A couple of years ago one of the most distinguished of our social
philosophers, Professor John Dewey, of Columbia University, was
invited to lecture at the Imperial University of Japan, and, having
delivered his message in Tokyo, proceeded to China, where he was
welcomed eagerly by the younger malcontents as an exponent of Western
ideas. The character of these ideas which our collegiate missioner
carried across the Pacific Ocean may be learned from the little
book since published by him under the title of _Reconstruction
in Philosophy_. His thesis, indeed, is simple almost to naïveté.
Hitherto, he avers, philosophy and religion have been nothing but
an attempt to "identify truth with authoritative dogma." And this
attempt has a double aspect, theoretical and practical. On the one
hand, mankind is prone to forget the evils of yesterday and to gloat
in memory over the good, so that by the combined force of memory and
imagination the past remains with us as a kind of idealized dream,
a lovely, impalpable curtain hanging between our vision and the hard
realities of the present. From such an iridescent dream has grown the
philosophical and religious belief in an immaterial world of ideas,
a glamorous make-believe under whose sway "we squirm," as Mr. Dewey
says in his pragmatic style, "dodge, evade, disguise, cover up, find
excuses and palliations--anything to render the mental scene less
uncongenial," and so to escape the actualities that confront us.
Buddha, Plato, Jesus, and the other great masters and doctors of the
life unseen were merely juggling with words and leading us nowhere;
the discipline of character proposed by them and their offers of
supernatural peace were a fraudulent perversion of the facts of human
experience. The only true knowledge is that which comes to the farmer
toiling at his crops, and to the carpenter laboring with his tools;
the real facts of life are those that we can see and smell and taste
and handle, and, so far as I can understand Mr. Dewey, such things
alone.
That is the theoretical aspect of the reconstruction of philosophy
proposed by our tender-hearted materialist; and the practical aspect
is like unto it. Existing forms of government, established order,
property, the church, institutions generally, draw their support
from the idealizing illusions of memory and imagination; they are in
truth the dead hand of the past clutching the throat of the living
present. Throughout all the ages preceding the advent of Mr. Dewey,
or by a gracious inclusion anterior to Francis Bacon, it has been
the task of philosophers and religious leaders to find reasons for
the existence of such institutions on ideal grounds, and to justify
those who profit from them at the expense of the masses. Religion
and philosophy have been simply the servile allies of the predatory
classes of society. The hope of the world is in the new gospel of
pragmatic materialism.
I trust I have not misrepresented Mr. Dewey's teaching. Indeed, with
an individual teacher I should have no quarrel, were he not in a
position of authority; but it is another matter when such doctrines
are spreading out from a lecture-room all over the country, and, as I
hear from Chinese friends, are persuading the young reformers of the
Far East that the only salvation for their people lies in adopting
the crudest materialism of Western civilization, and in emancipating
themselves from all that philosophy and religion hitherto have meant
to the Occident as well as to the Orient. At least here is a matter
to consider.
Now in one sense Mr. Dewey's theory of religion--I use this word
preferably, since the classical forms of philosophy which he would
reconstruct belonged essentially to the field of religion--in one
sense this theory is so far from being revolutionary that it has
been current almost from the inception of human thought. Plato knew
that the religious temper was naturally reverential of the past
and conservative in its influence. It was, indeed, for this reason
that he gave to religion and to a philosophy of the unseen world so
thorough a control over the polity of his state. Polybius, the Greek
historian of Rome, not only recognized this function of religion,
but went so far as to maintain that even the palpable fictions
of superstition should be upheld as a safeguard against political
anarchy. "Since the multitude," he argues, "is ever fickle and
capricious, full of lawless passions, and irrational and violent
resentments, there is no way left to keep them in order but the
terrors of future punishment, and all the pompous circumstance
that attends such kinds of fictions. On which account the ancients
acted, in my opinion, with great judgment and penetration, when they
contrived to bring in these notions of the gods and of a future state
into the popular belief." And on this basis Polybius goes on to show
how the power and permanence of Rome were connected with a national
morality grounded in irrational beliefs, whereas the inquisitive
rationalism of Greece was the cause of her ethical and political
decline. Livy's annals of Rome are inspired throughout by the same
idea, though without the tincture of scepticism that pervades the
philosophy of the Greek historian. The city on the Tiber, Livy
thought, grew mighty and conquered the world because of her faith in
the gods and in that mystical Fatum which presided over her destiny,
and kept her, through all the formal changes of her government, true
to her original _êthos_. "You will find," he writes, "all things
have prospered for those who follow the gods, while adversity dogs
those who spurn them--_invenietis omnia prospera evenisse sequentibus
deos, adversa spernentibus_." So, for Tacitus, religion was, as
he expresses it in his epigrammatic way, _instrumentum regni_.
Christianity, though it altered much, maintained this same view.
The greatest preacher of the ancient church, Chrysostom, was fond of
pointing to the connection of religious humility, mother of all the
virtues, with the principle of orderly subordination, on which, as
on the golden chain of divine law, depended the stability of society
and the happiness of the people.
But I must not fatigue you with examples. Passing on to the
eighteenth century, one finds the politico-religious thought of
England and France dominated by the Polybian notion that religion
was imposed more or less deliberately on the people by their masters
as an instrument of government, only with this important difference,
that in England the imposition was commonly regarded even by the
more radical deists and freethinkers as a salutary and necessary
fraud, whereas across the channel a more logical and less prudential
habit of speech led the bolder spirits at least to spurn the whole
fabric of traditional religion as an impediment to liberty and
progress. It was characteristic of the British mind, then as it has
always been, to stop short of final conclusions and to be tolerant
of a certain penumbra of illusion about the ultimate principles of
life, a trait which has resulted on the one hand in the national
willingness "to muddle through," and, on the other hand, in a deeper
sense of spiritual mysteries. Bolingbroke, atheist or deist, as
you choose to call him, would take the position frankly that the
truths of scepticism are for the enlightened few who, as Aristotle
said, have learned from philosophy to do voluntarily what other men
do under compulsion. Religion, to Bolingbroke and his class, was
simply an integral part of that marvellous fiction, the British
Constitution. "To make a government effectual to all the good
purposes of it," he says, "there must be a religion; this religion
must be national, and this national religion must be maintained in
reputation and reverence." And a little later in the century one of
the correspondents of that admirable and very British gentleman,
Sir William Pepys, condemns Gibbon for divulging to the public the
sort of scepticism which he might have enjoyed lawfully in his
closet. "I agree," avows our correspondent, "that no man should 'take
the bridle out of the mouth of that wild Beast Man' (as Bolingbroke
writes to Swift).... Tho' a man may be allowed to keep poisons in his
closet, he shall not be permitted to vend them as cordials." (Which,
so far as I know, is the first attempt recorded in history to evade,
prophetically, the Eighteenth Amendment of our own Constitution.)
Nothing is more characteristic of the ruling temper of England than
the fact that this same Gibbon, he who had expended his wit and his
vast erudition in "sapping a solemn creed with solemn sneer," in
his old age should have confessed admiration for Burke's chivalry,
even for his "superstition," and should have planned a dialogue of
the dead, wherein Lucian and Erasmus and Voltaire were to be heard
discussing the danger of shaking the ancient faith of the people in
religious institutions.
But the French mind could not rest in this severance of logic and
practice. To their more incisive and less humble way of thinking,
true was true and false was false, and to confound the boundaries
of truth and falsehood was only to pay homage to canting hypocrisy.
There was no distinction for them between an illusion and a plain
lie, nor would they rest satisfied with a suppression of truth as
known to individual reason, in order to leave room for a practical
faith as taught by public experience. So it happened that the
_philosophes_ as a body were not theoretical sceptics merely but
militant atheists. If, as La Mettrie believed, "the soul is an
empty word of which no one has any idea," if men are no more than
blind "moles creeping in the field of nature," then, o' God's name,
out with the truth of it; society can only profit from universal
knowledge of the facts. In like manner a Holbach will take up the
old theory of Polybius, but without the Polybian and the British
"reserve." "Experience," he says, "teaches us that sacred opinions
were the real source of the evils of human beings. Ignorance of
natural causes created gods for them. Imposture made these gods
terrible. This idea hindered the progress of reason." And again:
"An atheist ... is a man who destroys chimeras harmful to the human
race, in order to lead men back to nature, to experience, and to
reason, which has no need of recourse to ideal powers to explain
the operations of nature."
And the French view has prevailed, or threatens to prevail, as
courageous views inevitably tend to supplant timid views, however
true it may be that courage in such matters may sometimes be another
name for insensibility, not to say conceit. So Leslie Stephen,
writing of the eighteenth century in England, with a sneer that
contrives to combine the French boldness with the British reserve,
declares that "the church, in short, was excellent as a national
refrigerating machine; but no cultivated person could believe in
its doctrines." And at last Mr. Dewey, perhaps the most influential
teacher to-day in America, is renewing the old cry and persuading
our young men that religion is a fallacy of the reason devised
to maintain the more fortunate classes in their iniquitous claims,
and that progress and democracy are bound up with the materialistic
pragmatism that emanates from his own chair of reconstructed
philosophy.
Now, it will be clear from these illustrations, which might be
multiplied indefinitely, that the classic philosophy, the philosophy
of idealism properly so called, which underlies all religion, whether
Platonic or Christian, has been regarded by most thinking men from
ancient times to the present day as a conservative, or at least
as a regulative, force in society. But thinking men have differed
profoundly in their valuation of such a force. Those who hold this
philosophy to be true are naturally undivided in their opinion
that its social function is beneficial; but those sceptically and
materialistically inclined, to whom the spiritual world of Plato
and St. Augustine is merely an insubstantial fabric wrought out of
the discontent of mankind with the actualities of life, have been
divided in their attitude. By some this dream of the unseen, though
a deception, has been accepted as necessary for the ordered welfare
of society; the enlightened few might indulge their superiority of
doubt, but without the restraining content born of superstition the
turbulent desires of the masses would throw the world into anarchy
and barbarism and universal misery. That was the prevalent attitude
of ancient rationalism; and it is still common enough to-day among
those who have a condescending respect for the church as a useful
ally of the police court. To others, a rapidly growing number, it
seems that the spirit of content engendered by religion, if based
on a falsehood, must be detrimental to the progress of mankind.
Or perhaps their position might be expressed more accurately by
reversing the terms. They would not say that religious content is
false and therefore must be detrimental; but, rather, religious
content is inimical to progress and therefore must be false.
I am not here before you to-day to determine the truth or falsehood
of the ideal philosophy which supports religious institutions;
that is a question which for the present we may waive. We will not
discriminate between those who hold this philosophy to be true and
those who regard it as an illusion, but an illusion necessary for
the preservation of society. The line for us is drawn between those
who, for whatever reason, cling to a religious philosophy of the
unseen and those who denounce such a philosophy as a check to the
progress and prosperity of the race. And you will see at once that
the issue between these two classes has been sharpened for us of
the present day by the intrusion into sociology of a new theory of
existence--new at least in its scope and claims. I mean the great
and all-devouring doctrine of evolution.
Now the evolutionary philosophy, by which we have become accustomed,
rather prematurely perhaps, to test all problems of truth and
utility, has many aspects and follows various lines of argument. What
it means to the working scientist is one thing, and what it means to
the metaphysician may be quite another thing; but when it intrudes
into the field of sociology, and more specifically when it lays its
grasping hand upon that part of sociology which attempts to weigh
the value of religious belief, you will find it almost inevitably
taking the note so clearly defined in pages of Mr. Dewey's typical
book. Evolution is identified with progress, progress is measured
by increased power to satisfy physical wants, and the effort to
increase this power is conditioned on dissatisfaction with material
conditions. Oh, I know that many evolutionary sociologists will demur
against the reduction of their theories to a crudely materialistic
formula; but many of them will not, and I am sure the formula
does not misrepresent the real conclusions of their doctrine. It
comes down to this: Physical progress has its source in physical
discontent, and, by an extension of terms, social progress has its
source in social discontent; and any doctrine which dulls the edge
of this discontent is thereby an obstacle in the path of individual
and racial welfare. Discontent is motion and the striving for better
things, it is life; content is just stagnation and death. And here
lies the charge against religion. By drawing off the mind to the
contemplation of those so-called eternal things that are not visible
to the bodily eyes or palpable to these fleshly hands, by injecting
spiritual values into this present life and raising hopes of
other-worldly happiness, religion, together with the whole range of
illusory philosophy on which it is nurtured, throws the feelings of
physical discomfort out of the centre into the further margin of the
field of vision, into the penumbra, so to speak, of insignificance,
while it imposes a stillness of content upon the naturally restless
soul of man. In such a mood the past, out of which the oracles of
faith seem to sound by some miracle of memory, acquires a tender
sanctity, and the institutions of tradition are often invested with
a reverence and awe which easily flow into vested rights. If the
religious mood were really to prevail, they say, then society would
sink into the slothful decay described by old Mandeville in his
"Fable of the Bees," that terrible poem which the modern humanitarian
would abhor as a black parody of his doctrine, but which in good
sooth told the facts of a materialistic sociology once for all:
All Arts and Crafts neglected lie;
Content, the Bane of Industry,
Makes 'em admire their homely Store,
And neither seek nor covet more.
What shall be said of these contrasted views? I think first of all
we must say that the issue is confused by an ambiguity lurking in
the terms employed. And this is no new thing. It is, in fact, one of
the curiosities of our human warfare that the most bitter disputes
on the most fundamental questions often go round about in a circle
because the two parties to the dispute do not see that the same word
may be used in different senses. So it is certainly of content and
discontent; and a man's attitude may very well be determined by his
understanding or misunderstanding of the double meaning of these
words. Cardinal Newman, perhaps the keenest psychological analyst
of the past century, has insisted on this distinction in one of his
sermons:
To be out of conceit with our lot in life is no high
feeling--it is discontent or ambition; but to be out of
conceit with the ordinary way of _viewing_ our lot, with
the ordinary thoughts and feelings of mankind is nothing
but to be a Christian. This is the difference between
worldly ambition and heavenly. It is a heavenly ambition
which prompts us to soar above the vulgar and ordinary
_motives_ and _tastes_ of the world, the while we abide _in_
our calling; like our Saviour who, though the Son of God and
partaking of His Father's fulness, yet all His youth long
was obedient to His earthly parents, and learned a humble
trade. But it is a sordid, narrow, miserable ambition to
attempt to _leave_ our earthly lot; to be wearied or ashamed
of what we are, to hanker after greatness of station, or
novelty of life. However, the multitude of men go neither
in the one way nor the other; they neither have the high
ambition nor the low ambition.
If that sounds oversubtle, or if the preacher's assumptions seem
to beg the question, let us drop the pulpit jargon and look at
the distinction as it works out practically in the lives of two
highly useful members of society, the plumber and the college
president. Suppose a plumber is called into your house on a raw day
of January to tinker up a disordered pipe in the cellar. Probably
that plumber is discontented; indeed, I cannot imagine how a plumber
can be anything but discontented. Nevertheless, his discontent may
be either one of two very different sorts. He may be grumbling to
himself because he has to work at a cold and dirty job, while you
are enjoying your newspaper up-stairs over a warm and cosey fire.
In that case his discontent may take itself out in slighting his
task and wasting your time and lengthening his bill. These things
are said to happen. And he may even carry his discontent into a view
of the organization of society which expresses itself in very hardy
politics. But suppose now that his discontent takes another form.
Imagine him content with his lot as a plumber, even proud of it, but
dissatisfied with the common reproach of slackness and extortion,
ambitious to excel in his profession. I do not cite such a plumber
as a probability; but all things are possible in a Bross lecture. At
any rate, such a paragon would be worthy of succeeding to that famous
chair of the Harvard faculty once occupied by a gentleman whom the
trustees hired as the Plumber professor of Christianity, but whom
the undergraduates irreverently dubbed the Christian professor of
plumbing.
And so the other end of the scale, the college president. He too
is said sometimes to be discontented; and again his discontent may
assume either one of two forms. He may be ambitious of size and
_réclame_ for his institution, and may measure his dignity by the
number of students over whom he presides. His alumni are likely
to encourage him in this, and I have myself known the head of an
ancient university in the East who used to scan the catalogues of
the great Western institutions year by year with bitter jealousy and
heart-burning as their register of students gradually approached his
own, and then shot beyond it. Inevitably such discontent leads to a
lowering of standards, mitigated by the pious belief that that form
of education is noblest which is desired by, and accessible to, the
largest number of paying candidates. Thus a debasement of education
becomes identified in his mind with social service. But one can
imagine another kind of discontent, which should pursue just the
opposite course. Its standard would be qualitative, not quantitative,
and it would fear the temptation of size, not the murmurs of
ambitious alumni. It would look for its reward not in a swelling
registration or spreading houses or additional courses of study,
but to its success in attracting the better minds and the stronger
characters and in directing these in the narrow and tried paths. It
might even go so far--though this is confessedly a fairy-tale--as
to lay a rough, restraining hand on that most corrupting nurse of
materialism in our schools, professional athletics.
However it may be with the plumber and the college president, clearly
these words, content and discontent, are replete with ambiguity;
they are consequences rather than motives of conduct, and we cannot
safely argue upon them until we lave looked more closely into the
springs of action which control respectively the religious and the
natural life. And here I must beg you to indulge me in a bit of
pedantry. Our English speech, with all its practical efficiency, has
never developed a very precise ethical terminology, and so to get at
the distinction I have in mind I am going to ask you to consider two
rather outlandish-sounding Greek words which were much in use among
the early moralists of our era. One of them is _tapeinophrosynê_, the
other is _pleonexia_.
_Tapeinophrosynê_ is a compound word, meaning primarily lowness of
mind; it embraces the idea of humility and meekness, but neither
of these conveys its full significance. St. Paul uses it in the
Epistle to the Ephesians, where it is translated specifically
"lowliness," but its force really runs through the whole passage:
"I therefore, the prisoner of the Lord, beseech you that ye walk
worthy of the vocation wherewith ye are called, with all lowliness
(_tapeinophrosynê_) and meekness, with long-suffering, forbearing one
another in love; endeavoring to keep the unity of the Spirit in the
bond of peace." Paul had in mind the saying of Christ recorded in
the Gospel of Matthew, where an equivalent phrase is rendered "lowly
in heart": "Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden,
and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me;
for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your
souls." And the first of the Beatitudes contains the same idea in
slightly different language: "Blessed are the poor in spirit (_i.e._,
the lowly in heart), for theirs is the kingdom of heaven." This,
then, is the virtue, or, rather, as Chrysostom calls it, the mother
of the virtues, which was upheld by the fathers, without exception
one might almost say, as the basis of Christian character and the
motive of religious living--_tapeinophrosynê_. And the result of
such a virtue, as it works itself out through character into content
and discontent, is readily seen. It lays the axe at the very root
of that restlessness, that uneasy ambition, that natural instinct
of jealousy, that covetousness forbidden in the Tenth Commandment.
It goes even further than that. You may have observed that the
blessing bestowed in Matthew on the "poor in spirit," in Luke is
directed simply to the "poor," or "beggars," as the word might be
translated. Now Luke, it is fair to say, introduced a disturbing
element into religion by his habit of giving this materialistic
turn to spiritual graces. But it remains true, nevertheless, that
this glorification--the word is scarcely too strong--of poverty, or
at least of the freedom from material possessions, as in itself a
state of blessedness, is a note not only of all the Gospels but of
most of the other great religious books that have moved the world.
Always Chrysostom, to refer again to the model Christian preacher,
connects humility with the twin virtue of charity. And charity, as
he commends it, is not so much an act of giving out of sympathy for
the sufferings of the needy and downtrodden--though this feeling
is not absent--as it is a voluntary act of surrendering our worldly
possessions in the belief that in themselves they may be a snare to
the spirit. For Chrysostom, in a very literal sense of the word,
it was more blessed to give than to receive. If religion suffered
discontent to abide in the heart of a man, it would not be because
he owned too few of this world's goods, or felt humiliated by his
relative rank in society, but because the world was too much with
him. For true content he should look to treasures laid up elsewhere
and to riches that the eye of the flesh could not count.
So much for the religious motive of humility. _Pleonexia_, the
driving force of the natural man, might be defined as its exact
opposite. Etymologically, as an ethical term, _pleonexia_ means
simply the reaching out to grasp ever more and more, whether this
impulse show itself in the grosser appetite for possessions, or
in the ambition to overtop others in rank and honors, or in that
universal craving which Hobbes regarded as the state of nature:
"A general inclination of all mankind, a perpetual and restless
desire of power after power, that ceaseth only in death." To call
this the natural state of man might seem to involve a libel against
both nature and man, but by natural, as you see, is meant only the
condition of mankind if all those restraints were excluded which we
have defined as religious. And such a liberty has never lacked its
advocates as being not only the natural but the rational, even the
ideal rule of conduct. It would be easy to prove this by abundant
citations from modern writers; indeed, the name of Nietzsche leaps
to one's lips; but as I have already trespassed on your patience by
the introduction of Greek terms into my definitions, I will presume
further by going for my illustrations to the people who coined the
expression. In one of the dialogues of Plato, then, you may hear a
respectable citizen of Athens rebuking Socrates for his fantastic
notions of conduct, and arguing for what was really the popular code
of morality:
The makers of laws are the many weak; and they make laws and
distribute praises and censures with a view to themselves
and to their own interests; and they terrify the mightier
sort of men, and those who are able to get the better of
them, in order that they may not get the better of them; and
they say that dishonesty is shameful and unjust; meaning,
when they speak of injustice, the desire to have more
(_pleon echein_) than their neighbors, for knowing their own
inferiority they are only too glad of equality.... I plainly
assert that he who would truly live ought to allow his
desires to wax to the uttermost, and not to chastise them;
but when they have grown to their greatest he should have
courage and intelligence to minister to them and to satisfy
all his longings. And this I affirm to be natural justice
and nobility. But the many cannot do so; and, therefore,
they blame such persons, because they are ashamed of their
own inability, which they desire to conceal, and hence they
say that intemperance is base.
This is manifestly the Hobbian view of the natural state of man,
thought out long before Hobbes, not to mention the naturalists
of our own day. And it was not theory only, but practice. Turn
to Thucydides's _History of the Peloponnesian War_, which Hobbes
translated, and from which, though this is not generally known,
Hobbes borrowed the principles that stirred up the seventeenth
century as Nietzsche troubled the nineteenth. Read there the famous
debate between the envoys of Athens and the magistrates of Melos.
The Athenians are advising the Melians, whose racial affinity was
with Sparta, to submit their city to the empire of Athens; and to the
Melians' argument from justice they reply with cold-blooded candor:
"We tell you this, that we are here now both to enlarge our
own dominions and also to confer about the saving of your
city...." "But will you not accept?" plead the Melians,
"that we remain quiet, and be your friends (whereas before
we were your enemies), and take part with neither." "No,"
reply the Athenians, "for your enmity doth not so much hurt
us as your friendship would be an argument of our weakness,
and your hatred of our power, amongst those whom we bear
rule over.... As for the favor of the gods, we expect
to have it as well as you; for we neither do nor require
anything contrary to what mankind hath decreed either
concerning the worship of the gods or concerning themselves.
For of the gods we think according to the common opinion;
and of men that for certain, by necessity of nature, they
will everywhere reign over such as they be too strong for.
Neither did we make this law, nor are we the first that use
it made, but as we found it, and shall leave it to posterity
forever, so also we use it."
Such was the philosophy of the natural man in ancient Greece, and
such is the philosophy of the natural man to-day, however it may be
disguised and glossed over; it is based on the instinctive motive
of _pleonexia_, the "perpetual and restless desire of power after
power, that ceaseth only in death." I need not dwell on the kind
of discontent it begets in the soul, a discontent intrinsically
and totally opposite to that which accompanies the purely religious
motive.
But you will say that these principles of conduct and the feelings
that go with them are mere abstractions, fictions of the analytical
reason; no man is, or can be, purely religious as I have defined the
term, or purely naturalistic. And that is true, is in fact the point
at which I am aiming. On the one hand, no man can utterly uproot the
natural impulses out of his soul; and if a few men in a generation
approach anywhere near it, the saints and martyrs and lonely sages,
they are by their virtues cut off from the common life of mankind.
Were all men, or even a considerable proportion of men, at any
time to overcome the natural discontent that drives us on to seek
greater possessions and higher honors and more power, then, surely,
all ambition and invention would die, the wheels of progress would
slacken and stop, civilization would fail, and society would sink
back into barbarism, so far at least as we measure civilization and
barbarism by physical standards. Such would be the issue of "content,
the bane of industry."
On the other hand, it will be said, and by none more loudly than by
the champions of sentimental naturalism who belong to Mr. Dewey's
school, that the picture of the man controlled by the "perpetual and
restless desire of power," and by that alone, is a pure caricature
of human nature. Even a Napoleon, they will say, who might stand for
the model of such a monstrosity, yet had thought for the glory of
his land, and was a great reformer of laws and institutions. So, too,
the Athenian envoys in Thucydides, cynical as were their confessions
of the desire of power to rule their own people and all peoples,
nevertheless were compelled to mix some honey in their gall, and
tried to persuade the Melians that the hegemony of Athens would be
prudently exercised and would promote the well-being of her subject
states.
Such an objection we readily grant. It is perfectly true that the
creature in whom the instinct of greed and the lust of power should
reign without modification or mitigation would be no man at all, but
a ravening beast of prey. Both the religious man and the natural
man, as I have portrayed them, are avowedly abstractions, at least
to the extent that no society could exist if composed of either type
in its purity. They are abstractions, but they are made such by
abstracting one of the two contrasted impulses that do reign together
in virtually every human breast, and by showing what would result
if one of these impulses were so allowed an unhampered sway over a
man's conduct. And now and then, in some rare individual, the one or
the other of these types has been realized almost in its purity, the
religious type in a St. Francis of Assisi, with his ideals of poverty
and chastity and obedience, the natural type, if not in a Napoleon
or an Alexander, yet in certain notorious criminals who have raged
through life with the ferocity of a starving wolf.
The truth we must recognize is that both these motives exist in the
human heart, and that the conduct of man, not as the saint would see
him in the cloister nor as the evolutionist would see him in the
jungle, but as we see him in the market-place and the theatre and
the courts and the home--that the conduct of man is a resultant from
these two contrary impulsions.
Now, it is fair to say that religion has always recognized the
legitimacy of another standard of life besides the one peculiarly
its own. It has seen clearly that the ideal of poverty and chastity
and obedience, which would uproot altogether the natural instincts,
is possible for very few men, and that the attempt to enforce such
a standard absolutely on society at large would result in a world
of hypocrisies, if it did not actually run counter to the command
of the Creator. So the Christian Church, even in its most ascetic
days, admitted that property and marriage and prestige were the
normal condition of life; and Buddhism drew up two distinct tables
of law, one for the religious state pure and simple, the other
for the mass of mankind who are engaged in practical affairs. But
both Christianity and Buddhism held that the natural instincts
were ruinous if left to themselves, and that they became salutary
instruments of welfare only when limited and softened and illuminated
by a law not of themselves.
On the contrary, it is of the very essence of naturalism that it
should admit no standard but its own. To a naturalist and materialist
of the true type all the ideal philosophy of the past, with the
religion which grows out of it, is a lying cheat of the imagination
and corresponds to nothing real in the nature of things; its peace
is a pitiful sham cherished by those who are too cowardly to face the
facts; its promise to mitigate the harsher passions of greed is only
a cunning pretext devised to blind the dispossessed of their rights
and to fortify the owners of wealth and power in the unmolested
enjoyment of their criminal advantages. From the very beginning the
double standard of things spiritual and material has been the foe
of progress, and only then will justice and peace and prosperity
prevail, when the deceptions of priest and philosopher are swept
away and our vision of material values, as known to the scientist in
his laboratory and to the blacksmith at his forge, is not confused
by false lights. This, I repeat, is no caricature of the sort of
naturalistic pragmatism that is sweeping over the world.
I would not imply that all these enemies of religion, or even those
of them who are most influential to-day, are conscious advocates of
a pitiless egotism or believe that the repudiation of religion would
throw mankind into that anarchy of internecine warfare which Hobbes
described as the state of nature, or which Nietzsche glorified as
the battle-field of the superman. It is rather the mark of modern
naturalism that it is plastered up and down, swathed and swaddled,
masked and disguised, with sentimentalisms. A Dewey, for instance,
wields his influence over the young and troubled minds of our
generation because he stands forth as a reformer with a precious
panacea for the calamities of history. It is the dream of another
realm, such reformers declare, that has riveted upon us the chains
of lethargy and despair; shatter these, let men become aware of their
real nature, let them see that the only truth is to recognize this
life as all they have, and that their only hope of happiness is to
get together and increase the physical comforts of existence--let
this once come to pass, and at last a peace born of universal
benevolence will settle down upon this long-vexed planet. Sympathy,
they maintain, is a natural instinct of the heart, as surely as the
lust of power and possessions; rather, it is the genuine basis of
nature, and of itself will control the other natural instincts if
unhampered by false ideals. That is a pretty faith; but is it true?
No doubt the human heart is swayed by sympathy and benevolence; but
are these the qualities of the natural man? I will not go into the
answer given to this question by the religious minds from Plato down
to Cardinal Newman, who all with one accord assert that sympathy
and benevolence of an active sort do not spring up from the soil
of nature, but result from the reaching down, so to speak, of a
higher principle into the lusts of the flesh. They all maintain,
with one voice, that the only effective bond of union, whether it
be of friendship or of society, is through our perception of oneness
in the spirit. Mercy droppeth down as a gentle dew from heaven. I
will not argue from this thesis, because it would carry us into the
brier patch of metaphysics. But history and science both would seem
to enforce the bitter conviction that at the best the instinct of
natural sympathy is a fragile and treacherous support against the
assaults of a restless and perpetual desire of power. Greece learnt
this, to her frightful ruin, when she followed the law of nature as
avowed by the Athenians at Melos; and to-day we have rediscovered
it in the same desolation of war. That, I fear, is the lesson of
history. And science has no different lesson. Indeed, by the natural
man I would signify precisely the realization, if such were possible,
of the principle of natural selection and the survival of the
fittest by which the world is governed as the scientist, the natural
philosopher, as he used to be called, sees it when he eliminates the
religious idea from his view. I mean nothing more than what Huxley,
the protagonist of evolutionary philosophy, meant when, in his essay
on _The Struggle for Existence_, he thus described the law of nature
as actually seen in operation:
From the point of view of the moralist, the animal world is
on about the same level as a gladiator's show. The creatures
are fairly well treated, and set to fight--whereby the
strongest, the swiftest, and the cunningest live to fight
another day. The spectator has no need to turn his thumbs
down, as no quarter is given. He must admit that the skill
and training displayed are wonderful. But he must shut
his eyes if he would not see that more or less enduring
suffering is the meed of both vanquished and victor. And
since the great game is going on in every corner of the
world, thousands of times a minute; since, were our ears
sharp enough, we need not descend to the gates of hell to
hear
"sospiri, pianti, ed alti guai,
* * * * *