under the name of heredity. Every one of us bears upon him obvious marks
of his parentage, perhaps of remoter relationships. More particularly,
the sum of tendencies to act in a certain way, which we call
"character," is often to be traced through a long series of progenitors
and collaterals. So we may justly say that this "character"--this moral
and intellectual essence of a man--does veritably pass over from one
fleshy tabernacle to another, and does really transmigrate from
generation to generation. In the new-born infant the character of the
stock lies latent, and the Ego is little more than a bundle of
potentialities. But, very early, these become actualities; from
childhood to age they manifest themselves in dullness or brightness,
weakness or strength, viciousness or uprightness; and with each feature
modified by confluence with another character, if by nothing else, the
character passes on to its incarnation in new bodies.
CCXLV
Only one rule of conduct could be based upon the remarkable theory of
which I have endeavoured to give a reasoned outline. It was folly to
continue to exist when an overplus of pain was certain; and the
probabilities in favour of the increase of misery with the prolongation
of existence, were so overwhelming. Slaying the body only made matters
worse; there was nothing for it but to slay the soul by the voluntary
arrest of all its activities. Property, social ties, family affections,
common companionship, must be abandoned; the most natural appetites,
even that for food, must be suppressed, or at least minimized; until all
that remained of a man was the impassive, extenuated, mendicant monk,
self-hypnotised into cataleptic trances, which the deluded mystic took
for foretastes of the final union with Brahma.
CCXLVI
If the cosmos is the effect of an immanent, omnipotent, and infinitely
beneficent cause, the existence in it of real evil, still less of
necessarily inherent evil, is plainly inadmissible. Yet the universal
experience of mankind testified then, as now, that, whether we look
within us or without us, evil stares us in the face on all sides; that
if anything is real, pain and sorrow and wrong are realities.
It would be a new thing in history if _a priori_ philosophers were
daunted by the factious opposition of experience; and the Stoics were
the last men to allow themselves to be beaten by mere facts. "Give me a
doctrine and I will find the reasons for it," said Chrysippus. So they
perfected, if they did not invent, that ingenious and plausible form of
pleading, the Theodicy; for the purpose of showing firstly, that there
is no such thing as evil; secondly, that if there is, it is the
necessary correlate of good; and, moreover, that it is either due to our
own fault, or inflicted for our benefit.
CCXLVII
Unfortunately, it is much easier to shut one's eyes to good than to
evil. Pain and sorrow knock at our doors more loudly than pleasure and
happiness; and the prints of their heavy footsteps are less easily
effaced.
CCXLVIII
In the language of the Stoa, "Nature" was a word of many meanings. There
was the "Nature" of the cosmos, and the "Nature" of man. In the latter,
the animal "nature," which man shares with a moiety of the living part
of the cosmos, was distinguished from a higher "nature." Even in this
higher nature there were grades of rank. The logical faculty is an
instrument which may be turned to account for any purpose. The passions
and the emotions are so closely tied to the lower nature that they may
be considered to be pathological, rather than normal, phenomena. The one
supreme, hegemonic, faculty, which constitutes the essential "nature" of
man, is most nearly represented by that which, in the language of a
later philosophy, has been called the pure reason. It is this "nature"
which holds up the ideal of the supreme good and demands absolute
submission of the will to its behests. It is this which commands all men
to love one another, to return good for evil, to regard one another as
fellow-citizens of one great state. Indeed, seeing that the progress
towards perfection of a civilised state, or polity, depends on the
obedience of its members to these commands, the Stoics sometimes termed
the pure reason the "political" nature. Unfortunately, the sense of the
adjective has undergone so much modification that the application of it
to that which commands the sacrifice of self to the common good would
now sound almost grotesque.
CCXLIX
The majority of us, I apprehend, profess neither pessimism nor optimism.
We hold that the world is neither so good, nor so bad, as it conceivably
might be; and, as most of us have reason, now and again, to discover
that it can be. Those who have failed to experience the joys that make
life worth living are, probably, in as small a minority as those who
have never known the griefs that rob existence of its savour and turn
its richest fruits into mere dust and ashes.
CCL
There is another fallacy which appears to me to pervade the so-called
"ethics of evolution." It is the notion that because, on the whole,
animals and plants have advanced in perfection of organization by means
of the struggle for existence and the consequent "survival of the
fittest"; therefore men in society, men as ethical beings, must look to
the same process to help them towards perfection. I suspect that this
fallacy has arisen out of the unfortunate ambiguity of the phrase
"survival of the fittest." "Fittest" has a connotation of "best"; and
about "best" there hangs a moral flavour. In cosmic nature, however,
what is "fittest" depends upon the conditions. Long since, I ventured to
point out that if our hemisphere were to cool again, the survival of the
fittest might bring about, in the vegetable kingdom, a population of
more and more stunted and humbler and humbler organisms, until the
"fittest" that survived might be nothing but lichens, diatoms, and such
microscopic organisms as those which give red snow its colour; while, if
it became hotter, the pleasant valleys of the Thames and Isis might be
uninhabitable by any animated beings save those that flourish in a
tropical jungle. They, as the fittest, the best adapted to the changed
conditions, would survive.
CCLI
The practice of that which is ethically best--what we call goodness or
virtue--involves a course of conduct which, in all respects, is opposed
to that which leads to success in the cosmic struggle for existence. In
place of ruthless self-assertion it demands self-restraint; in place of
thrusting aside, or treading down, all competitors, it requires that the
individual shall not merely respect, but shall help his fellows; its
influence is directed, not so much to the survival of the fittest, as to
the fitting of as many as possible to survive. It repudiates the
gladiatorial theory of existence. It demands that each man who enters
into the enjoyment of the advantages of a polity shall be mindful of his
debt to those who have laboriously constructed it; and shall take heed
that no act of his weakens the fabric in which he has been permitted to
live. Laws and moral precepts are directed to the end of curbing the
cosmic process and reminding the individual of his duty to the
community, to the protection and influence of which he owes, if not
existence itself, at least the life of something better than a brutal
savage.
CCLII
The theory of evolution encourages no millennial anticipations. If, for
millions of years, our globe has taken the upward road, yet, some time,
the summit will be reached and the downward route will be commenced. The
most daring imagination will hardly venture upon the suggestion that the
power and the intelligence of man can ever arrest the procession of the
great year.
Moreover, the cosmic nature born with us and, to a large extent,
necessary for our maintenance, is the outcome of millions of years of
severe training, and it would be folly to imagine that a few centuries
will suffice to subdue its masterfulness to purely ethical ends. Ethical
nature may count upon having to reckon with a tenacious and powerful
enemy as long as the world lasts. But, on the other hand, I see no limit
to the extent to which intelligence and will, guided by sound principles
of investigation, and organized in common effort, may modify the
conditions of existence, for a period longer than that now covered by
history. And much may be done to change the nature of man himself. The
intelligence which has converted the brother of the wolf into the
faithful guardian of the flock ought to be able to do something towards
curbing the instincts of savagery in civilized men.
But if we may permit ourselves a larger hope of abatement of the
essential evil of the world than was possible to those who, in the
infancy of exact knowledge, faced the problem of existence more than a
score of centuries ago, I deem it an essential condition of the
realization of that hope that we should cast aside the notion that the
escape from pain and sorrow is the proper object of life.
CCLIII
We have long since emerged from the heroic childhood of our race, when
good and evil could be met with the same "frolic welcome"; the attempts
to escape from evil, whether Indian or Greek, have ended in flight from
the battle-field; it remains to us to throw aside the youthful
over-confidence and the no less youthful discouragement of nonage. We
are grown men, and must play the man
strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield,
cherishing the good that falls in our way, and bearing the evil, in and
around us, with stout hearts set on diminishing it. So far, we all may
strive in one faith towards one hope:
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down,
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
... but something ere the end,
Some work of noble note may yet be done.
CCLIV
I do not suppose that I am exceptionally endowed because I have all my
life enjoyed a keen perception of the beauty offered us by nature and by
art. Now physical science may and probably will, some day, enable our
posterity to set forth the exact physical concomitants and conditions of
the strange rapture of beauty. But if ever that day arrives, the rapture
will remain, just as it is now, outside and beyond the physical world;
and, even in the mental world, something superadded to mere sensation. I
do not wish to crow unduly over my humble cousin the orang, but in the
aesthetic province, as in that of the intellect, I am afraid he is
nowhere. I doubt not he would detect a fruit amidst a wilderness of
leaves where I could see nothing; but I am tolerably confident that he
has never been awestruck, as I have been, by the dim religious gloom, as
of a temple devoted to the earthgods, of the tropical forests which he
inhabits. Yet I doubt not that our poor long-armed and short-legged
friend, as he sits meditatively munching his durian fruit, has something
behind that sad Socratic face of his which is utterly "beyond the bounds
of physical science." Physical science may know all about his clutching
the fruit and munching it and digesting it, and how the physical
titillation of his palate is transmitted to some microscopic cells of
the gray matter of his brain. But the feelings of sweetness and of
satisfaction which, for a moment, hang out their signal lights in his
melancholy eyes, are as utterly outside the bounds of physics as is the
"fine frenzy" of a human rhapsodist.
CCLV
When I was a mere boy, with a perverse tendency to think when I ought to
have been playing, my mind was greatly exercised by this formidable
problem, What would become of things if they lost their qualities? As
the qualities had no objective existence, and the thing without
qualities was nothing, the solid world seemed whittled away--to my great
horror. As I grew older, and learned to use the terms "matter" and
"force," the boyish problem was revived, _mutato nomine_. On the one
hand, the notion of matter without force seemed to resolve the world
into a set of geometrical ghosts, too dead even to jabber. On the other
hand, Boscovich's hypothesis, by which matter was resolved into centres
of force, was very attractive. But when one tried to think it out, what
in the world became of force considered as an objective entity? Force,
even the most materialistic of philosophers will agree with the most
idealistic, is nothing but a name for the cause of motion. And if, with
Boscovich, I resolved things into centres of force, then matter vanished
altogether and left immaterial entities in its place. One might as well
frankly accept Idealism and have done with it.
CCLVI
Tolerably early in life I discovered that one of the unpardonable sins,
in the eyes of most people, is for a man to presume to go about
unlabelled. The world regards such a person as the police do an
unmuzzled dog, not under proper control. I could find no label that
would suit me, so, in my desire to range myself and be respectable, I
invented one; and, as the chief thing I was sure of was that I did not
know a great many things that the-ists and the-ites about me professed
to be familiar with, I called myself an Agnostic. Surely no denomination
could be more modest or more appropriate; and I cannot imagine why I
should be every now and then haled out of my refuge and declared
sometimes to be a Materialist, sometimes an Atheist, sometimes a
Positivist, and sometimes, alas and alack, a cowardly or reactionary
Obscurantist.
CCLVII
Lastly, with respect to the old riddle of the freedom of the will. In
the only sense in which the word freedom is intelligible to me--that is
to say, the absence of any restraint upon doing what one likes within
certain limits--physical science certainly gives no more ground for
doubting it than the common sense of mankind does. And if physical
science, in strengthening our belief in the universality of causation
and abolishing chance as an absurdity, leads to the conclusion of
determinism, it does no more than follow the track of consistent and
logical thinkers in philosophy and in theology, before it existed or was
thought of. Whoever accepts the universality of the law of causation as
a dogma of philosophy, denies the existence of uncaused phenomena. And
the essence of that which is improperly called the freewill doctrine is
that occasionally, at any rate, human volition is self-caused, that is
to say, not caused at all; for to cause oneself one must have anteceded
oneself--which is, to say the least of it, difficult to imagine.
CCLVIII
If the diseases of society consist in the weakness of its faith in the
existence of the God of the theologians, in a future state, and in
uncaused volitions, the indication, as the doctors say, is to suppress
Theology and Philosophy, whose bickerings about things of which they
know nothing have been the prime cause and continual sustenance of that
evil scepticism which is the Nemesis of meddling with the unknowable.
Cinderella is modestly conscious of her ignorance of these high matters.
She lights the fire, sweeps the house, and provides the dinner; and is
rewarded by being told that she is a base creature, devoted to low and
material interests. But in her garret she has fairy visions out of the
ken of the pair of shrews who are quarrelling downstairs. She sees the
order which pervades the seeming disorder of the world; the great drama
of evolution, with its full share of pity and terror, but also with
abundant goodness and beauty, unrolls itself before her eyes; and she
learns, in her heart of hearts, the lesson, that the foundation of
morality is to have done, once and for all, with lying; to give up
pretending to believe that for which there is no evidence, and repeating
unintelligible propositions about things beyond the possibilities of
knowledge.
She knows that the safety of morality lies neither in the adoption of
this or that philosophical speculation, or this or that theological
creed, but in a real and living belief in that fixed order of nature
which sends social disorganisation upon the track of immorality, as
surely as it sends physical disease after physical trespasses. And of
that firm and lively faith it is her high mission to be the priestess.
CCLIX
The first act of a new-born child is to draw a deep breath. In fact, it
will never draw a deeper, inasmuch as the passages and chambers of the
lungs, once distended with air, do not empty themselves again; it is
only a fraction of their contents which passes in and out with the flow
and the ebb of the respiratory tide. Mechanically, this act of drawing
breath, or inspiration, is of the same nature as that by which the
handles of a bellows are separated, in order to fill the bellows with
air; and, in like manner, it involves that expenditure of energy which
we call exertion, or work, or labour. It is, therefore, no mere metaphor
to say that man is destined to a life of toil: the work of respiration
which began with his first breath ends only with his last; nor does one
born in the purple get off with a lighter task than the child who first
sees light under a hedge.
How is it that the new-born infant is enabled to perform this first
instalment of the sentence of life-long labour which no man may escape?
Whatever else a child may be, in respect of this particular question, it
is a complicated piece of mechanism, built up out of materials supplied
by its mother; and in the course of such building-up, provided with a
set of motors--the muscles. Each of these muscles contains a stock of
substance capable of yielding energy under certain conditions, one of
which is a change of state in the nerve-fibres connected with it. The
powder in a loaded gun is such another stock of substance capable of
yielding energy in consequence of a change of state in the mechanism of
the lock, which intervenes between the finger of the man who pulls the
trigger and the cartridge. If that change is brought about, the
potential energy of the powder passes suddenly into actual energy, and
does the work of propelling the bullet. The powder, therefore, may be
appropriately called _work-stuff_, not only because it is stuff which is
easily made to yield work in the physical sense, but because a good deal
of work in the economical sense has contributed to its production.
Labour was necessary to collect, transport, and purify the raw sulphur
and saltpetre; to cut wood and convert it into powdered charcoal; to mix
these ingredients in the right proportions; to give the mixture the
proper grain, and so on. The powder once formed part of the stock, or
capital, of a powder-maker: and it is not only certain natural bodies
which are collected and stored in the gunpowder, but the labour bestowed
on the operations mentioned may be figuratively said to be incorporated
in it.
CCLX
In principle, the work-stuff stored in the muscles of the new-born child
is comparable to that stored in the gun-barrel. The infant is launched
into altogether new surroundings; and these operate through the
mechanism of the nervous machinery, with the result that the potential
energy of some of the work-stuff in the muscles which bring about
inspiration is suddenly converted into actual energy; and this,
operating through the mechanism of the respiratory apparatus, gives rise
to an act of inspiration. As the bullet is propelled by the "going off"
of the powder, as it might be said that the ribs are raised and the
midriff depressed by the "going off" of certain portions of muscular
work-stuff. This work-stuff is part of a stock or capital of that
commodity stored up in the child's organism before birth, at the expense
of the mother; and the mother has made good her expenditure by drawing
upon the capital of food-stuffs which furnished her daily maintenance.
Under these circumstances, it does not appear to me to be open to doubt
that the primary act of outward labour in the series which necessarily
accompany the life of man is dependent upon the pre-existence of a stock
of material which is not only of use to him, but which is disposed in
such a manner as to be utilisable with facility. And I further imagine
that the propriety of the application of the term "capital" to this
stock of useful substance cannot be justly called in question; inasmuch
as it is easy to prove that the essential constituents of the work-stuff
accumulated in the child's muscles have merely been transferred from the
store of food-stuffs, which everybody admits to be capital, by means of
the maternal organism to that of the child, in which they are again
deposited to await use. Every subsequent act of labour, in like manner,
involves an equivalent consumption of the child's store of
work-stuff--its vital capital; and one of the main objects of the
process of breathing is to get rid of some of the effects of that
consumption. It follows, then, that, even if no other than the
respiratory work were going on in the organism, the capital of
work-stuff, which the child brought with it into the world, must sooner
or later be used up, and the movements of breathing must come to an end;
just as the see-saw of the piston of a steam-engine stops when the coal
in the fireplace has burnt away.
Milk, however, is a stock of materials which essentially consists of
savings from the food-stuffs supplied to the mother. And these savings
are in such a physical and chemical condition that the organism of the
child can easily convert them into work-stuff. That is to say, by
borrowing directly from the vital capital of the mother, indirectly from
the store in the natural bodies accessible to her, it can make good the
loss of its own. The operation of borrowing, however, involves further
work; that is, the labour of sucking, which is a mechanical operation of
much the same nature as breathing. The child thus pays for the capital
it borrows in labour; but as the value in work-stuff of the milk
obtained is very far greater than the value of that labour, estimated by
the consumption of work-stuff it involves, the operation yields a large
profit to the infant. The overplus of food-stuff suffices to increase
the child's capital of work-stuff; and to supply not only the materials
for the enlargement of the "buildings and machinery" which is
expressed by the child's growth, but also the energy required to put
all these materials together, and to carry them to their proper places.
Thus, throughout the years of infancy, and so long thereafter as the
youth or man is not thrown upon his own resources, he lives by consuming
the vital capital provided by others.
CCLXI
Let us now suppose the child come to man's estate in the condition of a
wandering savage, dependent for his food upon what he can pick up or
catch, after the fashion of the Australian aborigines. It is plain that
the place of mother, as the supplier of vital capital, is now taken by
the fruits, seeds, and roots of plants and by various kinds of
animals.... The savage, like the child, borrows the capital he needs,
and, at any rate, intentionally, does nothing towards repayment; it
would plainly be an improper use of the word "produce" to say that his
labour in hunting for the roots, or the fruits, or the eggs, or the
grubs and snakes, which he finds and eats, "produces" or contributes to
"produce" them. The same thing is true of more advanced tribes, who are
still merely hunters, such as the Esquimaux. They may expend more labour
and skill; but it is spent in destruction.
CCLXII
When we find set forth as an "absolute" truth the statement that the
essential factors in economic production are land, capital and
labour--when this is offered as an axiom whence all sorts of other
important truths may be deduced--it is needful to remember that the
assertion is true only with a qualification. Undoubtedly "vital
capital" is essential; for, as we have seen, no human work can be done
unless it exists, not even that internal work of the body which is
necessary to passive life. But, with respect to labour (that is, human
labour) I hope to have left no doubt on the reader's mind that, in
regard to production, the importance of human labour may be so small as
to be almost a vanishing quantity.
CCLXIII
The one thing needful for economic production is the green plant, as the
sole producer of vital capital from natural inorganic bodies. Men might
exist without labour (in the ordinary sense) and without land; without
plants they must inevitably perish.
CCLXIV