than it can in the case of the individual. The mere existence of a
society, however simple in structure, is of itself proof that the
anti-social forces of selfishness and passion are in it less strong than
the instincts of neighbourliness and mutual help. Of competing societies
those eventually triumph which are least weakened by internal
dissension--that is to say, those societies tend to thrive and extend
most of which the members are most ready to subordinate their private
ends to the public good. Ultimately it is only by the development of
this type of individual character that a society can achieve success;
and it is this type of character that the competition between nations
develops. But essential as it is to the survival of a society, it is by
no means so essential to the survival of the individual in his struggle
for existence against other individuals. If, then, society were simply a
collection of warring atoms, or if the individual's whole activity were
expended in struggling with his neighbour and trying to elbow him out,
the type of character essential to the survival of society could never
be developed, and society itself could neither come into being nor
continue to be. The fact is that men not only compete, but co-operate:
society is, and from the beginning has been, an organisation requiring
from each of its parts some subordination to the interests of the
whole.
As the organisation of society grows more complex, the individual
becomes less and less capable of existing independently of society,
society becomes more and more independent of the services of any
individual member, and both these facts tend to foster the social and
weaken the anti-social forces in man. Increasing division and
subdivision of labour specialises the function of each member of the
community more and more, and so deprives him of the general aptitude for
doing all kinds of work which is essential to every man who is, as for
instance in a new colony, thrown largely on his own resources. Thus the
solitary existence which might be just possible for the outcast from a
savage tribe becomes a practical impossibility for the average member of
any community that has risen above that stage of social evolution. At
the same time the point is reached when no one man is indispensable to
the community. Society is made up of units so similar to one another
that any one can be replaced by some other, and, as a matter of fact,
the place of everyone is at death filled by some successor.
The theory of a social contract, as a historical or prehistorical event
in the development of any community, has long been rightly discredited:
at no time did a number of men, living solitary lives, have a public
meeting and formally contract to live together on certain conditions and
for certain ends. Man has been a gregarious, if not social, animal from
the beginning. Nevertheless, man has certain needs, desires, and ends
which can only be satisfied by means of social organisation, and which
are quite as potent in holding society together as if, instead of being
tacitly at work, they had been proclaimed aloud in a formal social
contract. If through any disease the social organism obstructs, or fails
to assist in realising, those ends, the dissatisfaction of the
individual and the danger to the state are just as great as if a formal
contract had been violated: the disappointment of the normal and
reasonable expectations of the members of the community is substantially
injustice, and is not altogether erroneously stated to be a violation of
the common and tacit understanding on which society is in fact if not
formally established. Co-operation in labour does imply some sort of
engagement, expressed or understood, that the joint product shall be
divided more or less fairly between the joint producers. Unfairness in
the distribution of social benefits may be of slow growth, but must
eventually result in undisguised resentment--appeal is made openly and
consciously to justice, which henceforth becomes the ideal of a section
at least of the community, and is recognised as a condition without
which a healthy social existence is impossible.
It is thus a monstrous perversion of the plain facts to represent the
struggle for existence as having been the sole or the main factor in
social evolution: every member of a community is born into an
atmosphere of co-operation and maintains his existence by the
co-operation of others. If he must labour to live, he cannot labour for
himself without at the same time rendering service to others; the very
same conditions which make him desire justice for himself constrain him
to maintain justice for the community at large. The social environment
is, and has always been, such as to lead man in the paths of justice and
to train him for the service of his fellow-man. The units which
constitute the social environment are men, beings whose physical,
mental, and moral structure is the result of a long process of evolution
stretching back to beyond the beginnings of life upon this earth, a
process which, assuming it to have had purpose, was designed to include
in its effects a creature capable of justice and of love.
The full development of the sentiment of justice has been the work of
many centuries. At first, when the community is small and nomad, the
idea that a stranger has a right to justice is incomprehensible. Even
when with the growth of civilisation provision is made for according
foreign merchants and others some protection from the law, the idea that
the stranger has the same right to justice as the citizen is neither
admitted by law nor entertained as a speculation. Indeed, the law,
modest though it be, may be in advance of public opinion and of the
practice of officials--witness the extortions practised by Roman
governors on the Roman provinces. Eventually, however, public opinion
outstrips the law and pronounces that even the colour of a man's skin
cannot bar his claims to justice, and that the inhabitants of a country,
though they be aborigines, have some rights in it. Finally comes
philosophy and pronounces justice, absolute and stern, the one thing
needful, the one and only duty which it is within the sphere and
function of government to maintain.
Unfortunately for the philosophy which maintains this view, it happens
that, just when the authority of justice is admitted by the conscience
of civilisation to be paramount, justice as an ideal is recognised to be
neither capable of realisation nor absolutely desirable. It is obvious
that in the best-regulated even of free communities the amount of
justice which can be secured by the action of the law and the
intervention of the State falls very far short of the ideal; and the
multiplication of laws and State inquisitors, which would be necessary
if every form of injustice and wrong-doing were to be punished by the
State, would be a remedy, if indeed it were a remedy, worse than the
disease. It is impossible to pretend to believe that wealth is
distributed according to merit in any existing community, or that any
governmental system, even if designed solely with that end in view,
could ever determine what a man's merits were, or what his reward should
be. Nor is the ill distribution of wealth the only factor of injustice,
though it is the only factor with which the State could make pretence to
deal: sickness and sorrow, grief and pain--nay, the very capacity for
suffering and for joy--are dealt to different men in very different
measure. It is plain matter of fact that earthly goods and pleasures are
not distributed according to merit; and it is just when man's conquest
of Nature has become most complete, when society is no longer struggling
for a bare subsistence, when the demand for justice is most fully and
unreservedly admitted, that the impossibility of meeting the demand and
the danger of failing to meet it become most manifest. The poverty which
accompanies progress may in one generation be less than it was in the
previous generation, but the extremes of poverty and wealth grow daily
wider apart, and the number of those who are poor increases in a growing
population much more rapidly than the number of the rich. The danger
which this rent in the social fabric threatens to the whole structure of
society may be exaggerated, but cannot be denied. The mere justice of
individualism which has hitherto sufficed to hold society together,
suffices now no longer. The justice which limits itself to the
fulfilment of those actions to the non-performance of which a legal
penalty is attached, is not the one and only thing needful, nor does its
force remedy the numerous cases of undeserved misfortune and suffering
which the working of our social and industrial system entails. What
heals the suffering and saves it from becoming a festering sore that
might prove fatal to society, is that love of man for his fellow-man,
which is manifested to the poor by the rich to some extent, but chiefly
by the poor. The State can only prescribe and enforce external acts of
justice; and the external acts which it prescribes are not the bond
which holds or can hold society together. The State, in its attempts to
modify society through the individual, is as clumsy as the breeder or
the gardener in dealing with animals and plants, and must fain be
content if it can modify some of the more prominent external
characteristics. Nature is much more searching, and, if slower, much
more thorough: the real nature of her work, the true character of the
force on which she has made the cohesion of society to depend, becomes
obvious at the time when the insufficiency of mere justice for the
purpose becomes apparent. Imperfect though man's obedience has been to
the commandment, "Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself," it is to
his obedience that society owes its maintenance.
As a matter of fact, then, strict justice is not and cannot be realised
in this world. Even the forces of the social environment which are, to
a large extent, under man's own control are not and cannot be so
directed by him as to secure rewards and punishments in exact proportion
to merit and demerit; while the action of those natural forces which
distribute fortune and misfortune, pain and the susceptibility to pain,
pleasure and the capacity of enjoyment, is still less under his control
and, as far as we can see, is still less proportionate to desert. The
fields of the unjust benefit as much as those of the just by the rain
from heaven; the labourers who enter the vineyard of civilisation at a
late hour receive as great a reward as their predecessors who bore the
heat and burden of the day, or even greater; when a tower in our social
fabric falls, it is not the guilty who are alone or even specially
involved in its ruin. From the time of Theognis, at least, men have
inquired with despair how the gods could expect worship when they
suffered these things to be; and as long as we look upon life as though
we were detached spectators, with no care for it save a disinterested
desire to see justice done, it is easy for us to declaim upon the
absolute indifference of the cosmic process to man and his deserts. But
this detached attitude is purely artificial, and we could not make even
the semblance of long maintaining it, did we not unconsciously glide
into the more natural, but less warrantable, position of tacitly
assuming that our own personal lot would be improved if strict justice
were done. But is not our resentment against the injustice of the world
partly premature and somewhat shallow and short-sighted? Are we sure we
want strict justice? Are we so anxious to have our merits weighed? are
they so imposing? Can we pray that we may be rewarded after our
iniquities? If society could by some supernatural power deal strict
justice to all its members, who _would_, who _could_ live in it? As a
matter of fact--to say it once more--it is not by law alone that society
lives, but by love, by the long-patient love of father or mother, of
wife or husband, of friend or neighbour, which every one of us has
accepted and none has fully requited. Our very hospitals are open to all
who need them, to those whose suffering is due to their own negligence,
or even crime, and not merely to those whose pain is undeserved. A
palpable injustice, worthy of the cosmic process itself! And what
excuse, if justice, absolute and relentless, be our highest and
worthiest aspiration, can there be for appropriating the reward of
honest toil to the often fruitless task of offering to those, who have
by their own vice sunk into the depths, one last chance of life and of
redemption? The mercy which falleth, like the gentle rain from heaven,
alike upon the unjust and the just, must be judged by the same standard
that we apply to the cosmic process. We may, like the elder brother of
the prodigal son, refuse to see anything in man or Nature but a world
given up to gross injustice--persons so superior as to stand in no need
of forgiveness and no fear of judgment are able doubtless to judge the
world and their fellow-man. But the prodigal himself may, perchance,
better understand some of the workings of his father's heart, and trust
he sees in the apparent injustice of Nature more instances of that mercy
which would not have showed itself to him had justice measured love.
It seems, then, that the "ethical process" and the "cosmic process" are
not so absolutely opposed to one another as Professor Huxley endeavoured
to make out. Both at times act with a calm disregard of justice. In the
one case we know that it is a higher principle which takes the place of
justice; and it is a reasonable conjecture that the ethical process,
which is one outcome or manifestation of the cosmic process, does but
reproduce, in this case as in others, the action of the cosmic force
which operates through the heart of man as well as through the rest of
the universe. It is at any rate inconsistent to condemn the cosmos for
exhibiting that quality of mercy which we rank highest amongst the
attributes of man: if we take credit to our fellow-men for that quality,
in fairness let us give the cosmos the same credit when it displays the
same quality. If, as we assume in this chapter, there is purpose in
evolution, let us admit that there is some presumption that it is a
purpose of love and of mercy.
As it is by faith in science that men of science succeed in solving
problems which, for a time, seem beyond the powers of science to deal
with, so it is on faith in religion that the religious explanation of
the universe depends for its slow but sure extension. With that faith we
may succeed in seeing, to some slight extent, that the unequal
distribution of pain, as well as of earthly prosperity, is not
incompatible with a Divine purpose in evolution. For that faith we must
believe that the suffering and sorrow from which none of us is exempt
are not evil, unless we choose to make them so, but opportunities for
good. Indeed, without that faith we seem forced upon the same
conclusion: the man who devotes himself, his soul, his life to the
relief of the needy and the suffering cannot make earthly prosperity his
chief good, though, as Professor Huxley has said, he may attain
something much better. But if we hold that there is something better
than earthly prosperity, can we consistently declaim against sickness
and sorrow as the worst of evils, or indict a universe because they are
not unknown in it? The Stoicism which lent Professor Huxley the strength
to teach that man must to the end declare defiance and resistance to the
cosmos--resistance unavailing and defiance doomed to certain failure in
the end--might also have taught him that the evil which he calls on us
to war against is not in the cosmos; that the enemy of the ethical
process has his headquarters not in Nature, but in the heart of man.
Pain and sorrow are evil to the sufferer who allows them to make him
selfish, and to the spectator who chooses to be callous to his
suffering. If our volitions do count for something in the course of
things, if we are so far free that we can, in response to Professor
Huxley's call, doggedly and repeatedly resist the cosmic process, then
it is of our own free will, also, that we do evil when the opportunity
of good is offered us. Yet we charge the evil upon the cosmos.
_ὦ πόποι, οἷον δή νυ θεοὺς βροτοὶ αἰτιόωνται
ἔξ ἡμέων γάρ φασι κάκ' ἔμμεναι· οἱ δὴ καὶ αὐτοὶ
σφῇσιν ἀτασθαλίῃσιν ὑπέρμορον ἄλγε' ἔχουσιν._
APPENDIX
ON BISHOP BERKELEY'S IDEALISM
When one asserts that a writer is wrong in one of the arguments which he
uses, it is well to begin by making sure that he really does use the
argument in question. For this purpose it is useful to quote the
passages in which the writer uses the argument, and such passages, for
my own satisfaction, I will speedily cite from Bishop Berkeley. But
first, in order that the reader may know that the interpretation which I
put on these extracts is not one peculiar to myself, but is in harmony
with the general tenor of Berkeley's metaphysical writings, I will quote
from Professor Fraser, who, in his preface to the _Dialogues between
Hylas and Philonous_, states Berkeley's argument to be as follows: "As
the common reason of men, tested by their actions, demands the
_permanence_ of sensible things, even though they are not permanently
present to the senses of any one embodied mind, it follows that the very
existence of the things of sense (apart from any 'marks of design' in
their collocations) implies the permanent existence of Supreme Mind, by
whom all real objects are perpetually conceived, and in whom their
orderly appearances, disappearances, and reappearances in finite minds
may be said to exist potentially."
And now for Berkeley's own words, (1) In the _Second Dialogue between
Hylas and Philonous_ (p. 304 of Professor Fraser's edition), he says,
"To me it is evident that sensible things cannot exist otherwise than in
a mind or spirit. Whence I conclude, not that they have no real
existence, but that, seeing they depend not on my thought, and have an
existence distinct from being perceived by me, _there must be some other
mind wherein they exist_. As sure, therefore, as the sensible world
really exists, so sure is there an infinite omnipresent Spirit, who
contains and supports it."
(2) In the _Third Dialogue_ (p. 325 of Professor Fraser's edition) we
have: "_Hyl._ Supposing you were annihilated, cannot you conceive it
possible that things perceivable by sense may still exist?--_Phil._ I
can; but then it must be in another mind. When I deny sensible things an
existence out of the mind, I do not mean my mind in particular, but all
minds. Now, it is plain they have an existence exterior to my mind;
since I find them by experience to be independent of it. There is
therefore some other mind wherein they exist, during the intervals
between the times of my perceiving them: as likewise they did before my
birth, and would do after my supposed annihilation. And, as the same is
true with regard to all other finite created spirits, it necessarily
follows there is an _omnipresent Eternal Mind_, which knows and
comprehends all things, and exhibits them to our view."
(3) The independent, real existence of things is affirmed with emphasis
in the _Second Dialogue_ (_ibid._, p. 307): "It is evident that the
things I perceive are my own ideas, and that no idea can exist unless it
be in a mind. Nor is it less plain that these ideas or things by me
perceived, either themselves or their archetypes, exist independently of
my mind; since I know myself not to be their author, it being out of my
power to determine at pleasure what particular ideas I shall be
affected with upon opening my eyes or ears. They must therefore exist in
some other mind, whose will it is they should be exhibited to me. The
things, I say, immediately perceived are ideas or sensations, call them
which you will. But how can any idea or sensation exist in, or be
produced by, anything but a mind or spirit?"
(4) Finally, in _The Principles of Human Knowledge_, § 90, in explaining
the two senses of "external": "The things perceived by sense may be
termed _external_, with regard to their origin--in that they are not
generated from within by the mind itself, but imprinted by a Spirit
distinct from that which perceives them. Sensible objects may likewise
be said to be 'without the mind' in another sense, namely when they
exist in some other mind; thus when I shut my eyes, the things I saw may
still exist, but it must be in another mind."
Berkeley's argument in brief, therefore, is that we believe things to be
permanent, and must therefore believe in a permanent, Divine mind in
which they may exist. The question which I wish to raise is as to this
permanence of things; for, if things are not permanent, they cannot
testify to the permanence of the Divine mind. I will begin my
questionings with the concluding words of the last-quoted passage: "when
I shut my eyes, the things I saw may still exist, but it must be in
another mind." The expression "the things I saw" would seem to be
ambiguous. Are the things I saw the sensations of sight which I had, or
are they something different? If they are my sensations, they certainly
do not exist when my eyes are closed--things are not permanent. If the
things I see are something different from my sensations of sight, then
the common-sense Realist would seem to be right, and Berkeley's
Idealism must be given up. Let us examine each alternative.
It looks, at first, as though Berkeley himself would say that the things
I saw are identical with my sensations of sight: in the third passage
quoted above he says, "the things I perceive are my own ideas ... the
things, I say, immediately perceived are ideas or sensations, call them
which you will." Let us, therefore, see the consequences of adhering
strictly to this interpretation of the ambiguous phrase. It will follow
in the first place that, unless I can see with my eyes shut, the things
I see are not permanent, but do cease to exist when I close my eyes.
Next, my sensations cannot exist in somebody else's mind--the fact that
you can see the object when your eyes are open does not enable me to see
it with my eyes closed. On the other hand, of course, it does not follow
that because my eyes are closed nobody else can see anything--only, this
does not make my sensations permanent, or prove that they can exist in
someone else's mind. In fine, if "the things I saw" are the sensations
of sight that I had, then Berkeley's argument from the permanent
existence of "things" to their existence in a permanent mind breaks down
doubly; for, first, my sensations plainly are not permanent; and,
second, my sensations cannot exist in another mind, permanent or
otherwise.
At this point it is necessary to note that "existence" has been used in
this connection in a double sense: actual existence has been
distinguished from potential. It is on this distinction that Mill bases
his definition of matter as "the permanent possibility of sensation";
but the distinction is derived from Berkeley, who has, as usual, given
the most lucid explanation. In his _MS. Common Place Book_ (quoted in
Fraser, i. 325, n. 9), Berkeley says, "Bodies, taken for powers, do
exist when not perceived; but this existence is not actual. When I say a
_power_ exists, no more is meant than that _if_, in the light, I open my
eyes, and look that way, I shall see the body." Thus far Mill will go
with Berkeley; and thus far both are open to the reproach of not giving
a plain answer to a plain question. The plain question of common sense
to the Idealist is: Do things exist when unperceived? Does the furniture
of my room exist when nobody is in the room to perceive it? To which the
Idealist replies that if I go into the room I shall see the
furniture--which is perfectly true, but is no answer to the question.
There is, indeed, no particular reason why Mill should not plainly
answer "No," if it were not for fear of giving a shock to the man of
common sense who cannot readily comprehend how it is that the coal in
his grate has come to be consumed if the process of combustion has been
suspended in his absence. But with Berkeley the case is different: for
him the permanence of things and the common-sense belief in that
permanence have a value as furnishing an additional argument in favour
of a Supreme Mind. But he too evades rather than meets the plain
question of the plain man: "Do things exist when no one is conscious of
them?" His reply is, "Yes, for the Divine Mind is conscious of
them"--which again is true, but is not an answer to the question.