THE SUPERSTITION OF POSITIVISM.
Glendower. _I can call spirits from the vasty deep._
Hotspur. _Why so can I, or so can any man,
But will they come when you do call for them?_
Henry IV. Part 1.
General and indefinite as the foregoing considerations have been, they
are quite definite enough to be of the utmost practical import. They are
definite enough to show the utter hollowness of that vague faith in
progress, and the glorious prospects that lie before humanity, on which
the positive school at present so much rely, and about which so much is
said. To a certain extent, indeed, a faith in progress is perfectly
rational and well grounded. There are many imperfections in life, which
the course of events tends manifestly to lessen if not to do away with,
and so far as these are concerned, improvements may go on indefinitely.
But the things that this progress touches are, as has been said before,
not happiness, but the negative conditions of it. A belief in this kind
of progress is not peculiar to positivism. It is common to all educated
men, no matter what their creed may be. What is peculiar to positivism
is the strange corollary to this belief, that man's subjective powers of
happiness will go on expanding likewise. It is the belief not only that
the existing pleasures will become more diffused, but that they will, as
George Eliot says, become '_more intense in diffusion_.' It is this
belief on which the positivists rely to create that enthusiasm, that
impassioned benevolence, which is to be the motive power of their whole
ethical machinery. They have taken away the Christian heaven, and have
thus turned adrift a number of hopes and aspirations that were once
powerful. These hopes and aspirations they acknowledge to be of the
first necessity; they are facts, they say, of human nature, and no
higher progress would be possible without them. What the enlightened
thought is to do is not to extinguish, but to transfer them. They are to
be given a new object more satisfactory than the old one; not our own
private glory in another world, but the common glory of our whole race
in this.
Now let us consider for a moment some of the positive criticisms on the
Christian heaven, and then apply them to the proposed substitute. The
belief in heaven, say the positivists, is to be set aside for two great
reasons. In the first place there is no objective proof of its
existence, and in the second place there is subjective proof of its
impossibility. Not only is it not deducible, but it is not even
thinkable. Give the imagination _carte blanche_ to construct it, and
the imagination will either do nothing, or will do something ridiculous.
'_My position [with regard to this matter]_' says a popular living
writer,[27] '_is this--The idea of a glorified energy in an ampler life,
is an idea utterly incompatible with exact thought, one which evaporates
in contradictions, in phrases, which when pressed have no meaning._'
Now if this criticism has the least force, as used against the Christian
heaven, it has certainly far more as used against the future glories of
humanity. The positivists ask the Christians how they expect to enjoy
themselves in heaven. The Christians may, with far more force, ask the
positivists how they expect to enjoy themselves on earth. For the
Christians' heaven being _ex hypothesi_ an unknown world, they do not
stultify their expectations from being unable to describe them. On the
contrary it is a part of their faith that they are indescribable. But
the positivists' heaven is altogether in this world; and no mystical
faith has any place in their system. In this case, therefore, whatever
we may think of the other, it is plain that the tests in question are
altogether complete and final. To the Christians, indeed, it is quite
open to make their supposed shame their glory, and to say that their
heaven would be nothing _if_ describable. The positivists have bound
themselves to admit that theirs is nothing _unless_ describable.
What then, let us ask the enthusiasts of humanity, will humanity be like
in its ideally perfect state? Let them show us some sample of the
general future perfection; let them describe one of the nobler, ampler,
glorified human beings of the future. What will he be like? What will he
long for? What will he take pleasure in? How will he spend his days? How
will he make love? What will he laugh at? And let him be described in
phrases which _when pressed_ do not _evaporate in contradictions_, but
which have some _distinct meaning_, and _are not incompatible with exact
thought_. Do our exact thinkers in the least know what they are
prophesying? If not, what is the meaning of their prophecy? The
prophecies of the positive school are rigid scientific inferences; they
are that or nothing. And one cannot infer an event of whose nature one
is wholly ignorant.
Let these obvious questions be put to our positive moralists--these
questions they have themselves suggested, and the grotesque unreality of
this vague optimism will be at once apparent. Never was vagary of
mediæval faith so groundless as this. The Earthly Paradise that the
mediæval world believed in was not more mythical than the Earthly
Paradise believed in by our exact thinkers now; and George Eliot might
just as well start in a Cunard steamer to find the one, as send her
faith into the future to find the other.
Could it be shown that these splendid anticipations were well founded,
they might perhaps kindle some new and active enthusiasm; though it is
very doubtful, even then, if the desire would be ardent enough to bring
about its own accomplishment. This, however, it is quite useless to
consider, the anticipations in question being simply an empty dream. A
certain kind of improvement, as I have said, we are no doubt right in
looking for, not only with confidence, but with complacency. But
positivism, so far from brightening this prospect, makes it indefinitely
duller than it would be otherwise. The practical results therefore to be
looked for from a faith in progress may be seen at their utmost already
in the world around us; and the positivists may make the sobering
reflection that their system can only change these from what they
already see them, not by strengthening, but by weakening them. Take the
world then as it is at present, and the sense, on the individual's part,
that he personally is promoting its progress, can belong to, and can
stimulate, exceptional men only, who are doing some public work; and it
will be found even in these cases that the pleasure which this sense
gives them is largely fortified (as is said of wine) by the entirely
alien sense of fame and power. On the generality of men it neither has,
nor can have, any effect whatever, or even if it gives a glow to their
inclinations in some cases, it will at any rate never curb them in any.
The fact indeed that things in general do tend to get better in certain
ways, must produce in most men not effort but acquiescence. It may, when
the imagination brings it home to them, shed a pleasing light
occasionally over the surface of their private lives: but it would be as
irrational to count on this as a stimulus to farther action, as to
expect that the summer sunshine would work a steam-engine.
If we consider, then, that even the present condition of things is far
more calculated to produce the enthusiasm of humanity than the condition
that the positivists are preparing for themselves, we shall see how
utterly chimerical is their entire practical system. It is like a
drawing of a cathedral, which looks magnificent at the first glance, but
which a second glance shows to be composed of structural
impossibilities--blocks of masonry resting on no foundations, columns
hanging from the roofs, instead of supporting them, and doors and
windows with inverted arches. The positive system could only work
practically were human nature to suffer a complete change--a change
which it has no spontaneous tendency to make, which no known power could
ever tend to force on it, and which, in short, there is no ground of
any kind for expecting.
There are two characteristics in men, for instance, which, though they
undoubtedly do exist, the positive system requires to be indefinitely
magnified--the imagination, and unselfishness. The work of the
imagination is to present to the individual consciousness the remote
ends to which all progress is to be directed; and the desire to work for
these is, on the positive supposition, to conquer all mere personal
impulses. Now men have already had an end set before them, in the shape
of the joys of heaven, which was far brighter and far more real to them
than these others can ever be; and yet the imagination has so failed to
keep this before them, that its small effect upon their lives is a
commonplace with the positivists themselves. How then can these latter
hope that their own pale and distant ideal will have a more vivid effect
on the world than that near and glowing one, in whose place they put it?
Will it incite men to virtues to which heaven could not incite them? or
lure them away from vices from which hell-fire would not scare them?
Before it can do so, it is plain that human nature must have completely
changed, and its elements have been re-mixed, in completely new
proportions. In a state of things where such a result was possible, a
man would do a better day's work for a penny to be given to his unborn
grandson, than he would now do for a pound to be paid to himself at
sunset.
For argument's sake, however, let us suppose such a change possible. Let
us suppose the imagination to be so developed that the remote end of
progress--that happier state of men in some far off century--is ever
vividly present to us as a possibility we may help to realise. Another
question still remains for us. To preserve this happiness for others, we
are told, we must to a large extent sacrifice our own. Is it in human
nature to make this sacrifice? The positive moralists assure us that it
is, and for this reason. Man, they say, is an animal who enjoys
vicariously with almost as much zest as in his own person; and therefore
to procure a greater pleasure for others makes him far happier than to
procure a less one for himself. In this statement, as I have observed in
an earlier chapter, there is no doubt a certain general truth; but how
far it will hold good in particular instances depends altogether on
particular circumstances. It depends on the temperament of the person
who is to make the sacrifice, on the nature of his feelings towards the
person for whom he is to make it, and on the proportion between the
pleasure he is to forego himself, and the pleasure he is to secure for
another. Now if we consider human nature as it is, and the utmost
development of it that on positive grounds is possible, the conditions
that can produce the requisite self-sacrifice will be found to be
altogether wanting. The future we are to labour for, even when viewed in
its brightest light, will only excel the present in having fewer
miseries. So far as its happiness goes it will be distinctly less
intense. It will, as we have seen already, be but a vapid consummation
at its best; and the more vividly it is brought before us in
imagination, the less likely shall we be to '_struggle, groan, and
agonize_,' for the sake of hastening it in reality. It will do nothing,
at any rate, to increase the tendency to self-sacrifice that is now at
work in the world; and this, though startling us now and then by some
spasmodic manifestation, is not strong enough to have much general
effect on the present; still less will it have more effect on the
future. Vicarious happiness as a rule is only possible when the object
gained for another is enormously greater than the object lost by self;
and it is not always possible even then: whilst when the gains on either
side are nearly equal, it ceases altogether. And necessarily so. If it
did not, everything would be at a dead-lock. Life would be a perpetual
holding back, instead of a pushing forward. Everyone would be waiting at
the door, and saying to everyone else, '_After you_.' But all these
practical considerations are entirely forgotten by the positivists. They
live in a world of their own imagining, in which all the rules of this
world are turned upside down. There, the defeated candidate in an
election would be radiant at his rival's victory. When a will was read,
the anxiety of each relative would be that he or she should be excluded
in favour of the others; or more probably still that they should be all
excluded in favour of a hospital. Two rivals, in love with the same
woman, would be each anxious that his own suit might be thwarted. And a
man would gladly involve himself in any ludicrous misfortune, because he
knew that the sight of his catastrophe would rejoice his whole circle of
friends. The course of human progress, in fact, would be one gigantic
donkey-race, in which those were the winners who were farthest off from
the prize.
We have but to state the matter in terms of common life, to see how
impossible is the only condition of things that would make the positive
system practicable. The first wonder that suggests itself, is how so
grotesque a conception could ever have originated. But its genesis is
not far to seek. The positivists do not postulate any new elements in
human nature, but the reduction of some, elimination of others, and the
magnifying of others. And they actually find cases where this process
has been effected. But they quite forget the circumstances that have
made such an event possible. They forget that in their very nature they
have been altogether exceptional and transitory; and that it is
impossible to construct a Utopia in which they shall exist at all. We
can, for instance, no doubt point to Leonidas and the three hundred as
specimens of what human heroism can rise to; and we can point to the
Stoics as specimens of human self-control. But to make a new Thermopylæ
we want a new Barbarian; and before we can recoil from temptation as the
Stoics did, we must make pleasure as perilous and as terrible as it was
under the Roman emperors. Such developments of humanity are at their
very essence abnormal; and to suppose that they could ever become the
common type of character, would be as absurd as to suppose that all
mankind could be kings. I will take another instance that is more to the
point yet. A favourite positivist parable is that of the miser. The
miser in the first place desires gold because it can buy pleasure. Next
he comes to desire it more than the pleasure it can buy. In the same
way, it is said, men can be taught to desire virtue by investing it with
the attractions of the end, to which, strictly speaking it is no more
than the means. But this parable really disproves the very possibility
it is designed to illustrate. It is designed to illustrate the
possibility of our choosing actions that will give pleasure to others,
in contradistinction to actions that will give pleasure to ourselves.
But the miser desires gold for an exactly opposite reason. He desires it
as potential selfishness, not as potential philanthropy. Secondly, we
are to choose the actions in question because they will make us happy.
But the very name we give the miser shows that the analogous choice in
his case makes him miserable. Thirdly, the material miser is an
exceptional character; there is no known means by which it can be made
more common; and with the moral miser the case will be just the same.
Lastly, if such a character be barely producible even in the present
state of the world, much less will it be producible when human
capacities shall have been curtailed by positivism, when the pleasures
that the gold of virtue represents are less intense than at present, and
the value of the coveted coin is indefinitely depreciated.
Much more might be added to the same purpose, but enough has been said
already to make these two points clear:--firstly, that the positive
system, if it is to do any practical work in the world, requires that
the whole human character shall be profoundly altered; and secondly,
that the required alteration is one that may indeed be dreamt about, but
which can never possibly be made. Even were it made, the results would
not be splendid; but no matter how splendid they might be, this is of no
possible moment to us. There are few things on which it is idler to
speculate than the issues of impossible contingencies. And the
positivists would be talking just as much to the purpose as they do now,
were they to tell us how fast we should travel supposing we had wings,
or what deep water we could wade through if we were twenty-four feet
high. These last, indeed, are just the suppositions that they do make.
Between our human nature and the nature they desiderate there is a deep
and fordless river, over which they can throw no bridge, and all their
talk supposes that we shall be able to fly or wade across it, or else
that it will dry up of itself.
_Rusticus expectat dum defluat amnis, at ille
Labitur et labetur, in omne volubilis ævum._
So utterly grotesque and chimerical is this whole positive theory of
progress, that, as an outcome of the present age, it seems little short
of a miracle. Professing to embody what that age considers its special
characteristics, what it really embodies is the most emphatic negation
of these. It professes to rest on experience, and yet no Christian
legend ever contradicted experience more. It professes to be sustained
by proof, and yet the professions of no conjuring quack ever appealed
more exclusively to credulity.
Its appearance, however, will cease to be wonderful, and its real
significance will become more apparent, if we consider the class of
thinkers who have elaborated and popularised it. They have been men and
women, for the most part, who have had the following characteristics in
common. Their early training has been religious;[28] their temperaments
have been naturally grave and earnest; they have had few strong
passions; they have been brought up knowing little of what is commonly
called the world; their intellects have been vigorous and active; and
finally they have rejected in maturity the religion by which all their
thoughts have been coloured. The result has been this. The death of
their religion has left a quantity of moral emotions without an object;
and this disorder of the moral emotions has left their mental energies
without a leader. A new object instantly becomes a necessity. They are
ethical Don Quixotes in want of a Dulcinea; the best they can find is
happiness and the progress of Humanity; and to this their imagination
soon gives the requisite glow. Their strong intellects, their activity,
and their literary culture each supplements the power that it
undoubtedly does give, with a sense of knowing the world that is
altogether fictitious. They imagine that their own narrow lives, their
own feeble temptations, and their own exceptional ambitions represent
the universal elements of human life and character; and they thus expect
that an object which has really been but the creature of an impulse in
themselves, will be the creator of a like impulse in others; and that in
the case of others, it will revolutionise the whole natural character,
whereas it has only been a symbol of it in their own.
Most of our positive moralists, at least in this country, have been and
are people of such excellent character, and such earnest and high
purpose, that there is something painful in having to taunt them with an
ignorance which is not their own fault, and which must make their whole
position ridiculous. The charge, however, is one that it is quite
necessary to make, as we shall never properly estimate their system if
we pass it over. It will be said, probably, that the simplicity as to
worldly matters I attribute to them, so far from telling against them,
is really essential to their character as moral teachers. And to moral
teachers of a certain kind it may be essential. But it is not so to
them. The religious moralist might well instruct the world, though he
knew little of its ways and passions; for the aim of his teaching was to
withdraw men from the world. But the aim of the positive moralist is
precisely opposite; it is to keep men in the world. It is not to teach
men to despise this life, but to adore it. The positions of the two
moralists are in fact the exact converses of each other. For the
divine, earth is an illusion, heaven a reality; for the positivist,
earth is a reality, and heaven an illusion. The former in his retirement
studied intensely the world that he thought real, and he could do this
the better for being not distracted by the other. The positivists
imitate the divine in neglecting what they think is an illusion; but
they do not attempt to imitate him in studying what they think is the
reality. The consequence is, as I have just been pointing out, that the
world they live in and to which alone their system could be applicable,
is a world of their own creation, and its bloodless populations are all
of them _idola specûs_.
If we will but think all this calmly over, and try really to sympathise
with the position of these poor enthusiasts, we shall soon see their
system in its true light, and shall learn at once to realise and to
excuse its fatuity. We shall see that it either has no meaning whatever,
or that its meaning is one that its authors have already repudiated, and
only do not recognise now, because they have so inadequately
re-expressed it. We shall see that their system has no motive power at
all in it, or that its motive power is simply the theistic faith they
rejected, now tied up in a sack and left to flounder instead of walking
upright. We shall see that their system is either nothing, or that it is
a mutilated reproduction of the very thing it professes to be
superseding. Once set it upon its own professed foundations, and the
entire quasi-religious structure, with its visionary hopes, its
impossible enthusiasms--all its elaborate apparatus for enlarging the
single life, and the generation that surrounds it, falls to earth
instantly like a castle of cards. We are left simply each of us with our
own lives, and with the life about us, amplified indeed to a certain
extent by sympathy, but to a certain extent only--an extent whose limits
we are quite familiar with from experience, and which positivism, if it
tends to move them at all, can only narrow, and can by no possibility
extend. We are left with this life, changed only in one way. It will
have nothing added to it, but it will have much taken from it.
Everything will have gone that is at present keenest in it--joys and
miseries as well. In this way positivism is indeed an engine of change,
and may inaugurate if not complete a most momentous kind of progress.
That progress is the gradual de-religionizing of life, the slow
sublimating out of it of its concrete theism--the slow destruction of
its whole moral civilisation. And as this progress continues there will
not only fade out of the human consciousness the things I have before
dwelt on--all capacity for the keener pains and pleasures, but there
will fade out of it also that strange sense which is the union of all
these--the white light woven of all these rays; that is, the vague but
deep sense of some special dignity in ourselves--a sense which we feel
to be our birthright, inalienable except by our own act and deed; a
sense which, at present, in success sobers us, and in failure sustains
us, and which is visible more or less distinctly in our manners, in our
bearing, and even in the very expression of the human countenance: it
is, in other words, the sense that life is worth living, not
accidentally but essentially. And as this sense goes its place will be
taken by one precisely opposite--the sense that life, in so far as it is
worth living at all, is worth living not essentially, but accidentally;
that it depends entirely upon what of its pleasures we can each one of
us realise; that it will vary as a positive quantity, like wealth, and
that it may become also a various quantity, like poverty; and that
behind and beyond these vicissitudes it can have no abiding value.
To realise fully a state of things like this is for us not possible. But
we can, however, understand something of its nature. I conceive those to
be altogether wrong who say that such a state would be one of any wild
license, or anything that we should call very revolting depravity.
Offences, certainly, that we consider the most abominable would
doubtless be committed continually and as matters of course. Such a
feeling as shame about them would be altogether unknown. But the normal
forms of passion would remain, I conceive, the most important; and it
is probable, that though no form of vice would have the least anathema
attached to it, the rage for the sexual pleasures would be far less
fierce than it is in many cases now. The sort of condition to which the
world would be tending would be a condition rather of dulness than what
we, in our parlance, should now call degradation. Indeed the state of
things to which the positive view of life seems to promise us, and which
to some extent it is actually now bringing on us, is exactly what was
predicted long ago, with an accuracy that seems little less than
inspired, at the end of Pope's _Dunciad_.
_In vain, in vain: the all-composing hour
Resistless falls! the muse obeys the power.
She comes! she comes! the sable throne behold
Of night primæval and of chaos old.
Before her, fancy's gilded clouds decay,
And all its varying rainbows die away.
Wit shoots in vain its momentary fires,
The meteor drops, and in a flash expires.
As one by one, at dread Medea's strain,
The sickening stars fade off the ethereal plain;
As Argus' eyes, by Hermes' wand oppress'd
Clos'd one by one to everlasting rest;
Thus, at her felt approach and secret might,
Art after art goes out, and all is night.
See skulking truth to her old cavern fled,
Mountains of casuistry heap'd o'er her head.
Philosophy, that lean'd on heaven before,
Shrinks to her second cause, and is no more._
_Physic of metaphysic begs defence,
And metaphysic calls for aid on sense!
See mystery to mathematics fly.
In vain: they gaze, turn giddy, rave, and die.
Religion, blushing, veils her sacred fires;
And, unawares, morality expires.
Nor public flame, nor private, dares to shine,
Nor human spark is left, nor glimpse divine.
Lo! thy dread empire, Chaos! is restor'd,
Light dies before thy uncreating word,
Thy hand, great Anarch! lets the curtain fall;
And universal darkness buries all._
Dr. Johnson said that these verses were the noblest in English poetry.
Could he have read them in our day, and have realised with what a
pitiful accuracy their prophecy might soon begin to fulfil itself, he
would probably have been too busy with dissatisfaction at the matter of
it to have any time to spare for an artistic approbation of the manner.
FOOTNOTES:
[27] Mr. Frederic Harrison.
[28] The case of J.S. Mill may seem at first sight to be an exception to
this. But it is really not so. Though he was brought up without any
religious teaching, yet the severe and earnest influences of his
childhood would have been impossible except in a religious country. He
was in fact brought up in an atmosphere (if I may borrow with a slight
change a phrase of Professor Huxley's) of Puritanism minus Christianity.
It may be remembered farther that Mill says of himself, '_I am one of
the very few examples of one who has not thrown off religious belief,
but never had it_.'