health and life at the call of every higher law to be reconciled with
the “Doctor’s Doctrine” that the interests of health are so supreme
that they themselves constitute the highest law, and render any
practice conducive to them _ipso facto_ lawful? Either we must admit,
according to the Divine’s Doctrine, that moral interests transcend
bodily interests, or we must hold, according to Doctor’s Doctrine,
that bodily interests transcend moral interests. There is no third
alternative. One principle or the other must prevail, and sooner or
later leaven society with its ennobling or else its debasing influence.
There are signs apparent that the Doctor’s Doctrine is already bearing
its proper fruit, and that, soothed by a becalmed conscience, absolved
by the authority of the priesthood of Science, men and women are
beginning to be systematically selfish and self-indulgent where their
health is concerned, or where there may appear a chance of curing their
maladies in modes not hitherto witnessed. I can only indicate a few of
the ways in which this deliberate self-preservation is exhibited.
Notably, it seems that the old courage of Englishmen is dwindling away.
Almost every month, cases come to light wherein men, even soldiers,
fail to stand by their comrades in danger; or wherein a crowd of fifty
people witness a child drowning in a shallow pond without an effort to
save it; or men who witness a cruel murder rush from the spot, leaving
the yet breathing victim dying unaided on the ground. There is even,
among young men, a cynical avowal of prudent concern for their own
lives and limbs which constantly strikes the old, who remember the
joyous youthful fearlessness of their fathers, as something altogether
new and far indeed from pleasant to contemplate.
Nor are our personal acts of selfishness and cowardice on a small scale
the only logical consequences of the new principle which are already
visible. Cruelty of the most heinous and systematic kind is another
result. The unanimous resolution passed by the great Medical Congress
in the year of grace 1881 has proclaimed that vivisection leads to
discoveries conducive to the cure of disease, and _therefore_ should
be sanctioned and left unrestricted by law. That is to say, that all
the fiendish imaginations of men like Mantegazza and Schiff, and Goltz
and Bernard, and Paul Bert, should be freely permitted in England for
the sake of a chance of useful hints for therapeutic science. Thus,
the whole medical profession in England stands committed to the demand
that the vice of cruelty in young men and old should be deliberately
unchained, expressly for the sake of anticipated benefits to bodily
health.
So far indeed has Doctor’s Doctrine made its way that, whenever
any Bill concerning sanitary measures or public hygiene is before
Parliament, there is exhibited by the speakers in the House, and by the
journalists who discuss the matter, a readiness to trample on personal
rights to an extent which would excite indignation, were any religious
or commercial interest in question. Men may spread the most deadly
_moral_ diseases, and teach doctrines which make virtue a mockery and
life a hopeless desolation, and scarcely an effort is made to stop
them. But let them threaten to spread bodily disease, and (unless they
be medical men, and thus authorized transmitters of infection) the most
stringent measures are adopted; and besides a Compulsory Vaccination
Act and the ever-infamous Contagious Diseases Acts, even while these
sheets are passing through the press, no less than three Bills are
before Parliament to make compulsory the notification of infectious
disease and segregation of infected persons. I am not now discussing
the merits of these Acts and Bills: I am only observing that the
spirit wherewith they are carried forward is quite an innovation in
English legislation. Health of body has been accorded the importance
which the--real or supposed--interests of the soul alone commanded two
centuries ago; and the tyranny of the priesthood of Hygeia threatens to
be as high-handed as ever was that of the Churches of Rome or of Geneva.
Lastly there is, outside of legislation, and hidden from the
knowledge of the majority of the laity, one remaining application
of the new principle of morals which more than all exhibits its
evil, its disastrous tendency. For obvious reasons, I cannot write
plainly of this moral poisoning, which I believe to be going on to a
frightful extent, both in this country and abroad. I can only quote
some observations made on it by an experienced minister of religion,
published in the _Modern Review_ for April, 1880:--
Any one who will make a few casual inquiries will be amazed to
discover the frequency with which medical men of high repute--men who
are admitted to the friendship of good and unsuspecting women--offer
counsel to young men, and even to boys, which strikes at the root
of all morality, and indeed can proceed from nothing else than
scepticism concerning the very possibility of morality itself. We
speak what we know not of one, but of many, and what no medical man
will deny, though many a medical man will revolt from the action of
his fellow-practitioners as vehemently as we ourselves. What we ask of
these purer spirits in the healing fraternity is that they will speak
out on this and other matters of professional practice, and condemn
their less honorable colleagues with no faltering tongue.
The Bishop of Bedford taking the chair at the meeting, May 3 of the
present year (1882), of the Social Purity Alliance, alluded to this
heavy charge against the medical profession in the following terms: “I
know what doctors say, and I here publicly protest against the terrible
thing that is often said by doctors to young men,--that sin is good for
their health. I say God forgive those who have said it.”
But it will be replied: “All these evils have existed for ages. There
have always been found selfish, cruel, cowardly, and profligate men,
ready to transgress when their inclinations goaded them, willing to
rank their own health, life, and enjoyment far before the law of God or
the interest of their fellows. What signifies, then, a new formula of
selfishness?”
It signifies, I venture to say, a great deal. Hitherto, men did
evil; but they (or their neighbors for them) had at least the grace
to recognize that it was evil. The selfish man was charged with
selfishness. The cruel man did not assume the airs of a benefactor
of mankind. The coward was kicked as a poltroon, not rewarded with
sympathetic smiles for his candor. The man who sought the dens of vice
did not go thither with his conscience pacified by his physician’s
orders in his pocket. To teach men that “a practice conducive to
health is _ipso facto_ morally right” is then, at one and the same
moment, to damp every aspiration after the nobler kinds of virtue, and
to supply a justification for every meaner kind of vice.
Neither selfishness, nor cowardice, nor cruelty, nor unchastity, can
be justifiable by the plea that they may conduce to the bodily health
of one man or of a thousand men; and he who will save his life by such
means will assuredly lose all that makes “life worth living,” all for
which life was given.
PESSIMISM, AND ONE OF ITS PROFESSORS.
The Rise and Progress of Buddhism in Europe may possibly form the
subject of a long chapter in the hands of a Mosheim of the twentieth
century. Hitherto, among all Western nations, not less than among
the Jews, there has been a tolerable unanimous consensus that life,
on the whole, is good, and that it is a pleasant thing for the eyes
to behold the sun. Happiness, like health, has been assumed to be
the normal condition of sentient beings; and misery, like disease,
to be exceptional and abnormal. The dead have been pitied, inasmuch
as they had passed away from so pleasant a world; more especially so
by those classic peoples who believed that the departed dwelt in an
insubstantial realm of shadows. No energetic Northern race, however,
contented itself with a twilight Hades, but built up in imagination
a Valhalla of feast and war for the worshipper of Odin; and, for the
disciple of the Druid, a glorious ascension from the darkness of
“Abred” to the light and felicity of “Gwynfyd.” Christianity, in its
perverted forms, Catholic ascetic and Calvinist, took away, indeed,
much of the joyfulness of the old heathen world, and made divines speak
of our earthly abode as a “city of wrath” or “vale of tears.” But they
were all the more urgent that men should fight the good fight, of which
the crown should be “_life_ everlasting” in the New Jerusalem; and, for
the majority of their flocks, even if this sinful planet remained, it
would appear at all times, a sufficiently desirable habitation to make
departure from it unwelcome.
Brought up in these common views, probably not one of us modern
Europeans has perused, for the first time, a philosophical statement
of the pessimist principles which underlie the vast religions of the
farther East, without a shock of astonishment. Individually, we may
have found our particular share of existence painful rather than
pleasurable. Disease, poverty, disappointment, bereavement, may have
embittered our years. But that any order of men, outside of lunatic
asylums, should lay down as a postulate, whereon to build religion and
morality, that Life is _per se_ an evil, and that, “whatever we have
been, ’tis something better not to be,” and proceed benevolently to
point out how we may, by much diligence, shake off not only this mortal
coil, but the entire burden of being, and arrive at the consummation
of nonentity,--this is an idea revolutionizing the order of our
conceptions, and as nearly incredible as any assertion dealing with
the vagaries of the human mind may be. Even yet, perhaps, some doubts
may legitimately linger as to whether the Buddhist creed, elsewhere
than in Nepaul (where it certainly does _not_ teach annihilation),
really intends by “Nirvana” to set forth the emptiness, rather than the
plenitude, of being. But that both Brahmin and Buddhist teachers have
systematically dealt with life as an evil rather than as a good, there
is, I apprehend, no question among competent inquirers. Here, then, are
two absolutely contrasted, fundamental conceptions of the totality of
human existence,--the Western, that life is a blessing; the Eastern,
that it is a curse. The European cries,--
“’Tis life, not death, for which we pant,--
More life, and fuller, that we want.”
He “shudders at destruction,” and better endures to face even the
tremendous threat of an eternal hell than to relax the tenacity of
his belief in an immortal consciousness. The Indian, on the contrary,
devoutly hopes that a life (or several lives) of self-abnegation, may
bring him to the bourne whence the traveller leaps into the gulf of
nothingness. Marvellous to add, as climax, there seems more likelihood
that a certain number of highly educated Germans, Frenchmen, and
Englishmen, may learn to sigh for Nirvana than that our missionaries
will induce an equal number of intelligent Singalese, Chinese, or
natives of Siam, to exchange their dreary anticipations for the hope of
heaven.
Not to exaggerate the importance of the “School” (if such it can be
accounted) of European Buddhists, we may, I think, properly afford to
its existence the attention due to a remarkable “fault” in the strata
of recent thought, and still more fitly ponder on the significant
tokens, scattered through current literature, of pessimist tendencies
quite other than the Western world has hitherto exhibited. Our modern
owls may be heard responding to each other in their turrets of the
_Nineteenth Century_ and the _Fortnightly Review_,--sometimes solemnly
and seriously, as when Mr. Morley wrote of “that droning, piteous
chronicle of wrong and cruelty and despair which everlastingly saddens
the compassionating ear like the moaning of a midnight sea”; sometimes
with odious pretension and self-conceit when smaller men and foolish
women hoot and croak. In the brightest intellectual circles, many of
us have learned to listen with well-bred calmness to assertions from
smiling gentlemen and beautifully dressed ladies touching the general
wrongness of all things, and the particular wretchedness of human
nature, which, did we believe them, would cause us to rush from the
dinner-table and hang ourselves on the nearest lamp-post. In Germany,
matters have proceeded further; and Schopenhauer has been for some time
as much the fashionable Philosopher, as Wagner is the Musician, of the
age.
Of course there are various degrees and kinds of Pessimism everywhere
to be noted. There is the Philanthropic Pessimist who thinks his
fellow-creatures are merely wretched; and the Misanthropic Pessimist,
who thinks them both wretched and despicable. There is the Theistic
Pessimist, who still believes in God, but considers Him either to
be a “baffled Ormusd,” or else to look down from such heights on
human affairs as to regard them no more than we do the politics and
catastrophes of an ant-hill. And, finally, there is the Atheistic
Pessimist, who has abandoned the notion of an Intelligence at the helm
of the Universe, and believes only in a blind Force, irresponsible
for all the misery and crime of which He--or rather It--is the cause.
For all these varied kinds of Pessimism there seem to be two quite
distinct sources,--a good and noble, and a bad and base one. Each of
these sources leads to results having an outward apparent similarity,
and accordingly creates an illusory resemblance between the feelings
and expressions of persons whose characters and actions are wide as the
poles asunder. Let me endeavor to discriminate them.
It is, at the first glance, not a little remarkable that the
development of Pessimism to which I have referred should have taken
place in an age of almost unparalleled public prosperity. Probably
the sufferings caused by disease, by want, and by injustice, are now
at their minimum in the settled countries of Europe. And yet it is in
our time that men are now beginning formally to pronounce the evil of
the world to exceed the good, and to treat what their fathers deemed
the “beneficent order of Providence,” as too harsh and unjust a system
to be attributed to a benevolent Deity, or indeed to any intelligent
Being at all. It was not in the days of old oppression and tyranny,
of the great famines or the “Black Death,” that there was any such
revolt. When earth was much more like hell than it is at present, few
men entertained any doubt that there was a God in heaven. Now that
its worst wrongs are in course of alleviation or remedy, and that
there opens before our eyes a vista of almost illimitable progress for
our race in happiness and virtue, the whole stupendous scheme is not
unfrequently pronounced to be nothing better than a huge blunder.
The anomaly is certainly striking, and it may be carried further by
noting _who_ are those persons who find the world so bad a place.
As it is a prosperous age which has developed Pessimism, so it is
almost always prosperous people who are Pessimists. It is the rarest
thing possible to hear any expression of such ideas from the lips
of the suffering or the dying, or even from those who see their
beloved ones suffer and die. A hundred visits to sordid lodgings or
miserable hovels, to workhouses, jails, hospitals, asylums for the
blind or the incurably diseased, will scarcely afford us the chance
of catching a phrase indicating that the inmate of the dreary abode
thinks the world awry, and Providence to blame for it. We must pass to
pleasanter scenes,--to the haunts of the well-paid lecture-frequenting
artisan,--or the houses of the most cultivated and wealthy of the
middle and upper classes, palaces which calamity has never visited, and
where luxurious food, clothing, furniture, books, flowers, pictures,
music, are accepted as matters of course; and _there_ we may, not
improbably, be told that “none but bigots who voluntarily close their
eyes to the terrible realities of life can dream of calling the world
a happy place, or speak of its design as beneficent.” Sometimes there
occurs in the experience of a single day a contrast, almost ludicrous,
between the patience and gratitude manifested by some poor suffering
creature--perhaps dying of cancer on a pauper’s pallet--and the
expression of revolt and despair used by a cultivated gentleman who is
possessed of nearly every source of human enjoyment.
All this is not so unmeaning and perverse as it at first appears.
There is a reason why our generation--the happiest and, we will hope,
perhaps, on the whole, the best the world has yet seen--should scan
the dread problem of Evil with other eyes than its predecessors; and
there are reasons, far from ignoble, why happy men and women should
find it harder to justify the ways of God to the miserable than those
miserable ones themselves to do so on their own account. In the first
place, our generation shrinks from the sight of physical anguish in
a way obviously unknown to our progenitors, who could ride gayly on
their daily errands under gallows-trees loaded each with its sickening
weight, or city gates decorated by decapitated heads; and who could
feast and sleep in the chambers of feudal castles while under their
floors miserable prisoners were pining in dungeons, or perhaps expiring
amid the unutterable horrors of the _oubliette_. They could stand
by as unmoved spectators, or throw fresh fagots on the piles where
heretics and witches were burning, and shout applause when half-hanged
traitors were cut down from the rope to be drawn and quartered.
Oppressions and injustices done by the strong against the weak were
matters of every-day experience in every town, almost in every parish
and household. If such things seem to us calculated to provoke vehement
indignation and rebellion against every Power above or below which
sanctioned or permitted them, it must be asked _who_ was there in
those days likely to feel any similar indignation? The laws were not
more cruel than the men who made them, nor the legislators than the
mass of the nation. This being the case, how should those who thought
it right and just that their fellows should endure such tortures find
anything mysterious in the severest decrees of Providence? The order of
nature--harsh to the eyes of a John Stuart Mill or a Shelley--must have
been mild enough to those of the _habitués_ of autos-da-fé, or even let
us say to the nobles of France under that _ancien régime_ of which M.
Taine has given us the picture.
Another difference between our age and all preceding ones, which
specially touches this matter, is that in former times men thought
so little of the lower animals that their lot scarcely entered as an
item into calculation in the purview of the world. It was always the
enigmas presented by _human_ inequalities, sufferings, and wrongs,
which disturbed the doubter of old. His questions were, “Why do the
wicked flourish like a green bay-tree? Why do the righteous perish,
and none regardeth it? Why do the good and useful die in the flower of
their years, and the evil live long in the land? Why, in short, is not
that great _justice of heaven_ (in which man everywhere intuitively
believes, though his intuition has assuredly never been evolved by
experience), why is this not manifested in all the concerns of human
beings?” The Book of Job posed the solemn question of this earlier
doubt; and the Book of Revelation, by opening up to the gaze of men a
heaven where the poor and the persecuted will be forever blessed and
triumphant, afforded it a reply which, if far from complete, has yet
practically sufficed to stay the faith of Christendom. By the fresh
stress which Christianity laid on the doctrine of Immortality, and
the different relative importance which it assigned to the earthly
and to the heavenly life, it fulfilled, in a profounder sense, the
boast of the English statesman. It “called up a New World to redress
the balance of the Old.” The orthodox Catholic doctrine, that sin and
suffering are necessarily permitted by the Creator to allow scope for
moral freedom, may be made in a loose and general way to cover the
larger difficulties presented by the condition of all _moral_ beings,
for whose woes, if in any case unmerited, compensation is provided
hereafter. So long, then, as the destiny of our own human race alone
occupied any appreciable place in philosophy (and this was down to the
earlier part of this century) there was not much room for Pessimism
to find root among Western races. As to the brutes, few thought of
their sufferings at all; and those who did so dismissed them with the
doctrine that they shared the consequences of the Fall, which caused
“the whole creation” to groan and “travail together in pain.”
“These emmets, how little they are in our eyes!
We tread them to dust, and a troop of them dies,
Without our regard or concern,”
as Dr. Watts cheerfully observed of the poor little insects, even
when he was calling us to remark their wondrous forethought and
industry. And larger animals more nearly akin to us were little more
“regarded” than the ants, till the widening circles of our sympathies
at last began to embrace the higher races of the brute creation; and
their sufferings then, as a necessary consequence, immediately took a
prominent place among the difficulties of theology. Geology first gave
a shock to the received explanation of their destiny by proving that
animals died painful deaths æons before “man’s first disobedience”
could have taken place, or man himself had existence on this planet;
and since those, now distant, days of Dean Buckland’s controversies,
the questions so opened out have pressed continually more upon the
thought of humane and religious men. The faith for which such men yearn
in our day is to be assured--
“That not a moth with vain desire
Is shrivelled in a fruitless fire,
Or but subserves another’s gain.”
Not one of their grandsires, probably, ever entertained any similar
idea, but rather indulged a sublime contempt of the “poor Indian” whose
“untutored mind” permitted him to hope that his dog might share his
paradise.
These causes, then, I think,--namely, the growth of a finer sense of
pity for human woes, and the inclusion of the lower animals in the
scope of our sympathies,--suffice to explain in great measure the
reasons why some of the best of men in our generation feel the evil and
misery of the world, and display a leaning toward Pessimism unexampled
in harder times.
Nearly all religious men, looking back upon life, seem disposed to be
thankful _on their own account_, and to acknowledge that goodness
and mercy have followed them all the days of their lives. They have
not been “dealt with according to their sins,” but have many a time
been set free from nets of their own weaving, and helped out of the
mire and clay of vice and passion. Viewed from _within_, such appears
to be the common testimony concerning every good man’s career. It is
the inexplicable mysteries in the destinies of their neighbors, as
viewed _from outside_, and (as I have just said) the sufferings of
the harmless brutes, which causes such men now to doubt God and think
the world evil. Satan tempted the old Chaldæan by heaping afflictions
on his own person. He tries the modern Job more cunningly,--by giving
him, Asmodeus-fashion, a wide bird’s-eye view of the woes and wrongs of
other people.
* * * * *
To descend from the general proclivities of our age to those of
individuals toward Pessimism, the same paradox may be observed. As
it is by no means altogether a bad sign of the times that there is
a keener consciousness afloat of the extent to which pain and wrong
prevail in the world, so neither is it by any means an indication of
a bad disposition when a man takes a dark view of human nature and of
life. Timon may be a noble fellow, or very much the reverse. We must
study him in both characters.