MUCH of what I have been saying was written before this war began. In
the great hush that has fallen upon the nations, is it not well for
us to stop and ask anew whither our progress has been tending? What
words have those who have been taught to live and breathe and think
in terms of matter, wherewith to voice this awful stirring of the
soul? People cry out that the Dark Ages will come again through this
fearful slaughter, this waste of resources intellectual and material.
Have not the Dark Ages been with us for decades? For mankind, more
and more stripped of the deeper faith, the larger hope, more and more
cut off from the finer part of his own nature, what darker ages can
there be than these shadowed by the dreary positivism, undiscussed and
undefined, but merely assumed, of our day? Many a thinker must see,
in this present awful crisis, not an isolated phenomenon, not a mere
political event for which a train of political causes had been laid,
but also one of the natural results of our ways of thinking, of our
kind of progress. The growth of material over spiritual conceptions in
the last fifty years is appalling; to such an end the Gospel of the
Perfect Brute legitimately leads. We may believe ourselves through this
struggle untouched, apart, and watch with wonder and surprise, but the
same forces are at work with us, and potent. This terrible, crashing
exposure is something to make us, who are not in the thick of the
battle, stop and think.
We are shuddering at a German nation Nietzscheized, brutalized, as
we conceive, through a brutal ideal; but are the Germans so far
removed? Have they not simply adopted, a little more vigorously, a
little more frankly than we, a doctrine which is becoming the moving
force in all countries, replacing Christianity? Are they not simply
the most progressive of all nations? Since the theory of evolution
was demonstrated, the doctrine of the survival of the fittest, which
should be taught as the mere working of a physical law, has come to
be taught as ethics, and an odd confusion of thought has come about.
How insidiously the idea of the biological necessity is coming to
be considered the whole necessity of man, we are only now faintly
realizing; the need of spiritual struggle, of spur to that instinct
which may save man from much that had seemed biological necessity, is
becoming more and more dim. It is one thing to recognize warfare in the
physical world, the strife that attended the evolution of man; it is
another thing to exalt this to a code of conduct and deliberately teach
it. A conscious lowering of nature to the first primitive impulse, a
deliberate going backward, is a very different matter from following
these impulses in the slow process of growth. If a higher thought
comes along your line of vision, woe betide you if you choose the
lower! Doubtless dragons and prehistoric monsters would have behaved
differently if they had got better ideas into their heads; we shall not
be acquitted by posterity if, after a finer ideal has been suggested,
we go back to writhing and biting in the slime.
I am a plain American citizen, with no direct connection with this war,
as innocent of having anything to do with starting it as the Kaiser
is claimed by his upholders to be; yet I feel a sense of guilt. I am
ashamed to look the young in the face; it seems to me that, in some
way, we older folk have betrayed them in letting humanity come to such
a pass; in tampering with the ways of thought and of belief which have
let this thing be. This deification of biological man has not as yet
gone with us so far as exalting the gospel of warfare; we cry out, when
we see the logical outcome of ideas taught with such fervor through the
last decades, against the German evangel of the mailed fist.
Yet England too has her theorists teaching the biological necessity of
war, that the fundamental laws which govern human conduct are the laws
of brute force, the survival of the fittest in death struggle. America
has been too profoundly influenced by Germany in educational matters,
has sat too submissively at her feet, to escape. Accepting so many
of the minor premises of her teaching, will not the major ultimately
follow as a matter of course?
It is Germany that has carried furthest this materialistic modernism,
has perfected it. The word Germany has been a name to conjure with
in swift denial if one but ventured to suggest the possibility of a
spiritual interpretation of life. High intellectual achievement has
been that of the Germany of these later years, but not the highest; she
has kept the mailed fist upon the spiritual aspirations of mankind,
and has made a treaty, on her own terms, with the human soul, with
what loss of territory! We have not yet accepted the whole of this
new evangel; we have doubts, mental reserves. Neither have we, in our
period of enlightenment, made gain in developing those forces of mind
and soul that would enable us to refute it.
Man, from a purely biological point of view, indulging in the
biological necessity of war in the year of our Lord 1915, is a sorry
spectacle, but perhaps it is, as Mr. Shandy said, “no year of our
Lord at all,” so progressive are we. Now that we make our swift
leap backward many thousand years, we pause to wonder whether this
means only a quickened pace in a direction already chosen. Of the
achievements of the mailed fist the Neanderthaler man, barring a
difference of weapons, would have been capable. How shall we escape
this progress which is utter retrogression?
This overwhelming catastrophe has brought the issues squarely before
us. It is well that the forces we have to fight have come into the
open; we know at last the world we live in. We are face to face, with
a distinctness never before presented, with two great principles: the
law of brute force, of the survival of the fittest, made into a code
of conduct; the law of Christianity, with its possibility of higher
development, finer progress than brute force dreamed,--the growth of
the greater through sacrifice of the less; soul-achievement at the
expense of flesh. In this great hour of need shall we let the shallow
intellectualism of much recent thought dominate, or shall we boldly
choose that faith in which the best of human life, from its first dim
stirring to triumphant self-sacrifice, is summed up? One way lies
inevitable slipping backward; the other way lies progress in inner
life too great for word or present vision.
These are crucial moments; how great the crisis none may understand.
Many an idealist, lost in the more than forty years of materialism of
our time, is praying that out of the horror of the present may come
better things: a deeper sense of the deepest needs of life; a knowledge
that neither material comfort, nor physical health, nor materialistic
thought can wholly satisfy; a hunger and thirst for which only the
spiritual can suffice. Suffering bears strange fruit, and the suffering
of the present days and of the days to come is incalculable. Even the
mental anguish of mere watchers of the strife may help reveal to the
modern world as profound need of faith.
One thing is evident in all this awful crash: men still are brave;
never before, perhaps, have they fought against such great odds. The
splendor of their courage dims our eyes. Shall the fighters in the
world of spirit, “fighters in the noblest fight,” be less brave in
defending in the face of odds, perhaps never so great before, these
inner truths, deeper than dogma, deeper than theology, deeper than life
itself, the immemorial heritage of the race,--longing unutterable for
righteousness, for faith in the spiritual, for enlarging and unending
life?