The Golden Rule is not exemplified by the conduct of any
considerable number of the inhabitants of the earth. To be civilised
or even half-civilised is, to the children of this world, neither
instinctive nor easy. To preserve a certain pretence or appearance
of virtue, especially when encouraged to do so by an uplifted cudgel
in the hands of the community, is a possible and not uncommon
accomplishment. But to be at heart and in reality as considerate of
others as we are of ourselves is, unfortunately, not natural. Human
beings are not children of the sun, sojourning for a season on this
spheroid of clay, and needing only pinions to be angels. Human
nature did not come, pure and shining, down from the glittering
gods. It came out of the jungle. Civilised peoples are the not very
remote posterity of savages, and savages are the posterity of
individuals who laid eggs and had literally cold blood in their
veins. Civilised men and women are troglodytes with a veneering of
virtue. In the heart of every ‘civilised’ man and woman is an
unconverted core, large or small, of barbarism. Humanity is only a
habit. Against it, and tending ever to weaken and subvert it, are
the powerful inertias of animalism. Like the ship in Ibsen’s
‘Rhymed Epistle,’ civilisation carries a corpse in its
cargo—the elemental appetites and passions which have been
implanted in all sentient nature by the laws in accordance with
which organic forms have been fashioned. Moral progress is simply
the sloughing off of this inherited animality.
To the initiated, therefore, it is not strange that we civilised
folk in our conduct display so freely the phenomena of the savage.
There is nothing more inevitable in the life of the convert than the
haunting inclination to give way to original impulses. It is not
strange that we are powerless to be as good and beautiful and true
as we would like to be, that our divine efforts are our half-hearted
efforts, and that the only time we get terribly in earnest and put
forth really titanic energies is when we are dominated directly or
indirectly by the instincts of the pack. Human aspiration is
fettered by the fearful facts of human origin. It is not strange
that we are continually conscious of being torn by contending
tendencies, conscious of ghastly masteries, and of horrible goings
on in our innermost beings. The human heart is the gladiatorial
meeting-place of gods and beasts.