consists of instinctive cycles, which begin with impulses to more
or less definite acts, and pass on to satisfaction of needs through
the consequences of these impulsive acts. Impulse and desire are not
directed towards the whole cycle, but only towards its initiation:
the rest is left to natural causes. We desire to eat, but we do not
desire to be nourished unless we are valetudinarians. Yet without
the nourishment eating is a mere momentary pleasure, not part of the
general impulse to life. Men desire sexual intercourse, but they
do not as a rule desire children strongly or often. Yet without the
hope of children and its occasional realization, sexual intercourse
remains for most people an isolated and separate pleasure, not uniting
their personal life with the life of mankind, not continuous with the
central purposes by which they live, and not capable of bringing that
profound sense of fulfilment which comes from completion by children.
Most men, unless the impulse is atrophied through disuse, feel a desire
to create something, great or small according to their capacities.
Some few are able to satisfy this desire: some happy men can create an
Empire, a science, a poem, or a picture. The men of science, who have
less difficulty than any others in finding an outlet for creativeness,
are the happiest of intelligent men in the modern world, since their
creative activity affords full satisfaction to mind and spirit as well
as to the instinct of creation.[21] In them a beginning is to be seen
of the new way of life which is to be sought; in their happiness we
may perhaps find the germ of a future happiness for all mankind. The
rest, with few exceptions, are thwarted in their creative impulses.
They cannot build their own house or make their own garden, or direct
their own labor to producing what their free choice would lead them to
produce. In this way the instinct of creation, which should lead on to
the life of mind and spirit, is checked and turned aside. Too often it
is turned to destruction, as the only effective action which remains
possible. Out of its defeat grows envy, and out of envy grows the
impulse to destroy the creativeness of more fortunate men. This is one
of the greatest sources of corruption in the life of instinct.
The life of instinct is important, not only on its own account, or
because of the direct usefulness of the actions which it inspires, but
also because, if it is unsatisfactory, the individual life becomes
detached and separated from the general life of man. All really
profound sense of unity with others depends upon instinct, upon
coöperation or agreement in some instinctive purpose. This is most
obvious in the relations of men and women and parents and children.
But it is true also in wider relations. It is true of large assemblies
swayed by a strong common emotion, and even of a whole nation in
times of stress. It is part of what makes the value of religion as a
social institution. Where this feeling is wholly absent, other human
beings seem distant and aloof. Where it is actively thwarted, other
human beings become objects of instinctive hostility. The aloofness
or the instinctive hostility may be masked by religious love, which
can be given to all men regardless of their relation to ourselves. But
religious love does not bridge the gulf that parts man from man: it
looks across the gulf, it views others with compassion or impersonal
sympathy, but it does not live with the same life with which they live.
Instinct alone can do this, but only when it is fruitful and sane and
direct. To this end it is necessary that instinctive cycles should be
fairly often completed, not interrupted in the middle of their course.
At present they are constantly interrupted, partly by purposes which
conflict with them for economic or other reasons, partly by the pursuit
of pleasure, which picks out the most agreeable part of the cycle and
avoids the rest. In this way instinct is robbed of its importance and
seriousness; it becomes incapable of bringing any real fulfilment, its
demands grow more and more excessive, and life becomes no longer a
whole with a single movement, but a series of detached moments, some of
them pleasurable, most of them full of weariness and discouragement.
The life of the mind, although supremely excellent in itself, cannot
bring health into the life of instinct, except when it results in a not
too difficult outlet for the instinct of creation. In other cases it
is, as a rule, too widely separated from instinct, too detached, too
destitute of inward growth, to afford either a vehicle for instinct
or a means of subtilizing and refining it. Thought is in its essence
impersonal and detached, instinct is in its essence personal and tied
to particular circumstances: between the two, unless both reach a
high level, there is a war which is not easily appeased. This is the
fundamental reason for vitalism, futurism, pragmatism, and the various
other philosophies which advertise themselves as vigorous and virile.
All these represent the attempt to find a mode of thought which shall
not be hostile to instinct. The attempt, in itself, is deserving of
praise, but the solution offered is far too facile. What is proposed
amounts to a subordination of thought to instinct, a refusal to allow
thought to achieve its own ideal. Thought which does not rise above
what is personal is not thought in any true sense: it is merely a more
or less intelligent use of instinct. It is thought and spirit that
raise man above the level of the brutes. By discarding them we may lose
the proper excellence of men, but cannot acquire the excellence of
animals. Thought must achieve its full growth before a reconciliation
with instinct is attempted.
When refined thought and unrefined instinct coexist, as they do in many
intellectual men, the result is a complete disbelief in any important
good to be achieved by the help of instinct. According to their
disposition, some such men will as far as possible discard instinct and
become ascetic, while others will accept it as a necessity, leaving
it degraded and separated from all that is really important in their
lives. Either of these courses prevents instinct from remaining vital,
or from being a bond with others; either produces a sense of physical
solitude, a gulf across which the minds and spirits of others may
speak, but not their instincts. To very many men, the instinct of
patriotism, when the war broke out, was the first instinct that had
bridged the gulf, the first that had made them feel a really profound
unity with others. This instinct, just because, in its intense form,
it was new and unfamiliar, had remained uninfected by thought, not
paralyzed or devitalized by doubt and cold detachment. The sense of
unity which it brought is capable of being brought by the instinctive
life of more normal times, if thought and spirit are not hostile to
it. And so long as this sense of unity is absent, instinct and spirit
cannot be in harmony, nor can the life of the community have vigor and
the seeds of new growth.
The life of the mind, because of its detachment, tends to separate a
man inwardly from other men, so long as it is not balanced by the life
of the spirit. For this reason, mind without spirit can render instinct
corrupt or atrophied, but cannot add any excellence to the life of
instinct. On this ground, some men are hostile to thought. But no good
purpose is served by trying to prevent the growth of thought, which has
its own insistence, and if checked in the directions in which it tends
naturally, will turn into other directions where it is more harmful.
And thought is in itself god-like: if the opposition between thought
and instinct were irreconcilable, it would be thought that ought to
conquer. But the opposition is not irreconciliable: all that is
necessary is that both thought and instinct should be informed by the
life of the spirit.
In order that human life should have vigor, it is necessary for the
instinctive impulses to be strong and direct; but in order that human
life should be good, these impulses must be dominated and controlled
by desires less personal and ruthless, less liable to lead to conflict
than those that are inspired by instinct alone. Something impersonal
and universal is needed over and above what springs out of the
principle of individual growth. It is this that is given by the life of
the spirit.
Patriotism affords an example of the kind of control which is needed.
Patriotism is compounded out of a number of instinctive feelings and
impulses: love of home, love of those whose ways and outlook resemble
our own, the impulse to coöperation in a group, the sense of pride
in the achievements of one’s group. All these impulses and desires,
like everything belonging to the life of instinct, are personal, in
the sense that the feelings and actions which they inspire towards
others are determined by the relation of those others to ourselves,
not by what those others are intrinsically. All these impulses and
desires unite to produce a love of man’s own country which is more
deeply implanted in the fiber of his being, and more closely united to
his vital force, than any love not rooted in instinct. But if spirit
does not enter in to generalize love of country, the exclusiveness of
instinctive love makes it a source of hatred of other countries. What
spirit can effect is to make us realize that other countries equally
are worthy of love, that the vital warmth which makes us love our own
country reveals to us that it deserves to be loved, and that only the
poverty of our nature prevents us from loving all countries as we love
our own. In this way instinctive love can be extended in imagination,
and a sense of the value of all mankind can grow up, which is more
living and intense than any that is possible to those whose instinctive
love is weak. Mind can only show us that it is irrational to love our
own country best; it can weaken patriotism, but cannot strengthen
the love of all mankind. Spirit alone can do this, by extending and
universalizing the love that is born of instinct. And in doing this it
checks and purifies whatever is insistent or ruthless or oppressively
personal in the life of instinct.
The same extension through spirit is necessary with other instinctive
loves, if they are not to be enfeebled or corrupted by thought. The
love of husband and wife is capable of being a very good thing, and
when men and women are sufficiently primitive nothing but instinct
and good fortune is needed to make it reach a certain limited
perfection. But as thought begins to assert its right to criticize
instinct the old simplicity becomes impossible. The love of husband
and wife, as unchecked instinct leaves it, is too narrow and personal
to stand against the shafts of satire, until it is enriched by the
life of the spirit. The romantic view of marriage, which our fathers
and mothers professed to believe, will not survive an imaginative
peregrination down a street of suburban villas, each containing its
couple, each couple having congratulated themselves as they first
crossed the threshold, that here they could love in peace, without
interruption from others, without contact with the cold outside world.
The separateness and stuffiness, the fine names for cowardices and
timid vanities, that are shut within the four walls of thousands upon
thousands of little villas, present themselves coldly and mercilessly
to those in whom mind is dominant at the expense of spirit.
Nothing is good in the life of a human being except the very best that
his nature can achieve. As men advance, things which have been good
cease to be good, merely because something better is possible. So it is
with the life of instinct: for those whose mental life is strong, much
that was really good while mind remained less developed has now become
bad merely through the greater degree of truth in their outlook on the
world. The instinctive man in love feels that his emotion is unique,
that the lady of his heart has perfections such as no other woman ever
equaled. The man who has acquired the power of impersonal thought
realizes, when he is in love, that he is one of so many millions of
men who are in love at this moment, that not more than one of all the
millions can be right in thinking his love supreme, and that it is not
likely that that one is oneself. He perceives that the state of being
in love in those whose instinct is unaffected by thought or spirit,
is a state of illusion, serving the ends of Nature and making a man
a slave to the life of the species, not a willing minister to the
impersonal ends which he sees to be good. Thought rejects this slavery;
for no end that Nature may have in view will thought abdicate, or forgo
its right to think truly. “Better the world should perish than that
I or any other human being should believe a lie”—this is the religion
of thought, in whose scorching flames the dross of the world is being
burnt away. It is a good religion, and its work of destruction must be
completed. But it is not all that man has need of. New growth must come
after the destruction, and new growth can come only through the spirit.
Both patriotism and the love of man and woman, when they are merely
instinctive, have the same defects: their exclusions, their enclosing
walls, their indifference or hostility to the outside world. It is
through this that thought is led to satire, that comedy has infected
what men used to consider their holiest feelings. The satire and the
comedy are justified, but not the death of instinct which they may
produce if they remain in supreme command. They are justified, not as
the last word of wisdom but as the gateway of pain through which men
pass to a new life, where instinct is purified and yet nourished by the
deeper desires and insight of spirit.
The man who has the life of the spirit within him views the love of man
and woman, both in himself and in others, quite differently from the
man who is exclusively dominated by mind. He sees, in his moments of
insight, that in all human beings there is something deserving of love,
something mysterious, something appealing, a cry out of the night, a
groping journey, and a possible victory. When his instinct loves, he
welcomes its help in seeing and feeling the value of the human being
whom he loves. Instinct becomes a reinforcement to spiritual insight.
What instinct tells him spiritual insight confirms, however much the
mind may be aware of littlenesses, limitations, and enclosing walls
that prevent the spirit from shining forth. His spirit divines in all
men what his instinct shows him in the object of his love.
The love of parents for children has need of the same transformation.
The purely instinctive love, unchecked by thought, uninformed by
spirit, is exclusive, ruthless, and unjust. No benefit to others is
felt, by the purely instinctive parent, to be worth an injury to one’s
own children. Honor and conventional morality place certain important
practical limitations on the vicarious selfishness of parents, since
a civilized community exacts a certain minimum before it will give
respect. But within the limits allowed by public opinion, parental
affection, when it is merely instinctive, will seek the advantage
of children without regard to others. Mind can weaken the impulse to
injustice, and diminish the force of instinctive love, but it cannot
keep the whole force of instinctive love and turn it to more universal
ends. Spirit can do this. It can leave the instinctive love of children
undimmed, and extend the poignant devotion of a parent, in imagination,
to the whole world. And parental love itself will prompt the parent
who has the life of the spirit to give to his children the sense of
justice, the readiness for service, the reverence, the will that
controls self-seeking, which he feels to be a greater good than any
personal success.
The life of the spirit has suffered in recent times by its association
with traditional religion, by its apparent hostility to the life of the
mind, and by the fact that it has seemed to center in renunciation.
The life of the spirit demands readiness for renunciation when the
occasion arises, but is in its essence as positive and as capable of
enriching individual existence as mind and instinct are. It brings with
it the joy of vision, of the mystery and profundity of the world, of
the contemplation of life, and above all the joy of universal love.
It liberates those who have it from the prison-house of insistent
personal passion and mundane cares. It gives freedom and breadth and
beauty to men’s thoughts and feelings, and to all their relations with
others. It brings the solution of doubts, the end of the feeling that
all is vanity. It restores harmony between mind and instinct, and leads
the separated unit back into his place in the life of mankind. For
those who have once entered the world of thought, it is only through
spirit that happiness and peace can return.
VIII
WHAT WE CAN DO
What can we do for the world while we live?
Many men and women would wish to serve mankind, but they are perplexed
and their power seems infinitesimal. Despair seizes them; those who
have the strongest passion suffer most from the sense of impotence, and
are most liable to spiritual ruin through lack of hope.
So long as we think only of the immediate future, it seems that what
we can do is not much. It is probably impossible for us to bring the
war to an end. We cannot destroy the excessive power of the State or
of private property. We cannot, here and now, bring new life into
education. In such matters, though we may see the evil, we cannot
quickly cure it by any of the ordinary methods of politics. We must
recognize that the world is ruled in a wrong spirit, and that a change
of spirit will not come from one day to the next. Our expectations
must not be for to-morrow, but for the time when what is thought now by
a few shall have become the common thought of many. If we have courage
and patience, we can think the thoughts and feel the hopes by which,
sooner or later, men will be inspired, and weariness and discouragement
will be turned into energy and ardor. For this reason, the first thing
we have to do is to be clear in our own minds as to the kind of life we
think good and the kind of change that we desire in the world.
The ultimate power of those whose thought is vital is far greater than
it seems to men who suffer from the irrationality of contemporary
politics. Religious toleration was once the solitary speculation of a
few bold philosophers. Democracy, as a theory, arose among a handful of
men in Cromwell’s army; by them, after the Restoration, it was carried
to America, where it came to fruition in the War of Independence. From
America, Lafayette and the other Frenchmen who fought by the side of
Washington brought the theory of democracy to France, where it united
itself with the teaching of Rousseau and inspired the Revolution.
Socialism, whatever we may think of its merits, is a great and growing
power, which is transforming economic and political life; and socialism
owes its origin to a very small number of isolated theorists. The
movement against the subjection of women, which has become irresistible
and is not far from complete triumph, began in the same way with a few
impracticable idealists—Mary Wollstonecraft, Shelley, John Stuart Mill.
The power of thought, in the long run, is greater than any other human
power. Those who have the ability to think and the imagination to think
in accordance with men’s needs, are likely to achieve the good they aim
at sooner or later, though probably not while they are still alive.
But those who wish to gain the world by thought must be content to
lose it as a support in the present. Most men go through life without
much questioning, accepting the beliefs and practices which they find
current, feeling that the world will be their ally if they do not
put themselves in opposition to it. New thought about the world is
incompatible with this comfortable acquiescence; it requires a certain
intellectual detachment, a certain solitary energy, a power of inwardly
dominating the world and the outlook that the world engenders. Without
some willingness to be lonely new thought cannot be achieved. And it
will not be achieved to any purpose if the loneliness is accompanied
by aloofness, so that the wish for union with others dies, or if
intellectual detachment leads to contempt. It is because the state
of mind required is subtle and difficult, because it is hard to be
intellectually detached yet not aloof, that fruitful thought on human
affairs is not common, and that most theorists are either conventional
or sterile. The right kind of thought is rare and difficult, but it is
not impotent. It is not the fear of impotence that need turn us aside
from thought if we have the wish to bring new hope into the world.
In seeking a political theory which is to be useful at any given
moment, what is wanted is not the invention of a Utopia, but the
discovery of the best direction of movement. The direction which is
good at one time may be superficially very different from that which
is good at another time. Useful thought is that which indicates the
right direction for the present time. But in judging what is the right
direction there are two general principles which are always applicable.
1. The growth and vitality of individuals and communities is to be
promoted as far as possible.
2. The growth of one individual or one community is to be as little as
possible at the expense of another.
The second of these principles, as applied by an individual in his
dealings with others, is the principle of _reverence_, that the life
of another has the same importance which we feel in our own life. As
applied impersonally in politics, it is the principle of _liberty_,
or rather it includes the principle of liberty as a part. Liberty in
itself is a negative principle; it tells us not to interfere, but does
not give any basis for construction. It shows that many political and
social institutions are bad and ought to be swept away, but it does not
show what ought to be put in their place. For this reason a further
principle is required, if our political theory is not to be purely
destructive.
The combination of our two principles is not in practice an easy
matter. Much of the vital energy of the world runs into channels which
are oppressive. The Germans have shown themselves extraordinarily full
of vital energy, but unfortunately in a form which seems incompatible
with the vitality of their neighbors. Europe in general has more vital
energy than Africa, but it has used its energy to drain Africa, through
industrialism, of even such life as the negroes possessed. The vitality
of southeastern Europe is being drained to supply cheap labor for the
enterprise of American millionaires. The vitality of men has been in
the past a hindrance to the development of women, and it is possible
that in the near future women may become a similar hindrance to men.
For such reasons the principle of reverence, though not in itself
sufficient, is of very great importance, and is able to indicate many
of the political changes that the world requires.
In order that both principles may be capable of being satisfied, what
is needed is a unifying or integration, first of our individual lives,
then of the life of the community and of the world, without sacrifice
of individuality. The life of an individual, the life of a community,
and even the life of mankind, ought to be, not a number of separate
fragments but in some sense a whole. When this is the case, the growth
of the individual is fostered, and is not incompatible with the growth
of other individuals. In this way the two principles are brought into
harmony.