_THIRTEEN_
Are we or are we not simians? It is no use for any man to try to think
anything else out until he has decided first of all where he stands on
that question. It is not only in love affairs: let us lay all that
aside for the moment. It is in ethics, economics, art, education,
philosophy, what-not. If we are fallen angels, we should go this road:
if we are super-apes, that.
"Our problem is not to discover what we ought to do if we were
different, but what we ought to do, being what we are. There is no end
to the beings we can imagine different from ourselves; but they do not
exist," and we cannot be sure they would be better than we if they did.
For, when we imagine them, we must imagine their entire environment;
they would have to be a part of some whole that does not now exist. And
that new whole, that new reality, being merely a figment of our little
minds, "would probably be inferior to the reality that is. For there is
this to be said in favor of reality: that we have nothing to compare it
with. Our fantasies are always incomplete, because they are fantasies.
And reality is complete. We cannot compare their incompleteness with
its completeness."[4]
[4] From an anonymous article entitled "Tolstoy and Russia" in
the _London Times_, Sept. 26, 1918.
Too many moralists begin with a dislike of reality: a dislike of men as
they are. They are free to dislike them--but not at the same time to be
moralists. Their feeling leads them to ignore the obligation which
should rest on all teachers, "to discover the best that man can do, not
to set impossibilities before him and tell him that if he does not
perform them he is damned."
Man is moldable; very; and it is desirable that he should aspire. But
he is apt to be hasty about accepting any and all general ideals
without figuring out whether they are suitable for simian use.
One result of his habit of swallowing whole most of the ideals that
occur to him, is that he has swallowed a number that strongly conflict.
Any ideal whatever strains our digestions if it is hard to assimilate:
but when two at once act on us in different ways, it is unbearable. In
such a case, the poets will prefer the ideal that's idealest: the
hard-headed instinctively choose the one adapted to simians.
Whenever this is argued, extremists spring up on each side. One
extremist will say that being mere simians we cannot transcend much,
and will seem to think that having limitations we should preserve them
forever. The other will declare that we are not merely simians, never
were just plain animals; or, if we were, souls were somehow smuggled in
to us, since which time we have been different. We have all been
perfect at heart since that date, equipped with beautiful spirits,
which only a strange perverse obstinacy leads us to soil.
What this obstinacy is, is the problem that confronts theologians. They
won't think of it as simian-ness; they call it original sin. They
regard it as the voice of some devil, and say good men should not
listen to it. The scientists say it isn't a devil, it is part of our
nature, which should of course be civilized and guided, but should not
be stamped out. (It might mutilate us dangerously to become
under-simianized. Look at Mrs. Humphry Ward and George Washington.
Worthy souls, but no flavor.)
* * * * *
In every field of thought then, two schools appear, that are divided on
this: Must we forever be at heart high-grade simians? Or are we at
heart something else?
For example, in education, we have in the main two great systems. One
depends upon discipline. The other on exciting the interest. The
teacher who does not recognize or allow for our simian nature, keeps
little children at work for long periods at dull and dry tasks. Without
some such discipline, he fears that his boys will lack strength. The
other system believes they will learn more when their interest is
roused; and when their minds, which are mobile by nature, are allowed
to keep moving.
Or in politics: the best government for simians seems to be based on a
parliament: a talk-room, where endless vague thoughts can be expressed.
This is the natural child of those primeval sessions that gave pleasure
to apes. It is neither an ideal nor a rational arrangement of course.
Small executive committees would be better. But not if we are simians.
Or in industry: Why do factory workers produce more in eight hours a
day than in ten? It is absurd. Super-sheep could not do it. But that
is the way men are made. To preach to such beings about the dignity of
labor is futile. The dignity of labor is not a simian conception at
all. True simians hate to have to work steadily: they call it grind
and confinement. They are always ready to pity the toilers who are
condemned to this fate, and to congratulate those who escape it, or
who can do something else. When they see some performer in spangles
risk his life, at a circus, swinging around on trapezes, high up in
the air, and when they are told he must do it daily, do they pity
_him_? No! Super-elephants would say, and quite properly, "What a
horrible life!" But it naturally seems stimulating to simians. Boys
envy the fellow. On the other hand whenever we are told about factory
life, we instinctively shudder to think of enduring such evils. We see
some old workman, filling cans with a whirring machine; and we hear
the humanitarians telling us, indignant and grieving, that he actually
must stand in that nice, warm, dry room every day, safe from storms
and wild beasts, and with nothing to do but fill cans; and at once we
groan: "How deadly! What monotonous toil! Shorten his hours!" His work
would seem blissful to super-spiders,--but to us it's intolerable. The
factory system is meant for other species than ours.
Our monkey-blood is also apparent in our judgments of crime. If a crime
is committed on impulse, we partly forgive it. Why? Because, being
simians, with a weakness for yielding to impulses, we like to excuse
ourselves by feeling not accountable for them. Elephants would have
probably taken an opposite stand. They aren't creatures of impulse, and
would be shocked at crimes due to such causes; their fault is the
opposite one of pondering too long over injuries, and becoming
vindictive in the end, out of all due proportion. If a young
super-elephant were to murder another on impulse, they would consider
him a dangerous character and string him right up. But if he could
prove that he had long thought of doing it, they would tend to forgive
him. "Poor fellow, he brooded," they would say. "That's upsetting to
any one."
As to modesty and decency, if we are simians we have done well,
considering: but if we are something else--fallen angels--we have
indeed fallen far. Not being modest by instinct we invent artificial
ideals, which are doubtless well-meaning but are inherently of course
second-rate, so that even at our best we smell prudish. And as for our
worst, when we as we say let ourselves go, we dirty the life-force
unspeakably, with chuckles and leers. But a race so indecent by nature
as the simians are would naturally have a hard time behaving as though
they were not: and the strain of pretending that their thoughts were
all pretty and sweet, would naturally send them to smutty extremes for
relief. The standards of purity we have adopted are far too strict--for
simians.
_FOURTEEN_
We were speaking a while ago of the fertility with which simians breed.
This is partly due to the constant love interest they take in each
other, but it is also reenforced by their reliance on numbers. That
reliance will be deep, since, to their numbers, they will owe much
success. It will be thus that they will drive out other species, and
garrison the globe. Such a race would naturally come to esteem
fertility. It will seem profane not to.
As time goes on, however, the advantage of numbers will end; and in
their higher stages, large numbers will be a great drawback. The
resources of a planet are limited, at each stage of the arts. Also,
there is only a limited space on a planet. Yet it will come hard to
them to think of ever checking their increase. They will bring more
young into existence than they can either keep well or feed. The earth
will be covered with them everywhere, as far as eye can see. North and
south, east and west, there will always be simians huddling. Their
cities will be far more distressing than cities of vermin,--for vermin
are healthy and calm and successful in life.
Ah, those masses of people--unintelligent, superstitious, uncivilized!
What a dismal drain they will be on the race's strength! Not merely
will they lessen its ultimate chance of achievement; their hardships
will always distress and preoccupy minds,--fine, generous minds,--that
might have done great things if free: that might have done something
constructive at least, for their era, instead of being burned out
attacking mere anodyne-problems.
Nature will do what it can to lessen the strain, providing an
appropriate remedy for their bad behavior in plagues. Many epochs will
pass before the simians will learn or dare to control them--for they
won't think they can, any more than they dare control propagation. They
will reverently call their propagation and plagues "acts of God." When
they get tired of reverence and stop their plagues, it will be too
soon. Their inventiveness will be--as usual--ahead of their wisdom; and
they will unfortunately end the good effects of plagues (as a check)
before they are advanced enough to keep down their numbers themselves.
Meanwhile, when, owing to the pressure of other desires, any group of
primates does happen to become less prolific, they will feel ashamed,
talk of race suicide, and call themselves decadent. And they will often
be right: for though some regulation of the birth-rate is an obvious
good, and its diminution often desirable in any planet's history, yet
among simians it will be apt to come from second-rate motives. Greed,
selfishness or fear-thoughts will be the incentives, the bribes.
Contrivances, rather than continence, will be the method. How
audacious, and how disconcerting to Nature, to baffle her thus! Even
into her shrine they must thrust their bold paws to control her.
Another race viewing them in the garlanded chambers of love, unpacking
their singular devices, might think them grotesque: but the busy little
simians will be blind to such quaint incongruities.
Still, there is a great gift that their excess of passion will bestow
on this race: it will give them romance. It will teach them what little
they ever will learn about love. Other animals have little romance:
there is none in the rut: that seasonal madness that drives them to
mate with perhaps the first comer. But the simians will attain to a
fine discrimination in love, and this will be their path to the only
spiritual heights they can reach. For, in love, their inmost selves
will draw near, in the silence of truth; learning little by little what
the deepest sincerity means, and what clean hearts and minds and what
crystal-clear sight it demands. Such intercommunication of spirit with
spirit is at the beginning of all true understanding. It is the
beginning of silent cosmic wisdom: it may lead to knowing the ways of
that power called God.
_FIFTEEN_
Not content with the whole of a planet and themselves too, to study,
this race's children will also study the heavens. How few kinds of
creatures would ever have felt that impulse, and yet how natural it
will seem to these! How boundless and magnificent is the curiosity of
these tiny beings, who sit and peer out at the night from their small
whirling globe, considering deeply the huge cold seas of space, and
learning with wonderful skill to measure the stars.
In studies so vast, however, they are tested to the core. In these
great journeys the traveler must pay dear for his flaws. For it always
is when you most finely are exerting your strength that every weakness
you have most tells against you.
One weakness of the primates is the character of their self-consciousness.
This useful faculty, that can probe so deep, has one naive defect--it
relies too readily on its own findings. It doesn't suspect enough its
own unconfessed predilections. It assumes that it can be completely
impartial--but isn't. To instance an obvious way in which it will
betray them: beings that are intensely self-conscious and aware of
their selves, will also instinctively feel that their universe is. What
active principle animates the world, they will ask. A great blind
force? It is possible. But they will recoil from admitting any such
possibility. A self-aware purposeful force then? That is better! (More
simian.) "A blind force can't have been the creator of all. It's
unthinkable." Any theory _their_ brains find "unthinkable" cannot be
true.
(This is not to argue that it really is a blind force--or the opposite.
It is merely an instance of how little impartial they are.)
* * * * *
A second typical weakness of this race will come from their fears. They
are not either self-sufficing or gallant enough to travel great roads
without cringing,--clear-eyed, unafraid. They are finely made, but not
nobly made,--in that sense. They will therefore have a too urgent need
of religion. Few primates have the courage to face--alone--the still
inner mysteries: Infinity, Space and Time. They will think it too
terrible, they will feel it would turn them to water, to live through
unearthly moments of vision without creeds or beliefs. So they'll get
beliefs first. Ah, poor creatures! The cart before the horse! Ah, the
blasphemy (pitiful!) of their seeking high spiritual temples, with
god-maps or bibles about them, made below in advance! Think of their
entering into the presence of Truth, declaring so loudly and boldly
they know her already, yet far from willing to stand or fall by her
flames--to rise like a phoenix or die as an honorable cinder!--but
creeping in, clad in their queer blindfolded beliefs, designed to
shield them from her stern, bright tests! Think of Truth sadly--or
merrily--eyeing such worms!
_SIXTEEN_
Imagine you are watching the Bandarlog at play in the forest. As you
behold them and comprehend their natures, now hugely brave and
boastful, now full of dread, the most weakly emotional of any
intelligent species, ever trying to attract the notice of some greater
animal, not happy indeed unless noticed,--is it not plain they are
bound to invent things called gods? Don't think for the moment of
whether there are gods or not; think of how sure these beings would be
to invent them. (Not wait to find them.) Having small self-reliance
they can not bear to face life alone. With no self-sufficingness, they
must have the countenance of others. It is these pressing needs that
will hurry the primates to build, out of each shred of truth they can
possibly twist to their purpose, and out of imaginings that will
impress them because they are vast, deity after deity to prop up their
souls.
What a strange company they will be, these gods, in their day, each of
them an old bearded simian up in the sky, who begins by fishing the
universe out of a void, like a conjurer taking a rabbit out of a hat.
(A hat which, if it resembled a void, wasn't there.) And after creating
enormous suns and spheres, and filling the farthest heavens with vaster
stars, one god will turn back and long for the smell of roast flesh,
another will call desert tribes to "holy" wars, and a third will grieve
about divorce or dancing.
All gods that any groups of simians ever conceive of, from the
woodenest little idol in the forest to the mightiest Spirit, no matter
how much they may differ, will have one trait in common: a readiness to
drop any cosmic affair at short notice, focus their minds on the
far-away pellet called Earth, and become immediately wholly concerned,
aye, engrossed, with any individual worshipper's woes or desires,--a
readiness to notice a fellow when he is going to bed. This will bring
indescribable comfort to simian hearts; and a god that neglects this
duty won't last very long, no matter how competent he may be in other
respects.
But one must reciprocate. For the maker of the Cosmos, as they see him,
wants noticing too; he is fond of the deference and attention that
simians pay him, and naturally he will be angry if it is withheld;--or
if he is not, it will be most magnanimous of him. Hence prayers and
hymns. Hence queer vague attempts at communing with this noble kinsman.
To desire communion with gods is a lofty desire, but hard to attain
through an ignobly definite creed. Dealing with the highest, most
wordless states of being, the simians will attempt to conceive them in
material form. They will have beliefs, for example, as to the
furnishings and occupations in heaven. And why? Why, to help men to
have religious conceptions without themselves being seers,--which in
any true sense of "religious" is an impossible plan.
* * * * *
In their efforts to be concrete they will make their creeds amusingly
simian. Consider the simian amorousness of Jupiter, and the brawls on
Olympus. Again, in the old Jewish Bible, what tempts the first pair?
The Tree of Knowledge, of course. It appealed to the curiosity of their
nature, and who could control _that_!
And Satan in the Bible is distinctly a simian's devil. The snake, it is
known, is the animal monkeys most dread. Hence when men give their
devil a definite form they make him a snake. A race of super-chickens
would have pictured their devil a hawk.
_SEVENTEEN_
What are the handicaps this race will have in building religions? The
greatest is this: they have such small psychic powers. The
over-activity of their minds will choke the birth of such powers, or
dull them. The race will be less in touch with Nature, some day, than
its dogs. It will substitute the compass for its once innate sense of
direction. It will lose its gifts of natural intuition, premonition,
and rest, by encouraging its use of the mind to be cheaply incessant.
This lack of psychic power will cheat them of insight and poise; for
minds that are wandering and active, not receptive and still, can
seldom or never be hushed to a warm inner peace.
One service these restless minds however will do: they eventually will
see through the religions they themselves invented.
But ages will be thrown away in repeating this process.
A simian creed will not be very hard thus to pierce. When forming a
religion, they will be in far too much haste, to wait to apply a strict
test to their holy men's visions. Furthermore they will have so few
visions, that any will awe them; so naturally they will accept any
vision as valid. Then their rapid and fertile inventiveness will come
into play, and spin the wildest creeds from each vision living dust
ever dreamed.
They will next expect everybody to believe whatever a few men have
seen, on the slippery ground that if you simply try believing it, you
will then feel it's true. Such religions are vicarious; their prophets
alone will see God, and the rest will be supposed to be introduced to
him by the prophets. These "believers" will have no white insight at
all of their own.
Now, a second-hand believer who is warmed at one remove--if at all--by
the breath of the spirit, will want to have exact definitions in the
beliefs he accepts. Not having had a vision to go by, he needs plain
commandments. He will always try to crystallize creeds. And that,
plainly, is fatal. For as time goes on, new and remoter aspects of
truth are discovered, which can seldom or never be fitted into creeds
that are changeless.
* * * * *
Over and over again, this will be the process: A spiritual personality
will be born; see new truth; and be killed. His new truth not only will
not fit into too rigid creeds, but whatever false finality is in them
it must contradict. So, the seer will be killed.
His truth being mighty, however, it will kill the creeds too.
There will then be nothing left to believe in--except the dead seer.
For a few generations he may then be understandingly honored. But his
priests will feel that is not enough: he must be honored uncritically:
so uncritically that, whatever his message, it must be deemed the Whole
Truth. Some of his message they themselves will have garbled; and it
was not, at best, final; but still it will be made into a fixed creed
and given his name. Truth will be given his name. All men who
thereafter seek truth must find only his kind, else they won't be his
"followers." (To be his co-seekers won't do.) Priests will always hate
any new seers who seek further for truth. Their feeling will be that
their seer found it, and thus ended all that. Just believe what he
says. The job's over. No more truth need be sought.
It's a comforting thing to believe cosmic search nicely settled.
Thus the mold will be hardened. So new truths, when they come, can but
break it. Then men will feel distraught and disillusioned, and
civilizations will fall.
Thus each cycle will run. So long as men intertwine falsehoods with
every seer's visions, both perish, and every civilization that is built
on them must perish too.
_EIGHTEEN_
If men can ever learn to accept all their truths as not final, and if
they can ever learn to build on something better than dogma, they may
not be found saying, discouragedly, every once in so often, that every
civilization carries in it the seeds of decay. It will carry such seeds
with great certainty, though, when they're put there, by the very race,
too, that will later deplore the results. Why shouldn't creeds totter
when they are jerry-built creeds?
On stars where creeds come late in the life of a race; where they
spring from the riper, not cruder, reactions of spirit; where they grow
out of nobly developed psychic powers that have put their possessors in
tune with cosmic music; and where no cheap hallucinations discredit
their truths; they perhaps run a finer, more beautiful course than the
simians', and open the eyes of the soul to far loftier visions.
_NINETEEN_
It has always been a serious matter for men when a civilization
decayed. But it may at some future day prove far more serious still.
Our hold on the planet is not absolute. Our descendants may lose it.
Germs may do them out of it. A chestnut fungus springs up, defies us,
and kills all our chestnuts. The boll weevil very nearly baffles us.
The fly seems unconquerable. Only a strong civilization, when such foes
are about, can preserve us. And our present efforts to cope with such
beings are fumbling and slow.
We haven't the habit of candidly facing this danger. We read our
biological history but we don't take it in. We blandly assume we were
always "intended" to rule, and that no other outcome could even be
considered by Nature. This is one of the remnants of ignorance certain
religions have left: but it's odd that men who don't believe in Easter
should still believe this. For the facts are of course this is a hard
and precarious world, where every mistake and infirmity must be paid
for in full.
* * * * *
If mankind ever is swept aside as a failure however, what a brilliant
and enterprising failure he at least will have been. I felt this with a
kind of warm suddenness only today, as I finished these dreamings and
drove through the gates of the park. I had been shutting my modern
surroundings out of my thoughts, so completely, and living as it were
in the wild world of ages ago, that when I let myself come back
suddenly to the twentieth century, and stare at the park and the
people, the change was tremendous. All around me were the well-dressed
descendants of primitive animals, whizzing about in bright motors, past
tall, soaring buildings. What gifted, energetic achievers they suddenly
seemed!
I thought of a photograph I had once seen, of a ship being torpedoed.
There it was, the huge, finely made structure, awash in the sea, with
tiny black spots hanging on to its side--crew and passengers. The great
ship, even while sinking, was so mighty, and those atoms so helpless.
Yet, it was those tiny beings that had created that ship. They had
planned it and built it and guided its bulk through the waves. They had
also invented a torpedo that could rend it asunder.
* * * * *
It is possible that our race may be an accident, in a meaningless
universe, living its brief life uncared-for, on this dark, cooling
star: but even so--and all the more--what marvelous creatures we are!
What fairy story, what tale from the Arabian Nights of the jinns, is a
hundredth part as wonderful as this true fairy story of simians! It is
so much more heartening, too, than the tales we invent. A universe
capable of giving birth to many such accidents is--blind or not--a good
world to live in, a promising universe.
And if there are no other such accidents, if we stand alone, if all the
uncountable armies of planets are empty, or peopled by animals only,
with no keys to thought, then we have done something so mighty, what
may it not lead to! What powers may we not develop before the Sun dies!
We once thought we lived on God's footstool: it may be a throne.
This is no world for pessimists. An amoeba on the beach, blind and
helpless, a mere bit of pulp,--that amoeba has grandsons today who read
Kant and play symphonies. Will those grandsons in turn have descendants
who will sail through the void, discover the foci of forces, the means
to control them, and learn how to marshal the planets and grapple with
space? Would it after all be any more startling than our rise from the
slime?
No sensible amoeba would have ever believed for a minute that any of
his most remote children would build and run dynamos. Few sensible men
of today stop to feel, in their hearts, that we live in the very same
world where that miracle happened.
This world, and our racial adventure, are magical still.
_TWENTY_
Yet although for high-spirited marchers the march is sufficient, there
still is that other way of looking at it that we dare not forget. Our
adventure may satisfy _us_: does it satisfy Nature? She is letting us
camp for awhile here among the wrecked graveyards of mightier
dynasties, not one of which met her tests. Their bones are the message
the epochs she murdered have left us: we have learned to decipher their
sickening warning at last.
* * * * *
Yes, and even if we are permitted to have a long reign, and are not
laid away with the failures, are we a success?
We need so much spiritual insight, and we have so little. Our airships
may some day float over the hills of Arcturus, but how will that help
us if we cannot find the soul of the world? Is that soul alive and
loving? or cruel? or callous? or dead?
We have no sure vision. Hopes, guesses, beliefs--that is all.
There are sounds we are deaf to, there are strange sights invisible to
us. There are whole realms of splendor, it may be, of which we are
heedless; and which we are as blind to as ants to the call of the sea.
Life is enormously flexible--look at all that we've done to our
dogs,--but we carry our hairy past with us wherever we go. The wise St.
Bernards and the selfish toy lap-dogs are brothers, and some things are
possible for them and others are not. So with us. There are definite
limits to simian civilizations, due in part to some primitive traits
that help keep us alive, and in part to the mere fact that every being
has to be something, and when one is a simian one is not also
everything else. Our main-springs are fixed, and our principal traits
are deep-rooted. We cannot now re-live the ages whose imprint we bear.
We have but to look back on our past to have hope in our future:
but--it will be only _our_ future, not some other race's. We shall
win our own triumphs, yet know that they would have been different, had
we cared above all for creativeness, beauty, or love.
* * * * *
So we run about, busy and active, marooned on this star, always
violently struggling, yet with no clearly seen goal before us. Men,
animals, insects--what tribe of us asks any object, except to keep
trying to satisfy its own master appetite? If the ants were earth's
lords they would make no more use of their lordship than to learn and
enjoy every possible method of toiling. Cats would spend their span of
life, say, trying new kinds of guile. And we, who crave so much to
know, crave so little but knowing. Some of us wish to know Nature most;
those are the scientists. Others, the saints and philosophers, wish to
know God. Both are alike in their hearts, yes, in spite of their
quarrels. Both seek to assuage, to no end, the old simian thirst.
If we wanted to _be_ Gods--but ah, can we grasp that ambition?