preceded me, while admiring the beauty and ingenuity of the
superstructures they have raised, I have been busy, according to my
practice, in questioning the foundations. And this is the kind of
result I have arrived at. All political convictions vary between the
two extremes which I will call Collectivism and Anarchy. Each of these
pursues at all costs a certain end--Collectivism, order, and Anarchy,
liberty. Each is held as a faith and propagated as a religion. And
between them lie those various compromises between faith and
experience, idea and fact, which are represented by liberalism,
conservatism, and the like. Now, the degree of enthusiasm which
accompanies a belief, is commonly in direct proportion to its freedom
from empirical elements. Simplicity and immediacy are the
characteristics of all passionate conviction. But a critic like myself
cannot believe that in politics, or anywhere in the field of practical
action, any such simple and immediate beliefs are really and wholly
true. Thus, in the case before us, I would point out that neither
liberty nor order are sufficient ends in themselves, though each, I
think, is part of the end. The liberty that is desirable is that of
good people pursuing Good in order; and the order that is desirable is
that of good people pursuing Good in liberty. This is a correction
which, perhaps, both collectivist and anarchist would accept. What
they want, they would say, is that kind of liberty and that kind of
order which I have described. But as liberty and order, so conceived,
imply one another, the difference between the two positions ceases to
be one of ends and becomes one of means. But every problem of means is
one of extreme complexity which can only be solved, in the most
tentative way, by observation and experiment. And opinions based upon
such a process, though they may be strongly held, cannot be held with
the simplicity and force of a religious or ethical intuition. We
might, conceivably, on this basis adopt the position either of the
collectivist or of the anarchist; but we should do so not as
enthusiasts, but as critics, with a full consciousness that we are
resting not upon an absolute principle, but upon a balance of
probabilities.
"This, then, is the first point I wished to make, that the whole
question is one to be attacked by criticism, not by intuition. But
now, tested by criticism, both the extreme positions suggest the
gravest possible difficulties and doubts. In the case of anarchy,
especially, these force themselves upon the most superficial view. The
anarchist maintains, in effect, that to bring about his ideal of
ordered liberty all you have to do is to abolish government. But he
can point to no experience that will justify such a belief. It is
based upon a theory of human nature which is contradicted by all the
facts known to us. For if men, were it not for government, might be
living in the garden of Eden, how comes it that they ever emerged from
that paradise? No, it is not government that is the root of our
troubles, it is the niggardliness of Nature and the greed of man. And
both these are primitive facts which would be strengthened, not
destroyed, by anarchy. Can it be believed that the result would be
satisfactory? The anarchist may indeed reply that anything would be
better than what exists. And I can well understand how some generous
and sensitive souls, or some victims of intolerable oppression, may be
driven into such counsels. But they are surely counsels of despair.
Or is it possible really to hold--as MacCarthy apparently does--that on
the eve of a bloody revolution, whereby all owners of property will be
summarily deprived of all they have, the friendly and co-operative
instincts of human nature will immediately come into play without
friction; that the infinitely complex problems of production and
distribution will solve themselves, as it were, of their own accord;
that there will be a place ready for everybody to do exactly the work
he wants; that everybody will want to work at something, and will be
contented with the wage assigned him, that there will be no shortage,
no lack of adaptation of demand to supply; and all this achieved, not
by virtue of any new knowledge or new capacity, but simply by a
rearrangement of existing elements? Does anyone, does MacCarthy
really, in a calm moment, believe all this? And is he prepared to
stake society upon his faith? If he be, he is indeed beyond the reach
of my watering-pot. I leave him, therefore, burning luridly and
unsubdued, and pass on to Allison.
"Allison's flame is gentler; and I would not wish, even if I could,
altogether to extinguish it. But I am anxious, I confess, to temper
it; for in colour, to my taste, it is a little ghastly; and I fear that
if it increased in intensity, it might even become too hot, though I do
not suggest that that is a present danger. To drop the metaphor, my
objections to collectivism are not as fundamental as my objections to
anarchy, nor are they based upon any lack of appreciation of the
advantages of that more equitable distribution of the opportunities of
life which I take to be at the bottom of the collectivist ideal. I do
not share--no man surely who has reflected could share--the common
prejudice that there is something fundamental, natural, and inevitable
about the existing organization of property. On the contrary, it is
clear to me that it is inequitable; and that the substitution of the
system advocated by collectivists would be an immense improvement, if
it could be successfully carried out, and if it did not endanger other
Goods, which may be even more important than equality of opportunity.
Nor do I hold that in a collectivist state there need be any dangerous
relaxation of that motive of self-interest which every reasonable man
must admit to be, up to a point, the most potent source of all
practical energy. I do not see why the state should not pay its
servants according to merit just as private companies do, and make the
rewards of ambition depend on efficiency. In this purely economic
region there is not, so it seems to me, anything absurd or chimerical
in the socialist ideal. My difficulty here is of a different kind. I
do not see how, by the democratic machinery contemplated, it will be
possible to secure officials sufficiently competent and disinterested
to be entrusted with functions so important and so difficult as those
which would be demanded of them under the socialist regime. In a
democracy the government can hardly rise above--in practice, I think,
it tends to fall below--the average level of honesty and intelligence.
In the United States, for example, it is notorious that the whole
machinery of government, and especially of local government, where the
economic functions are important, is exploited by the more unscrupulous
members of the community; and this tendency must be immensely
accentuated in every society in proportion as the functions of
government become important. A socialist state badly administered
would, I believe, be worse than the state under which we live, to the
same degree in which, when well administered, it would be better. And
I do not, I confess, see what guarantees socialists can offer that the
administration will be good. I have far less confidence than Allison
in mere machinery; and I am sure that no machinery will produce good
results in a society where a large proportion of the citizens have no
other idea than to exploit the powers of government in their own
interest. But such, I believe, is the case in existing societies; and
I do not see by what miracle they are going to be transformed.
"Such is my first difficulty with regard to collectivism. And though
it would not prevent me from supporting, as in fact I do support,
cautious and tentative experiments in the direction of practical
socialism, it does prevent me from looking to a collectivist future
with anything like the breezy confidence which animates Allison. And I
will go further: I will say that no man who possesses an adequate
intelligence, and does not deliberately stifle it, has a right to any
such confidence. Setting aside, however, for the sake of argument,
this difficulty, and admitting the possibility of an honest and
efficient collectivist state, I am confronted with a further and even
graver cause of hesitation. For while I consider that the distribution
of the opportunities of life is, under the existing system, in the
highest degree capricious and inequitable, yet I would prefer such
inequity to the most equitable arrangement in the world if it afforded
a better guarantee for the realization of certain higher goods than
would be afforded by the improved system. And I am not clear in my own
mind, and I do not see how anyone can be clear, that collectivism gives
as good a security as the present system for the realization of these
higher goods. And this brings me back to the question of liberty. On
this point there is, I am well aware, a great deal of cant talked, and
I have no wish to add to it. Under our present arrangements, I admit,
for the great mass of people, there is no liberty worth the name;
seeing that they are bound and tied all their lives to the meanest
necessities. And yet we see that out of the midst of all this chaos of
wrong, there have emerged and do emerge artists, poets, men of science,
saints. And the appearance of such men seems to me to depend on the
fact that a considerable minority have the power to choose, for good or
for evil, their own life, to follow their bent, even in the face of
tremendous difficulties, and perhaps because of those difficulties, in
the more fortunate cases, to realize, at whatever cost of suffering,
great works and great lives. But under the system sketched by Allison
I have the gravest doubts whether any man of genius would ever emerge.
The very fact that everybody's career will be regulated for him, and
his difficulties smoothed away, that, in a word, the open road will
imply the beaten track, will, I fear, diminish, if not destroy, the
enterprise, the innate spirit of adventure, in the spiritual as in the
physical world, on which depends all that we call, or ought to call,
progress. A collectivist state, it is true, might establish and endow
academies; but would it ever produce a Shakespeare or a Michelangelo?
It might engender and foster religious orthodoxy; but would it have a
place for the reformer or the saint? Should we not have to pay for the
general level of comfort and intelligence, by suppressing the only
thing good in itself, the manifestation of genius? I do not say
dogmatically that it would be so: I do not even say dogmatically that,
even if it were, the argument would be conclusive against the
collectivist state. But the issue is so tremendous that it necessarily
makes me pause, as it must, I contend, any candid man, who is not
prejudiced by a preconceived ideal.
"Now, it is not for the sake of recommending any opinion of my own that
I have dwelt on these considerations. It is, rather, to illustrate and
drive home the point with which I began, that the intellect has its
rights, that it enters into every creed, and that it undermines, in
every creed, all elements of mere irrational or anti-rational faith;
that this fact can only be disguised by a conscious or unconscious
predetermination, not to let the intellect have its say; and that such
predetermination is a very serious error and vice. It is without shame
and without regret, on the contrary it is with satisfaction and
self-approval, that I find in my own case, my intelligence daily more
and more undermining my instinctive beliefs. If, as some have held, it
were necessary to choose between reason and passion, I would choose
reason. But I find no such necessity; for reason to me herself is a
passion. Men think the life of reason cold. How little do they know
what it is to be responsive to every call, solicited by every impulse,
yet still, like the magnet, vibrate ever to the north, never so tense,
never so aware of the stress and strain of force as when most
irremovably fixed upon that goal. The intensity of life is not to be
measured by the degree of oscillation. It is at the stillest point
that the most tremendous energies meet; and such a point is the
intelligence open to infinity. For such stillness I feel myself to be
destined, if ever I could attain it. But others, I suppose, like
MacCarthy, have a different fate. In the celestial world of souls, the
hierarchy of spirits, there is need of the planet no less than of its
sun. The station and gravity of the one determines the orbit of the
other, and the antagonism that keeps them apart also knits them
together. There is no motion of MacCarthy's but I vibrate to it; and
about my immobility he revolves. But both of us, as I am inclined to
think, are included in a larger system and move together on a remoter
centre. And the very law of our contention, as perhaps one day we may
come to see, is that of a love that by discord achieves harmony."
THE conclusion of Martin's speech left me somewhat in doubt how to
proceed. All of the company who were primarily interested in politics
had now spoken; and I was afraid there might be a complete break in the
subject of our discourse. Casting about, I could think of nothing
better than to call upon Wilson, the biologist. For though he was a
specialist, he regarded everything as a branch of his specialty; and
would, I knew, be as ready to discourse on society as on anything else.
Although, therefore, I disliked a certain arrogance he was wont to
display, I felt that, since he was to speak, this was the proper place
to introduce him. I asked him accordingly to take up the thread of the
debate; and without pause his aggressive voice began to assail our ears.
"I don't quite know," he began, "why a mere man of science should be
invited to intervene in a debate on these high subjects. Politics, I
have always understood, is a kind of mystery, only to be grasped by a
favoured few, and then not by any processes of thought, but by some
kind of intuition. But of late years something seems to have happened.
The intuition theory was all very well when the intuitions did not
conflict, or when, at least, those who were possessed by one, never
came into real intellectual contact with those who were possessed by
another. But here, to-night, have we met together upon this terrace,
been confronted with the most opposite principles jostling in the
roughest way, and, as it seems to the outsider, simply annihilating one
another. Whence Martin's plea for criticism; a plea with which I most
heartily sympathize, only that he gave no indication of the basis on
which criticism itself is to rest. And perhaps that is where and why I
come in. I have been watching to-night with curiosity, and I must
confess with a little amusement, one building after another laboriously
raised by each speaker in turn, only to collapse ignominiously at the
first touch administered by his successor. And why? For the ancient
reason, that the structures were built upon the sand. Well, I have
raised no building myself to speak of. But I am one of an obscure
group of people who are working at solid foundations; which is only
another way of saying that I am a man of science. Only a biologist, it
is true; heaven forfend that I should call myself a sociologist! But
biology is one of the disciplines that are building up that general
view of Nature and the world which is gradually revolutionizing all our
social conceptions. The politicians, I am afraid, are hardly aware of
this. And that is why--if I may say so without offence--their
utterances are coming to seem more and more a kind of irrelevant
prattle. The forces that really move the world have passed out of
their control. And it is only where the forces are at work that the
living ideas move upon the waters. Politicians don't study science;
that is the extraordinary fact. And yet every day it becomes clearer
that politics is either an applied science or a charlatanism. Only,
unfortunately, as the most important things are precisely the last to
be known about, and it is exactly where it is most imperative to act
that our ignorance is most complete, the science of politics has hardly
yet even begun to be studied. Hence our forlorn paralysis of doubt
whenever we pause to reflect; and hence the kind of blind desperation
with which earnest people are impelled to rush incontinently into
practice. The position of MacCarthy is very intelligible, however much
it be, to my mind--what shall I say?--regrettable. There is, in fact,
hardly a question that has been raised to-night that is at present
capable of scientific determination. And with that word I ought
perhaps, in my capacity of man of science, to sit down.
"And so I would, if it were not that there is something else, besides
positive conclusions, that results from a long devotion to science.
There is a certain attitude towards life, a certain sense of what is
important and what is not, a view of what one may call the commonplaces
of existence, that distinguishes, I think, all competent people who
have been trained in that discipline. For we do think about politics,
or rather about society, even we specialists. And between us we are
gradually developing a sort of body of first principles which will be
at the basis of any future sociology. It is these that I feel tempted
to try to indicate. And the more so, because they are so foreign to
much that has been spoken here to-night. I have had a kind of feeling,
to tell the truth, throughout this whole discussion, of dwelling among
the tombs and listening to the voices of the dead. And I feel a kind
of need to speak for the living, for the new generation with which I
believe I am in touch. I want to say how the problems you have raised
look to us, who live in the dry light of physical science.
"Let me say, then, to begin with, that for us the nineteenth century
marks a breach with the whole past of the world to which there is
nothing comparable in human annals. We have developed wholly new
powers; and, coincidentally and correspondingly, a wholly new attitude
to life. Of the powers I do not intend to speak; the wonders of steam
and electricity are the hackneyed theme of every halfpenny paper. But
the attitude to life, which is even more important, is something that
has hardly yet been formulated. And I shall endeavour to give some
first rough expression to it.
"The first constituent, then, of the new view is that of continuity.
We of the new generation realize that the present is a mere transition
from the past into the future; that no event and no moment is isolated;
that all things, successive as well as coincident, are bound in a
single system. Of this system the general formula is causation. But,
in human society, the specifically important case of it is the nexus of
successive generations. We do not now, we who reflect, regard man as
an individual, nor even as one of a body of contemporaries; we regard
him as primarily a son and a father. In other words, what we have in
mind is always the race: whereas hitherto the central point has been
the individual or the citizen. But this shifting in the point of view
implies a revolution in ethics and politics. With the ancients, the
maintenance of the existing generation was the main consideration, and
patriotism its formula. To Marcus Aurelius, to the Stoics, as later to
the Christians, the subject of all moral duties was the individual
soul, and personal salvation became for centuries the corner-stone of
the ethical structure. Well, all the speculation, all the doctrine,
all the literature based upon that conception has become irrelevant and
meaningless in the light of the new ideal. We no longer conceive the
individual save as one in a chain of births. Fatherless, he is
inconceivable; sonless, he is abortive. His soul, if he have one, is
inseparable from its derivation from the past and its tradition to the
future. His duty, his happiness, his value, are all bound up with the
fact of paternity; and the same, mutatis mutandis, is true of women.
The new generation in a word has a totally new code of ethics; and that
code is directed to the end of the perfection of the race. For, and
this is the second constituent of the modern view, the series of births
is also the vehicle of progress. It is this discovery that gives to
our outlook on life its exhilaration and zest. The ancients conceived
the Golden Age as lying in the past; the men of the Middle Ages removed
it to an imaginary heaven. Both in effect despaired of this world; and
consequently their characteristic philosophy is that of the tub or the
hermitage. So soon as the first flush of youth was past, pessimism
clouded the civilization of Greece and of Rome; and from this
Christianity escaped only to take refuge in an imaginary bliss beyond
the grave. But we, by means of science, have established progress. We
look to a future, a future assured, and a future in this world. Our
eyes are on the coming generations; in them centres our hope and our
duty. To feed them, to clothe them, to educate them, to make them
better than ourselves, to do for them all that has hitherto been so
scandalously neglected, and in doing it to find our own life and our
own satisfaction--that is our task and our privilege, ours of the new
generation.
"And this brings me to the third point in our scheme of life. We
believe in progress; but we do not believe that progress is fated. And
here, too, our outlook is essentially new. Hitherto, the conceptions
of Fate and Providence have divided the empire of the world. We of the
new generation accept neither. We believe neither in a good God
directing the course of events; nor in a blind power that controls them
independently and in despite of human will. We know that what we do or
fail to do matters. We know that we have will; that will may be
directed by reason; and that the end to which reason points is the
progress of the race. This much we hold to be established; more than
this we do not need. And it is the acceptance of just this that cuts
us off from the past, that makes its literature, its ethics, its
politics, meaningless and unintelligible to us, that makes us, in a
word, what we are, the first of the new generation.