species, though distant in space and time, go through an identical
development. Root corresponds with root, stem with stem, flower with
flower, fruit with fruit. Something seems to control all this change. It
is not mere change. It is change with a plan, a purpose, a pattern.
Hence the Greek said that there must be an unchanging type, a fixed
"idea," a spiritual, invisible norm, the "first" and "final" cause of
all this change, to which all concrete, particular plants of the species
are true. Back of the visible tangible plant must be its _Eidos_, its
eternal norm, form, idea, "species." So with everything. An elaboration
of this conclusion gives the real unchanging, fixed eternal world back
of, underpinning, supporting this visible changing, temporal world.
Such a world-view as this was made more valuable and more imperative by
the break-up of the traditional morals and religion of the Greek state.
The search for the _meaning_ of life was precipitated by the
disintegration of social sanctions and of the guarantees of custom. This
search was voiced in the questionings of Socrates. It was made serious
by the menacing individualism of the sophists. The outcome was that
stability, security, confidence were found in the Platonic doctrine.
Back of this ephemeral world is the real world of "ideas," the
unchanging and eternal, upon which we may rest our minds and hearts amid
all this disappointing and desperate flux.
Passing by the Middle Ages, which, _mutatis mutandis_, appropriated this
scheme, we pause over the significance of the Renaissance period. Two
things are uppermost in one's mind and as one thinks of the tumultuous
beginnings of modern life which characterized the fourteenth, fifteenth,
and sixteenth centuries. For one thing, the Renaissance was the
culmination of a long period of absorption in which men had been
gradually working their way back, by intellectual assimilation, towards
the beginnings of the rich tradition which Church and Empire had stored
up. This period of absorption was that five hundred years during which
pagan hordes that had conquered Rome were conquered by the knowledge,
faith, custom, civilization of their victims. From the cultural
standpoint the new nations were hungry, the larder of the old
civilization was replete, and hence authority on one side and absorption
on the other became natural and inevitable. Thus, the philosophical
preconceptions, the cosmological ground-principles, the whole general
attitude toward life's problems of the whole old world were fastened
upon the mind of the young European peoples. _It must not be forgotten_
that all this was _aat_ the _hatural_ achievement of the new European
life and genius, but as foreign to it, as inherited (and at first as
cherished) as grandfatherly ideas are in the mind of a child. If some
day the child must shake off the old conceptions because he hears the
call of life to go forth and achieve his own inner world, it would be
only natural to expect that this young European giant should some day
struggle to cast aside his intellectual inheritance and go forth to
conquer reality for himself, in his own way, with his own weapons.
Well--and this is the second matter--it was just that very thing that
was happening in the early "teens" of our era. The young western world
began to look at life for itself, and a curious, astonished, wild-eyed
look it was. Europe had learned at its mother's knee to say: "The true
world is fixed and final. Reality is static." But looking out now in
wonderment, seeing farther than the ancient world had ever seen, the new
world said: "Ah, no! The world is not static. The world _moves_. Things
change."
Two well-known anecdotes are told of Galileo, which, if not authentic,
are well invented. The one tells how, in the dome at Pisa during
worship, the litany or the sermon boring him, he observed the cathedral
chandelier move by the wind and, studying its vibrations, discovered a
basic law of mechanics. The profound meaning of this anecdote is,
obviously, that God spoke to the man more effectively through the
_self-moving_ pendulum than in the rigid, immobile litany from a rigid,
immobile, hieratic heart; and that, if we do not understand such litany,
and it bores us, we may still devoutly worship by meditating upon what
we can understand.
The other narrative tells how, imprisoned, tortured inwardly by a
compulsory recantation, Galileo gathered himself together and declared:
"_E pu se muove_" ("it moves though"). Galileo never uttered these
words; but the history of the world has uttered them for him! Yes, it
moves _itself_, this earth, and in its motion it knocks everything down
that is in its way. Not the earth alone moves--all that is in the world
is eternal motion!
Man moves--in space, and time, extensively and intensively. Truth moves,
and, moving, demolishes thrones and altars. Morality moves, making
ancient good uncouth. Faith moves, the human heart putting into it the
pulse beat of its life, and there is no way to stop this self moving
Faith.
Those old stories are not true to fact, but they are true to truth.
Galileo _did_ say: "It is my opinion that the earth is very noble and
admirable by reason of so many and so different generations and
alterations which are incessantly made therein." And Descartes joined
him: "The nature of things physical is much more easily conceived when
they are beheld coming gradually into existence, than when they are only
considered as produced at once in a finished and perfect state." Thus
these men--and many others--voiced the changed temper that was coming
over the world,--the transfer of interest from the permanent to the
changing.
Slowly the new attitude was adopted in many departments of knowledge,
but the facts of biology were apparently all against its becoming a
general philosophical movement. The species of plants and animals had
every appearance of being fixed and final, unchangeably stamped once for
all upon the sentient world by the Creator. Not only so, but the
wonderful adaptation of organism to environment, of organ to organism, a
marvelous and delicate complexity of teleological adjustment, seemed to
testify unanswerably to the reality of fixed and final types, to a
static underpinning for all this changing order.
_Origin of_ Species! That was the bomb with which Charles Darwin
destroyed the last stronghold of a static world-view. "Species" is the
scholastics' translation of the Greek _Eidos_, the fixed and final type
or idea which is first and final cause of the changing life of each
creature. Species is a synonym and epitome of fixity and finality; it is
the key-word of a static other-world reality. When Darwin said,
"_Origin_ of Species," he was cramming the conflict of the ancient
wisdom and the modern knowledge into a bursting phrase. When he said of
species what Galileo said of the earth, _e pu se muove_, he emancipated
once for all genetic and experimental ideas as an _organon_ of asking
questions and looking for explanations. He lifted the biological gates
which had kept back the flood of change from inundating the old fields
of fixity.
In sum: The world of thought is slowly, painfully making a change in its
fundamental attitude toward reality such as is not made oftener than
once in several millennia: One general conception of reality was
all-controlling for 2,000 years. Then from Copernicus to Darwin many
factors in a world-subversive change were struggling for recognition.
Conceptions that had reigned in the philosophy of nature and of
knowledge for 2,000 years rested in the superiority of the fixed and
final: they rested on treating change and origin as signs of defect and
unreality. In laying hands upon the sacred ark of absolute permanency;
in treating forms that had been regarded as types of fixity and
perfection as originating and passing away, the "origin of species"
introduced a mode of thinking that in the end was bound to transform the
logic of knowledge, and hence the treatment of all our values and
verities and virtues.
But heaven and earth and species are not all. Shall there be no
Copernicus of the moral heavens, no Galileo of the moral earth, no
Darwin of the moral life?
Hove now Friedrich Nietzsche into sight!
Loyalty has ever been the basic virtue, foundation of life and of law.
Naturally, in the moral world, the objects to which loyalty shall be
related will be objects that are real. But, as we have seen, in the old
world, the real was the unchangeable, the immobile, the finished, the
final, the absolute. To these, therefore, the old loyalty was directed
and dedicated.
Comes now Friedrich Nietzsche, a man in whose name the entire moral
revolution of our time has found its most pregnant expression, and
declares war upon that old loyalty, and does so in the name of a new
culture, a new humanity. To him this loyalty is not only an empty folly;
it is more than that--a crime against life, a weakening of human power.
To him, not stationariness, but _self-changing_, is the life task of
man. He feels himself akin only to him who changes. Every moment of life
has an existence, a right, a content of its own. No present point of
time has a right to lay claim, on its own account, to the next point.
From what we now will, think, feel, no man may presume to require us to
will, think, feel the same way tomorrow. And this preaching of
Nietzsche's on the duty of change as against the old duty to change
never has found more ears to listen and more hearts to believe than any
other preaching of our time. This new preaching is at once most
influential and most dangerous. But its very dangerousness is a most
wholesome and necessary part of the modern moral view of life.
Is loyalty, then, something about which there is nothing to be learned?
Is there no counterfeit and caricature of loyalty? No mask behind which
men hide their indolence and complacency and thoughtlessness? You meet a
man whom you have not seen in long years, and you say to him: "Why, you
have not changed a bit, you are precisely the same as in the old days."
Have you praised him, necessarily? If he left you as a child, looking
and speaking and thinking and acting like a child, ought he not to have
changed? Does a fruit remain what it was as bud and blossom? Life is
development--but development is a constant _self-changing_. Development
is an incessant _dis_-loyalty to what is already there. And if man, just
because he is man, and has a will of his own and can set himself against
the law of development, should sell his life to the force of
inertia--would not that be a crime against life? And yet, even such a
deed men call loyalty! Men say that they want to be faithful to the
heritage of the fathers. Which is often enough simply to say that they
mean to store away their heritage where it will be kept from the world's
light and air that would destroy it--but where, also, it can enter into
no human intercourse, serve no life, fulfil no end of life. This loyalty
of unchangeableness to the heritage puts the talent in a napkin, and
there can be no increase. Men say that they mean to abide faithful to
their faith unto death. Often enough this is only stubbornness and
narrowness. It requires no art and no merit to exercise such
faithfulness. All one needs to do is to close one's eyes and ears to
what lies beyond the bounds of this faith, to forego the questionings
and uncertainties that others must pass through,--and then to send in
one's claim to the reward and gratitude due such loyalty! Today it is
quite the thing at college commencements to spy out the men who are
models of such loyalty and to say: "Look how firm and steadfast and
rock-like they are!" But it cannot be denied that much of this
illustrious loyalty is nothing but natural or voluntary incapacity to
think more widely than others have taught them to think, or, for the
matter of that, permitted them to think. Back of this bragging about
principles which are vainly declared to be unshakable, there is
frequently nothing but an ill-natured obstinacy whose so-called
principles have no other basis than the self-interest to which they are
contributary. It was this loyalty to the finished,--finished cult,
finished belief, finished customs and practices, finished religion and
morality,--that stoned the prophets and crucified Jesus. It was this
kind of loyalty that the mediaeval church imposed upon the "Faithful,"
imprisoning the conscience therein for time and for eternity. Bound by
an oath of loyalty, the priest renounced the world; the monk and nun
under monastic vows dedicated their lives to the church, their services
to "heaven." And hence it marked an epoch when Luther called their
loyalty a sin, and went forth into the world, the home, the vocation,
the business, breaking the vows of priest and cloister. Was such
disloyalty to a sacred obligation loyalty in the sixteenth century, and
shall it be blasphemy in the twentieth? Is it not rather a blasphemy to
preach to men a loyalty which obligates them to forego the use of their
best and noblest powers, which condemns them to spiritual standstill in
the eternal progressive movement of life?
Take some illustrations which will test insight and courage. There is
the constitution of the United States. Shall we assume toward it the
loyalty of fixedness and finality, or the loyalty of change? No man of
veneration and equipoise would favor capricious or precipitate or
superfluous change in so noble a document. But, for all that, the
experience of life made the constitution for life's sake, and the maker
is more than the made. If our national life pass--as pass it has--into
new seas and under new stars, where life needs a change of the
constitution, then the principle which prompted the people to frame the
constitution in the first place requires them to change it to meet the
new needs of our growing and changing national life. The superficial
loyalty to the changeless letter must yield to the profound loyalty to
the ever-changing spirit. The constitution is for the sake of the
people, not the people for the sake of the constitution. They, rather
than it, are sacred.
Similarly, there is the modern problem of marriage, the family, and the
home. Shall ours be the old loyalty that holds the customs of the past
inviolable, marriage indissoluble, the inherited patterns of home and
family unchangeable--the loyalty of fixedness and finishedness; or shall
it be the loyalty of change in all these matters to meet the changing
needs and situations of our burdened and bewildered modernity? Again, no
man of sanctity and sanity and stability of soul can favor any arbitrary
radicalism that is subversive of time-honored institutions _for no
better reason_ than a fleeting fancy, or the passing of the romance of
the honeymoon, or raw self-will, or an unanticipated burden or hardship.
But, for all that, the marriage institution, like all others, is for the
sake of man and not man for the sake of the institution. It was _life_
that originated our domestic ideas and customs and conventions and
codes; and if ever life, in the interest of its well-being and progress,
requires changes suited to new needs and new days, then the "new
loyalty" to life that ever changes must replace the old loyalty to codes
that never change. Codes, too, are for the sake of life, not life for
the sake of codes. No loyalty to the letter that means disloyalty to the
spirit.
And there is the everlasting problem of education. Education in the past
had for its subject matter symbols--reading, writing, arithmetic,
grammar, rhetoric, logic, and the like. The new education has for its
subject matter realities--nature and history. The old education taught
topics or subjects; the new education teaches boys and girls. According
to the old education, knowledge precedes action; according to the new
education, action precedes knowledge. In the old education things were
done to the pupils; in the new education the pupils do things.
The old school teacher was a "star and dwelt apart"--that is, his
aloofness and superiority were indispensable. He taught from above. The
new school teacher is down among the students, a democrat of democrats.
The old school teacher communicated knowledge from without; the new
school teacher develops interest from within. The old education was
atomistic, the new organic. The old education was a donation to the
pupils, the new is an achievement by them. The old education proceeded
on the assumption that man is primarily intellect; the new that he is
primarily will. The old education preceded life and fitted for it; the
new education is a part of life itself.
It is a great change. According to the old theory, there was perfection
to start with, perfection at the top. All that we needed was to pipe it
down through aqueducts so well constructed that nothing that was in
could get out, nothing that was without could get in; and thus--thus
only--would the vain and empty world and life be filled with value and
verity and virtue--donation on the one side, reception on the other.
But the time came when men asked: if there is perfection to start with,
why start? Why paint the lily? And if there is perfection to start with,
how does there come to be imperfection? How can imperfection come from
perfection? Ugly questions, these! Soon the world was turned upside
down.
The new theory holds that matters began very humbly and struggled and
fought their way slowly upward. Ascent from below, not descent from
above. No values or verities or virtues donated, all achieved. Education
an evolution, not a communication.
Some business men favor the old education. Their world is one of
mechanism and authority. They think that they do not need men with
initiative, spontaneity, freedom. That is their prerogative, as it was
of the king of old. They need the mechanical, the automatic, the
impersonal in man. This fits into their world. This is what the old
education stands for. The new education unfolds and matures
personalities. Personalities make good masters but poor servants.
Business men as a class are perhaps our best men. But the very
conditions of business economy and certainty are the impersonal, the
unfree, the mechanical. So business has warped the judgment of some good
men and led them astray on the most fundamental problem in the history
of the race.
Were it not multiplying illustrations, the same point might be urged as
to politics. Does not party loyalty often mean personal servility? As a
matter of fact what is loyalty in one situation, or one age, may be
simple cowardice or abjectness in another.
The upshot is that the modern man has to endure the reproach of not
thinking and feeling and judging and acting as men formerly did--the
reproach of perfidy toward the past, its solutions and its sanctities.
In consequence, it would not be a bad idea for him to cultivate respect
for the past, gratitude for its achievements, appreciation for its
unfinished tasks. Still, he should learn to accept the reproach as
praise,--recognition that, though problems remain the same, solutions
change; though sanctity abide, the objects which are sacred change.
_Evolutionism no longer recognizes any fact as sacred._ Man is inwardly
working on ever farther, ever overcoming the old and conquering ever the
new--this must also be recognized.
It is said that we ought to love the old, the finished. But is love
blind? Does it consist in advocating the point of view of one's friend,
not because it seems true, but just because love requires it? Is loyalty
of love the faculty of adaptation with which we remodel ourselves after
the image of another? Is one disloyal in love if one affirm one's self
against another, or if another affirm himself against one? Surely
fidelity of friendship, even of marriage, ought not to be the grave of
one's own being. Surely loyalty should be the life and not the death of
one's self! Surely we must all see with our own eyes, hear with our own
ears, judge with our own judgments, love with our own hearts, for the
quite plain reason that we have no others with which we can do these
things.
And so, if we take up this great subject in a large way, as Nietzsche
has done, we see that we have all broken with the old loyalty, and that
the consummation of this breach has been life and blessing to us.
We moderns all somehow live in a disloyalty which we have
committed--imputed to us as transgression, viewed by us as our strength
and pride. We have all become unfaithful,--as children to our parents,
as pupils to our teachers, as disciples to our masters. We felt
ourselves bound to them; we loosed ourselves from them. The paths they
walked we have forsaken. In the strange untrodden land whither our
vagrant feet have wandered, we "came to ourselves" in declaring
disobedience to the laws of tradition, in breaking loyalty to the rules
of the schools. It is precisely on this account that once again we have
won spiritual life, a living art and science, a living religion and
morality. We have snapped the fetters fastened upon us in the name of
the old loyalty, and all that is great and fruitful and constructive in
the life of the modern spirit is a monument of the disloyalty which its
creators have built thereto. Nothing is gained any longer by our
screening ourselves behind this word loyalty, and making believe that we
shall not be found out! We owe it to ourselves and we owe it to the
world to confess frankly that we have done with the old loyalty to the
unchangeable and the finished, for that is to be loyal to an unreality,
_since there is no such thing_. Even God, if he be the living God,
cannot be the same yesterday, today, and forever. But we owe it even
more to ourselves and to the world to strive for a clear position in
reference to this question which is so profoundly agitating our entire
moral world today. We may not abandon the field to those who would
demolish the temple of the old goddess simply that they may celebrate
upon its ruins the orgies of their caprice and inconstancy and
characterlessness. If ever there was a doctrine whose right is easily
turned into a wrong, whose truth into an error, whose blessing into a
curse, it is this Nietzschean doctrine of the right and the duty of
ceaseless change, of self-dependence, by which we are redeemed from
slavery to the past. If the old loyalty--loyalty to the past--no longer
holds men, wherewith shall they be held? Shall they be like the
weathervane blown hither and thither by every wind of doctrine, or like
the rudderless ship driven aimless and planless over the high seas by
the midnight hurricane? Better a thousand times be tethered to the old
loyalty than to be doomed to such a life of levity and poiselessness and
flightiness.
But the new loyalty which we seek, without which we go forward into no
future, should it not be more stable and enduring and loyal than the
old? If a moment releases itself from what to it is past, and validates
its right as a self-dependent life to its predecessor, a birth has
transpired in man, and birth means pain. Without such pain, man has
changed his situation, but not himself. A new color has come upon the
motly manifoldness of his life--_he_ has remained the same. Trees do not
have their roots in the air. Weaklings cannot make the real change--it
needs a strength that they do not have. The strength to change
really--only he has this who bears the new loyalty in his own bosom;
loyalty not to his opinion, not to his learning and heritage, but
loyalty to his _growth_, to the great eternal goal of life, to the great
sacred task which he has yet to fulfil in life.