Here, too, is the source of that common complaint of the world-weary

that they are tired of their pleasures. They have what they yearned

for; yet having it they are depressed at finding that they do not care.

Their inability to enjoy what they can have is the obverse of the

desire to possess the unattainable: both are due to carrying over the

expectations of youth into adult life. They find themselves in a world

unlike the world of their youth; they themselves are no longer youths.

But they retain the criteria of youth, and with them measure the world

and their own deserts.

Here, too, is the origin of the apparent paradox that as men grow older

they grow wiser but sadder. It is not a paradox at all if we remember

that this wisdom which [p186] makes them sadder is, after all, an

incompleted wisdom. They have grown wiser as to the character of the

world, wiser too about their own powers, but they remain naive as to

what they may expect of the world and themselves. The expectations

which they formed in their youth persist as deeply ingrained habits

to worry them in their maturity. They are only partially matured;

they have become only partially wise. They have acquired skill and

information, but the parts of them which are adult are embedded in

other parts of their natures which are childish. For men do not

necessarily mature altogether and in unison; they learn to do this

and that more easily than they learn what to like and what to reject.

Intelligence is often more completely educated than desire; our outward

behavior has an appearance of being grown up which our inner vanities

and hopes, our dim but powerful cravings, often belie. In a word, we

learn the arts and the sciences long before we learn philosophy.

If we ask ourselves what is this wisdom which experience forces upon

us, the answer must be that we discover the world is differently

constituted than we had supposed it to be. It is not that we learn more

about its physical elements, or its geography, or the variety of its

inhabitants, or the ways in which human society is governed. Knowledge

of this sort can be taught to a child without in any fundamental way

disturbing his childishness. In fact, all of us are aware that we once

knew a great many things which we have since forgotten. The essential

discovery of maturity has little if anything to do with information

about the names, the locations, and the sequences of facts; it is the

acquiring of a different sense [p187] of life, a different kind of

intuition about the nature of things.

A boy can take you into the open at night and show you the stars;

he might tell you no end of things about them, conceivably all that

an astronomer could teach. But until and unless he feels the vast

indifference of the universe to his own fate, and has placed himself

in the perspective of cold and illimitable space, he has not looked

maturely at the heavens. Until he has felt this, and unless he can

endure this, he remains a child, and in his childishness he will

resent the heavens when they are not accommodating. He will demand

sunshine when he wishes to play, and rain when the ground is dry, and

he will look upon storms as anger directed at him, and the thunder as a

personal threat.

The discovery that our wishes have little or no authority in the world

brings with it experience of the necessity that is in the nature of

things. The lesson of this experience is one from which we shrink and

to which few ever wholly accommodate themselves. The world of the child

is a kind of enchanted island. The labor that went into procuring his

food, his clothes, his toys, is wholly invisible at first. His earliest

expectations are, therefore, that somehow the Lord will provide. Only

gradually does the truth come home to him how much effort it costs to

satisfy his wants. It takes even longer for him to understand that not

only does he not get what he wants by asking for it but he cannot be

sure to get what he wants by working for it. It is not easy to accept

the knowledge that desire, that prayer, that effort can be and often

are frustrated, that in the nature of things [p188] there is much

fumbling, trial and error, deadlock and defeat.

The sense of evil is acquired late; by many persons it is never

acquired at all. Children suffer, and childhood is by no means so

unreservedly happy as some make it out to be. But childish suffering

is not inherently tragic. It is not stamped with the irrevocability

which the adult feels to be part of the essence of evil. Evil for the

child is something which can be explained away, made up for, done away

with. Pretentious philosophies have been built on this fancy purporting

somehow to absorb the evil of the world in an all-embracing goodness,

as a child’s tears are dried by its mother’s kisses. The discovery that

there is evil which is as genuine as goodness, that there is ugliness

and violence which are no less real than joy and love, is one of those

discoveries that the adult is forced somehow to accept in his valuation

of experience.

And then there is the knowledge, which only experience can give, that

everything changes and that everything comes to an end. It is possible

to tell a child about mortality, but to realize it he must live long

enough to experience it. This knowledge does not come from words; it

comes in feeling, in the feeling that he himself is older, in the

death of kin and friends, in seeing well-known objects wear out, in

discarding old things, in awakening to the sense that there is a whole

new generation in the world which looks upon him as old. There is an

intimation of immortality in our youth because we have not yet had

experience of mortality. The persons and the things which surround us

seem eternal because [p189] we have known them too briefly to realize

that they change. We have seen neither their beginning nor their end.

In the last analysis we have no right to say that the world of youth is

an illusion. For the child it is a true picture of the world in that

it corresponds to, and is justified in, his experience. If he did not

have to grow older, it would be quite sufficient because nothing in his

experience would contradict it. Our sense of life as we mature is quite

different, but there is no reason to think that it has any absolute

finality. Perhaps if we lived several hundred years we should acquire

a wholly different sense of life, compared with which all our adult

philosophy would seem quite callow.

The child’s sense of life can be called an illusion only if it is

carried over into manhood, for then it ceases to fit his experience and

to be justified by events. The habits formed in a childish environment

become progressively unworkable and contradictory as the youth is

thrust out from the protection of his family into an adult environment.

Then the infantile conviction that his wants will somehow be met

collides with the fact that he must provide for himself. The world

begins to seem out of joint. The child’s notion that things are to be

had for the asking becomes a vast confusion in which words are treated

as laws, and rhetoric as action. The childish belief that each of us is

the center of an adoring and solicitous universe becomes the source of

endless disappointments because we cannot reconcile what we feel is due

us with what we must resign ourselves to. The sense of the unreality of

evil, which our earliest experience seemed to justify, [p190] becomes

a deep preference for not knowing the truth, an habitual desire to

think of the world as we should prefer it to be; out of this rebellion

against truth, out of this determination that the facts shall conform

to our wishes, are born all manner of bigotry and uncharitableness.

The child’s sense that things do not end, that they are there forever,

becomes, once it is carried over into maturity, a vain and anxious

effort to possess things forever. The incapacity to realize that

the objects of desire will last only a little while makes us put an

extravagant value upon them, and to care for them, not as they are and

for what they can actually give us, but for what we foolishly insist

they ought to be and ought always to give us.

The child’s philosophy rests upon the assumption that the world outside

is in gear with his own appetites. For this reason an adult with a

childish character will ascribe an authority to his appetites which may

easily land him in fanaticism or frustration, in a crazy indulgence

or a miserable starvation. And to the environment he will ascribe a

willingness to conform to him, a capacity to be owned by him, which

land him in all sorts of delusions of grandeur. Only the extreme

cases are in the asylums. The world is full of semi-adult persons who

secretly nurse the notion that they are, or that by rights they ought

to be, Don Juan, Crœsus, Napoleon, or the Messiah.

They have brought with them the notion that they are still as

intimately attached to nature and to society as the child is to its

household. The adult has to break this attachment to persons and

things. His world does not permit him to remain fused with it, but

compels him to stand away from things. For things no longer obey

[p191] his wishes. And therefore he cannot let his wishes become

too deeply involved in things. He can no longer count on possessing

whatever he may happen to want. And therefore he must learn to want

what he can possess. He can no longer hold forever the things at which

he grasps; for they change, and slip away. And therefore he must

learn to hold on to things which do not slip away and change, to hold

on to things not by grasping them, but by understanding them and by

remembering them. Then he is wholly an adult. Then he has conquered

mortality in the only way mortal men can conquer it. For he has ceased

to expect anything of the world which it cannot give, and he has

learned to love it under the only aspect in which it is eternal.

9. _The Function of High Religion_

In the light of this conception of maturity as the ultimate phase

in the development of the human personality, we are, I think, in

a position to understand the riddle which we set ourselves at the

beginning of this chapter. I asked what significance there was for us

in the fact that men have so persistently associated the good life

with some form of ascetic discipline and renunciation. The answer is

that asceticism is an effort to overcome immaturity. When men do not

outgrow their childish desires, they seek to repress them. The ascetic

discipline, if it is successful, is a form of education; if it is

unsuccessful, it is an agonized conflict due to an imperfect education

or an incapacity to grow up. By the same token, moral regulations

imposed on others, insofar as they are at all rational, and not methods

of exploitation or expressions of jealousy, are attempts to curb the

social disorders [p192] which result from the activities of grown-up

children.

It follows that asceticisms and moralities are at best means to an

end; they are more or less inadequate substitutes for the educational

process and the natural growth of wisdom. They are often confused

with virtue, but they are not virtue. For virtue is the quality of

mature desire, and when desire is mature the tortures of renunciations

and of prohibitions have ceased to be necessary. “Blessedness,” says

Spinoza, “is not the reward of virtue, but virtue itself; nor should

we rejoice in it for that we restrain our lusts, but, on the contrary,

because we rejoice therein we can restrain our lusts.” The mature

character may be attained by growth and experience and insight, or by

ascetic discipline, or by that process of being reborn which is called

conversion; when it is attained, the moral problem of whether to yield

to impulse or to check it, and how much to check it and how much to

yield, has disappeared. A mature desire is innocent. This, I think, is

the final teaching of the great sages. “To him who has finished the

Path, and passed beyond sorrow, who has freed himself on all sides,

and thrown away every fetter, there is no more fever of grief,” says a

Buddhist writer.

The Master said,

“At fifteen I had my mind bent on learning.

“At thirty, I stood firm.

“At forty, I had no doubts.

“At fifty, I knew the decrees of Heaven.

“At sixty, my ear was an obedient organ for the reception of truth.

“At seventy, I could follow what my heart desired, without

transgressing what was right.”

[p193] To be able, as Confucius indicates, to follow what the heart

desires without coming into collision with the stubborn facts of life

is the privilege of the utterly innocent and of the utterly wise. It is

the privilege of the infant and of the sage who stand at the two poles

of experience; of the infant because the world ministers to his heart’s

desire and of the sage because he has learned what to desire. Perhaps

this is what Jesus meant when he told his followers that they must

become like little children.

If this is what he meant, and if this is what Buddha, Confucius, and

Spinoza meant, then we have here the clue to the function of high

religion in human affairs. I venture, at least, to suggest that the

function of high religion is to reveal to men the quality of mature

experience, that high religion is a prophecy and an anticipation of

what life is like when desire is in perfect harmony with reality. It

announces the discovery that men can enter into the realm of the spirit

when they have outgrown all childishness.

CHAPTER X [p194]

HIGH RELIGION AND THE MODERN WORLD

1. _Popular Religion and the Great Teachers_

In popular thought it is taken for granted that to be religious is to

accept in some form or other the theocratic view that God governs the

universe. If that assumption is correct then the orthodox who inveigh

against the godlessness of contemporary thought and the militant

atheists who rejoice in this godlessness are both right when they

insist that religion is disappearing. Insofar as religion is identical

with a belief in theocracy, it has indeed lost much of its reality for

modern men.

There is little doubt, I think, that popular religion has been

always and everywhere theocratic in principle. If, then, we are to

define as religion that which the overwhelming majority of mankind

have cherished, it would be necessary to concede at once that the

dissolution of the belief in a supernatural government of human affairs

is a dissolution of religion itself. But if that is conceded, then it

is necessary to concede also that many whom the world recognizes as

its greatest religious teachers were not themselves religious men. For

it could be demonstrated, I think, that in the central intuition of

Aristotle, of the author of the Fourth Gospel, of Buddha, of Spinoza,

to name only originating minds, the theocratic principle is irrelevant.

No one of these teachers held the belief, [p195] which is at the

heart of theocratic religion, that the relationship between God and

man is somehow analogous with that of a king to his subjects, that

the relationship is in any sense a transaction between personalities

involving, however subtly, a quid pro quo, that God’s will and the

human will are interacting forces.

In place of the popular conception of religion as a matter of

commandments and obedience, reward and punishment, in a word, as a

form of government, these great teachers placed their emphasis upon

the conversion, the education, and the discipline of the human will.

Such beliefs as they had about God were not in the nature of oaths of

allegiance to a superior; their concern was not to placate the will of

God but to alter the will of man. This alteration of the human will

they conceived as good not because God commands it, but because it

is intrinsically good for man, because by the test of experience it

yields happiness, serenity, whole-heartedness. Belief is not, as it is

in popular religion, an act which by creating a claim upon divinity

insures man’s salvation; the force of belief, as Mr. Whitehead has put

it, is in “cleansing the inward parts.” Thus religion becomes “the art

and the theory of the internal life of man, so far as it depends on the

man himself and on what is permanent in the nature of things.”

The difference between religion conceived as the art and theory of

the internal life of man and religion conceived as cosmic government

is the great difference between the religion of these great sages and

the religion of the multitude. Though in matters of this kind the

distinction is not always absolutely clear in every case, [p196] on

the whole it cannot be disputed, I believe, that the difference is real

and of fundamental importance. If we observe popular religions as they

are administered by ecclesiastical establishments, it is overwhelmingly

plain that their main appeal rests upon the belief that through their

offices the devout are able to obtain eternal salvation, and even

earthly favors, from an invisible king. But if we observe truly, I

think, we shall see also that side by side with the popular religion,

sometimes in open conflict with it, sometimes in outward conformity

with it, there is generally to be found in cultivated communities a

minority to whom religion is primarily a reconditioning of their own

souls. They may be mystics like Eckhart, they may be platonists like

Origen or Dean Inge, they may be protestants like St. Augustine and

Luther in certain phases of their thought, they may be humanists like

Erasmus and Montaigne; as of Confucius, it may be said of them that

“the subjects on which the Master did not talk were: extraordinary

things, feats of strength, disorder, and spiritual beings.” They may

be inside the churches or outside them, but in intention, in the inner

meaning of their religion, they are wholly at variance with the popular

creeds. For in one form or another they reject the idea of attaining

salvation by placating God; in one form or another they regard

salvation as a condition of the soul which is reached only by some kind

of self-discipline.

It must be obvious that religion, conceived in this way, “as the art

and theory of the internal life of man,” is not dissolved by what I

have been calling the acids of modernity. It is the popular religion

which is dissolved. [p197] But just because this vast dissolution is

destroying the disposition to believe in a theocratic government of

the universe, just because men no longer find it wholly credible that

their affairs are subject to the ordinances of a heavenly king, just

because they no longer vividly believe in an invisible power which

regulates their lives, judges them, and sustains them, their only hope

of salvation lies in a religion which provides an internal discipline.

The real effect of modernity upon religion, therefore, is to make the

religion which was once the possession of an aristocracy of the spirit

the only possible kind of religion for all modern men.

2. _The Aristocratic Principle_

To those who want salvation cheap, and most men do, there is very

little comfort to be had out of the great teachers. Spinoza might have

been speaking for all of them when he said:

If the way which I have pointed out ... seems exceedingly hard, it

may nevertheless be discovered. Needs must it be hard, since it is

so seldom found. How would it be possible, if salvation were ready

to our hand, and could without great labor be found, that it should

be by almost all men neglected? But all things excellent are as

difficult as they are rare.

But why, we may ask, is salvation by almost all men neglected? The

answer is that they do not desire that which they have never learned to

desire. “One cannot,” as Voltaire said, “desire that which one does not

know.” Can a man love good wine when he has drunk nothing but ginger

beer? Did we have naturally and instinctively [p198] a taste for

that which constitutes the happiness of the saved, we should already

be saved, and their happiness would be ours. We lack the taste, which

is, I suppose, another way of saying what the theologians meant when

they spoke of original sin. To be saved, in the sense which the sages

had in mind, is by conversion, education, and self-discipline to have

achieved a certain quality and harmony of the passions. Then the good

life is possible. But although men have often heard this said, and have

read about it, unless in some measure they already desire it, the whole

teaching remains mere words and abstractions which are high, cold,

and remote. As long as they feel that the way to happiness is through

a will other than their own, and that somehow events can in this

fashion be made to yield to their unregenerate wishes, in this world or

another, the wisdom of the sages will not touch their hearts, and the

way which is pointed out will be neglected.

Wisdom will seem inhuman. In a sense it is inhuman, for it is so

uncommon. Those who have it speak a strange language, of which the

words perhaps have a familiar sound, but the meaning is too high and

abstract; their delights are strange delights, and unfathomable, like

a passion which we have never known. And if we encounter them in their

lives or in their writings, they seem to us a mixture of grandeur

and queerness. For they are at once more deeply at home in the world

than the transients who make up most of mankind; yet, because of the

quality of their passions, they are not wholly of the world as the

worldling understands it. But unless the worldling is entirely without

the capacity to transcend himself, he is [p199] bound in such an

encounter to catch a glimpse now and then of an experience where there

is a serenity he himself has never known, a peace that passes his

understanding, an ecstasy exquisite and without regret, and happiness

so clarified that it seems like brilliant and kindly light.

Yet no teacher has ever appeared in the world who was wise enough

to know how to teach his wisdom to all mankind. In fact, the great

teachers have attempted nothing so utopian. They were quite well aware

how difficult for most men is wisdom, and they have confessed frankly

that the perfect life was for a select few. It is arguable, in fact,

that the very idea of teaching the highest wisdom to all men is the

recent notion of a humanitarian and romantically democratic age, and

that it is quite foreign to the thought of the greatest teachers.

Gautama Buddha, for example, abolished caste within the religious

order which he founded, and declared that the path to Nirvana was open

to the lowest outcast as well as to the proudest Brahman. But it was

necessary to enter the order and submit to its stringent discipline.

It is obvious that Buddha never believed that very many could or would

do that. Jesus, whom we are accustomed to think of as wholly catholic

in his sympathies, spoke the bitter words: “Give not what is holy to

the dogs and cast not your pearls before swine.” In Mohammedanism that

which is mystical is esoteric: “all those emotions are meant only for

a small number of chosen ones ... even some of the noblest minds in

Islam restrict true religious life to an aristocracy, and accept the

ignorance of the multitude as an irremediable evil.”

There is an aristocratic principle in all the religions [p200] which

have attained wide acceptance. It is significant that Jesus was content

to leave the governance of the mass of men to Caesar, and that he

created no organization during his lifetime beyond the appointment

of the Apostles. It is significant, because it shows how much more

he was concerned with the few who could be saved than with arranging

the affairs of the mass of mankind. Plato, who was a more systematic

teacher than either Jesus or Buddha, did work out an elaborate social

order which took account not only of the philosophers, but of all the

citizens of the state. But in that very attempt he rested upon the

premise that most men will not attain the good life, and that for

them it is necessary to institute the laws. “The worthy disciples of

philosophy will be but a small remnant,” he said, “... the guardian ...

must be required to take the longer circuit, and toil at learning as

well as at gymnastics, or he will never reach the highest knowledge of

all which is his proper calling.”

Perhaps because they looked upon the attempts as hopeless, perhaps

because they did not know how to go about it, perhaps because they

were so wise, the greatest teachers have never offered their full

wisdom to the multitude. Like Mr. Valiant-for-truth in _The Pilgrim’s

Progress_ they said: “My sword I give to him that shall succeed me in

my pilgrimage, and my courage and skill to him that can get it.”

3. _The Peculiarity of the Modern Situation_

But because the teaching of the sages was incomprehensible, the

multitude, impressed but also bewildered, ignored them as teachers and

worshipped them as gods. [p201] In their wisdom the people were not

interested, but in the legends of their power, which rumor created,

there was something understandable. And thus, the religions which have

been organized around the names of great spiritual teachers have been

popular in proportion, one might almost say, to the degree in which the

original insight into the necessity for conversion and self-discipline

has been reduced to a system of commands and promises which the common

man can understand.

For popular religion is suited to the capacities of the unconverted.

The adherents of a popular religion necessarily include an enormous

number of people who are too young, or too feeble, too dull or too

violent, too unstable or too incurious, to have any comprehension

whatsoever of anything but the simplest scheme of rewards and

punishments. An organized religion cannot neglect them if it has any

pretensions to being universal. The great ecclesiastical establishments

have often sheltered spiritual lives, and drawn new vitality from

them. But fundamentally the great churches are secular institutions;

they are governments preoccupied inevitably with the regulation of

the unregenerate appetites of mankind. In their scriptures there is

to be found the teaching that true salvation depends upon internal

reform of desire. But since this reform is so very difficult, in

practice the churches have devoted themselves not so much to making

real conversions, as to governing the dispositions of the unconverted

multitude.

They are immensely engaged by the task of administering their moral

codes, persuading their congregations with promises, and threatening

them with punishments [p202] if they do not keep their childish

lusts within bounds. The fact that they use rewards and punishments,

and appeal even to Caesar, is evidence enough that they are dealing

with the unconverted. The fact that they invoke authority is in

itself evidence that they are speaking to the naive. The fact that

they pretend to have certain knowledge about the constitution of the

universe is evidence that they are interested in those who are not wise

enough to understand the limitations of knowledge. For to the few who

are converted, goodness is pleasant, and needs no sanctions. It needs

no authority, for it has been verified by experience. But when men have

to be coerced into goodness, it is plain that they do not care for it.

Now although the great teachers saw clearly enough the difference

between the popular religion and their own insight, they were under

no great compulsion to try and overcome it. They accepted the fact

that the true religion was esoteric and for the few. They saw that it

demanded the re-education of desire, but they had no systematic and

tested knowledge of how new habits can be formed. Invincible as was

their insight into the principle of happiness, they were compelled

to depend upon introspection, and to generalize from a limited

observation. They understood that the good life was in some degree an

acquired disposition; they were aware that it is not easily or naively

acquired.

For those who somehow had the disposition, the teachers instituted

stern disciplines which were really primitive experiments in the

re-education of desire. But there was no very urgent practical need

which impelled them to search for ways of making disciplines more

[p203] widely available. Those who submitted to them were in general

individuals who were already out of the ordinary. The mass of mankind

lived solidly within the framework of custom and the psychological

compulsions of theocracy. There was no pressing reason, as there is

to-day, now that this ancestral order is dissolved, why anyone should

seek to formulate a mode of life by which ordinary men, thrown upon

their own resources, can find their way without supernatural rules,

commands, punishments, and compensations. In the past there were a

few men here and there who had somehow, for reasons which we do not

understand, outgrown the ancestral society in which they lived. But the

society itself remained. It sheltered them. And it ruled the many.

The peculiarity of our modern situation is that multitudes, instead of

a few, are compelled to make radical and original adjustments. These

multitudes, though they have lost the ancient certainties, have not

outgrown the needs to which they ministered. They need to believe,

but they cannot. They need to be commanded, but they cannot find a

commander. They need support, and there is none. Their situation is

adult, but their dispositions are not. The religion of the spirit would

suit their needs, but it would seem to be beyond their powers.

4. _The Stone Which the Builders Rejected_

The way of life which I have called high religion has in all ages

seemed so unapproachably high that it has been reserved for a voluntary

aristocracy of the spirit. It has, in fact, been looked upon not only

as a kind of splendid idiosyncrasy of a few men here and there, but

[p204] as incompatible, in essence, with the practical conditions

under which life is lived. It is for these reasons, no doubt, that

the practice of high religion has almost invariably been associated

either with a solitary asceticism or with a specially organized life in

monastic establishments. High religion has been regarded as something

separate from the main concerns of mankind.

It is not difficult to see why this was so if we realize that the

insight into the value of disinterestedness, which is the core of high

religion, was not a sudden discovery nor a complete one, anywhere or

any time. Like all other things associated with evolutionary man, this

insight must have had very crude beginnings; it would be possible

to show, I think, that there have been many tentative and partial

perceptions of it which, under the clarifying power of men of genius,

have at times become coherent. When we remember that we are dealing

with an insight into the qualities of a matured personality, there is

no reason to suppose that the full significance of this insight has

ever been completely exhausted. It seems far more likely that the sages

demonstrated the existence of the realm of the spirit, but that it

still remains to be thoroughly explored.

If that is true then the attempt to live by these partial insights

must necessarily have presented inordinate practical difficulties.

Pythagoras, for example, seems to have grasped the idea that the

disinterested study of mathematics and music was cleansing to the

passions and also that in order to be disinterested it was necessary

to have purity of mind. So when he established his society in Southern

Italy he evidently attempted to combine the [p205] serious pursuit

of science with an ascetic discipline. But the pursuit of science was

too much for the mass of the faithful who assumed that “to follow

Pythagoras meant to go barefoot and to abstain from animal flesh and

beans.” And this in turn was too much for the dignity of the learned

who proceeded to dissociate themselves from the disciplinary aspect of

the Pythagorean teaching. It is a fair conclusion, I think, that the

breakdown of this early experiment must have been due fundamentally to

the fact that Pythagoras could not have known any tested method either

of equipping his followers to appreciate science or anything beside a

crude asceticism as a means of moral discipline. If this is true, then

the reason for the failure lay in the fact that though the original

insight was marvelously good, it was not implemented with the necessary

technical knowledge for applying it. Only a few, we may suppose, who

were already by the accidents of nature and nurture suited to the

Pythagorean ideal, can ever have successfully applied it.

In the Christian pursuit of the higher religious life the practical

difficulties presented themselves in a different way. In its beginning

Christianity was a sect of obscure men and women who were out of

touch with the intellectual interests of the Roman world. They were

persecuted aliens both in Palestine and elsewhere, and they came to

the conclusion that the Roman Empire and all its concerns was the

Kingdom of Satan. This, together with the widespread belief in the

Second Coming of Christ, dissociated the Christian life at the outset

from the life of the world. Later on, when Christianity became the

official religion of the Empire, and the Church a great [p206] secular

institution which concerned itself with government and property and

diplomacy and war, those who wished to live as nearly as possible

according to the original meaning of the Gospels were quite evidently

compelled to withdraw and live a separated life. “If any man love the

world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the

world, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride

of life, is not of the Father, but is of the world. And the world

passeth away, and the lust thereof: but he that doeth the will of God

abideth forever.”

Although for some centuries the monasteries were the centers of what

learning there was, the impressions left by monasticism on mankind

seems to have been that the highest type of religious life is not

disinterested in human affairs, but uninterested; that it requires not

merely the renunciation of worldly desires, but of the world itself.

The insight was imperfect, and therefore as an example to mankind the

practice was abortive and confusing. Yet only an uncomprehending person

can fail to see that the vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience

proceeded from a profound, if partial, understanding of human nature

and its most perfect harmony. Plainly all manner of disorder both in

society and in the individual result from greed, uncontrollable sexual

desire, arrogance, and imperiousness. That was so plain to the early

Christians, and on the other hand it was so little plain how those

powerful passions could be civilized, that the monastics in effect gave

up and attempted to excise them entirely from their natures. In this

they did not succeed.

Had they known any way of curing the fever of human [p207] passion

except by attempting to excise it, the insight of high religion would

have had some practicable meaning for those who did not withdraw from

the world. But no way was known, and therefore the practice of high

religion had to mean separation from human society and violence to

human nature. But why was there no other way known of overcoming the

chaos of the passions? Was it because there is no other way? If that

were so then the world is as hopeless as the early Christians thought

it was; indeed it is more hopeless because it does not show any signs,

as they believed, of coming to an end. Was it because the early

Christian Fathers were not wise enough to discover a way? It is always

a good rule, I think, to discard any idea based on the premise that the

best minds of another age were congenitally inferior to our own. My

conviction is that necessity is the mother of discovery and invention,

and that the reason why the insight of high religion and the methods

of practicing it were so imperfectly developed, is that there was no

practical necessity for developing them.

The mass of men lived in an ancestral order which was regulated by

custom and authority, and made endurable by usage and compensatory

consolations. The organic quality of that society into which they

fitted took care of their passions; those who had outgrown such a

society, or were so constituted that they did not fit it, were the

exceptions. From them came the insight of high religion; for them a

separated life was a possible solution of their personal problems.

There was nothing in the nature of things to compel men to work out a

way of life, I won’t say for all men, but at least for many men, by

which [p208] they could govern their own natures. Behind any such

effort there would almost certainly have to be an urgent need. For the

inertia of the human race is immense.

It is my thesis that because the acids of modernity have dissolved

the adjustments of the ancestral order, there exists to-day on a

scale never before experienced by mankind and of an urgency without a

parallel, the need for that philosophy of life of which the insight

of high religion is a prophecy. For it is immature and unregenerate

desire which creates the disorders and the frustrations that confound

us. The preoccupation of the popular religion has been to find a way of

governing these disorders and of compensating for their frustrations.

The preoccupation of high religion is with the regeneration of the

passions that create the disorders and the frustrations. Insofar as

modernity has dissolved the power of the popular religion to govern

and to compensate, the need for a high religion which regenerates

becomes imperative, and what was once a kind of spiritual luxury of the

few has, under modern conditions, become an urgent necessity of the

many. The insight of high religion which has hitherto indicated a kind

of bypath into rare experiences is now a trail which the leaders of

mankind are compelled to take.

There is implied in this a radical displacement in the field of morals.

The main interest of the practical moralist in the past has been to

interpret, administer, and enforce a moral code. He knew what was

right. The populace acknowledged that he knew what was right. His

task was to persuade and compel them to do what was right. There was

a tacit assumption, which was [p209] quite correct, that very often

the populace and even the moralist himself would much rather have done

what was wrong. Very often they did it. Then they were punished in

this world or in the next. But to-day the moralist finds himself in

a different position. He is no longer absolutely sure that he knows

what is right. The populace, even if it respects him, is disinclined

to believe that a thing is right simply because he says it is. The

populace continues very frequently to prefer what was once regarded

as wrong. It no longer knows whether it is right or wrong, and of

course it gives itself the benefit of the doubt. The result is that

there no longer exists a moral code which the moralist can interpret,

administer, and enforce. The effect of that is moral anarchy within

and without. Since there is no principle under modern conditions which

authorizes the re-establishment of a moral code, the moralist, unless

he revises his premises, becomes entirely ineffectual. To revise his

premises can, under the circumstances, mean only one thing: that he

occupies himself with the problem of how to encourage that growth

into maturity, that outgrowing of naive desire, that cultivation of

disinterestedness, which render passion innocent and an authoritative

morality unnecessary.

The novelty of all this lies in the fact that the guardians of morality

among the people are compelled at last to take seriously what the

teachers of wisdom have taught. The insight of high religion may

be said, then, to be a discovery in the field of human experience

comparable with those prophetic conceptions in the natural sciences

which, after being looked upon for long periods as a [p210] curiosity,

are at last, because circumstances are ripe, seen to be the clue

to otherwise insoluble perplexities. The concept of evolution was

discovered by sheer insight innumerable times before the time of

Darwin. Not much came of it until the rapid evolution of human affairs

after the industrial revolution had somehow brought this neglected

insight into focus with men’s interests. There are many conceptions in

the science of the Greeks which are true intimations of what modern

physicists have found. But an insight of this sort comes into its own

only when circumstances conspire to make it inevitably appropriate.

It is my contention that in the field of morals circumstances are

producing a somewhat analogous condition: that the insight of the sages

into the value of disinterestedness has become the clue to otherwise

insoluble perplexities.

PART III [p211]

THE GENIUS OF MODERNITY

_Where is the way where light dwelleth?_

Job 38:19.

CHAPTER XI [p213]

THE CURE OF SOULS

1. _The Problem of Evil_

The greatest of all perplexities in theology has been to reconcile the

infinite goodness of God with his omnipotence. Nothing puts a greater

strain upon the faith of the common man than the existence of utterly

irrational suffering in the universe, and the problem which tormented

Job still troubles every devout and thoughtful man who beholds the

monstrous injustices of nature. If there were no pain in the world

except that which was felt by responsible beings who had knowingly

transgressed some law of conduct, there would, of course, be no problem

of evil. Pain would be nothing but a rational punishment. But the pain

which is suffered by those who according to all human standards are

innocent, by children and by animals, for example, cannot be fitted

into any rational theory of reward and punishment. It never has been.

The classic attempts to solve the problem of evil invariably falsify

the premises. This falsification may for a time satisfy the inquirer,

but it does not settle the problem. That is why the problem is forever

presenting itself again.

The solutions which have been proposed neglect one or the other of the

attributes of God: tacitly or otherwise either his infinite power or

his infinite love is denied. [p214] In the Old Testament, at least

in the older parts of it, the power of God is exalted at the expense

of his goodness. For it is simply impossible by any human standard

and within any intelligible meaning of the words to regard Yahveh as

wholly good. His cruelty is notorious and his capriciousness is that

of an Oriental despot. It is admitted, I believe, by all but the most

literally-minded of the fundamentalists that there are innumerable

incidents in the Old Testament which have to be expurgated if the Bible

is to be used as a source book of conduct for impressionable children.

Now for the ancient Hebrews who conceived God in their fashion, the

problem of evil did not exist because it had not occurred to them that

a ruler should be just and good as well as great and powerful.

As men came to believe that God must be just, beneficent, and loving,

the problem soon presented itself. And in the Book of Job, which is

supposed to date from the Fifth or Fourth Century B.C., we have a

poignant effort to solve it. Job’s conclusion is that the goodness of

Jehovah is among the “things too wonderful for me.” He accepts the

judgments of God, and acknowledges their goodness by attributing to God

a kind of goodness which is unlike the human conception of goodness.

He holds fast to the premise that God is omnipotent—“I know that thou

canst do all things”—and the other premise that God is beneficent

he redefines. Job’s mind was satisfied, and it is reported that he

prospered greatly thereafter. What had really happened was that Job

gave up the attempt to prove that God was like Job, that the world was

as Job wished it to be, and so piously and with his mind at [p215]

rest he made the best of things, and went about his affairs.

In Job the solution is reached by claiming that what seems evil to

us would really be recognized as goodness if our minds were not so

limited. To the naive this is no solution at all, for it depends

upon using the word ‘good’ in two senses; actually it was a perfect

solution, for Job had resigned himself to the fact that God and the

universe in which he was manifest are not controlled by human desires.

Those who refused to accept this solution involved themselves in

intricate theorizing. Some of them argued that evil is an illusion.

This theory has been widely held, though it is rather difficult to

see how, if evil is an illusion, good is not also an illusion. The

one seems as vividly real as the other. It has also been argued by

some that evil is not important. This, of course, does not solve the

theoretical problem. In fact it ignores the problem and is really

a piece of advice as to how men ought to conduct themselves in the

presence of God. Many have argued, also, that evil exists in the world

to test human character, that by bearing it and conquering it men prove

their worth. There is a core of truth in this observation as there is

in the theory that many things are not so bad as they seem. But it does

not explain why a good and all powerful Deity chose to make men go

through a school of suffering to achieve goodness, when he might have

created them good in the first place.

These theoretical difficulties have furnished the material for endless

debate. I shall not pursue the matter in all its intricacies, but I

venture to point out that what is attempted in all these solutions is

ultimately to make plain [p216] why the ruler of the universe does

not order things as we should order them if we had his power. Once

we confess, as Job finally did, that the plan of the universe is not

what we naively wish it would be, there is no problem of evil. For the

whole difficulty arises because of our desire to impute to the universe

itself, or to the god who rules it, purposes like our own; failing to

find them, we are disappointed, and are plunged into elaborate and

interminable debate.

The final insight of Job, though it seems to be consistent with the

orthodox popular religion, is really wholly inconsistent with the

inwardness of popular religion. The God of the Book of Job does not

minister to human desires, and the story of Job is really the story

of a man’s renunciation of the belief in such a God. It is the story

of how a man learned to accept life maturely. The God whose ways Job

finally acknowledges is no longer a projection of Job’s desires. He is

like the God of Spinoza who cannot be cajoled into returning the love

of his worshipper. He is, in short, the God of an impersonal reality.

Whether God is conceived as a creator of that reality, who administers

it inexorably, or whether he is identified with reality and is

conceived as the sum total of its laws, or whether, as in the language

of modern science, the name of God is not employed at all, is a matter

of metaphysical taste. The great divide lies between those who think

their wishes are of more than human significance and those who do

not. For these latter the problem of evil does not arise out of the

difficulty of reconciling the existence of evil with their assumptions.

They do not assume that reality must conform to human desire. The

[p217] problem for them is wholly practical. It is the problem of how

to remove evil and of how to bear the evil which cannot be removed.

Thus from the attempt to explain the ways of God in the world as it now

is, nature and human nature being what they are, the center of interest

is shifted to an attempt to discover ways of equipping man to conquer

evil. This displacement has in fact taken place in the modern world.

In their actual practice men do not try to account for evil in order

that they may accept it; they do not deny evil in order that they may

not have to account for it; they explain it in order that they may deal

with it.

2. _Superstition and Self-Consciousness_

This change of attitude toward evil is not, as at first perhaps it

may seem, merely a new way of talking about the same thing. It alters

radically the nature of evil itself. For evil is not a quality of

things as such. It is a quality of our relation to them. A dissonance

in music is unpleasant only to a musical ear. Pain is an evil only if

someone suffers, and there are those to whom pain is pleasure and most

men’s evil their good. For things are neutral and evil is a certain way

of experiencing them.

To realize this is to destroy the awfulness of evil. I use the word

‘awful’ in its exact sense, and I mean that in abandoning the notion

that evil has to be reconciled with a theory of how the world is

governed, we rob it of universal significance. We deflate it. The

psychological consequences are enormous, for a very great part of all

human suffering lies not in the pain itself, but in the [p218] anxiety

contributed by the meaning which we attach to it. Lucretius understood

this quite well, and in his superb argument against the fear of death

he reasoned that death has no terror because nothing can be terrible to

those who no longer exist. Before we were born, he says, “we felt no

distress when the Poeni from all sides came together to do battle....

For he whom evil is to befall, must in his own person exist at the

very time it comes, if the misery and suffering are haply to have any

place at all.” St. Thomas defines superstition as the vice of excess

in religion, and in this sense of the word it may be said that the

effect of the modern approach is to take evils out of the context of

superstition.

They cease to be signs and portents symbolizing the whole of human

destiny and become specific and distinguishable situations which have

to be dealt with. The effect of this is not only to limit drastically

the meaning, and therefore the dreadfulness, of any evil, but to

substitute for a general sense of evil an analytical estimate of

particular evils. They are then seen to be of long duration and of

short, preventable, curable, or inevitable. As long as all evils are

believed somehow to fit into a divine, if mysterious, plan, the effort

to eradicate them must seem on the whole futile, and even impious.

The history of medical progress offers innumerable instances of how

men have resisted the introduction of sanitary measures because they

dreaded to interfere with the providence of God. It is still felt, I

believe, in many quarters, even in medical circles, that to mitigate

the labor pains in childbirth is to blaspheme against the commandment

that in pain children shall be brought forth. An aura of dread [p219]

surrounds evil as long as evil situations remain entangled with a

theory of divine government.

The realization that evil exists only because we feel it to be

painful helps us not only to dissociate it from this aura of dread

but to dissociate ourselves from our own feelings about it. This is a

momentous achievement in the inner life of man. To be able to observe

our own feelings as if they were objective facts, to detach ourselves

from our own fears, hates, and lusts, to examine them, name them,

identify them, understand their origin, and finally to judge them, is

somehow to rob them of their imperiousness. They are no longer the same

feelings. They no longer dominate the whole field of consciousness.

They seem no longer to command the whole energy of our being. By

becoming conscious of them we in some fashion or other destroy their

concentration and diffuse their energy into other channels. We cease to

be possessed by one passion; contrary passions retain their vitality,

and an equilibrium tends to establish itself.

Just what the psychological mechanism of all this is I do not pretend

to say. It is something to which psychologists are giving increasing

attention. But since Hellenic times the phenomenon which I have been

describing has been well known. It was undoubtedly what the Sophists

meant by the injunction: know thyself. It was in large measure to

achieve control through detachment that Socrates elaborated his

dialectic, for the Socratic dialectic is an instrument for making men

self-conscious, and therefore the masters of their motives. Spinoza

grasped this principle with great clarity. “An emotion,” he says,

“which is a passion ceases to be a passion as soon as we [p220] form a

clear and distinct idea of it.” He goes on to say that “insofar as the

mind understands all things as necessary, it has more power over the

emotions, or is less passive to them.”

The more recent discoveries in the field of psychoanalysis are an

elaboration of this principle. They are based on the discovery of

Freud and Breuer at the close of the last century that a catharsis of

emotion is often obtained if the patient can be made to recall, and

thus to relive by describing it, the emotional situation which troubles

him. The release of the psychic poison is known technically as an

abreaction. Where the new psychology supplements the insights of the

Sophists, of Socrates, and Spinoza, is in the demonstration that there

are powerful passions affecting our lives of which it is impossible by

ordinary effort of memory “to form a clear and distinct idea.” They are

said to be unconscious, or more accurately, I suppose, they are out

of the reach of the normal consciousness. Freud and his school have

invented an elaborate technic by which the analyst is able frequently

to help the patient thread his way back through a chain of associations

to the buried passion and fetch it into consciousness.

The special technic of psychoanalysis can be tested only by scientific

experience. The therapeutic claims made by psychoanalysts, and their

theories of the functional disorders, lie outside the realm of this

discussion. But the essential principle is not a technical matter.

Anyone can confirm it out of his own experience. It has been discovered

and rediscovered by shrewd observers of human nature for at least

two thousand years. To become detached from one’s passions and to

understand them consciously [p221] is to render them disinterested. A

disinterested mind is harmonious with itself and with reality.

This is the principle by which a humanistic culture becomes bearable.

If the principle of a theocratic culture is dependence, obedience,

conformity in the presence of a superhuman power which administers

reality, the principle of humanism is detachment, understanding, and

disinterestedness in the presence of reality itself.

3. _Virtue_

It can be shown, I think, that those qualities which civilized men,

regardless of their theologies and their allegiances, have agreed to

call virtues, have disinterestedness as their inner principle. I am not

talking now about the eccentric virtues which at some time or other

have been held in great esteem. I am not talking about the virtue of

not playing cards, or of not drinking wine, or of not eating beef, or

of not eating pork, or of not admitting that women have legs. These

little virtues are historical accidents which may or may not once

have had a rational origin. I am talking about the central virtues

which are esteemed by every civilized people. I am talking about such

virtues as courage, honor, faithfulness, veracity, justice, temperance,

magnanimity, and love.

They would not be called virtues and held in high esteem if there were

no difficulty about them. There are innumerable dispositions which are

essential to living that no one takes the trouble to praise. Thus it is

not accounted a virtue if a man eats when he is hungry or goes to bed

when he is ill. He can be depended upon to take care of his immediate

wants. It is only those actions which [p222] he cannot be depended

upon to do, and yet are highly desirable, that men call virtuous. They

recognize that a premium has to be put upon certain qualities if men

are to make the effort which is required to transcend their ordinary

impulses. The premium consists in describing these desirable and rarer

qualities as virtues. For virtue is that kind of conduct which is

esteemed by God, or public opinion, or that less immediate part of a

man’s personality which he calls his conscience.

To transcend the ordinary impulses is, therefore, the common element in

all virtue. Courage, for example, is the willingness to face situations

from which it would be more or less natural to run away. No one thinks

it is courageous to run risks unwittingly. The drunken driver of an

automobile, the boy playing with a stick of dynamite, the man drinking

water which he does not know is polluted, all take risks as great as

those of the most renowned heroes. But the fact that they do not know

the risks, and do not, therefore, have to conquer the fear they would

feel if they did know them, robs their conduct of all courage. The

test is not the uselessness or even the undesirability of their acts.

It is useless to go over Niagara Falls in a barrel. But it is brave,

assuming the performer to be in his right mind. It is a wicked thing

to assassinate a king. But if it is not done from ambush, it is brave,

however wicked and however useless.

Because courage consists in transcending normal fears, the highest kind

of courage is cold courage; that is to say, courage in which the danger

has been fully realized and there is no emotional excitement to conceal

the danger. The world instantly recognized this in Colonel Lindbergh’s

[p223] flight to Paris. He flew alone; he was not an impetuous fool,

but a man of the utmost sobriety of judgment. He had no companion to

keep his courage screwed up; he knew exactly what he was doing, yet

apparently he did not realize the rewards which were in store for him.

The world understood that here was somebody who was altogether braver

than the average sensual man. For Colonel Lindbergh did not merely

conquer the Atlantic Ocean; he conquered those things in himself which

the rest of us would have found unconquerable.

The cold courage of a man like Noguchi who, though in failing health,

went into one of the unhealthiest parts of Africa to study a deadly

disease, could come only from a nature which was overwhelmingly

interested in objects outside itself. Noguchi must have known exactly

how dangerous it was for him to go to Africa, and exactly how horrible

was the disease to which he exposed himself. To have gone anyway is

really to have cared for science in a way which very few care for

anything so remote and impersonal. But even courage like Lindbergh’s

and Noguchi’s is more comprehensible than the kind of courage which

anonymous men have displayed. I am thinking of the four soldiers at

the Walter Reed Hospital who let themselves be used for the study

of typhoid fever. They did not even have Lindbergh’s interest in

performing a great feat or Noguchi’s interest in science to buoy them

up and carry them past the point where they might have faltered. Their

courage was as near to absolute courage as it is possible to imagine,

and I who think this cannot even recall their names.

To understand the inwardness of courage would be, I [p224] think, to

have understood almost all the other important virtues. It is “not only

the chiefest virtue and most dignifies the haver,” but it embodies

the principle of all virtue, which is to transcend the immediacy of

desire and to live for ends which are transpersonal. Virtuous action

is conduct which responds to situations that are more extensive,

more complicated, and take longer to reach their fulfillment, than

the situations to which we instinctively respond. An infant knows

neither vice nor virtue because it can respond only to what touches it

immediately. A man has virtue insofar as he can respond to a larger

situation.

He has honor if he holds himself to an ideal of conduct though it is

inconvenient, unprofitable, or dangerous to do so. He has veracity

if he says and believes what he thinks is true though it would be

easier to deceive others or himself. He is just if he acknowledges the

interests of all concerned in a transaction and not merely his own

apparent interest. He is temperate if, in the presence of temptation,

he can still prefer Philip sober to Philip drunk. He is magnanimous if,

as Aristotle says, he cares “more for truth than for opinion,” speaks

and acts openly, will not live at the will of another, except it be a

friend, does not recollect injuries, does not care that he should be

praised or that others should be blamed, does not complain or ask for

help in unavoidable or trifling calamities. For such a man, as the word

‘magnanimous’ itself implies, is “conversant with great matters.”

A man who has these virtues has somehow overcome the inertia of his

impulses. Their disposition is to respond to the immediate situation,

and not merely to the situation [p225] at the moment, but to the most

obvious fragment of it, and not only to the most obvious fragment,

but to that aspect which promises instant pleasure or pain. To have

virtue is to respond to larger situations and to longer stretches of

time and without much interest in their immediate result in convenience

and pleasure. It is to overcome the impulses of immaturity, to

detach one’s self from the objects that preoccupy it and from one’s

own preoccupations. There are many virtues in the catalogues of

the moralists, and they have many different names. But they have a

common principle, which is detachment from that which is apparently

pleasant or unpleasant, and they have a common quality, which is

disinterestedness, and they spring from a common source, which is

maturity of character.

Few men, if any, possess virtue in all its varieties because few men

are wholly matured to the core of their being. We are for the most part

like fruit which is partly ripened: there is sourness and sweetness in

our natures. This may be due to the casualness of our upbringing; it

may be due to unknown congenital causes; it may be due to functional

and organic disease, to partial inferiorities of mind and body. But

it is due also to the fact that we can give our full attention only

to a few phases of our experience. With the equipment at our disposal

we are forced to specialize and to neglect very much. Hence the

mature scientist with petty ambitions and ignoble timidities. Hence

the realistic statesman who is a peevish husband. Hence the man who

manages his affairs in masterly fashion and bungles every personal

relationship when he is away from his office. Hence the loyal friend

who is a [p226] crooked politician, the kind father who is a merciless

employer, the champion of mankind who is an intolerable companion.

If any of these could carry over into all their relationships the

qualities which have made them distinguished in some, they would be

wholly adult and wholly good. It would not be necessary to imagine the

ideal character, for he would already exist.

It is out of these practical virtues that our conception of virtue has

been formed. We may be sure that no quality is likely to have become

esteemed as a virtue which did not somewhere and sometime produce

at least the appearance of happiness. The virtues are grounded in

experience; they are not idle suggestions inadvertently adopted because

somebody took it into his head one fine day to proclaim a new ideal.

There are, to be sure, certain residual and obsolete virtues which

no longer correspond to anything in our own experience and now seem

utterly arbitrary and capricious. But the cardinal virtues correspond

to an experience so long and so nearly universal among men of our

civilization, that when they are understood they are seen to contain a

deposited wisdom of the race.

4. _From Clue to Practice_

The wisdom deposited in our moral ideals is heavily obscured at the

present time. We continue to use the language of morality, having no

other which we can use. But the words are so hackneyed that their

meanings are concealed, and it is very hard, especially for young

people, to realize that virtue is really good and really relevant.

[p227] Morality has become so stereotyped, so thin and verbal, so

encrusted with pious fraud, it has been so much monopolized by the

tender-minded and the sentimental, and made so odious by the outcries

of foolish men and sour old women, that our generation has almost

forgotten that virtue was not invented in Sunday schools but derives

originally from a profound realization of the character of human life.

This sense of unreality is, I believe, due directly to the widespread

loss of genuine belief in the premises of popular religion. Virtue is

a product of human experience: men acquired their knowledge of the

value of courage, honor, temperance, veracity, faithfulness, and love,

because these qualities were necessary to their survival and to the

attainment of happiness. But this human justification of virtue does

not carry conviction to the immature, and would not of itself break up

the inertia of their naive impulses. Therefore, virtue which derives

from human insight has to be imposed on the immature by authority;

what was obtained on Sinai was not the revelation of the moral law but

divine authority to teach it.

Now the very thing which made moral wisdom convincing to our ancestors

makes it unconvincing to modern men. We do not live in a patriarchal

society. We do not live in a world which disposes us to a belief

in theocratic government. And therefore insofar as moral wisdom is

entangled with the premises of theocracy it is unreal to us. The

very thing which gave authority to moral insight for our forefathers

obscures moral insight for us. They lived in the kind of world which

disposed them to practice [p228] virtue if it came to them as a divine

commandment. A thoroughly modernized young man to-day distrusts moral

wisdom precisely because it is commanded.

It is often said that this distrust is merely an aspect of the normal

rebellion of youth. I do not believe it. This distrust is due to a

much more fundamental cause. It is due not to a rebellion against

authority but to an unbelief in it. This unbelief is the result of

that dissolution of the ancient order out of which modern civilization

is emerging, and unless we understand the radical character of this

unbelief we shall never understand the moral confusion of this age. We

shall fail to see that morals taught with authority are pervaded with

a sense of unreality because the sense of authority is no longer real.

Men will not feel that wisdom is authentic if they are asked to believe

that it derives from something which does not seem authentic.

We may be quite certain, therefore, that we shall not succeed in making

the traditional morality convincingly authentic to modern men. The

whole tendency of the age is to make it seem less and less authentic.

The effort to impose it, nevertheless, merely deepens the confusion by

converting the discussion of morals from an examination of experience

into a dispute over its metaphysical sanctions. The consequence of this

dispute is to drive men, especially the most sensitive and courageous,

further away from insight into virtue and deeper and deeper into mere

negation and rebellion. What they are actually rebelling against is the

theocratic system in which they do not believe. But because that system

appears to them to claim a vested interest in morality they empty out

the baby with the [p229] bath, and lose all sense of the inwardness of

deposited wisdom.

For that reason the recovery of moral insight depends upon

disentangling virtue from its traditional sanctions and the

metaphysical framework which has hitherto supported it. It will be

said, I know, that this would rob virtue of its popular prestige. My

answer is that in those communities which are deeply under modern

influences the loss of belief in these very traditional sanctions and

this very metaphysical framework has robbed virtue of its relevance.

I should readily grant that for communities and for individuals which

are outside the orbit of modernity, it is neither necessary nor

desirable to disentangle morality from its ancient associations. It is

also impossible to do so, for when the ancestral order is genuinely

alive, there is no problem of unbelief. But where the problem exists,

when the ancient premises of morality have faded into mere verbal

acknowledgments, then these ancient premises obscure vision. They have

ceased to be the sanctions of virtue and have become obstructions to

moral insight. Only by deliberately thinking their way past these

obstructions can modern men recover that innocence of the eye, that

fresh, authentic sense of the good in human relations on which a living

morality depends.

I have tried in these pages to do that for myself. I am under no

illusion as to the present value of the conceptions arrived at.

I regard them simply as a probable clue to the understanding of

modernity. If the clue is the correct one, the more we explore the

modern world the more coherence it will give to our understanding of

it. A true insight is fruitful; it multiplies insight, until at last

it not [p230] only illuminates a situation but provides a practical

guide to conduct. I believe the insight of high religion into the value

of disinterestedness will, if pursued resolutely, untangle the moral

confusion of the age and make plain, as it is not now plain, what we

are really driving at in our manifold activity, what we are compelled

to want, what, rather dimly now, we do want, and how to proceed about

achieving it. To say that is to say that I believe in the hypothesis.

I do believe in it. I believe that this valuation of human life, which

was once the possession of an élite, now conforms to the premises of a

whole civilization.

The proof of that must lie in a detailed and searching examination

of the facts all about us. If the ideal of human character which

is prophesied in high religion is really suitable and necessary in

modern civilization, then an examination ought to show that events

themselves are pregnant with it. If they are not, then all this is

moonshine and cobwebs and castles in the air. Unless circumstance and

necessity are behind it, the insight of high religion is still, as it

has always been hitherto, a noble eccentricity of the soul. For men

will not take it seriously, they will not devote themselves to the

discovery and invention of ways of cultivating maturity, detachment,

and disinterestedness unless events conspire to drive them to it.

The realization of this ideal is plainly a process of education in

the most inclusive sense of that term. But it will not do much good

to tell mothers that they should lead their children away from their

childishness; an actual mother, even if she understood so abstruse a

bit of advice, and did not reject it out of hand as a reflection upon

the [p231] glory of childhood, would insist upon being told very

concretely what this good advice means and how with a bawling infant in

the cradle you go about cultivating his capacity to be disinterested.

It is not much better to offer the advice to school teachers; they will

wish to know what they must not do that they now do, and what they must

do that they leave undone. But the answers to these questions are no

more to be had from the original concept than are rules for breeding

fine cattle to be had from the theory of evolution and Mendel’s law. By

the use of the concept, psychologists and educators may, if the concept

is correct and if they are properly encouraged, thread their way by

dialectic and by experiment to practical knowledge which is actually

usable as a method of education and as a personal discipline.

If they are to do that they will have to see quite clearly just how

and in what sense the ideal of disinterestedness is inherent and

inevitable in the modern world. The remaining chapters of this book are

an attempt to do that by demonstrating that in three great phases of

human interest, in business, in government, and in sexual relations,

the ideal is now implicit and necessary.

CHAPTER XII [p232]

THE BUSINESS OF THE GREAT SOCIETY

1. _The Invention of Invention_

One of the characteristics of the age we live in is that we are forever

trying to explain it. We feel that if we understood it better we should

know better how to live in it, and should cease to be aliens who do not

know the landmarks of a strange country. There is, however, a school

of philosophic historians who argue that this sense of novelty in the

modern world is an illusion, and that as a matter of fact mankind has

passed before through the same phase of the same inexorable cycle. The

boldest of them, like Oswald Spengler, cite chapter and verse to show

that there have been several of these great cycles of development from

incubation through maturity to decay, and that our western civilization

which began about 900 A.D. is now in the phase which corresponds with

the century after Pericles in the classical world.

That the analogy is striking no reader of Spengler will deny who can

endure Spengler’s procrustean determination to make the evidence fit

the theory. We can see the growth of towns at the expense of the

farms, the rise of capitalism, the growth of international trade and

finance, a development of nationalism, of democracy, attempts at the

abolition of war through international organization, and with it all

a dissolution of the popular religion, of [p233] the traditional

morality, and vast and searching inquiry into the meaning of life.

There is little doubt that the speculation of the Greek philosophers

seems extraordinarily fresh to us, because they were confronted with a

situation in many respects remarkably like our own.

But however nicely such analogies are worked out they are superficial

and misleading. There is something radically new in the modern world,

something for which there is no parallel in any other civilization.

This new thing is usually described as power-driven machinery. Thus

Mr. Charles A. Beard says that “what is called Western or modern

civilization by way of contrast with the civilization of the Orient or

Mediæval times is at bottom a civilization that rests upon machinery

and science as distinguished from one founded on agriculture or

handicraft commerce. It is in reality a technological civilization ...

and ... it threatens to overcome and transform the whole globe.” By way

of illustrating how deeply machinery affects human life, Mr. Beard says

that because they are untouched by this machine civilization “there

are more fundamental resemblances between the culture of a peasant in

a remote village in Spain and that of a peasant in a remote village

in Japan than between the culture of a Christian priest of the upper

Pyrenees and that of a Baptist clergyman in a thriving manufacturing

town in Illinois.”

Mr. H. G. Wells uses much the same argument to show that in spite of

the apparent similarities there is an essential difference between our

civilization and the later phases of the classical. “The essential

difference,” he says, “between the amassing of riches, the extinction

of small farmers and small business men, and the phase of [p234] big

finance in the latter centuries of the Roman republic on the one hand,

and the very similar concentration of capital in the eighteenth and

nineteenth centuries on the other, lies in the profound difference in

the character of labor that the mechanical revolution was bringing

about. The power of the old world was human power; everything depended

ultimately upon the driving power of human muscle, the muscle of

ignorant and subjugated men. A little animal muscle, supplied by draft

oxen, horse traction, and the like contributed. Where a weight had to

be lifted, men lifted it; where a rock had to be quarried, men chipped

it out; where a field had to be ploughed, men and oxen ploughed it;

the Roman equivalent of the steamship was the galley with its banks of

sweating rowers.... The Roman civilization was built upon cheap and

degraded human beings; modern civilization is being rebuilt upon cheap

mechanical power.”

These differences are genuine enough, and yet it is doubtful whether

Mr. Wells has described the really “new thing in human experience.”

After all a great deal of cheap man power is still used in conjunction

with cheap mechanical power; it is somewhat of an idealization to

talk as if the machine had supplanted the drudge. What Mr. Wells has

in mind, of course, is that in the Roman world a vast proportion of

mankind were doomed to “purely mechanical drudgery” whereas in the

modern world there is tangible hope that they will be released from it.

They are not yet released from it, however, and their hope of release

rests upon the really new element in human experience.

The various mechanical inventions from James Watt’s [p235] steam

engine to the electric dishwasher and vacuum cleaner are not this new

element. All these inventions, singly or collectively, though they have

revolutionized the manner of human life, are not the ultimate reason

why men put such hope in machines. Their hope is not based on the

machines we possess. They are obviously a mixed blessing. Their hope is

based on the machines that are yet to be made, and they have reason to

hope because a really new thing has come into the world. That thing is

the invention of invention.

Men have not merely invented the modern machines. There have been

machines invented since the earliest days, incalculably important, like

the wheel, like sailing ships, like the windmill and the watermill.

But in modern times men have invented a method of inventing, they have

discovered a method of discovery. Mechanical progress has ceased to

be casual and accidental and has become systematic and cumulative. We

know, as no other people ever knew before, that we shall make more

and more perfect machines. When Mr. Beard says that “the machine

civilization differs from all others in that it is highly dynamic,

containing within itself the seeds of constant reconstruction,” he is,

I take it, referring to this supreme discovery which is the art of

discovery itself.

2. _The Creative Principle in Modernity_

Although the disposition to scientific thought may be said to have

originated in remote antiquity, it was not until the Sixteenth Century

of our era that it ceased to appear spasmodically and as if by chance.

The Greeks had their schools on the shores of the Ægean, in Sicily,

[p236] and in Alexandria, and in them some of the conclusions and much

of the spirit of scientific inquiry was imaginatively anticipated.

But the conscious organized effort to relate “general principles to

irreducible and stubborn facts,” as Mr. Whitehead puts it, began about

three hundred years ago. The first society chiefly devoted to science

seems to have been founded by della Porta at Naples in 1560, but it

was closed by the ecclesiastical authorities. Forty years later the

_Accademia dei Lincei_ was founded at Rome with Galileo among its early

members. The Royal Society of London was chartered in 1662. The French

Academy of Sciences began its meetings in 1666, the Berlin Academy in

1700, the American Philosophical Association was proposed by Benjamin

Franklin in 1743 and organized in 1769.

The active pursuit of science is a matter, then, of only a few hundred

years. The practical consequences in the form of useful inventions are

still more recent. Newcomen’s air-and-steam engine dates from 1705,

but it was not until 1764 that James Watt produced a practicable steam

engine. It was not until the beginning of the Nineteenth Century that

invention really got under way and began to transform the structure

of civilization. It was not until about 1850 that the importance of

invention had impressed itself upon the English people, yet they were

the first to experience the effects of the mechanical revolution. They

had seen the first railway, the first steamboat, the illumination

of towns by gas, and the application of power-driven machinery to

manufacture. Professor Bury fixes the Exhibition of London in 1851 as

the event which marks the public recognition of the role of science

[p237] in modern civilization. The Prince Consort who originated the

Exhibition said in his opening speech that it was designed “to give

us a true test and a living picture of the point of development at

which the whole of mankind has arrived in this great task, and a new

starting-point from which the nations will be able to direct their

further exertions.”

But this public recognition was at first rather sentimental and

gaping. The full realization of the place of science in modern life

came slowly, and only in our generation can it be said that political

rulers, captains of industry, and leaders of thought have actually

begun to appreciate how central is science in our civilization, and to

act upon that realization. In our time governments have begun to take

science seriously and to promote research and invention not only in

the art of war, but in the interest of trade, agriculture, and public

hygiene. Great corporations have established laboratories of their

own, not merely for the perfecting of their own processes, but for

the promotion of pure research. Money has become available in great

quantities for scientific work in the universities, and the educational

curriculum down to the lowest grades has begun to be reorganized not

only in order to train a minority of the population for research and

invention, but to train the great majority to understand and use the

machines and the processes which are available.

The motives and the habits of mind which are thus brought into play at

the very heart of modern civilization are mature and disinterested.

That may not be the primary intention, but it is the inevitable

result. No doubt [p238] governments encourage research in order to

have powerful weapons with which to overawe their neighbors; no doubt

industries encourage research because it pays; no doubt scientists

and inventors are in some measure moved by the desire for wealth and

fame; no doubt the general public approves of science because of the

pleasures and conveniences it provides; no doubt there is an intuitive

sense in modern communities that the prospects of survival both for

nations and for individuals are somehow related to their command of

scientific knowledge. But nevertheless, whatever the motives which

cause men to endow laboratories, to work patiently in laboratories or

to buy the products, the fact remains that inside the laboratory, at

the heart of this whole business, the habit of disinterested realism in

dealing with the data is the indispensable habit of mind. Unless this

habit of mind exists in the actual research, all the endowments and

honorary degrees and prize awards will not produce the results desired.

This is an original and tremendous fact in human experience: that a

whole civilization should be dependent upon technology, that this

technology should be dependent upon pure science, and that this pure

science should be dependent upon a race of men who consciously refuse,

as Mr. Bertrand Russell has said, to regard their “own desires, tastes,

and interests as affording a key to the understanding of the world.”

When I say that the refusal is conscious I do not mean merely that

scientists tell themselves that they must ignore their prejudices.

They have developed an elaborate method for detecting and discounting

their prejudices. It consists of instruments of precision, an accurate

vocabulary, [p239] controlled experiment, and the submission not only

of their results but of their processes to the judgment of their peers.

This method provides a body in which the spirit of disinterestedness

can live, and it might be said that modern science, not in its crude

consequences but in its inward principle, not, that is to say, as

manifested in automobiles, electric refrigerators, and rayon silk, but

in the behavior of the men who invent and perfect these things, is

the actual realization in a practicable mode of conduct which can be

learned and practiced, of the insight of high religion. The scientific

discipline is one way in which this insight, hitherto lyrical and

personal and apart, is brought down to earth and into direct and

decisive contact with the concerns of mankind.

It is no exaggeration to say that pure science is high religion

incarnate. No doubt the science we have is not the whole incarnation,

but as far as it goes it translates into a usable procedure what in the

teaching of the sages has been an esoteric insight. Scientific method

can be learned. The learning of it matures the human character. Its

value can be demonstrated in concrete results. Its importance in human

life is indisputable. But the insight of high religion as such could be

appreciated only by those who were already mature; it corresponded to

nothing in the experience and the necessities of the ordinary man. It

could be talked about but not taught; it could inspire only the few who

were somehow already inspired. With the discovery of scientific method

the insight has ceased to be an intangible and somewhat formless idea

and has become an organized effort which moves mankind more profoundly

than anything else in human affairs. Therefore, [p240] what was once

a personal attitude on the part of a few who were somewhat withdrawn

and disregarded has become the central principle in the careers of

innumerable, immensely influential, men.

Because the scientific discipline is, in fact, the creative element in

that which is distinctively modern, circumstances conspire to enhance

its prestige and to extend its acceptance. It is the ultimate source

of profit and of power, and therefore it is assured of protection and

encouragement by those who rule the modern state. They cannot afford

not to cultivate the scientific spirit: the nation which does not

cultivate it cannot hold its place among the nations, the corporation

which ignores it will be destroyed by its competitors. The training of

an ever increasing number of pure scientists, of inventors, and of men

who can operate and repair machinery is, therefore, a sheer practical

necessity. The scientific discipline has become, as Mr. Graham Wallas

would say, an essential part of our social heritage. For the machine

technology requires a population which in some measure partakes of the

spirit which created it.

Naturally enough, however, the influence of the scientific spirit

becomes more and more diluted the further one goes from the work of the

men who actually conceive, discover, invent, and perfect the modern

machines. From Faraday, Maxwell, and Hertz who did the chief work

which made possible the wireless it is a long way to the broker who

sells radio stock or the householder with his six-tube set. I have not

been supposing that these latter partake in any way of the original

spirit which made the radio possible. But it is a fact of enormous

consequences, [p241] cumulative in its effect upon the education of

succeeding generations, that the radio, and all the other contrivances

around which modern civilization is constructed, should be possible

only by the increasing use of a scientific discipline.

3. _Naive Capitalism_

The application of science to the daily affairs of men was acclaimed

at first with more enthusiasm than understanding. “That early people,”

said Buffon, speaking of the Babylonians, “was very happy, because

it was very scientific.” Entranced with the success of the Newtonian

physics and by the dazzling effect of inventions, the intellectuals

of the Eighteenth Century persuaded themselves that science was a

messianic force which would liberate mankind from pain, drudgery, and

error. It was believed that science would somewhat mysteriously endow

mankind with invincible power over the forces of nature, and that men,

if they were released from the bondage of religious custom and belief,

could employ the power of science to their own consummate happiness.

The mechanical revolution, in short, was inaugurated on the theory

that the natural man must be liberated from moral conventions and that

nature must be subjugated by mechanical instruments.

There are intelligible historical reasons why our great grandfathers

adopted this view. They found themselves in a world regulated by the

customs and beliefs of a landed society. They could not operate their

factories successfully in such a society, and they rebelled fiercely

against the customs which restricted them. That rebellion [p242]

was rationalized in the philosophy of _laissez-faire_ which meant in

essence that machine industry must not be interfered with by landlords

and peasants who had feudal rights, nor by governments which protected

those rights. On the positive side this rebellion expressed itself in

declarations of the rights of man. These declarations were a denial of

the vested rights of men under the old landed order and an assertion of

the rights of men, particularly the new middle-class men, who proposed

to make the most of the new industrial and mechanical order. By the

rights of men they meant primarily freedom of contract, freedom of

trade, freedom of occupation—those freedoms, that is to say, which

made it possible for the new employer to buy and sell, to hire and fire

without being accountable to anyone.

The prophet of this new dispensation was Adam Smith. In the _Wealth of

Nations_ he wrote that

All systems either of preference or of restraint ... being thus

completely taken away, the obvious and simple system of natural

liberty establishes itself of its own accord. Every man, as long as

he does not violate the laws of justice, is left perfectly free to

pursue his own interest his own way, and to bring both his industry

and capital into competition with those of any other man, or order

of men.

The employing class in the early days of capitalism honestly believed,

and indeed its less enlightened members still believe to this very

day, that somehow the general welfare will be served by trusting

naively to the acquisitive instincts of the employing capitalist. Thus

at the outset the machine technology was applied under the direction

of men who scorned as sentimental, when they [p243] did not regard

as subversive, that disinterestedness which alone makes possible the

machine technology itself. They did not understand science. They merely

exploited certain of the inventions which scientists produced. What

they believed, insofar as they had any philosophy, was that there

exists a preestablished harmony in the universe—an “obvious and

simple system of natural liberty,” in Adam Smith’s language, “which

establishes itself of its own accord”—by which if each man naively

pursued his primitive impulse to have and to hold in competition with

other men, peace, prosperity, and happiness would ensue.

They did not ensue. And the social history of the last seventy-five

years has in large measure been concerned with the birth pains of an

industrial philosophy that will really suit the machine technology and

the nature of man. For the notion that an intricate and delicately

poised industrial mechanism could be operated by uneducated men

snatching competitively at profits was soon exposed as a simple-minded

delusion.

It was discovered that if each banker was permitted to do what seemed

to him immediately most profitable, the result was a succession of

disastrous inflations and deflations of credit; that if natural

resources in oil, coal, lumber, and the like were subjected to the

competitive principle, the result was a shocking waste of irreplaceable

wealth; that if the hiring and firing of labor were carried on under

absolute freedom of contract, a whole chain of social evils in the form

of child labor, unsuitable labor for women, sweating, unemployment,

and the importation of cheap and unassimilable labor resulted; that if

business men were left to their own devices the consumer of necessary

[p244] goods was helpless when he was confronted with industries

in which there was an element of monopoly. There is no need here to

recount the well-known story of how in every modern community the

theory of free competition has in the course of the last generation

been modified by legislation, by organized labor, by organized business

itself. So little has _laissez-faire_ worked under actual experience

that all the powers of the government have actually had to be invoked

to preserve a certain amount of compulsory “free competition.” For the

industrial machine, as soon as it passes out of the early phase of

rough exploitation in virgin territory, becomes unmanageable by naively

competitive and acquisitive men.

4. _The Credo of Old-Style Business_

It was frequently pointed out by moralists like Ruskin and William

Morris, and by churchmen as well, that this “obvious and simple system

of natural liberty” by which “every man was left perfectly free to

pursue his own interest his own way,” was not only contrary to the

dogmas of the popular religion but irreconcilable with moral wisdom.

The credo of the unregenerate business man was utterly atheistical in

its premises, for it displaced the notion that there is any higher

will than his own to which the employer is accountable. It was more

than atheistical, however; it was, in Aristotle’s sense of the word,

barbarous in that it implied “the living as one likes” with virtually

complete acquiescence in the supremacy of the acquisitive instinct.

There is no reason to suppose that such theoretical comments on the

credo of naive capitalism did more than [p245] rub off a little

of its unction. Capitalism may be, as Mr. Maynard Keynes has said,

“absolutely irreligious ... often, though not always, a mere congeries

of possessors and pursuers.” Were the credo workable in practice, some

way would have been found of anointing it with attractive phrases. The

real reason for the gradual abandonment of the credo, proclaimed by

Adam Smith and repeated so steadily since his day, is that the credo

of naive capitalism is deeply at variance with the real character

of modern industry. It rests upon false premises, is therefore

contradicted by experience, and has proved to be unworkable.

The system of natural liberty assumes that if each man pursues his own

interest his own way, each man will promote his interest. There is an

unanalyzed fallacy in this theory which makes it utterly meaningless.

It is assumed that each man knows his own interest and can therefore

pursue it. But that is precisely what no man is certain to know, and

what few men can possibly know if they consult only their own impulses.

There is nothing in the natural equipment of man which enables him to

know intuitively whether it will be profitable to increase his output

or reduce it, to enter a new line of business, to buy or to sell, or to

make any of the other thousand and one decisions on which the conduct

of business depends. Since he is not born with this wisdom, since

he does not automatically absorb it from the air, to pursue his own

interest his own way is a fairly certain way to disaster.

The fallacy of the theory of natural liberty is undetected in a

bonanza period of industrial development. Where the business man has

unexhausted natural resources to [p246] draw upon, where there is a

surplus of customers competing for his goods, he can with naive and

furious energy pursue his own interests his own way and reap enormous

profits. There is no real resistance from the outside; there are no

stubborn and irreducible facts to which he must adjust himself. He

can proceed with an infantile philosophy to achieve success. But this

bonanza period when the omnipotence of the capitalist is unthwarted,

and his omniscience therefore assumed, soon comes to an end. In

advanced communities the mere multiplication of industries produces

such a complicated environment that the business man is compelled to

substitute considered policies for his intuitions, objective surveys

for his guesses, and conferences world without end for his natural

liberties.

What has upset the idea of the old-style business man that he knows

what’s what is that the relevant facts are no longer visible. The owner

of a primitive factory might have known all his working men and all

his customers; the keeper of a little neighborhood shop may still, to

a certain extent, know personally his whole business. But for most

men to-day the facts which matter vitally to them are out of sight,

beyond their personal control, intricate, subject to more or less

unpredictable changes, and even with highly technical reporting and

analysis almost unintelligible to the average man.

It is, of course, the machine process itself which has created these

complications. Men are forced to buy and sell in markets that for many

commodities are world-wide: they do not buy and sell in one market

but in many markets, in markets for raw materials, in markets for

semi-finished goods, in wholesale and retail markets, in labor [p247]

markets, in the money market. They employ and are employed in corporate

organizations which are owned here, there, and everywhere. They compete

not only with their obvious competitors in the same line of business,

but with competitors in wholly different lines of business, automobiles

with railroads, railroads with ships, cotton goods with silk and silk

with artificial silk, pianos with furs and cigarettes with chewing gum.

The modern environment is invisible, complex, without settled plan,

subtly and swiftly changing, offering innumerable choices, demanding

great knowledge and imaginative effort to comprehend it.

It is not a social order at all as the Greek city state or the feudal

society was a social order. It is rather a field for careers, an arena

of talents, an ordeal by trial and error, and a risky speculation. No

man has an established position in the modern world. There is no system

of rights and duties to which he is clearly subject. He moves among

these complexities which are shrouded in obscurity, making the best he

can out of what little it is possible for him to know.

5. _Old-Style Reform and Revolution_

Naive capitalism—that is to say, the theory of each for himself

according to such light as he might happen to possess—produced such

monstrous evils the world over that an anti-capitalist reaction was

the inevitable result. What had happened was that the most intricate

and consequential technology which man has ever employed on this

planet was given over to the direction of a class of enterprising,

acquisitive, uneducated, and undisciplined [p248] men. No doubt it

could not have been otherwise. The only discipline that was known was

the discipline of custom in a society of farmers, hand-workers, and

traders. The only education available was one based on the premises

of the past. The revolution in human affairs produced by the machine

began slowly, and no one could have anticipated its course. It would

be absurd, therefore, to complain in retrospect over the fact that

no one was prepared for the industrial changes which took place.

The only absurdity, and it is still a prevalent one, is to go on

supposing that the political philosophy and the “economic laws” which

were extemporized to justify the behavior of the first bewildered

capitalists have any real bearing upon modern industry.

But it is almost equally absurd to take too seriously the “reforms”

and “solutions” which were devised by kindhearted men to alleviate

the pains suffered by those who were hurt by the results of this

early capitalist control of the machine. These proposals, when they

are examined, turn out almost invariably to have been proposals for

coercing or for abolishing the then masters of industry. I do not

mean to deny the utility of the long series of legislative enactments

which began about the middle of the Nineteenth Century and are still

being elaborated. The factory acts, the regulatory laws, the measures

designed to protect the consumers against fraud were, looked at singly,

good, bad, or indifferent. As a whole they were a necessary attempt

to police those who had been left free to pursue their own interest

their own way. But when it has been said that they were necessary,

and that they are still necessary, it is important to realize just

what they [p249] imply. They imply that the masters of industry are

unregenerate and will remain unregenerate. The whole effort to police

capitalism assumes that the capitalist can be civilized only by means

of the police. The trouble with this theory is that there is no way

to make sure that the policemen will themselves be civilized. It

presupposes that somehow politicians and office-holders will be wise

enough and disinterested enough to make business men do what they would

not otherwise do. The fundamental problem, which is to find a way of

directing industry wisely, is not solved. It is merely deposited on the

doorsteps of the politician.

The revolutionary programs sponsored by the socialists in the half

century before the Great War were based on the notion that it is

impossible to police the capitalist-employers and that, therefore, they

should be abolished. In their place functionaries were to be installed.

The theory was that these functionaries, being hired by the state and

being deprived of all incentive for personal profit, would administer

the industrial machine disinterestedly. The trouble with this theory is

in its assumption that the removal of one kind of temptation, namely,

the possibility of direct personal pecuniary profit—will make the

functionaries mature and disinterested men.

This is nothing but a new variant of the ascetic principle that it is

possible to shut off an undesirable impulse by thwarting it. Human

nature does not work that way. The mere frustration of an impulse like

acquisitiveness produces either some new expression of that impulse or

disorders due to its frustration. It produces, that is to say, either

corruption or the lethargy, the pedantry, and the [p250] officiousness

which are the diseases of bureaucracy the world over. The socialists

are right, as the early Christians were right, in their profound

distrust of the acquisitive instinct as the dominant motive in society.

But they are wrong in supposing that by transferring the command of

industry from business men to socialist officials they can in any

fundamental sense alter the acquisitive instinct. That can be done only

by refining the human character through a better understanding of the

environment. I do not mean to say that a revolution like the Russian

does not sweep away a vast amount of accumulated rubbish. I am talking

not about the salutary destruction which may accompany a revolution,

but of the problem which confronts the successful revolutionists when

they have to carry on the necessary affairs of men.

When that time comes they are bound to find that the administration

of industry under socialism no less than under capitalism depends

upon the character of the administrators. Corrupt, stupid, grasping

functionaries will make at least as big a muddle of socialism as

stupid, selfish, and acquisitive employers can make of capitalism.

There is no escape from this elementary truth, and all social policies

which attempt to ignore it must come to grief. They are essentially

utopian. The early doctrine of _laissez-faire_ was utopian because it

assumed that unregenerate men were destined somehow to muddle their

way to a harmonious result. The early socialism was utopian because it

assumed that these same unregenerate men, once the laws of property had

been altered, would somehow muddle their way to a harmonious result.

Both ignored the chief lesson of human experience, which is [p251] the

insight of high religion, that unregenerate men can only muddle into

muddle.

A dim recognition of this truth has helped to inspire the procedure of

the two most recent manifestations of the revolutionary spirit. I refer

to bolshevism and to fascism. It is proper, I believe, to talk of them

as one phenomenon for their fundamental similarities, as most everyone

but the bolshevists and the fascists themselves has noted, are much

greater than their superficial differences. They were attempts to cure

the evils resulting from the breakdown of a somewhat primitive form

of capitalism. In neither Russia nor Italy had modern industrialism

passed beyond its adolescent phase. In both countries the prevailing

social order for the great mass of people was still pre-machine and

pre-industrial. In both countries the acids of modernity had not yet

eaten deeply into the religious disposition of the people. In both

countries the natural pattern of all government was still the primitive

pattern of the hierarchy with an absolute sovereign at the top. The

bolshevik dictatorship and the fascist dictatorship, underneath all

their modernist labels and theories, are feudal military organizations

attempting to subdue and administer the machine technology.

The theorists of the two dictatorships are, however, men educated under

modern influences, and the result is that their theories are an attempt

to explain the primitive behavior of the two dictatorships in terms

which are consistent with modern ideas. The formula reached in both

instances is the same one. The dictatorships are said to be temporary.

Their purpose, we are told, is to put the [p252] new social order

into effect, and to keep it going long enough by dictation from on top

to give time for a new generation to grow up which will be purged of

those vices which would make the new order unworkable. The bolshevists

and fascists regard themselves as ever so much more realistic than

the old democratic socialists and the _laissez-faire_ liberals whom

they have executed, exiled, or dosed with castor oil. In an important

sense they are more realistic. They have recognized that a substitute

for primitive capitalism cannot be inaugurated or administered by a

generation which has been schooled in the ways of primitive capitalism.

And therefore the oligarchy of dictators, as a conscious, enlightened,

superior, and heavily armed minority, propose to administer the

industrial machine as trustees until there is a generation ready to

accept the responsibilities.

It would be idle to predict that they will not succeed. But it is

reasonable, I believe, to predict that if they succeed it will

be because they are administering relatively simple industrial

arrangements. It is precisely because the economic system of Russia is

still fundamentally pre-capitalist and pre-mechanical that the feudal

organization of the bolshevists is most likely to survive. Because

the economic system of Italy is more modern than Russia’s, the future

of the fascist dictatorship is much less assured. For insofar as the

machine technology is advanced, it becomes complex, delicate, and

difficult to manage by commands from the top.

6. _The Diffusion of the Acquisitive Instinct_

While both the bolshevists and the fascists look upon [p253]

themselves as pathfinders of progress, it is fairly clear, I think,

that they are, in the literal meaning of the term, reactionary. They

have won their victories among the people to whom modern large scale

industrial organization is still an unnatural and alien thing. It is no

accident that fascism or bolshevism took root in Italy and Spain, but

not in Germany and England, in Hungary but not in Austria, in Poland

but not in Czechoslovakia, in Russia but not in Scandinavia, in China

but not in Japan, in Central America but not in Canada or the United

States. Dictatorship, based on a military hierarchy, administering

the affairs of the community on behalf of the “nation” or of the

“proletariat,” is nothing but a return to the natural organization of

society in the pre-machine age. Some countries, like Russia, Mexico,

and China, for example, are still living in the pre-machine age.

Others, like Italy, had become only partially industrialized when they

were subjected to such strains by the War that they reverted to the

feudal pattern of behavior. Unable to master the industrial process by

methods which are appropriate to it, the fascists and the bolshevists

are attempting to master it by methods which antedate it. That is why

military dictatorship in a country like Mexico may be looked upon as

the normal type of social control, whereas in Italy it is regressive

and neurotic. Feudal habits are appropriate to a feudal society; in

a semi-industrialized nation they are a social disease. It is the

disease of frightened and despairing men who, having failed to adjust

themselves to the reality of the industrial process, try, by main

force and awkwardness, to adjust the machine process to a pre-machine

mentality. [p254]

The more primitive the machine process is—that is, the more nearly it

resembles the petty handicrafts of earlier days—the better are the

chances for survival of a bolshevist or fascist dictatorship. Where

the machine technology is really established and advanced it is simply

unmanageable by militarized functionaries. For when the process has

become infinitely complicated, the subdivision of function is carried

so far, the internal adjustments are so numerous and so varied that

no collection of oligarchs in a capital city, however much they may

look like supermen, can possibly direct the industrial system. In its

advanced stages, as it now exists in England, Germany, or the United

States, nobody comprehends the system as a whole. One has only to

glance over the financial pages of an American newspaper, to look at

the list of corporations doing business, to try and imagine the myriad

daily decisions at a thousand points which their business involves,

in order to realize the bewildering complexity of modern industrial

society. To suppose that all that can be administered, or even

directed, from any central point by any human brain, by any cabinet of

officeholders or cabal of revolutionists, is simply to have failed to

take it in. Here is the essential reason why bolshevism and fascism

are, as we say, un-American. They are no less un-Belgian, un-German,

un-English. For they are unindustrial.

The same reasons which make dictatorship unworkable are rapidly

rendering obsolete the attempts to reform industry by policing it.

Every year as the machine technology becomes more elaborated, the

legislative control for which the pre-war progressives fought becomes

less [p255] effective. It becomes more and more difficult for

legislatures to make laws to protect the workers which really fit the

rapidly changing conditions of work. Hence the tendency to put the real

law-making power in the hands of administrative officials and judges

who can adjust the general purpose of the law to the unclassifiable

facts of industry. The whole attempt to regulate public utilities in

the interest of the consumer is chaotic, for these organizations, by

their intricacies, their scale, and their constant revolutions in

technology, tend to escape the jurisdiction of officials exercising

a local jurisdiction. The current outcry against the multiplication

of laws and the meddling of legislatures is in part, but not wholly,

the outcry of old-fashioned business men demanding their old natural

liberty to pursue their own interest their own way. The outcry is

due no less to a recognition that the industrial process is becoming

too subtly organized to be policed successfully by the wholesale,

uninformed enactments of legislatures.

Yet the very thing which makes an advanced industrial organization

too complex to be directed by a dictatorship, or to be policed by

democratic politicians, is forcing the leaders of industry to evolve

forms of self-control. When I say that they are being forced to do this

I am not referring to those ostentatiously benevolent things which are

done now and then as sops to Cerberus. There is a certain amount of

reform undertaken voluntarily by men who profess to fear ‘bolshevism,’

and if not bolshevism, then Congress. That is relatively unimportant.

So also is the discovery that it pays to cultivate the good will of

the public. What I am referring to is the fact that the [p256] sheer

complexity of the industrial system would make it unmanageable to

business men, no less than to politicians or dictators, if business men

were not learning to organize its control.

It is the necessity of stabilizing their own business, of directing

technical processes which are beyond the understanding of stockholders,

of adjusting the supply and demand of the multitudinous elements

they deal in, which is the compelling force behind that divorce

between management and ownership, that growing use of experts and of

statistical measurements, and that development of trade associations,

of conferences, committees, and councils, with which modern industry

is honeycombed. The captain of industry in the romantic sense tends to

disappear in highly evolved industrial organizations. His thundering

commands are replaced by the decisions of executives who consult with

representatives of the interests involved and check their opinions

by the findings of experts. The greater the corporation the more

the shareholders and the directors lose the actual direction of the

institution. They cannot direct the corporation because they do

not really know what it is and what it is doing. That knowledge is

subdivided among the executives and bureau chiefs and consultants, all

of them on salary; each of them is so relatively small a factor in the

whole that his personal success is in very large degree bound up with

the success of the institution. A certain amount of jealousy, intrigue,

and destructive pushing, of office politics, in short, naturally

prevails, men being what they are. But as compared with the old-style

business man, the ordinary executive in a great corporation is

something quite strange. He is [p257] so little the monarch of all he

surveys, his experience is so continually with stubborn and irreducible

facts, he is so much compelled to adjust his own preferences to the

preferences of others, that he becomes a relatively disinterested

person. The more clearly he realizes the nature of his position in

industry, the more he tends to submit his desires to the discipline of

objective information. And the more he does this the less dominated

he is by the acquisitiveness of immaturity. He may on the side gamble

acquisitively in the stock market or at the race track, but in relation

to his business his acquisitive instinct tends to become diffused and

to be absorbed in the job itself.

7. _Ideals_

It is my impression that when machine industry reaches a certain scale

of complexity it exerts such pressure upon the men who run it that they

cannot help socializing it. They are subject to a kind of economic

selection under which only those men survive who are capable of taking

a somewhat disinterested view of their work. A mature industry, because

it is too subtly organized to be run by naively passionate men, puts a

premium upon men whose characters are sufficiently matured to make them

respect reality and to discount their own prejudices.

When the machine technology is really advanced, that is to say when it

has drawn great masses of men within the orbit of its influence, when

a corporation has become really great, the old distinction between

public and private interest becomes very dim. I think it is destined

largely to disappear. It is difficult even to-day to say [p258]

whether the great railways, the General Electric Company, the United

States Steel Corporation, the bigger insurance companies and banks are

public or private institutions. When institutions reach a point where

the legal owners are virtually disfranchised, when the direction is in

the hands of salaried executives, technicians, and experts who hold

themselves more or less accountable in standards of conduct to their

fellow professionals, when the ultimate control is looked upon by the

directors not as “business” but as a trust, it is not fanciful to say,

as Mr. Keynes has said, that “the battle of socialism against unlimited

private profit is being won in detail hour by hour.”

Insofar as industry itself evolves its own control, it will regain its

liberty from external interference. To say that is to say simply that

the “natural liberty” of the early business man was unworkable because

the early business man was unregenerate: he was immature, and he was

therefore acquisitive. The only kind of liberty which is workable in

the real world is the liberty of the disinterested man, of the man who

has transformed his passions by an understanding of necessity. He can,

as Confucius said, follow what his heart desires without transgressing

what is right. For he has learned to desire what is right.