The result then of our digression is to show that Health--in body or
mind--means unity, integration as opposed to disintegration. In the
animals we find this physical unity existing to a remarkable degree. An
almost unerring instinct and selective power rules their actions and
organisation. Thus a cat before it has fallen (say before it has become
a very wheezy fireside pussy!) is in a sense perfect. The wonderful
consent of its limbs as it runs or leaps, the adaptation of its
muscles, the exactness and inevitableness of its instincts, physical and
affectional; its senses of sight and smell, its cleanliness, nicety as
to food, motherly tact, the expression of its whole body when enraged,
or when watching for prey--all these things are so to speak absolute and
instantaneous--and fill one with admiration. The creature is "whole" or
in one piece: there is no mentionable conflict or division within
it.[12]
Similarly with the other animals, and even with the early man himself.
And so it would appear returning to our subject--that, if we accept the
doctrine of Evolution, there is a progression of animated beings--which,
though not perfect, possess in the main the attribute of Health--from
the lowest forms up to a healthy and instinctive though certainly
limited man. During all this stage the central law is in the ascendant,
and the physical frame of each creature is the fairly clean vehicle of
its expression--varying of course in complexity and degree according to
the point of unfoldment which has been reached. And when thus in the
long process of development the inner Man (which has lain hidden or
dormant within the animal) at last appears, and the creature
consequently takes on the outer frame and faculties of the human being,
which are only as they are because of the inner man which they
represent; when it has passed through stage after stage of animal life,
throwing out tentative types and likenesses of what is to come, and
going through innumerable preliminary exercises in special forms and
faculties, till at last it begins to be able to wear the full majesty of
manhood itself--_then_ it would seem that that long process of
development is drawing to a close, and that the goal of creation must be
within measurable distance.
But then, at that very moment, and when the goal is, so to speak, in
sight, occurs this failure of "wholeness" of which we have spoken, this
partial break-up of the unity of human nature--and man, instead of going
forward any longer in the same line as before, to all appearance
_falls_.
What is the meaning of this loss of unity? What is the cause and purpose
of this fall and centuries-long exile from the earlier Paradise?
There can be but one answer. It is self-knowledge--(which involves in a
sense the abandonment of self). Man has to become conscious of his
destiny--to lay hold of and realise his own freedom and blessedness--to
transfer his consciousness from the outer and mortal part of him to the
inner and undying.
The cat cannot do this. Though perfect in its degree, its interior
unfoldment is yet incomplete. The human soul within it has not yet come
forward and declared itself; some sheathing leaves have yet to open
before the divine flower-bud can be clearly seen. And when at last
(speaking as a fool) the cat becomes a man--when the human soul within
the creature has climbed itself forward and found expression,
transforming the outer frame in the process into that of
humanity--(which is the meaning I suppose of the evolution theory)--then
the creature, though perfect and radiant in the form of Man, still lacks
one thing. It lacks the knowledge of itself; it lacks its own identity,
and the realisation of the manhood to which as a fact it has attained.
In the animals consciousness has never returned upon itself. It radiates
easily outwards; and the creature obeys without let or hesitation, and
with little if any _self_-consciousness, the law of its being. And when
man first appears on the earth, and even up to the threshold of what we
call civilisation, there is much to show that he should in this respect
still be classed with the animals. Though vastly superior to them in
attainments, physical and mental, in power over nature, capacity of
progress, and adaptability, he still in these earlier stages was like an
animal in the unconscious instinctive nature of his action; and on the
other hand, though his moral and intellectual structures were far less
complete than those of the modern man--as was a necessary result of the
absence of self-knowledge--he actually lived more in harmony with
himself and with nature,[13] than does his descendant; his impulses,
both physical and social, were clearer and more unhesitating; and his
unconsciousness of inner discord and sin a great contrast to our modern
condition of everlasting strife and perplexity.
If then to this stage belongs some degree of human perfection and
felicity, yet there remains a much vaster height to be scaled. The human
soul which has wandered darkling for so many thousands of years, from
its tiny spark-like germ in some low form of life to its full splendor
and dignity in man, has yet to come to the _knowledge_ of its wonderful
heritage, has yet to become finally individualised and free, to know
itself immortal, to resume and interpret all its past lives, and to
enter in triumph into the kingdom which it has won.
It has in fact to face the frightful struggle of self-consciousness, or
the disentanglement of the true self from the fleeting and perishable
self. The animals and man, unfallen, are healthy and free from care, but
unaware of what they are; to attain self-knowledge man must fall; he
must become less than his true self; he must endure imperfection;
division and strife must enter his nature. To realise the perfect Life,
to know what, how wonderful it is--to understand that all blessedness
and freedom consists in its possession--he must for the moment suffer
divorce from it; the unity, the repose of his nature must be broken up,
crime, disease and unrest must enter in, and by contrast he must attain
to knowledge.
Curious that at the very dawn of the Greek and with it the European
civilisation we have the mystic words "Know Thyself" inscribed on the
temple of the Delphic Apollo; and that first among the legends of the
Semitic race stands that of Adam and Eve eating of the tree of the
Knowledge of good and evil! To the animal there is no such knowledge, to
the early man there was no such knowledge, and to the perfected man of
the future there will be no such knowledge. It is a temporary
perversion, indicating the disunion of the present-day man--the disunion
of the outer self from the inner--the horrible dual
self-consciousness--which is the means ultimately of a more perfect and
conscious union than could ever have been realised without it--the death
that is swallowed up in victory. "For the first man is of the earth,
earthy; but the second man is the Lord from heaven."
In order then, at this point in his Evolution, to advance any farther,
Man must first fall; in order to know, he must lose. In order to realise
what Health is, how splendid and glorious a possession, he must go
through all the long negative experience of Disease; in order to know
the perfect social life, to understand what power and happiness to
mankind are involved in their true relation to each other, he must learn
the misery and suffering which come from mere individualism and greed;
and in order to find his true Manhood, to discover what a wonderful
power it is, he must first lose it--he must become a prey and a slave to
his own passions and desires--whirled away like Phaethon by the horses
which he cannot control.
This moment of divorce, then, this parenthesis in human progress, covers
the ground of all History; and the whole of Civilisation, and all crime
and disease, are only the materials of its immense purpose--themselves
destined to pass away as they arose, but to leave their fruits eternal.
Accordingly we find that it has been the work of Civilisation--founded
as we have seen on Property--in every way to disintegrate and corrupt
man--literally to corrupt--to _break up_ the unity of his nature. It
begins with the abandonment of the primitive life and the growth of the
sense of shame (as in the myth of Adam and Eve). From this follows the
disownment of the sacredness of sex. Sexual acts cease to be a part of
religious worship; love and desire--the inner and the outer
love--hitherto undifferentiated, now become two separate things. (This
no doubt a necessary stage in order for the development of the
_consciousness of love_, but in itself only painful and abnormal.) It
culminates and comes to an end, as to-day, in a complete divorce between
the spiritual reality and the bodily fulfilment--in a vast system of
commercial love, bought and sold, in the brothel and in the palace. It
begins with the forsaking of the hardy nature-life, and it ends with a
society broken down and prostrate, hardly recognisable as human, amid
every form of luxury, poverty and disease. He who had been the free
child of Nature denies his sonship; he disowns the very breasts that
suckled him. He deliberately turns his back upon the light of the sun,
and hides himself away in boxes with breathing holes (which he calls
houses), living ever more and more in darkness and asphyxia, and only
coming forth perhaps once a day to blink at the bright god, or to run
back again at the first breath of the free wind for fear of catching
cold! He muffles himself in the cast-off furs of the beasts, every
century swathing himself in more and more layers, more and more
fearfully and wonderfully fashioned, till he ceases to be recognisable
as the Man that was once the crown of the animals, and presents a more
ludicrous spectacle than the monkey that sits on his own barrel organ.
He ceases to a great extent to use his muscles, his feet become
partially degenerate, his teeth wholly, his digestion so enervated that
he has to cook his food and make pulps of all his victuals, and his
whole system so obviously on the decline that at last in the end of
time a Kay Robinson arises and prophesies as aforesaid, that he will
before long become wholly toothless, bald and toeless.
And so with this denial of Nature comes every form of disease; first
delicatesse, daintiness, luxury; then unbalance, enervation, huge
susceptibility to pain. With the shutting of himself away from the
all-healing Power, man inevitably weakens his whole manhood; the central
bond is loosened, and he falls a prey to his own organs. He who before
was unaware of the existence of these latter, now becomes only too
conscious of them (and this--is it not the very object of the process?);
the stomach, the liver and the spleen start out into painful
distinctness before him, the heart loses its equable beat, the lungs
their continuity with the universal air, and the brain becomes hot and
fevered; each organ in turn asserts itself abnormally and becomes a seat
of disorder, every corner and cranny of the body becomes the scene and
symbol of disease, and Man gazes aghast at his own kingdom--whose extent
he had never suspected before--now all ablaze in wild revolt against
him. And then--all going with this period of his development--sweep vast
epidemic trains over the face of the earth, plagues and fevers and
lunacies and world-wide festering sores, followed by armies, ever
growing, of doctors--they too with their retinues of books and bottles,
vaccinations and vivisections, and grinning death's-heads in the rear--a
mad crew, knowing not what they do, yet all unconsciously, doubtless,
fulfilling the great age-long destiny of humanity.
In all this the influence of Property is apparent enough. It is evident
that the growth of property through the increase of man's powers of
production reacts on the man in three ways: to draw him away namely, (1)
from Nature, (2) from his true Self, (3) from his Fellows. In the first
place it draws him away from Nature. That is, that as man's power over
materials increases he creates for himself a sphere and an environment
of his own, in some sense apart and different from the great elemental
world of the winds and the waves, the woods and the mountains, in which
he has hitherto lived. He creates what we call the artificial life, of
houses and cities, and, shutting himself up in these, shuts Nature out.
As a growing boy at a certain point, and partly in order to assert his
independence, wrests himself away from the tender care of his mother,
and even displays--just for the time being--a spirit of opposition to
her, so the growing Man finding out his own powers uses them--for the
time--even to do despite to Nature, and to create himself a world in
which she shall have no part. In the second place the growth of property
draws man away from his true Self. This is clear enough. As his power
over materials and his possessions increases, man finds the means of
gratifying his senses at will. Instead of being guided any longer by
that continent and "whole" instinct which characterises the animals,
his chief motive is now to use his powers to gratify this or that sense
or desire. These become abnormally magnified, and the man soon places
his main good in their satisfaction; and abandons his true Self for his
organs, the whole for the parts. Property draws the man outwards,
stimulating the external part of his being, and for a time mastering
him, overpowers the central Will, and brings about his disintegration
and corruption. Lastly, Property by thus stimulating the external and
selfish nature in Man, draws him away from his Fellows. In the anxiety
to possess things for himself, in order to gratify his own bumps, he is
necessarily brought into conflict with his neighbor and comes to regard
him as an enemy. For the true Self of man consists in his organic
relation with the whole body of his fellows; and when the man abandons
his true Self he abandons also his true relation to his fellows. The
mass-Man must rule in each unit-man, else the unit-man will drop off and
die. But when the outer man tries to separate himself from the inner,
the unit-man from the mass-Man, then the reign of individuality
begins--a false and impossible individuality of course, but the only
means of coming to the consciousness of the true individuality. With the
advent of a Civilisation then founded on Property the unity of the old
tribal society is broken up. The ties of blood relationship which were
the foundation of the gentile system and the guarantees of the old
fraternity and equality become dissolved in favor of powers and
authorities founded on mere possession. The growth of Wealth
disintegrates the ancient Society; the temptations of power, of
possession, etc., which accompany it, wrench the individual from his
moorings; personal greed rules; "each man for himself" becomes the
universal motto; the hand of every man is raised against his brother,
and at last society itself becomes an organisation by which the rich
fatten upon the vitals of the poor, the strong upon the murder of the
weak. [It is interesting in this connection to find that Lewis Morgan
makes the invention of a written alphabet and the growth of the
conception of private property the main characteristics of the
civilisation-period as distinguished from the periods of savagery and
barbarism which preceded it; for the invention of writing marks perhaps
better than anything else could do the period when Man becomes
_self-conscious_--when he records his own doings and thoughts, and so
commences History proper; and the growth of private property marks the
period when he begins to sunder himself from his fellows, when therefore
the conception of sin (or separation) first enters in, and with it all
the long period of moral perplexity, and the denial of that community of
life between himself and his fellows which is really of the essence of
man's being.]
And then arises the institution of Government.
Hitherto this had not existed except in a quite rudimentary form. The
early communities troubled themselves little about individual ownership,
and what government they had was for the most part essentially
democratic--as being merely a choice of leaders among blood-relations
and social equals. But when the delusion that man can exist for himself
alone--his outer and, as it were, accidental self apart from the great
inner and cosmical self by which he is one with his fellows--when this
delusion takes possession of him, it is not long before it finds
expression in some system of private property. The old community of life
and enjoyment passes away, and each man tries to grab the utmost he can,
and to retire into his own lair for its consumption. Private
accumulations arise; the natural flow of the bounties of life is dammed
back, and artificial barriers of Law have to be constructed in order to
preserve the unequal levels. Outrage and Fraud follow in the wake of the
desire of possession; force has to be used by the possessors in order to
maintain the law-barriers against the non-possessors; classes are
formed; and finally the formal Government arises, mainly as the
expression of such force; and preserves itself, as best it can, until
such time as the inequalities which it upholds become too glaring, and
the pent social waters gathering head burst through once more and regain
their natural levels.
Thus Morgan in his "Ancient Society" points out over and over again that
the civilised state rests upon territorial and property marks and
qualifications, and not upon a personal basis as did the ancient _gens_,
or the tribe; and that the civilised government correspondingly takes on
quite a different character and function from the simple organisation
of the gens. He says (p. 124), "Monarchy is incompatible with
gentilism." Also with regard to the relation of Property to Civilisation
and Government he makes the following pregnant remarks (p. 505): "It is
impossible to over-estimate the influence of property in the
civilisation of mankind. It was the power that brought the Aryan and
Semitic nations out of barbarism into civilisation. The growth of the
idea of property in the human mind commenced in feebleness and ended in
becoming its master passion. Governments and Laws are instituted with
primary reference to its creation, protection and enjoyment. It
introduced human slavery as an instrument in its production; and after
the experience of several thousand years it caused the abolition of
slavery upon the discovery that a freeman was a better property-making
machine." And in another passage on the same subject, "The dissolution
of society bids fair to become the termination of a career of which
property is the end and aim; because such a career contains the elements
of self-destruction. Democracy is the next higher plane. It will be a
revival in a higher form of the liberty, equality and fraternity of the
ancient gentes."
The institution of Government is in fact the evidence in social life
that man has lost his inner and central control, and therefore must
resort to an outward one. Losing touch with the inward Man--who is his
true guide--he declines upon an external law, which must always be
false. If each man remained in organic adhesion to the general body of
his fellows, no serious dis-harmony could occur; but it is when this
vital unity of the body politic becomes weak that it has to be preserved
by artificial means, and thus it is that with the decay of the primitive
and instinctive social life there springs up a form of government which
is no longer the democratic expression of the life of the whole people;
but a kind of outside authority and compulsion thrust upon them by a
ruling class or caste.
Perhaps the sincerest, and often though not always the earliest, form of
Government is Monarchy. The sentiment of human unity having been already
partly but not quite lost, the people choose--in order to hold society
together--a man to rule over them who has this sentiment in a high
degree. He represents the true Man and therefore the people. This is
often a time of extensive warfare and the formation of nations. And it
is interesting in this connection to note that the quite early "Kings"
or leaders of each nation just prior to the civilisation period were
generally associated with the highest religious functions, as in the
case of the Roman _rex_, the Greek _basileus_, the early Egyptian Kings,
Moses among the Israelites, and Druid leaders of the Britons, and so on.
Later, and as the central authority gets more and more shadowy in each
man, and the external attraction of Property greater, so it does in
Society. The temporal and spiritual powers part company. The king--who
at first represented the Divine Spirit or soul of society, recedes into
the background, and his nobles of high degree (who may be compared to
the nobler, more generous, qualities of the mind) begin to take his
place. This is the Aristocracy and the Feudal Age--the Timocracy of
Plato; and is marked by the appearance of large private tenures of land,
and the growth of slavery and serfdom--the slavery thus outwardly
appearing in society being the symbol of the inward enslavement of the
man.
Then comes the Commercial Age--the Oligarchy or Plutocracy of Plato.
Honour quite gives place to material wealth; the rulers rule not by
personal or hereditary, but by property qualifications. Parliaments and
Constitutions and general Palaver are the order of the day.
Wage-slavery, usury, mortgages, and other abominations, indicate the
advance of the mortal process. In the individual man gain is the end of
existence; industry and scientific cunning are his topmost virtues.
Last of all the break-up is complete. The individual loses all memory
and tradition of his heavenly guide and counterpart; his nobler passions
fail for want of a leader to whom to dedicate themselves; his industry
and his intellect serve but to minister to his little swarming desires.
This is the era of anarchy--the democracy of Carlyle; the rule of the
rabble, and mob-law; caucuses and cackle, competition and universal
greed, breaking out in cancerous tyrannies and plutocracies--a mere
chaos and confusion of society. For just as we saw in the human body,
when the inner and positive force of Health has departed from it, that
it falls a prey to parasites which overspread and devour it; so, when
the central inspiration departs out of social life, does it writhe with
the mere maggots of individual greed, and at length fall under the
dominion of the most monstrous egotist who has been bred from its
corruption.
Thus we have briefly sketched the progress of the symptoms of the
"disease," which, as said before, runs much (though not quite) the same
course in the various nations which it attacks. And if this last stage
were really the end of all, and the true Democracy, there were indeed
little left to hope for. No words of Carlyle could blast that black
enough. But this is no true Democracy. Here in this "each for himself"
is no rule of the Demos in every man, nor anything resembling it. Here
is no solidarity such as existed in the ancient tribes and primæval
society, but only disintegration and a dust-heap. The true Democracy has
yet to come. Here in this present stage is only the final denial of all
outward and class government, in preparation for the restoration of the
inner and true authority. Here in this stage the task of civilisation
comes to an end; the purport and object of all these centuries is
fulfilled; the bitter experience that mankind had to pass through is
completed; and out of this Death and all the torture and unrest which
accompanies it, comes at last the Resurrection. Man has sounded the
depths of alienation from his own divine spirit, he has drunk the dregs
of the cup of suffering, he has literally descended into Hell;
henceforth he turns, both in the individual and in society, and mounts
deliberately and consciously back again towards the unity which he has
lost.[14]
And the false democracy parts aside for the disclosure of the true
Democracy which has been formed beneath it--which is not an external
government at all, but an inward rule--the rule of the mass-Man in each
unit-man. For no outward government can be anything but a make-shift--a
temporary hard chrysalis-sheath to hold the grub together while the new
life is forming inside--a device of the civilisation-period. Farther
than this it cannot go, since no true life can rely upon an external
support, and, when the true life of society comes, all its forms will be
fluid and spontaneous and voluntary.