The New Optimism
The
New Optimism
By
H. de Vere Stacpoole
[Illustration]
London: John Lane, The
Bodley Head. New York:
John Lane Company
Toronto: Bell & Cockburn
MCMXIV
COPYRIGHT, 1914, BY JOHN LANE COMPANY
PUBLISHERS PRINTING COMPANY, NEW YORK, U. S. A.
The New Optimism
The New Optimism
PART I
ON THE BEACH
[Sidenote: The Beach We Came From]
I was standing by the sea-wall, watching the green water foaming round
the stakes of the breakwater, when my companion, a charming and elegant
woman, turned to me:
“What is there in water that fascinates one?” she asked.
“Do you feel the fascination?”
“Yes.”
“Do you not know why you feel it?”
“No.”
“Shall I tell you?”
“Yes.”
“Because you were once a swimming reptile.”
“Thank you.”
“Oh, there is nothing to thank me for, though the fact is the most
glorious in the universe.”
“The fact that I was once a reptile?”
“Precisely.”
She pondered on this for a moment, and then:
“I don’t see where the glory comes in,” said she.
“Nevertheless, it is there, for the fact is the master key to the
meaning of the universe, the one light that shines in a world of
darkness, and the one sure hope in a world of doubt.”
“The fact that I was once a reptile?”
“And I—yes. I would not give what the webbing between my fingers tells
me for all the promises of all the religions of all the countries on
earth.”
“Ancestral pride is evidently not your strong point.”
“I don’t know about that; but up to a year ago mental darkness was my
portion. I had no religion.”
“And have you any now?”
“No, but I have a certainty.”
“Of what?”
“Of the fact that the world has a meaning and life an aim. Shall we sit
down on this seat and talk for a while, if I am not boring you?—and may
I light a cigarette?”
“You are not boring me—yet. And if you can prove what you say, I shall
not mind even if you bore me. But I must tell you, first of all, that,
to me, the world seems absolutely without a meaning and life without an
aim. I mean, of course, the general life of the world, which implies,
as far as I can see, general suffering. If suffering did people good,
then I could understand that we were placed here to grow and develop;
but suffering and poverty, as far as I can see, only stunt and twist
and spoil everything they touch.”
“Precisely.”
“Then, if you admit that, you must admit that the meaning and aim of
the world is far from being glorious.”
“Never. That is what I wish to disprove.”
“Then disprove it.”
[Sidenote: The Growth of the World]
“Tell me,” I said. “Why is it that an ordinary human being placed
before a flower sees only a flower and nothing of the wonder that is in
it?”
“Because flowers are so common.”
“More than that—because a flower is of such slow growth. If one could
see a seed sprouting, a stalk rising, a bud forming, bursting, and
expanding all in five minutes, the wonder of the thing would bring one
on one’s knees. The world is just the same. We do not see the splendour
and magnificence and meaning of it, because the growth has been so
slow, because every-day jargon has blinded our eyes, and scientific
jargon has dulled the poetic perception of the miracle in its entirety.
It is by looking at bits of the world that men have come to confusion,
instead of fixing their eyes on the world from its very beginning.”
“Ah, but who can do that?”
“You can, and so can I, and so can anyone who has studied the
development of the world from the very beginning.”
“But I have never studied the development of the world.”
“Well, then it is high time you began; and to assist you in your
studies, I will give you a vague sketch of the facts, and when I
have sketched those facts, I will expound to you in a few words the
deduction which I draw from them and the reason why I have implicit
faith that earth has a meaning and life an aim—both equally glorious.
“Now, mind, I have nothing to do with fancies, only facts. Hard, dry
facts that no one can refuse.”
“First, then, before the beginning of time there was neither sun, moon,
nor planets; the whole of the solar system was a zone of incandescent
gas.”
“How do you know that?”
“I know it because all philosophy points to it, and because in the
depths of space the telescope shews to me hundreds of solar systems in
the process of making. Perhaps you will take my word for the fact.”
“Yes. Go on.”
“This sea of gas, floating lost in the universe, was possessed of two
movements: the movement of the atoms buzzing round each other, and a
movement of rotation by which the whole sea whirled round its central
point. Millions of years went by, and during those years our gaseous
sea began to cool and shrink. But it did not shrink evenly. The great
outer ring of the sea was left behind, still whirling and cooling and
condensing, but it did not remain in the form of a ring. The atoms drew
together, sucked toward a common point from every part of the ring, and
the result was that a globe began to form like a great tumour on the
attenuated ring; and as years went on, the ring gave up more and more
atoms to the globe, till at last there was nothing left but the globe
whirling along the path once occupied by the ring. This globe was the
first and outermost planet, Neptune.
“Meanwhile, the sea of gas was still contracting, and again the same
thing happened. The outermost edge of the sea was left behind, in the
form of a ring, a globe was formed and that globe was Uranus, the
second furthest planet from us. Again the same thing happened, and
Saturn was formed: and yet again, and Jupiter was formed: and yet
again, and Mars was left behind in the shape of a whirling globe of
fire, and then the Earth.
“The sea continued contracting, leaving Venus behind and then Mercury;
and still it continued contracting, but now it was too small to throw
off any more rings, and it consolidated to form one great central
globe, the sun.
“The first great act of creation was accomplished, and on that vast
day when, Mercury left definitely behind, the budding of worlds was
finished, the sun and the planets around it might have been seen like
a golden bee surrounded by its golden children, shining in the night of
space.
“The earth was a much brighter place then, for it was simply a globe
of incandescent vapour, and yet that glowing vapour held everything.
Man and woman, and love and war, beauty and sorrow. Art, poetry, music,
hunger, and cruelty.
“That mixture of the abstract and the concrete sounds like rant, but
it is not. It is a bald statement of facts. Every thought that man has
ever thought, every dream that man has ever dreamed was lying unborn
yet in the essence of that globe of incandescent vapour. Every form
that ever sketched itself on earth was there, too—from the daisy to the
hippopotamus. But as yet there was nothing definite, nothing but the
dance of the atoms and the atoms themselves.
“From the first moment of its separate existence this world _in posse_,
consisting as yet of incandescent vapour, began to cool and shrink,
and after the first million years or so it began to exhibit the first
symptoms of thought and to storm at its own shrinking.”
“Excuse me for a moment, but what do you mean by the first symptoms of
thought?”
[Sidenote: The Germ of Thought]
“The first and only symptom of thought is action, arising from opposing
forces, and when the world, now condensed into a liquid form, began to
exhibit tides and storms of molten matter, it began to exhibit action
arising from opposing forces; _and here let me say that the amount of
work done by the world before life ever appeared upon it, the amount of
work done by what we call senseless matter, and the amount of thought
and ingenuity expended on that work put the much trumpeted wonder of
life in the shade_.
“Long, long before the first germ of life began to form, matter in
its own mind had worked out the problem of the mountains and the
seas; matter had kneaded the moon in its ‘dull’ hands and flung it
up into the sky to be a lamp and a tide-maker; matter had worked out
the whole problem of lighting and watering and warming the earth, so
that when life appeared in its first humble and rudimentary form, it
found a house built for it, water laid on for it, and all the lighting
arrangements perfect.
“Yes, to me, sometimes, all that work done by matter on its own account
is even more wonderful than all the work done by Life, for even had
life never appeared on the world, the labours of ‘dull matter’ and
‘brute force’ would still have created the house of the earth.”
“It was created for Life to live in?”
“I do not think so. I think the creation of the world was the result of
the first vague struggle of the spirit of matter toward higher things.
The senseless ferocity of blazing gas had calmed down, and the mind of
matter, if I may use the term, had reached the dignity of expressing
itself in form; and you will mark that the advance toward higher
things was on the road from ferocity to kindliness; that the triumph
of matter was not so much in the creation of the forms of hills and
plains and mountains and seas from whirling oceans of molten material,
as in the creation of those conditions of mildness necessary for the
existence of life.
“Yes, before life ever appeared, matter had developed abstract
qualities, the benign had separated itself from the malignant, and,
under the influence of the benign, Life first peeped out.
“We date everything from that first budding of matter into what we
call life. Yet in reality it was the last stage of a long journey, the
last act of a long series of actions and reactions, the last triumph
of benignity over ferocity in the first stage of the evolution of the
world.”
[Sidenote: The Benign]
“What do you mean by Benignity?”
“I use the word Benignity for all that makes for development of the
simple into the complex, and the word Malignity for all that retards
it. I will use the words Good and Evil if you like them better, and
say that Good in those days was anything that helped forward the
evolution of matter, Evil anything that retarded it. The sunray falling
on the first jelly-fish was good, the storm that injured it was evil;
and Good was good just because it enabled matter to build one storey
higher, and Evil was evil just because it tried to pull that storey
down.
“Now you have followed me from the very beginning of the world to the
first beginnings of life. Have I impressed you logically with one
simple fact, that the journey of atoms from a mass of blazing gas to a
world where life was just beginning to bud was along one path, and one
path only, the path of development?”
“Of course it was.”
“And of the other fact are you equally assured?—that the journey from
a whirling lava storm to a solid world of comparatively quiet seas and
hills and plains and mountains was a glorious journey and a benign?”
“Yes.”
“Then we will start with matter on the new journey on which it set
forth a million million years ago, using for its carriage the first
jelly-fish.”
[Sidenote: Life Appears]
“It had laboured dimly to form the hills, the plains, and the seas, but
that part of it which had laboured to form the seas, now that they were
formed, found something more to do, found itself developing in a new
and strange direction—that of life.
“The energy of matter that had already constructed the solar system
and had evolved the rocks and the sea found itself at last held up,
cribbed, cabined and confined, with nothing to do.
“Men ask how did life appear in the world. For myself, I believe that
life was created by the explosion, so to speak, of this world energy,
which, bound down by the limitations it had reached in the inorganic
world, burst the rigid bonds of its prison and found a new field for
its labour in the construction of the higher organic world.—And, in
parenthesis, let me say that I believe when this same energy reaches
rigid limitations in the organic world, it will burst those limits and
find its field in a world as yet unknown.
“However that may be, I propose to deal only with known facts, and the
surest fact on earth is this, that when the first vague sketches of
life appeared in the sea, they existed not by the virtue of chemistry,
nor the virtue of the life that was in them, but by the virtue of the
steadily working benignity of the world energy that had constructed
their home.
[Sidenote: Conditions]
“To me more wonderful than the creation of life is the creation of
those external conditions that made life possible. They collectively
formed the mould in which life was cast.
“Now, in my sketch of the creation of the sun and planets I have just
hinted what the brain can scarcely guess—the scenes of fiery storm and
horror that preceded the welding of the world into a solid whole and
the birth of the conditions that made life possible. But these are less
halting to thought than the scenes of ferocity that filled the earth
when life awoke, raging and tempestuous, and form began to devour form
as though the world energy were eating its way through all forms to
reach the form of man. And that is, in fact, the truth. Man has been
reached by teeth just as the hills have been reached by fire. And not
only man. The dove that was once a pterodactyl, the dog that was once a
wolf, the cat that was once a tiger, and a thousand other things once
terrible, thoughtless and ferocious, all these have come along the very
path that the hills and the seas came along in their making—the path
from negation and through ferocity to the benign.
“Now, can you not see why the fact that I was once a swimming
reptile,—just as you were—devouring other reptiles, is a fact that
I would not barter for all fancies? for by its light and by what
astronomy and geology and the other sciences tell me I can see that the
world, taken as a whole, has a glorious and definite meaning.
[Sidenote: The World Spirit]
“And the gist of the meaning is this: that side by side with the
evolution of world forms, from the liquid lava wave to the solid rock,
from the rock to the saurian, and from the saurian to man, has gone the
evolution of world character and the development of a world spirit;
and that the beauty of kindliness and benignity and good receives
its deep, deep significance from the fact that all the labour of the
world since the first cooling of its fires has been directed along the
path leading to these three gods. Nothing is more clear than that,
and nothing can be more definitely proved. There is no use at all in
fixing your eyes on the Jurassic period and saying, ‘What monsters are
here!’ or on a London slum and saying, ‘How terrible life is! It can
have no meaning!’ There is no use in fixing your eyes on a thousand
years of history and saying, ‘I see no development. Men were as good
then as they are now.’ You must take a billion years in your purview,
to see the amazing and glorious thing as it is, and then what you will
see will be strangely like the growth and unfolding of a flower—or the
flowering of a bramble.”
[Sidenote: Hard Facts]
“I believe in dreams, but I have no faith except in hard facts. Those
hard facts tell me that the sun, toward which everything grows to-day,
is the same sun toward which the seas and the hills and the rocks grew
before life exhibited itself first, and toward which life has grown
since its birth; and that sun is the sun of Amelioration, Benignity,
Good, and Gentleness. Let us call it by the great good word that
embraces all these things: Good. Well, then, the world, since the
beginning, has grown toward Good.”
“Do you deny the soul?”
“I do not. I know nothing about it. I am quite content to live in a
world that is slowly and steadily developing in benignity, and to
assist that development in my small way by trying to develop the
benignity in myself.
“I do not trouble about my soul one iota, but I am deeply concerned to
keep on that upward path along which earth is ascending.”
[Sidenote: The Imitation of Earth]
“Ah, but how can one do that?”
“By copying what the earth has done; by freeing oneself as much as
possible from ferocity, hatred, lust, and cruelty.”
“But you are neither ferocious nor cruel?”
“Perhaps not actively, but just as I carry in my material brain the
eye of the extinct monster I once was, so do I carry in my mind the
remnants of the passions of the reptile that once was me, the lust of
the reptile and the hatred. I do not tear other human beings with my
teeth, but I have torn them by deeds and words. I have been cruel—who
has not? lustful—who has not? inspired by hatred—who has not? I have
regretted these things—who has not?—and forgotten them—who has not?”
“But since I have taken a broad view of the world, since I have seen
that all these things are part and parcel of the malignity from which
earth is freeing herself in her journey toward the Benign, I have come
to hate those things as a man on the road to some brilliant festival
might hate the obstacles on his path.”
“But since you have no surety that you possess an individual soul, you
have no surety of ever reaching the festival.”
“I cannot help that. My immediate aim is to keep up with the
procession. I leave the rest to chance.”
[Sidenote: The Universal Brain]
“All that,” said she, “seems true. No one can deny that the world has
developed; no one can deny that the world has developed along the path
that leads to gentleness and good. The world is like a big head, isn’t
it? With all its brains on the outside.”
“Just. It began to think like a jelly-fish; then it went on to the
consciousness of the first reptile; then it went on till it thought
like an animal, and finished by thinking like a man. The world, as you
say, is a big head, with its brains on the outside. But during the last
hundred years an astounding development has taken place in the world
of ethics. Philosophically speaking now, there is no such thing as an
individual brain; every brain in the western world is only a cell in
the universal brain. And the universal brain is developing on lines
of its own, and in precisely the same way as the individual brain
developed.
“A hundred—or shall we say eighty?—years ago, the brain of the world
consisted of a number of isolated thought centres. A thought took six
months to reach Australia from England, and two days to reach London
from Manchester. Then came railways, the printing-press, and the
electric telegraph; and in a hundred years the universal brain has
developed from almost nothing into a highly complex organism.
“This new power of man to think universally has not been recognized by
philosophers for what it is. It is practically the fusion of all brains
into one great brain and the creation of a new organism. Formerly there
were men in the world—now there is Man. Roughly speaking, every brain
in the western world is joining, now, with every other brain, and the
universal brain thinks as a whole. You remember, I defined the Benign
as that which assists the elevation of the simple to the complex, and
if, as I fully believe, all evolution is the child of the Benign, ought
we not to look at this evolution of the universal brain with a critical
eye, to discover whether it is following in the same path as the world
followed in its development from seas of fire to hills and plains; and
as the individual brain followed in its evolution from the brain of
the saurian to the brain of the civilised man?
“What do we find?
“We find that the development of the universal brain has followed
in exactly the same path that all matter has followed from the very
beginning of things. The development has been extraordinarily rapid
and the stride toward Good has been mathematically in keeping with the
development. And it is absolutely truthful to say that since joining
this great confederation of thought the individual brain of man has
advanced on the road of ethical progress more in the last hundred years
than in all the years between the birth of Christ and the eighteenth
century.
“To see what has really happened, let us look far back over the
civilisations of the world. Egypt was great, and vanished; Athens
brought art and philosophy and culture to their highest pitch, and
died; Rome arose, and fell thundering in ruins into the night of the
Middle Ages. For all these civilisations were in reality segregated
communities, and even in the communities themselves thought was not
universal. And if you watch civilisation rising from the mist of the
Middle Ages, you will see that it rose not by the power of the word
or of precept, but of the printing-press, the telegraph, and the
train—that is to say, by the universalisation of thought.
“A hundred years ago men were still half bogged in the Middle Ages.
Men, compared to what men are now, were stupid, brutal, and merciless.
Brains there were, and clever brains, but the universal brain was not
born. The individual brain has reached its limit of development as an
individual brain and was preparing for its great development as a part
of the universal brain.
“What happened was this. From the printing-press, from the
steam-engine, and from the electric telegraph station all sorts of
threads began to spin, joining mind to mind. The minds of Birmingham
became linked up with the minds of London, those of London with Paris.
The remotest country village to-day thinks with the greatest town.
A giant of thought has suddenly arisen in the place of a thousand
pigmies; he has developed in the short space of eighty or a hundred
years, and his development has been on the line leading to Beneficence.
And this giant is a new creation, as important as the creation of earth
from fire, and of life from earth.
“There have been, in fact, three creations. The creation of the
material earth; the creation of life, which reached its ultimate form
in men; and the creation of Man from the scattered tribes of men.
Man the giant (whose brain extends to China and Peru, and which will
eventually include China and Peru), and who feels in the London part
of his brain a pain that exists in the Congo or Putumayo part of his
brain. Man, who, though a giant, is still in his infancy and who, when
he has reached his teens, will be a much more perfect being than he is
now.
“Ah, but will he?”
“Look back at the earth struggling up from chaos, and always and always
advancing toward the good; set back now, perhaps, for a million years
by the ferocity of life fighting for its foothold in the age of the
saurians and the monsters, breaking past that fearful period till those
terrible forms are utterly destroyed and there is moulded from them the
kindlier animals, and, from them, animals more kindly still; and until
among them are seen the first vague forms of men.
“Then look at these forms of men, how steadily they have advanced
in perfection and toward the good. Steadily, I say, though at times
the advance has been set back for perhaps a thousand years—till the
highest development of individual man was reached. That is to say, the
highest development that men could reach toward the good as individual
entities.
“Then what happened? From purely material causes all these individual
entities have become, or are becoming, fused into one great universal
entity. The struggle of the world spirit to higher things found itself
held up by the individual brain, just as before the birth of organic
life it found itself held up by the limits of the inorganic world. It
burst that boundary, and now it has burst the narrow limit imposed by
the individual mind and has found a new outlet for its energies in the
mind universal.
“And that mind, though recently formed, is developing hugely in the
direction of the good. It may receive set-backs, but even in the
hundred years since its birth, look at the beneficence displayed in its
working, and look at the effect of that beneficence on the lives of the
individual men it has taken into its great keeping.
“Since Man has arisen to take charge of the world, Justice and Mercy
have marked his dealings with men. All things have improved, and
ferocity and injustice have found themselves under the sway of a cruel
tyrant who is turning them into the wilderness to keep company with
the tigers and the remnants of a world that was once all ferocity and
cruelty.
“Since Man has arisen, he has taken war in his hand; he is weighing it
and finding it wanting. He has taken superstition and is pulling its
vile wings off. He is taking the unjust magistrate by his shoulders and
shewing him the door; and he has put his heel on the tyrant king. He
is freeing the individual man from the odious idea that the individual
man is made of mud, to be burnt forever in hell if there is a flaw in
his making. And he has taught humanity at large that it is an infamous
thing to hang a poor devil for the theft of a sheep.
“Man is only a hundred years old, and he has done all that since his
birth.
“The world spirit has been only a hundred years on this new path of
development. Can you doubt, then, seeing its progression during a
billion years, and how it has spread over ever new fields, that it will
continue so to progress and so to spread into fields newer still?”
“I can not.”
[Sidenote: The Craving for Truth]
“You are a philosopher,” she said.
“No. I am a man who is sick of philosophy, at least transcendental
philosophy. I want matter under my feet all the time. Philosophers make
me giddy, swinging like spiders on threads over abysms of nothing, and
weaving words into webs to catch—words which they mistake for thoughts.
“I am sick of religious theories, doctrines and dogmas, and gods. I
want Truth that a plain man can understand. I never could understand
the Christian creed as distinct from the teachings of Christ, and, what
is more, I believe no one else can. Mahommedanism revolts me. Buddhism
attracts me, yet I feel it to be as unfeeding to the truth-craving
part of my nature as a soap-bubble to a starving man. Materialism that
denies a god revolts me.”
“But you say you are sick of gods.”
“Yes, but I am more sick of materialists—all the rest of the religions
are pretty much the same; they don’t satisfy me. Nothing has ever
satisfied me but the faith I have struck out for myself and the
philosophy that a little child can understand.”
“And that faith?”
[Sidenote: The Essential Goodness of the World]
“Is simply in the essential goodness of the world. That is what I have
been driving at all the time since we began our conversation.”
“But doesn’t Christianity believe in that?”
“No; Christianity believes in the essential badness of the world.”
“Of course!—I forgot. All men are sinners.”
“Yes, that’s it. Christianity believes that the world is bad to the
core, and yet it believes that a God Who is all goodness made man
right at once and thoroughly bad; left him in this condition for an
indefinite time, and then sent His son down to redeem him.
“Now, I have a great reverence for other people’s religious beliefs,
but I have a greater reverence for honest thought, and I cannot—though
I worship Christ—believe that the world followed that line of
development.”
“You worship Christ, yet you deny him!”
“No—I worship Christ because He was entirely lovable. He shines
entirely alone in the world of the Western peoples, just as Buddha
shines in the world of the Eastern. He was goodness itself made visible
and audible. I worship all I can understand of Him. I cannot worship
Him as a mystical figure sent suddenly to earth to be put to a cruel
death in order that I might be saved, simply because my brain cannot
understand that process and proceeding, and I cannot worship what I
cannot understand. It is my defect, perhaps, but that defect is shared
by numerous people.
“And I speak for those people when I say that faith with us is
impossible unless based on a sure foundation of reason; that we must
understand before we can worship, that we do not deny God, but that
we do not _see_ Him, and that if He, the maker of the world, does
exist as an individual entity, we have implicit faith that He is the
fountain and origin of all goodness, and that goodness is His robe;
that we worship goodness and humbly believe that if He does exist
beyond the ken of our purblind eyes, He takes our worship of His robe
as homage to Himself far more profound than homage exacted by fear or
by superstition, and equal to the homage which great and saintly souls
lay at His feet by virtue, perhaps, of their truer sight of Him.
“But we deny, utterly, the essential badness of man, and our denial is
based on the sure fact that as man grows in stature, so, _pari passu_,
he grows in goodness. We believe that man, unaided by miracles, can
increase in goodness just by the virtue of the goodness that is in
life, a seed in the cave man, a flower in the civilised; we believe
that the printing-press, the telegraph, and the steam-engine have
produced better ethical result than all the teaching of the Apostles,
simply because those great fibres of communication have enabled men to
develop by mutual touch and the good in each individual man to rush
upward and find a vast field of new growth in the field of universal
good, a field that shines now, like a star galaxy above the hell of
darkness of a hundred years ago.
[Sidenote: Left-offs and Fissures]
“We believe that the minds of men, like the bodies of men, are filled
with old left-offs and fissures, and that just as some men are born
with the gills of fishes, through whose forms their beings once
passed, so some men are born with the thoughts of the reptiles they
once were, and that the hells of the priests and the sensuous and
painted heavens, the asceticism that kills joy, the persecutions and
mutilations, and mummeries and terrors under which men have groaned
for two thousand years have arisen, not from Religion, but from old
defects in the mind of man equivalent to defects in his body, like,
for instance, the vermiform appendix. These defects have taken the
good food that Christ gave the mind of man and turned it, not into
nourishment, but into causes of inflammation. Saurian hatred is bound
up with Religion; superstitions from the time of the cave men, a spirit
of simian persecution from the times of the tree men, and lust; all
these vile left-overs clinging to the mind of the individual man, as
the Pineal eye and vermiform appendix cling to his body, have made
Religion an impossible food for the advancement of ethics beyond a
certain point.
“Now mark this. The universal mind knows not lust; hates persecution;
abhors cruelty, and is preparing to free itself from superstition.
“How do I prove this? Take the press of the civilised world, which is
an expression of the universal mind. Where is the place of lust there?
Where is the place of Cruelty? Where is the place of Hate? Where is the
place of Tyranny? I tell you this, that the mind universal is as far
above the mind individual as the mind of a man is above the mind of a
chimpanzee—in ethics.
“An ordinary man dare not advance into the pure world of the mind
universal one half of the thoughts, nay, one-fourth of the thoughts
that fill his individual mind. He dare not preach the hatred that is
in him or shew the lust that is in him, or the spirit of persecution,
or even the spirit of intolerance; and the restraint upon him is
not so much the fear of the police, or the fear of public censure,
as a certain recognition in his own soul of ethical values and an
instinctive horror of putting forth into pure light his deformities,—a
recognition, in short, of the essential goodness of the world. Of
course there are extraordinary men not so affected—so are there
murderers and thieves.
[Sidenote: The New Religion]
“Now, I wish to be perfectly explicit about Religion, or, rather,
about the new Religion which the world has received from Man. The new
Religion which has advanced the world more in a hundred years than all
the priest-ridden religions advanced it since the dawn of Time.
“Its miraculous qualities arise from one fundamental fact. It knows not
Individualism.
“It is a simple recognition of fundamental Rights. It is not the
individual laying down the law for other individuals (as in the
churches); it is the universe of Man recognising the laws that brought
it into being, and imposing those laws on the individual. It does not
teach; it accepts.
“The great teachers of the world laid down precepts, they formulated
rules of conduct, and their scholars took precepts and formulæ and
boiled men alive with them for coining, and hanged men with them for
stealing, and burned women with them for witchcraft, and persecuted
men with them for making the sign of the cross—or not making it, and
twisted and bedevilled those precepts and formulæ into every shape that
an individual mind could imagine.
“The new Religion does not discard these precepts.
“Its decalogue, in fact, is longer and more highly developed in parts
than the old, but it does not preach its laws, it breathes them and
lives by them.
“More than that: it lives by the spirit of good, not by the letter.
“The universal mind, for instance, denounces Theft, yet it recognizes
that theft is a multifaced thing, some faces being almost innocent,
others hideously cruel. A hundred years ago, a thief had only one face,
one head, and one neck, by which he was hanged, if the theft amounted
to more than—six-and-eightpence, was it?
“—So, to come to the end of the matter, we have evolved a secular
morality that knows no more of creeds, or threats of future
punishments, or promises of future bliss than I know of Hindustanee;
which lives above all men, yet touches all men; which abhors lust and
cruelty and oppression; which teaches the kindness of Christ to men and
of Buddha to animals, and before which Atheists and Christians, Jews
and Gentiles all bow. A morality which, by the influence of the press,
the telegraph, and the steam-engine, those three Apostles, will spread
to the uttermost depth of China and to the last temple of that hideous
black blot, India; and which, in the course of ages, will change the
individual brain of man and raise it ethically far above its present
advanced position. No; development has not ceased. Development has only
begun. Give the world a thousand years more.”
“A thousand years!”
“I do not want to be unduly optimistical. I foresee set-backs even
in the world of universal thought. Give it a thousand years under
this new influence, and I foresee Man, individual man, on the heights
immeasurably above us.”
“And then?”
“And then—who knows? The world spirit that has reached so many limits,
and broken through them to higher things, will reach the limit of
perfection in man. If there is a field of perfection beyond, it will
break those limits and flow on.”
“And if there is no field beyond?”
“Then this whole business would be as senseless as a farce by M.
Crebillon the younger—whom I hope you have never read.”