of no way of preventing; but knowledge and human power are indeed
synonymous, and I know of no end to either. But, as for those of us
bound to die before we have learned how not to, and as for our children
whose world may well vanish before they have thought of a way of
saving it, we have always this solace--that we know we are facing the
only way salvation can come from when our face is toward science. “For
nature,” says Bacon, with his queer crooked smile,--“nature is only
subdued by submission.”
IX
PROGRESS
We little realize, until we have met them socially, how engaging the
manners of cannibals can be. It is unfortunate that so many obstacles
lie in the way of our making their better acquaintance,--they live
so far out of town for one thing, and for another are so clannish a
set that only occasionally is one of our sort welcomed to their inner
circles. Yet when one who has had this fortune returns to tell about
it,--which happens too rarely--we can see it has been a revelation to
him and an enlightenment. There is that friend of our youth, Herman
Melville, who about the year 1840 was entertained by the Merquesan
Islanders--I swear that as I read him I find something very winning
about the ways of these people. It is true they were what Melville
calls “occasional cannibals”; but although cannibalism, however
occasional, cannot win our entire approval (perhaps because, as
Montaigne suggests, we have learned how much better it is to torment
our enemies alive than to consume them dead) yet it is not wise or just
to allow our prejudice against an odd local custom to blind us to so
much that is fair in their lives.
For much there is that is fair in the lives of the Typees. Dwelling
on that enchanted island of the Pacific, their lines are cast in
pleasant places. The asperities which civilization seems rather to have
aggravated than smoothed do not roughen their way. Their existence is
passed in the midst of tropical plenty, on which their numbers, few
and hot on the increase, make light demand. They toil not to cover
what nature has conceived in innocence, and spin but lightly to adorn
what nature has fashioned fair. Little thought do they take on their
housing. “There are few villages,” Melville tells us, “the houses
stand here and there in the shadow of groves or are scattered along
the banks of the winding stream; their bamboo sides and their gleaming
white thatch forming a beautiful contrast to the perpetual verdure
in which they are embowered. There are no roads of any kind in the
valley; nothing but a labyrinth of foot paths twisting and turning
without end.” Yet the morals of these people do not seem to have been
so far below our standards as their benighted condition might lead us
to expect. “There seemed,” says Melville, “to be no rogues of any sort
in Typee. In the darkest nights the natives slept securely with all
their worldly wealth around them, in houses the doors of which were
never fastened. The disquieting thought of theft and assassination
never disturbed them. Each islander reposed beneath his own palmetto
thatching, or sat under his own breadfruit tree, with none to molest or
alarm him. There was not a padlock in the valley.”
I had gone so far in one of my readings of Melville, and was beginning
to wonder in the back of my head what a Typee introduced into
our civilization could find to say of us half as pleasant as the
things their guest had noted of them, when I recalled that another
had long ago put the like question to himself when he was in much
better position to answer it. It was when the New World was very
much newer than it is now, that Villegaignon landed in a country he
surnamed Antarctic France, where dwelt a people of cannibals the very
counterpart (as I judge) of our friends the Typees. “Three of these
people,” the Sieur de Montaigne records, “were at Rouen in the reign
of our late King, Charles the Ninth, who talked with them a great
while. They were showed our fashions, our pomp, and the form of a fair
city; afterwards some demanded their advice, and would needs know of
them what things of note and admirable they had observed amongst us.
They answered three things,” ... of which Montaigne seems particularly
impressed with this one: “They had perceived [they said] there were men
among us full gorged with all sorts of commodities, and others which
hunger-starved and bare with need and poverty begged at their gates:
and found it strange these moieties [they have a phrase whereby they
call men but a moiety one of another]--strange these moieties so needy
could endure such an injustice, and that they took not the others by
the throat, or set fire to their houses.”
I do not suppose Montaigne approved, any more than we can, the touch
of savagery that concludes these observations; but on the whole they
seem to have confirmed him in certain opinions he had already formed
on the pretended advantages of civilized over barbarous life. For this
occasion on which he actually met and conversed with the cannibals was
not the first acquaintance he had with them. There had long been with
him a certain serving-man who had spent some ten or twelve years in
their country, and seems to have given his master much the same account
of them as Melville has given us of the Typees. I cannot refrain
from recalling in Montaigne’s own words his reflections on the whole
spectacle of savagery and civilization:
“Now I find,” he says, “as far as I have been informed, there is
nothing in that nation that is either barbarous or savage,--unless men
call that barbarism which is not common to them.... They are even
savage as we call those fruits wild which nature of herself and of
her ordinary progress hath produced,--whereas, indeed, they are those
which ourselves have ordered by our artificial devices and diverted
from their common order we should rather term savage. In those are the
true and most profitable virtues, and natural properties most lively
and vigorous, which in these we have bastardized, applying them to the
pleasure of our corrupted taste.... And if notwithstanding, in diverse
fruits of those countries that were never tilled, we shall find that
in respect of ours they are most excellent and as delicate to the
taste, there is no reason art should gain the point of honor over our
puissant mother Nature. We have so much by our invention surcharged
the beauties and riches of her works, that we have altogether choked
her; yet wherever her purity shineth, she maketh our vain and frivolous
enterprises wonderfully ashamed.
“Et veniunt hederae sponte sua melius,
Surgit et in solis formosior arbutus antris,
Et volucres nulla dulcius arte canunt.
“All our endeavor or wit cannot so much as reach to represent the nest
of the least birdlet, ... no, nor the web of a silly spider....
“Those nations seem therefore so barbarous unto me because they have
received very little fashion from human wit, and are yet near their
original naturality. The laws of nature do yet command them which are
but little bastardized by ours, and that with such purity as I am
sometimes grieved the knowledge of it came not sooner to light, what
time there were men that, better than we, could have judged of it. I am
sorry Lycurgus and Plato had it not; for me seemeth that what in these
nations we see by experience doth not only exceed all the pictures
wherewith licentious poesy hath proudly embellished the Golden Age, but
also the conception and desire of philosophy.... It is a nation, would
I answer Plato, that hath no kind of traffic, no knowledge of letters,
no name of magistrate nor of politic priority, no use of service, of
riches or of poverty, no occupation but idle, no respect of kindred but
common, no apparel but natural, no measuring of lands, no use of wine,
corn or metal.... The very words that import lying, falsehood, treason,
dissimulation, covetousness, envy, detraction and pardon were never
heard of amongst them. How dissonant would Plato find his imaginary
commonwealth from this perfection?
“Hos natura modos primum dedit.”
I had thought to begin a sound philosophical account of the nature
of progress with a picture, not, if I could help it, unsympathetic,
of man’s condition before he had felt its benefits. The plan would
recommend itself to any philosopher as suitable and convenient to its
purpose, yet here am I well beyond the beginning of my discourse,
still lingering with the cannibals, and, what is worse, sensible
that I have not been diligent to uncover the many causes there must
be for rejoicing that we are not as they were. Not that there is any
difficulty in pointing to the host of things we can do which they could
not. We have only to mount in one of our winged ships and look down on
the simple Typee rubbing two sticks together for their spark, to see
in all the distance that lies between us the like of what Prometheus
scaled Heaven for. But what in all this is there to rejoice over?
It is singular how many have asked this question and found no answer,
or have answered--Nothing. I do not cite the licentious poets Montaigne
refers to as having invented a Golden Age and feigned a happy condition
of man before progress had spoiled the world for him; although these
are many, and if their wisdom is not of the philosopher’s kind, yet is
it all the closer to that “ancient wisdom of childhood” a wise man does
well to keep near him. But even learned academies have thought the
question not beyond their interest and study. In 1749, the Academy of
Dijon set for the prize competition of the following year the question,
“Whether the progress of the arts and sciences had contributed to the
purification of life?” The prize was won by J.-J. Rousseau. His little
essay, generally known as the “Discours sur les Sciences et les Arts,”
worked on the thought of its time as seldom so casual a thing. “One
cannot,” Jean-Jacques wrote then, “one cannot reflect on the ways of
life without finding pleasure in recalling the image of its first
simplicity. That was a fair shore, bedecked by only Nature’s hand,
toward which our eyes are ever turning back regretfully as we watch it
fade in the distance.”
There may be, nay, I think there must be, a meaning and a moral to
this disgust of the enlightened here and now, this longing for a
life not all “sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought.” But the
interpretations of this feeling we most commonly meet with are not I
hope to be taken very seriously, for if they are, there is no counsel
for us but one of despair. Thus, whatever could come of the lament for
the good old days, the golden days, before science had done this or
that to cloud our first innocence? No history written in such ancient
times but that it can recall times still more ancient when things went
better with the sons of the gods because then they knew less. And it
is still open to any one--traveler, philosopher, poet--to draw what
picture he will of far away lands wherein, for that nobody wanted very
much, everybody found all he wanted. The subject of this sketch may
vary from Diogenes snarling in his tub to a Typee girl dancing in her
flowers; from the desert to which the Christian cenobites withdrew to
Tasso’s bosky places, where, before that vain word Onore had mingled
its grief with love,
Sedean pastori e ninfe,
Meschiando alle parole
Vezzi e susurri, ed ai susurri i baci
Strettamente tenaci ...
But of all this, nothing is serious, nothing sincere,--of all those
who lament the past not one would take the first step toward it, so
little is it in man’s nature to retreat. Or if anyone would, yet what
could he do, save drag his own sadness into the desert with him? As for
the world, it must even go on with its science, though it be but the
science of hurting itself.
Wherefore, no less futile than regret for a past we cannot recover,
is fear for a future we cannot avert. It is natural that certain
conditions arising out of the progress of science should make gentle
souls anxious for what is to come. Science is power, and as no man can
commit the sins he is impotent to commit, there is a certain safeguard
for innocence in ignorance. Only after having eaten of the Tree of
Knowledge did our first parents come to mourn outside the gates. No
shepherds and shepherdesses conceived the iniquity of Babel’s tower,
and Egypt and great Babylon were of no children’s dreaming. Yet must
man go on gathering unto himself knowledge with all its power for harm
and no warning gesture of the fearful can stay him. Our only comfort
can be that however great a power for harm science may bring, it ought
to enhance in equal measure the power for good,--did we but know what
good and evil were.
Did we but know good and evil! In the suggestion that perhaps we
do not, in the suspicion that this is just the knowledge to which
science does not help us,--yes, in the fear that it is science itself
which throws doubt on ethical standards--is, I conceive, a motive for
deprecating the progress of science more serious than the others, and
more sincere. Science is, indeed, endlessly critical; no authority
of tradition or of general acceptance imposes upon it; nothing for
it is finished, nothing fixed; and to those to whom all goodness is
in danger the moment one asks, What is good? science may well seem a
dangerous growth,--unhallowed in its origin, curiosity; damnable in its
outcome, unrest. And yet if as we assume science must progress, stayed
neither by regret for the past nor by fear for the future, then must
its questioning spirit invade every realm of opinion, examine the most
sacred of beliefs, look into the very meaning of good and evil.
For this reason we did well, I conceive, to begin a consideration of
progress with some account of the skeptics. Science itself cannot
quarrel with those who meet its advances with the question, What is the
good of you? But it can only begin its answer by asking another, What
do you take to be good?
* * * * *
What do you take to be good? Evidently there cannot be two minds, one
of which points to the advance of civilization with every confidence
that it means the world’s betterment, the other conceiving that men
may grow wiser and none the better for that, unless _the good_ is
understood by them in different senses. What are these two meanings
tangled in the single word,--_the good_?
It is this question that Immanuel Kant has studied with peculiar
care and thoughtfulness in his ethical writings, and there he has
made a distinction between two such meanings that seems very much
to our purpose. The first, in his stiff academic way, he calls the
_hypothetical_ use. Thus, if you were to enquire what would be the best
thing to do in order to attain a certain object, your answer would
recommend a certain procedure as “good,” certainly, but good only on
the hypothesis that such and such is your end. Your hypothetical good
washes its hands of any responsibility for what, if anything, of some
other kind of good or evil may attach to your purpose; it only places
its wits at your disposal in devising the best means to this end. Is
your purpose to rob a bank?--Then will science set itself to think
out for you the best way of robbing a bank. After that, let who will
complain that bank-robbing is not a good thing to set about, he cannot
deny that you have set about it in a good way.
But it seemed to Kant, as I suppose it would to anyone, that we do not
restrict ourselves to this hypothetical use of the term good. There
seems to us to be a distinction between a good way of thieving and a
way of being good. If so, must there not be a good that is sought for
its own sake and not merely for the sake of what it may lead to? Is
there not a _categorical_, an _absolute_ good? And surely Kant was not
very far from the thought of all of us when he sought to identify
this absolute good with the moral good and with the object of virtue.
Plainly we see that however good a thief a man may become, he does not
increase in virtue as he advances in science. And have we not here come
upon the ultimate meaning of those who contend that, let the world
advance never so in its science, it grows no whit better? Its increase
is altogether measured in those hypothetical goods thanks to which the
thieves of today are indeed better thieves than the crude ones that
used to be; but as little as ever do they know, and still less do they
care, for that absolute good, that moral world, to have progressed away
from which is to have gone backward indeed.
What, we asked of the critics of civilization, do you take to be good?
And setting aside those who have idly answered, It was good when the
world was young, before Onor “bound in nets the tresses Zephyr used to
scatter,”--setting aside “licentious poesy” we have found the answer
of serious men to be, The world will only be good when it has become
moral. Not the growth of science, but the increase in morality is real
progress, progress toward the absolute good. We have then only to make
plain morality’s meaning to have found what progress is.
Morality no doubt first presents itself to most of us as a set of laws
or maxims of conduct to follow which is virtue. These laws we may think
of as delivered unto man in God’s own voice, and carved upon tables
of stone. Or, if our image of their origin and authority be not so
definite, we may still find moral peace in the thought that what words
the still small voice of conscience whispers to us are no less God’s
words. They are what Antigone took them to be--
The immutable unwritten law of Heaven.
They were not born today or yesterday;
They die not, and none knoweth whence they sprang.
If many have been unable to keep the sweet moral confidence of
childhood until the end, it is because riper experience has not
confirmed to them Antigone’s premises, nor mature reflection born out
her conclusions. Do they _not_ die, these unwritten laws: are new ones,
indeed, never born? For a little searching we may find that not a
precept marks a virtue for one people at one time, but that elsewhere
or elsewhen its ordinance is taken to be vicious. And conversely, we do
not have to travel far to find vice turning into virtue. Antigone’s own
people are not so remote from us as the Mingrelians and Topinamboues;
we owe them much that we prize most in our culture, and would be proud
to match them in more ways than one. And yet, consider their admiration
in the way of a man, which, if it was any one, was surely the Wise
Ulysses. Now, if there are any two principles of Christian morals
more firmly planted in our souls than others, they are the maxims, Be
truthful, and, Be kind. But was Ulysses truthful? was Ulysses kind?
To leave for one’s unconquered enemies a wooden horse as it were a
parting token may be an innocent enough thing to do, however pagan. But
to make of this wooden horse a disguised troop ship is not within the
strict letter of truthfulness; and to sally forth therefrom to slay
your quondam foes while they sleep in the security of your peace does
not show a kindly spirit. Yet it does not appear that the Greek gods
resented any more than did the Greek people Ulysses’ cruel craft: all
of which would lead one to suspect that the unwritten law of peoples,
if indeed it come from Heaven, must come from only that part of it
which is directly overhead at the time.
But let time and place be never so circumscribed, and men never so in
accord as to their moral maxims, are these maxims at least consistent
with one another? Does one bid us be truthful?--then another bids us
be kind! But how in this vale of perplexities is one always to be
truthful yet never unkind? “Yes I know,” writes an old gossip of mine
and fellow philosopher, “I know. Morality; Duty. But how hard it is to
discover what is duty! I assure you that for three quarters of my time
I do not know where duty lies. It is like the hedgehog that belonged
to our English governess at Joinville. We used to spend the evening
looking for it under the furniture, and when we had found it, it was
time to go to bed.”[15]
For these reasons, most have abandoned the attempt to define the moral
good in terms of maxims, which they take rather to be hypothetical
goods in disguise. They are rules indeed, but only rules of thumb
holding “for the most part.” If they vary with the time and place, if
within the most circumscribed communities they contradict one another,
this is because they cannot pretend to be good in themselves, but
are only the means which the community accepting them has found by
experience to be best fitted for attaining a certain end. It is indeed
the end that justifies the means, it alone is the categorical good, and
the whole meaning of morality is to be sought in its purpose.
But those who, like David Hume, have sought the purpose common to all
the discordant moral maxims of history, have found it not in some
quality this purpose might be assumed to have, without question of him
whose purpose it was. No, the moral purpose founds its right to have
all other purposes bow to it on nothing but the authoritative position
of the one that has chosen this purpose as his. Suppose, with Hume,
we found no harmony in the moral ordinances of all the many peoples
of history save that each maxim at the time and under the conditions
of its acceptance was held to serve the well-being of the community.
Now communities are not so different from particular men but that they
must, like men, hold their well-being to lie in having the objects
of their desire accorded to them. From which it follows that to act
virtuously is to make your will conform to the will of the community to
which you belong. Descartes has somewhere said that God did not choose
this world because it was good, but the world is good because God chose
it. Just so, a community does not choose its purpose because it is
good, but that purpose is good which the community chooses. We might
say that, not the good will, but the Good Willer is morality’s last
word on the subject of the categorical good.
Thus it would seem that all virtues melt into one, and that one is what
the late Professor Royce was fond of calling “loyalty,” the devotion
of my will to the will of another. I am aware that not just _any_
other-will, whosesoever it may be, is contemplated by moralists as a
fit object of loyalty’s devotion. The Other to whom my will should bow,
if I would be moral, is generally conceived to be more numerous than
I (_e.g._ the majority), or more inclusive (the family, the state,
the cause), or in some sense higher (God). In short, the Other-will
is taken to be, in one way or another, an Over-will, and moralists
may differ widely as to which one of several conceivable Over-wills
should be recognized as the Absolute. But for the purpose of this
discussion, one illustration of moral loyalty is as good as another,
for the difficulty that morality has found in making good its claim to
have laid hold on the absolute good lies not, I conceive, in deciding
_which_ Other-will is sovereign, but in convincing a man that he ought
to acknowledge as sovereign _any_ other will than his own. One who is
told that it is not good for him to remain captain of his soul is bound
to ask, Why not? It is morality’s way of dealing with this _why_ that
I would consider in an example which, for being simple, loses nothing
that I can think essential to the issue.
* * * * *
In Thomas Hobbes’s “Leviathan,” one finds an account, clear,
legalistic, unsentimental, of the meaning of duty interpreted as the
obligation of your will and mine to bow to a Sovereign-will. The
title-page of the first edition (1651) of this work bears the image of
a man of heroic size whose body is made up of little men. The little
men stand for you and me, the big man is Leviathan. The story of the
generation of the living giant made up of living men is in this wise:
“Nature it seems hath made men so equal ... as though there be found
one man manifestly stronger in body or quicker in mind than another,
yet when all is reckoned together the difference between man and man
is not so considerable as that one man can therefore claim to himself
any benefit to which another man may not pretend as well as he.... From
this equality of ability arises equality of hope in attaining of our
ends. And therefore if any two men desire the same thing, they become
enemies, and in the way to their end ... endeavor to destroy or subdue
one another.... From this diffidence of one another, there is no way
for any man to secure himself so reasonable as anticipation; that is,
by force or wiles to master the persons of all the men he can, so long
till he see no other power great enough to endanger him....