Middle Ages; but it has not. The Middle Ages have blown over; but
Christianity seems, in some ways, never to have been understood before
the nineteenth century. It is upon us, sevenfold strong. Its mysteries
supersede the other mysteries; its rod threatens to eat up the rods
of the other magicians. These tigers of Christian criticism within
us attack the classics. The half-formed objections to Plato which I
have mentioned are seriously reinforced by the Hebrew dispensation,
which somehow reduces the philosophic speculations of Greece to the
status of favors at a cotillion. It is senseless to contrast Christ
with Socrates; it is unfair and even absurd to review Greek life
and thought by the light of Hebrew life and thought. But to do so is
inevitable. We are three parts Hebrew in our nature and we see the
Mediterranean culture with Hebrew eyes. The attempts of such persons
as Swinburne and Pater to writhe themselves free from the Hebrew
domination always betray that profound seriousness which comes from
the Jew. These men make a break for freedom--they will be joyous,
antique, and irresponsible. Alas, they are sadder than the Puritans and
shallower than Columbine.
It has become forever and perpetually impossible for any one to treat
Greek thought on a Greek basis: the basis is gone. As I wrote the
words a page or two back about “Comedy having been placed by Plato in
the heaven of man’s highest endeavor,” I thought to myself, “Perhaps
I ought to say highest _artistic_ endeavor.” There spoke the Jew
monitor which dogs our classical studies, sniffing at them and hinting
that they are trivial. In the eye of that monitor there is no room for
the comic in the whole universe: there is no such thing as the comic.
The comic is something outside of the Jewish dispensation, a kind of
irreducible unreason, a skeptical or satanic element.
One would conclude from their records that the Jews were people who
never laughed except ironically. To be sure, Michal laughed at
David’s dancing, and Sara laughed at the idea of having a child, and
various people in the New Testament laughed others “to scorn.” But
nobody seems to have laughed heartily and innocently. One gets the
impression of a race devoid of humor. This is partly because it is not
the province of religious writings to record humor; but it is mainly
because Jewish thought condemns humor. Wherever humor arises in a
Christian civilization--as in the popular Gothic humor--it is a local
race-element, an unsubdued bit of something foreign to Judah. Where the
Bible triumphs utterly, as in Dante and Calvin, there is no humor.
And yet the comic survives in us. It eludes the criticism of
Christianity as the sunlight eludes the net. Yes, not only our own
laughter survives, but the old classic comedy still seems comic--and
more truly comic than the old lyric poetry seems poetic or the drama
dramatic. Ancient poesy must always be humored and nursed a little; but
when the comic strikes home, it is our own comic; no allowances need be
made for it.
There is a kind of laughter that makes the whole universe throb. It
has in it the immediate flash of the power of God. We can no more
understand it than we can understand other religious truth. It reminds
us that we are not wholly Jew. There is light in the world that does
not come from Israel; nevertheless, that this is a part of the same
light that shines through Israel we surely know.
I have not tried to analyze laughter; but only to show the mystery
that surrounds its origin. Now a certain mystery surrounds all human
expression. The profoundest truths can only be expressed through the
mystery of paradox--as philosophers, poets, prophets, and moralists
have agreed since the dawn of time. This saying sounds hard; but its
meaning is easy. The meaning is that Truth can never be exactly stated;
every statement is a misfit. But truth can be alluded to. A paradox
says frankly, “What I say here is not a statement of the truth, but
is a mere allusion to the truth.” The comic vehicle does the same.
It pretends only to allude to the truth, and by this method makes a
directer appeal to experience than any attempted statement of truth can
make.
There is, no doubt, some reason at the back of this strange fact,
that our most expressive language is a mere series of hints and
gestures--that we can only hope, whether by word or chisel, to give, as
it were, a side reference to truth. To fathom this reason would be to
understand the nature of life and mind.
I have often thought that the fact that life does not originate in
us, but is a thing supplied to us from moment to moment--as the power
of the electric current is supplied to the light--accounts for the
paradoxical nature of our minds and souls. It is a commonplace that
the poet is inspired--that Orpheus was carried away by the god. So
also it is a commonplace that the religious person is absorbed in
the will of God--as St. Paul said, his own strength was due to his
weakness. So also it is a commonplace of modern scientific psychology
that unconsciousness accompanies high intellectual activity. Sir Isaac
Newton solved his problems by the art he had of putting them off his
mind--of committing them to the unconscious.
All these are but different aspects of the same truth, and we must
regard consciousness as resistance to the current of life. If this be
true, it is clear that any wilful attempt to tell the truth must _pro
tanto_ defeat itself, for it is only by the surrender of our will
that truth becomes effective. This idea, being a universal idea, is
illustrated by everything; and the less you try to understand it, the
more fully will you understand it. In fact one great difficulty that a
child or a man has in learning anything, comes from his trying too hard
to understand.
Once imagine that our understanding of a thing comes from our ceasing
to prevent ourselves from understanding it, and we have the problem
in its true form. Accept once for all that all will is illusion, and
that the expressive power is something that acts most fully when
least impeded by will, and there remains no paradox anywhere. The
things we called paradoxes become deductions. Of course St. Paul’s
weakness was the foundation of his strength; of course Orpheus was
irresponsible; of course the maximum of intellectual power will be
the maximum of unimpeded, unconscious activity. And as for our Comic,
of course--whatever laughter may be in itself--laughter will be most
strongly called forth by anything that merely calls and vanishes. Such
things are jokes, burlesques, humor. They state nothing: they assume
inaccuracy: they cry aloud and vanish, leaving the hearer to become
awakened to his own thoughts. They are mere stimuli--mere gesture and
motion, and hence the very truest, very strongest form of human appeal.
THE UNITY OF HUMAN NATURE.[C]
[C] This was an address delivered before the graduating class at
Hobart College in 1900.
If one could stand on the edge of the moon and look down through a
couple of thousand years on human politics, it would be apparent
that everything that happened on the earth was directly dependent on
everything else that happened there. Whether the Italian peasant shall
eat salt with his bread, depends upon Bismarck. Whether the prison
system of Russia shall be improved, depends upon the ministry of Great
Britain. If Lord Beaconsfield is in power, there is no leisure in
Russia for domestic reform. The lash is everywhere lifted in a security
furnished by the concurrence of all the influences upon the globe that
favor coercion. In like manner, the good things that happen are each
the product of all extant conditions. Constitutional government in
England qualifies the whole of western Europe. Our slaves were not set
free without the assistance of every liberal mind in Europe; and the
thoughts which we think in our closet affect the fate of the Boer in
South Africa. That Tolstoy is to-day living unmolested upon his farm
instead of serving in a Siberian mine, that Dreyfus is alive and not
dead, is due directly to the people in this audience and to others like
them scattered over Europe and America.
The effect of enlightenment on tyranny is not merely to make the
tyrant afraid to be cruel, it makes him not want to be cruel. It makes
him see what cruelty is. And reciprocally the effect of cruelty on
enlightenment is to make that enlightenment grow dim. It prevents men
from seeing what cruelty is.
The Czar of Russia cannot get rid of your influence, nor you of his.
Every ukase he signs makes allowance for you, and, on the other hand,
the whole philosophy of your life is tinged by him. You believe that
the abuses under the Russian government are inscrutably different
from and worse than our own; whereas both sets of atrocities are
identical in principle, and are more alike in fact, in taste and smell
and substance than your prejudice is willing to admit. The existence
of Russia narrows America’s philosophy, and misconduct by a European
power may be seen reflected in the moral tone of your clergyman on
the following day. More Americans have abandoned their faith in free
government since England began to play the tyrant in South Africa than
there were colonists in the country in 1776.
Europe is all one family, and speaks, one might say, the same language.
The life that has been transplanted to North America during the last
three centuries, is European life. From your position on the moon
you would not be able to understand what the supposed differences
were between European and American things, that the Americans make so
much fuss over. You would say, “I see only one people, splashed over
different continents. The problems they talk about, the houses they
live in, the clothes they wear, seem much alike. Their education and
catchwords are identical. They are the children of the Classics, of
Christianity, and of the Revival of Learning. They are homogeneous, and
they are growing more homogeneous.”
The subtle influences that modern nations exert over one another
illustrate the unity of life on the globe. But if we turn to ancient
history we find in its bare outlines staggering proof of the
interdependence of nations. The Greeks were wiped out. They could not
escape their contemporaries any more than we can escape the existence
of the Malays. Israel could not escape Assyria, nor Assyria Persia, nor
Persia Macedonia, nor Macedonia Rome, nor Rome the Goths. Life is not
a boarding-school where a bad boy can be dismissed for the benefit of
the rest. He remains. He must be dealt with. He is as much here as we
are ourselves. The whole of Europe and Asia and South America and every
Malay and every Chinaman, Hindoo, Tartar, and Tagal--of such is our
civilization.
Let us for the moment put aside every dictate of religion and
political philosophy. Let us discard all prejudice and all love. Let
us regard nothing except facts. Does not the coldest conclusion of
science announce the fact that the world is peopled, and that every
individual of that population has an influence as certain and far more
discoverable than the influence of the weight of his body upon the
solar system?
A Chinaman lands in San Francisco. The Constitution of the United
States begins to rock and tremble. What shall we do with him? The
deepest minds of the past must be ransacked to the bottom to find an
answer. Every one of seventy million Americans must pass through a
throe of thought that leaves him a modified man. The same thing is true
when the American lands in China. These creatures have thus begun to
think of each other. It is unimaginable that they should not hereafter
incessantly and never-endingly continue to think of each other. And out
of their thoughts grows the destiny of mankind.
We have an inherited and stupid notion that the East does not change.
If Japan goes through a transformation scene under our eyes, we still
hold to our prejudice as to the immutability of the Chinese. If our
own people and the European nations seem to be meeting and surging and
reappearing in unaccustomed rôles every ten years, till modern history
looks like a fancy ball, we still go on muttering some old ignorant
shibboleth about East and West, Magna Charta, the Indian Mutiny, and
Mahomet. The chances are that England will be dead-letter, and Russia
progressive before we have done talking. Of a truth, when we consider
the rapidity of visible change and the amplitude of time--for there is
plenty of time--we need not despair of progress.
The true starting-point for the world’s progress will never be reached
by any nation as a whole. It exists and has been reached in the past as
it will in the future by individuals scattered here and there in every
nation. It is reached by those minds which insist on seeing conditions
as they are, and which cannot confine their thoughts to their own
kitchen, or to their own creed, or to their own nation. You will think
I have in mind poets and philosophers, for these men take humanity as
their subject, and deal in the general stuff of human nature. But the
narrow spirit in which they often do this cuts down their influence
to parish limits. I mean rather those men who in private life act out
their thoughts and feelings as to the unity of human life; those same
thoughts which the poets and philosophers have expressed in their
plays, their sayings, and their visions. There have always been men
who in their daily life have fulfilled those intimations and instincts
which, if reduced to a statement, receive the names of poetry and
religion. These men are the cart-horses of progress, they devote their
lives to doing things which can only be justified or explained by the
highest philosophy. They proceed as if all men were their brothers.
These practical philanthropists go plodding on through each century
and leave the bones of their character mingled with the soil of their
civilization.
See how large the labors of such men look when seen in historic
perspective. They have changed the world’s public opinion. They have
moulded the world’s institutions into forms expressive of their will. I
ask your attention to one of their achievements. We have one province
of conduct in which the visions of the poets have been reduced to
practice--yes, erected into a department of government--through the
labors of the philanthropists. They have established the hospital and
the reformatory; and these visible bastions of philosophy hold now a
more unchallenged place in our civilization than the Sermon on the
Mount on which they comment.
The truth which the philanthropists of all ages have felt is that
the human family was a unit; and this truth, being as deep as human
nature, can be expressed in every philosophy--even in the inverted
utilitarianism now in vogue. The problem of how to treat insane people
and criminals has been solved to this extent, that everyone agrees that
nothing must be done to them which injures the survivors. That is the
reason we do not kill them. It is unpleasant to have them about, and
this unpleasantness can be cured only by our devotion to them. We must
either help the wretched or we ourselves become degenerate. They have
thus become a positive means of civilizing the modern world; for the
instinct of self-preservation has led men to deal with this problem in
the only practical way.
Put a Chinaman into your hospital and he will be cared for. You may lie
awake at night drawing up reasons for doing something different with
this disgusting Chinaman--who, somehow, is in the world and is thrown
into your care, your hospital, your thought--but the machinery of your
own being is so constructed that if you take any other course with
him than that which you take with your own people, your institution
will instantly lose its meaning; you would not have the face to beg
money for its continuance in the following year. The logic of this,
which, if you like, is the logic of self-protection under the illusion
of self-sacrifice, is the logic which is at the bottom of all human
progress. I dislike to express this idea in its meanest form; but I
know there are some professors of political economy here, and I wish
to be understood. The utility of hospitals is not to cure the sick.
It is to teach mercy. The veneration for hospitals is not accorded to
them because they cure the sick, but because they stand for love, and
responsibility.
The appeal of physical suffering makes the strongest attack on our
common humanity. Even zealots and sectaries are touched. The practice
and custom of this kind of mercy have therefore become established,
while other kinds of mercy which require more imagination are still in
their infancy. But at the bottom of every fight for principle you will
find the same sentiment of mercy. If you take a slate and pencil and
follow out the precise reasons and consequences of the thing, you will
always find that a practical and effective love for mankind is working
out a practical self-sacrifice. The average man cannot do the sum,
he does not follow the reasoning, but he knows the answer. The deed
strikes into his soul with a mathematical impact, and he responds like
a tuning-fork when its note is struck.
Everyone knows that self-sacrifice is a virtue. The child takes his
nourishment from the tale of heroism as naturally as he takes milk.
He feels that the deed was done for his sake. He adopts it: it is his
own. The nations have always stolen their myths from one another, and
claimed each other’s heroes. It has required all the world’s heroes
to make the world’s ear sensitive to new statements, illustrations
and applications of the logic of progress. Yet their work has been so
well done that all of us respond to the old truths in however new a
form. Not France alone but all modern society owes a debt of gratitude
to Zola for his rescue of Dreyfus. The whole world would have been
degraded and set back, the whole world made less decent and habitable,
but for those few Frenchmen who took their stand against corruption.
Now the future of civil society upon the earth depends upon the
application to international politics of this familiar idea, which
we see prefigured in our mythology, and monumentalized in our
hospitals--the principle that what is done for one is done for all.
When you say a thing is “right,” you appeal to mankind. What you mean
is that everyone is at stake. Your attack upon wrong amounts to saying
that some one has been left out in the calculation. Both at home and
abroad you are always pleading for mercy, and the plea gains such a
wide response that some tyranny begins to totter, and its engines are
turned upon you to get you to stop. This outcry against you is the
measure of your effectiveness. If you imitate Zola and attack some
nuisance in this town to-morrow, you will bring on every symptom and
have every experience of the Dreyfus affair. The cost is the same,
for cold looks are worse than imprisonment. The emancipation of the
reformer is the same, for if a man can resist the influences of his
townsfolk, if he can cut free from the tyranny of neighborhood gossip,
the world has no terrors for him; there is no second inquisition.
The public influence is the same, for every citizen of that town can
thereafter look a town officer in the face with more self-respect.
But not to townsmen, nor to neighboring towns, nor to Parisians is
this force confined. It goes out in all directions, continuously. The
man is in communication with the world. This impulse of communication
with all men is at the bottom of every ambition. The injustice,
cruelty, oppression in the world are all different forms of the same
non-conductor, that prevents utterances, that stops messages, that
strikes dumb the speaker and deafens the listener. You will find
that it makes no difference whether the non-conductor be a selfish
oligarchy, a military autocracy, or a commercial ring. The voice of
humanity is stifled by corruption: and corruption is only an evil
because it stifles men.
Try to raise a voice that shall be heard from here to Albany and watch
what it is that comes forward to shut off the sound. It is not a German
sergeant, nor a Russian officer of the precinct. It is a note from a
friend of your father’s offering you a place in his office. This is
your warning from the secret police. Why, if any of you young gentlemen
have a mind to make himself heard a mile off, you must make a bonfire
of your reputations and a close enemy of most men who wish you well.
And what will you get in return? Well, if I must for the benefit of
the economist, charge you with some selfish gain, I will say that you
get the satisfaction of having been heard, and that this is the whole
possible scope of human ambition.
When I was asked to make this address I wondered what I had to say
to you boys who are graduating. And I think I have one thing to say.
If you wish to be useful, never take a course that will silence you.
Refuse to learn anything that you cannot proclaim. Refuse to accept
anything that implies collusion, whether it be a clerkship or a curacy,
a legal fee or a post in a university. Retain the power of speech,
no matter what other power you lose. If you can take this course,
and in so far as you take it, you will bless this country. In so far
as you depart from this course you become dampers, mutes, and hooded
executioners. As for your own private character it will be preserved by
such a course. Crime you cannot commit, for crime gags you. Collusion
with any abuse gags you. As a practical matter a mere failure to speak
out upon occasions where no opinion is asked or expected of you, and
when the utterance of an uncalled-for suspicion is odious, will often
hold you to a concurrence in palpable iniquity. It will bind and gag
you and lay you dumb and in shackles like the veriest serf in Russia.
I give you this one rule of conduct. Do what you will, but speak out
always. Be shunned, be hated, be ridiculed, be scared, be in doubt, but
don’t be gagged.
The choice of Hercules was made when Hercules was a lad. It cannot be
made late in life. It will perhaps come for each one of you within
the next eighteen months. I have seen ten years of young men who rush
out into the world with their messages, and when they find how deaf
the world is, they think they must save their strength and wait. They
believe that after a while they will be able to get up on some little
eminence from which they can make themselves heard. “In a few years,”
reasons one of them, “I shall have gained a standing, and then I
will use my power for good.” Next year comes and with it a strange
discovery. The man has lost his horizon of thought. His ambition has
evaporated; he has nothing to say. The great occasion that was to have
let him loose on society was some little occasion that nobody saw, some
moment in which he decided to obtain a standing. The great battle of a
lifetime has been fought and lost over a silent scruple. But for this,
the man might, within a few years, have spoken to the nation with the
voice of an archangel. What was he waiting for? Did he think that the
laws of nature were to be changed for him? Did he think that a “notice
of trial” would be served on him? Or that some spirit would stand at
his elbow and say, “Now’s your time?” The time of trial is always. Now
is the appointed time. And the compensation for beginning at once is
that your voice carries at once. You do not need a standing. It would
not help you. Within less time than you can see it, you will have
been heard. The air is filled with sounding-boards and the echoes are
flying. It is ten to one that you have but to lift your voice to be
heard in California, and that from where you stand. A bold plunge will
teach you that the visions of the unity of human nature which the poets
have sung, were not the fictions of their imagination, but a record
of what they saw. Deal with the world, and you will discover their
reality. Speak to the world, and you will hear their echo.
Social and business prominence look like advantages, and so they are if
you want money. But if you want moral influence you may bless God you
have not got them. They are the payment with which the world subsidizes
men to keep quiet, and there is no subtilty or cunning by which you
can get them without paying in silence. This is the great law of
humanity, that has existed since history began, and will last while man
lasts--evil, selfishness, and silence are one thing.