we conceive a precept that shall be more complete. At most we could
widen somewhat the meaning of the word "neighbour," and raise, render
somewhat more subtle and more elastic, that of the word "injure." And
the book in which these words are found is a monument of horror,
notwithstanding all its flowers and all its wisdom a monument of
horror and blood and tears, of despotism and slavery. And they who
pronounce these words are slaves. A merchant buys them I know not
where, and sells them to some old hag who teaches them, or causes them
to be taught, philosophy, poetry, all Eastern sciences, in order that
one day they may become gifts worthy of a king. And when their
education is finished, and their beauty and wisdom call forth the
admiration of all who approach them, the industrious, prudent old woman
does indeed offer them to a very wise, very just king. And when this
very wise, very just king has taken their virginity from them, and
seeks other loves, he will probably bestow them (I have forgotten the
end of this particular story, but it is the invariable destiny of all
the heroines of these marvellous legends) on his viziers. And these
viziers will give them away in exchange for a vase of perfume or a belt
studded with jewels; or perhaps despatch them to a distant country,
there to conciliate a powerful protector, or a hideous, but dreaded,
rival. And these women, so fully conscious of themselves, whose gaze
can penetrate so deeply into the consciousness of others--these women
who forever are pondering the loftiest, grandest problems of justice,
of the morality of men and of nations--never throw one questioning
glance on their fate, or for an instant suspect the abominable
injustice whereof they are the victims. Nor do those suspect it either
who listen to them, and love and admire them, and understand them. And
we who marvel at this--we who also reflect on justice and virtue, on
pity and love--are we so sure that they who come after us shall not
some day find, in our present social condition, a spectacle no less
disconcerting?
28
It is difficult for us to imagine what the ideal justice will be, for
every thought of ours that tends towards it is clogged by the injustice
wherein we still live. Who shall say what new laws or relations will
stand revealed when the misfortunes and inequalities due to the action
of man shall have been swept away; when, in accordance with the
principles of evolutionary morality, each individual shall "reap the
results, good or bad, of his own nature, and of the consequences that
ensue from that nature"? At present things happen otherwise; and we
may unhesitatingly declare that, as far as the material condition of
the vast bulk of mankind is concerned, the connection between conduct
and consequences--to use Spencer's formula--exists only in the most
ludicrous, arbitrary, and iniquitous fashion. Is there not some
audacity in our imagining that our thoughts can possibly be just when
the body of each one of us is steeped to the neck in injustice? And
from this injustice no man is free, be it to his loss or his gain:
there is not one whose efforts are not disproportionately rewarded,
receiving too much or too little; not one who is not either advantaged
or handicapped. And endeavour as we may to detach our mind from this
inveterate injustice, this lingering trace of the sub-human morality
needful for primitive races, it is idle to think that our thoughts can
be as strenuous, independent, or clear as they might have been had the
last vestige of this injustice disappeared; it is idle to think that
they can achieve the same result. The side of the human mind that can
attain a region loftier than reality is necessarily timid and
hesitating. Human thought is capable of many things; it has, in the
course of time, brought startling improvement to bear upon what seemed
immutable in the species or the race. But even at the moment when it
is pondering the transformation of which it has caught a distant
glimpse, the improvement that it so eagerly desires, even then it is
still thinking, feeling, seeing like the thing that it seeks to alter,
even then it lies captive beneath the yoke. All its efforts
notwithstanding, it is practically that which it would change. For the
mind of man lacks the power to forecast the future; it has been formed
rather to explain, judge, and co-ordinate that which was, to help,
foster, and make known what already exists, but so far cannot be seen;
and when it ventures into what is not yet, it will rarely produce
anything very salutary or very enduring. And the influence of the
social condition in which we exist lies heavy upon it. How can we
frame a satisfactory idea of justice, and ponder it loyally, with the
needful tranquillity, when injustice surrounds us on every side?
Before we can study justice, or speak of it with advantage, it must
become what it is capable of being: a social force, irreproachable and
actual. At present all we can do is to invoke its unconscious, secret,
and, as it were, almost imperceptible efforts. We contemplate it from
the shores of human injustice; never yet has it been granted us to gaze
on the open sea beneath the illimitable, inviolate sky of a conscience
without reproach. If men had at least done all that it was possible
for them to do in their own domain, they would then have the right to
go further, and question elsewhere; and their thoughts would probably
be clearer, were their consciences more at ease.
29
And further, a heavy reproach lies on us and chills our ardour whenever
we try to grow better, to increase our knowledge, our love, our
forgiveness. Though we purify our consciousness and ennoble our
thoughts, though we strive to render life softer and sweeter for those
who are near us, all our efforts halt at our threshold, and have no
influence on what lies outside our door; and the moment we leave our
home we feel that we have done nothing, that there is nothing for us to
do, and that we are taking part, ourselves notwithstanding, in the
great anonymous injustice. Is it not almost ludicrous that we, who
within our four walls strive to be noble and faithful, pitiful, simple
and loyal; we whose consciousness balances the nicest, most delicate
problems, and rejects even the suspicion of a bitter thought, have no
sooner gone into the street and met faces that are unfamiliar, than, at
that very instant, and without the least possibility of our having it
otherwise, all pity, equity, love, should be completely ignored by us?
What dignity, what loyalty, can there be in this double life, so wise
and humane, uplifted and thoughtful, this side the threshold, and
beyond it so callous, so instinctive and pitiless! For it is enough
that we should feel the cold a little less than the labourer who passes
by, that we should be better fed or clad than he, that we should buy
any object that is not strictly indispensable, and we have
unconsciously returned, through a thousand byways, to the ruthless act
of primitive man despoiling his weaker brother. There is no single
privilege we enjoy but close investigation will prove it to be the
result of a perhaps very remote abuse of power, of an unknown violence
or ruse of long ago; and all these we set in motion again as we sit at
our table, stroll idly through the town, or lie at night in a bed that
our own hands have not made. Nay, what is even the leisure that
enables us to improve, to grow more compassionate and gentler, to think
more fraternally of the injustice others endure--what is this, in
truth, but the ripest fruit of the great injustice?
30
These scruples, I know, must not be carried too far: they would either
induce a spirit of useless revolt, possibly disastrous to the species
whose mild and mighty sluggishness we are bound to respect; or they
would lead us back to I know not what mystic, inert renouncement,
directly opposed to the most evident and unchanging desires of life.
Life has laws that we call inevitable; but we are already becoming more
sparing in our use of the word. And here especially do we note the
change that has come over the attitude of the wise and upright man.
Marcus Aurelius--than whom perhaps none ever craved more earnestly for
justice, or possessed a soul more wisely impressionable, more nobly
sensitive--Marcus Aurelius never asked himself what might be happening
outside that admirable little circle of light wherein his virtue and
consciousness, his divine meekness and piety, had gathered those who
were near him, his friends and his servants. Infinite iniquity, he
knew full well, stretched around him on every side; but with this he
had no concern. To him it seemed a thing that must be, a thing
mysterious and sacred as the mighty ocean; the boundless domain of the
gods, of fatality, of laws unknown and superior, irresistible,
irresponsible, and eternal. It did not lessen his courage; on the
contrary, it enhanced his confidence, his concentration, and spurred
him upwards, like the flame that, confined to a narrow area, rises
higher and higher, alone in the night, urged on by the darkness. He
accepted the decree of fate, that allotted slavery to the bulk of
mankind. Sorrowfully but with full conviction, did he submit to the
irrevocable law; wherein he once again gave proof of his piety and his
virtue. He retired into himself, and there, in a kind of sunless,
motionless void, became still more just, still more humane. And in
each succeeding century do we find a similar ardour, self-centred and
solitary, among those who were wise and good. The name of more than
one immovable law might change, but its infinite part remained ever the
same; and each one regarded it with the like resigned and chastened
melancholy. But we of to-day--what course are we to pursue? We know
that iniquity is no longer necessary. We have invaded the region of
the gods, of destiny, and unknown laws. These may still control
disease or accident, perhaps, no less than the tempest, the
lightning-flash, and most of the mysteries of death--we have not yet
penetrated to them--but we are well aware that poverty, wretchedness,
hopeless toil, slavery, famine, are completely outside their domain.
It is we who organise these, we who maintain and distribute them.
These frightful scourges, that have grown so familiar, are wielded by
us alone; and belief in their superhuman origin is becoming rarer and
rarer. The religious, impassable ocean, that excused and protected the
retreat into himself of the sage and the man of good, now only exists
as a vague recollection. To-day Marcus Aurelius could no longer say
with the same serenity: "They go in search of refuges, of rural
cottages, of mountains and the seashore; thou too art wont to cherish
an eager desire for these things. But is this not the act of an
ignorant, unskilled man, seeing that it is granted thee at whatever
hour thou pleasest to retire within thyself? It is not possible for
man to discover a retreat more tranquil, less disturbed by affairs,
than that which he finds in his soul; especially if he have within him
those things the contemplation of which suffices to procure immediate
enjoyment of the perfect calm, which is no other, to my mind, than the
perfect agreement of soul."
Other matters concern us to-day than this agreement of soul; or let us
rather say that what we have to do is to bring into agreement there
that from which the soul of Marcus Aurelius was free--three-fourths of
the sorrows of mankind, in a word--which have become real to us,
intelligible, human, and urgent, and are no longer regarded as the
inexplicable, immutable, intangible decrees of fatality.
31
This does not imply, however, that we should abandon the old sages'
desire for "agreement"; and even though we may not be entitled to
expect such perfect "agreement" as they derived from their pardonable
egoism, we may still look for agreement of a provisional, conditional
kind. And although such "agreement" be not the last word of morality,
it is none the less indispensable that we should begin by being as just
as we possibly can within ourselves and to those round about us, our
neighbours, our friends, and our servants. It is at the moment when we
have become absolutely just to these, and within our own consciousness,
that we realise our great injustice to all the others. The method of
being more practically just towards these last is not yet known to us;
to return to great, heroic renouncements would effect but little, for
these are incapable of unanimous action, and would probably run counter
to the profoundest laws of nature, which rejects renouncement in every
form save that of maternal love.
This practical justice, therefore, remains the secret of the race. Of
such secrets it has many, which it reveals one by one, at such moments
of history as become truly critical; and the solutions it offers to
insuperable difficulties are almost always unexpected, and of strangest
simplicity. The hour approaches, perhaps, when it will speak once
more. Let us hope, without being too sanguine; for we must bear in
mind that humanity has yet by no means emerged from the period of
"sacrificed generations." History has known no others; and it is
possible that, to the end of time, all generations may call themselves
sacrificed. Nevertheless, it cannot be denied that the sacrifices,
however unjust and useless they still may be, are growing ever less
inhuman and less inevitable; and that the laws which govern them are
becoming better and better known, and would seem to draw nearer and
nearer to those that a lofty mind might accept without being pitiless.
32
It must be admitted, however, that a majestic, redoubtable slowness
attends the movements of these "ideas of the species." Centuries had
to pass before it dawned upon primitive men, who fled from each other,
or fought when they met at the mouth of their caverns, that they would
do well to form into groups, and unite in defence against the mighty
enemies who threatened them from without. And besides, these "ideas"
of the species will often be widely different from those that the
wisest man might hold. They would seem to be independent, spontaneous,
often based on facts of which no trace is shown by the human reason of
the epoch that witnessed their birth; and indeed there is no graver or
more disturbing problem before the moralist or sociologist than that of
determining whether all his efforts can hasten by one hour or divert by
one hair's-breadth the decisions of the great anonymous mass which
proceeds, step by step, towards its indiscernible goal.
Long ago--so long indeed that this is one of the first affirmations of
science when, quitting the bowels of the earth, the glaciers and
grottoes, it ceased to call itself geology and palaeontology and became
the history of man--humanity passed through a crisis not wholly unlike
that which now lies ahead of it, or is actually menacing it at the
moment; the difference being only that in those days the dilemma seemed
vastly more tragic and more unsolvable. It may truly be said that
mankind never has known a more perilous or more decisive hour, or a
period when it drew nearer its ruin; and the fact that we exist to-day
would appear to be due to the unexpected expedient which saved the race
at the moment when the scourge that fed on man's very reason, on all
that was best and most irresistible in his instinct of justice and
injustice, was actually on the point of destroying the heroic
equilibrium between the desire to live and the possibility of living.
I refer to the acts of violence, rapine, outrage, murder, which were of
natural occurrence among the earliest human groups. These crimes,
which will probably have been of the most frightful description, must
have very seriously endangered the existence of the race; for vengeance
is the terrible, and, as it were, the epidemic form which the craving
for justice at first assumes. Now this spirit of vengeance, abandoned
to itself and forever multiplying--revenge followed by the revenge of
revenge--would finally have engulfed, if not the whole of mankind, at
least all those of the earliest men who were possessed of energy or
pride. We find, however, that among these barbarous races, as among
most of the existing savage tribes whose habits are known to us, there
comes a time, usually at the period when their weapons are growing too
deadly, when this vengeance suddenly halts before a singular custom,
known as the "blood-tribute," or the "composition for murder;" which
allows the homicide to escape the reprisals of the victim's friends and
relations by payment to them of an indemnity, that, from being
arbitrary at the start, soon becomes strictly graduated.
In the whole history of these infant races, in whom impulse and heroism
were the predominant factors, there is nothing stranger, nothing more
astounding, than this almost universal custom, which for all its
ingenuity would seem almost too long-suffering and mercantile. May we
attribute it to the foresight of the chiefs? We find it in races among
whom authority might almost be said to be entirely lacking. Did it
originate among the old men, the thinkers, the sages, of the primitive
groups? That is not more probable. For underlying this custom there
is a thought which is at the same time higher and lower than could be
the thought of an isolated prophet or genius of those barbarous days.
The sage, the prophet, the genius--above all, the untrained genius--is
rather inclined to carry to extremes the generous and heroic tendencies
of the clan or epoch to which he belongs. He would have recoiled in
disgust from this timid, cunning evasion of a natural and sacred
revenge, from this odious traffic in friendship, fidelity, and love.
Nor is it conceivable, on the other hand, that he should have attained
sufficient loftiness of spirit to be able to let his gaze travel beyond
the noblest and most incontestable duties of the moment, and to behold
only the superior interest of the tribe or the race: that mysterious
desire for life, which the wisest of the wise among us to-day are
generally unable to perceive or to justify until they have wrought
grave and painful conquest over their isolated reason and their heart.
No, it was not the thought of man which found the solution. On the
contrary, it was the unconsciousness of the mass, compelled to act in
self-defence against thoughts too intrinsically, individually human
to satisfy the irreducible exigencies of life on this earth. The
species is extremely patient, extremely long-suffering. It will bear
as long as it can and carry as far as it can the burden which reason,
the desire for improvement, the imagination, the passions, vices,
virtues, and feelings natural to man, may combine to impose upon it.
But the moment the burden becomes too overwhelming, and disaster
threatens, the species will instantaneously, with the utmost
indifference, fling it aside. It is careless as to the means; it will
adopt the one that is nearest, the simplest, most practical, being
doubtless perfectly satisfied that its own idea is the justest and
best. And of ideas it has only one, which is that it wishes to live;
and truly this idea surpasses all the heroism, all the generous dreams,
that may have reposed in the burden which it has discarded.
And indeed, in the history of human reason, the greatest and the
justest thoughts are not always those which attain the loftiest
heights. It happens somewhat with the thoughts of men as with a
fountain; for it is only because the water has been imprisoned and
escapes through a narrow opening that it soars so proudly into the air.
As it issues from this opening and hurls itself towards the sky, it
would seem to despise the great, illimitable, motionless lake that
stretches out far beneath it. And yet, say what one will, it is the
lake that is right. For all its apparent motionlessness, for all its
silence, it is tranquilly accomplishing the immense and normal task of
the most important element of our globe; and the jet of water is merely
a curious incident, which soon returns into the universal scheme. To
us the species is the great, unerring lake; and this even from the
point of view of the superior human reason that it would seem at times
to offend. Its idea is the vastest of all, and contains every other;
it embraces limitless time and space. And does not each day that goes
by reveal more and more clearly to us that the vastest idea, no matter
where it reside, always ends by becoming the most just and most
reasonable, the wisest and the most beautiful?
33
There are times when we ask ourselves whether it might not be well for
humanity that its destinies should be governed by the superior men
among us, the great sages, rather than by the instinct of the species,
that is always so slow and often so cruel.
It is doubtful whether this question could be answered to-day in quite
the same fashion as formerly. It would surely have been highly
dangerous to confide the destinies of the species to Plato or
Aristotle, Marcus Aurelius, Shakespeare, or Montesquieu. At the very
worst moments of the French Revolution the fate of the people was in
the hands of philosophers of none too mean an order. It cannot be
denied, however, that in our time the habits of the thinker have
undergone a great change. He has ceased to be speculative or Utopian;
he is no longer exclusively intuitive. In politics as in literature,
in philosophy as in all the sciences, he displays less imagination, but
his powers as an observer have grown. He inclines rather to
concentrate his attention on the thing that is, to study it and strive
at its organisation, than to precede it, or to endeavour to create what
is not yet, or never shall be. And therefore he may possibly have some
claim to more authoritative utterance; nor would so much danger attend
his more direct intervention. It must be admitted, however, that there
is no greater likelihood now than in former times of such intervention
being permitted him. Nay, there is less, perhaps; for having become
more circumspect and less blinded by narrow convictions, he will be
less audacious, less imperious, and less impatient. And yet it is
possible that, finding himself in natural sympathy with the species
which he is content merely to observe, he will by slow degrees acquire
more and more influence; so that here again, in ultimate analysis, it
is the species that will be right, the species that will decide: for it
will have guided him who observes it, and therefore, in following him
whom it has guided, it will truly only be following its own
unconscious, formless desires, which shall have been expressed by him,
and by him brought into light.
34