is most likely to be achieved through children. Children are to
most people rather a need than a desire: instinct is as a rule only
consciously directed towards what used to lead to children. The desire
for children is apt to develop in middle life, when the adventure of
one’s own existence is past, when the friendships of youth seem less
important than they once did, when the prospect of a lonely old age
begins to terrify, and the feeling of having no share in the future
becomes oppressive. Then those who, while they were young, have had
no sense that children would be a fulfilment of their needs, begin to
regret their former contempt for the normal, and to envy acquaintances
whom before they had thought humdrum. But owing to economic causes it
is often impossible for the young, and especially for the best of the
young, to have children without sacrificing things of vital importance
to their own lives. And so youth passes, and the need is felt too late.
Needs without corresponding desires have grown increasingly common as
life has grown more different from that primitive existence from which
our instincts are derived, and to which, rather than to that of the
present day, they are still very largely adapted. An unsatisfied need
produces, in the end, as much pain and as much distortion of character
as if it had been associated with a conscious desire. For this reason,
as well as for the sake of the race, it is important to remove the
present economic inducements to childlessness. There is no necessity
whatever to urge parenthood upon those who feel disinclined to it, but
there is necessity not to place obstacles in the way of those who have
no such disinclination.
In speaking of the importance of preserving seriousness in the
relations of men and women, I do not mean to suggest that relations
which are not serious are always harmful. Traditional morality has
erred by laying stress on what ought not to happen, rather than on
what ought to happen. What is important is that men and women should
find, sooner or later, the best relation of which their natures are
capable. It is not always possible to know in advance what will be the
best, or to be sure of not missing the best if everything that can be
doubted is rejected. Among primitive races, a man wants a female, a
woman wants a male, and there is no such differentiation as makes one
a much more suitable companion than another. But with the increasing
complexity of disposition that civilized life brings, it becomes more
and more difficult to find the man or woman who will bring happiness,
and more and more necessary to make it not too difficult to acknowledge
a mistake.
The present marriage law is an inheritance from a simpler age, and
is supported, in the main, by unreasoning fears and by contempt for
all that is delicate and difficult in the life of the mind. Owing
to the law, large numbers of men and women are condemned, so far
as their ostensible relations are concerned, to the society of an
utterly uncongenial companion, with all the embittering consciousness
that escape is practically impossible. In these circumstances,
happier relations with others are often sought, but they have to be
clandestine, without a common life, and without children. Apart from
the great evil of being clandestine, such relations have some almost
inevitable drawbacks. They are liable to emphasize sex unduly, to be
exciting and disturbing; and it is hardly possible that they should
bring a real satisfaction of instinct. It is the combination of love,
children, and a common life that makes the best relation between a man
and a woman. The law at present confines children and a common life
within the bonds of monogamy, but it cannot confine love. By forcing
many to separate love from children and a common life, the law cramps
their lives, prevents them from reaching the full measure of their
possible development, and inflicts a wholly unnecessary torture upon
those who are not content to become frivolous.
To sum up: The present state of the law, of public opinion, and of
our economic system is tending to degrade the quality of the race, by
making the worst half of the population the parents of more than half
of the next generation. At the same time, women’s claim to liberty
is making the old form of marriage a hindrance to the development of
both men and women. A new system is required, if the European nations
are not to degenerate, and if the relations of men and women are to
have the strong happiness and organic seriousness which belonged to
the best marriages in the past. The new system must be based upon the
fact that to produce children is a service to the State, and ought
not to expose parents to heavy pecuniary penalties. It will have to
recognize that neither the law nor public opinion should concern itself
with the private relations of men and women, except where children
are concerned. It ought to remove the inducements to make relations
clandestine and childless. It ought to admit that, although lifelong
monogamy is best when it is successful, the increasing complexity of
our needs makes it increasingly often a failure for which divorce
is the best preventive. Here, as elsewhere, liberty is the basis of
political wisdom. And when liberty has been won, what remains to be
desired must be left to the conscience and religion of individual men
and women.
VII
RELIGION AND THE CHURCHES
Almost all the changes which the world has undergone since the
end of the Middle Ages are due to the discovery and diffusion of
new knowledge. This was the primary cause of the Renaissance, the
Reformation, and the industrial revolution. It was also, very directly,
the cause of the decay of dogmatic religion. The study of classical
texts and early Church history, Copernican astronomy and physics,
Darwinian biology and comparative anthropology, have each in turn
battered down some part of the edifice of Catholic dogma, until,
for almost all thinking and instructed people, the most that seems
defensible is some inner spirit, some vague hope, and some not very
definite feeling of moral obligation. This result might perhaps have
remained limited to the educated minority but for the fact that the
Churches have almost everywhere opposed political progress with the
same bitterness with which they have opposed progress in thought.
Political conservatism has brought the Churches into conflict with
whatever was vigorous in the working classes, and has spread free
thought in wide circles which might otherwise have remained orthodox
for centuries. The decay of dogmatic religion is, for good or evil,
one of the most important facts in the modern world. Its effects have
hardly yet begun to show themselves: what they will be it is impossible
to say, but they will certainly be profound and far-reaching.
Religion is partly personal, partly social: to the Protestant primarily
personal, to the Catholic primarily social. It is only when the two
elements are intimately blended that religion becomes a powerful
force in molding society. The Catholic Church, as it existed from the
time of Constantine to the time of the Reformation, represented a
blending which would have seemed incredible if it had not been actually
achieved, the blending of Christ and Cæsar, of the morality of humble
submission with the pride of Imperial Rome. Those who loved the one
could find it in the Thebaid; those who loved the other could admire it
in the pomp of metropolitan archbishops. In St. Francis and Innocent
III the same two sides of the Church are still represented. But
since the Reformation personal religion has been increasingly outside
the Catholic Church, while the religion which has remained Catholic
has been increasingly a matter of institutions and politics and
historic continuity. This division has weakened the force of religion:
religious bodies have not been strengthened by the enthusiasm and
single-mindedness of the men in whom personal religion is strong, and
these men have not found their teaching diffused and made permanent by
the power of ecclesiastical institutions.
The Catholic Church achieved, during the Middle Ages, the most organic
society and the most harmonious inner synthesis of instinct, mind,
and spirit, that the Western world has ever known. St. Francis,
Thomas Aquinas, and Dante represent its summit as regards individual
development. The cathedrals, the mendicant Orders, and the triumph of
the Papacy over the Empire represent its supreme political success.
But the perfection which had been achieved was a narrow perfection:
instinct, mind, and spirit all suffered from curtailment in order to
fit into the pattern; laymen found themselves subject to the Church in
ways which they resented, and the Church used its power for rapacity
and oppression. The perfect synthesis was an enemy to new growth, and
after the time of Dante all that was living in the world had first to
fight for its right to live against the representatives of the old
order. This fight is even now not ended. Only when it is quite ended,
both in the external world of politics and in the internal world of
men’s own thoughts, will it be possible for a new organic society and
a new inner synthesis to take the place which the Church held for a
thousand years.
The clerical profession suffers from two causes, one of which it shares
with some other professions, while the other is peculiar to itself.
The cause peculiar to it is the convention that clergymen are more
virtuous than other men. Any average selection of mankind, set apart
and told that it excels the rest in virtue, must tend to sink below the
average. This is an ancient commonplace in regard to princes and those
who used to be called “the great.” But it is no less true as regards
those of the clergy who are not genuinely and by nature as much better
than the average as they are conventionally supposed to be. The other
source of harm to the clerical profession is endowments. Property
which is only available for those who will support an established
institution has a tendency to warp men’s judgments as to the excellence
of the institution. The tendency is aggravated when the property is
associated with social consideration and opportunities for petty power.
It is at its worst when the institution is tied by law to an ancient
creed, almost impossible to change, and yet quite out of touch with
the unfettered thought of the present day. All these causes combine to
damage the moral force of the Church.
It is not so much that the creed of the Church is the wrong one. What
is amiss is the mere existence of a creed. As soon as income, position,
and power are dependent upon acceptance of no matter what creed,
intellectual honesty is imperiled. Men will tell themselves that a
formal assent is justified by the good which it will enable them to do.
They fail to realize that, in those whose mental life has any vigor,
loss of complete intellectual integrity puts an end to the power of
doing good, by producing gradually in all directions an inability to
see truth simply. The strictness of party discipline has introduced the
same evil in politics; there, because the evil is comparatively new, it
is visible to many who think it unimportant as regards the Church. But
the evil is greater as regards the Church, because religion is of more
importance than politics, and because it is more necessary that the
exponents of religion should be wholly free from taint.
The evils we have been considering seem inseparable from the existence
of a professional priesthood. If religion is not to be harmful in a
world of rapid change, it must, like the Society of Friends, be carried
on by men who have other occupations during the week, who do their
religious work from enthusiasm, without receiving any payment. And such
men, because they know the everyday world, are not likely to fall into
a remote morality which no one regards as applicable to common life.
Being free, they will not be bound to reach certain conclusions decided
in advance, but will be able to consider moral and religious questions
genuinely, without bias. Except in a quite stationary society, no
religious life can be living or a real support to the spirit unless it
is freed from the incubus of a professional priesthood.
It is largely for these reasons that so little of what is valuable in
morals and religion comes nowadays from the men who are eminent in
the religious world. It is true that among professed believers there
are many who are wholly sincere, who feel still the inspiration which
Christianity brought before it had been weakened by the progress of
knowledge. These sincere believers are valuable to the world because
they keep alive the conviction that the life of the spirit is what is
of most importance to men and women. Some of them, in all the countries
now at war, have had the courage to preach peace and love in the name
of Christ, and have done what lay in their power to mitigate the
bitterness of hatred. All praise is due to these men, and without them
the world would be even worse than it is.
But it is not through even the most sincere and courageous believers
in the traditional religion that a new spirit can come into the world.
It is not through them that religion can be brought back to those who
have lost it because their minds were active, not because their spirit
was dead. Believers in the traditional religion necessarily look to
the past for inspiration rather than to the future. They seek wisdom
in the teaching of Christ, which, admirable as it is, remains quite
inadequate for many of the social and spiritual issues of modern life.
Art and intellect and all the problems of government are ignored in
the Gospels. Those who, like Tolstoy, endeavor seriously to take the
Gospels as a guide to life are compelled to regard the ignorant peasant
as the best type of man, and to brush aside political questions by an
extreme and impracticable anarchism.
If a religious view of life and the world is ever to reconquer the
thoughts and feelings of free-minded men and women, much that we are
accustomed to associate with religion will have to be discarded. The
first and greatest change that is required is to establish a morality
of initiative, not a morality of submission, a morality of hope rather
than fear, of things to be done rather than of things to be left
undone. It is not the whole duty of man to slip through the world so
as to escape the wrath of God. The world is _our_ world, and it rests
with us to make it a heaven or a hell. The power is ours, and the
kingdom and the glory would be ours also if we had courage and insight
to create them. The religious life that we must seek will not be one
of occasional solemnity and superstitious prohibitions, it will not be
sad or ascetic, it will concern itself little with rules of conduct.
It will be inspired by a vision of what human life may be, and will
be happy with the joy of creation, living in a large free world of
initiative and hope. It will love mankind, not for what they are to
the outward eye, but for what imagination shows that they have it in
them to become. It will not readily condemn, but it will give praise to
positive achievement rather than negative sinlessness, to the joy of
life, the quick affection, the creative insight, by which the world may
grow young and beautiful and filled with vigor.
“Religion” is a word which has many meanings and a long history. In
origin, it was concerned with certain rites, inherited from a remote
past, performed originally for some reason long since forgotten, and
associated from time to time with various myths to account for their
supposed importance. Much of this lingers still. A religious man is one
who goes to church, a communicant, one who “practises,” as Catholics
say. How he behaves otherwise, or how he feels concerning life and
man’s place in the world, does not bear upon the question whether he
is “religious” in this simple but historically correct sense. Many men
and women are religious in this sense without having in their natures
anything that deserves to be called religion in the sense in which I
mean the word. The mere familiarity of the Church service has made
them impervious to it; they are unconscious of all the history and
human experience by which the liturgy has been enriched, and unmoved
by the glibly repeated words of the Gospel, which condemn almost all
the activities of those who fancy themselves disciples of Christ. This
fate must overtake any habitual rite: it is impossible that it should
continue to produce much effect after it has been performed so often as
to grow mechanical.
The activities of men may be roughly derived from three sources, not
in actual fact sharply separate one from another, but sufficiently
distinguishable to deserve different names. The three sources I mean
are instinct, mind, and spirit, and of these three it is the life of
the spirit that makes religion.
The life of instinct includes all that man shares with the lower
animals, all that is concerned with self-preservation and reproduction
and the desires and impulses derivative from these. It includes vanity
and love of possessions, love of family, and even much of what makes
love of country. It includes all the impulses that are essentially
concerned with the biological success of oneself or one’s group—for
among gregarious animals the life of instinct includes the group. The
impulses which it includes may not in fact make for success, and may
often in fact militate against it, but are nevertheless those of which
success is the _raison d’être_, those which express the animal nature
of man and his position among a world of competitors.
The life of the mind is the life of pursuit of knowledge, from mere
childish curiosity up to the greatest efforts of thought. Curiosity
exists in animals, and serves an obvious biological purpose; but it
is only in men that it passes beyond the investigation of particular
objects which may be edible or poisonous, friendly or hostile.
Curiosity is the primary impulse out of which the whole edifice of
scientific knowledge has grown. Knowledge has been found so useful
that most actual acquisition of it is no longer prompted by curiosity;
innumerable other motives now contribute to foster the intellectual
life. Nevertheless, direct love of knowledge and dislike of error still
play a very large part, especially with those who are most successful
in learning. No man acquires much knowledge unless the acquisition is
in itself delightful to him, apart from any consciousness of the use
to which the knowledge may be put. The impulse to acquire knowledge
and the activities which center round it constitute what I mean by the
life of the mind. The life of the mind consists of thought which is
wholly or partially impersonal, in the sense that it concerns itself
with objects on their own account, and not merely on account of their
bearing upon our instinctive life.
The life of the spirit centers round impersonal feeling, as the life
of the mind centers round impersonal thought. In this sense, all art
belongs to the life of the spirit, though its greatness is derived
from its being also intimately bound up with the life of instinct. Art
starts from instinct and rises into the region of the spirit; religion
starts from the spirit and endeavors to dominate and inform the life
of instinct. It is possible to feel the same interest in the joys and
sorrows of others as in our own, to love and hate independently of
all relation to ourselves, to care about the destiny of man and the
development of the universe without a thought that we are personally
involved. Reverence and worship, the sense of an obligation to
mankind, the feeling of imperativeness and acting under orders which
traditional religion has interpreted as Divine inspiration, all
belong to the life of the spirit. And deeper than all these lies the
sense of a mystery half revealed, of a hidden wisdom and glory, of a
transfiguring vision in which common things lose their solid importance
and become a thin veil behind which the ultimate truth of the world is
dimly seen. It is such feelings that are the source of religion, and if
they were to die most of what is best would vanish out of life.
Instinct, mind, and spirit are all essential to a full life; each has
its own excellence and its own corruption. Each can attain a spurious
excellence at the expense of the others; each has a tendency to
encroach upon the others; but in the life which is to be sought all
three will be developed in coördination, and intimately blended in a
single harmonious whole. Among uncivilized men instinct is supreme,
and mind and spirit hardly exist. Among educated men at the present
day mind is developed, as a rule, at the expense of both instinct and
spirit, producing a curious inhumanity and lifelessness, a paucity
of both personal and impersonal desires, which leads to cynicism and
intellectual destructiveness. Among ascetics and most of those who
would be called saints, the life of the spirit has been developed
at the expense of instinct and mind, producing an outlook which is
impossible to those who have a healthy animal life and to those who
have a love of active thought. It is not in any of these one-sided
developments that we can find wisdom or a philosophy which will bring
new life to the civilized world.
Among civilized men and women at the present day it is rare to find
instinct, mind, and spirit in harmony. Very few have achieved a
practical philosophy which gives its due place to each; as a rule,
instinct is at war with either mind or spirit, and mind and spirit are
at war with each other. This strife compels men and women to direct
much of their energy inwards, instead of being able to expend it all
in objective activities. When a man achieves a precarious inward peace
by the defeat of a part of his nature, his vital force is impaired,
and his growth is no longer quite healthy. If men are to remain whole,
it is very necessary that they should achieve a reconciliation of
instinct, mind, and spirit.
Instinct is the source of vitality, the bond that unites the life of
the individual with the life of the race, the basis of all profound
sense of union with others, and the means by which the collective life
nourishes the life of the separate units. But instinct by itself leaves
us powerless to control the forces of Nature, either in ourselves
or in our physical environment, and keeps us in bondage to the same
unthinking impulse by which the trees grow. Mind can liberate us from
this bondage, by the power of impersonal thought, which enables us to
judge critically the purely biological purposes towards which instinct
more or less blindly tends. But mind, in its dealings with instinct,
is _merely_ critical: so far as instinct is concerned, the unchecked
activity of the mind is apt to be destructive and to generate cynicism.
Spirit is an antidote to the cynicism of mind: it universalizes the
emotions that spring from instinct, and by universalizing them makes
them impervious to mental criticism. And when thought is informed by
spirit it loses its cruel, destructive quality; it no longer promotes
the death of instinct, but only its purification from insistence and
ruthlessness and its emancipation from the prison walls of accidental
circumstance. It is instinct that gives force, mind that gives the
means of directing force to desired ends, and spirit that suggests
impersonal uses for force of a kind that thought cannot discredit by
criticism. This is an outline of the parts that instinct, mind, and
spirit would play in a harmonious life.
Instinct, mind, and spirit are each a help to the others when their
development is free and unvitiated; but when corruption comes into any
one of the three, not only does that one fail, but the others also
become poisoned. All three must grow together. And if they are to grow
to their full stature in any one man or woman, that man or woman must
not be isolated, but must be one of a society where growth is not
thwarted and made crooked.