of them as though vanity, 
 self-seeking, self-interest, were the only motives. 
 But one has but to reflect on what has gone before 
 to realise that this is not so. One finds these 
 *'self" motives vary with the mental power and 
 [raining of the individual ; here they are fragmen- 
 tary and discursive, there drawn tight together 
 into a coherent scheme. Where they are weak 
 they mingle with the animal motives and curiosity 
 like travellers in a busy market-place, but where 
 the sense of self is strong they become rulers and 
 regulators, self-seeking becomes deliberate and 
 sustained in the case of the human being, vanity 
 passes into pride. 
 
 Here again that something in the mind so difficult 
 to define, so easy for all who understand to under- 
 
Of Belief 85 
 
 stand, that something which insists upon a best 
 and keenest, the desire for beauty, comes into the 
 play of motives. Pride demands a beautiful self 
 and would discipline all other passions to its 
 service. It also demands recognition for that 
 beautiful self. Now pride, I know, is denounced 
 by many as the essential quality of sin. We are 
 taught that " self-abnegation" is the substance 
 of virtue and self-forgetfulness the inseparable 
 quality of right conduct. But indeed I cannot so 
 dismiss egotism and that Pride which was the 
 first form in which the desire to rule oneself as a 
 whole came to me. Through pride one shapes 
 oneself towards a best, though at first it may be 
 an ill-conceived best. Pride is not always arro- 
 gance and aggression. There is that pride that 
 does not ape but learn humility. 
 
 And with the human imagination all these 
 elementary instincts, of the flesh, of curiosity, of 
 self-assertion, become only the basal substance of 
 a huge elaborate edifice of secondary motive and 
 intention. We live in a great flood of example 
 and suggestion, our curiosity and our social quality 
 impel us to a thousand imitations, to dramatic 
 attitudes and subtly obscure ends. Our pride 
 turns this way and that as we respond to new 
 notes in the world about us. We are arenas for 
 
86 First and Last Things 
 
 a conflict between suggestions flung in from all 
 sources, from the most diverse and essentially 
 incompatible sources. We live long hours and 
 days in a kind of dream, negligent of self-interest, 
 our elementary passions in abeyance, among these 
 derivative things. 
 
§7- 
 
 The Synthetic Motive. — Such it seems to me 
 are the chief masses of the complex of motive in 
 us, the group of sense, the group of pride, curi- 
 osity and the imitative and suggested motives, 
 making up the system of impulses which is our 
 will. Such has been the common outfit of mo- 
 tives in every age, and in every age its meUe has 
 been found insufficient in itself. It is a hetero- 
 geneous system, it does not form in any sense a 
 completed or balanced system, its constituents 
 are variable and compete among themselves. 
 They are not so much arranged about one another 
 as superposed and higgledy-piggledy. The senses 
 war with pride and one another, the motives sug- 
 gested to us fall into conflict with this element or 
 that of our intimate and habitual selves. We find 
 all our instincts are snares to excess. Excesses 
 of indulgence lead to excesses of abstinence, and 
 even the sense of beauty may be clouded and be- 
 tray. So to us all, even for the most balanced of 
 us, come disappointments, regrets, gaps; and for 
 
 most of us who are ill-balanced, miseries and 
 
 87 
 
88 First and Last Things 
 
 despairs. Nearly all of us want something to hold 
 us together — something to dominate this swarming 
 confusion and save us from the black misery of 
 wounded and exploded pride, of thwarted desire, 
 of futile conclusions. We want more oneness, 
 some steadying thing that will afford an escape 
 from fluctuations. 
 
 Different people, of differing temperament and 
 tradition have sought oneness, this steadying and 
 universalising thing, in various manners. Some 
 have attained it in this manner and some in that. 
 Scarcely a religious system has existed that has 
 not worked effectively and proved true for some- 
 one. To me it seems that the need is synthetic, 
 that some synthetic idea and belief is needed to 
 harmonise one's life, to give a law by which 
 motive may be tried against motive and an 
 effectual peace of mind achieved. I want an 
 active peace and not a quiescence, and I do not 
 want to suppress and expel any motive at all. 
 But to many people the effort takes the form of 
 attempts to cut off some part of oneself as it were, 
 to repudiate altogether some straining or dis- 
 tressing or disappointing factor in the scheme of 
 motives, and find a tranquillising refuge in the 
 residuum. So we have men and women aban- 
 doning their share in economic development, 
 
Of Belief 89 
 
 crushing the impulses and evading the complica- 
 tions that arise out of sex and flying to devotions 
 and simple duties in nunneries and monasteries- 
 we have people cutting their lives down to a 
 vegetarian dietary and scientific research, resort- 
 ing to excesses of self-discipline, giving themselves 
 up wholly to some "art" and making everything 
 else subordinate to that, or, going in another di- 
 rection, abandoning pride and love in favour of 
 an acquired appetite for drugs or drink. 
 
 Now it seems to me that this desire to get the 
 confused complex of life simplified is essentially 
 what has been called the religious motive and 
 that the manner in which a man achieves that 
 simplification, if he does achieve it, and imposes 
 an order upon his life is his religion. I find in the 
 scheme of conversion and salvation as it is pre- 
 sented by man) 7- Christian sects, a very exact 
 statement of the mental processes I am trying to 
 express. In these systems this discontent with 
 the complexity of life upon which religion is based, 
 is called the conviction of sin, and it is the first 
 phase in the process of conversion — of finding sal- 
 vation. It leads through distress and confusion 
 to illumination, to the act of faith and peace. 
 
 And after peace comes the beginning of right 
 conduct. If you believe and you are saved, you 
 
90 First and Last Things 
 
 will want to behave well, you will do your utmost 
 to behave well and to understand what is behaving 
 well, and you will feel neither shame nor disap- 
 pointment when after all you fail. You will say 
 then, "so it is failure I had to achieve/' And 
 you will not feel bitterly because you seem unsuc- 
 cessful beside others or because you are misunder- 
 stood or unjustly treated, you will not bear malice 
 nor cherish anger nor seek revenge, you will never 
 turn towards suicide as a relief from intolerable 
 things; indeed there will be no intolerable things. 
 You will have peace within you. 
 
 But if you do not truly believe and are not 
 saved, you will know it because you will still 
 suffer the conflict of motives, and in regrets, con- 
 fusions, remorses and discontents, you will suffer 
 the penalties of the unbeliever and the lost. You 
 will know certainly your own salvation. 
 
§8. 
 
 The Being of Mankind. — I will boldly adopt 
 the technicalities of the sects. I will speak as a 
 person with experience and declare that I have 
 been through the distresses of despair and the 
 conviction of sin and that I have found salvation. 
 
 / believe. 
 
 I believe in the scheme, in the Project of all 
 things, in the significance of myself and all life, 
 and that my defects and uglinesses and failures, 
 just as much as my powers and successes are 
 things that are necessary and important and con- 
 tributory in that scheme, that scheme which 
 passes my understanding — and that no thwarting 
 of my conception, not even the cruelty of nature, 
 now defeats or can defeat my faith, however much 
 it perplexes my mind. 
 
 And though I say that scheme passes my under- 
 standing, nevertheless I hope you will see no in- 
 consistency when I say that necessarily it has an 
 aspect towards me that I find imperative. 
 
 It has an aspect that I can perceive, however 
 
 dimly and fluctuatingly. 
 
 91 
 
92 First and Last Things 
 
 I take it that to perceive this aspect to the 
 utmost of my mental power and to shape my 
 acts according to that perception is my function 
 in the scheme, that if I hold steadfastly to that 
 conception, I am — saved. I find in that idea of 
 perceiving the scheme as a whole towards me and 
 in this attempt to perceive, that something to 
 which all my other emotions and passions may 
 contribute by gathering and contributing ex- 
 perience, and through which the synthesis of my 
 life becomes possible. 
 
 Let me try to convey to you what it is I per- 
 ceive, what aspect this scheme seems to bear on 
 the whole towards me. 
 
 The essential fact in man's history to my sense 
 is the slow unfolding of a sense of community 
 with his kind, of the possibilities of co-operations 
 leading to scarce-dreamt-of collective powers, of 
 a synthesis of the species, of the development of 
 a common general idea, a common general pur- 
 pose out of a present confusion. In that awaken- 
 ing of the species, one's own personal being lives 
 and moves — a part of it and contributing to it. 
 One's individual existence is not so entirely cut off 
 as it seems at first ; one's entirely separate individu- 
 ality is another, a profounder, among the subtle 
 inherent delusions of the human mind. Between 
 
Of Belief 93 
 
 you and me as we set our minds together, and 
 between us and the rest of mankind, there is 
 something, something real, something that rises 
 through us and is neither you nor me, that com- 
 prehends us, that is thinking here and using me 
 and you to play against each other in that thinking 
 just as my finger and thumb play against each 
 other as I hold this pen with which I write. 
 
 Let me put it to you that this is no sentimental 
 or mystical statement. It is hard fact as any 
 hard fact we know. We, you and I, are not only 
 parts in a thought process, but parts of one flow 
 of blood and life. Let me put that in a way that 
 may be new to some of you. Let me remind you 
 of what is sometimes told as a jest, the fact that 
 the number of one's ancestors increases as we 
 look back in time. Disregarding the chances of 
 intermarriage, each one of us had two parents, 
 four grandparents, eight great-grandparents, and 
 so on backward until very soon, in less than fifty 
 generations, we should find that but for the 
 qualification introduced, we should have all the 
 earth's inhabitants of that time as our progenitors. 
 For a hundred generations it must hold abso- 
 lutely true, that everyone of that time trho has 
 issue living now is ancestral to all of us. That 
 brings the thing quite within the historical period. 
 
94 First and Last Things 
 
 There is not a western European palaeolithic or 
 neolithic relic that is not a family relic for every 
 soul alive. The blood in our veins has handled it. 
 
 And there is something more. We are all 
 going to mingle our blood again. We cannot 
 keep ourselves apart ; the worst enemies will some 
 day come to the Peace of Verona. All the Mon- 
 tagues and Capulets are doomed to intermarry. 
 A time will come in less than fifty generations 
 when all the population of the world will have 
 my blood, and I and my worst enemy will not 
 be able to say which child is his or mine. 
 
 But you may retort — perhaps you may die 
 childless. Then all the sooner the whole species 
 will get the little legacy of my personal achieve- 
 ment, whatever it may be. 
 
 You see that from this point of view — which is 
 for me the vividly true and dominating point of 
 view — our individualities, our nations and states 
 and races are but bubbles and clusters of foam 
 upon the great stream of the blood of the species, 
 incidental experiments in the growing knowledge 
 and consciousness of the race. 
 
 I think this real solidarity of humanity is a fact 
 that is only being slowly apprehended, that it is 
 an idea that we who have come to realise it have 
 to assist in thinking into the collective mind. I 
 
Of Belief 95 
 
 believe the species is still as a whole unawakened, 
 still sunken in the delusion of the permanent 
 separateness of the individual and of races and 
 nations, that so it turns upon itself and frets 
 against itself and fails to see the stupendous 
 possibilities of deliberate self-development that 
 lie open to it now. 
 
 I see myself in life as part of a great physical 
 being that strains and I believe grows towards 
 Beauty, and of a great mental being that strains 
 and I believe grows towards knowledge and power. 
 In this persuasion that I am a gatherer of ex- 
 perience, a mere tentacle that arranged thought 
 beside thought for this Being of the Species, this 
 Being that grows beautiful and powerful, in this 
 persuasion I find the ruling idea of which I stand 
 in need, the ruling idea that reconciles and ad- 
 judicates among my warring motives. In it I 
 find both concentration of myself and escape 
 from myself, in a word, I find Salvation. 
 
§9- 
 
 Individuality an Interlude — I would like 
 in a parenthetical section to expand and render 
 a little more concrete this idea of the species as 
 one divaricating flow of blood by an appeal to its 
 arithmetical aspect. I do not know if it has ever 
 occurred to the reader to compute the number of 
 his living ancestors at some definite remote date, 
 at, let us say the year one of the Christian era. 
 Everyone has two parents and four grandparents, 
 most people have eight great-grandparents, and 
 if we ignore the possibility of intermarriage we 
 shall go on to a fresh power of two with every 
 generation, thus : — 
 
 Number of generations. Number of ancestors. 
 
 3 8 
 
 4 16 
 
 5 32 
 7 128 
 
 10 1,024 
 
 20 126,976 
 
 3° i5»745»o 2 4 
 
 40 1,956,282,976 
 
 I do not know whether the average age of the 
 
 parent at the birth of a child under modern con- 
 
 96 
 
Of Belief 97 
 
 ditions can be determined from existing figures. 
 There is, I should think, a strong presumption 
 that it has been a rising age. There may have 
 been a time in the past when most women were 
 mothers in their early teens and bore most or 
 all of their children before thirty, and when men 
 had done the greater part of their procreation 
 before thirty-five; this is still the case in many 
 tropical climates and I do not think that I favour 
 my own case unduly by assuming that the average 
 parent must be about, or even less than, five and 
 twenty. This gives four generations to a century. 
 At that rate and disregarding intermarriage of 
 relations the ancestors living a thousand years 
 ago needed to account for a living person would 
 be double the estimated present population of 
 the world. But it is obvious that if a person 
 sprang from a marriage of first cousins, the eight 
 ancestors of the third generation are cut down 
 to six; if of cousins at the next stage, to fourteen 
 in the fourth. And every time that a common 
 pair of ancestors appears in any generation, the 
 number of ancestors in that generation must be 
 reduced by two from our original figures, or if it 
 is only one common ancestor, by one, and that 
 as we go back that reduction will have to be 
 doubled, quadrupled and so on. I daresay that 
 
98 First and Last Things 
 
 by the time anyone gets to the 8916 names of 
 his Elizabethan ancestors he will find quite a 
 large number repeated over and over again in 
 the list and that he is cut down to perhaps two or 
 three thousand separate persons. But this does 
 not effectually invalidate my assumption that 
 if we go back only to the closing years of the 
 Roman Republic, we go back to an age in which 
 nearly every person within the confines of what 
 was then the Roman Empire who left living 
 offspring must have been ancestral to every 
 person living within that area to-day. No 
 doubt they were so in very variable measure. 
 There must be for everyone some few individu- 
 als in that period who have so to speak inter- 
 married with themselves again and again and 
 again down the genealogical series, and others 
 who are represented just by one touch of their 
 blood. The blood of the Jews, for example, has 
 turned in upon itself again and again, but for 
 all we know one Italian proselyte in the first year 
 of the Christian era may have made by this time 
 every Jew alive a descendant of some unrecorded 
 bastard of Julius Caesar. The exclusive breeding 
 of the Jews is in fact the most effectual guar- 
 antee that whatever does get into the charmed 
 circle through either proselytism, the violence of 
 
Of Belief 99 
 
 enemies, or feminine unchastity, must ultimately 
 pervade it universally. 
 
 It may be argued that as a matter of fact 
 humanity has until recently been segregated in 
 pools, that in the great civilisation of China for 
 example, humanity has pursued its own inter- 
 lacing system of inheritances without admixture 
 from other streams of blood. But such considera- 
 tions only defer the conclusion ; they do not stave 
 it off indefinitely. It needs only that one philo- 
 progenitive Chinaman should have wandered into 
 those regions that are now Russia, about the time 
 of Pericles, to link east and west in that matter; 
 one Tartar chieftain in the Steppes may have 
 given a daughter to a Roman soldier and sent 
 his grandsons east and west to interlace the 
 branches of every family tree in the world. If 
 any race stands apart it is such an isolated 
 group as that of the now extinct Tasmanian 
 primitives or the Australian black. But even 
 here, in the remote dawn of navigation, may 
 have come shipwrecked Malays, or some half- 
 breed woman kidnapped by wandering Phoe- 
 nicians have carried this link of blood back 
 to the western world. The more one lets 
 one's imagination play upon the incalculable 
 drift and soak of population, the more one 
 
ioo First and Last Things 
 
 realises the true value of that spreading relation 
 with the past. 
 
 But now let us turn in the other direction, the 
 direction of the future, because there it is that 
 this series of considerations becomes most edi- 
 fying. It is the commonest trick to think of 
 one's descendants as though they were one's own. 
 We are told that one of the dearest human motives 
 is the desire to found a family, but think how 
 much of a family one founds at the best. One's 
 son is after all only half one's blood ; one's grand- 
 son only one quarter, and so one goes on until it 
 may be that in ten brief generations one's heir 
 and namesake has but TT fe ¥ th of one's inherited 
 self. Those other thousand odd unpredictable 
 people thrust in and mingle with one's pride. The 
 trend of all things nowadays is to render such 
 admixture far more probable and facile in the 
 future than in the past, the ever increasing ease 
 of communication, the great and increasing drift 
 of population, the establishment of a common 
 standard of civilisation. 
 
 It is a pleasant fancy to imagine some ambitious 
 hoarder of wealth, some egotistical founder of 
 name and family returning to find his descendants 
 — '-his descendants — after the lapse of a few brief 
 generations. His heir and namesake may have 
 
Of Belief 101 
 
 not a thousandth part of his heredity, while under 
 some other name, lost to all the tradition and 
 glory of him, enfeebled and degenerate through 
 much intermarriage, may be a multitude of 
 people who have as much as a fiftieth or even 
 more of his quality. They may even be in servi- 
 tude and dependence to the. really alien person 
 who is head of the family. Our founder will go 
 through the spreading record of offspring and 
 find it mixed with that of the people he most hated 
 and despised. The antagonists he wronged and 
 overcame will have crept into his line and recap- 
 tured all they lost ; have played the cuckoo in his 
 blood and acquisitions and turned out his diluted 
 strain to perish. 
 
 And while I am being thus biological let me 
 point out another queer aspect in which our ego- 
 tism is overridden by physical facts. Men and 
 women are apt to think of their children as being 
 their very own, blood of their blood and bone of 
 their bone. But indeed one of the most striking 
 facts in this matter is the frequent want of resem- 
 blance between parents and children. It is one 
 of the commonest things in the world for a child 
 to resemble an aunt or an uncle, or to revive a 
 trait of some grandparent that has seemed entirely 
 lost in the intervening generation. The Men- 
 
102 First and Last Things 
 
 delians have given much attention to facts of this 
 nature and though their general method of ex- 
 position seems to me to be altogether too exact 
 and precise, it cannot be denied that it is often 
 vividly illuminating. It is so in this connexion. 
 They distinguish between "dominant" and " reces- 
 sive" qualities and they establish cases in which 
 parents with all the dominant characteristics 
 produce offspring of recessive type. Recessive 
 qualities are constantly being masked by dominant 
 ones and emerging again in the next generation. 
 It is not the individual that reproduces himself, 
 it is the species that reproduces through the 
 individual and often in spite of his characteristics. 
 
 The race flows through us, the race is the drama 
 and we are the incidents. This is not any sort of 
 poetical statement; it is statement of fact. In 
 so far as we are individuals, so far as we seek to 
 follow merely individual ends, we are accidental, 
 disconnected, without significance, the sport of 
 chance. In so far as we realise ourselves as 
 experiments of the species for the species, just 
 in so far do we escape from the accidental and 
 the chaotic. We are episodes in an experience 
 greater than ourselves. 
 
 Now none of this, if you read me aright, makes 
 for the suppression of one's individual difference, 
 
Of Belief 103 
 
 but it does make for its correlation. We have 
 to get everything we can out of ourselves for this 
 very reason that we do not stand alone ; we signify 
 as parts of a universal and immortal development. 
 Our separate selves are our charges, the talents 
 of which much has to be made. It is because 
 we are episodical in the great synthesis of life 
 that we have to make the utmost of our individual 
 lives and traits and possibilities. 
 
§ io. 
 
 The Mystic Element. — What stupendous con- 
 structive mental and physical possibilities are 
 there to which I feel I am contributing, you may 
 ask, when I feel that I contribute to this greater 
 Being, and at once I confess I become vague and 
 mystical. I do not wish to pass glibly over this 
 point. I call your attention to the fact that here 
 I am mystical and arbitrary. I am what I am, 
 an individual in this present phase. I can see 
 nothing of these possibilities except that they will 
 be in the nature of those indefinable and over- 
 powering gleams of promise in our world that 
 we call Beauty. Elsewhere (in my Food of the 
 Gods) I have tried to render my sense of our 
 human possibility by monstrous images; I have 
 written of those who will " stand on this earth as 
 on a footstool and reach out their hands among 
 the stars." But that is mere rhetoric at best, a 
 straining image of unimaginable things. Things 
 move to Power and Beauty ; I say that much and 
 I have said all that I can say. 
 
 But what is Beauty, you ask, and what will 
 
 104 
 
Of Belief 105 
 
 Power do? And here I reach my utmost point 
 in the direction of what you are free to call the 
 rhapsodical and the incomprehensible. I will not 
 even attempt to define Beauty. I will not because 
 I cannot. To me it is a final, quite indefinable 
 thing. Either you understand it or you do not. 
 Every true artist and many who are not artists 
 know — they know there is something that shows 
 suddenly — it may be in music, it may be in paint- 
 ing, it may be in the sunlight on a glacier or 
 shadow cast by a furnace or the scent of a flower ; 
 it may be in the person or act of some fellow- 
 creature, but it is right, it is commanding, it is, 
 to use theological language, the revelation of God. 
 To the mystery of Power and Beauty, out of 
 the earth that mothered us, we move. I do 
 not attempt to define Beauty nor even to dis- 
 tinguish it from Power. I do not think indeed 
 that one can effectually distinguish these aspects 
 of life. I do not know how far Beauty may not 
 be simply fulness and clearness of sensation, a 
 momentary unveiling of things hitherto seen but 
 not dully and darkly. As I have already said 
 there may be beauty in the feeling of beer in the 
 throat, in the taste of cheese in the mouth, there 
 may be beauty in the scent of earth, in the warmth 
 of a body, in the sensation of waking from sleep. 
 
106 First and Last Things 
 
 I use the word Beauty therefore in its widest 
 possible sense, ranging far beyond the special 
 beauties that art discovers and develops. Per- 
 haps as we pass from death to life all things become 
 beautiful. The utmost I can do in conveying 
 what I mean by Beauty is to tell of things that 
 I have perceived to be beautiful as beautifully as 
 I can tell of them. It may be, as I suggest else- 
 where, Beauty is a thing synthetic and not simple ; 
 it is a common effect produced by a great medley 
 of causes, a larger aspect of harmony. 
 
 But the question of what Beauty is does not 
 very greatly concern me, since I have known it 
 when I met it and almost every day in life I seem 
 to apprehend it more and to find it more sufficient 
 and satisfying. It is light, I fall back upon that 
 image, it is all things that light can be, beacon, 
 elucidation, pleasure, comfort and consolation, 
 promise, warning, the vision of reality. 
 
§ II. 
 
 The Synthesis. — It seems to me that the 
 whole living creation may be regarded as walking 
 in its sleep, as walking in the sleep of in- 
 stinct and individualised illusion, and that now 
 out of it all rises man, beginning to perceive 
 his larger self, his universal brotherhood and 
 a collective synthetic purpose to realise power 
 and beauty. . . . 
 
 I write this down. It is the form of 
 my belief and that unanalysable something 
 called Beauty is the light that falls upon 
 that form. 
 
 It is only by such images, it is only by the use 
 
 of what are practically Parables, that I can in 
 
 any way express these things in my mind. These 
 
 two things, I say, are the two aspects of my belief; 
 
 one is the form and the other the light. The 
 
 former places me as it were in a scheme, the latter 
 
 illuminates and inspires me. I am a member in 
 
 that great Being and my function is, I take it, 
 
 to develop my capacity for Beauty and convey 
 
 the perception of it to my fellows, to gather and 
 
 store experience and increase the racial conscious- 
 
 107 
 
108 First and Last Things 
 
 ness. I hazard no whys nor wherefores. That is 
 how I see things; that is how the universe in re- 
 sponse to my demand for a synthesising aspect, 
 presents itself to me. 
 
§ 12. 
 
 Of Personal Immortality. — These are my 
 beliefs. They begin with arbitrary assumptions; 
 they end in a mystery. So do all beliefs that are 
 not grossly utilitarian and material, promising 
 houris and deathless appetite or endless hunting 
 or a cosmic mortgage. The Peace of God passe th 
 understanding, the Kingdom of Heaven within 
 us and without can be presented only by parables. 
 But the unapproachable distance and vagueness 
 of these things make them none the less necessary, 
 just as a cloud upon a mountain or sunlight re- 
 motely seen upon the sea are as real as, and to 
 many people far more necessary than, pork chops. 
 The driven swine may root and take no heed, but 
 man the dreamer drives. And because these 
 things are vague and impalpable and wilfully 
 attained, it is none the less important that they 
 should be rendered with all the truth of one's 
 being. To be atmospherically vague is one thing, 
 to be haphazard, wanton and untruthful, quite 
 another. 
 
 But here I may give a specific answer to a 
 
 109 
 
no First and Last Things 
 
 question that many find profoundly important 
 though indeed it is already implicitly answered in 
 what has gone before. 
 
 I do not believe I have any personal immor- 
 tality. I am part of an immortality perhaps; 
 but that is different. I am not the continuing 
 thing. I personally am experimental, incidental. 
 I feel I have to do something, a number of things 
 no one else could do and then I am finished and 
 finished altogether. Then my substance returns 
 to the common lot. I am a temporary enclosure 
 for a temporary purpose; that served, and my 
 skull and teeth, my idiosyncrasy and desire, will 
 disperse, I believe, like the timbers of a booth 
 after a fair. 
 
 Let me shift my ground a little and ask you to 
 consider what is involved in the alternative. 
 
 My idea of the unknown scheme is of something 
 so wide and deep that I cannot conceive it en- 
 cumbered by my egotism perpetually. I shall 
 serve my purpose and pass under the wheel and 
 end. That distresses me not at all. Immortality 
 would distress and perplex me. If I may put this 
 in a mixture of theological and social language, 
 I cannot respect, I cannot believe in a God who is 
 always going about with me. 
 
 But this is after all what I feel is true and what 
 
Of Belief in 
 
 I choose to believe. It is not a matter of fact. 
 So far as that goes there is no evidence that I am 
 immortal and none that I am not. 
 
 I may be altogether wrong in my beliefs ; I may 
 be misled by the appearances of things. I believe 
 in the great and growing Being of the Species 
 from which I rise, to which I return, and which, 
 it may be, will ultimately even transcend the 
 limitation of the Species and grow into the Con- 
 scious Being, the eternally conscious Being of all 
 things. Believing that I cannot also believe 
 that my peculiar little thread will not undergo 
 synthesis and vanish as a separate thing. 
 
 And what after all is my distinctive something, 
 certain capacities, certain incapacities, an uncer- 
 tain memory, a hesitating presence? It matters 
 no doubt in its place and time, as all things matter 
 in their place and time, but where in it all is the 
 eternally indispensable? The great things of my 
 life, love, faith, the intimation of beauty, the 
 things most savouring of immortality, are the 
 things most general, the things most shared, and 
 least distinctively me. 
 
§ 13- 
 
 A Criticism of Christianity. — And here per- 
 haps, before I go on to the question of Conduct, 
 is the place to define a relationship to that system 
 of faith and religious observance out of which I 
 and most of my readers have come. How do these 
 beliefs on which I base my rule of conduct stand 
 to Christianity? 
 
 They do not stand in any attitude of antagonism. 
 A religious system so many-faced and so enduring 
 as Christianity must necessarily be saturated 
 with truth even if it be not wholly true. To as- 
 sume as the Atheist and Deist seem to do, that 
 Christianity is a sort of disease that came upon 
 civilisation, an unprofitable and wasting disease, 
 is to deny that conception of a progressive scheme 
 and Tightness which we have taken as our basis of 
 belief. As I have already confessed, the Scheme 
 of Salvation, the idea of a process of sorrow and 
 atonement presents itself to me as adequately 
 true. So far I do not think the new faith breaks 
 with the old. But it follows as a natural con- 
 sequence of our metaphysical preliminaries that 
 
 112 
 
Of Belief 113 
 
 I should find the Christian theology Aristotelian, 
 over-defined and excessively personified. The 
 painted figure of that bearded ancient upon the 
 Sistine Chapel or William Blake's wild-haired, 
 wild-eyed Trinity, convey no nearer sense of God 
 to me than some pearl-eyed carven monster from 
 the worship of the South Sea Islands. And the 
 whole story Milton has rehearsed, the whole fable 
 of the offended creator and the sacrificial son, 
 it cannot span the circle of my ideas, it is a little 
 thing and none the less little because it is inti- 
 mate, flesh of my flesh and spirit of my spirit, 
 like the drawings of my little boy. I put it aside 
 as I would put aside the gay figure of a costumed 
 officiating priest. The passage of time has made 
 his canonicals too strange, too unlike the world of 
 common thought and costume. These things 
 helped, but now they hinder and disturb. I 
 cannot bring myself back to them. . . . 
 
 But the psychological experience and the 
 theology of Christianity are only a ground-work 
 for its essential feature, which is the conception 
 of a relationship of the individual believer to a 
 mystical being at once human and divine, the 
 Risen Christ. This being presents itself to the 
 modern consciousness as a familiar and beautiful 
 figure, associated with a series of sayings and 
 
ii4 First and Last Things 
 
 incidents that coalesce with a very distinct and 
 rounded-off and complete effect of personality. 
 After we have cleared off all the definitions of 
 theology, He remains, mystically suffering for 
 humanity, mystically asserting that love in pain 
 and sacrifice in service are the necessary substance 
 of Salvation. Whether he actually existed as a 
 finite individual person in the opening of the 
 Christian era seems to me a question entirely 
 beside the mark. The evidence at this distance 
 is of imperceptible force, for or against. The 
 Christ we know is quite evidently something 
 different from any finite person, a figure, a con- 
 ception, a synthesis of emotions, experiences and 
 inspirations, sustained by and sustaining millions 
 of human souls. 
 
 Now it seems to be the common teaching of 
 almost all Christians, that Salvation, that is to 
 say the consolidation and amplification of one's 
 motives through the conception of a general 
 scheme or purpose, is to be attained through the 
 personality of Christ. Christ is made cardinal 
 to the act of Faith. The act of Faith, they assert, 
 is not simply as I hold it to be, belief, but belief 
 in Him. 
 
 We are dealing here, be it remembered, with 
 beliefs deliberately undertaken and not with 
 
Of Belief 115 
 
 questions of fact. The only matters of fact 
 material here are facts of experience. If in your 
 experience Salvation is attainable through Christ, 
 then certainly Christianity is true for you. And 
 if a Christian asserts that my belief is a false light 
 and that presently I shall "come to Christ," I 
 cannot disprove his assertion, I can but disbelieve 
 it. I hesitate even to make the obvious retort. 
 
 I hope I shall offend no susceptibilities when I 
 assert that this great and very definite personality 
 in the hearts and imaginations of mankind does 
 not and never has attracted me. It is a fact I 
 record about myself without aggression or regret. 
 I do not find myself able to associate Him in any 
 way with the emotion of Salvation. 
 
 I admit the splendid imaginative appeal in the 
 idea of a divine-human friend and mediator. If 
 it were possible to have access by prayer, by 
 meditation, by urgent outcries of the soul, to 
 such a being whose feet were in the darknesses, 
 who stooped down from the light, who at once was 
 great and little, limitless in power and virtue and 
 one's very brother; if it were possible by sheer will 
 in believing to make such a helper and to make 
 one's way to him, who would refuse such help? 
 But I do not find such a being in Christ. I do 
 not find, I cannot imagine, such a being. I wish 
 
n6 First and Last Things 
 
 I could. To me the Christian Christ seems not 
 so much a humanised God as an incomprehensibly 
 sinless Being neither God nor man. His sinless- 
 ness wears his incarnation like a fancy dress, 
 all his white self unchanged. He had no petty 
 weaknesses. 
 
 Now the essential trouble of my life is its petty 
 weaknesses. If I am to have that love, that 
 sense of understanding fellowship, which is, I 
 conceive, the peculiar magic and merit of this 
 idea of a personal Saviour, then I need someone 
 quite other than this image of virtue, this terrible 
 and incomprehensible Galilean with his crown of 
 thorns, his blood-stained hands and feet. I 
 cannot love him any more than I can love a man 
 upon the rack. Even in the face of torments I 
 do not think I should feel a need for him. I had 
 rather then a hundred times have Botticelli's 
 armed angel in his Tobit at Florence. (I hope 
 I do not seem to want to shock in writing these 
 things, but indeed my only aim is to lay my 
 feelings bare.) I know what love for an idealised 
 person can be. It happens that in my younger 
 days I found a character in the history of litera- 
 ture that had a singular and extraordinary charm 
 for me, of whom the thought was tender and 
 comforting, who indeed helped me through 
 
Of Belief 117 
 
 shames and humiliations as though he held my 
 hand. This person was Oliver Goldsmith. His 
 blunders and troubles, his vices and vanities, 
 seized and still hold my imagination. The 
 slights of Boswell, the contempt of Gibbon and 
 all his company save Johnson, the exquisite 
 fineness of spirit in his Vicar of Wakefield, and 
 that green suit of his and the doctor's cane and 
 the love despised, these things together make him 
 a congenial saint and hero for me, so that I 
 thought of him as others pray. When I think 
 of that youthful feeling for Goldsmith, I know 
 what I need in a personal Saviour, as a troglodyte 
 who has seen a candle can imagine the sun. But 
 the Christian Christ in none of his three charac- 
 teristic phases, neither as the magic babe (from 
 whom I am cut off by the wanton and indecent 
 purity of the Immaculate Conception) nor as the 
 white-robed, spotless miracle worker, nor as the 
 fierce unreal torment of the cross, comes close 
 to my soul. I do not understand the Agony in 
 the Garden; to me it is like a scene from a play 
 in an unknown tongue. The last cry of despair 
 is the one human touch discordant with all the 
 rest of the story. One cry of despair does not 
 suffice. The Christian's Christ is too fine for 
 me, not incarnate enough, not flesh enough, not 
 
n8 First and Last Things 
 
 earth enough nor failure enough. He was never 
 foolish and hot-eared and inarticulate, never vain, 
 he never forgot things nor tangled his miracles. 
 I could love him I think more easily if the dead 
 had not risen and if he had lain in peace in his 
 sepulchre instead of coming back more enhaloed 
 and whiter than ever, as a postscript to his own 
 tragedy. 
 
 When I think of the Resurrection I am always 
 reminded of the "happy endings" that editors 
 and actor managers are accustomed to impose 
 upon essentially tragic novels and plays. . . . 
 
 You see how I stand in this matter, puzzled 
 and confused by the Christian presentation of 
 Christ. I know there are many will answer — 
 as I suppose my friend the Rev. R. J. Campbell 
 would answer — that what confuses me is the 
 overlaying of the personality of Jesus by stories 
 and superstitions and conflicting symbols; he will 
 in effect ask me to disentangle the Christ I need 
 from the accumulated material, choosing and 
 rejecting. Perhaps one may do that. He does, 
 I know, so present him as a man inspired and 
 strenuously, inadequately and erringly presenting 
 a dream of human brotherhood and the immediate 
 Kingdom of Heaven on earth and so blundering 
 to his failure and death. But that will be a 
 
Of Belief 119 
 
 recovered and restored person he would give me, 
 and not the Christ the Christians worship and 
 declare they love, in whom they find their 
 salvation. 
 
 When I write "declare they love" I throw 
 doubt intentionally upon the universal love of 
 Christians for their Saviour. I have watched 
 men and nations in this matter. I am struck by 
 the fact that so many Christians fall back upon 
 more humanised figures, upon the tender figure 
 of Mary, upon patron saints and such more erring 
 creatures, for the effect of mediation and sym- 
 pathy they need. . . . 
 
 You see it comes to this, that I think Christ- 
 ianity has been true and is for countless people 
 practically true, but that it is not true now for 
 me and that for most people it is true only with 
 modifications. Every believing Christian is, I am 
 sure, my spiritual brother, but if systematically 
 I called myself a Christian I feel that to most men 
 I should imply too much and so tell a lie. 
 
§ 14- 
 
 Of Other Religions. — In the same manner, 
 in varying degree, I hold all religions to be in a 
 measure true. Least comprehensible to me are 
 the Indian formulae because they seem to stand 
 not on common experience but on those intel- 
 lectual assumptions my metaphysical analysis 
 destroys. Transmigration of souls without a con- 
 tinuing memory is to my mind utter foolishness, 
 the imagining of a race of children. The ag- 
 gression, discipline and submission of Mahometan- 
 ism is, I think, an intellectually limited but fine 
 and honourable religion — for men. Its spirit if 
 not its formulae is abundantly present in our 
 modern world. Mr. Rudyard Kipling, for example 
 manifestly preaches a Mahometan God, a modern- 
 ised God with a taste for engineering. I have no 
 doubt that, in devotion to a virile, almost national 
 Deity and to the service of His Empire of stern 
 Law and Order, efficiently upheld, men have 
 found and will find Salvation. 
 
 All these religions are true for me as Canterbury 
 Cathedral is a true thing and as a Swiss chalet is 
 
 120 
 
Of Belief 121 
 
 a true thing. There they are and they have 
 served a purpose, they have worked. Men and 
 women have lived in and by them. Men and 
 women still do. Only they are not true for me 
 to live in them. I have, I believe, to live in a 
 new edifice of my own discovery. They do not 
 work for me. 
 
 These schemes are true, and also these schemes 
 are false! in the sense that new things, new 
 phrasings, have to replace them. 
 
5 15- 
 
 Such are the essential beliefs by which I express 
 myself. But now comes the practical outcome 
 of these things, and that is to discuss and show 
 how upon this metaphysical basis and these be- 
 liefs, and in obedience to the ruling motive that 
 arises with them, I frame principles of conduct. 
 
 1*3 
 
Book the Third. 
 
 Of General Conduct 
 
 ii3 
 
1 1. 
 
 Conduct Follows from Belief. — I hold that 
 the broad direction of Conduct follows necessa- 
 rily from Belief. The Believer does not require 
 rewards and punishments to direct him to the 
 Right. Motive and idea are not so separable. 
 To Believe truly is to want to do Right. To get 
 Salvation is to be unified by a comprehending 
 idea of a purpose and by a ruling motive. 
 
 The Believer wants to do right, he naturally 
 and necessarily seeks to do right. If he fails to 
 do right, if he finds he has done wrong instead of 
 right, he is not greatly distressed or terrified, he 
 naturally and cheerfully does his best to correct 
 his error. He can be damned only by the fading 
 and loss of his belief. And naturally he recurs 
 to and refreshes his belief. 
 
 I write in phrases that the evangelical Christ- 
 ianity of my childhood made familiar to me, be- 
 cause they are the most expressive phrases I have 
 ever met for the psychological facts with which 
 I am dealing. 
 
 But faith, though it banishes fear and despair 
 
 125 
 
126 First and Last Things 
 
 and brings with it a real prevailing desire to know 
 and do the Good does not in itself determine what 
 is the Good or supply any simple guide to the 
 choice between alternatives. If it did, there 
 would be nothing more to be said, a book upon 
 Conduct would be unnecessary. 
 
J a. 
 
 What is Good? — It seems to me one of the 
 heedless errors of those who deal in philosophy, 
 to suppose all things that have simple names or 
 unified effects are in their nature simple and may 
 be discovered and isolated as a sort of essence by 
 analysis. It is natural to suppose — and I think 
 it is also quite wrong to suppose — that such things 
 as Good and Beauty can be abstracted from good 
 and beautiful things and considered alone. But 
 pure Good and pure Beauty are to me empty 
 terms. It seems to me that these are in their 
 nature synthetic things, that they arise out of the 
 coming together of contributory things and con- 
 ditions, and vanish at their dispersal; they are 
 synthetic just as more obviously Harmony is 
 synthetic. It is consequently not possible to 
 give a definition of Good, just as it is not possible 
 to give a definition of that other something which 
 is so closely akin to it, Beauty. Nor is it to be 
 maintained that what is Good for one is Good 
 for another. But what is Good of one's general 
 
 relations and what is right in action must be 
 
 127 
 
128 First and Last Things 
 
 determined by the nature of one's Beliefs about 
 the purpose in things. I have set down my broad 
 impression of that purpose in respect to me, as 
 the awakening and development of the conscious- 
 ness and will of our species, and I have confessed 
 my belief that in subordinating myself and all 
 my motives to that idea lies my Salvation. It 
 follows from that, that the good life is the life 
 that most richly gathers and winnows and pre- 
 pares experience and renders it available for the 
 race, that contributes most effectively to the 
 collective growth. 
 
 This is in general terms my idea of Good. So 
 soon as one passes from general terms to the 
 question of individual good, one encounters in- 
 dividuality; for everyone in the differing quality 
 and measure of their personality and powers and 
 possibilities, good and right must be different. We 
 are all engaged, each contributing from his or her 
 own standpoint, in the collective synthesis ; what- 
 ever one can best do, one must do that, in what- 
 ever manner one can best help the synthesis, one 
 must exert oneself; the setting apart of oneself, 
 secrecy, the service of secret and personal ends, 
 is the waste of life and the essential quality of Sin. 
 
 That is the general expression for right living 
 as I conceive it. 
 
§3- 
 
 Socialism. — In the study of what is Good, it 
 is very convenient to make a rough division of our 
 subject into general and particular. There are 
 first the interests and problems that affect us all 
 collectively, in which we have a common concern 
 and from which no one may legitimately seek 
 exemption; of these interests and problems we 
 may fairly say every man should do so and so 
 or so and so, or the law should be so and so, or so 
 and so; and secondly there are those other pro- 
 blems in which individual difference and the inter- 
 play of one or two individualities is predominant. 
 This is of course no hard and fast classification, 
 but it gives a method of approach. We can 
 begin with the generalised person in ourselves 
 and end with individuality. 
 
 In the world of ideas about me, I have found 
 
 going on a great social and political movement 
 
 that correlates itself with my conception of a great 
 
 synthesis of human purpose as the aspect towards 
 
 us of the universal scheme. This movement is 
 
 Socialism. Socialism is to me no clear-cut system 
 9 129 
 
130 First and Last Things 
 
 of theories and dogmas; it is one of those solid 
 and extensive and synthetic ideas that are better 
 indicated by a number of different formulae than 
 by one, just as one only realises a statue by 
 walking round it and seeing it from a number 
 of points of view. I do not think it is to be 
 completely expressed by any one system of 
 formulae or by any one man. Its common 
 quality from nearly every point of view is the 
 subordination of the will of the self-seeking indi- 
 vidual to the idea of a racial well-being embodied 
 in an organised state, organised for every end 
 that can be obtained collectively. Upon that I 
 seize ; that is the value of Socialism for me. 
 
 Socialism for me is a common step we are all 
 taking in the great synthesis of human purpose. 
 It is the organisation, in regard to a great mass 
 of common and fundamental interests, that have 
 hitherto been dispersedly served, of a collective 
 purpose. 
 
 I see humanity scattered over the world, dis- 
 persed, conflicting, unawakened. ... I see 
 human life as avoidable waste and curable con- 
 fusion. I see peasants living in wretched huts 
 knee-deep in manure, mere parasites on their 
 own pigs and cows; I see shy hunters wandering 
 in primeval forests ; I see the grimy millions who 
 
Of General Conduct 131 
 
 slave for industrial production; I see some who 
 are extravagant and yet contemptible creatures 
 of luxury, and some leading lives of shame and 
 indignity, tens of thousands of wealthy people 
 wasting lives in vulgar and unsatisfying triviali- 
 ties, hundreds of thousands meanly chaffering 
 themselves, rich or poor, in the wasteful byways 
 of trade; I see gamblers, fools, brutes, toilers, 
 martyrs. Their disorder of effort, the spectacle 
 of futility fills me with a passionate desire to end 
 waste, to create order, to develop understanding. 
 . . . All these people reflect and are part of 
 the waste and discontent of my life, and this co- 
 ordinating of the species in a common general end, 
 and the effort of my personal salvation are the 
 social and the individual aspect of essentially 
 the same desire. . . . 
 
 And yet dispersed as all these people are, they 
 are yet far more closely drawn together to common 
 ends and a common effort than the filthy savages 
 who ate food rotten and uncooked in the age of 
 unpolished stone. They live in the mere opening 
 phase of a synthesis of effort the end of which sur- 
 passes our imagination. Such intercourse and 
 community as they have is only a dawn. We look 
 towards the day, the day of the organised civilised 
 world state. The first clear intimation of that 
 
132 First and Last Things 
 
 conscious synthesis of human thought to which I 
 look, the first edge of the dayspring has arisen — 
 as Socialism, as I conceive of Socialism. Socialism 
 is to me no more and no less than the awakening 
 of a collective consciousness in humanity, a collec- 
 tive will and a collective mind out of which finer 
 individualities may arise forever in a perpetual 
 series of fresh endeavours and fresh achievements 
 for the race. 
 
§4- 
 
 A Criticism of Certain Forms of Socialism. — 
 It is necessary to point out that a Socialism arising 
 in this way out of the conception of a synthesis 
 of the will and thought of the species will neces- 
 sarily differ from conceptions of Socialism arrived 
 at in other and different ways. It is based on a 
 self-discontent and self-abnegation and not on 
 self-satisfaction, and it will be a scheme of per- 
 sistent thought and construction, essentially, and 
 it will support this or that method of law-making, 
 or this or that method of economic exploitation 
 or this or that matter of social grouping, only 
 incidentally and in relation to that. 
 
 Such a conception of Socialism is very remote 
 in spirit, however it may agree in method, from 
 that philanthropic administrative socialism one 
 finds among the British ruling and administrative 
 class. That seems to me to be based on a pity 
 which is largely unjustifiable and a pride that is 
 altogether unintelligent. The pity is for the ob- 
 vious wants and distresses of poverty, the pride 
 
 appears in the arrogant and aggressive conception 
 
 133 
 
134 First and Last Things 
 
 of raising one's fellows. I have no strong feeling 
 for the horrors and discomforts of poverty as such 5 
 sensibilities can be hardened to endure the life 
 led by the Romans in Dartmoor jail a hundred 
 years ago, 1 or softened to detect the crumpled 
 roseleaf; what disgusts me is the stupidity and 
 warring purposes of which poverty is the outcome. 
 When it comes to this idea of raising human 
 beings, I must confess the only person I feel con- 
 cerned about raising is H. G. Wells, and that 
 even in his case my energies might be better 
 employed. After all, presently he must die and 
 the world will have done with him. His output 
 for the species is more important than his moral 
 elevation. 
 
 Moreover all this talk of raising implies a classi- 
 fication I doubt. I find it hard to fix any stand- 
 ards that will determine who is above me and 
 who below. Most people are different from me 
 I perceive, but which among them is better, which 
 worse ? I have a certain power of communicating 
 with other minds, but what experiences I com- 
 municate seem often far thinner and poorer stuff 
 than those which others less expressive than I 
 half fail to communicate and half display to me. 
 
 1 See The Story of Dartmoor Prison, by Basil Thomson. 
 Heinemann, 1907. 
 
Of General Conduct 135 
 
 My "inferiors," judged by the common social 
 standards seem indeed intellectually more limited 
 than I and with a narrower outlook, they are 
 often dirtier and more driven, more under the 
 stress of hunger and animal appetites ; but on the 
 other hand have they not more vigorous sensa- 
 tions than I, and through sheer coarsening and 
 hardening of fibre, the power to do more toilsome 
 things and sustain intenser sensations than I 
 could endure? When I sit upon the bench, a 
 respectable magistrate, and commit some bat- 
 tered reprobate for trial for this lurid offence or 
 that, or send him or her to prison for drunkenness 
 or such-like indecorum, the doubt drifts into my 
 mind which of us after all is indeed getting near- 
 est to the keen edge of life. Are I and my re- 
 spectable colleagues much more than successful 
 evasions of that? Perhaps these people in the dark 
 know more of the essential strains and stresses 
 of nature, being more intimate with pain. At 
 any rate I do not think I am justified in saying 
 certainly that they do not know. . . . 
 
 No, I do not want to raise people, using my 
 own position as a standard, I do not want to be 
 one of a gang of consciously superior people, I do 
 not want arrogantly to change the quality of other 
 lives. I do not want to interfere with other lives, 
 
136 First and Last Things 
 
 except incidentally — incidentally, in this way that I 
 do want to get to an understanding with them, I 
 do want to share and feel with them in our com- 
 merce with the collective mind. I suppose I do 
 not stretch language very much when I say I 
 want to get rid of stresses and obstacles between 
 our minds and personalities and to establish a 
 relation that is understanding and sympathy. 
 
 I want to make more generally possible a rela- 
 tionship of communication and interchange that 
 for want of a less battered and ambiguous word, I 
 must needs call love. 
 
 And if I disavow the Socialism of condescension, 
 so also do I disavow the Socialism of revolt. 
 There is a form of socialism based upon the eco- 
 nomic generalisations of Marx, an economic fatal- 
 istic Socialism that I hold to be rather wrong in its 
 vision of facts, rather more distinctly wrong in 
 its theory, and altogether wrong and hopeless in 
 its spirit. It preaches as inevitable a concentra- 
 tion of property in the hands of a limited number 
 of property owners and the expropriation of the 
 great proletarian mass of mankind, a concentration 
 which is after all no more than a tendency condi- 
 tional on changing and changeable conventions 
 about property, and it finds its hope of a better 
 future in the outcome of a class conflict between 
 
Of General Conduct 137 
 
 the expropriated Many and the expropriating Few. 
 Both sides are to be equally swayed by self- 
 interest, but the toilers are to be gregarious and 
 mutually loyal in their self-interest — Heaven 
 knows why, except that otherwise the Marxist 
 dream will not work. The experience of con- 
 temporary events seems to show at least an equal 
 power of combination for material ends among 
 owners and employers as among workers. 
 
 Now this class-war idea is one diametrically 
 opposed to that religious-spirited Socialism which 
 supplied the form of my general activities. 
 
 The class-war idea would exacerbate the an- 
 tagonism of the interests of the Many individuals 
 against the Few individuals, and I would oppose 
 the conception of the Whole to the self-seeking 
 of the Individual. The spirit and constructive 
 intention of the Many to-day are no better than 
 those of the Few ; poor and rich alike are over- 
 individualised, self-seeking and non-creative; to 
 organise the confused jostling competitions, over- 
 reachings, envies and hatreds of to-day into two 
 great class-hatreds and antagonisms will advance 
 the reign of love at most only a very little, only 
 so far as it will simplify and make plain certain 
 issues. It may very possibly not advance the 
 reign of love at all, but rather shatter the order 
 
138 First and Last Things 
 
 we have. Socialism, as I conceive it, and as I 
 have presented it in my book, New Worlds for 
 Old, seeks to change economic arrangements only 
 by the way, as an aspect and outcome of a great 
 change, a change in the spirit and method of 
 human intercourse. 
 
 I know that here I go beyond the limits many 
 Socialists in the past, and some who are still 
 contemporary, have set for themselves. Much 
 Socialism to-day seems to think of itself as fighting 
 a battle against poverty and its concomitants 
 alone. Now poverty is only a symptom of a 
 profounder evil and is never to be cured by itself. 
 It is one aspect of divided and dispersed purposes. 
 If Socialism is only a conflict with poverty, 
 Socialism is nothing. But I hold that Socialism 
 is and must be a battle against human stupidity 
 and egotism and disorder, a battle fought all 
 through the forests and jungles of the soul of man. 
 As we get intellectual and moral light and the 
 realisation of brotherhood, so social and economic 
 organisation will develop. But the Socialist may 
 attack poverty for ever, disregarding the intel- 
 lectual and moral factors that necessitate it, and 
 he will remain until the end a purely economic 
 doctrinaire crying in the wilderness in vain. 
 
 And if I antagonise myself in this way to the 
 
Of General Conduct 139 
 
 philanthropic Socialism of the kindly prosperous 
 people on the one hand and to the fierce class 
 hatred Socialism of the other, still more am I 
 opposed to that furtive Socialism of the specialist 
 which one meets most typically in the Fabian 
 Society. It arises very naturally out of what I 
 may perhaps call specialist fatigue and impatience. 
 It is very easy for writers like myself to deal in 
 the broad generalities of Socialism and urge their 
 adoption as general principles; it is altogether 
 another affair with a man who sets himself to 
 work out the riddle of the complications of 
 actuality in order to modify them in the direction 
 of Socialism. He finds himself in a jungle of 
 difficulties that demand his intellectual power to 
 the utmost. He emerges at last with conclusions, 
 and they are rarely the obvious conclusions, as 
 to what needs to be done. Even the people of 
 his own side he finds do not see as he sees; they 
 are, he perceives, crude and ignorant. Now I 
 hold that his duty is to explain his discoveries 
 and intentions until they see as he sees. But the 
 specialist temperament is often not a generalis- 
 ing and expository temperament. Specialists are 
 apt to measure minds by their specialty and 
 underrate the average intelligence. The specialist 
 is appalled by the real task before him and he sets 
 
140 First and Last Things 
 
 himself by tricks and misrepresentations, by be- 
 nevolent scoundrelism in fact, to effect changes 
 he desires. Too often he fails even in that. 
 Where he might have found fellowship he arouses 
 suspicion. And even if a thing is done in this 
 way, its essential merit is lost. For it is better, 
 I hold, for a man to die of his diseases than to be 
 cured unwittingly. That is to cheat him of life, 
 and to cheat life of the contribution his conscious- 
 ness might have given it. 
 
 The Socialism of my belief rests on a profounder 
 faith and a broader proposition. It looks over 
 and beyond the warring purposes of to-day as a 
 general may look over and beyond a crowd of 
 sullen, excited and confused recruits, to the day 
 when they will be disciplined, exercised, trained, 
 willing and convergent on a common end. It 
 holds persistently to the idea of men increasingly 
 working in agreement, doing things that are sane 
 to do, on a basis of mutual helpfulness, temperance 
 and toleration. It sees the great masses of hu- 
 manity rising out of base and immediate anxieties, 
 out of dwarfing pressures and cramped surround- 
 ings, to understanding and participation and fine 
 effort. It sees the resources of the earth hus- 
 banded and harvested, economised and used with 
 scientific skill for the maximum of result. It 
 
Of General Conduct 141 
 
 sees towns and cities finely built, a race of beings 
 finely bred and taught and trained, open ways 
 and peace and freedom from end to end of the 
 earth. It sees beauty increasing in humanity, 
 about humanity and through humanity. Through 
 this great body of mankind goes evermore an in- 
 creasing understanding, an intensifying brother- 
 hood. As Christians have dreamt of the New 
 Jerusalem so does Socialism, growing ever more 
 temperate, patient, forgiving and resolute, set 
 its face to the World City of Mankind. 
 
§4- 
 
 Hate and Love. — Before I go on to point out 
 the broad principles of action that flow from this 
 wide conception of Socialism, I may perhaps give 
 a section to elucidating that opposition of hate 
 and love I made when I dealt with the class war. 
 I have already used the word love several times; 
 it is an ambiguous word and it may be well to 
 spend a few words in making clear the sense in 
 which it is used here. I use it in a very broad 
 sense to convey all that complex of motives, im- 
 pulses, sentiments, that incline us to find our 
 happiness and satisfactions in the happiness and 
 sympathy of others. Essentially it is a synthetic 
 force in human affairs, the merger tendency, a 
 linking force, an expression in personal will and 
 feeling of the common element and interest. It 
 insists upon resemblances and shares and sym- 
 pathies. And hate, I take it, is the emotional 
 aspect of antagonism, it is the expression in per- 
 sonal will and feeling of the individual's sepa- 
 ration from others. It is the competing and 
 
 destructive tendency. So long as we are individu- 
 
 142 
 
Of General Conduct 143 
 
 als and members of a species, we must needs both 
 hate and love. But because I believe, as I have 
 already confessed, that the oneness of the species 
 is a greater fact than individuality, and that we 
 individuals are temporary separations from a 
 collective purpose, and since hate eliminates itself 
 by eliminating its objects, whilst love multiplies 
 itself by multiplying its objects, so love must be 
 a thing more comprehensive and enduring than 
 hate. 
 
 Moreover hate must be in its nature a good 
 thing. We individuals exist as such, I believe, 
 for the Purpose in things, and our separations 
 and antagonisms serve that Purpose. We play 
 against each other like hammer and anvil. But 
 the synthesis of a collective will in humanity 
 which is I believe our human and terrestrial share 
 in that Purpose, is an idea that carries with it a 
 conception of a secular alteration in the scope 
 and method of both love and hate. Both widen 
 and change with man's widening and developing 
 apprehension of the Purpose he serves. The 
 savage man loves in gusts a fellow-creature or so 
 about him, and fears and hates all other people. 
 Every expansion of his scope and ideas widens 
 either circle. The common man of our civilised 
 world loves not only many of his friends and 
 
i44 First and Last Things 
 
 associates systematically and enduringly, but 
 dimly he loves also his city and his country, his 
 creed and his race; he loves it may be less in- 
 tensely but over a far wider field and much more 
 steadily. But he hates also more widely if less 
 passionately and vehemently than a savage, and 
 since love makes rather harmony and peace and 
 hate rather conflict and events, one may easily 
 be led to suppose that hate is the ruling motive in 
 human affairs. Men band themselves together 
 in leagues and loyalties, in cults and organisations 
 and nationalities, and it is often hard to say 
 whether the bond is one of love for the association 
 or hatred of those to whom the association is 
 antagonised. The two things pass insensibly 
 into one another. London people have recently 
 seen an edifying instance of the transition, in the 
 Brown Dog statue riots. A number of people 
 drawn together by their common pity for animal 
 suffering, by love indeed of the most disinterested 
 sort, had so forgotten their initial spirit as to 
 erect a monument with an inscription at once 
 recklessly untruthful, spiteful in spirit and par- 
 ticularly vexatious to one great medical school of 
 London. They have provoked riots and pla- 
 carded London with taunts and irritating mis- 
 representation of the spirit of medical research, 
 
Of General Conduct 145 
 
 and they have infected a whole fresh generation 
 of London students with a bitter partisan con- 
 tempt for the humanitarian effort that has so 
 lamentably misconducted itself. Both sides vow 
 they will never give in, and the anti-vivisectionists 
 are busy manufacturing small china copies of the 
 Brown Dog figure, inscription and all, for purposes 
 of domestic irritation. Here hate, the evil ugly 
 brother of effort, has manifestly slain love the 
 initiator and taken the affair in hand. That is a 
 little model of human conflicts. So soon as we 
 become militant and play against one another, 
 comes this danger of strain and this possible 
 reversal of motive. The fight begins. Into a pit 
 of heat and hate fall right and wrong together. 
 Now it seems to me that a religious faith such 
 as I have set forth in the second Book, and a clear 
 sense of our community of blood with all man- 
 kind, must necessarily affect both our loving and 
 our hatred. It will certainly not abolish hate, 
 but it will subordinate it altogether to love. We 
 are individuals, so the Purpose presents itself to 
 me, in order that we may hate the things that 
 have to go, ugliness, baseness, insufficiency, un- 
 reality, that we may love and experiment and 
 strive for the things that collectively we seek — ■ 
 
 power and beauty. Before our conversion wc 
 10 
 
146 First and Last Things 
 
 did this darkly and with our hate spreading to 
 persons and parties from the things for which 
 they stood. But the believer will hate lovingly 
 and without fear. We are of one blood and sub- 
 stance with our antagonists, even with those that 
 we desire keenly may die and leave no issue in 
 flesh or persuasion. They all touch us and are 
 part of one necessary experience. They are all 
 necessary to the synthesis, even if they are neces- 
 sary only as the potato-peel in the dust-bin is 
 necessary to my dinner. 
 
 So it is I disavow and deplore the whole spirit 
 of class-war Socialism with its doctrine of hate, 
 its envious assault upon the leisure and freedom 
 of the wealthy. Without leisure and freedom 
 and the experience of life they gave, the ideas 
 of Socialism could never have been born. The 
 true mission of Socialism is against darkness, 
 vanity and cowardice; that darkness which 
 hides from the property owner the intense 
 beauty, the potentialities of interest, the splen- 
 did possibilities of life ; that vanity and coward- 
 ice that makes him clutch his precious holdings 
 and fear and hate the shadow of change. It 
 has to teach the collective organisation of 
 society; and to that the class-consciousness 
 and intense class-prejudices of the worker need 
 
Of General Conduct 147 
 
 to bow quite as much as those of the property 
 owner. 
 
 But when I say that Socialism's mission is to 
 teach, I do not mean that its mission is a merely 
 verbal and mental one ; it must use all instruments 
 and teach by example as well as precept. So- 
 cialism by becoming charitable and merciful will 
 not cease to be militant. Socialism must, lovingly 
 but resolutely, use law, use force, to dispossess 
 the owners of socially disadvantageous wealth, 
 as one coerces a lunatic brother or takes a wrong- 
 fully acquired toy from a spoilt and obstinate 
 child. It must intervene between all who would 
 keep their children from instruction in the busi- 
 ness of citizenship and the lessons of fraternity. 
 It must build and guard what it builds with laws 
 and with that sword which is behind all laws. 
 Non-resistance is for the non-constructive man, 
 for the hermit in the cave and the naked saint 
 in the dust; the builder and maker with the first 
 stroke of his foundation spade uses force and 
 opens war against the anti-builder. 
 
§5- 
 
 The Preliminary Social Duty. — The belief 
 I have that contributing to the development of 
 the collective being of man is the individual's 
 general meaning and duty, and the formulae of 
 the Socialism which embodies this belief so far 
 as our common activities go, give a general frame- 
 work and direction how a man or woman should 
 live. (I do throughout all this book mean man 
 or woman equally when I write of "man," unless 
 it is manifestly inapplicable.) 
 
 And first in this present time he must see to 
 
 it that he does live, that is to say he must get 
 
 food, clothing, covering, an adequate leisure for 
 
 the finer aspects of living. Socialism plans an 
 
 organised civilisation in which these things will 
 
 be a collective solicitude, and the gaining of 
 
 a subsistence an easy preliminary to the fine 
 
 drama of existence, but in the world as we have 
 
 it we are forced to engage much of our energy in 
 
 scrambling for these preliminary necessities. Our 
 
 problems of conduct lie in the world as it is and 
 
 not in the world as we want it to be. First then 
 
 148 
 
Of General Conduct 149 
 
 a man must get a living, a fair, civilised living for 
 himself. It is a fundamental duty. It must be a 
 fair living, not pinched nor mean nor strained. A 
 man can do nothing higher, he can be of no service 
 to any cause until he himself is fed and clothed 
 and equipped and free. He must earn this living 
 or equip himself to earn it in some way not socially 
 disadvantageous, he must contrive as far as 
 possible that the work he does shall be construc- 
 tive and contributory to the general well-being. 
 
 And these primary necessities of food, clothing 
 and freedom being secured, one comes to the 
 general disposition of one's surplus energy. With 
 regard to that I think that a very simple proposi- 
 tion follows from the broad beliefs I have chosen 
 to adopt. The general duty of a man, his exis- 
 tence being secured, is to educate and chiefly to 
 educate and develop himself. It is his duty to 
 live, to make all he can out of himself and life, 
 to get full of experience, to make himself fine and 
 perceiving and expressive, to render his experience 
 and perceptions honestly and helpfully to others. 
 And in particular he has to educate himself and 
 others with himself in Socialism. He has to make 
 and keep this idea of synthetic human effort and 
 of conscious constructive effort clear first to him- 
 self and then clear in the general mind. For it is 
 
150 First and Last Things 
 
 an idea that comes and goes. We are all of us 
 continually lapsing from it towards Individual 
 isolation again. He needs, we all need, constant 
 refreshment in this belief if it is to remain a pre- 
 dominant living fact in our lives. 
 
 And that duty of education, of building up the 
 collective idea and organisation of humanity, falls 
 into various divisions depending in their impor- 
 tance upon individual quality. For all there is 
 one personal work that none may evade, and 
 that is thinking hard, criticising strenuously and 
 understanding as clearly as one can religion, 
 socialism and the general principle of one's acts. 
 The intellectual factor is of primary importance 
 in my religion. I can see no more reason why 
 Salvation should come to the intellectually in- 
 capable than to the morally incapable. For 
 simple souls thinking in simple processes, Sal- 
 vation perhaps comes easily, but there is none 
 for the intellectual coward, for the mental sloven 
 and sluggard, for the stupid and obdurate mind. 
 The Believer will think hard and continue to grow 
 and learn, to read and seek discussion as his 
 needs determine. 
 
 Correlated with one's own intellectual activity, 
 part of it and growing out of it for almost every- 
 one, is intellectual work with and upon others. 
 
Of General Conduct 151 
 
 By teaching we learn. Not to communicate one's 
 thoughts to others, to keep one's thoughts to 
 oneself as people say, is either cowardice or pride. 
 It is a form of sin. It is a duty to talk, teach, 
 explain, write, lecture, read and listen. Every 
 truly religious man, every good Socialist, is a 
 propagandist. Those who cannot write or dis- 
 cuss can talk, those who cannot argue can induce 
 people to listen to others and read. We have a 
 belief and an idea that we want to spread, each 
 to the utmost of his means and measure, through- 
 out all the world. We have a thought that we 
 want to make humanity's thought. And it is a 
 duty too that one should within the compass 
 of one's ability, make teaching, writing and 
 lecturing possible where it has not existed before. 
 This can be done in a hundred ways, by founding 
 and enlarging schools and universities and chairs, 
 for example; by making print and reading and 
 all the material of thought cheap and abundant; 
 by organising discussion and societies for enquiry. 
 And talk and thought and study are but the 
 more generalised aspects of duty. The Believer 
 may find his own special aptitude lies rather 
 among concrete things, in experimenting and pro- 
 moting experiments in collective action. Things 
 teach as well as words, and some of us are most 
 
152 First and Last Things 
 
 expressive by concrete methods. The Believer 
 will work himself and help forward others to his 
 utmost in all these developments of material 
 civilisation, in organised sanitation for example, 
 all those developments that force collective acts 
 upon communities and collective realisations into 
 the minds of men. And the whole field of scien- 
 tific research is a field of duty calling to everyone 
 who can enter it, to add to the permanent store 
 of knowledge and new resources for the race. 
 
 The Mind of that Civilised State we seek to 
 make by giving ourselves into its making is evi- 
 dently the central work before us. But while 
 the writer, the publisher and printer, the book- 
 seller and librarian and teacher and preacher, the 
 investigator and experimenter, the reader and 
 everyone who thinks, will be contributing them- 
 selves to this great organised mind and intention 
 in the world, many sorts of specialised men will 
 be more immediately concerned with parallel 
 and more concrete aspects of the human syn- 
 thesis. The medical worker and the medical 
 investigator for example, will be building up the 
 body of a new generation, the Body of the Civilised 
 State; and he will be doing all he can not simply 
 as an individual, but as a citizen, to organise his 
 services of cure and prevention, of hygiene and 
 
Of General Conduct 153 
 
 selection. A great and growing multitude of 
 men will be working out the apparatus of the 
 civilised state; the organisers of transit and 
 housing, the engineers in their incessantly in- 
 creasing variety, the miners and geologists es- 
 timating the world's resources in metals and 
 minerals, the mechanical inventors perpetually 
 economising force. The scientific agriculturist 
 again will be studying the food supply of the world 
 as a whole, and how it may be increased and dis- 
 tributed and economised. And to the student of 
 law comes the task of rephrasing his intricate and 
 often quite beautiful science in relation to modern 
 conceptions. All these and a hundred other 
 aspects are integral to the wide project of Con- 
 structive Socialism as it shapes itself in my faith. 
 
§6. 
 
 Wrong Ways of Living. — When we lay down 
 the proposition that it is one's duty to get one's 
 living in some way not socially disadvantageous, 
 and as far as possible by work that is contributory 
 to the general well-being and development, when 
 we state that one's surplus energies, after one's 
 living is gained, must be devoted to experience, 
 self-development and constructive work, it is 
 clear we condemn by implication many modes of 
 life that are followed to-day. 
 
 For example it is manifest we condemn living 
 in idleness or on non-productive sport, on the 
 income derived from private property, and all 
 sorts of ways of earning a living that cannot be 
 shown to conduce to the constructive process. 
 We condemn trading that is merely speculative, 
 and in fact all trading and manufacture that is 
 not a positive social service; we condemn living 
 by gambling or by playing games for either stakes 
 or pay. Much more do we condemn dishonest 
 or fraudulent trading and every act of advertise- 
 ment that is not punctiliously truthful. We 
 
 154 
 
Of General Conduct 155 
 
 must condemn too the taking of any income from 
 the community that is neither earned nor con- 
 ceded in the collective interest. But to this 
 last point and to certain issues arising out of 
 it, I will return in the section next following 
 this one. 
 
 And it follows evidently from our general 
 propositions that every form of prostitution is 
 a double sin, against one's individuality and 
 against the species which we serve by the de- 
 velopment of that individuality's preferences 
 and idiosyncrasies. 
 
 And by prostitution I mean not simply the act 
 of a woman who sells for money and against her 
 thoughts and preferences, her smiles and endear- 
 ments and the secret beauty and pleasure of her 
 body, but the act of anyone who, to gain a living, 
 suppresses himself, does things in a manner alien 
 to himself and subserves aims and purposes with 
 which he disagrees. The journalist who writes 
 against his personal convictions, the solicitor who 
 knowingly assists the schemes of rogues, the 
 barrister who pits himself against what he per- 
 ceives is justice and the right, the artist who does 
 unbeautiful things or less beautiful things than 
 he might, simply to please base employers, the 
 craftsman who makes instruments for foolish 
 
156 First and Last Things 
 
 uses or bad uses, the dealer who sells and pushes 
 an article because it fits the customer's folly; all 
 these are prostitutes of mind and soul if not of 
 body, with no right to lift an eyebrow at the 
 painted disasters of the streets. 
 
§7- 
 
 Social Parasitism and Contemporary In- 
 justices. — These broad principles about one's 
 way of living are very simple; our minds move 
 freely among them. But the real interest is with 
 the individual case, and the individual case is 
 almost always complicated by the fact that the 
 existing social and economic system is based upon 
 conditions that the growing collective intelligence 
 condemns as unjust and undesirable, and that 
 the constructive spirit in men now seeks to super- 
 sede. We have to live in a provisional State 
 while we dream of and work for a better one. 
 
 The ideal life for the ordinary man in a civilised, 
 that is to say a Socialist, State would be in public 
 employment or in private enterprise aiming at 
 public recognition. But in our present world 
 only a small minority can have that direct and 
 honourable relation of public service in the work 
 they do; most of the important business of the 
 community is done upon the older and more tor- 
 tuous private ownership system, and the great 
 
 mass of men in socially useful employment find 
 
 i57 
 
158 First and Last Things 
 
 themselves working only indirectly for the com- 
 munity and directly for the profit of a private 
 owner, or they themselves are private owners. 
 Every man who has any money put by in the bank 
 or any money invested, is a private owner, and 
 in so far as he draws interest or profit from this 
 investment he is a social parasite. It is in prac- 
 tice almost impossible to divest oneself of that 
 parasitic quality, however straightforward the gen- 
 eral principle may be. 
 
 It is practically impossible for two equally valid 
 sets of reasons. The first is that under existing 
 conditions, saving and investment constitute the 
 only way to rest and security in old age, to leisure, 
 study and intellectual independence, to the safe 
 upbringing of a family and the happiness of one's 
 weaker dependents. These are things that should 
 not be left for the individual to provide; in the 
 civilised state, the state itself will insure every 
 citizen against these anxieties that now make the 
 study of the City Article almost a duty. To 
 abandon saving and investment to-day, and to 
 do so is of course to abandon all insurance, is 
 to become a driven and uncertain worker, to risk 
 one's personal freedom and culture and the up- 
 bringing and efficiency of one's children. It is 
 to lower the standard of one's personal civilisa- 
 
Of General Conduct 159 
 
 tion, to think with less deliberation and less 
 detachment, to fall away from that work of ac- 
 cumulating fine habits and beautiful and pleasant 
 ways of living contributory to the coming State. 
 And in the second place there is not only no return 
 for such a sacrifice in anything won for Socialism, 
 but for fine-thinking and living people to give up 
 property is merely to let it pass into the hands 
 of more egoistic possessors. Since at present 
 things must be privately owned, it is better that 
 they should be owned by people consciously 
 working for social development and willing to 
 use them to that end. 
 
 We have to live in the present system and 
 under the conditions of the present system, while 
 we work with all our power to change that system 
 for one more completely organised. 
 
 The case of Cadburys, the cocoa and choco- 
 late makers, and the practical slavery under the 
 Portuguese of the East African negroes who grow 
 the raw material for Messrs. Cadbury, is an il- 
 luminating one in this connection. The Cad- 
 burys, like the Rowntrees, are well known as an 
 energetic and public-spirited family, the social 
 and industrial experiments at Bourne ville and the 
 general social and political activities are broad 
 and constructive in the best sense. But they 
 
160 First and Last Things 
 
 find themselves in the peculiar dilemma that they 
 must either abandon an important and profitable 
 portion of their great manufacture or continue to 
 buy produce grown under cruel and even horrible 
 conditions. Their retirement from this branch 
 of the cocoa and chocolate trade concerned would 
 under these circumstances mean no diminution 
 of the manufacture or of the horrors of this par- 
 ticular slavery; it would mean merely that less 
 humanitarian manufacturers would step in to 
 take up the abandoned trade. The self-righteous 
 individualist would have no doubts about the 
 question; he would keep his hands clean anyhow, 
 retrench his social work, abandon the types of 
 cocoa involved, and pass by on the other side. 
 But indeed I do not believe we came into the mire 
 of life simply to hold our hands up out of it. 
 Messrs. Cadbury follow a better line; they keep 
 their business going and exert themselves in 
 every way to let light into the secrets of Portu- 
 guese East Africa and to organise a better control 
 of these labour cruelties. That I think is alto- 
 gether the right course in this difficulty. 
 
 We cannot keep our hands clean in this world 
 as it is. There is no excuse indeed for a life of 
 fraud or any other positive fruitless wrongdoing 
 or for a purely parasitic non-productive life, yet 
 
Of General Conduct 161 
 
 all but the fortunate few who are properly paid 
 and recognised state servants, must in financial 
 and business matters do their best amidst and 
 through institutions tainted with injustice and 
 flawed with unrealities. All Socialists everywhere 
 are like expeditionary soldiers far ahead of the 
 main advance. The organised State that should 
 own and administer their possessions for the 
 general good has not arrived to take them over; 
 and in the meanwhile they must act like its 
 anticipatory agents according to their lights and 
 make things ready for its coming. 
 
 The Believer then who is not in the public 
 service, whose life lies among the operations of 
 private enterprise must work always on the sup- 
 position that the property he administers, the 
 business in which he works, the profession he 
 follows, is destined to be taken over and organ- 
 ised collectively for the commonweal and must be 
 made ready for the taking over, that the private 
 outlook he secures by investment, the provision 
 he makes for his friends and children, are tem- 
 porary, wasteful, unavoidable devices to be pre- 
 sently merged in and superseded by the broad 
 and scientific previsions of the co-operative State. 
 
§8. 
 
 The Case of the Wife and Mother. — These 
 principles give a rule also for the problem that 
 faces the great majority of thinking wives and 
 mothers to-day. The most urgent and necessary 
 social work falls upon them ; they bear, and largely 
 educate and order the homes of the next genera- 
 tion, and they have no direct recognition from 
 the community for either of these supreme func- 
 tions. They are supposed to perform them not 
 for God or the world, but to please and satisfy a 
 particular man. Our laws, our social conventions, 
 our economic methods, so hem a woman about 
 that however fitted for and desirous of maternity 
 she may be, she can only effectually do that duty 
 in a dependent relation to her husband. Nearly 
 always he is the paymaster and if his payments 
 are grudging or irregular, she has little remedy 
 short of a breach and the rupture of the home. 
 Her duty is conceived of as first to him and only 
 secondarily to her children and the State. Many 
 wives become under these circumstances mere 
 
 prostitutes to their husbands, often evading the 
 
 162 
 
Of General Conduct 163 
 
 bearing of children with their consent and even 
 at their request, and " loving for a living." That 
 is a natural outcome of the proprietary theory of 
 the family out of which our civilisation emerges. 
 But our modern ideas trend more and more to 
 regard a woman's primary duty to be her duty 
 to the children and to the world to which she gives 
 them. She is to be a citizen side by side with her 
 husband ; no longer is he to intervene between her 
 and the community. As a matter of contem- 
 porary fact he can do so and does do so habitually, 
 and most women have to square their ideas of 
 life to that possibility. 
 
 Before any woman who is clear-headed enough 
 to perceive that this great business of motherhood 
 is one of supreme public importance, there are a 
 number of alternatives at the present time. She 
 may, like Grant Allen's heroine in The Woman 
 Who Did, declare an exaggerated and impossible 
 independence, refuse the fetters of marriage and 
 bear children to a lover. This in the present state 
 of public opinion in almost every existing social 
 atmosphere would be a purely anarchistic course. 
 It would mean a fatherless home, and since the 
 woman will have to play the double part of 
 income-earner and mother, an impoverished and 
 struggling home. It would mean also an unsocial 
 
1 64 First and Last Things 
 
 because ostracised home. In most cases, and 
 even assuming it to be right in idea it would still 
 be on all fours with that immediate abandonment 
 of private property we have already discussed, a 
 sort of suicide that helps the world nothing. 
 
 Or she may "strike," refuse marriage and pur- 
 sue a solitary and childless career, engaging her 
 surplus energies in constructive work. But that 
 also is suicide; it is to miss the keenest experi- 
 ences, the finest realities life has to offer. 
 
 Or she may meet a man whom she can trust 
 to keep a treaty with her and supplement the 
 common interpretations and legal insufficiencies 
 of the marriage bond, who will respect her always 
 as a free and independent person, will abstain 
 absolutely from authoritative methods and will 
 either share and trust his income and property 
 with her in a frank communism, or give her a 
 sufficient and private income for her personal use. 
 It is only fair under existing economic conditions 
 that at marriage a husband should insure his 
 life in his wife's interest, and I do not think it 
 would be impossible to bring our legal marriage 
 contract into accordance with modern ideas in 
 that matter. Certainly it should be legally im- 
 perative that at the birth of each child a new 
 policy upon its father's life, as the income-getter, 
 
Of General Conduct 165 
 
 should begin. The latter provision at least should 
 be a normal condition of marriage and one that a 
 wife should have power to enforce when payments 
 fall away. With such safeguards and under 
 such conditions marriage ceases to be a haphazard 
 dependence for a woman, and she may live, teach- 
 ing and rearing and free, almost as though the 
 co-operative commonwealth had come. 
 
 But in many cases, since great numbers of 
 women marry so young and so ignorantly that 
 their thinking about realities begins only after 
 marriage, a woman will find herself already mar- 
 ried to a man and married before she realised the 
 significance of these things. She may be already 
 the mother of children. Her husband's ideas 
 may not be her ideas. He may dominate, he 
 may prohibit, he may intervene, he may default. 
 He may, if he sees fit, burden the family income 
 with the charges of his illegitimate offspring. 
 
 We live in the world as it is and not in the 
 world as it should be. That sentence becomes 
 the refrain of this discussion. 
 
 The normal modern married woman has to 
 make the best of a bad position, to do her best 
 under the old conditions, to live as though she 
 was under the new conditions, to make good 
 citizens, to give her spare energies as far as she 
 
166 First and Last Things 
 
 can, to bringing about a better state of affairs. 
 Like the private property owner and the official 
 in a privately owned business, her best method of 
 conduct is to consider herself an unrecognised 
 public official, irregularly commanded and im- 
 properly paid. There is no good in flagrant 
 rebellion. She has to study her particular cir- 
 cumstances and make what good she can out of 
 them, keeping her face towards the coming time. 
 I cannot better the image I have already used 
 for the thinking and believing modern-minded 
 people of to-day as an advance guard cut off 
 from proper supplies, ill furnished so that make- 
 shift prevails, and rather demoralised. We have 
 to be wise as well as loyal; discretion itself is 
 loyalty to the coming State. 
 
§9. 
 
 Associations. — In the previous sections I have 
 dealt with the single individual's duty in relation 
 to the general community and to law and gener- 
 ally received institutions. But there is a new 
 set of questions now to be considered. Let us 
 take up the modifications that arise when it is 
 not one isolated individual but a group of in- 
 dividuals who find themselves in disagreement 
 with contemporary rule or usage and disposed to 
 find a Tightness in things not established or not 
 conceded. They too, live in the world as it is 
 and not in the world as it ought to be, but their 
 association opens up quite new possibilities of 
 anticipating coming developments of living and 
 of protecting and guaranteeing one another from 
 what for a single unprotected individual would 
 be the inevitable consequences of a particular 
 line of conduct, conduct which happened to be 
 unorthodox or only, in the face of existing con- 
 ditions, unwise. 
 
 For example, a friend of mine who had read a 
 
 copy of the preceding section wrote as follows: 
 
 167 
 
1 68 First and Last Things 
 
 ' ' I can see no reason why even to-day a number 
 of persons avowedly united in the same 'Belief 
 and recognising each other as the self-constituted 
 social vanguard should not form a recognised 
 spiritual community centring round some kind 
 of 'religious' edifice and ritual, and agree to 
 register and consecrate the union of any couples 
 of the members according to a contract which the 
 whole community should have voted acceptable. 
 The community would be the guardian of money 
 deposited or paid in gradually as insurance for 
 the children. And the fact of the whole business 
 being regular, open and connected with a common 
 intellectual and moral ritual and common name, 
 such for example as your name of 'The Samurai' 
 would secure the respect of outsiders so that 
 eventually these new marriage arrangements 
 would modify the old ones. People would ask 
 ' Were you married before the registrar ? ' and the 
 answer would be, 'No, we are Samurai and were 
 united before the Elders.' In Catholic countries 
 those who use only the civil marriage are con- 
 sidered outcasts by the religiously minded, which 
 shows that recognition by the State is not as 
 potent as recognition by the community to which 
 one belongs. The religious marriage is considered 
 the only binding one by Catholics, and the civil 
 
Of General Conduct 169 
 
 ceremony is respected merely because the State 
 has brute force behind it." 
 
 There is in this passage one particularly valu- 
 able idea, the idea of an association of people to 
 guarantee the welfare of their children in common. 
 I will follow that a little, though it takes me 
 away from my main line of thought. It seems 
 to me that such an association might be found in 
 many cases a practicable way of easing the con- 
 flict that so many men and women experience, 
 between their individual public service and their 
 duty to their own families. Many people of 
 exceptional gifts, whose gifts are not necessarily 
 remunerative, are forced by these personal con- 
 siderations to direct them more or less askew, to 
 divert them from their best application to some 
 inferior but money-making use, and many more 
 are given the disagreeable alternative of evading 
 parentage or losing the freedom of mind needed 
 for socially beneficial work. This is particularly 
 the case with many scientific investigators, many 
 sociological and philosophical workers, many 
 artists, teachers and the like. Even when such 
 people are fairly prosperous personally they do 
 not care to incur the obligation to keep prosperous 
 at any cost to their work that a family involves. It 
 gives great ease of mind to any sort of artistic 
 
170 First and Last Things 
 
 or intellectual worker to feel free to become poor. 
 I do not see why a group of such people should not 
 attempt a merger of their family anxieties and 
 family adventures, insure all its members, and 
 while each retains a sufficient personal inde- 
 pendence for freedom of word and movement, 
 pool their family solicitudes and resources, or- 
 ganise a collective school and a common main- 
 tenance fund for all the children born of members 
 of the association. I do not see why they should 
 not in fact develop a permanent Trust to main- 
 tain, educate and send out all their children into 
 the world, a Trust to which their childless friends 
 and associates could contribute by gift and bequest 
 and to which the irregular good fortune that is 
 not uncommon in the careers of these exceptional 
 types could be devoted. I do not mean any 
 sort of Charity but an enlarged family basis. 
 
 Such an idea passes very readily into the form 
 of a Eugenic association. It would be quite 
 possible and very interesting for prosperous 
 people interested in Eugenics to create a Trust 
 for the offspring of a selected band of beneficia- 
 ries, and with increasing resources to admit new 
 members and so build up within the present so- 
 cial system a special strain of chosen people. So 
 far people with Eugenic ideas and people with 
 
Of General Conduct 171 
 
 conceptions of associated and consolidated families 
 have been too various and too dispersed for such 
 associations to be practicable, but as such views 
 of life become more common, the chance of a 
 number of sufficiently homogeneous and con- 
 genial people working out the method of such a 
 grouping increases steadily. 
 
 Moreover I can imagine no reason to prevent 
 any women who are in agreement with the moral 
 standards of The Woman Who Did (standards 
 I will not discuss at this present point but defer 
 for a later section) combining for mutual pro- 
 tection and social support and the welfare of 
 such children as they may bear. Then certainly, 
 to the extent that this succeeds, the objections 
 that arise from the evil effects upon the children 
 of social isolation disappear. This isolation would 
 be at worst a group isolation and there can 
 be no doubt that my friend is right in pointing 
 out that there is much more social toleration 
 for an act committed under the sanction of a 
 group than for an isolated act that may be 
 merely impulsive misbehaviour masquerading as 
 high principle. 
 
 It seems to me remarkable that, to the best of 
 my knowledge, so obvious a form of combination 
 has never yet been put in practice. It is remark- 
 
172 First and Last Things 
 
 able but not inexplicable. The first people to 
 develop novel ideas, more particularly of this 
 type, are usually people in isolated circumstances 
 and temperamentally incapable of disciplined co- 
 operation. 
 
§ IO. 
 
 Of an Organised Brotherhood. — The idea 
 of organising the progressive elements in the 
 social chaos into a regulated developing force is 
 one that has had a great attraction for me. I 
 have written upon it elsewhere, and I make no 
 apology for returning to it here and examining 
 it in the light of various afterthoughts and with 
 fresh suggestions. 
 
 I first broached the idea in a book called An- 
 ticipationSy wherein I described a possible devel- 
 opment of thought and concerted action which 
 I called New Republicanism, and afterwards I 
 redrew the thing rather more elaborately in my 
 Modern Utopia. I had been struck by the 
 apparently chaotic and wasteful character of 
 most contemporary reform movements, and it 
 seemed reasonable to suppose that those who 
 aimed at organising society and replacing chaos 
 and waste by wise arrangements might very well 
 begin by producing a more effective organisation 
 for their own efforts. These complexities of 
 good intention made me impatient, and I sought 
 
 industriously in my mind for a short cut through 
 
 173 
 
174 First and Last Things 
 
 them. In doing so I think I overlooked alto- 
 gether too much how heterogeneous all pro- 
 gressive thought and progressive people must 
 necessarily be. 
 
 In my Modern Utopia I turned this idea of an 
 organised brotherhood about very thoroughly* 
 I looked at it from this point and that; I let it 
 loose as it were and gave it its fullest development 
 and so produced a sort of secular Order of govern- 
 ing men and women. In a spirit entirely jour- 
 nalistic I called this the Order of the Samurai, 
 for at the time I wrote there was much interest 
 in Bushido because of the capacity for hardship 
 and self-sacrifice this chivalrous culture appears 
 to have developed in the Japanese. These 
 Samurai of mine were a sort of voluntary nobility 
 who supplied the administrative and organising 
 forces that held my Utopian world together. 
 They were the "New Republicans" of my Anti- 
 cipations and Mankind in the Making, much 
 developed and supposed triumphant and ruling 
 the world. 
 
 I sought of course to set out these ideas as 
 attractively as possible in my books, and they 
 have as a matter of fact proved very attractive 
 to a certain number of people. Quite a number 
 have wanted to go on with them. Several little 
 
Of General Conduct 1 75 
 
 organisations of Utopians and Samurai and the 
 like have sprung up and informed me of them- 
 selves, and some survive; and young men do still 
 at times drop into my world "personally or by 
 letter" declaring themselves New Republicans. 
 
 All this has been very helpful and at times a 
 little embarrassing to me. It has given me an 
 opportunity of seeing the ideals I flung into the 
 distance beyond Sirius and among the mountain 
 snows, coming home partially incarnate in girls 
 and young men. It has made me look into in- 
 dividualised human aspirations, human impa- 
 tience, human vanity and a certain human need 
 of fellowship, at close quarters. It has illuminated 
 subtle and fine traits ; it has displayed nobilities, 
 and it has brought out aspects of human absurdity 
 to which only the pencil of Mr. George Morrow 
 could do adequate justice. The thing I have 
 had to explain most generally is that my New 
 Republicans and Samurai are but figures of 
 suggestion, figures to think over and use in plan- 
 ning disciplines but by no means copies to follow. 
 I have had to go over again, as though it had 
 never been raised before in any previous writings, 
 the difference between the spirit and the letter. 
 
 These responses have on the whole confirmed 
 my main idea that there is a real need, a need that 
 
176 First and Last Things 
 
 many people, and especially adolescent people, 
 feel very strongly, for some sort of constructive 
 brotherhood of a closer type than mere political 
 association, to co-ordinate and partly guide their 
 loose chaotic efforts to get hold of life — but they 
 have also convinced me that no wide and com- 
 prehensive organisation can supply that want. 
 
 My New Republicans were presented as in many 
 respects harsh and overbearing people, "a sort 
 of outspoken secret society" for the organisation 
 of the world. They were not so much an ideal 
 order as the Samurai of the later book, being 
 rather deduced as a possible outcome of certain 
 forces and tendencies in contemporary life (a. d. 
 1900) than, as literary people say, "created. " 
 They were to be drawn from among engineers, 
 doctors, scientific business organisers and the like, 
 and I found that it is to energetic young men of 
 the more responsible classes that this particular 
 ideal appeals. Their organisation was quite in- 
 formal, a common purpose held them together. 
 
 Most of the people who have written to me to 
 call themselves New Republicans are I find also 
 Imperialists and Tariff Reformers, and I suppose 
 that among the prominent political figures of 
 to-day the nearest approach to my New Repub- 
 licans is Lord Milner and the Socialist-Unionists 
 
Of General Conduct 177 
 
 of his group. It is a type harshly constructive, 
 inclined to an unscrupulous pose and slipping 
 readily into a Kiplingesque brutality. 
 
 The Samurai on the other hand were more pic- 
 turesque figures, with a much more elaborated 
 organisation. 
 
 I may perhaps recapitulate the points about 
 that Order here. 
 
 In the Modern Utopia the visitor from earth 
 remarks : 
 
 " These Samurai form the real body of the State. 
 All this time that I have spent going to and fro in 
 this planet, it has been growing upon me that this 
 order of men and women, wearing such a uniform 
 as you wear, and with faces strengthened by dis- 
 cipline and touched with devotion, is the Utopian 
 reality; that but for them, the whole fabric of these 
 fair appearances would crumble and tarnish, shrink 
 and shrivel, until at last, back I should be amidst 
 the grime and disorders of the life of earth. Tell me 
 about these samurai, who remind me of Plato's 
 guardians, who look like Knight Templars, who 
 bear a name that recalls the swordsmen of Japan. 
 What are they? Are they an hereditary caste, a 
 specially educated order, an elected class? For, cer- 
 tainly, this world turns upon them as a door upon 
 its hinges." 
 
 His informant explains : 
 
 "Practically the whole of the responsible rule of the 
 12 
 
178 First and Last Things 
 
 world is in their hands; all our head teachers and 
 disciplinary heads of colleges, our judges, barristers, 
 employers of labour beyond a certain limit, prac- 
 tising medical men, legislators, must be samurai, 
 and all the executive committees and so forth, that 
 play so large a part in our affairs, are drawn by 
 lot exclusively from them. The order is not hered- 
 itary — we know just enough of biology and the un- 
 certainties of inheritance to know how silly that 
 would be — and it does not require an early conse- 
 cration or novitiate or ceremonies and initiations 
 of that sort. The samurai are, in fact, volunteers. 
 Any intelligent adult in a reasonably healthy and 
 efficient state may, at any age after five and twenty, 
 become one of the samurai and take a hand in the 
 universal control. " 
 
 " Provided he follows the Rule." 
 " Precisely — provided he follows the Rule." 
 "I have heard the phrase, 'voluntary nobility.' " 
 "That was the idea of our Founders. They made 
 a noble and privileged order — open to the whole 
 world. No one could complain of an unjust ex- 
 clusion, for the only thing that could exclude from 
 the order was unwillingness or inability to follow 
 the Rule." 
 
 " The Rule aims to exclude the dull and base alto- 
 gether, to discipline the impulses and emotions, to 
 develop a moral habit and sustain a man in periods 
 of stress, fatigue and temptation, to produce the 
 maximum co-operation of all men of good-intent, 
 and in fact to keep all the samurai in a state of moral 
 and bodily health and efficiency. It does as much 
 of this as well as it can, but of course like all general 
 propositions, it does not do it in any case with ab- 
 
Of General Conduct 179 
 
 solute precision. At first in the militant days, it was 
 a trifle hard and uncompromising; it had rather too 
 strong an appeal to the moral prig and the harshly 
 righteous man, but it has undergone, and still under- 
 goes, revision and expansion, and every year it 
 becomes a little better adapted to the need of a 
 general rule of life that all men may try to follow. 
 We have now a whole literature with many very 
 fine things in it, written about the Rule. 
 
 " The Rule consists of three parts : there is the list 
 of things that qualify, the list of things that must 
 not be done, and the list of things that must be done. 
 Qualification exacts a little exertion as evidence of 
 good faith and it is designed to weed out the duller 
 dull and many of the base. " 
 
 He goes on to tell of certain intellectual qualifi- 
 cations and disciplines. 
 
 " Next to the intellectual qualification comes the 
 physical, the man must be in sound health, free from 
 certain foul, avoidable and demoralising diseases, 
 and in good training. We reject men who are fat, 
 or thin, or flabby, or whose nerves are shaky — we 
 refer them back to training. And finally the man 
 or woman must be fully adult." 
 
 "Twenty-one? But you said twenty-five!" 
 "The age has varied. At first it was twenty-five 
 or over; then the minimum became twenty- five 
 for men and twenty-one for women. Now there 
 is a feeling that it ought to be raised. We don't want 
 to take advantage of mere boy and girl emotions — - 
 men of my way of thinking, at any rate, don't — we 
 want to get our samurai with experiences, with a 
 
180 First and Last Things 
 
 settled mature conviction. Our hygiene and regimen 
 are rapidly pushing back old age and death, and 
 keeping men hale and hearty to eighty and more. 
 There 's no need to hurry the young. Let them have 
 a chance of wine, love and song; let them feel the 
 bite of full-blooded desire, and know what devils 
 they have to reckon with. . . . 
 
 " We forbid a good deal. Many small pleasures 
 do no great harm, but we think it well to forbid them 
 none the less, so that we can weed out the self- 
 indulgent. We think that a constant resistance to 
 little seductions is good for a man's quality. At 
 any rate, it shows that a man is prepared to pay 
 something for his honour and privileges. We pre- 
 scribe a regimen of food, forbid tobacco, wine, or any 
 alcoholic drink, all narcotic drugs. . . . 
 
 "Originally the samurai were forbidden usury, 
 that is to say the lending of money at fixed rates 
 of interest. They are still under that interdiction, 
 but since our commercial code practically prevents 
 usury altogether, and our law will not recognise con- 
 tracts for interest upon private accommodation 
 loans to unprosperous borrowers" (he is speaking 
 of Utopia), "it is now scarcely necessary. The idea 
 of a man growing richer by mere inaction and at the 
 expense of an impoverished debtor is profoundly 
 distasteful to Utopian ideas, and our State insists 
 pretty effectually now upon the participation of the 
 lender in the borrower's risks. This, however, is 
 only one part of a series of limitations of the same 
 character. It is felt that to buy simply in order to 
 sell again brings out many unsocial human qualities; 
 it makes a man seek to enhance profits and falsify 
 values, and so the samurai are forbidden to buy of 
 
Of General Conduct 181 
 
 sell on their own account or for any employer save 
 the State, unless by some process of manufacture 
 they change the nature of the commodity (a mere 
 change in bulk or packing does not suffice) and they 
 are forbidden salesmanship and all its arts. Nor 
 may the samurai do personal services, except in the 
 matter of medicine or surgery; they may not be 
 barbers, for example, nor inn waiters nor boot 
 cleaners. But nowadays we have scarcely any 
 barbers or boot cleaners; men do these things for 
 themselves. Nor may a man under the Rule be 
 any man's servant; pledged to do whatever he is told. 
 He may neither be a servant nor keep one; he must 
 shave and dress and serve himself, carry his own 
 food from the helper's place, redd his sleeping room 
 and leave it clean. ..." 
 
 Finally came the things they had to do. Their 
 Rule contained. 
 
 "many precise directions regarding his health and 
 rules that would aim at once at health and that 
 constant exercise of will that makes life good. Save 
 in specified exceptional circumstances, the samurai 
 must bathe in cold water and the men must shave 
 every day; they have the precisest directions in such 
 matters; the body must be in health, the skin and 
 nerves and muscles in perfect tone or the samurai 
 must go to the doctors of the order and give im- 
 plicit obedience to the regimen prescribed. They 
 must sleep alone at least four nights in five ; and they 
 must eat with and talk to anyone in their fellowship 
 who cares for their conversation for an hour at least, 
 at the nearest club-house of the samurai once on 
 
1 82 First and Last Things 
 
 three chosen days in every week. Moreover they 
 must read aloud from the Book of the Samurai for 
 at least five minutes every day. Every month they 
 must buy and read faithfully through at least one 
 book that has been published during the past five 
 years, and the only intervention with private choice 
 in that matter is the prescription of a certain minimum 
 of length for the monthly book or books. But the 
 full rule in these minor compulsory matters is vo- 
 luminous and detailed, and it abounds with alter- 
 natives. Its aim is rather to keep before the samurai 
 by a number of sample duties, as it were, the need 
 of and some of the chief methods towards health 
 of body and mind rather than to provide a com- 
 prehensive rule, and to ensure the maintenance 
 of a community of feeling and interests among 
 the samurai through habit, intercourse and a living 
 contemporary literature. These minor obligations 
 do not earmark more than an hour in the day, yet 
 they serve to break down isolations of sympathy, 
 all sorts of physical and intellectual sluggishness and 
 the development of unsocial preoccupations of many 
 sorts. . . . 
 
 "So far as the samurai have a purpose in common 
 in maintaining the State and the order and discipline 
 of the world, so far, by their discipline and denial, 
 by their public work and effort, they worship God 
 together. But the ultimate fount of motives lies 
 in the individual life, it lies in silent and deliberate 
 reflections, and at this, the most striking of all the 
 rules of the samurai aims. For seven consecutive 
 days in the year, at least, each man or woman under 
 the Rule must go right out of all the life of men into 
 ^ome wild and solitary place, must speak to no man 
 
Of General Conduct 183 
 
 or woman and have no sort of intercourse with man- 
 kind. They must go bookless and weaponless, 
 without pen or paper or money. Provision must be 
 taken for the period of the journey, a rug or sleeping- 
 sack — for they must sleep under the open sky — but 
 no means of making a fire. They may study maps 
 before to guide them, showing any difficulties and 
 dangers in the journey, but they may not carry such 
 helps. They must not go by beaten ways or wherever 
 there are inhabited houses, but into the bare, quiet 
 places of the globe — the regions set apart for 
 them. 
 
 "This discipline was invented to secure a certain 
 stoutness of heart and body in the samurai. Other- 
 wise the order might have lain open to too many tim- 
 orous, merely abstemious men and women. Many 
 things had been suggested, sword-play and tests 
 that verged on torture, climbing in giddy places 
 and the like, before this was chosen. Partly, it is 
 to ensure good training and sturdiness of body and 
 mind, but partly also, it is to draw the minds of the 
 Samurai for a space from the insistent details of 
 life, from the intricate arguments and the fretting 
 effort to work, from personal quarrels and personal 
 affections and the things of the heated room. Out 
 they must go, clean out of the world. ..." 
 
 These passages will at least serve to present 
 the samurai idea and the idea of common Rule 
 of conduct it embodied. 
 
 In the Modern Utopia I discuss also a lesser 
 Rule and the modification of the Rule for women 
 
184 First and Last Things 
 
 and the relation to the order of what I call the 
 poietic types, those types whose business in life 
 seems to be rather to experience and express 
 than to act and effectually do. For those things 
 I must refer the reader to the book itself. To- 
 gether with a sentence I have put in italics above, 
 they serve to show that even when I was devising 
 those samurai, I was not unmindful of the defects 
 that are essential to such a scheme. 
 
 This dream of the samurai proved attractive 
 to a much more various group of readers than 
 the New Republican suggestion, and there have 
 been actual attempts to realise the way of life 
 proposed. In most of these cases there was mani- 
 fest a disposition greatly to overaccentuate organ- 
 isation, to make too much of the disciplinary side 
 of the Rule and to forget the entire subordination 
 of such things to active thought and constructive 
 effort. They are valuable and indeed only justi- 
 fiable as a means to an end. These attempts of 
 a number of people of very miscellaneous origins 
 and social traditions to come together and work 
 like one machine made the essential wastefulness 
 of any terrestrial realisation of my samurai very 
 clear. The only reason for such an Order is the 
 economy and development of force, and under 
 existing conditions disciplines would consume 
 
Of General Conduct 185 
 
 more force than they would engender. The 
 Order so far from being a power would be an 
 isolation. Manifestly the elements of organisa- 
 tion and uniformity were overdone in my Utopia ; 
 in this matter I was nearer the truth in the case 
 of my New Republicans. These, in contrast 
 with the samurai, had no formal general organisa- 
 tion, they worked for a common end because 
 their minds and the suggestion of their circum- 
 stances pointed them to a common end. Nothing 
 was enforced upon them in the way of observance 
 or discipline. They were not shepherded and 
 trained together, they came together. It was 
 assumed that if they wanted strongly they would 
 see to it that they lived in the manner most 
 conducive to their end just as in all this book I 
 am taking it for granted that to believe truly is 
 to want to do right. It was not even required of 
 them that they should sedulously propagate their 
 constructive idea. 
 
 Apart from the illumination of my ideas by 
 these experiments and proposals, my Samurai idea 
 has also had a quite unmerited amount of subtle 
 and able criticism from people who found it at 
 once interesting and antipathetic. My friends 
 Vernon Lee and G. K. Chesterton, for example, 
 have criticised it, and I think very justly, on the 
 
1 86 First and Last Things 
 
 ground that the invincible tortuousness of human 
 pride and class-feeling would inevitably vitiate 
 its working. All its disciplines would tend to 
 give its members a sense of distinctness, would 
 tend to syndicate power and rob it of any inti- 
 macy and sympathy with those outside the 
 Order. . . . 
 
 It seems to me now that anyone who shares the 
 faith I have been developing in this book will see 
 the value of these comments and recognise that 
 this dream is a dream; the samurai are just one 
 more picture of the Perfect Knight, an ideal of 
 clean, resolute and balanced living. They may 
 be valuable as an ideal of attitude but not as an 
 ideal of organisation. They are never to be put, 
 as people say, upon a business footing and made 
 available as a refuge from the individual problem. 
 
 To modernise the parable, the Believer must 
 not only not bury his talent but he must not bank 
 it with an organisation. Each Believer must 
 decide for himself how far he wants to be kinetic 
 or efficient, how far he needs a stringent rule of 
 conduct, how far he is poietic and may loiter and 
 adventure among the coarse and dangerous things 
 of life. There is no reason why one should not, 
 and there is every reason why one should, discuss 
 one's personal needs and habits and disciplines 
 
Of General Conduct 187 
 
 and elaborate one's way of life with those about 
 one, and form perhaps with those of like training 
 and congenial temperament, small groups for 
 mutual support. That sort of association I have 
 already discussed in the previous section. With 
 adolescent people in particular such societies are 
 in many cases an almost instinctive necessity. 
 There is no reason moreover why everyone who 
 is lonely should not seek out congenial minds and 
 contrive a grouping with them. All mutual 
 lovers for example are Orders of a limited mem- 
 bership, many married couples and endless cliques 
 and sets are that. Such small and natural asso- 
 ciations are indeed force-giving Orders because 
 they are brought together by a common innate 
 disposition out of a possibility of mutual assis- 
 tance and inspiration; they observe a Rule that 
 springs up and not a Rule imposed. The more 
 of such groups and Orders we have the better. I 
 do not see why having formed themselves they 
 should not dispose and organise themselves. I 
 believe there is a phase somewhere between fifteen 
 and thirty, in the life of nearly everybody when 
 such a group is sought, is needed and would be 
 helpful in self-development and self-discovery. 
 In leagues and societies for specific ends too, we 
 must all participate. But the order of the 
 
1 88 First and Last Things 
 
 samurai as a great progressive force controlling 
 a multitude of lives right down to their intimate 
 details and through all the phases of personal 
 development is a thing unrealisable. To seek 
 to realise it is impatience. True brotherhood is 
 universal brotherhood. The way to that is long 
 and toilsome, but it is a way that permits of no 
 such energetic short cuts as this militant order 
 of my dream would achieve. 
 
§ II. 
 
 Concerning New Starts and New Religions. 
 — When one is discussing this possible formation 
 of cults and brotherhoods, it may be well to con- 
 sider a few of the conditions that rule such human 
 re-groupings. We live in the world as it is and 
 not in the world as we want it to be, that is the 
 practical rule by which we steer, and in directing 
 our lives we must constantly consider the forces 
 and practicabilities of the social medium in which 
 we move. 
 
 In contemporary life the existing ties are so 
 
 various and so imperative that the detachment 
 
 necessary as a preliminary condition to such new 
 
 groupings is rarely found. This is not a period 
 
 in which large numbers of people break away 
 
 early and completely from old connexions. Things 
 
 change less catastrophically than once they did. 
 
 More particularly is there less driving out into 
 
 the wilderness. There is less heresy hunting; 
 
 persecution is frequently reluctant and can be 
 
 evaded by slight concessions. The world as a 
 
 whole is less harsh and emphatic than it was. 
 
 189 
 
190 First and Last Things 
 
 Customs and customary attitudes change now- 
 adays not so much by open, defiant and revolu- 
 tionary breaches as by the attrition of partial 
 negligencies and new glosses. Innovating people 
 do conform to current usage, albeit they conform 
 unwillingly and imperfectly. There is a constant 
 breaking down and building up of usage, and as 
 a consequence a lessened need of wholesale sub- 
 stitutions. Human methods have become vivi- 
 parous ; the New nowadays lives for a time in the 
 form of the Old. The friend I quote in § 9 writes 
 of a possible sect with a "religious edifice" and 
 ritual of its own, a new religious edifice and a 
 new ritual. In practice I doubt whether "real" 
 people, people who matter, people who are get- 
 ting things done and who have already developed 
 complex associations, can afford the intensive 
 readjustment implied in such a new grouping. 
 It would mean too much loss of time, too much 
 loss of energy and attention, too much sacrifice 
 of existing co-operations. 
 
 New cults, new religions, new organisations of 
 all sorts, insisting upon their novelty and differ- 
 ence, are most prolific and most successful wher- 
 ever there is an abundant supply of dissociated 
 people, where movement is in excess of delibera- 
 tion and creeds and formulae unyielding and 
 
Of General Conduct 191 
 
 unadaptable because they are unthinking. In 
 England, for example, in the last century where 
 social conditions have been comparatively stable, 
 discussion good and abundant and internal mi- 
 gration small, there have been far fewer such 
 developments than in the United States of Amer- 
 ica. In England toleration has become an insti- 
 tution, and where Tory and Socialist, Bishop 
 and Infidel can all meet at the same dinner table 
 and spend an agreeable week-end together, there 
 is no need for defensive segregations. In such 
 an atmosphere opinion and usage change and 
 change continually but not dramatically as the 
 results of separations and pitched battles but 
 continuously and fluently as the outcome of in- 
 numerable personal reactions. America on the 
 other hand because of its material preoccupations, 
 because of the dispersal of its thinking classes over 
 great areas, because of the cruder understand- 
 ing of its more heterogeneous population (which 
 constantly renders hard and explicit statement 
 necessary), means its creeds much more literally 
 and is at once more experimental and less com- 
 promising and tolerant. It is there if anywhere 
 that new Brotherhoods and new creeds will con- 
 tinue to appear. But even in America I think 
 the trend of things is away from separations and 
 
192 First and Last Things 
 
 segregations and new starts, and towards more com- 
 prehensive and graduated methods of development. 
 New Religions, I think, appear and are possible 
 and necessary in phases of social disorganisation, 
 in phases when considerable numbers of people 
 are detached from old systems of direction and 
 unsettled and distressed. So at any rate it was 
 Christianity appeared, in a strained and disturbed 
 community, in the clash of Roman and Oriental 
 thought, and for a long time it was confined to 
 the drifting population of seaports and great 
 cities and to wealthy virgins and widows, reaching 
 the most settled and most adjusted class, the 
 pagani last of all and in its most adaptable forms. 
 It was the greatest new beginning in the world's 
 history, and the wealth of political and literary 
 and social and artistic traditions it abandoned 
 had subsequently to be revived and assimilated 
 to it, fragment by fragment from the past it had 
 submerged. Now I do not see that the world 
 to-day presents any fair parallelism to that sere 
 age of stresses in whose recasting Christianity 
 played the part of a flux. Ours is on the whole 
 an organising and synthetic rather than a dis- 
 integrating phase throughout the world. Old 
 institutions are neither hard nor obstinate to-day, 
 and the immense and various constructive forces 
 
Of General Conduct 193 
 
 at work are saturated now with the conception of 
 evolution, of secular progressive development, 
 as opposed to the revolutionary idea. Only a 
 very vast and terrible war explosion can, I think, 
 change this state of affairs. 
 
 This conveys in general terms, at least, my 
 interpretation of the present time, and it is in 
 accordance with this view that the world is moving 
 forward as a whole and with much dispersed and 
 discrepant rightness, that I do not want to go 
 apart from the world as a whole into any smaller 
 community with all the implication of an exclu- 
 sive possession of right which such a going apart 
 involves. Put to the test of my own Samurai for 
 example, by a particularly urgent and enthusiastic 
 disciple, I found I did not in the least want to be 
 one of that organisation, that it only expressed 
 one side of a much more complex self than its 
 disciplines permitted. And still less do I want 
 to hamper the play of my thoughts and motives 
 by going apart into the particularism of a New 
 Religion. Such refuges are well enough when the 
 times threaten to overwhelm one. The point about 
 the present age, so far as I am able to judge the 
 world, is that it does not threaten to overwhelm, 
 that at the worst, by my standards, it maintains its 
 way of thinking instead of assimilating mine. 
 
 X3 
 
§ 12. 
 
 The Idea of the Church. — Now all this leads 
 very directly to a discussion of the relations of 
 a person of my way of thinking to the Church 
 and religious institutions generally. I have al- 
 ready discussed my relation to commonly ac- 
 cepted beliefs, but the question of institutions is, 
 it seems to me, a different one altogether. Not 
 to realise that, to confuse a church with its 
 creed, is to prepare the ground for a mass of 
 disastrous and life-wasting errors. 
 
 Now my rules of conduct are based on the 
 supposition that moral decisions are to be deter- 
 mined by the belief that the individual life guided 
 by its perception of beauty is incidental, experi- 
 mental and contributory to the undying life of 
 the blood and race. I have decided for myself 
 that the general business of life is the develop- 
 ment of a collective consciousness and will and 
 purpose out of a chaos of individual conscious- 
 nesses and wills and purposes, and that the way 
 to that is through the development of the So- 
 cialist State, through the socialisation of existing 
 
 194 
 
Of General Conduct 195 
 
 State organisations and their merger or pacific 
 association in a world state. But so far I have 
 not taken up the collateral aspect of the synthesis 
 of human consciousness, the development of 
 collective feeling and willing and expression in 
 the form, among others, of religious institutions. 
 Religious institutions are things to be legiti- 
 mately distinguished from the creeds and cos- 
 mogonies with which one finds them associated. 
 Customs are far more enduring things than ideas, 
 witness the misletoe at Christmas or the old lady 
 turning her money in her pocket at the sight of 
 the new moon. And the exact origin of a religious 
 institution is of much less significance to us than 
 its present effect. The theory of a religion may 
 propose the attainment of Nirvana or the propitia- 
 tion of an irascible Deity or a dozen other things 
 as its end and aim, the practical fact is that it 
 draws together great multitudes of diverse in- 
 dividualised people in a common solemnity and 
 self -subordination however vague, and is so far 
 like the State, and in a manner far more intimate 
 and emotional and fundamental than the State, 
 a synthetic power. And in particular, the idea 
 of the Catholic Church is charged with synthetic 
 suggestion \ it is in many ways an idea broader 
 and finer than the constructive idea of any existing 
 
196 First and Last Things 
 
 state. And just as the Beliefs I have adopted lead 
 me to regard myself as in and of the existing state, 
 such as it is, and working for its rectification 
 and development, so I think there is a reasonable 
 case for considering oneself in and of the Catholic 
 Church and bound to work for its rectification 
 and development. And this in spite of the fact 
 that one may not feel justified in calling oneself 
 a Christian in any sense of the term. 
 
 It may be maintained very plausibly that the 
 Catholic Church is something greater than Christ- 
 ianity, however much the Christians may have 
 contributed to its making. From the historical 
 point of view it is a religious and social method 
 that developed with the later development of the 
 world empire of Rome and as the expression of 
 its moral and spiritual side. Its head was and 
 so far as its main body is concerned still is, the 
 pontifex maximus of the Roman world empire, an 
 official who was performing sacrifices centuries 
 before Christ was born. It is easy to assert that 
 the Empire was converted to Christianity and 
 submitted to its terrestrial leader, the bishop of 
 Rome; it is quite equally plausible to say that 
 the religious organisation of the Empire adopted 
 Christianity and so made Rome, which had hith- 
 erto had no priority over Jerusalem or Antioch ia 
 
Of General Conduct 197 
 
 the Christian Church the headquarters of the 
 adopted cult. And if the Christian movement 
 could take over and assimilate the prestige, the 
 world predominance and sacrificial conception of 
 the pontifex maximus and go on with that as part 
 at any rate of the basis of a universal church, it 
 is manifest that now in the fulness of time, this 
 great organisation, after its accumulation of 
 Christian tradition, may conceivably go on still 
 further to alter and broaden its teaching and 
 observances and formulae. 
 
 In a sense no doubt all we moderns are bound 
 to consider ourselves children of the Catholic 
 Church, albeit critical and innovating children 
 with a tendency rather to hark back to our Greek 
 grandparents; we cannot detach ourselves abso- 
 lutely from the church without at the same time 
 detaching ourselves from the main process of 
 spiritual synthesis that has made us what we are. 
 And there is a strong case for supposing that not 
 only is this reasonable for us who live in the 
 tradition of Western Europe, but that w T e are 
 legitimately entitled to call upon extra-European 
 peoples to join with us in that attitude of filiation 
 to the Catholic Church since, outside it, there is no 
 organisation whatever aiming at a religious catho- 
 licity and professing or attempting to formulate 
 
198 First and Last Things 
 
 a collective religious consciousness in the world. 
 So far as they come to a conception of a human 
 synthesis they come to it by coming into our 
 tradition. 
 
 I write here of the Catholic Church as an idea. 
 To come from that idea to the world of present 
 realities is to come to a tangle of difficulties. Is 
 the Catholic Church merely the Roman commun- 
 ion or does it include the Greek and Protestant 
 Churches? Some of these bodies are declaredly 
 dissentient, some claim to be integral portions 
 of the Catholic Church which have protested 
 against and abandoned certain errors of the 
 central organisation. I admit it becomes a very 
 confusing riddle in such a country as England to 
 determine which is the Catholic Church; whether 
 it is the body which possesses and administers 
 Canterbury Cathedral and Westminster Abbey, 
 or the bodies claiming to represent purer and 
 finer or more authentic and authoritative forms 
 of Catholic teaching which have erected that new 
 Byzantine-looking cathedral in Westminster, or 
 Whitefield's Tabernacle in the Tottenham Court 
 Road, or a hundred or so other organised and inde- 
 pendent bodies. It is still more perplexing to settle 
 upon the Catholic Church in America among an 
 immense confusion of sectarian fragments. 
 
Of General Conduct 199 
 
 Many people, I know, take refuge from the 
 struggle with this tangle of controversies by re- 
 fusing to recognise any institutions whatever as 
 representing the Church. They assume a mystical 
 Church made up of all true believers, of all men 
 and women of good intent, whatever their formulae 
 or connexion. Wherever there is worship, there, 
 they say, is a fragment of the Church. All and 
 none of these bodies are the true Church. 
 
 This is profoundly true no doubt. It gives 
 something like a working assumption for the needs 
 of the present time. People can get along upon 
 that. But it does not exhaust the question. We 
 seek a real and understanding synthesis. We 
 want a real collectivism, not a poetical idea; a 
 means whereby men and women of all sorts, all 
 kinds of humanity, may pray together, sing to- 
 gether, stand side by side, feel the same wave of 
 emotion, develop a collective being. No doubt 
 right-spirited men are praying now at a thousand 
 discrepant altars. But for the most part those 
 who pray imagine those others who do not pray 
 beside them are in error, they do not know their 
 common brotherhood and salvation. Their bro- 
 therhood is marked by unanalysable differences; 
 theirs is a dispersed collectivism; their churches 
 are only a little more extensive than their 
 
200 First and Last Things 
 
 individualities and intenser in the ; r collective 
 separations. 
 
 The true Church towards which my own 
 thoughts tend will be the conscious illuminated 
 expression of Catholic brotherhood. It must, I 
 think, develop out of the existing medley of 
 Church fragments and out of all that is worthy 
 in our poetry and literature, just as the world- 
 wide Socialist State at which I aim must develop 
 out of such state and casual economic organisa- 
 tions and constructive movements as exist to- 
 day. There is no "beginning again" in these 
 things. In neither case will going apart out of 
 existing organisations secure our ends. Out of 
 what is, we have to develop what has to be. To 
 work for the Reformation of the Catholic Church 
 is an integral part of the duty of a believer. 
 
 It is curious how misleading a word can be. 
 We speak of a certain phase in the history of 
 Christianity as the Reformation, and that word 
 effectually conceals from most people the simple 
 indisputable fact that there has been no Reforma- 
 tion. There was an attempt at a Reformation 
 in the Catholic Church, and through a variety 
 of causes it failed. It detached great masses 
 from the Catholic Church and left that organisa- 
 tion impoverished intellectually and spiritually, 
 
Of General Conduct 201 
 
 but it achieved no reconstruction at all. It 
 achieved no reconstruction because the movement 
 as a whole lacked an adequate grasp of one funda- 
 mentally necessary idea, the idea of Catholicity. 
 It fell into particularism and failed. It set up a 
 vast process of fragmentation among Christian 
 associations. It drove huge fissures through the 
 once common platform. In innumerable cases 
 they were fissures of organisation and prejudice 
 rather than real differences in belief and mental 
 habit. Sometimes it was manifestly conflicting 
 material interests that made the split. People 
 are now divided by forgotten points of difference, 
 by sides taken by their predecessors in the dis- 
 putes of the sixteenth century, by mere sectarian 
 names and the walls of separate meeting places. 
 In the present time as a result of the dissenting 
 method, there are multitudes of believing men 
 scattered quite solitarily through the world. 
 
 The Reformation, the Reconstruction of the 
 Catholic Church lies still before us. It is a neces- 
 sary w T ork. It is a work strictly parallel to the 
 reformation and expansion of the organised State. 
 Together these processes constitute the general 
 duty before mankind. 
 
§ 13- 
 
 Of Secession. — The whole trend of my thought 
 in matters of conduct is against whatever ac- 
 centuates one's individual separation from the 
 collective consciousness. It follows naturally 
 from my fundamental creed that avoidable 
 silences and secrecy are sins, just as abstinences 
 are in themselves sins rather than virtues. And 
 so I think that to leave any organisation or human 
 association except for a wider and larger associa- 
 tion, to detach oneself in order to go alone, or to 
 go apart narrowly with just a few T , is fragmenta- 
 tion and sin. Even if one disagrees with the pro- 
 fessions or formulae or usages of an association, 
 one should be sure that the disagreement is suffi- 
 ciently profound to justify one's secession, and 
 in any case of doubt, one should remain. 
 
 No profession of faith, no formula, no usage 
 can be perfect. It is only required that it should 
 be possible. More particularly does this apply 
 to churches and religious organisations. There 
 never was a creed nor a religious declaration but 
 admitted of a wide variety of interpretations and 
 
 202 
 
Of General Conduct 203 
 
 implied both more and less than it expressed. 
 The pedantically conscientious man, in his search 
 for an unblemished religious brotherhood, tends 
 always to a solitude of universal dissent. 
 
 In the religious, as in the economic, sphere one 
 must not look for perfect conditions. Setting up 
 for oneself in a new sect is like founding Utopian 
 settlements in Paraguay, an evasion of the essential 
 question; our real business is to take what we 
 have, live in and by it, use it and do our best to 
 better such faults as are manifest to us, in the 
 direction of a wider and nobler organisation. If 
 you do not agree with the church in which you 
 find yourself, your best course is to become a re- 
 former in that church, to declare it a detached 
 forgetful part of the greater church that ought 
 to be, just as your State is a detached unawakened 
 part of the World State. You take it as what it 
 is and try and broaden it towards reunion. It 
 is only when secession is absolutely unavoidable 
 that it is right to secede. 
 
 This is particularly true of state churches such 
 as is the Church of England. These are bodies 
 constituted by the national law and amenable 
 to the collective will. I do not think a man should 
 consider himself excluded from them because 
 they have Articles of Religion to which he cannot 
 
204 First and Last Things 
 
 subscribe and Creeds he will not say. A National 
 State Church has no right to be thus limited and 
 exclusive. Rather then let any man, just to the 
 very limit that is possible for his intellectual or 
 moral temperament, remain in his Church to 
 redress the balance and do his utmost to change 
 and broaden it. 
 
 But perhaps the church will not endure a broad- 
 minded man in its body, speaking and reforming, 
 and will expel him? 
 
 Be expelled — well and good! That is alto- 
 gether different. Let them expel you, struggling 
 valiantly, and resolved to return so soon as they 
 release you to hammer at the door. But with- 
 drawing — sulking — going off in a serene huff to 
 live by yourself spiritually and materially in your 
 own way — that is voluntary damnation, the de- 
 nial of the Brotherhood of Man. Be a rebel or 
 a revolutionary to your heart's content, but a 
 mere seceder never. 
 
 For otherwise it is manifest that we shall have 
 to pay for each step of moral and intellectual 
 progress with a fresh start, with a conflict between 
 the new organisation and the old from which it 
 sprang, a perpetually recurring parricide. There 
 will be a series of religious institutions in develop- 
 ing order, each containing the remnant too dull or 
 
Of General Conduct 205 
 
 too hypocritical to secede at the time of stress 
 that began the new body. Something of the 
 sort has indeed happened to both the Catholic 
 and English protestant churches. We have the 
 intellectual and moral guidance of the people 
 falling more and more into the hands of an in- 
 formal Church of morally impassioned leaders, 
 writers, speakers and the like, while the beautiful 
 cathedrals in which their predecessors sheltered, 
 fall more and more into the hands of an unin- 
 spiring, retrogressive but conforming clergy. 
 
 Now this was all very well for the Individualist 
 Liberal of the Early Victorian period, but In- 
 dividualist Liberalism was a more destructive 
 phase in the process of renewing the old Catholic 
 order, a clearing of the site. We Socialists want 
 a Church through which we can feel and think 
 collectively, as much as we want a State that we 
 can serve and be served by. Whether as members 
 or external critics we have to do our best to get 
 rid of obsolete doctrinal and ceremonial barriers, 
 so that the churches may merge again in a uni- 
 versal Church, and that Church comprehend again 
 the whole growing and amplifying spiritual life 
 of the race. 
 
 I do not know if I make my meaning perfectly 
 clear here. By conformity I do not mean silent 
 
206 First and Last Things 
 
 conformity. It is a man's primary duty to con- 
 vey his individual difference to the minds of his 
 fellow-men. It is because I want that difference 
 to tell to the utmost that I suggest he should not 
 leave the assembly. But in particular instances 
 he may find it more striking and significant to 
 stand out and speak as a man detached from the 
 general persuasion, just as obstructed and em- 
 barrassed ministers of State can best serve their 
 country at times by resigning office and appealing 
 to the public judgment by this striking and sig- 
 nificant act. 
 
§ 14- 
 
 A Dilemma. — We are led by this discussion of 
 secession straight between the horns of a moral 
 dilemma. We have come to two conclusions; 
 to secede is a grave sin, but to lie is also a grave 
 sin. 
 
 But often the practical alternative is between 
 futile secession or implicit or actual falsehood. 
 It has been the instinct of the aggressive contro- 
 versialist in all ages to seize upon collective or- 
 ganisations and fence them about with oaths and 
 declarations of such a nature as to bar out anyone 
 not of his own way of thinking. In a democracy, 
 for example, to take an extreme caricature of our 
 case, a triumphant majority in power, before 
 allowing anyone to vote, might impose an oath 
 whereby the leader of the minority and all his 
 aims were specifically renounced. And if no 
 country goes so far as that, nearly all countries 
 and all churches make some such restrictions upon 
 opinion. The United States, that land of freedoms 
 abandoned and seceding, imposes upon everyone 
 
 who crosses the Atlantic to its shores, a childish 
 
 207 
 
208 First and Last Things 
 
 ineffectual declaration against anarchy and poly- 
 gamy. None of these tests exclude the unhesitat- 
 ing liar, but they do bar out many proud and 
 honest-minded people. They "fix" and kill 
 things that should be living and fluid; they are 
 offences against the mind of the race. How is a 
 man then to behave towards these test oaths and 
 affirmations, towards repeating Creeds, signing 
 assent to Articles of Religion and the like? Do 
 not these unavoidable barriers to public service, 
 religious work and the like, stand on a special 
 footing? 
 
 Personally I think they do. 
 
 I think that in most cases personal isolation 
 and disuse is the greater evil. I think if there is 
 no other way to constructive service except 
 through test oaths and declarations, one must 
 take them. This is a particular case that stands 
 apart from all other cases. The man who preaches 
 a sermon and pretends therein to any belief he 
 does not truly hold is an abominable scoundrel, 
 but I do not think he need trouble his soul very 
 greatly about the barrier he stepped over to get 
 into the pulpit, if he felt the call to preach, so long 
 as the preaching be honest. A Republican who 
 takes the oath of allegiance to the King and wears 
 his uniform is in a similar case. These things 
 
Of General Conduct 209 
 
 stand apart; they are so formal as to be scarcely 
 more reprehensible than the falsehood of calling 
 a correspondent "Dear" or asking a tiresome 
 intruder to whom one is being kind and civil for 
 the pleasure of his company to lunch or dinner. 
 We ought to do what we can to abolish these 
 absurd barriers and petty falsehoods, but we 
 ought not to commit a social suicide against 
 them. 
 
 That is how I think and feel in this matter, but 
 if a man sees the matter more gravely, if his con- 
 science tells him relentlessly and uncompro- 
 misingly, "this is a lie," then it is a lie and he 
 must not be guilty of it. But then I think it ill 
 becomes him to be silently excluded. His work 
 is to clamour against the existence of the barrier 
 that wastes him. 
 
 I do not see that lying itself is a fundamental 
 sin. In the first place some lying, that is to say 
 some unavoidable inaccuracy of statement is 
 necessary to nearly everything we do, and the 
 truest statement becomes false if we forget or 
 alter the angle at which it is made, the direction 
 in which it points. In the next the really funda- 
 mental and most generalised sin is self -isolation. 
 Lying is a sin only because self -isolation is a sin, 
 because it is an effectual way of cutting oneself 
 
210 First and Last Things 
 
 off from human co-operation. That is why there 
 is no sin in telling a fairy tale to a child. But 
 telling the truth when it will be misunderstood is 
 no whit better than lying, and silences are often 
 blacker than any lies. I class secrets with lies 
 and cannot comprehend the moral standards 
 that exonerate secrecy in human affairs. 
 
 To all these things one must bring a personal 
 conscience and be prepared to examine particular 
 cases. The excuses I have made, for example, 
 for a very broad churchman to stay in the Church 
 might very well be twisted into an excuse for 
 professing faith in something one did not to 
 the slightest extent believe in order to enter and 
 betray some organisation to which one was vio- 
 lently hostile. I admit that there may be every 
 gradation between these two things. The in- 
 dividual must examine his special case and weigh 
 the element of treachery against the possibility 
 of co-operation. I do not see how there can be 
 a general rule. I have already shown why in 
 my own case I hesitate to profess a belief in God 
 because I think the misleading element in that 
 profession would outweigh the advantage of sym- 
 pathy and confidence gained. 
 
§ is- 
 
 A Comment. — The preceding section has been 
 criticised by a friend who writes: 
 
 "In religious matters apparent assent produces 
 false unanimity. There is no convention about 
 these things; if there were they would not exist. 
 On the contrary, the only way to get perfunctory 
 tests and so forth abrogated, is for a sufficient 
 number of people to refuse to take them. It is 
 in this case as in every other ; secession is the be- 
 ginning of a new integration. The living elements 
 leave the dead or dying form and gradually create 
 in virtue of their own combinations a new form 
 more suited to present things. There is a forma- 
 tive, a creative power in sincerity, and also in 
 segregation itself. And the new form, the new 
 species produced by variation and segregation 
 will measure itself and its qualities with the old 
 one. The old one will either go to the wall, 
 accept the new one and be renewed by it, or the 
 new one will itself be pushed out of existence if 
 the old one has more vitality and is better adapted 
 to the circumstances. This process of variation, 
 
 211 
 
212 First and Last Things 
 
 competition and selection, also of intermarriage 
 between equally vital and equally adapted varie- 
 ties, is after all the process by which not only 
 races exist but all human thoughts." 
 
 So my friend, who I think is altogether too 
 strongly swayed by biological analogies. But I 
 am thinking not of the assertion of opinions pri- 
 marily but of co-operation with an organisation 
 within which, save for the matter of the test, one 
 may agree. Secession may not involve the de- 
 velopment of a new and better moral organisation ; 
 it may simply mean the suicide of one's public 
 aspect. There may be no room or no need of a 
 rival organisation. To secede from state employ- 
 ment for example is not to create the beginnings 
 of a new state however many — short of a revolu- 
 tion — may secede with you. It is to become a 
 disconnected private person and throw up one's 
 social side. 
 
§i6 
 
 War. — I do not think a discussion of a man's 
 social relations can be considered at all complete 
 or satisfactory until we have gone into the ques- 
 tion of military service. To-day, in an increasing 
 number of countries, military service is an essen- 
 tial part of citizenship and the prospect of war 
 lies like a great shadow across the whole bright 
 complex prospect of human affairs. What should 
 be the attitude of a right-living man towards 
 his state at war and to warlike preparations? 
 
 In no other connexion are the confusions 
 
 and uncertainty of the contemporary mind 
 
 more manifest. It is an odd contradiction that 
 
 in Great Britain and Western Europe generally, 
 
 just those parties that stand most distinctly 
 
 for personal devotion to the State in economic 
 
 matters, the Socialist and Socialistic parties, 
 
 are most opposed to the idea of military service, 
 
 and just those parties that defend individual 
 
 self-seeking and social disloyalty in the sphere 
 
 of property, are most urgent for conscription. 
 
 No doubt some of this uncertainty is due to the 
 
 213 
 
214 First and Last Things 
 
 mixing in of private interests with public pro- 
 fessions, but much more is it, I think, the result 
 of mere muddle-headedness and an insufficient 
 grasp of the implications of the propositions 
 under discussion. The ordinary political So- 
 cialist desires, as I desire, and as I suppose every 
 sane man desires as an ultimate ideal, universal 
 peace, the merger of national partitions in loy- 
 alty to the World State. But he does not re- 
 cognise that the way to reach that goal is not 
 necessarily by minimising and specialising war 
 and war responsibility at the present time. 
 There he falls short of his own constructive 
 conceptions and lapses into the secessionist 
 methods of the earlier Radicals. We have here 
 another case strictly parallel to several we have 
 already considered. War is a collective con- 
 cern; to turn one's back upon it, to refuse to 
 consider it as a possibility, is to leave it entirely 
 to those who are least prepared to deal with it 
 in a broad spirit. 
 
 In many ways war is the most socialistic of 
 all forces. In many ways military organisation 
 is the most peaceful of activities. When the 
 contemporary man steps from the street of clam- 
 orous insincere advertisement, push, adultera- 
 tion, underselling and intermittent employment, 
 
Of General Conduct 2 1 5 
 
 into the barrack-yard, he steps on to a higher 
 social plane, into an atmosphere of service and 
 co-operation and of infinitely more honourable 
 emulations. Here at least men are not flung 
 out of employment to degenerate because there 
 is no immediate work for them to do. They 
 are fed and drilled and trained for better ser- 
 vices. Here at least a man is supposed to win 
 promotion by self-forgetfulness and not by self- 
 seeking. And beside the feeble and irregular 
 endowment of research by commercialism, its 
 little short-sighted snatches at profit by inno- 
 vation and scientific economy, see how remark- 
 able is the steady and rapid development of 
 method and appliances in naval and military 
 affairs! Nothing is more striking than to com- 
 pare the progress of civil conveniences which 
 has been left almost entirely to the trader, to 
 the progress in military apparatus during the 
 last few decades. The house appliances of to- 
 day for example, are little better than they 
 were fifty years ago. A house of to-day is still 
 almost as ill- ventilated, badly heated by waste- 
 ful fires, clumsily arranged and furnished as 
 the house of 1858. Houses a couple of hundred 
 years old are still satisfactory places of residence, 
 so little have our standards risen. But the rifle 
 
216 First and Last Things 
 
 or battleship of fifty years ago was beyond all 
 comparison inferior to those we possess; in 
 power, in speed, in convenience alike. No one 
 has a use now for such superannuated things. 
 
§ i7 
 
 War and Competition. — What is the mean- 
 ing of war in life? 
 
 War is manifestly not a thing in itself, it is 
 something correlated with the whole fabric of 
 human life. That violence and killing which 
 between animals of the same species is private 
 and individual becomes socialised in war. It 
 is a co-operation for killing that carries with 
 it also a co-operation for saving and a great 
 development of mutual help and development 
 within the war-making group. 
 
 War, it seems to me, is really the elimination 
 of violent competition as between man and 
 man, an excretion of violence from the develop- 
 ing social group. Through war and military 
 organisation, and through war and military 
 organisation only, has it become possible to 
 conceive of peace. 
 
 This violence was a necessary phase in human 
 and indeed in all animal development. Among 
 low types of men and animals it seems an in- 
 evitable condition of the vigour of the species 
 
 217 
 
218 First and Last Things 
 
 and the beauty of life. The more vital and 
 various individual must lead and prevail, leave 
 progeny and make the major contribution to 
 the synthesis of the race; the weaker individual 
 must take a subservient place and leave no 
 offspring. That means in practice that the 
 former must directly or indirectly kill the latter 
 until some mitigated but equally effectual sub- 
 stitute for that killing is invented. That duel 
 disappears from life, the fight of the beasts for 
 food and the fight of the bulls for the cows, only 
 by virtue of its replacement by new forms of 
 competition. With the development of prim- 
 itive war we have such a replacement. The 
 competition becomes a competition to serve 
 and rule in the group, the stronger take the 
 leadership and the larger share of life, and the 
 weaker co-operate in subordination, they waive 
 and compromise the conflict and use their con- 
 joint strength against a common rival. 
 
 Competition is a necessary condition of pro- 
 gressive life. I do not know if so far I have 
 made that belief sufficiently clear in these con- 
 fessions. Perhaps in my anxiety to convey 
 my idea of a human synthesis I have not suffi- 
 ciently insisted upon the part played by com- 
 petition in that synthesis. But the implications 
 
Of General Conduct 219 
 
 of the view I have set forth are fairly plain. 
 Every individual, I have stated, is an experi- 
 ment for the synthesis of the species, and upon 
 that idea my system of conduct so far as it is 
 a system is built. Manifestly the individual's 
 function is either self -development, service and 
 reproduction or failure and an end. 
 
 With moral and intellectual development the 
 desire to serve and participate in a collective 
 purpose arises to control the blind and pas- 
 sionate impulse to survival and reproduction 
 that the struggle of life has given us, but it does 
 not abolish the fact of selection, of competition. 
 I contemplate no end of competition. But for 
 competition that is passionate, egoistic and 
 limitless, cruel, clumsy and wasteful, I desire 
 to see competition that is controlled and fair- 
 minded and devoted, men and women doing 
 their utmost with themselves and making their 
 utmost contribution to the specific accumu- 
 lation, but in the end content to abide by a 
 verdict. 
 
 The whole development of civilisation, it 
 seems to me, consists in the development of 
 adequate tests of survival and of an intellectual 
 and moral atmosphere about those tests so that 
 they shall be neither cruel nor wasteful. If 
 
220 First and Last Things 
 
 the test is not to be "are you strong enough to 
 kill everyone you do not like?" that will only be 
 because it will ask still more comprehensively 
 and with regard to a multitude of qualities other 
 than brute-killing power, "are you adding worth- 
 ily to the synthesis by existence and survival?" 
 
 I am very clear in my mind on this perpetual 
 need of competition. I admit that upon that 
 turns the practicability of all the great series of 
 organising schemes that are called Socialism. 
 The Socialist scheme must show a system in 
 which predominance and reproduction are cor- 
 related with the quantity and amount of an 
 individual's social contribution, and so far I 
 acknowledge it is only in the most general terms 
 that this can be claimed as done. We Socialists 
 have to work out all these questions far more 
 thoroughly than we have done hitherto. We 
 owe that to our movement and the world. 
 
 It is no adequate answer to our antagonists 
 to say, indeed it is a mere tu quoque to say, that 
 the existing system does not present such a 
 correlation, that it puts a premium on secretive- 
 ness and self-seeking and a discount on many 
 most necessary forms of social service. That 
 is a mere temporary argument for a delay in 
 judgment. 
 
Of General Conduct 221 
 
 The whole history of humanity seems to me 
 to present a spectacle of this organising special- 
 isation of competition, this replacement of the 
 indiscriminate and collectively blind struggle for 
 life by an organised and collectively intelligent 
 development of life. We see a secular replace- 
 ment of brute conflict by the law, a secular 
 replacement of indiscriminate brute lust by mar- 
 riage and sexual taboos, and now with the develop- 
 ment of Socialistic ideas and methods, the steady 
 replacement of blind industrial competition by 
 public economic organisation. As moreover there 
 is going on a great educational process bringing 
 a greater and greater proportion of the minds of 
 the community into relations of understanding 
 and interchange. 
 
 Just as this process of organisation proceeds, 
 the violent and chaotic conflict of individuals 
 and presently of groups of individuals disappears ; 
 personal violence, private war, cutthroat com- 
 petition, local war, each in turn is replaced by 
 a more efficient and more economical method 
 of survival, a method of survival giving con- 
 stantly and selecting always more accurately 
 a finer type of survivor. 
 
 I might compare the social synthesis to crys- 
 tals growing out of a fluid matrix. It is where 
 
222 First and Last Things 
 
 the growing order of the crystals has as yet not 
 spread that the old resource to destruction and 
 violent personal or associated acts remains. 
 
 But this metaphor of crystals is a very in- 
 adequate one. Because crystals have no will in 
 themselves ; nor do crystals, having failed to grow 
 in some particular form, presently modify that 
 form more or less and try again. I see the or- 
 ganising of forces, not simply law and police 
 which are indeed mere paid mercenaries from 
 the region of violence, but legislation and litera- 
 ture, teaching and tradition, organised religion, 
 getting themselves and the social structure 
 together, year after year and age after age, 
 halting, failing, breaking up in order to try again. 
 And it seems to me that the amount of lawless- 
 ness and crime, the amount of waste and futility, 
 the amount of war and war possibility and war 
 danger in the world are just the measure of the 
 present inadequacy of the world's system of 
 collective organisations to the Purpose before 
 them. 
 
§i8. 
 
 Modern War. — In our contemporary world, 
 in our particular phase, military and naval or- 
 ganisation loom up, colossal and unprecedented 
 facts. They have the effect of an overhanging 
 disaster that grows every year more tremendous, 
 every year in more sinister contrast with the in- 
 creasing securities and tolerations of the every- 
 day life. It is impossible to imagine now what 
 a great war in Europe would be like ; the change 
 in material and method has been so profound 
 since the last cycle of wars ended with the down- 
 fall of the Third Napoleon. But there can be 
 little or no doubt that it would involve a de- 
 struction of property and industrial and social 
 disorganisation of the most monstrous dimen- 
 sions. No man, I think, can mark the limits 
 of the destruction of a great European conflict 
 were it to occur at the present time, and the 
 near advent of practicable flying machines opens 
 a whole new world of frightful possibilities. 
 
 For my own part I can imagine that a col- 
 lision between such powers as Great Britain, 
 
 223 
 
224 First and Last Things 
 
 Germany or America, might very well involve 
 nearly every other power in the world, might 
 shatter the whole fabric of credit upon which 
 our present system of economics rests and put 
 back the orderly progress of social construction 
 for a vast interval of time. One figures great 
 towns red with destruction while giant airships 
 darken the sky, one pictures the crash of mighty 
 ironclads, the bursting of tremendous shells fired 
 from beyond the range of sight into unprotected 
 cities. One thinks of congested ways swarming 
 with desperate fighters, of torrents of fugitives 
 and battles gone out of the control of their gen- 
 erals into unappeasable slaughter. There is a 
 vision of interrupted communications, of wrecked 
 food trains and sunken food ships, of vast masses 
 of people thrown out of employment and darkly 
 tumultuous in the streets, of famine and famine- 
 driven rioters. What modern population will 
 stand a famine? For the first time in the his- 
 tory of warfare the rear of the victor, the rear 
 of the fighting line becomes insecure, assailable 
 by flying machines and subject to unprecedented 
 and unimaginable panics. No man can tell 
 what savagery of desperation these new condi- 
 tions may not release in the soul of man. A 
 conspiracy of adverse chances, I say, might 
 
Of General Conduct 225 
 
 contrive so great a cataclysm. There is. no effect- 
 ual guarantee that it could not occur. 
 
 But in spite of that, I believe that on the whole 
 there is far more good than evil in the enormous 
 military growths that have occurred in the last 
 half century. I cannot estimate how far the 
 alternative to war is lethargy. It is through 
 military urgencies alone that many men can 
 be brought to consent to the collective endow- 
 ment of research, to public education and to 
 a thousand interferences with their private self- 
 seeking. Just as the pestilence of cholera was 
 necessary before men could be brought to con- 
 sent to public sanitation, so perhaps the dread 
 of foreign violence is an unavoidable spur in 
 an age of chaotic industrial production in order 
 that men may be brought to subserve the growth 
 of a State whose purpose might otherwise be too 
 high for them to understand. Men must be 
 forced to care for fleets and armies until they 
 have learnt to value cities and self-development 
 and a beautiful social life. 
 
 The real danger of modern war lies not in the 
 disciplined power of the fighting-machine but 
 in the undisciplined forces in the collective mind 
 that may set that machine in motion. It is 
 not that our guns and ships are marvellously 
 is 
 
226 First and Last Things 
 
 good, but that our press and political organisa- 
 tions are haphazard growths entirely inferior 
 to them. If this present phase of civilisation 
 should end in a debacle, if present humanity 
 finds itself beginning again at a lower level of 
 organisation, it will not be because we have 
 developed these enormous powers of destruction 
 but because we have failed to develop adequate 
 powers of control for them and collective de- 
 termination. This panoply of war waits as the 
 test of our progress towards the realisation of 
 that collective mind which I hold must ulti- 
 mately direct the evolution of our specific being. 
 It is here to measure our incoherence and error, 
 and in the measure of those defects to refer us 
 back to our studies. 
 
 Just as we understand does war become 
 needless. 
 
 But I do not think that war and military 
 organisation will so much disappear as change 
 its nature as the years advance. I think that 
 the phase of universal military service we seem 
 to be approaching is one through which the mass 
 of mankind may have to pass, learning some- 
 thing that can be learnt in no other way, that 
 the uniforms and flags, the conceptions of order 
 and discipline, the tradition of service and de- 
 
Of General Conduct 227 
 
 votion, of physical fitness, unstinted exertion 
 and universal responsibility, will remain a per- 
 manent acquisition, though the last ammunition 
 has been used ages since in the pyrotechnic 
 display that welcomed the coming of the ultimate 
 Peace. 
 
§ 19- 
 
 Of Abstinences and Disciplines. —From 
 these large issues of conduct let me come now 
 to more intimate things, to one's self-control, 
 the regulation of one's personal life. And first 
 about abstinences and disciplines. 
 
 I have already confessed (Book II, § 6) that 
 my nature is one that dislikes abstinences and 
 is wearied by and wary of excess. 
 
 I do not feel that it is right to suppress alto- 
 gether any part of one's being. In itself ab- 
 stinence seems to me a refusal to experience, 
 and that, upon the lines of thought I follow, is 
 to say that abstinence for its own sake is evil. 
 But for an end all abstinences are permissible, 
 and if the kinetic type of believer finds both 
 his individual and his associated efficiency en- 
 hanced by a systematic discipline, if he is con- 
 vinced that he must specialise because of the 
 discursiveness of his motives, because there is 
 something he wants to do or be so good that 
 the rest of them may very well be suppressed 
 
 for its sake, then he must suppress. But the 
 
 228 
 
Of General Conduct 229 
 
 virtue is in what he gets done and not what he 
 does not do. Reasonable fear is a sound reason 
 for abstinence, as when a man has a passion 
 like a lightly sleeping maniac that the slightest 
 indulgence will arouse. Then he must needs 
 adopt heroic abstinence, and even more so must 
 he take to preventive restraint if he sees any 
 motive becoming unruly and urgent and trouble- 
 some. Fear is a sound reason for abstinence 
 and so is love. Many who have sensitive imag- 
 inations nowadays very properly abstain from 
 meat because of butchery. And it is often need- 
 ful, out of love and brotherhood, to abstain from 
 things harmless to oneself because they are 
 inconveniently alluring to others linked to us. 
 The moderate drinker who sits at table sipping 
 his wine in the sight of one he knows to be a 
 potential dipsomaniac is at the best but an 
 unloving fool. 
 
 But mere abstinence and the doing of barren 
 toilsome unrewarding things for the sake of the 
 toil, is a perversion of one's impulses. There 
 is neither honour nor virtue nor good in that. 
 
 I do not believe in negative virtues. I think 
 the ideas of them arise out of the system of 
 metaphysical errors I have roughly analysed 
 in my first book, out of the inherent tendency 
 
230 First and Last Things 
 
 of the mind to make the relative absolute and 
 to convert quantitative into qualitative dif- 
 ferences. Our minds fall very readily under the 
 spell of such unmitigated words as Purity and 
 Chastity. Only death beyond decay, absolute 
 non-existence, can be Pure and Chaste. Life 
 is impurity, fact is impure. Everything has 
 traces of alien matter ; our very health is depend- 
 ent upon parasitic bacteria, the purest blood in 
 the world has a tainted ancestor, and not a saint 
 but has evil thoughts. It was blindness to that 
 which set men stoning the woman taken in 
 adultery. They forgot what they were made 
 of. This stupidity, this unreasonable idealism 
 of the common mind, fills life to-day with cruelties 
 and exclusions, with partial suicides and secret 
 shames. But we are born impure, we die impure ; 
 it is a fable that spotless white lilies sprang from 
 any saint's decay, and the chastity of monk or 
 nun is but introverted impurity. We have to 
 take life valiantly on these conditions and make 
 such honour and beauty and sympathy out of 
 our confusions, gather such constructive experi- 
 ence, as we may. 
 
 There is a mass of real superstition upon these 
 points, a belief in a magic purity, in magic per- 
 sonalities who can say: — 
 
Of General Conduct 231 
 
 " My strength is as the strength of ten 
 Because my heart is pure," — 
 
 and in wonderful clairvoyant innocents like the 
 young man in Mr. Kipling's Finest Story in the 
 World. 
 
 There is a lurking disposition to believe, even 
 among those who lead the normal type of life, 
 that the abstinent and chastely celibate are 
 exceptionally healthy, energetic, immune. The 
 wildest claims are made. But indeed it is true 
 for all who can see the facts of life simply and 
 plainly, that man is an omnivorous, versatile, 
 various creature and can draw his strength from 
 a hundred varieties of nourishment. He has 
 physiological idiosyncracies too that are indif- 
 ferent to biological classifications and moral 
 generalities. It is not true that his absorbent 
 vessels begin their task as children begin the 
 guessing game, by asking, "Is it animal, veg- 
 etable or mineral ?" He responds to stimulation 
 and recuperates after the exhaustion of his re- 
 sponse, and his being is singularly careless 
 whether the stimulation comes as a drug or 
 stimulant, or as anger or music or noble appeals. 
 
 Most people speak of drugs in the spirit of 
 that admirable firm of soap-boilers which assures 
 its customers that the soap they make "con- 
 
232 First and Last Things 
 
 tains no chemicals." Drugs are supposed to 
 be a mystic diabolical class of substance, remote 
 from and contrasting in their nature with all 
 other things. So they banish a tonic from the 
 house and stuff their children with manufactured 
 cereals and chocolate creams. The drunken 
 helot of this system of absurdities is the Christian 
 Scientist who denies healing only to those who 
 have studied pathology, and declares that any- 
 thing whatever put into a bottle and labelled 
 with directions for its use by a doctor is thereby 
 damnable and damned. But indeed all drugs 
 and all the things of life have their uses and 
 dangers, and there is no wholesale truth to ex- 
 cuse us a particular wisdom and watchfulness 
 in these matters. Unless we except smoking 
 as an unclean and needless artificiality, all these 
 matters of eating and drinking and habit are 
 matters of more or less. It seems to me foolish 
 to make anything that is stimulating and pleas- 
 urable into a habit, for that is slowly and surely 
 to lose a stimulus and pleasure and create a 
 need that it may became painful to check or 
 control. The moral rule of my standards is 
 irregularity. If I were a father confessor I should 
 begin my catalogue of sins by asking, "Are you 
 a man of regular life?" And I would charge 
 
Of General Conduct 233 
 
 my penitent to go away forthwith and commit 
 some practicable saving irregularity; to fast or 
 get drunk or climb a mountain or sup on pork 
 and beans or give up smoking or spend a month 
 with publicans and sinners. Right conduct for 
 the common unspecialised man lies delicately 
 adjusted between defect and excess as a watch 
 is adjusted and adjustable between fast and 
 slow. We none of us altogether and always 
 keep the balance or are altogether safe from 
 losing it. We swing, balancing and adjusting, 
 along our path. Life is that and abstinence is 
 for the most part a mere evasion of life. 
 
§ 20. 
 
 On Forgetting, and the Need of Prayer, 
 Reading, Discussion and Worship. — One as- 
 pect of life I had very much in mind when I 
 planned those Samurai disciplines of mine. It 
 was forgetting. 
 
 We forget. 
 
 Even after we have found Salvation, we have 
 to keep hold of Salvation; believing, we must 
 continue to believe. We cannot always be at 
 a high level of noble emotion. We have clam- 
 bered on the ship of Faith and found our place 
 and work aboard, and even while we are busied 
 upon it, behold we are back and drowning in 
 the sea of chaotic things. 
 
 Every religious body, every religious teacher, 
 has appreciated this difficulty and the need 
 there is of reminders and renewals. Faith needs 
 restatement and revival as the body needs food. 
 And since the Believer is to seek much experi- 
 ence and be a judge of less or more in many 
 things, it is particularly necessary that he should 
 
 keep hold upon a living Faith. 
 
 234 
 
Of General Conduct 235 
 
 How may he best do this ? 
 
 I think we may state it as a general duty 
 that he must do whatever he can to keep his 
 faith constantly alive. But beyond that what 
 a man must do depends almost entirely upon 
 his own intellectual character. Many people 
 of a regular type of mind can refresh themselves 
 by some recurrent duty, by repeating a daily 
 prayer, by daily reading or re-reading some 
 devotional book. With others constant repe- 
 tition leads to a mental and spiritual deaden- 
 ing, until beautiful phrases become unmeaning, 
 eloquent statements inane and ridiculous, — 
 matter for parody. All who can, I think, should 
 pray and should read and re-read what they have 
 found spiritually helpful, and if they know of 
 others of kindred dispositions and can organise 
 these exercises, they should do so. Collective 
 worship again is a necessity for many Believers. 
 For many, the public religious services of this 
 or that form of Christianity supply an at- 
 mosphere rich in the essential quality of religion 
 and abounding in phrases about the religious 
 life, rich and mellow from the use of centuries 
 and almost immediately applicable. It seems 
 to me that if one can do so, one should par- 
 ticipate in such public worship and habituate 
 
236 First and Last Things 
 
 oneself to read back into it that collective pur- 
 pose and conscience it once embodied. 
 
 With others again, Faith can be most ani- 
 mated by writing, by confession, by discussion, 
 by talk with friends or antagonists. 
 
 One or other or all of these things the Believer 
 must do, for the mind is a living and moving 
 process, and the thing that lies inert in it is 
 presently covered up by new interests and lost. 
 If you make a sort of King Log of your faith, 
 presently something else will be sitting upon 
 it, pride or self-interest, or some rebel craving, 
 King de facto of your soul, directing it back to 
 anarchy. 
 
 For many types that however is exactly what 
 happens with public worship. They do get a 
 King Log in Ceremony. And if you deliberately 
 overcome and suppress your perception of and 
 repugnance to the perfunctoriness of religion in 
 nine tenths of the worshippers about you, you 
 may be destroying at the same time your own 
 intellectual and moral sensitiveness. But I am 
 not suggesting that you should force yourself 
 to take part in public worship against your 
 perceptions, but only that if it helps you to 
 worship you should not hesitate to do so. 
 
 We deal here with a real need that is not to 
 
Of General Conduct 237 
 
 be fettered by any general prescription. I have 
 one Cambridge friend who finds nothing so up- 
 lifting in the world as the atmosphere of the 
 afternoon service in the choir of King's College 
 Chapel, and another, a very great and distinguished 
 and theologically sceptical woman, who ac- 
 customed herself for some time to hear from 
 a distant corner the evening service in St. Paul's 
 Cathedral and who would go great distances to 
 do that. 
 
 Many people find an exaltation and broad- 
 ening of the mind in mountain scenery and the 
 starry heavens and the wide arc of the sea, and 
 as I have already said, it was part of the dis- 
 ciplines of these Samurai of mine that yearly 
 they should go apart for at least a week of sol- 
 itary wandering and meditation in lonely and 
 desolate places. Music again is a frequent means 
 of release from the narrow life as it closes about 
 us. One man I know makes an anthology into 
 which he copies to re-read any passage that 
 stirs and revives in him the sense of broad issues. 
 Others again seem able to refresh their nobility 
 of outlook in the atmosphere of an intense per- 
 sonal love. 
 
 Some of us seem to forget almost as if it were 
 an essential part of ourselves. Such a man as 
 
238 First and Last Things 
 
 myself, irritable, easily fatigued and bored, 
 versatile, sensuous, curious and a little greedy 
 for experience, is perpetually losing touch with 
 his faith, so that indeed I sometimes turn over 
 these pages that I have written and come upon 
 my declarations and confessions with a sense of 
 alien surprise. 
 
 It may be, I say, that for some of us forget- 
 ting is the normal process, that one has to 
 believe and forget and blunder and learn some- 
 thing and regret and suffer and so come again 
 to belief much as we have to eat and grow hun- 
 gry and eat again. What these others can get 
 in their temples we, after our own manner, must 
 distil through sleepless and lonely nights, from 
 unavoidable humiliations, from the smarting of 
 bruised shins. 
 
§21. 
 
 Democracy and Aristocracy. — And now- 
 having dealt with the general form of a man's 
 duty and with his duty to himself, let me come 
 to his attitude to his individual fellow-men. 
 
 The broad principles determining that atti- 
 tude are involved in things already written in 
 this book. The belief in a collective being gather- 
 ing experience and developing will, to which 
 every life is subordinated, renders the cruder 
 conception of aristocracy, the idea of a select 
 life going on amidst a majority of trivial and 
 contemptible persons who "do not exist," un- 
 tenable. It abolishes contempt. Indeed to 
 believe at all in a comprehensive purpose in 
 things is to abandon that attitude and all the 
 habits and acts that imply it. But a belief in 
 universal significance does not altogether pre- 
 clude a belief in an aristocratic method of prog- 
 ress, in the idea of the subordination of a number 
 of individuals to others who can utilise their 
 lives and help and contributory achievements 
 
 in the general purpose. To a certain extent 
 
 239 
 
240 First and Last Things 
 
 indeed, this last conception is almost inevitable. 
 We must needs so think of ourselves in relation 
 to plants and animals, and I see no reason why 
 we should not think so of our relations to other 
 men. There are clearly great differences in the 
 capacity and range of experience of man and 
 man and in their power of using and rendering 
 their experiences for the racial synthesis. Vig- 
 orous persons do look naturally for help and 
 service to persons of less initiative, and we all 
 are more or less capable of admiration and hero- 
 worship and pleased to help and give ourselves 
 to those we feel to be finer or better or completer 
 or more forceful and leaderly than ourselves. 
 This is natural and inevitable aristocracy. 
 
 For that reason it is not to be organised. We 
 organise things that are not inevitable, but 
 this is clearly a complex matter of accident and 
 personalities for which there can be no general 
 rule. All organised aristocracy is manifestly 
 begotten by that fallacy of classification my 
 Metaphysical book set itself to expose. Its 
 effect is, and has been in all cases, to mask natural 
 aristocracy, to draw the lines by wholesale and 
 wrong, to bolster up weak and ineffectual per- 
 sons in false positions and to fetter or hamper 
 strong and vigorous people. The false aristo- 
 
Of General Conduct 241 
 
 crat is a figure of pride and claims, a consumer 
 followed by dupes. He is proudly secretive, pre- 
 tending to aims beyond the common under- 
 standing. The true aristocrat is known rather 
 than knows; he makes and serves. He exacts 
 no deference. He is urgent to make others 
 share what he knows and wants and achieves. 
 He does not think of others as his but as the 
 End's. 
 
 There is a base democracy just as there is a 
 base aristocracy, the swaggering, aggressive dis- 
 position of the vulgar soul that admits neither 
 of superiors nor leaders. Its true name is in- 
 subordination. It resents rules and refinements, 
 delicacies, differences and organisation. It dreams 
 that its leaders are its delegates. It takes refuge 
 from all superiority, all special knowledge, in 
 a phantom ideal, the People, the sublime and 
 wonderful People. "You can fool some of the 
 people all the time and all the people some of 
 the time, but you can't fool all the people all 
 the time," expresses I think quite the quintes- 
 sence of this mystical faith, this faith in which 
 men take refuge from the demand for order, 
 discipline and conscious light. In England it 
 has never been of any great account, but in 
 America, the vulgar individualist's self-protective 
 
242 First and Last Things 
 
 exaltation of an idealised Common Man has 
 worked and is working infinite mischief. 
 
 In politics the crude democratic faith leads 
 directly to the submission of every question, 
 however subtle and special its issues may be,, 
 to a popular vote. The community is regarded 
 as a consultative committee of profoundly wise, 
 alert and well-informed Comman Men. Since 
 the common man is, as Gustave le Bon has 
 pointed out, a gregarious animal, collectively 
 rather like a sheep, emotional, hasty and shallow, 
 the practical outcome of political democracy 
 in all large communities under modern con- 
 ditions is to put power into the hands of rich 
 newspaper proprietors, advertising producers and 
 the energetic wealthy generally who are best 
 able to flood the collective mind freely with the 
 suggestions on which it acts. 
 
 But democracy has acquired a finer meaning 
 than its first crude intentions — there never was 
 a theory started yet in the human mind that 
 did not beget a finer offspring than itself — and 
 the secondary meaning brings it at last into 
 entire accordance with the finer conception of 
 aristocracy. The test of this quintessential 
 democracy is neither a passionate insistence 
 upon voting and the majority rule, nor an 
 
Of General Conduct 243 
 
 arrogant bearing towards those who are one's 
 betters in this aspect or that, but fellowship. 
 The true democrat and the true aristocrat meet 
 and are one in feeling themselves parts of one 
 synthesis under one Purpose and one Scheme. 
 Both realise that self-concealment is the last 
 evil, both make frankness and veracity the basis 
 of their intercourse. The general Tightness of 
 living for you and others and for others and you 
 is to understand them to the best of your ability 
 and to make them all, to the utmost limits of 
 your capacity of expression and their under- 
 standing and sympathy, participators in your 
 act and thought. 
 
§ 22. 
 
 On Debts of Honour. — My ethical dispo- 
 sition is all against punctilio and I set no greater 
 value on unblemished honour than I do on purity. 
 I never yet met a man who talked proudly of 
 his honour who did not end by cheating me, 
 not a code of honour that did not impress me 
 as something of a conspiracy against the com- 
 mon welfare and purpose in life. There is honour 
 among thieves, and I think it might well end 
 there as an obligation in conduct. The soldier 
 who risks a life he owes to his army in a duel 
 upon some silly matter of personal pride is no 
 better to me than the clerk who gambles with 
 the money in his master's till. When I was a 
 boy I once paid a debt of honour, and it is one 
 of the things I am most ashamed of. I had 
 played cards into debt and I still remember 
 burningly how I went flushed and shrill-voiced 
 to my mother and got the money she could so 
 ill afford to give me. I would not pay such a 
 debt of honour now. If I were to wake up one 
 
 morning owing big sums that I had staked 
 
 244 
 
Of General Conduct 245 
 
 over-night I would set to work at once by 
 every means in my power to evade and repudi- 
 ate that obligation. Such money as I have I 
 owe under our present system to wife and 
 sons and my work and the world, and I see 
 no valid reason why I should hand it over 
 to Smith because he and I have played the 
 fool and rascal and gambled. Better by far 
 to accept that fact and be published fool and 
 rascal. 
 
 I have never been able to understand the 
 sentimental spectacle of sons toiling dreadfully 
 and wasting themselves upon mere money- 
 making to save the secret of a father's pecu- 
 lations and the " honour of the family," or men 
 conspiring to weave a wide and mischievous 
 net of lies to save the "honour" of a woman. 
 In the conventional drama the preservation of the 
 honour of a woman seems an adequate excuse 
 for nearly any offence short of murder; the 
 preservation that is to say of the appearance 
 of something that is already gone. Here it is 
 that I do definitely part company with the false 
 aristocrat who is by nature and intent a humbug 
 and fabricator of sham attitudes, and ally my- 
 self with democracy. Fact, valiantly faced, is 
 of more value than any reputation. The false 
 
246 First and Last Things 
 
 aristocrat is robed to the chin and unwashed 
 beneath, the true goes stark as Apollo. The 
 false is ridiculous with undignified insistence 
 upon his dignity; the true says like God, "I 
 am that I am." 
 
§ 23. 
 
 The Idea of Justice. — One word has so far 
 played a very little part in this book, and that 
 is the word Justice. 
 
 Those who have read the opening book on 
 Metaphysics will perhaps see that this is a nec- 
 essary corollary of the system of thought de- 
 veloped therein. In my philosophy, with its 
 insistence upon uniqueness and marginal differ- 
 ences and the provisional nature of numbers 
 and classes, there is little scope for that blind- 
 folded lady with the balances, seeking always 
 exact equivalents. Nowhere in my system of 
 thought is there work for the idea of Rights 
 and the conception of conscientious litigious- 
 spirited people exactly observing nicely defined 
 relationships. 
 
 You will note, for example, that I base my 
 Socialism on the idea of a collective develop- 
 ment and not on the "right" of every man to 
 his own labour, or his "right" to work, or his 
 "right" to subsistence. All these ideas of 
 
 "rights" and of a social "contract" however 
 
 247 
 
248 First and Last Things 
 
 implicit are merely conventional ways of look- 
 ing at things, conventions that have arisen in 
 the mercantile phase of human development. 
 
 Laws and rights, like common terms in speech, 
 are provisional things, conveniences for taking 
 hold of a number of cases that would otherwise 
 be unmanageable. The appeal to Justice is a 
 necessarily inadequate attempt to de-individ- 
 ualise a case, to eliminate the self's biassed at- 
 titude. I have declared that it is my wilful 
 belief that everything that exists is significant 
 and necessary. The idea of Justice seems to 
 me a defective, quantitative application of the 
 spirit of that belief to men and women. In 
 every case you try and discover and act upon 
 a plausible equity that must necessarily be based 
 on arbitary assumptions. 
 
 There is no equity in the universe, in the 
 various spectacle outside our minds; and the 
 most terrible nightmare the human imagination 
 has ever engendered is a Just God, measuring 
 with himself as the Standard against finite men. 
 Ultimately there is no adequacy, we are all 
 weighed in the balance and found wanting. 
 
 So, as the recognition of this has grown, Jus- 
 tice has been tempered with Mercy, which indeed 
 is no more than an attempt to equalise things 
 
Of General Conduct 249 
 
 by making the factors of the very defect that 
 is condemned, its condonation. The modern 
 mind fluctuates uncertainly somewhere between 
 extremes, now harsh and now ineffectual. 
 
 To me there seems no validity in these quasi- 
 absolute standards. 
 
 A man seeks and obeys standards of equity 
 simply to economise his moral effort, not be- 
 cause there is anything true or sublime about 
 Justice, but because he knows he is too egoistic 
 and weak-minded and obsessed to do any perfect 
 thing at all, because he cannot trust himself 
 with his own transitory emotions unless he 
 train himself beforehand to observe a prede- 
 termined rule. There is scarcely an eventuality 
 in life that without the help of these general- 
 isations would not exceed the average man's 
 intellectual power and moral energy, just as 
 there is scarcely an idea or an emotion that can 
 be conveyed without the use of faulty and de- 
 fective common names. Justice and Mercy are 
 indeed not ultimately different in their nature 
 from such other conventions as the rules of a 
 game, the rules of etiquette, forms of address, 
 cab tariffs and standards of all sorts. They 
 are mere organisations of relationship either to 
 economise thought or else to facilitate mutual 
 
250 First and Last Things 
 
 understanding and codify common action. Mod- 
 esty and self-submission, love and service are, in 
 the system of my beliefs, far more fundamental 
 Tightnesses and duties. 
 
 We are not mercantile and litigious units 
 such as making Justice our social basis would 
 imply, we are not select responsible right persons 
 mixed with and tending weak irresponsible 
 wrong persons such as the notion of Mercy sug- 
 gests, we are parts of one being and body, each 
 unique yet sharing a common nature and a 
 variety of imperfections and working together 
 (albeit more or less darkly and ignorantly) for 
 a common end. 
 
 We are strong and weak together and in one 
 brotherhood. The weak have no essential rights 
 against the strong, nor the strong against the 
 weak. The world does not exist for our weak- 
 nesses but our strength. And the real justifi- 
 cation of democracy lies in the fact that none of 
 us are altogether strong nor altogether weak; 
 for everyone there is an aspect wherein he is 
 seen to be weak; for everyone there is a strength 
 though it may be only a little peculiar strength 
 or an undeveloped potentiality. The uncon- 
 verted man uses his strength egotistically, em- 
 phasises himself harshly against the man who 
 
Of General Conduct 251 
 
 is weak where he is strong, and hates and con- 
 ceals his own weakness. The Believer, in the 
 measure of his belief, respects and seeks to under- 
 stand the different strength of others and to use 
 his own distinctive power with and not against 
 his fellow men, in the common service of that 
 synthesis to which each one of them is ultimately 
 as necessary as he. 
 
24. 
 
 Of Love and Justice. — Now here the friend 
 who has read the first draft of this book falls 
 into something like a dispute with me. She 
 does not, I think, like this dismissal of Justice 
 from a primary place in my scheme of conduct. 
 
 "Justice," she asserts, "is an instinctive crav- 
 ing very nearly akin to the physical craving for 
 equilibrium. Its social importance corresponds. 
 It seeks to keep the individual's claims in such 
 a position as to conflict as little as possible with 
 those of others. Justice is the root instinct of 
 all social feeling, of all feeling which does not 
 take account of whether we like or dislike indi- 
 viduals, it is the feeling of an orderly position 
 of our Ego towards others, merely considered as 
 others and of all the Egos merely as Egos towards 
 each other. Love cannot be felt towards others 
 as others. Love is the expression of individual 
 suitability and preference, its positive existence 
 in some cases implies its absolute negation in 
 others. Hence Love can never be the essential 
 
 and root of social feeling, and hence the necessity 
 
 252 
 
Of General Conduct 253 
 
 for the instinct of abstract justice which takes 
 no account of preferences or aversions. And 
 here I may say that all application of the word 
 love to unknown, distant creatures, to mere 
 others, is a perversion and a wasting of the word 
 love, which taking its origin in sexual and parental 
 preference, always implies a preference of one 
 object to the other. To love everybody is simply 
 not to love at all. And it is just because of the 
 passionate preference instinctively felt for some in- 
 dividuals, that mankind requires the self-regarding 
 and self-respecting passion of justice." 
 
 Now this is not altogether contradictory of 
 what I hold. I disagree that because love neces- 
 sarily expresses itself in preference, selecting this 
 rather than that, that it follows necessarily that 
 its absolute negation is implied in the non-selected 
 cases. A man may go into the world as a child 
 goes into a garden and gathers its hands full of 
 the flowers that please it best and then desists, 
 but only because its hands are full and not because 
 it is at an end of the flowers that it can find delight 
 in. So the man finds at last his memory and 
 apprehensions glutted. It is not that he could 
 not love those others. And I dispute the pro- 
 position that to love everybody is not to love at 
 all. To love two people is surely to love more 
 
254 First and Last Things 
 
 than to love just one person, and so by way of 
 three and four to a very large number. But if 
 it is put that love must be a preference because of 
 the mental limitations that forbid us to apprehend 
 and understand more than a few of the multitudin- 
 ous lovables of life, then I agree. For all the 
 individuals and things and cases for which we 
 have inadequate time and energy, we need a 
 wholesale method-justice. That is exactly what 
 I have said in the previous section. 
 
§ 25. 
 
 The Weakness of Immaturity. — One is apt 
 to write and talk of strong and weak as though 
 some were always strong, some always weak. 
 But that is quite a misleading version of life. 
 Apart from the fact that everyone is fluctuatingly 
 strong and fluctuatingly weak, and weak and 
 strong according to the quality we judge them 
 by, we have to remember that we are all develop- 
 ing and learning and changing, gaining strength 
 and at last losing it, from the cradle to the grave. 
 We are all, to borrow the old scholastic term, 
 pupil-teachers of Life; the term is none the less 
 appropriate because the pupil-teacher taught 
 badly and learnt under difficulties. 
 
 It may seem to be a crowning feat of platitude 
 
 to write that "we have to remember" this, but 
 
 it is overlooked in a whole mass of legal, social 
 
 and economic literature. Those extraordinary 
 
 imaginary cases as between a man A and a man 
 
 B who start level on a desert island or elsewhere, 
 
 and work or do not work, or save or do not save, 
 
 become the basis of immense schemes of just 
 
 255 
 
256 First and Last Things 
 
 arrangement which soar up confidently and 
 serenely regardless of the fact that never did 
 anything like that equal start occur; that from 
 the beginning there were family groups and old 
 heads and young heads, help, guidance and sacri- 
 fice, and those who had learnt and those who had 
 still to learn, jumbled together in confused trans- 
 actions. Deals, tradings and so forth are entirely 
 secondary aspects of these primaries, and the 
 attempt to get an idea of abstract relationship 
 by beginning upon a secondary issue is the fatal 
 pervading fallacy in all these regions of thought. 
 At the present moment the average age of the 
 world is I suppose about 21 or 22, the normal 
 death somewhere about 44 or 45, that is to say 
 nearly half the world is " under age," green, in- 
 experienced, demanding help, easily misled and 
 put in the wrong and betrayed. Yet the younger 
 moiety, if we do indeed assume life's object is a 
 collective synthesis, is more important than the 
 older, and every older person bound to be some- 
 thing of a guardian to the younger. It follows 
 directly from the fundamental beliefs I have as- 
 sumed that w T e are missing the most important 
 aspects of life if we are not directly or indirectly 
 serving the young, helping them individually or 
 collectively. Just in the measure that one's living 
 
Of General Conduct 257 
 
 falls away from that, do we fall away from life 
 into a mere futility of existence, and approach 
 the state, the extraordinary and wonderful middle 
 state of (for example) those extinct and entirely 
 damned old gentlemen one sees and hears eating 
 and sleeping in every comfortable London club. 
 That constructive synthetic purpose which I 
 have made the ruling idea in my scheme of con- 
 duct may be indeed completely restated in an- 
 other form, a form I adopted for a book I wrote 
 some years ago called Mankind in the Making. 
 In this I pointed out that "Life is a tissue of 
 births," 
 
 and if the whole of life is an evolving succession of 
 births then not only must a man in his individual 
 capacity (physically as parent, doctor, food dealer, 
 food carrier, home builder, protector, or mentally 
 as teacher, news dealer, author, preacher) contribute 
 to births and growths and the fine future of mankind, 
 but the collective aspects of man, his social and 
 political organisations must also be, in the essence, 
 organisations that more or less profitably and more 
 or less intentionally, set themselves towards this end. 
 They are finally concerned with the birth and with 
 the sound development towards still better births, 
 of human lives, just as every implement in the tool- 
 shed of a seedsman's nursery, even the hoe and the 
 roller, is concerned finally with the seeding and with 
 the sound development towards still better seeding 
 of plants. The private and personal motive of the 
 17 
 
258 First and Last Things 
 
 seedsman in procuring and using these tools may 
 be avarice, ambition, a religious belief in the saving 
 efficacy of nursery keeping or a simple passion for 
 bettering flowers, that does not affect the definite 
 final purpose of his outfit of tools. 
 
 And just as we might judge completely and criti- 
 cise and improve that outfit from an attentive study 
 of the welfare of plants and with an entire disregard 
 of his remoter motives, so we may judge all collective 
 human enterprises from the standpoint of an atten- 
 tive study of human births and development. Any 
 collective human enterprise, institution, movement, 
 party or state, is to be judged as a whole and com- 
 pletely, as it conduces more or less to wholesome and 
 hopeful births, and according to the qualitative and 
 quantitative advance due to its influence made by each 
 generation of citizens born under its influence towards 
 a higher and ampler standard of life. 
 
 And individual conduct, quite as much as 
 collective affairs, comes under the same test. 
 We are guides and school builders, helpers and 
 influences every hour of our lives, and by that 
 standard we can and must judge all our ways of 
 living. 
 
26. 
 
 Possibility of a New Etiquette. — These two 
 ideas, firstly the pupil-teacher parental idea and 
 secondly the democratic idea (that of an equal 
 ultimate significance), the second correcting any 
 tendency in the first to pedagogic arrogance and 
 tactful concealments, do I think give, when taken 
 together, the general attitude a right-living man 
 will take to his individual fellow creature. They 
 play against each other, providing elements of 
 contradiction and determining a balanced course. 
 It seems to me to follow necessarily from my 
 fundamental beliefs that the Believer will tend 
 to be and want to be and seek to be friendly to, 
 and interested in, all sorts of people, and truth- 
 ful and helpful and hating concealment. To be 
 that with any approach to perfection demands an 
 intricate and difficult effort, introspection to the 
 hilt of one's power, a saving natural gift; one 
 has to avoid pedantry, aggression, brutality, ami- 
 able tiresomeness — there are pitfalls on every 
 side. The more one thinks about other people 
 
 the more interesting and pleasing they are; I am 
 
 259 
 
260 First and Last Things 
 
 all for kindly gossip and knowing things about 
 them, and all against the silly and limiting hard- 
 ness of soul that will not look into one's fellows 
 nor go out to them. The use and justification of 
 most literature, of fiction, verse, history, biog- 
 raphy, is that it lets us into understandings and 
 the suggestion of human possibilities. The gen- 
 eral purpose of intercourse is to get as close as one 
 can to the realities of the people one meets and 
 to give oneself to them just so far as possible. 
 
 From that I think there arises naturally a 
 newer etiquette that would set aside many of the 
 rigidities of procedure that keep people apart 
 to-day. There is a fading prejudice against 
 asking personal questions, against talking about 
 oneself or one's immediate personal interests, 
 against discussing religion and politics and any 
 such keenly felt matter. No doubt it is necessary 
 at times to protect oneself against clumsy and 
 stupid familiarities, against noisy and inattentive 
 egotists, against intriguers and liars but only in 
 the last resort do such breaches of patience seem 
 justifiable to me; for the most part our traditions 
 of speech and intercourse altogether overdo sep- 
 arations, the preservation of distances and pro- 
 tective devices in general. 
 
27. 
 
 Sex. — So far I have ignored the immense im- 
 portance of Sex in our lives and for the most part 
 kept the discussion so generalised as to apply 
 impartially to women and men. But now I have 
 reached a point when this great boundary line 
 between two halves of the world and the intense 
 and intimate personal problems that play across 
 it must be faced. 
 
 For not only must we bend our general activi- 
 ties and our intellectual life to the conception of 
 a human synthesis, but out of our bodies and 
 emotional possibilities we have to make the new 
 world bodily and emotionally. To the test of 
 that we have to bring all sorts of questions that 
 agitate us to-day, the social and political equality 
 and personal freedom of women, the differing 
 code of honour for the sexes, the controls and 
 limitations to set upon love and desire. If, for 
 example, it is for the good of the species that a 
 whole half of its individuals should be specialised 
 and subordinated to the physical sexual life, as 
 
 in certain phases of human development women 
 
 261 
 
262 First and Last Things 
 
 have tended to be, then certainly we must do 
 nothing to prevent that. We have set aside the 
 conception of Justice as in any sense a counter- 
 vailing idea to that of the synthetic process. 
 
 And it is well to remember that for the whole 
 of sexual conduct there is quite conceivably no 
 general simple rule. It is quite possible that, as 
 Metchnikoff maintains in his extraordinarily illu- 
 minating Nature of Man, we are dealing with an 
 irresolvable tangle of disharmonies. We have 
 passions that do not insist upon their physiologi- 
 cal end, desires that may be prematurely vivid in 
 childhood, a fantastic curiosity, old needs of the 
 ape but thinly overlaid by the acquisitions of the 
 man, emotions that jar with physical impulses, 
 inexplicable pains and diseases. And not only 
 have we to remember that we are dealing with 
 disharmonies that may at the very best be only 
 patched together, but we are dealing with matters 
 in which the element of idiosyncrasy is essential, 
 insisting upon an incalculable flexibility in any 
 rule we make, unless we are to take types and 
 indeed whole classes of personality and write 
 them down as absolutely bad and fit only for 
 suppression and restraint. And on the mental 
 side we are further perplexed by the extraordinary 
 suggestibility of human beings. In sexual matters 
 
Of General Conduct 263 
 
 there seems to me— and I think I share a general 
 ignorance here — to be no directing instinct at all, 
 but only an instinct to do something generally 
 sexual; there are almost equally powerful desires 
 to do right and not to act under compulsion. 
 The specific forms of conduct imposed upon these 
 instincts and desires depend upon a vast con- 
 fusion of suggestions, institutions, conventions, 
 ways of putting things. We are dealing therefore 
 with problems ineradicably complex, varying 
 endlessly in their instances, and changing as we 
 deal with them. I am inclined to think that the 
 only really profitable discussion of sexual matters 
 is in terms of individuality, through the novel, 
 the lyric, the play, autobiography or biography 
 of the frankest sort. But such generalisations as 
 I can make I will. 
 
 To me it seems manifest that sexual matters 
 may be discussed generally in at least three 
 permissible and valid ways, of which the con- 
 sideration of the world as a system of births and 
 education is only the dominant chief. There is 
 next the question of the physical health and 
 beauty of the community and how far sexual rules 
 and customs affect that, and thirdly the question 
 of the mental and moral atmosphere in which 
 sexual conventions and laws must necessarily be 
 
264 First and Last Things 
 
 an important factor. It is alleged that probably 
 in the case of men and certainly in the case of 
 women, some sexual intercourse is a necessary 
 phase in existence; that without it there is an 
 incompleteness, a failure in the life cycle, a real 
 wilting and failure of energy and vitality and 
 the development of morbid states. And for most 
 of us half the friendships and intimacies from 
 which we derive the daily interest and sustaining 
 force in our lives, draw mysterious elements from 
 sexual attraction and depend and hesitate upon 
 our conception of the liberties and limits we must 
 give to that force. 
 
28. 
 
 The Institution of Marriage. — The indi- 
 vidual attitudes of men to women and of women 
 to men are necessarily determined to a large ex- 
 tent by certain general ideas of relationship, by 
 institutions and conventions. One of the most 
 important and debatable of these is whether we 
 are to consider and treat women as citizens and 
 fellows, or as beings differing mentally from men 
 and grouped in positions of at least material 
 dependence to individual men. Our decision in 
 that direction will affect all our conduct from the 
 larger matters down to the smallest points of 
 deportment; it will affect even our manner of 
 address and determine whether when we who are 
 men speak to a woman we shall be as frank and 
 unaffected as with a man or touched with a faint 
 suggestion of the reserves of a cat which does not 
 wish to be suspected of wanting to steal the milk. 
 
 Now as far as that goes it follows almost ne- 
 cessarily from my views upon aristocracy and 
 democracy that I declare for the conventional 
 
 equality of women, that is to say for the deter- 
 
 265 
 
266 First and Last Things 
 
 mination to make neither sex nor any sexual 
 characteristic a standard of superiority or in- 
 feriority, for the view that a woman is a person 
 as important and necessary, as much to be con- 
 sulted, and entitled to as much freedom of action 
 as a man. I admit that this decision is a choice 
 into which temperament enters, that I cannot 
 produce compelling reason why anyone else 
 should adopt my view. I can produce considera- 
 tions in support of my view, that is all. But 
 they are so implicit in all that has gone before 
 that I will not trouble to detail them here. 
 
 The conception of equality and fellowship 
 between men and women is an idea at least as 
 old as Plato and one that has recurred wherever 
 civilisation has reached a phase in which men 
 and women were sufficiently released from mili- 
 tant and economic urgency to talk and read and 
 think. But it has never yet been, at least in the 
 historical period and in any but isolated social 
 groups, a working structural idea. The working 
 structural idea is the Patriarchal Family, in 
 which the woman is inferior and submits herself 
 and is subordinated to the man, the head of the 
 family. 
 
 We live in a constantly changing development 
 and modification of that tradition. It is well 
 
Of General Conduct 267 
 
 to bring that factor of constant change into mind 
 at the outset of this discussion and to keep it 
 there. To forget it, and it is commonly forgotten, 
 is to falsify every issue. Marriage and the Family 
 are perennially fluctuating institutions, and prob- 
 ably scarcely anything in modern life has changed 
 and is changing so much; they are in their legal 
 constitution or their moral and emotional quality, 
 profoundly different things from what they were 
 a hundred years ago. A woman who marries 
 nowadays marries, if one may put it quantita- 
 tively, far less than she did even half a century 
 ago; the married woman's property act, for 
 example, has revolutionised the economic rela- 
 tionship, her husband has lost his right to assault 
 her and he cannot even compel her to cohabit 
 with him if she refuses to do so. Legal separa- 
 tions and divorces have come to modify the quality 
 and logical consequences of the bond. The rights 
 of parent over the child have been even more 
 completely qualified. The State has come in as 
 protector and educator of the children, taking over 
 personal powers and responsibilities that have 
 been essential to the family institution ever since 
 the dawn of history. It inserts itself more and 
 more between child and parent. It invades what 
 were once the most sacred intimacies, and the 
 
268 First and Last Things 
 
 Salvation Army is now promoting legislation to 
 invade those overcrowded homes in which chil- 
 dren (it is estimated to the number of thirty or 
 forty thousand) are living as I write, vassals of 
 the sacred bond of the family, daily witnesses of 
 their mother's prostitution or in constant danger 
 of incestuous attack from drunken fathers and 
 brothers. And finally as another indication of 
 profound differences, births were almost univer- 
 sally accidental a hundred years ago; they are 
 now in an increasing number of families controlled 
 and deliberate acts of will. In every one of their 
 relations do Marriage and the Family change and 
 continue to change. 
 
 But the inherent defectiveness of the human 
 mind which my metaphysical book sets itself to 
 analyse, does lead it constantly to speak of 
 Marriage and the Family as things as fixed and 
 unalterable as, let us say the characteristics of 
 oxygen. One is asked, do you believe in Marriage 
 and the Family ? as if it was a case of either having 
 or not having some definite thing. Socialists are 
 accused of being "against the Family," as if it 
 were not the case that Socialists, Individualists, 
 high Anglicans and Roman Catholics are all 
 against Marriage and the Family as these institu- 
 tions exist at the present time. But once we 
 
Of General Conduct 269 
 
 have realised the absurdity of this absolute treat- 
 ment, then it should become clear that with it 
 goes most of the fabric of right and wrong, and 
 nearly all those arbitrary standards by which we 
 classify people into moral and immoral. Those 
 last words are used when as a matter of fact we 
 mean either conforming or failing to conform to 
 changing laws and developing institutional cus- 
 toms we may or may not consider right or wrong. 
 Their use imparts a flavour of essential wrong- 
 doing and obliquity into acts and relations that 
 may be in many cases no more than social in- 
 discipline, which may be even conceivably a 
 courageous act of defiance to an obsolescent limi- 
 tation. Such, until a little while ago, was a 
 man's cohabitation with his deceased wife's 
 sister. This, which was scandalous yesterday, is 
 now a legally honourable relationship, albeit I 
 believe still regarded by the high Anglican an 
 incestuous wickedness. 
 
 Now I will not deal here with the institutional 
 changes that are involved in that general scheme 
 of progress called Socialism. I have discussed 
 the relation of Socialism to Marriage and the 
 Family quite fully in my New Worlds for Old l 
 and to that I must refer the reader. Therein he 
 » New Worlds for Old (A. Constable & Co., 190S). 
 
270 First and Last Things 
 
 will see how the economic freedom and independ- 
 ent citizenship of women and indeed also the wel- 
 fare of the whole next generation hang on the 
 idea of endowing motherhood, and he will find 
 too how much of the nature of the marriage con- 
 tract is outside the scope of Socialist proposals 
 altogether. 
 
 Apart from the broad proposals of Socialism, 
 as a matter of personal conviction quite out- 
 side the scope of Socialism altogether, I am 
 persuaded of the need of much greater facili- 
 ties of divorce than exist at present, divorce, 
 on the score of mutual consent, of faithless- 
 ness, of simple cruelty, of insanity, habitual 
 vice or the prolonged imprisonment of either 
 party. And this being so I find it impossible to 
 condemn on any ground except that it is ''break- 
 ing ranks" and making a confusion, those who by 
 anticipating such wide facilities as I propose have 
 sinned by existing standards. How far and in 
 what manner such breaking of ranks is to be 
 condoned I will presently discuss. But it is clear 
 it is an offence of a different nature from actions 
 one believed to be in themselves and apart from 
 the law, reprehensible things. 
 
 But my scepticisms about the current legal 
 institutions and customary code are not ex- 
 
Of General Conduct 271 
 
 hausted by these modifications I have suggested. 
 I believe firmly in some sort of marriage, that is 
 to say an open declaration of the existence of 
 sexual relations between man and woman, be- 
 cause I am averse to all unnecessary secrecies and 
 because the existence of these peculiarly intimate 
 relationships affects everybody about the persons 
 concerned. It is ridiculous to say as some do that 
 sexual relations between two people affect no one 
 but themselves unless a child is born. They do, 
 because they tend to break down barriers and 
 set-up a peculiar emotional partnership. It is a 
 partnership that kept secret may work as anti- 
 socially as a secret business partnership or a se- 
 cret preferential railway tariff. And I believe too 
 in the general social desirability of the family 
 group, the normal group of fathers and mother and 
 children and in the extreme efficacy in the normal 
 human being of the blood link and pride link 
 between parent and child in securing loving care 
 and upbringing for the child. But this clear 
 adhesion to Marriage and to the Family grouping 
 about mother and father does not close the door 
 to a large series of exceptional cases which our 
 existing institutions and customs ignore or crush. 
 For example, monogamy in general seems to 
 me to be clearly indicated (as doctors say) by the 
 
272 First and Last Things 
 
 fact that there are not several women in the 
 world for every man, but quite as clearly does it 
 seem necessary to recognise that the fact that 
 there are (or were in 1901) 21,436,107 women to 
 20,172,984 men in our British community seems 
 to condemn our present rigorous insistence upon 
 monogamy, unless feminine celibacy has its own 
 delights. But, as I have said, it is now largely 
 believed that the sexual life of a woman is more 
 important to her than his sexual life to a man 
 and less easily ignored. 
 
 It is true also on the former side that for the 
 great majority of people one knows personally, 
 any sort of household but a monogamous one 
 conjures up painful and unpleasant visions. The 
 ordinary civilised woman and the ordinary civil- 
 ised man are alike obsessed with the idea of 
 meeting and possessing one peculiar intimate 
 person, one special exclusive lover who is their 
 very own, and a third person of either sex cannot 
 be associated with that couple without an in- 
 tolerable sense of privacy and confidence and 
 possession destroyed. It is difficult to imagine a 
 second wife in a home, who would not be and feel 
 herself to be a rather excluded and inferior per- 
 son. But that does not abolish the possibility that 
 there are exceptional people somewhere capable 
 
Of General Conduct 273 
 
 of, to coin a phrase, triangular mutuality, and I 
 do not see why we should either forbid or treat 
 with bitterness or hostility a grouping we may 
 consider so inadvisable or so unworkable as never 
 to be adopted, if three people of their own free 
 will desire it. 
 
 The peculiar defects of the human mind when 
 they approach these questions of sex are rein- 
 forced by passions peculiar to the topic, and it is 
 perhaps advisable to point out that to discuss these 
 possibilities is not the same thing as to urge the 
 married reader to take unto himself or herself a 
 second partner or a series of additional partners. 
 We are trained from the nursery to become 
 secretive, muddle-headed and vehemently con- 
 clusive upon sexual matters, until at last the 
 editors of magazines blush at the very phrase and 
 long to put a petticoat over the page that bears it. 
 Yet our rebellious natures insist on being in- 
 terested by it. It seems to me that to judge 
 these large questions from the personal point of 
 view, to insist upon the whole world without 
 exception living exactly in the manner that 
 suits oneself or accords with one's emotional 
 imagination and the forms of delicacy in which 
 one has been trained, is not the proper way to 
 
 deal with them. I want as a sane social organiser 
 18 
 
274 First and Last Things 
 
 to get just as many contented and law-abiding 
 citizens as possible ; I do not want to force people 
 who would otherwise be useful citizens into rebel- 
 lion, concealments and the dark and furtive ways 
 of vice, because they may not love and marry as 
 their temperaments command, and so I want to 
 make the meshes of the law as wide as possible. 
 But the common man will not understand this 
 yet, and seeks to make the meshes just as small 
 as his own private case demands. 
 
 Then marriage, to resume my main discussion, 
 does not necessarily mean cohabitation. All 
 women who desire children do not want to be 
 entrusted with their upbringing. Some women 
 are sexual and philoprogenitive without being 
 sedulously maternal, and some are maternal 
 without much or any sexual passion. There are 
 men and women in the world now, great allies, 
 fond and passionate lovers who do not live nor 
 want to live constantly together. It is at least 
 conceivable that there are women who, while 
 desiring offspring, do not want to abandon great 
 careers for the work of maternity, women again 
 who would be happiest managing and rearing 
 children in manless households that they might 
 even share with other women friends, and men 
 to correspond with those who do not wish to live 
 
Of General Conduct 275 
 
 in a household with wife and children. I submit, 
 these temperaments exist and have a right to exist 
 in their own way. But one must recognise the 
 possibility of these departures from the normal 
 type of household opens up other possibilities. 
 The polygamy that is degrading or absurd under 
 one roof assumes a different appearance when one 
 considers it from the point of view of people whose 
 habit of life does not centre upon an isolated home. 
 All the relations I have glanced at above do 
 as a matter of fact exist to-day, but shamefully 
 and shabbily, tainted with what seems to me an 
 unmerited and unnecessary ignominy. The pun- 
 ishment for bigamy seems to me insane in its 
 severity, contrasted as it is with our leniency to 
 the common seducer. Better ruin a score of 
 women, says the law, than marry two. I do not 
 see why in these matters there should not be 
 much ampler freedom than there is, and this 
 being so I can hardly be expected to condemn 
 with any moral fervour or exclude from my so- 
 ciety those who have seen fit to behave by what 
 I believe may be the standards of a.d. 2000 
 instead of by the standards of 1850. These are 
 offences, so far as they are offences, on an alto- 
 gether different footing from murder, or exacting 
 usury, or the sweating of children, or cruelty, or 
 
276 First and Last Things 
 
 transmitting diseases, or unveracity, or commercial 
 or intellectual or physical prostitution, or any 
 such essentially grave anti-social deeds. We must 
 distinguish between sins and mere errors of 
 judgment and differences of taste from ourselves. 
 To draw up harsh laws, to practise exclusions 
 against everyone who does not see fit to duplicate 
 one's own blameless home life, is to waste a 
 number of courageous and exceptional persons 
 in every generation, to drive many of them into 
 a forced alliance with real crime and embittered 
 rebellion against custom and the law. 
 
§ 29. 
 
 Conduct in Relation to the Thing that Is. 
 — But the reader must keep clear in his mind the 
 distinction between conduct that is right or per- 
 missible in itself and conduct that becomes either 
 inadvisable or mischievous and wrong because of 
 the circumstances about it. There is no harm 
 under ordinary conditions in asking a boy with a 
 pleasant voice to sing a song in the night, but 
 the case is altered altogether if you have reason 
 to suppose that a Red Indian is lying in wait a 
 hundred yards off, holding a loaded rifle and ready 
 to fire at the voice. It is a valid objection to many 
 actions that I do not think objectionable in them- 
 selves, that to do them will discharge a loaded 
 prejudice into the heart of my friend — or even 
 into my own. I belong to the world and my 
 work, and I must not lightly throw my time, my 
 power, my influence away. For a splendid thing 
 any risk or any defiance may be justifiable, but 
 is it a sufficiently splendid thing? So far as he 
 possibly can a man must conform to common 
 
 prejudices, prevalent customs and all laws, — 
 
 277. 
 
278 First and Last Things 
 
 whatever his estimate of them may be. But he 
 must at the same time do his utmost to change 
 what he thinks to be wrong. 
 
 And I think that conformity must be honest 
 conformity. There is no more anti-social act 
 than secret breaches, and only some very urgent 
 and exceptional occasion justifies even the un- 
 veracity of silence about the thing done. If your 
 personal convictions bring you to a breach, let it 
 be an open breach, let there be no misrepresenta- 
 tion of attitudes, no organised fabric of lies, no 
 deception of honourable friends. Of course an 
 open breach need not be an ostentatious breach- 
 to do what is right to yourself without fraud or 
 concealment is one thing, to make a challenge and 
 aggression quite another. Your friends may 
 understand and sympathise and condone, but 
 it does not lie upon you to force them to identify 
 themselves with your act and situation. But 
 better too much openness than too little. Squalid 
 intrigue was the shadow of the old intolerably 
 narrow order ; it is a shadow we want to illuminate 
 out of existence. Secrets will be contraband 
 in the new time. 
 
 And if it chances to you to feel called upon to 
 make a breach with the institution or custom or 
 prejudice that is, remember that doing so is your 
 
Of General Conduct 279 
 
 own affair. You are going to take risks and 
 specialise as an experiment. You must not expect 
 other people about you to share the consequences 
 of your dash forward. You must not drag in 
 confidants and secondaries. You must fight your 
 little battle in front on your own responsibility, 
 unsupported — and take the consequences without 
 repining. 
 
§3<>. 
 
 Conduct towards Transgressions. — So far 
 as breaches of the prohibitions and laws of mar- 
 riage go, to me it seems they are to be tolerated 
 by us in others just in the measure that, within 
 the limits set by discretion, they are frank and 
 truthful and animated by spontaneous passion 
 and pervaded by the quality of beauty. I hate 
 the vulgar sexual intriguer, man or woman, and 
 the smart and shallow atmosphere of unloving 
 lust and vanity about the type, as I hate few 
 kinds of human life ; I would as lief have a polecat 
 in my home, and this sort of person and every 
 sort of prostitute except the victim of utter neces- 
 sity I despise, even though marriage be the fee. 
 But honest lovers should be, I think, a charge 
 and pleasure for us. We must judge each pair 
 as we can. 
 
 One thing renders a sexual relationship in- 
 curably offensive to others and altogether wrong, 
 and that is cruelty. 
 
 But who can define cruelty? How far is the 
 
 leaving of a third person to count as cruelty? 
 
 280 
 
Of General Conduct 281 
 
 There again I hesitate to judge. To love and not 
 be loved is a fate for which it seems no one can be 
 blamed; to lose love and to change one's loving 
 belongs to a subtle interplay beyond analysis or 
 control, but to be deceived or mocked or deliber- 
 ately robbed of love, that at any rate is an abom- 
 inable wrong. 
 
 In all these matters I perceive a general rule is 
 in itself a possible instrument of cruelty. I set 
 down what I can in the way of general principles, 
 but it all leaves off far short of the point of ap- 
 plication. In every case among those we know 
 I think we moderns must judge for ourselves. 
 Where there is doubt, there I hold must be 
 Charity. And with regard to strangers mani- 
 festly our duty is to avoid inquisitorial and 
 uncharitable acts. 
 
 This is as true of financial and economic mis- 
 conduct as of sexual misconduct, of ways of 
 living that are socially harmful and of political 
 faith. We are dealing with people in a mal- 
 adjusted system to whom absolute right living is 
 practically impossible, because there are no ab- 
 solutely right institutions and no simple choice of 
 good or evil, and we have to balance merits and 
 defects in every case. 
 
 Some people are manifestly and essentially 
 
282 First and Last Things 
 
 base and self-seeking and regardless of the happi- 
 ness and welfare of their fellows, some in business 
 affairs and politics as others in love. Some 
 wrong-doers again are evidently so through 
 heedlessness, through weakness, timidity or haste. 
 We have to judge and deal with each sort upon 
 no clear issue but upon impressions they have 
 given us of their spirit and purpose. We owe 
 it to them and ourselves not to judge too rashly 
 or too harshly, but for all that we are obliged to 
 judge and take sides, to avoid the malignant and 
 exclude them from further opportunity, to help 
 and champion the cheated and the betrayed, to 
 forgive and aid the repentant blunderer and by 
 mercy to save the lesser sinner from desperate 
 alliance with the greater. That is the broad rule 
 and it is as much as we have to go upon until the 
 individual case comes before us. 
 
Book the Fourth, 
 Some Personal Things. 
 
 283 
 
§1. 
 
 Personal Love and Life. — It has been most 
 convenient to discuss all that might be generalised 
 about conduct first, to put in the common back- 
 ground the vistas and atmosphere of the scene. 
 But a man's relations are of two orders, and these 
 questions of rule and principle are over and about 
 and round more vivid and immediate interests. 
 A man is not simply a relationship between his 
 individual self and the race, society, the world 
 and God's Purpose. Close about him are per- 
 sons, friends and enemies and lovers and beloved 
 and beautiful people. He desires them, lusts 
 after them, craves their affection, needs their 
 presence, abhors them, hates and desires to 
 limit and suppress them. This is for most of us 
 the flesh and blood of life. We go through the 
 noble scene of the world neither alone nor alone 
 with God, nor serving an undistinguishable mul- 
 titude, but in a company of individualised people. 
 
 Here is a system of motives and passions, im- 
 perious and powerful, which follows no broad 
 
 general rule and in which each man must needs 
 
 285 
 
286 First and Last Things 
 
 be a light unto himself upon innumerable issues. 
 I am satisfied that these personal urgencies are 
 neither to be suppressed nor crudely or ruthlessly 
 subordinated to the general issues. Religious 
 and moral teachers are apt to make this part of 
 life either too detached or too insignificant. They 
 teach it either as if it did not matter or as if it 
 ought not to matter. Indeed our individual 
 friends and enemies stand between us and hide or 
 interpret for us all the larger things. Few of us 
 can even worship alone. We must feel others, 
 and those not strangers, kneeling beside us. 
 
 I have already spoken under the heading of 
 Beliefs of the part that the idea of a Mediator 
 has played and can play in the religious life. I 
 have pointed out how the imagination of men 
 has sought and found in certain personalities, 
 historical or fictitious, a bridge between the 
 blood-warm private life and the intolerable 
 spaciousness of right and wrong. The world is 
 full of such figures and their images, Christ and 
 Mary and the Saints and all the lesser, dearer gods 
 of heathendom. These things and the human 
 passion for living leaders and heroes and leagues 
 and brotherhoods all confess the mediatory role, 
 the mediatory possibilities of personal love be- 
 tween the individual and the great synthesis of 
 
Some Personal Things 287 
 
 which he is a part and agent. The great synthesis 
 may become incarnate in personal love, and 
 personal love lead us directly to universal service. 
 I write may, and temper that sentence to the 
 quality of a possibility alone. This is only true 
 for those who believe, for those who have faith, 
 whose lives have been unified, who have found 
 Salvation. For those whose lives are chaotic, 
 personal loves must also be chaotic; this or that 
 passion, malice, a jesting humour, some physical 
 lust, gratified vanity, egotistical pride, will rule 
 and limit the relationship and colour its ultimate 
 futility. But the Believer uses personal love 
 and sustains himself by personal love. It is his 
 provender, the meat and drink of his campaign. 
 
§2. 
 
 The Nature of Love. — It is well perhaps to 
 look a little into the factors that make up love. 
 
 Love does not seem to me to be a simple ele- 
 mental thing. It is, as I have already said, one 
 of the vicious tendencies of the human mind to 
 think that whatever can be given a simple name 
 can be abstracted as a single something in a state 
 of quintessential purity. I have pointed out that 
 this is not true of Harmony nor Beauty, and that 
 these are synthetic things. You bring together 
 this which is not beautiful and that which is not 
 beautiful, and behold! Beauty! So also love is, 
 I think, a synthetic thing. One observes this 
 and that, one is interested and stirred; suddenly 
 the metal fuses, the dry bones live ! One loves. 
 
 Almost every interest in one's being may be a 
 factor in the love synthesis. But apart from 
 the overflowing of the parental instinct that makes 
 all that is fine and delicate and young dear to us 
 and to be cherished, there are two main factors 
 that bring us into love with our fellows. There is 
 
 first the emotional elements in our nature that 
 
 288 
 
Some Personal Things 289 
 
 arise out of the tribal necessity, out of a fellow- 
 ship in battle and hunting, drinking and feasting, 
 out of the needs and excitements and delights 
 of those occupations; and there is next the in- 
 tenser narrower desirings and gratitudes, satis- 
 factions and expectations that come from sexual 
 intercourse. Now both these factors originate 
 in physical needs and consummate in material 
 acts, and it is well to remember that this great 
 growth of love in life roots there, and, it may be, 
 dies when its roots are altogether cut away. 
 
 At its lowest, love is the mere sharing of, or 
 rather the desire to share, pleasure and excite- 
 ment, the excitements of conflict 01 lust or what 
 not. I think that the desire to partake, the 
 desire to merge one's individual identity with 
 another's, remains a necessary element in all 
 personal loves. It is a way out of ourselves, a 
 breaking down of our individual separation, just as 
 hate is an intensification of that. Personal love 
 is the narrow and intense form of that breaking 
 down, just as what I call Salvation is its widest, 
 most extensive form. We cast aside our reserves, 
 our secrecies, our defences; we open ourselves; 
 touches that would be intolerable from common 
 people become a mystery of delight; acts of self- 
 abasement and self-sacrifice are charged with 
 
 10 
 
290 First and Last Things 
 
 symbolical pleasure. We cannot tell which of us 
 is me, which you. Our imprisoned egoism looks 
 out through this window, forgets its wall and is 
 for those brief moments released and universal. 
 
 For most of us the strain of primordial sexual 
 emotion in our love is very strong. Many men 
 can love only women, many women only men, 
 and some can scarcely love at all without bodily 
 desire. But the love of fellowship is a strong one 
 also, and for many, love is most possible and 
 easy when the thought of physical love-making 
 has been banished. Then the lovers will pursue 
 other interests together, will work together or 
 journey together. So we have the warm fellow- 
 ships of men for men and women for women. 
 But even then it may happen that men friends 
 together will talk of women, and women friends 
 of men. Nevertheless we have also the strong 
 and altogether sexless glow of those who have 
 fought well together, or drunk or jested together 
 or hunted a common quarry. 
 
 Now it seems to me that the Believer must also 
 be a Lover, that he will love as much as he can 
 and as many people as he can, and in many moods 
 and ways. As I have said already, many of those 
 who have taught religion and morality in the past 
 have been neglectful or unduly jealous of the 
 
Some Personal Things 291 
 
 in tenser personal loves. They have been, to put 
 it by a figure, urgent upon the road to the ocean. 
 To that they would lead us, though we come to 
 it shivering, fearful and unprepared, and they 
 grudge it that we should strip and plunge into 
 the wayside stream. But all streams, all rivers, 
 come from this ocean in the beginning, lead back 
 to it in the end. 
 
 It is the essential fact of love as I conceive it, 
 that it breaks down the boundaries of self. That 
 love is most perfect which does most completely 
 merge its lovers. But no love is altogether per- 
 fect, and for most men and women love is no more 
 than a partial and temporary lowering of the 
 barriers that keep them apart. With many, the 
 attraction of love seems always to fall short of 
 what I hold to be its end ; it draws people together 
 in the most momentary of self -forgetfuln ess, and 
 for the rest seems rather to enhance their ego- 
 tisms and their difference. They are secret from 
 one another even in their embraces. There is a 
 sort of love that is egotistical lust almost regard- 
 less of its partner, a sort of love that is mere flesh- 
 less pride and vanity at a white heat. There is 
 the love-making that springs from sheer bore- 
 dom, like a man reading a story-book to fill an 
 hour. These inferior loves seek to accomplish an 
 
292 First and Last Things 
 
 agreeable act, or they seek the pursuit or glory 
 of a living possession, they aim at gratification or 
 excitement or conquest. True love seeks to be 
 mutual and easy-minded, free of doubts, but 
 these egotistical mockeries of love have always 
 resentment in them and hatred in them and a 
 watchful distrust. Jealousy is the measure of 
 self-love in love. 
 
 True love is a synthetic thing, an outcome of 
 life, it is not a universal thing. It is, I hold, the 
 individualised correlative of Salvation; like that 
 it is a synthetic consequence of conflicts and con- 
 fusions. Many people do not desire or need Sal- 
 vation, they cannot understand it, much less can 
 they achieve it; for them chaotic life suffices. 
 So too, very many never, save for some rare mo- 
 ment of illumination, desire or feel love. Its 
 happy abandonment, its careless self -giving, these 
 things are mere foolishness to them. But much 
 has been said and sung of faith and love alike, 
 and in their confused greed these things also they 
 desire and parody. So they act worship, they 
 make a fine fuss of their devotions. And also 
 they must have a few half- furtive, half -flaunting 
 fallen love-triumphs prowling the secret back- 
 streets of their lives, they know not why. 
 
 (In setting this down be it remembered I am 
 
Some Personal Things 293 
 
 doing my best to tell what is in me because I am 
 trying to put my whole view of life before the 
 reader without any vital omissions. These are 
 difficult matters to explain because they have no 
 clear outlines; one lets in a hard light suddenly 
 upon things that have lurked in warm intimate 
 shadows, dim inner things engendering motives. 
 I am not only telling quasi-secret things but explor- 
 ing them for myself. They are none the less real 
 and important because they are elusive.) 
 
 True love I think is not simply felt but known. 
 Just as Salvation as I conceive it demands a fine 
 intelligence and mental activity, so love calls to 
 brain and body alike and all one's powers, there 
 is always elaborate thinking and dreaming in 
 love. Love will stir imaginations that have never 
 stirred before. 
 
 Love may be and is for the most part one-sided. 
 It is the going out from oneself that is love and 
 not the accident of its return. It is the expedi- 
 tion whether it fail or succeed. 
 
 But an expedition starves that comes to no 
 port. Love seeks mutuality and grows by the 
 sense and hope of responses, or we should love 
 beautiful inanimate things more than we do. 
 Failing a full return, it makes the most of an 
 inadequate return. Failing a sustained return 
 
294 First and Last Things 
 
 it welcomes a temporary coincidence. But it seeks 
 a full return always, and the fulness of life has 
 come only to those who, loving, have met the 
 lover. 
 
 I am trying to be as explicit as possible in thus 
 writing about Love. But the substance in which 
 one works here is emotion that evades definition; 
 poetic flashes and figures of speech are truer than 
 prosaic statements. Body, and the most sub- 
 limated ecstasy pass into one another, exchange 
 themselves, and elude every net of words we 
 cast. 
 
 I have put out two ideas of unification and 
 self-devotion, extremes upon a scale one from 
 another ; one of these ideas is that devotion to the 
 Purpose in things I have called Salvation; the 
 other that devotion to some other most fitting 
 and satisfying individual which is passionate 
 love, the former extensive as the universe, the 
 latter the intensest thing in life. These it seems 
 to me are the boundary and the living capital of 
 the empire of life we rule. 
 
 All empires need a comprehending boundary, 
 but many have not one capital but many chief 
 cities, and all have cities and towns and villages 
 beyond the capital. It is an impoverished capital 
 that has no dependent towns, and it is a poor love 
 
Some Personal Things 295 
 
 that will not overflow in affection and eager kindly 
 curiosity and sympathy and the search for fresh 
 mutuality. To love is to go loving radiantly 
 through the world. To love and be loved is to 
 be fearless of experience and rich in the power to 
 give. 
 
§3- 
 
 The Will to Love. — Love is a thing to a large 
 extent in its beginnings voluntary and controlla- 
 ble, and at last quite involuntary. It is so hedged 
 about by obligations and consequences, real and 
 artificial, that for the most part I think people 
 are overmuch afraid of it. And also the tradition 
 of sentiment that suggests its forms and guides 
 it in the world about us, is far too strongly ex- 
 clusive. It is not so much when love is glowing 
 as when it is becoming habitual that it is jealous 
 for itself and others. Lovers a little exhausting 
 their mutual interest find a fillip in an alliance 
 against the world. They bury their talent of 
 understanding and sympathy to return it duly 
 in a clean napkin. They narrow their interest 
 in life lest the other lover should misunderstand 
 their amplitude as disloyalty. 
 
 Our institutions and social customs seem all to 
 assume a definiteness of preference, a singleness 
 and a limitation of love, which is not psychologi- 
 cally justifiable. People do not, I think, fall 
 
 naturally into agreement with these assumptions; 
 
 296 
 
Some Personal Things 297 
 
 they train themselves to agreement. They take 
 refuge from experiences that seem to carry with 
 them the risk at least of perplexing situations, in 
 a theory of barred possibilities and locked doors. 
 How far this shy and cultivated irresponsive 
 lovelessness towards the world at large may not 
 carry with it the possibility of compensating in- 
 tensities, I do not know. Quite equally probable 
 is a starvation of one's emotional nature. 
 
 The same reasons that make me decide against 
 mere wanton abstinences make me hostile to the 
 common convention of emotional indifference to 
 most of the charming and interesting people one 
 encounters. In pleasing and being pleased, in 
 the mutual interest, the mutual opening out of 
 people to one another, is the key of the door to 
 all sweet and mellow living. 
 
§ 4- 
 
 Love and Death. — For him who has faith, 
 death, so far as it is his own death, ceases to pos- 
 sess any quality of terror. The experiment will 
 be over, the rinsed beaker returned to its shelf, 
 the crystals gone dissolving down the wastepipe 
 and the duster sweeps the bench. But the deaths 
 of those we love are harder to understand, or bear. 
 
 It happens that of those very intimate with 
 me I have lost only one, and that came slowly and 
 elaborately, a long gradual separation wrought 
 by the accumulation of years and mental decay, 
 but many close friends and many whom I have 
 counted upon for sympathy and fellowship have 
 passed out of my world. I miss such a one as 
 Bob Stevenson, that luminous, extravagant talker, 
 that eager fantastic mind. I miss him whenever 
 I write. It is less pleasure now to write a story 
 since he will never read it, much less give a word 
 of praise for it. And I miss York Powell's 
 friendly laughter and Henley's exuberant wel- 
 come. They made a warmth that has gone, 
 
 those men. I can understand why I, with my 
 
 298 
 
Some Personal Things 299 
 
 fumbling lucidities and explanations, have to 
 finish up presently and go, expressing as I do 
 the mood of a type and of a time, but not those 
 radiant presences. 
 
 And the gap these men have left, these 
 men with whom after all I only sat now and 
 again, or wrote to in a cheerful mood or got 
 a letter from at odd times, gives me some 
 measure of the thing that happens, that may 
 happen, when the mind that is always near 
 one's thoughts, the person who moves to one's 
 movement and lights nearly all the common 
 flow of events about one with the reminder 
 of fellowship and meaning — ceases. 
 
 Faith which feeds on personal love must at 
 last prevail over it. If Faith has any virtue it 
 must have it here when we find ourselves bereft 
 and isolated, facing a world from which the light 
 has fled, leaving it bleak and strange. We live 
 for experience and the race ; these individual inter- 
 ludes are just helps to that; the warm inn in 
 which we lovers met and refreshed was but a 
 halt on a journey. When we have loved to the 
 in tensest point we have done our best with each 
 other. To keep to that image of the inn, we must 
 not sit overlong at our wine beside the fire. We 
 must go on to new experiences and new adven- 
 
300 First and Last Things 
 
 tures. Death comes to part us and turn us out 
 and set us on the road again. 
 
 But the dead stay where we leave them. 
 
 I suppose that is the real good in death that 
 they do stay; that it makes them immortal for 
 us. Living they were mortal. But now they 
 can never spoil themselves or be spoilt by change 
 again. They have finished — for us indeed just 
 as much as themselves. There they sit for ever, 
 rounded off and bright and done. Beside these 
 clear and certain memories I have of my dead, 
 my impressions of the living are vague provisional 
 things. 
 
 And since they are gone out of the world and 
 become immortal memories in me, I feel no need 
 to think of them as in some disembodied and 
 incomprehensible elsewhere, changed and yet not 
 done. I want actual immortality for those I love 
 as little as I desire it for myself. 
 
 Indeed I dislike the idea that those I have 
 loved are immortal in any real sense ; it conjures 
 up dim uncomfortable drifting phantoms that 
 have no kindred with the flesh and blood I knew. 
 I would as soon think of them trailing after the 
 tides up and down the Channel outside my win- 
 dow. Bob Stevenson for me is a presence utterly 
 concrete, slouching, eager, quick-eyed, intimate 
 
Some Personal Things 301 
 
 and profound, carelessly dressed (at Sandgate he 
 commonly wore a little felt hat that belonged to 
 his son) and himself, himself, indissoluble matter 
 and spirit, down to the heels of his boots. I 
 cannot conceive of his as any but a concrete im- 
 mortality. If he lives, he lives as I knew him and 
 clothed as I knew him and with his unalterable 
 voice, in a heaven of daedal flowers or a hell of 
 ineffectual flame, he lives, dreaming and talking 
 and explaining, explaining it all very earnestly 
 and preposterously, so I picture him, into the ear 
 of the amused, incredulous principal person in 
 the place. 
 
 I have a real hatred for those dreary fools and 
 knaves who would have me suppose that Henley, 
 that crippled Titan, may conceivably be tapping 
 at the underside of a mahogany table or scratching 
 stifled incoherence into a locked slate! Henley 
 tapping! — for the professional purposes of Sludge! 
 If he found himself among the circumstances of 
 a spiritualist seance, he would, I know, instantly 
 smash the table with that big fist of his. And as 
 the splinters flew surely York Powell out of the 
 dead past from which he shines on me, would 
 laugh that hearty laugh of his back into the world 
 again. 
 
 Henley is nowhere now except that, red-faced 
 
302 First and Last Things 
 
 and jolly like an October sunset, "October mild 
 and boon" he leans over a gate at Worthing 
 after a long day of picnicking at Clanktonbury 
 Ring, or sits at his Woking table praising and 
 quoting The Admirable Baskville, or blue-shirted 
 and wearing the hat that Nicholson has painted, 
 is thrust and lugged laughing and talking aside 
 in his bath-chair along the Worthing esplan- 
 acic • • • 
 
 And Bob Stevenson walks for ever about a 
 garden in Chiswick, talking in the dusk. . . . 
 
§ 5- 
 
 The Consolation of Failure. — That parable 
 of the talents I have made such free use of in this 
 book has one significant defect. It gives but 
 two cases, and three are possible. There was 
 first the man who buried his talent, and of his 
 condemnation we are assured. But those others 
 all took their talents and used them courageously 
 and came back with gain. Was that gain inevi- 
 table? Does courage always ensure us victory? 
 Because if that is so we can all be heroes, and 
 valour is the better part of discretion. Alas! the 
 faith in such magic dies. What of the possible 
 case of the man who took his two or three talents 
 and invested them as best he could and was de- 
 ceived or heedless and lost them, interest and 
 principal together? 
 
 There is something harder to face than death, 
 and that is the realisation of failure and mis- 
 directed effort and wrong-doing. 
 
 Faith is no Open Sesame to right-doing, much 
 
 less is it the secret of success. The service of 
 
 God on earth is no processional triumph. What 
 
 303 
 
304 First and Last Things 
 
 if one does wrong so extremely as to condemn 
 one's life, to make oneself part of the refuse and 
 not of the building? Or what if one is misjudged, 
 or it may be too pitilessly judged, and one's co- 
 operation despised and the help one brought 
 becomes a source of weakness? Or suppose that 
 the fine scheme one made lies shattered or wrecked 
 by one's own act, or through some hidden blemish 
 one's offering is rejected and flung back and one 
 is thrust out? 
 
 So in the end it may be you or I will find we 
 have been anvil and not hammer in the Purpose 
 of God. 
 
 Then indeed will come the time for Faith, for 
 the last work of Faith, to say still steadfastly, 
 disgraced or dying, defeated or discredited, that 
 all is well. 
 
 "This and not that was my appointed work, 
 and this I had to be." 
 
§6. 
 
 The Last Confession. — So these broken con- 
 fessions and statements of mood and attitude 
 come to an end. 
 
 But at this end, since I have, I perceive, run a 
 little into a pietistic strain, I must repeat again 
 how provisional and personal I know all these 
 things to be. I began by disavowing ultimates. 
 My beliefs, my dogmas, my rules, they are made 
 for my campaigning needs, like the knapsack 
 and water-bottle of a Cockney soldier invading 
 some stupendous mountain gorge. About him 
 are fastnesses and splendours, torrents and cata- 
 racts, glaciers and untrodden snows. He comes 
 tramping on heel-worn boots and ragged socks. 
 Beauties and blue mysteries shine upon him and 
 appeal to him, the enigma of beauty smiling the 
 faint strange smile of Leonardo's Monna Lisa. 
 He sees a light on the grass like music; and the 
 blossom on the trees against the sky brings him 
 near weeping. Such things come to him, give 
 themselves to him. I do not know why he should 
 
 not in response fling his shabby gear aside and 
 30 305 
 
So6 First and Last Things 
 
 behave like a god; I only know that he does not 
 do so. His grunt of appreciation is absurd, his 
 speech goes like a crippled thing — and withal, 
 and partly by virtue of the knapsack and water- 
 bottle, he is conqueror of the valley. The valley 
 is his for the taking. 
 
 There is a duality in life that I cannot express 
 except by such images as this, a duality so that 
 we are at once absurd and full of sublimity, and 
 most absurd when we are most anxious to render 
 the real splendours that pervade u*» This du- 
 plicity in life seems to me at times ineradicable, 
 at times like the confusing of something essen- 
 tially simple, like the reduplication of something 
 seen through a doubly refracting medium. You 
 think then that you have only to turn the crystal 
 of Iceland spar about in order to have the whole 
 thing plain. But you never get it plain. I have 
 been doing my halting utmost to get down sin- 
 cerely and simply my vision of life and duty. I 
 have permitted myself no defensive restraints! 
 I have shamelessly written my starkest, and it is 
 plain to me that a smile that is not mine plays 
 over my most urgent passages. There is a 
 rebellious rippling of the grotesque under our 
 utmost tragedy and gravity. One's martialled 
 phrases grimace as one turns and wink at the 
 
Some Personal Things 307 
 
 reader. None the less they signify. Do you 
 note how in this that I have written, such a word 
 as Believer will begin to wear a capital letter and 
 give itself solemn ridiculous airs? It does not 
 matter. It carries its message for all that neces- 
 sary superficial absurdity. 
 
 Thought has made me shameless. It does 
 not matter at last at all if one is a little harsh or 
 indelicate or ridiculous if that also is in the 
 mystery of things. 
 
 Behind everything I perceive the smile that 
 makes all effort and discipline temporary, all the 
 stress and pain of life endurable. In the last 
 resort I do not care whether I am seated on a 
 throne or drunk or dying in a kitchen. I follow 
 my leading. In the ultimate I know, though I 
 cannot prove my knowledge in any way what- 
 ever, that everything is right and all things mine. 
 
 THE END. 
 
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