MONISM AND THE INDIVIDUAL
When Tennyson, in _Locksley Hall_, wrote the line declaring that "the
individual withers and the world is more and more," he might have been
inditing a prophecy summing up those modern tendencies which have
engaged our attention in preceding chapters. And there are perhaps few
more important questions before us to-day than this--whether Tennyson's
prophecy is to be fulfilled, whether the individual is to be allowed to
"wither," and the world to become more and more. There are those who
hold that such a consummation is devoutly to be wished; there are those
who regard any movement making in such a direction with something more
than suspicion.
Let us say at once that in discussing the status of the individual, we
are not referring--at least, not directly--to the struggle between
Individualism and Socialism. We know that individualists express the
fear that under a socialist _régime_ there would be an end to
individual initiative, while socialists retort that the chief sin of
the competitive system is {65} that it crushes and destroys
individuality; but between the contentions of these rival schools of
economics we are not attempting to adjudicate. Perhaps we cannot
better indicate the scope of our subject than by quoting from two
recent theological works, written from such widely differing points of
view as Professor Peake's _Christianity: Its Nature and its Truth_,
and Professor Bousset's _The Faith of a Modern Protestant_:--
"It is only in it"--_viz._, in Christianity--says the learned Primitive
Methodist theologian, "that the individual has received his true place.
In antiquity the worth of the individual was greatly under-estimated;
he was unduly subordinated to the community. But the Christian
religion, by insisting on the infinite value of each human soul, and by
asserting the greatness of its destiny, supplied an immense incentive
to the attainment by each of the highest within reach. The doctrine of
the worth of man is, to all who accept it, a powerful stimulus in the
struggle to a fuller and deeper life. An interest in mankind in the
mass is compatible with heartless indifference to the lot of
individuals" (p. 88).
"The Gospel," declares the Göttingen modernist, "announces a God who
seeks and desires above all else the individual human soul. It unites,
in a security and closeness hitherto unknown, belief in God with the
importance of the individual human life. It {66} is the religion of
religious individualism raised to its highest point." (p. 36).
Such concurrence of testimony from two such different quarters is as
remarkable as it is significant; and this brings us to our point. The
question with which we are confronted to-day, and which our
civilisation must either answer aright or perish, is not whether an
individualist or a socialist state would be more conducive to the
individual's self-realisation, but whether Christianity is right or
wrong in its doctrine of the individual's paramount importance. The
issue, as we shall try to show, lies between Christianity on the one
hand and Monism on the other. From the Christian point of view the
individual matters supremely; from that of Monism the beginning of
wisdom is that the individual should recognise and acquiesce in his
utter insignificance.
As in our last chapter we glanced at the monistic ethics, so in the
present one we propose to inquire briefly first into the social and
then into the religious implications of this theory, which it must be
remembered is receiving a good deal of support, and meeting with a
large measure of acceptance just now. Turning, then, to the social
side first of all, no one, of course, would say that Socialism as such
was monistic; on the other hand it is easy to understand the attraction
of Socialism for those whose philosophy is Monism. They will embrace
the economic teachings of Collectivism the more {67} eagerly in exact
proportion to their root-conviction that the only thing that matters is
the totality of things, while the individual, _per se_, does not count
at all. That is the conception which underlies the Socialism of a
writer like Mr. Wells, who is in nothing more emphatic than in
asserting that the individual as such has no value at all. "Our
individualities," he says, "are but bubbles and clusters of foam upon
the great stream of the blood of the species." "The race is the drama,
and we are the incidents." "In so far as we are individuals . . . we
are accidental, disconnected, without significance." And when we ask
for what we should strive and labour, if not for the good of individual
men and women, his answer is that we ought to work for the Species, for
the Race, for what he calls a great physical and mental being, to wit,
Mankind.
Now we believe that this philosophy, consistently embraced, is utterly
devoid of the dynamic which can generate any great social reform. The
smallest and forlornest actual slum baby appeals to our sympathy
immeasurably more than a vast, dim aggregate of indistinguishable items
called the Race; for we have actually met the slum-baby, and we have
never met--what is more, we shall never meet--the Race. This tendency
to treat the individual as negligible is as futile as it is inhuman; in
the long run it will be found that he who loveth not his brother whom
he hath seen, cannot love {68} the Race which he hath not seen. No
matter by how many times we multiply nothing, the result is
still--nothing. If the individuals do not count, neither can the
species which is made up of such individuals. Or, if "the Race is the
drama, and we are the incidents," it must be observed that no great and
noble drama can be strung together out of trivial and unmeaning
incidents. All the talk about Mankind as the greater being, "the great
and growing Being of the Species," "the eternally conscious Being of
all things," is only the old, thin, unsatisfying idolatry of
Positivism. If we wish to be social reformers in earnest we must take
care of the individuals, and the race will take care of itself.
That the monistic denial of all individual significance should lead to
the denial of a future life is only what we should expect; for if man,
as such, does not _matter_, why should he _survive_? On the other
hand, the more we care for the individual, refusing to regard him
merely as "an experiment of the species for the species," the more
irresistibly shall we be impelled to believe that this life is not all.
It is the inestimable achievement of Christianity, by its insistence on
the infinite value of the soul, to have given the strongest impetus and
support to belief in personal immortality. That, however, is an aspect
of our subject which demands, and will subsequently come up for,
separate treatment.
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What, for the present, we must yet once more point out, as we did in
the preceding chapter, is this--that wide as is the influence of a
non-Christian writer like Mr. Wells, the danger of such teaching is
intensified when it is given by those who profess Christianity.
Doubtless, Bousset is right when he points to the closer contact
between East and West as one of the causes of the growth in our midst
of a type of religion in which "the human ego is put on one side and
almost reduced to zero." Doubtless, also, he is correct in saying "the
adherents of this kind of religion will be chiefly found in circles
where people do not regard religion seriously, where they desire and
accept religion as aesthetic enjoyment." Nevertheless, the evil
attending this type of teaching is, to our thinking, great and serious,
designed to undermine selfhood and to set up a species of dry-rot at
the very centre.
Let us again show what we mean by quoting from an actual utterance:
"God," we read, "is supposed to be thinking more about us than about
anything else--a rather arrogant assumption when we come to think of
it, considering what specks of dust we are amid these myriads of stars
and suns whirling through space like motes in a ray of light--and the
great object of His solicitude is to get us individually to toe the
mark of Christ-likeness." If this view be the true one, the writer
went on to ask, why do questions like unemployment, the Budget, {70}
the uprising of nationalism in Turkey, etc., bulk so largely in our
thought? These topics, he says, have "little or no relation to the
question of saving the individual soul, as commonly understood." How,
he demands, does the actual life of every day fit into "that view of
the scheme of things which bids us believe that the silent God above us
is principally anxious about just one thing, the moral recovery and
ingathering of these individual souls one by one"? The answer is given
with characteristic confidence: "It does not fit into it at all; _if
God be as anxious about that as we are assured He is, He has a queer
way of showing it_."
Here we have a conception of man and his place in the sum of things
fundamentally at one with that of Mr. Wells, and as utterly
irreconcilable with that of Christianity. Not only does the individual
not matter in himself; he does not even matter to God. The idea of the
soul's infinite value to God is held up to derision, and so is the idea
of God's interest in individual character; man, the atom, must not
think that the Creator is specially anxious for his fate, and is bidden
to measure his insignificance against the vastness of the heavenly
bodies; and in conclusion we are pertly told that if God really cares
about the individual as such, "He has a queer way of showing it." In
this view--the view of Monism--it is indeed true that "the individual
withers, and the world is more and more."
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We say that the issue is plain; it lies between Monism and
Christianity; if the one is true, the other must be rejected. On which
side shall we cast our verdict? For a warning example we have only to
glance at the case of Buddhism, in which, the value of human
individuality having been steadily lowered, "the other main factor is
religion, belief in God, was likewise lost" (Bousset). But, turning to
a more detailed examination of the statement just quoted, it is hardly
necessary to discuss the astounding suggestion that man must not take
himself too seriously by the side of the immensities of suns and stars.
Such a view merely betrays a spiritual perception miles below that of
the Psalmist, who saw man, to all appearance a negligible speck, yet in
reality made by the Almighty little lower than the angels, and crowned
with glory and honour. Neither need we combat at length the strangely
superficial notion that such questions as unemployment, the Budget,
etc., have little or no relation to that of saving the individual soul,
as commonly understood. If they have no relation to _that_ subject,
they are hardly worth considering; but the fact is that the regulation
of industry, the distribution of wealth--these and all other questions
derive their importance solely from the manner in which they affect
individual men, women and children, fitting or unfitting them for the
life that now is and that which is to come. A good deal might be said
of {72} the temper which makes fun of the idea of God's "solicitude to
get us individually to toe the mark of Christ-likeness"; but we may
leave that unhappy phrase to be its own comment.
The attitude of Christianity to our question is perfectly clear.
Christianity, in teaching each frailest, poorest human unit to address
God as Father, affirms in unmistakeable accents the Eternal's personal
interest in and care for the individual soul, and by so doing ennobles
every human life that falls under the sway of the Gospel. It is
Christianity's master-thought that to the Father from whom all
fatherhood is named each one of His children is personally dear, and
that His desire is for the salvation of each one. To the cheap and
ugly sneer that God has a "queer way" of manifesting His concern for us
as individuals, the Christian consciousness has its own answer; how, in
any case, such a sneer could come from the same source from which we
previously quoted the statement that "nothing can happen to any of
God's children which is not in some way the sacrament of God's love to
us," we do not profess to understand. We are not mere individual
organ-stops, each without use or significance apart from the rest,
waiting for our mutual dissonances to be swallowed up in some "music of
the whole," but members of a family, each with a place in the Parent's
heart and thought. Finally, to the Christian there is one last, {73}
crowning proof of the soul's value for God, and God's yearning for the
soul; that proof is Calvary. To the Christian there is one experience
which settles this problem fully and finally for him; it is the
experience which Paul embodied in the cry, "He loved me, and gave
Himself for me."
For Monism the individual is a mere surface ripple on an infinite
ocean, alike impermanent and impersonal; for Christianity the soul is a
child of the Father of all souls, loved with an everlasting love.
Between these two conceptions we have to choose, remembering that each
utterly excludes the other. There is no third alternative.
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