an unknown justice that will absorb our human justice, or is the
impulse of justice within us, that would seem to resist blind force,
actually no more than a devious emanation from that force, tending to
the same end; and is it only the point of deviation that escapes us?
This is not a question that we can answer, we who ourselves form part
of the mystery we seek to solve; the reply could come only from one who
might be gazing upon us from the heights of another world: one who
should have learned the aim of the universe and the destiny of man. In
the meanwhile, if we say that Nature is right, we say that the instinct
of justice, which she has placed in us, and which therefore also is
nature, is wrong; whereas if we approve this instinct, our approval is
necessarily derived from the exercise of the very faculty that is
called in question.
21
That is true; but it is no less true that the endeavour to sum up the
world in a syllogism is one of the oldest and vainest habits of man.
In the region of the unknown and unknowable, logic-chopping has its
perils; and in the present case all our doubts would seem to arise from
another hazardous syllogism. We tell ourselves--boldly at times, but
more often in a whisper--that we are Nature's children, and bound
therefore in all things to conform to her laws and copy her example.
And since Nature regards justice with indifference, since she has
another aim, which is the sustaining, the renewing, the incessant
development of life, it follows. . . . So far we have not formulated
the conclusion, or, at least, this conclusion has not yet openly dared
to force its way into our morality; but, although its influence has
hitherto only been remotely felt in that familiar sphere which includes
our relations, our friends, and our immediate surroundings, it is
slowly penetrating into the vast and desolate region whither we
relegate all those whom we know not and see not, who for us have no
name. It is already to be found at the root of many of our actions; it
has entered our politics, our industry, our commerce; indeed it affects
almost all we do from the moment we emerge from the narrow circle of
our domestic hearth, the only place for the majority of men where a
little veritable justice is still to be found, a little benevolence, a
little love. It will call itself economic or social law, evolution,
competition, struggle for life; it will masquerade under a thousand
names, forever perpetrating the selfsame wrong. And yet nothing can be
less legitimate than such a conclusion. Apart from the fact that we
might with equal justification reverse the syllogism, and cause it to
declare that there must be a certain justice in Nature, since we, her
children, are just, we need only consider it as it stands to realise
how doubtful and contestable is at least one of its premisses.
We have seen in the preceding chapters that Nature does not appear to
be just from our point of view; but we have absolutely no means of
judging whether she be not just from her own. The fact that she pays
no heed to the morality of our actions does not warrant the inference
that she has no morality, or that ours is the only one there can be.
We are entitled to say that she is indifferent as to whether our
intentions be good or evil, but have not the right to conclude that she
has therefore no morality and no equity; for that would be tantamount
to affirming that there are no more mysteries or secrets, and that we
know all the laws of the universe, its origin and its end. Her mode of
action is different from our own, but, I say it once more, we know not
what her reason may be for acting in this different fashion; and we
have no right to imitate what seems to us iniquitous and cruel, so long
as we have no precise knowledge of the profound and salutary reasons
that may underlie such action. What is the aim of Nature? Whither do
the worlds tend that stretch across eternity? Where does consciousness
begin, and is its only form that which it assumes in ourselves? At
what point do physical laws become moral laws? Is life unintelligent?
Have we sounded all the depths of Nature, and is it only in our
cerebro-spinal system that she becomes mind? And finally, what is
justice when viewed from other heights? Is the intention necessarily
at its centre; and can no regions exist where intentions no longer
shall count? We should have to answer these questions, and many
others, before we could tell whether Nature be just or unjust from the
point of view of masses whose vastness corresponds to her own. She
disposes of a future, a space, of which we can form no conception; and
in these there exists, it may be, a justice proportioned to her
duration, to her extent and aim, even as our own instinct of justice is
proportioned to the duration and narrow circle of our own life. The
wrong that she may for centuries commit she has centuries wherein to
repair; but we, who have only a few days before us, what right have we
to imitate what our eye cannot see, understand, or follow? By what
standard are we to judge her, if we look away from the passing hour?
For instance, considering only the imperceptible speck that we form in
the worlds, and disregarding the immensity that surrounds us, we are
wholly ignorant of all that concerns our possible life beyond the tomb;
and we forget that, in the present state of our knowledge, nothing
authorises us to affirm that there may not be a kind of more or less
conscious, more or less responsible after-life, that shall in no way
depend on the decisions of an external will. He would indeed be rash
who should venture to maintain that nothing survives, either in us or
in others, of the efforts of our good intentions and the acquirements
of our mind. It may be--and serious experiments, though they do not
seem to prove the phenomenon, may still allow us to class it among
scientific possibilities--it may be that a part of our personality, of
our nervous force, may escape dissolution. How vast a future would
then be thrown open to the laws that unite cause to effect, and that
always end by creating justice when they come into contact with the
human soul, and have centuries before them! Let us not forget that
Nature at least is logical, even though we call her unjust; and were we
to resolve on injustice, our difficulty would be that we must also be
logical; and when logic comes into touch with our thoughts and our
feelings, our intentions and passions, what is there that
differentiates it from justice?
22
Let us form no too hasty conclusion; too many points are still
uncertain. Should we seek to imitate what we term the injustice of
Nature, we would run the risk of imitating and fostering only the
injustice that is in ourselves. When we say that Nature is unjust, we
are in effect complaining of her indifference to our own little
virtues, our own little intentions, our own little deeds of heroism;
and it is our vanity, far more than our sense of equity, that considers
itself aggrieved. Our morality is proportioned to our stature and our
restricted destiny; nor have we the right to forsake it because it is
not on the scale of the immensity and infinite destiny of the universe.
And further, should it even be proved that Nature is unjust at all
points, the other question remains intact: whether the command be laid
upon man to follow Nature in her injustice. Here we shall do well to
let our own consciousness speak, rather than listen to a voice so
formidable that we hear not a word it utters, and are not even certain
whether words there be. Reason and instinct tell us that it is right
to follow the counsels of Nature; but they tell us also that we should
not follow those counsels when they clash with another instinct within
us, one that is no less profound: the instinct of the just and the
unjust. And if instincts do indeed draw very near to the truth of
Nature, and must be respected by us in the degree of the force that is
in them, this one is perhaps the strongest of all, for it has struggled
alone against all the others combined, and still persists within us.
Nor is this the hour to reject it. Until other certitudes reach us, it
behoves us, who are men, to continue just in the human way and the
human sphere. We do not see far enough, or clearly enough, to be just
in another sphere. Let us not venture into a kind of abyss, out of
which races and peoples to come may perhaps find a passage, but
whereinto man, in so far as he is man, must not seek to penetrate. The
injustice of Nature ends by becoming justice for the race; she has time
before her, she can wait, her injustice is of her girth. But for us it
is too overwhelming, and our days are too few. Let us be satisfied
that force should reign in the universe, but equity in our heart.
Though the race be irresistibly, and perhaps justly, unjust, though
even the crowd appear possessed of rights denied to the isolated man,
and commit on occasions great, inevitable, and salutary crimes, it is
still the duty of each individual of the race, of every member of the
crowd, to remain just, while ever adding to and sustaining the
consciousness within him. Nor shall we be entitled to abandon this
duty till all the reasons of the great apparent injustice be known to
us; and those that are given us now, preservation of the species,
reproduction and selection of the strongest, ablest, "fittest," are not
sufficient to warrant so frightful a change. Let each one try by all
means to become the strongest, most skilful, the best adapted to the
necessities of the life that he cannot transform; but, so far, the
qualities that shall enable him to conquer, that shall give the fullest
play to his moral power and his intelligence, and shall truly make him
the happiest, most skilful, the strongest, and "fittest"--these
qualities are precisely the ones that are the most human, the most
honourable, and the most just.
23
"Within me there is more," runs the fine device inscribed on the beams
and pediment of an old patrician mansion at Bruges, which every
traveller visits; filling a corner of one of those tender and
melancholy quays, that are as forlorn and lifeless as though they
existed only on canvas. And so too might man exclaim, "Within me there
is more;" every law of morality, every intelligible mystery. There may
be many others, above us and below us; but if these are to remain for
ever unknown, they become for us as though they were not; and should
their existence one day be revealed to us; it can only be because they
already are in us, already are ours. "Within me there is more;" and we
are entitled to add, perhaps, "I have nothing to fear from that which
is in me."
This much at least is certain, that the one active, inhabited region of
the mystery of justice is to be found within ourselves. Other regions
lack consistency; they are probably imaginary, and must inevitably be
deserted and sterile. They may have furnished mankind with illusions
that served some purpose, but not always without doing harm; and though
we may scarcely be entitled to demand that all illusions should be
destroyed, they should at least not be too manifestly opposed to our
conception of the universe. To-day we seek in all things the illusion
of truth. It is not the last, perhaps, or the best, or the only one
possible; but it is the one which we at present regard as the most
honourable and the most necessary. Let us limit ourselves therefore to
recognising the admirable love of justice and truth that exists in the
heart of man. Proceeding thus, yielding admiration only where it is
incontestably due, we shall gradually acquire some knowledge of this
passion, which is the distinguishing note of man; and one thing, most
important of all, we shall most undoubtedly learn--the means whereby we
can purify it, and still further increase it. As we observe its
incessant activity in the depths of our heart, the only temple where it
can truly be active: as we watch it blending with all that we think,
and feel, and do, we shall quickly discover which are the things that
throw light upon it, and which those that plunge it in darkness; which
are the things that guide it, and which those that lead it astray; we
shall learn what nourishes it and what atrophies, what defends and what
attacks.
Is justice no more than the human instinct of preservation and defence?
Is it the purest product of our reason; or rather to be regarded as
composed of a number of those sentimental forces which so often are
right, though directly opposed to our reason--forces that in themselves
are a kind of unconscious, vaster reason, to which our conscious reason
invariably accords its startled approval when it has reached the
heights whence those kindly feelings long had beheld what itself was
unable to see? Is justice dependent on intellect, or rather on
character? Questions, these, that are perhaps not idle if we indeed
would know what steps we must take to invest with all its radiance and
all its power the love of justice that is the central jewel of the
human soul. All men love justice, but not with the same ardent,
fierce, and exclusive love; nor have they all the same scruples, the
same sensitiveness, or the same deep conviction. We meet people of
highly developed intellect in whom the sense of what is just and unjust
is yet infinitely less delicate, less clearly marked, than in others
whose intellect would seem to be mediocre; for here a great part is
played by that little-known, ill-defined side of ourselves that we term
the character. And yet it is difficult to tell how much more or less
unconscious intellect must of necessity go with the character that is
unaffectedly honest. The point before us, however, is to learn how
best to illumine, and increase within us, our desire for justice; and
it is certain that, at the start, our character is less directly
influenced by the desire for justice than is our intellect, the
development of which this desire in a large measure controls; and the
co-operation of the intellect, which recognises and encourages our good
intention, is necessary for this intention to penetrate into, and
mould, our character. That portion of our love of justice, therefore,
which depends on our character, will benefit by its passage through the
intellect; for in proportion as the intellect rises, and acquires
enlightenment, will it succeed in mastering, enlightening, and
transforming our instincts and our feelings.
But let us no longer believe that this love must be sought in a kind of
superhuman, and often inhuman, infinite. None of the grandeur and
beauty that this infinite may possess would fall to its portion; it
would only be incoherent, inactive, and vague. Whereas by seeking it
in ourselves, where it truly is; by observing it there, listening to
it, marking how it profits by every acquirement of our mind, every joy
and sorrow of our heart, we soon shall learn what we best had do to
purify and increase it.
24
Our task within these limits will be sufficiently long and mysterious.
To increase and purify within us the desire for justice: how shall this
thing be done? We have some vague conception of the ideal that we
would approach; but how changeable still, and illusory, is this ideal!
It is lessened by all that is still unknown to us in the universe, by
all that we do not perceive or perceive incompletely, by all that we
question too superficially. It is hedged round by the most insidious
dangers; it falls victim to the strangest oblivion, the most
inconceivable blunders. Of all our ideals it is the one that we should
watch with the greatest care and anxiety, with the most passionate,
pious eagerness and solicitude. What seems irreproachably just to us
at the moment is probably the merest fraction of what would seem just
could we shift our point of view. We need only compare what we were
doing yesterday with what we do to-day; and what we do to-day would
appear full of faults against equity, were it granted to us to rise
still higher, and compare it with what we shall do to-morrow. There
needs but a passing event, a thought that uses, a duty to ourselves
that takes definite form, an unexpected responsibility that is suddenly
made clear, for the whole organisation of our inward justice to totter
and be transformed. Slow as our advance may have been, we still should
find it impossible to begin life over again in the midst of many a
sorrow whereof we were the involuntary cause, many a discouragement to
which we unconsciously gave rise; and yet, when these things came into
being around us, we appeared to be in the right, and did not consider
ourselves unjust. And even so are we convinced to-day of our excellent
intentions, even so do we tell ourselves that we are the cause if no
suffering and no tears, that we stay not a murmur of happiness, shorten
no moment of peace or of love; and it may be that there passes,
unperceived of us, to our right or our left, an illimitable injustice
that spreads over three-fourths of our life.
25
I chanced to-day to take up a copy of the "Arabian Nights," in the very
remarkable translation recently published by Dr. Mardrus; and I
marvelled at the extraordinary picture it gives of the ancient,
long-vanished civilisations. Not in the Odyssey or the Bible, in
Xenophon or Plutarch, could their teaching be more clearly set forth.
There is one story that the Sultana Schahrazade tells--it is one of the
very finest the volume contains--that reveals a life as pure and as
admirable as mankind ever has known; a life replete with beauty,
happiness, and love; spontaneous and vivid, intelligent, nourishing,
and refined; an abundant life that, to a certain point, comes as near
truth as a life well can. It is, in many respects, almost as perfect
in its moral as in its material civilisation. And the pillars on which
this incomparable structure of happiness rests--like pillars of light
supporting the light--are formed of ideas of justice so exquisitely
delicate, counsels of wisdom so deeply penetrating, that we of to-day,
being less fine in grain, less eager and buoyant, have lost the power
to formulate, or to discern, them. And for all that, this abode of
felicity, that harbours a moral life so active and vigorous, so
graciously grave, so noble--this palace, wherein the purest and holiest
wisdom governs the pleasures of rejoicing mankind, is in its entirety
based on so great an injustice, is enclosed by so vast, so profound, so
frightful an iniquity, that the wretchedest man of us all would shrink
in dismay from its glittering, gem-bestrewn threshold. But of this
iniquity they who linger in that marvellous dwelling have not the
remotest suspicion. It would seem that they never draw near to a
window; or that, should one by some chance fly open and reveal to their
sorrowful gaze the misery strewn in the midst of the revels and
feasting, they still would be blind to the crime which was infinitely
more revolting, infinitely more monstrous, than the most appalling
poverty--the crime of the slavery, and the even more terrible
degradation, of their women. For these, however exalted their
position, and at the moment even when they are speaking to the men
round about them of goodness and justice--when they are reminding them
of their most touching and generous duties--these women never are more
than objects of pleasure, to be bought or sold, or given away in a
moment of gratitude, ostentation, or drunkenness, to any barbarous or
hideous master.
26
"They tell us," says the beautiful slave Nozhatan, as, concealed behind
a curtain of silk and of pearls, she speaks to Prince Sharkan and the
wise men of the kingdom; "they tell us that the Khalif Omar set forth
one night, in the company of the venerable Aslam Abou-Zeid, and that he
beheld, far away from his palace, a fire that was burning; and drew
near, as he thought that his presence might perhaps be of service. And
he saw a poor woman who was kindling wood underneath a cauldron; and by
her side were two little wretched children, groaning most piteously.
And Omar said, 'Peace unto thee, O woman! What dost thou here, alone
in the night and the cold?' And she answered, 'Lord, I am making this
water to boil, that my children may drink, who perish of hunger and
cold; but for the misery we have to bear Allah will surely one day ask
reckoning of Omar the Khalif.' And the Khalif, who was in disguise,
was much moved, and he said to her, 'But dost thou think, O woman, that
Omar can know of thy wretchedness, since he does not relieve it?' And
she answered, 'Wherefore then is Omar the Khalif, if he be unaware of
the misery of his people and of each one of his subjects?' Then the
Khalif was silent, and he said to Aslam Abou-Zeid, 'Let us go quickly
from hence.' And he hastened until he had reached the storehouse of
his kitchens, and he entered therein and drew forth a sack of flour
from the midst of the other sacks, and also a jar that was filled to
the brim with sheep-fat, and he said to Abou-Zeid, 'O Abou-Zeid, help
thou me to charge these on my back.' But Abou-Zeid refused, and he
cried, 'Suffer that I carry them on my back, O Commander of the
Faithful.' And Omar said calmly to him, 'Wilt thou also, O Abou-Zeid,
bear the weight of my sins on the day of resurrection?' And Abou-Zeid
was obliged to lay the jar filled with fat, and the sack of flour, on
the Khalif's back. And Omar hastened, thus laden, until he had once
again reached the poor woman; and he took of the flour, and he took of
the fat, and placed these in the cauldron, over the fire; and with his
own hands did he then get ready the food, and he quickened the fire
with his breath; and as he bent over, his beard being long, the smoke
from the wood forced its way through the beard of the Khalif. And at
last, when the food was prepared, Omar offered it unto the woman and
the two little children; and with his breath did he cool the food while
they ate their fill. Then he left them the sack of flour and the jar
of fat; and he went on his way, and said unto Aslam Abou-Zeid, 'O
Abou-Zeid, the light from this fire I have seen to-day has enlightened
me also.'"
27
And it is thus that, a little further on, there speaks to a very wise
king one of five pensive maidens whom this king is invited to purchase:
"Know thou, O king," she says, "that the most beautiful deed one can do
is the deed that is disinterested. And so do they tell us that in
Israel once were two brothers, and that one asked the other, 'Of all
the deeds thou hast done, which was the most wicked?' And his brother
replied, 'This. As I passed a hen-roost one day, I stretched out my
arm and I seized a chicken and strangled it, and then flung it back
into the roost. That is the wickedest deed of my life. And thou, O my
brother, what is thy wickedest action?' And he answered, 'That I
prayed to Allah one day to demand a favour of him. For it is only when
the soul is simply uplifted on high that prayer can be beautiful.'"
And one of her companions, captive and slave like herself, also speaks
to the king: "Learn to know thyself," she says. "Learn to know
thyself! And do thou not act till then. And do thou then only act in
accordance with all thy desires, but having great care always that thou
do not injure thy neighbour."