LIFE AS ITS OWN REWARD.
'_If in this life only we have hope_--'
What we have now before us is a certain subtraction sum. We have to take
from life one of its strongest present elements; and see as well as we
can what will then be the remainder. An exact answer we shall, of
course, not expect; but we can arrive at an approximate one without much
difficulty.
What we have to subtract has been shown in the previous chapter; but it
may again be described briefly in the following way. Life in its present
state, as we have just seen, is a union of two sets of feelings, and of
two kinds of happiness, and is partly the sum of the two, and partly a
compromise between them. Its resources, by one classification, are
separable into two groups, according as in themselves they chance to
repel or please us; and the most obvious measure of happiness would seem
to be nothing more than our gain of what is thus pleasant, and our
shirking of what is thus painful. But if we examine life as it actually
exists about us, we shall see that this classification has been
traversed by another. Many things naturally repellent have received a
supernatural blessing; many things naturally pleasant have received a
supernatural curse; and thus our highest happiness is often composed of
pain, and our profoundest misery is nearly always based on pleasure.
Accordingly, whereas happiness naturally would seem the test of right,
right has come supernaturally to be the test of happiness. And so
completely is this notion engrained in the world's consciousness, that
in all our deeper views of life, no matter whether we be saints or
sinners, right and wrong are the things that first appeal to us, not
happiness and misery. A certain supernatural moral judgment, in fact,
has become a primary faculty with us, and it mixes with every estimate
we form of the world around us.
It is this faculty that positivism, if accepted fully, must either
destroy or paralyse; it is this, therefore, that in imagination we must
now try to eliminate. To do this--to see what will be left in life to
us, without this faculty, we must first see in general, how much is at
present dependent on it.
This might at first sight seem a hard task to perform; the interests we
shall have to deal with are so many and so various. But the difficulty
may be eluded. I have already gone to literature for examples of special
feelings on the part of individuals, and under certain circumstances.
We will now go to it for a kindred, though not for the same assistance;
and for this end we shall approach it in a slightly different way. What
we did before was this. We took certain works of literary art, and
selecting, as it were, one or two special patches of colour, we analysed
the composition of these. What we shall now do will be to take the
pictures as organic wholes, with a view to analysing the effect of them
as pictures--the harmony or the contrast of their colours, and the
massing of their lights and shadows. If we reflect for a moment what art
is--literary and poetical art in particular--we shall at once see how,
examined in this way, it will be of use to us. In the first place, then,
what is art? and what is the reason that it pleases us? It is a
reflection, a reproduction of the pleasures of life, and is altogether
relative to these, and dependent on them. We should, for instance, take
no interest in portraits unless we took some interest in the human face.
We should take none in statues if we took none in the human form. We
must know something of love as a feeling, or we should never care for
love-songs. Art may send us back to these with intenser appreciation of
them, but we must bring to art from life the appreciation we want
intensified. Art is a factor in common human happiness, because by its
means common men are made partakers in the vision of uncommon men.
Great art is a speculum reflecting life as the keenest eyes have seen
it. All its forms and imagery are of value only as this. Taken by
themselves, '_the best in this kind are but shadows_.' We have to
'_piece out their imperfections, with our thoughts_;' '_imagination has
to amend them_,' and '_it must be our imagination, not theirs_.'[23] In
examining a work of art, then, we are examining life itself; or rather,
in examining the interest which we take in a work of art, in examining
the reasons why we think it beautiful, or great, or interesting, we are
examining our own feelings as to the realities represented by it.
And now remembering this, let us turn to certain of the world's greatest
works of art--I mean its dramas: for just as poetry is the most
articulate of all the arts, so is the drama the most comprehensive form
of poetry. In the drama we have the very thing we are now in want of. We
have life as a whole--that complex aggregate of details, which forms, as
it were, the mental landscape of existence, presented to us in a
'_questionable shape_,' at once concentrated and intensified. And it is
no exaggeration to say that the reasons why men think life worth
living, can be all found in the reasons why they think a great drama
great.
Let us turn, then, to some of the greatest works of Sophocles, of
Shakespeare, and of Goethe, and consider briefly how these present life
to us. Let us take _Macbeth_, _Hamlet_, _Measure for Measure_, and
_Faust_. We have here five presentations of life, under what confessedly
are its most striking aspects, and with such interests as men have been
able to find in it, raised to their greatest intensity. Such, at least,
is the way in which these works are regarded, and it is only in virtue
of this estimate that they are called great. Now, in producing this
estimate, what is the chief faculty in us that they appeal to? It will
need but little thought to show us that they appeal primarily to the
supernatural moral judgment; that this judgment is perpetually being
expressed explicitly in the works themselves; and, which is far more
important, that it is always pre-supposed in us. In other words, these
supreme presentations of life are presentations of men struggling, or
failing to struggle, not after natural happiness, but after supernatural
right; and it is always pre-supposed on our part that we admit this
struggle to be the one important thing. And this importance, we shall
see further, is based, not on the external and the social consequences
of conduct, but essentially and primarily on its internal and its
personal consequences.
In _Macbeth_, for instance, the main incident, the tragic-colouring
matter of the drama, is the murder of Duncan. But in what aspect of this
does the real tragedy lie? Not in the fact that Duncan is murdered, but
in the fact that Macbeth is the murderer. What appals us, what purges
our passions with pity and with terror as we contemplate it, is not the
external, the social effect of the act, but the personal, the internal
effect of it. As for Duncan, he is in his grave; after life's fitful
fever he sleeps well. What our minds are made to dwell upon is not that
Duncan shall sleep for ever, but that Macbeth shall sleep no more; it is
not the extinction of a dynasty, but the ruin of a character.
We see in _Hamlet_ precisely the same thing. The action there that our
interest centres in, is the hero's struggle to conform to an internal
personal standard of right, utterly irrespective of use to others, or of
natural happiness to himself. In the course of this struggle, indeed, he
does nothing but ruin the happiness around him; and this ruin adds
greatly to the pathos of the spectacle. But we are not indignant with
Hamlet, as being the cause of it. We should have been indignant rather
with him if the case had been reversed, and if, instead of sacrificing
social happiness for the sake of personal right, he had sacrificed
personal right for the sake of social happiness.
In _Antigone_ the case is just the same, only there its nature is yet
more distinctly exhibited. We have for the central interest the same
personal struggle after right, not after use or happiness; and one of
the finest passages in that whole marvellous drama is a distinct
statement by the heroine that this is so. The one rule she says, that
she is resolved to live by, and not live by only, but if needs be to die
for, is no human rule, is no standard of man's devising, nor can it be
modified to suit our changing needs; but it is
_The unwritten and the enduring laws of God,
Which are not of to-day nor yesterday,
But live from everlasting, and none breathes
Who knows them, whence begotten._
In _Measure for Measure_ and _Faust_ we can see the matter reduced to a
narrower issue still. In both these plays we can see at once that one
moral judgment at least, not to name others, is before all things
pre-supposed in us. This is a hard and fixed judgment with regard to
female chastity, and the supernatural value of it. It is only because we
assent to this judgment that Isabella is heroic to us; and primarily for
the same reason that Margaret is unfortunate. Let us suspend this
judgment for a moment, and what will become of these two dramas? The
terror and the pity of them will vanish instantly like a dream. The
fittest name for both of them will be '_Much Ado about Nothing_.'
It will thus be seen, and the more we consider the matter the more
plain will it become to us--that in all such art as that which we have
been now considering, the premiss on which all its power and greatness
rests is this: The grand relation of man is not first to his brother
men, but to something else, that is beyond humanity--that is at once
without and also beyond himself; to this first, and to his brother men
through this. We are not our own; we are bought with a price. Our bodies
are God's temples, and the joy and the terror of life depends on our
keeping these temples pure, or defiling them. Such are the solemn and
profound beliefs, whether conscious or unconscious, on which all the
higher art of the world has based itself. All the profundity and
solemnity of it is borrowed from these, and exists for us in exact
proportion to the intensity with which we hold them.
Nor is this true of sublime and serious art only. It is true of cynical,
profligate, and concupiscent art as well. It is true of Congreve as it
is true of Sophocles; it is true of _Mademoiselle de Maupin_ as it is
true of _Measure for Measure_. This art differs from the former in that
the end presented in it as the object of struggle is not only not the
morally right, but is also to a certain extent essentially the morally
wrong. In the case of cynical and profligate art this is obvious. For
such art does not so much depend on the substitution of some new object,
as in putting insult on the present one. It does not make right and
wrong change places; on the contrary it carefully keeps them where they
are; but it insults the former by transferring its insignia to the
latter. It is not the ignoring of the right, but the denial of it.
Cynicism and profligacy are essentially the spirits that deny, but they
must retain the existing affirmations for their denial to prey upon.
Their function is not to destroy the good, but to keep it in lingering
torture. It is a kind of spiritual bear-baiting. They hate the good, and
its existence piques them; but they must know that the good exists none
the less. '_I'd no sooner_,' says one of Congreve's characters, '_play
with a man that slighted his ill-fortune, than I'd make love to a woman
who undervalued the loss of her reputation_.' In this one sentence is
contained the whole secret of profligacy; and profligacy is the same as
cynicism, only it is cynicism sensualized. Now we have in the above
sentence the exact counterpart to the words of Antigone that I have
already quoted. For just as her life lay in conformity to '_The
unwritten, and the enduring laws of God_,' so does the life of the
profligate lie in the violation of them. To each the existence of laws
is equally essential. For profligacy is not merely the gratification of
the appetites, but the gratification of them at the expense of something
else. Beasts are not profligate. We cannot have a profligate goat.
In what I have called concupiscent art, the case might seem different,
and to a certain extent it is so. The objects of struggle that we are
there presented with are meant to be presented as pleasures, not in
defiance of right and wrong, but independently of them. The chief of
these, indeed, as Théophile Gautier has told us, are the physical
endearments of a man and a woman, with no other qualification than that
they are both of them young and beautiful. But though this art professes
to be thus independent of the moral judgment, and to trust for none of
its effects to the discernment between good and evil, this really is
very far from being the case. Let us turn once again to the romance we
have already quoted from. The hero says, as we have seen already, that
he has completely lost the power of discernment in question. Now, even
this, as might be shown easily, is not entirely true; for argument's
sake, however, we may grant him that it is so. The real point in the
matter to notice is that he is at any rate conscious of the loss. He is
a man tingling with the excitement of having cast off some burden. The
burden may be gone, but it is still present in the sharp effects of its
absence. He is a kind of moral poacher, who, though he may not live by
law, takes much of his life's tone from the sense that he is eluding it.
His pleasures, though pleasurable in themselves, yet have this quality
heightened by the sense of contrast. '_I am at any rate not virtuous_,'
his mistress says to him, '_and that is always something gained_.'
George Eliot says of Maggie Tulliver, that she liked her aunt Pullet
chiefly because she was not her aunt Gleg. Théophile Gautier's hero
likes the Venus Anadyomene, partly at least, because she is not the
Madonna.
Nay, let us even descend to worse spectacles--to the sight of men
struggling for enjoyments that are yet more obviously material, more
devoid yet of any trace of mind or morals, and we shall see plainly, if
we consult the mirror of art, that the moral element is present even
here. We shall trace it even in such abnormal literature of indulgence
as the erotic work commonly ascribed to Meursius. We shall trace it in
the orgies of Tiberius at Capri; or of Quartilla, as Petronius describes
them, at Neapolis. It is like a ray of light coming in at the top of a
dark cavern, whose inmates see not _it_, but _by_ it; and which only
brings to them a consciousness of shadow. It is this supernatural
element that leavens natural passion, and gives its mad rage to it. It
creates for it '_a twilight where virtues are vices_.' The pleasures
thus sought for are supposed to enthral men not in proportion to their
intensity (for this through all their varieties would be probably nearly
equal) but in proportion to their lowness--to their sullying power.
Degradation is the measure of enjoyment; or rather it is an increasing
numeral by which one constant figure of enjoyment is multiplied.
_Ah, where shall we go then, for pastime,
If the_ worst _that can be has been done?_
This is the great question of the votaries of such joys as these.[24]
Thus if we look at life in the mirror of art, we shall see how the
supernatural is ever present to us. If we climb up into heaven it is
there; if we go down into hell it is there also. We shall see it at the
bottom of those two opposite sets of pleasures, to the one or the other
of which all human pleasures belong. The source of one is an impassioned
struggle after the supernatural right, or an impassioned sense of rest
upon attaining it; the source of the other is the sense of revolt
against it, which in various ways flatters or excites us. In both cases
the supernatural moral judgment is the sense appealed to, primarily in
the first case, and secondarily if not primarily in the second. All the
life about us is coloured by this, and naturally if this be destroyed or
wrecked, the whole aspect of life will change for us. What then will
this change be? Looking still into the mirror of art, the general
character of it will be very readily perceptible. I noticed just now,
in passing, how _Measure for Measure_ and _Faust_ would suffer in their
meaning and their interest, by the absence on our part of a certain
moral judgment. They would become like a person singing to a deaf
audience--a series of dumb grimaces with no meaning in them. The same
thing is equally true in all the other cases. Antigone's heroism will
evaporate;[25] she will be left obstinate only. The lives of Macbeth and
Hamlet will be tales of little meaning for us, though the words are
strong. They will be full of sound and fury, but they will signify
nothing. What they produce in us will be not interest but a kind of
wondering weariness--weariness at the weary fate of men who could
'_think so brainsickly of things_.' So in like manner will all the
emphasis and elaboration in the literature of sensuality become a
weariness without meaning, also. Congreve's caustic wit will turn to
spasmodic truism; and Théophile Gautier's excess of erotic ardour, into
prolix and fantastic affectation. All its sublimity, its brilliance, and
a large part of its interest, depend in art on the existence of the
moral sense, and would in its absence be absolutely unproducible. The
reason of this is plain. The natural pains and pleasures of life,
merely manipulated by the imagination and the memory, have too little
variety or magnitude in them without further aid. Art without the moral
sense to play upon, is like a pianist whose keyboard is reduced to a
single octave.
And exactly the same will be the case with life. Life will lose just the
same qualities that art will--neither more nor less. There will be no
introduction of any new interests, but merely the elimination of certain
existing ones. The subtraction of the moral sense will not revolutionise
human purposes, but simply make them listless. It will reduce to a
parti-coloured level the whole field of pains and pleasures. The moral
element gives this level a new dimension. Working underneath it as a
subterranean force, it convulses and divides its surface. Here vast
areas subside into valleys and deep abysses; there mountain peaks shoot
up heavenwards. Mysterious shadows begin to throng the hollows; new
tints and half-tints flicker and shift everywhere; mists hang floating
over ravines and precipices; the vegetation grows more various, here
slenderer, there richer and more luxuriant; whilst high over all, bright
on the topmost summits, is a new strange something--the white snows of
purity, catching the morning streaks on them of a brighter day, that has
never as yet risen upon the world below.
With the subtraction, or nullifying, of the moral force, all this will
go. The mountains will sink, the valleys be filled up; all will be once
more dead level--still indeed parti-coloured, but without light and
shadow, and with the colours reduced in number, and robbed of all their
vividness. The chiaro-oscuro will have gone from life; the moral
landscape, whose beauty and grandeur is at present so much extolled,
will have dissolved like an insubstantial pageant. Vice and virtue will
be set before us in the same grey light; every deeper feeling either of
joy or sorrow, of desire or of repulsion, will lose its vigour, and
cease any more to be resonant.
It may be said indeed, and very truly, that under favourable
circumstances there must always remain a joy in the mere act of living,
in the exercising of the bodily functions, and in the exciting and
appeasing of the bodily appetites. Will anything, it may be asked, for
instance, rob the sunshine of its gladness, or deaden the vital
influence of a spring morning?--when the sky is a cloudless blue, and
the sea is like a wild hyacinth, when the pouring brooks seem to live as
they sparkle, and the early air amongst the woodlands has the breath in
it of unseen violets? All this, it is quite true, will be left to us;
this and a great deal more. This, however, is but one side of the
picture. If life has its own natural gladness which is expressed by
spring, it has also its own natural sadness which is expressed by
winter; and the worth of life, if this is all we trust to, will be as
various and as changing as the weather is. But this is not all. Even
this worth, such as it is, depends for us at present, in a large
measure, upon religion--not directly indeed, but indirectly. This life
of air, and nerve, and muscle, this buoyant consciousness of joyous and
abounding health, which seems so little to have connection with faiths
or theories, is for us impregnated with a life that is impregnated with
these, and thus their subtle influence pervades it everywhere. There is
no impulse from without which stirs or excites the senses, that does not
either bring to us, or send us on to, a something beyond itself. In each
of these pleasures that seems to us so simple, floats a swarm of hopes
and memories, like the gnats in a summer twilight. There is not a sight,
a sound, a smell, not a breath from sea or garden, that is not full of
them, and on which, busy and numberless, they are not wafted into us.
And each of these volatile presences brings the notions of right and
wrong with it; and it is these that make sensuous life tingle with so
strange and so elaborate an excitement. Indirectly then, though not
directly, the mere joy in the act of living will suffer from the loss of
religion, in the same manner, though perhaps not in the same degree, as
the other joys will. It will not lose its existence, but it will lose
zest. The fabric of its pleasures will of course remain what it ever
was; but its brightest inhabitants will have left it. It will be as
desolate as Mayfair in September, or as a deserted college during a long
vacation.
We may here pause in passing, to remark on the shallowness of that
philosophy of culture, to be met with in certain quarters, which, whilst
admitting all that can be said as to the destruction for us of any moral
obligation, yet advises us still to profit by the variety of moral
distinctions. '_Each moment_,' says Mr. Pater for instance, '_some form
grows perfect in hand or face; some tone on the hills or sea is choicer
than the rest; some mood of passion or insight or intellectual
excitement, is irresistibly real and attractive for us_.' And thus, he
adds, '_while all melts under our feet, we may well catch at any
exquisite passion, or any contribution to knowledge, that seems by a
lifted horizon to set the spirit free for a moment, or any stirring of
the senses, strange dyes, strange flowers, and curious odours, or the
work of the artist's hand, or the face of one's friend_.' It is plain
that this positive teaching of culture is open to the same objections,
and is based on the same fallacy, as the positive teaching of morals. It
does not teach us, indeed, to let right and wrong guide us in the choice
of our pleasures, in the sense that we should choose the one sort and
eschew the other; but teaching us to choose the two, in one sense
indifferently, it yet teaches us to choose them as distinct and
contrasted things. It teaches us in fact to combine the two fruits
without confusing their flavours. But in the case of good and evil, as
has been seen, this is quite impossible; for good is only good as the
thing that ought to be chosen; evil is only evil as the thing that ought
not to be chosen; and the only reasons that could justify us in
combining them would altogether prevent our distinguishing them. The
teachings of positive culture, in fact, rest on the naïve supposition
that shine and shadow, as it were, are portable things; and that we can
take bright objects out of the sunshine, and dark objects out of the
shadow, and setting them both together in the diffused grey light of a
studio, make a magical mosaic out of them, of gloom and glitter. Or such
teachings, to put the matter yet more simply, are like telling us to
pick a primrose at noonday, and to set it by our bed-side for a
night-light.
It is plain therefore that, in that loss of zest and interest, which the
deadening of the moral sense, as we have seen, must bring to life, we
shall get no help there. The massy fabric of which saints and heroes
were the builders, will never be re-elected by this mincing moral
dandyism.
But there is another last resource of the modern school, which is far
more worthy of attention, and which, being entirely _sui generis_, I
have reserved to treat of here. That resource is the devotion to truth
as truth; not for the sake of its consequences, but in scorn of them.
Here we are told we have at least one moral end that can never be taken
away from us. It will still survive to give life a meaning, a dignity,
and a value, even should the pursuit of it prove destructive to all the
others. The language used by the modern school upon this subject is very
curious and instructive. I will take two typical instances. The common
argument, says Dr. Tyndall, in favour of belief is the comfort and the
gladness that it brings us, its redemption of life, in fact, from that
dead and dull condition we have been just considering. '_To this,_' he
says, '_my reply is that I choose the nobler part of Emerson when, after
various disenchantments, he exclaimed "I covet_ truth!" _The gladness of
true heroism, visits the heart of him who is really competent to say
this._' The following sentences are Professor Huxley's: '_If it is
demonstrated to me,_' he says, '_that without this or that theological
dogma the human race will lapse into bipedal cattle, more brutal than
the beasts by reason of their greater cleverness, my next question is to
ask for the proof of the dogma. If this proof is forthcoming, it is my
conviction that no drowning sailor ever clutched a hen-coop more
tenaciously than mankind will hold by such dogma, whatever it may be.
But if not, then I verily believe that the human race will go its own
evil way; and my only consolation lies in the reflection that, however
bad our posterity may become, so long as they hold by the plain rule of
not pretending to believe what they have no reason to believe, because
it may be to their advantage so to pretend, they will not have reached
the lowest depths of immorality._' I will content myself with these two
instances, but others of a similar kind might be multiplied
indefinitely.
Now by a simple substitution of terms, such language as this will reveal
at once one important fact to us. According to the avowed principles of
positive morality, morality has no other test but happiness. Immorality,
therefore, can have no conceivable meaning but unhappiness, or at least
the means to it, which in this case are hardly distinguishable from the
end; and thus, according to the above rigid reasoners, the human race
will not have reached the lowest depths of misery so long as it rejects
the one thing which _ex hypothesi_ might render it less miserable.
Either then all this talk about truth must really be so much irrelevant
nonsense, or else, if it be not nonsense, the test of conduct is
something distinct from happiness. The question before us is a plain
one, which may be answered in one of two ways, but which positivism
cannot possibly answer in both. Is truth to be sought only because it
conduces to happiness, or is happiness only to be sought for when it is
based on truth? In the latter case truth, not happiness, is the test of
conduct. Are our positive moralists prepared to admit this? If so, let
them explicitly and consistently say so. Let them keep this test and
reject the other, for the two cannot be fused together.
[Greek: oxos t' aleipha t' egcheas tautô kutei
dichostatount an ou philoin prosennepois.]
This inconsistency is here, however, only a side point--a passing
illustration of the slovenliness of the positivist logic. As far as my
present argument goes, we may let this pass altogether, and allow the
joint existence of these mutually exclusive ends. What I am about to do
is to show that on positive grounds the last of these is more hopelessly
inadequate than the first--that truth as a moral end has even more of
religion in its composition than happiness, and that when this religion
goes, its value will even more hopelessly evaporate.
At first sight this may seem impossible. The devotion to truth may seem
as simple as it is sacred. But if we consider the matter further, we
shall soon think differently. To begin then; truth, as the positivists
speak of it, is plainly a thing that is to be worshipped in two
ways--firstly by its discovery, and secondly by its publication. Thus
Professor Huxley, however much it may pain him, will not hide from
himself the fact that there is no God; and however bad this knowledge
may be for humanity, his highest and most sacred duty still consists in
imparting it. Now why should this be? I ask. Is it simply because the
fact in question is the truth? That surely cannot be so, as a few other
examples will show us. A man discovers that his wife has been seduced by
his best friend. Is there anything very high or very sacred in that
discovery? Having made it, does he feel any consolation in the knowledge
that it is the entire truth? And will the '_gladness of true heroism_'
visit him if he proclaims it to everyone in his club? A chattering nurse
betrays his danger to a sick man. The sick man takes fright and dies.
Was the discovery of the truth of his danger very glorious for the
patient? or was its publication very sacred in the nurse? Clearly the
truths that it is sacred to find out and to publish are not all truths,
but truths of a certain kind only. They are not particular truths like
these, but the universal and eternal truths that underlie them. They are
in fact what we call the truths of Nature, and the apprehension of them,
or truth as attained by us, means the putting ourselves _en rapport_
with the life of that infinite existence which surrounds and sustains
all of us. Now since it is this kind of truth only that is supposed to
be so sacred, it is clear that its sacredness does not depend on itself,
but on its object. Truth is sacred because Nature is sacred; Nature is
not sacred because truth is; and our supreme duty to truth means neither
more nor less than a supreme faith in Nature. It means that there is a
something in the Infinite outside ourselves that corresponds to a
certain something within ourselves; that this latter something is the
strongest and the highest part of us, and that it can find no rest but
in communion with its larger counterpart. Truth sought for in this way
is evidently a distinct thing from the truth of utilitarianism. It is no
false reflection of human happiness in the clouds. For it is to be
sought for none the less, as our positivists decidedly tell us, even
though all other happiness should be ruined by it. Now what on positive
principles is the groundwork of this teaching? All ethical epithets such
as sacred, heroic, and so forth--all the words, in fact, that are by
implication applied to Nature--have absolutely no meaning save as
applied to conscious beings; and as a subject for positive observation,
there exists no consciousness in the universe outside this earth. By
what conceivable means, then, can the positivists transfer to Nature in
general qualities which, so far as they know, are peculiar to human
nature only? They can only do this in one of two ways--both of which
they would equally repudiate--either by an act of fancy, or by an act of
faith. Tested rigidly by their own fundamental common principles, it is
as unmeaning to call the universe sacred as to say that the moon talks
French.
Let us however pass this by; let us refuse to subject their teaching to
the extreme rigour of even their own law; and let us grant that by some
mixed use of fancy or of mysticism, they can turn to Nature as to some
vast moral hieroglyph. What sort of morality do they find in it? Nature,
as positive observation reveals her to us, is a thing that can have no
claim either on our reverence or our approbation. Once apply any moral
test to her conduct, and as J.S. Mill has so forcibly pointed out, she
becomes a monster. There is no crime that men abhor or perpetrate that
Nature does not commit daily on an exaggerated scale. She knows no sense
either of justice or mercy. Continually indeed she seems to be tender,
and loving, and bountiful; but all that, at such times, those that know
her can exclaim to her, is
_Miseri quibus
Intentata nites_.
At one moment she will be blessing a country with plenty, peace, and
sunshine; and she will the next moment ruin the whole of it by an
earthquake. Now she is the image of thrift, now of prodigality; now of
the utmost purity, now of the most revolting filth; and if, as I say,
she is to be judged by any moral standard at all, her capacities for
what is admirable not only make her crimes the darker, but they also
make her virtues partake of the nature of sin. How, then, can an
intimacy with this eternal criminal be an ennobling or a sacred thing?
The theist, of course, believes that truth _is_ sacred. But his belief
rests on a foundation that has been altogether renounced by the
positivists. He values truth because, in whatever direction it takes
him, it takes him either to God or towards Him--God, to whom he is in
some sort akin, and after whose likeness he is in some sort made. He
sees Nature to be cruel, wicked, and bewildering when viewed by itself.
But behind Nature he sees a vaster power--his father--in whom
mysteriously all contradictions are reconciled. Nature for him is God's,
but it is not God; and '_though God slay me_,' he says, '_yet will I
trust in Him_.' This trust can be attained to only by an act of faith
like this. No observation or experiment, or any positive method of any
kind, will be enough to give it us; rather, without faith, observation
and experiment will do nothing but make it seem impossible. Thus a
belief in the sacredness of Nature, or, in other words, in the essential
value of truth, is as strictly an act of religion, as strictly a
defiance of the whole positive formula, as any article in any
ecclesiastical creed. It is simply a concrete form of the beginning of
the Christian symbol, '_I believe in God the Father Almighty_.' It rests
on the same foundation, neither more nor less. Nor is it too much to
say that without a religion, without a belief in God, no fetish-worship
was ever more ridiculous than this cultus of natural truth.
This subject is so important that it will be well to dwell on it a
little longer. I will take another passage from Dr. Tyndall, which
presents it to us in a slightly different light, and which speaks
explicitly not of truth itself, but of that sacred Object beyond, of
which truth is only the sacramental channel to us. '"_Two things," said
Imanuel Kant_' (it is thus Dr. Tyndall writes), '"_fill me with awe--the
starry heavens, and the sense of moral responsibility in man." And in
the hours of health and strength and sanity, when the stroke of action
has ceased, and when the pause of reflection has set in, the scientific
investigator finds himself overshadowed by the same awe. Breaking
contact with the hampering details of earth, it associates him with a
power which gives fulness and tone to his existence, but which he can
neither analyse nor comprehend._' This, Dr. Tyndall tells us, is the
only rational statement of the fact of that '_divine communion_,' whose
nature is '_simply distorted and desecrated_' by the unwarranted
assumptions of theism.
Now let us try to consider accurately what Dr. Tyndall's statement
means. Knowledge of Nature, he says, associates him with Nature. It
withdraws him from '_the hampering details of earth_,' and enables the
individual human being to have communion with a something that is beyond
humanity. But what is communion? It is a word with no meaning at all
save as referring to conscious beings. There could be no communion
between two corpses; nor, again, between a corpse and a living man. Dr.
Tyndall, for instance, could have no communion with a dead canary.
Communion implies the existence on both sides of a common something. Now
what is there in common between Dr. Tyndall and the starry heavens, or
that '_power_' of which the starry heavens are the embodiment? Dr.
Tyndall expressly says that he not only does not know what there is in
common, but that he '_dare_' not even say that, as conscious beings,
they two have anything in common at all.[26] The only things he can know
about the power in question are that it is vast, and that it is uniform;
but a contemplation of these qualities by themselves, must tend rather
to produce in him a sense of separation from it than of union with it.
United with it, in one sense, he of course is; he is a fraction of the
sum of things, and everything, in a certain way, is dependent upon
everything else. But in this union there is nothing special. Its
existence is an obvious fact, common to all men, whether they dwell upon
it or no: and though by a knowledge of Nature we may grow to realise it
more keenly, it is impossible to make the union in the least degree
closer, or to turn it into anything that can be in any way called a
communion. Indeed, for the positivists to talk about communion or
association with Nature is about as rational as to talk about communion
or association with a steam-engine. The starry skies at night are
doubtless an imposing spectacle; but man, on positive principles, can be
no more raised by watching them than a commercial traveller can by
watching a duke--probably far less: for if the duke were well behaved,
the commercial traveller might perhaps learn some manners from him; but
there is nothing in the panorama of the universe that can in any way be
any model for the positivist. There are but two respects in which he can
compare himself to the rest of nature--firstly, as a revealed force;
and, secondly, as a force that works by law. But the forces that are
revealed by the stars, for instance, are vast, and the force revealed in
himself is small; and he, as he considers, is a self-determining agent,
and the stars are not. There are but two points of comparison between
the two; and in these two points they are contrasts, and not
likenesses. It is true, indeed, as I said just now, that a sense of awe
and of hushed solemnity is, as a fact, born in us at the spectacle of
the starry heavens--world upon luminous world shining and quivering
silently; it is true, too, that a spontaneous feeling connects such a
sense somehow with our deepest moral being. But this, on positive
principles, must be feeling only. It means absolutely nothing: it can
have no objective fact that corresponds to it. It is an illusion, a
pathetic fallacy. And to say that the heavens with their stars declare
to us anything high or holy, is no more rational than to say that
Brighton does, which itself, seen at night from the sea, is a long braid
of stars descended upon the wide horizon. All that the study of nature,
all that the love of truth, can do for the positivist is not to guide
him to any communion with a vaster power, but to show him that no such
communion is possible. His devotion to truth, if it mean anything--and
the language he often uses about it betrays this--let us know the worst,
not let us find out the best:--a wish which is neither more nor less
noble than the wish to sit down at once in a slop upon the floor rather
than sustain oneself any longer above it on a chair that is discovered
to be rickety.
Here then again, in this last resource of positivism we have religion
embodied as a yet more important element than in any of the others; and
when this element is driven out of it, it collapses yet more hopelessly
than they do. By the whole positive system we are bound to human life.
There is no mystical machinery by which we can rise above it. It is by
its own isolated worth that this life must stand or fall.
And what, let us again ask, will this worth, be? The question is of
course, as I have said, too vague to admit of more than a general
answer, but a general answer, as I have said also, may be given
confidently enough. Man when fully imbued with the positive view of
himself, will inevitably be an animal of far fewer capacities than he at
present is. He will not be able to suffer so much; but also he will not
be able to enjoy so much. Surround him, in imagination, with the most
favourable circumstances; let social progress have been carried to the
utmost perfection; and let him have access to every happiness of which
we can conceive him capable. It is impossible even thus to conceive of
life as a very valuable possession to him. It would at any rate be far
less valuable than it is to many men now, under outer circumstances that
are far less favourable. The goal to which a purely human progress is
capable of conducting us, is thus no vague condition of glory and
felicity, in which men shall develop new and ampler powers. It is a
condition in which, the keenest life attainable has continually been
far surpassed already, without anything having been arrived at that in
itself seemed of surpassing value.
FOOTNOTES:
[23] 'Hippolyta.--_This is the silliest stuff I ever heard._
Theseus.--_The best in this kind are but shadows, and the worst no
worse, if imagination amend them._ Hippolyta.--_It must be your
imagination then, not theirs._'--Midsummer's Night's Dream, Act V.
'_Piece out our imperfections with your thoughts._'--Prologue to Henry
V.
[24] Seneca says of virtue, '_Non quia delectat placet, sed quia placet
delectat_.' Of vice in the same way we may say, '_Non quia delectat_
pudet, _sed quia_ pudet _delectat_.'
[25] It will be of course recollected that in this abstraction of the
moral sense, we have to abstract it from the characters as well as
ourselves.
[26] '_When I attempt to give the power which I see manifested in the
universe an objective form, personal or otherwise, it slips away from
me, declining all intellectual manipulation. I dare not, save
poetically, use the pronoun_ "He" _regarding it. I dare not call it a_
"Mind." _I refuse even to call it a_ "Cause." _Its mystery overshadows
me; but it remains a mystery, while the objective frames which my
neighbours try to make it fit, simply distort and desecrate it._'--Dr.
Tyndall, '_Materialism and its Opponents_.'