For myself, I shall try to avoid a purely moral and idealistic treatment
of the subject. At the same time, before explaining what practical
measures should, in my opinion, be taken to lessen the evils, I should
like to refer briefly, and I know inadequately, to the deeper causes,
which are rooted in our attitude of life, as well as dependent on our
hidden desires. Man, and of course I include woman, as a whole is
estimated at too low a value. It is a paradoxical consequence that the
_parts of man_, I mean his separate organs, rise in value. His brain,
his sex, his stomach--each strives for mastery in attention; a faithless
age has manias of sexuality, of intellect, of gastronomy.[117:1] These
manias are the result of low values really placed on man himself. How do
we discover that low value? It is not so much a matter of opinion; far
more important than the opinion of the public is the wide-spread,
always-acting, fundamental public feeling, expressed in the atmosphere
of our society. Every smallest detail of life, our aims and hourly
habits, everything that makes up the secret imaginations and the
un-willed purposes of life--all have a part to play in deciding what our
estimations of life will be, the things we shall seek as desirable, what
avoid as unpleasant. If our estimations and hidden desires in actual
fact rise in goodness, if we find better aims to satisfy our lives than
the excitements of sexual satisfaction, then this department of morality
will rise.
The question is one of great complexity, and the surest means of
improvement are very difficult to decide; not to be settled in a spirit
of Sunday-school optimism. The bad boy does not always come to harm, or
the good boy gain the reward that he ought to have. It is not so simple
as that. Even if all vulgar and evil desires could by some magician's
wand be transformed into their opposites, so that all of us bubbled and
seethed with virtues, I do not believe we could count on the results.
Our very virtues might hasten us to perdition: both higher and lower
aims, if ill-adjusted to form a complete life, may lead astray. The
savage in us all has to be reckoned with as the angel, and the dreamer
who ever looks to heaven often stumbles over a tiny stone. Thus a
helpless romanticizing, a too ideal as well as a too low view of love,
may lead easily to a self-deceiving resort to prostitution.
All forcing of goodness, in my opinion, is dangerous. Often the cause of
virtue is injured, like the cause of religion, not only when virtue is
allied with routine, dullness and narrowness, but also when appeal is
made to aspirations, which the young rarely feel spontaneously,
aspirations ill-adapted and too high for their immature characters and
the needs at the stage of virtue that has been reached. Certainly they
_appear_ to respond, fall in with our plans of salvation and often
accept them with seeming joy; I venture, however, to think that very
often this external attitude does not in any way correspond with the
internal one, that very often there has been disturbance and shock, to
be followed later by increased need for excitement, with an impulse to
more perilous adventure to cover the unconscious feeling of frustration
and disappointment; while another result is a sense of unreality, a
state always unfavorable to moral health.
If morality is seen as something overbeautiful for daily use, even more
than as something dull, inactive, over-prudent; if vice, on the other
hand, is conceived as easy, brilliant, gay, gallantly reckless, in
opposition to the too ethereal or merely stupid and prosaic aspects of
life (though in reality seldom do the dissipated and those who prey on
the vices of mankind possess any brilliance or originality), then beauty
and virtue will aid vice, through the stimulus of contradiction it will
provide. Vice will gain by the brilliance, wit and beauty, which the
artists and creators of the world ought to be induced, were the world's
cause properly cared for, to connect with virtue.
The popular view of our common motives still inclines to reduce
everything to a single impulse--the young are moved exclusively by
self-interest and the search for pleasure. But surely this view is
false. Hazlitt, the English essayist most interested in psychology, in
his essay on "Mind and Motive," correctly observes that, "love of strong
excitement both in thought and action" has much more influence on our
ideas, passions and pursuits than mere desire for the agreeable.
Curiosity itself, also the love of truth, "our teasing ourselves to
recollect the names of persons and places we have forgotten, the love of
riddles and of abstruse philosophy," he holds these to be illustrations
of "the love of intellectual excitement," and, with respect to this
curiosity, he holds that our vices are more due to it than to sexual
gratifications, saying with regard to vicious habits, "curiosity makes
more votaries than inclination."
We find, then, that the difficult problem we are considering, like other
social problems, has a material aspect, that is a medical aspect, an
intellectual aspect, and a spiritual aspect concerning the aims of life:
and of these the last is the most fundamental; it is obviously also the
most difficult. To attack the situation fully it would be necessary to
change most of our contemporary life. We are, however, bound to realize
that, if we are to succeed, our attention must shift from saving the
fallen, to removing the hindrances and the temptations that are the
causes of falling. In other words, we have to provide a society in which
the young will find virtue and goodness as serviceable to their needs
and as attractive as vice and doing evil.