sensitive individuals, usually at great personal sacrifice. These
special individuals, heavily charged with the social spirit, push and
struggle, work and fight, suffer and die, trying to stir to equal life
the great ego-bound mass of unawakened Society. Much work has been
accomplished, great good has been done, the world is incomparably better
off for the presence of these better developed members, but our gain is
as nothing to what it would be if the progress was shared by all.
If we _were_ still savages, still beasts, still mere individuals, this
book and its many brothers might as well wait for weary thousands of
years more, but we are not. We are, in patent fact, highly specialised
members of a highly advanced Society; but our eyes are holden, our minds
are darkened by piously preserved collections of old concepts long found
false. We can lay aside these erroneous ideas at a moment’s recognition
of the true. We can incorporate the true into the make-up of our minds
by acting upon them. We can put ourselves in touch with the heart of the
world, sharing its splendid pulses, its tireless energy, its flood of
common human love, by simply doing our right work. We can break up
forever the old false tendencies of thought and feeling by rearranging
our material conditions in line with true social forces.
“Better housing for the poor” is necessary, but so it is for the rich,
for all of us. Truer housing; housing suitable to the age we live in;
housing proper to the human soul. We build “the house of God,” bringing
to it the highest love and power and aspiration; and that house uplifts
the soul of the beholder. What prevents our building the houses of Man
with that high love and power and aspiration—that splendid beauty,
ennobling space, and tender ornament? Only that ancient, shrivelled,
artificially preserved mummy, the Ego concept, prevents.
You cannot build right houses for modern humanity on the basis of a
kitchen, on the service of the belly of a beast. Rightly to nourish all
people makes the feeding of humanity as noble a form of work as any
other work broad and beautiful and true, to be devoutly entered upon and
grandly fulfilled; to cater only to the bodily desires of one’s own
family is proper to the level of meanest savagery.
A rearrangement of ideas and their consequent feelings, from the process
false to the process true, is possible to any sane mind, is the duty of
every last one of us. A rearrangement of the external conditions follows
logically and helps materially. This we can do in the mind at once, in
the body not so promptly, but still swiftly in our age of mechanical
wonders. And why should we? What will it mean to us? We should, for
underlying cause, because it is in the line of social evolution; a race
duty. Because in doing it we further the divine purpose, we fulfil
ultimate law. But if the so-long-stunted soul demands its pay, there is
reason more than enough.
Are men so happy now, each trying to take care of himself and his
family, that they should dread the peace and ease given by society’s
vast resources in full circulation? Are women so happy now, either the
squaw or the parasite, that they should dread becoming full human
beings, active, conscious members of society? What this change will mean
to us no one can fully measure, but those who know anything of the real
heart of humanity, those who can interpret the gleams of light that
break through all religions, those who ever felt the soul lift and light
and swell with power and joy, under the influence of music, or painting,
or speech, or any form of human work, can tell us something of it.
We have been taught, in tattered remnants of worn-out faiths, to despise
human nature. We, forsooth, mere worms and weaklings, “as prone to evil
as the sparks are to fly upward,” we were born in iniquity, conceived in
sin, doomed to suffer here, and likely to suffer forever, important
worms that we were!
We have been taught in later days, by half-seeing students of science,
that we were but beasts, and must fight it out as they did, our progress
lying in the slow and painful process of survival.
What a change in thought, in feeling, in action, when we see that we are
the crowning form of created life, we, collectively, though never so
much “worms” taken personally. That Humanity is the one fact we should
realise, and that in it we find free scope and full satisfaction for all
the vague aspirations which have haunted the individual. That in that
organic social life we are all held together by our mutual service, by
our work, and that in our work and only in our work lies growth, lies
peace, lies the highest human duty, lies happiness.
Happiness, for a human being, is in full, true, conscious, social
relation:
To feel the world’s life, unbroken in its steady pour, from the inchoate
nebulæ, through age on age of changing orders, into the spreading growth
of an organised democracy. To feel our own historic family, the immense
racial pride of the long ascent, the conquest of elements, of plants, of
animals, the unquenchable fire of progress, the vast and rapid increase
of the race: To feel the extending light of common consciousness as
Society comes alive!—the tingling “I” that reaches wider and wider in
every age, that is sweeping through the world to-day like an electric
current, that lifts and lights and enlarges the human soul in kindling
majesty: To feel the power! the endless power! Not only the ceaseless
stream of the universal Godness, but our interminable array of
batteries, full charged; the stored energy of all time embodied in poem
and story, in picture and statue, in music and architecture, in every
tool, utensil, and giant machine wherein the human brain and the human
hand have made force incarnate:
And, so feeling, to Do:
To Do, as only Human beings can; not in the paltry processes of the
individual, mere servant of his stomach, but in the fascinating
complexity and rhythmic splendour of the march of social activities; to
take part in that huge, thrilling, organic life in which the individual
thrives unconscious—of which the soul is lodged in each of us:
And in the ceaseless development of that measureless vitality, this
vast, ever-increasing Social Life, to feel, now and again,—always
oftener,—the distant music of the universe grow clearer—that is
Happiness.
THE END
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TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES
1. Silently corrected typographical errors and variations in spelling.
2. Archaic, non-standard, and uncertain spellings retained as printed.
3. Enclosed italics font in _underscores_.