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The New Optimism



  The
  New Optimism

  By
  H. de Vere Stacpoole

  [Illustration]

  London: John Lane, The
  Bodley Head. New York:
  John Lane Company
  Toronto: Bell & Cockburn
  MCMXIV

  COPYRIGHT, 1914, BY JOHN LANE COMPANY

  PUBLISHERS PRINTING COMPANY, NEW YORK, U. S. A.

The New Optimism



The New Optimism




PART I

ON THE BEACH


[Sidenote: The Beach We Came From]

I was standing by the sea-wall, watching the green water foaming round
the stakes of the breakwater, when my companion, a charming and elegant
woman, turned to me:

“What is there in water that fascinates one?” she asked.

“Do you feel the fascination?”

“Yes.”

“Do you not know why you feel it?”

“No.”

“Shall I tell you?”

“Yes.”

“Because you were once a swimming reptile.”

“Thank you.”

“Oh, there is nothing to thank me for, though the fact is the most
glorious in the universe.”

“The fact that I was once a reptile?”

“Precisely.”

She pondered on this for a moment, and then:

“I don’t see where the glory comes in,” said she.

“Nevertheless, it is there, for the fact is the master key to the
meaning of the universe, the one light that shines in a world of
darkness, and the one sure hope in a world of doubt.”

“The fact that I was once a reptile?”

“And I—yes. I would not give what the webbing between my fingers tells
me for all the promises of all the religions of all the countries on
earth.”

“Ancestral pride is evidently not your strong point.”

“I don’t know about that; but up to a year ago mental darkness was my
portion. I had no religion.”

“And have you any now?”

“No, but I have a certainty.”

“Of what?”

“Of the fact that the world has a meaning and life an aim. Shall we sit
down on this seat and talk for a while, if I am not boring you?—and may
I light a cigarette?”

“You are not boring me—yet. And if you can prove what you say, I shall
not mind even if you bore me. But I must tell you, first of all, that,
to me, the world seems absolutely without a meaning and life without an
aim. I mean, of course, the general life of the world, which implies,
as far as I can see, general suffering. If suffering did people good,
then I could understand that we were placed here to grow and develop;
but suffering and poverty, as far as I can see, only stunt and twist
and spoil everything they touch.”

“Precisely.”

“Then, if you admit that, you must admit that the meaning and aim of
the world is far from being glorious.”

“Never. That is what I wish to disprove.”

“Then disprove it.”


[Sidenote: The Growth of the World]

“Tell me,” I said. “Why is it that an ordinary human being placed
before a flower sees only a flower and nothing of the wonder that is in
it?”

“Because flowers are so common.”

“More than that—because a flower is of such slow growth. If one could
see a seed sprouting, a stalk rising, a bud forming, bursting, and
expanding all in five minutes, the wonder of the thing would bring one
on one’s knees. The world is just the same. We do not see the splendour
and magnificence and meaning of it, because the growth has been so
slow, because every-day jargon has blinded our eyes, and scientific
jargon has dulled the poetic perception of the miracle in its entirety.
It is by looking at bits of the world that men have come to confusion,
instead of fixing their eyes on the world from its very beginning.”

“Ah, but who can do that?”

“You can, and so can I, and so can anyone who has studied the
development of the world from the very beginning.”

“But I have never studied the development of the world.”

“Well, then it is high time you began; and to assist you in your
studies, I will give you a vague sketch of the facts, and when I
have sketched those facts, I will expound to you in a few words the
deduction which I draw from them and the reason why I have implicit
faith that earth has a meaning and life an aim—both equally glorious.

“Now, mind, I have nothing to do with fancies, only facts. Hard, dry
facts that no one can refuse.”

“First, then, before the beginning of time there was neither sun, moon,
nor planets; the whole of the solar system was a zone of incandescent
gas.”

“How do you know that?”

“I know it because all philosophy points to it, and because in the
depths of space the telescope shews to me hundreds of solar systems in
the process of making. Perhaps you will take my word for the fact.”

“Yes. Go on.”

“This sea of gas, floating lost in the universe, was possessed of two
movements: the movement of the atoms buzzing round each other, and a
movement of rotation by which the whole sea whirled round its central
point. Millions of years went by, and during those years our gaseous
sea began to cool and shrink. But it did not shrink evenly. The great
outer ring of the sea was left behind, still whirling and cooling and
condensing, but it did not remain in the form of a ring. The atoms drew
together, sucked toward a common point from every part of the ring, and
the result was that a globe began to form like a great tumour on the
attenuated ring; and as years went on, the ring gave up more and more
atoms to the globe, till at last there was nothing left but the globe
whirling along the path once occupied by the ring. This globe was the
first and outermost planet, Neptune.

“Meanwhile, the sea of gas was still contracting, and again the same
thing happened. The outermost edge of the sea was left behind, in the
form of a ring, a globe was formed and that globe was Uranus, the
second furthest planet from us. Again the same thing happened, and
Saturn was formed: and yet again, and Jupiter was formed: and yet
again, and Mars was left behind in the shape of a whirling globe of
fire, and then the Earth.

“The sea continued contracting, leaving Venus behind and then Mercury;
and still it continued contracting, but now it was too small to throw
off any more rings, and it consolidated to form one great central
globe, the sun.

“The first great act of creation was accomplished, and on that vast
day when, Mercury left definitely behind, the budding of worlds was
finished, the sun and the planets around it might have been seen like
a golden bee surrounded by its golden children, shining in the night of
space.

“The earth was a much brighter place then, for it was simply a globe
of incandescent vapour, and yet that glowing vapour held everything.
Man and woman, and love and war, beauty and sorrow. Art, poetry, music,
hunger, and cruelty.

“That mixture of the abstract and the concrete sounds like rant, but
it is not. It is a bald statement of facts. Every thought that man has
ever thought, every dream that man has ever dreamed was lying unborn
yet in the essence of that globe of incandescent vapour. Every form
that ever sketched itself on earth was there, too—from the daisy to the
hippopotamus. But as yet there was nothing definite, nothing but the
dance of the atoms and the atoms themselves.

“From the first moment of its separate existence this world _in posse_,
consisting as yet of incandescent vapour, began to cool and shrink,
and after the first million years or so it began to exhibit the first
symptoms of thought and to storm at its own shrinking.”

“Excuse me for a moment, but what do you mean by the first symptoms of
thought?”

[Sidenote: The Germ of Thought]

“The first and only symptom of thought is action, arising from opposing
forces, and when the world, now condensed into a liquid form, began to
exhibit tides and storms of molten matter, it began to exhibit action
arising from opposing forces; _and here let me say that the amount of
work done by the world before life ever appeared upon it, the amount of
work done by what we call senseless matter, and the amount of thought
and ingenuity expended on that work put the much trumpeted wonder of
life in the shade_.

“Long, long before the first germ of life began to form, matter in
its own mind had worked out the problem of the mountains and the
seas; matter had kneaded the moon in its ‘dull’ hands and flung it
up into the sky to be a lamp and a tide-maker; matter had worked out
the whole problem of lighting and watering and warming the earth, so
that when life appeared in its first humble and rudimentary form, it
found a house built for it, water laid on for it, and all the lighting
arrangements perfect.

“Yes, to me, sometimes, all that work done by matter on its own account
is even more wonderful than all the work done by Life, for even had
life never appeared on the world, the labours of ‘dull matter’ and
‘brute force’ would still have created the house of the earth.”

“It was created for Life to live in?”

“I do not think so. I think the creation of the world was the result of
the first vague struggle of the spirit of matter toward higher things.
The senseless ferocity of blazing gas had calmed down, and the mind of
matter, if I may use the term, had reached the dignity of expressing
itself in form; and you will mark that the advance toward higher
things was on the road from ferocity to kindliness; that the triumph
of matter was not so much in the creation of the forms of hills and
plains and mountains and seas from whirling oceans of molten material,
as in the creation of those conditions of mildness necessary for the
existence of life.

“Yes, before life ever appeared, matter had developed abstract
qualities, the benign had separated itself from the malignant, and,
under the influence of the benign, Life first peeped out.

“We date everything from that first budding of matter into what we
call life. Yet in reality it was the last stage of a long journey, the
last act of a long series of actions and reactions, the last triumph
of benignity over ferocity in the first stage of the evolution of the
world.”

[Sidenote: The Benign]

“What do you mean by Benignity?”

“I use the word Benignity for all that makes for development of the
simple into the complex, and the word Malignity for all that <DW44>s
it. I will use the words Good and Evil if you like them better, and
say that Good in those days was anything that helped forward the
evolution of matter, Evil anything that retarded it. The sunray falling
on the first jelly-fish was good, the storm that injured it was evil;
and Good was good just because it enabled matter to build one storey
higher, and Evil was evil just because it tried to pull that storey
down.

“Now you have followed me from the very beginning of the world to the
first beginnings of life. Have I impressed you logically with one
simple fact, that the journey of atoms from a mass of blazing gas to a
world where life was just beginning to bud was along one path, and one
path only, the path of development?”

“Of course it was.”

“And of the other fact are you equally assured?—that the journey from
a whirling lava storm to a solid world of comparatively quiet seas and
hills and plains and mountains was a glorious journey and a benign?”

“Yes.”

“Then we will start with matter on the new journey on which it set
forth a million million years ago, using for its carriage the first
jelly-fish.”


[Sidenote: Life Appears]

“It had laboured dimly to form the hills, the plains, and the seas, but
that part of it which had laboured to form the seas, now that they were
formed, found something more to do, found itself developing in a new
and strange direction—that of life.

“The energy of matter that had already constructed the solar system
and had evolved the rocks and the sea found itself at last held up,
cribbed, cabined and confined, with nothing to do.

“Men ask how did life appear in the world. For myself, I believe that
life was created by the explosion, so to speak, of this world energy,
which, bound down by the limitations it had reached in the inorganic
world, burst the rigid bonds of its prison and found a new field for
its labour in the construction of the higher organic world.—And, in
parenthesis, let me say that I believe when this same energy reaches
rigid limitations in the organic world, it will burst those limits and
find its field in a world as yet unknown.

“However that may be, I propose to deal only with known facts, and the
surest fact on earth is this, that when the first vague sketches of
life appeared in the sea, they existed not by the virtue of chemistry,
nor the virtue of the life that was in them, but by the virtue of the
steadily working benignity of the world energy that had constructed
their home.

[Sidenote: Conditions]

“To me more wonderful than the creation of life is the creation of
those external conditions that made life possible. They collectively
formed the mould in which life was cast.

“Now, in my sketch of the creation of the sun and planets I have just
hinted what the brain can scarcely guess—the scenes of fiery storm and
horror that preceded the welding of the world into a solid whole and
the birth of the conditions that made life possible. But these are less
halting to thought than the scenes of ferocity that filled the earth
when life awoke, raging and tempestuous, and form began to devour form
as though the world energy were eating its way through all forms to
reach the form of man. And that is, in fact, the truth. Man has been
reached by teeth just as the hills have been reached by fire. And not
only man. The dove that was once a pterodactyl, the dog that was once a
wolf, the cat that was once a tiger, and a thousand other things once
terrible, thoughtless and ferocious, all these have come along the very
path that the hills and the seas came along in their making—the path
from negation and through ferocity to the benign.

“Now, can you not see why the fact that I was once a swimming
reptile,—just as you were—devouring other reptiles, is a fact that
I would not barter for all fancies? for by its light and by what
astronomy and geology and the other sciences tell me I can see that the
world, taken as a whole, has a glorious and definite meaning.

[Sidenote: The World Spirit]

“And the gist of the meaning is this: that side by side with the
evolution of world forms, from the liquid lava wave to the solid rock,
from the rock to the saurian, and from the saurian to man, has gone the
evolution of world character and the development of a world spirit;
and that the beauty of kindliness and benignity and good receives
its deep, deep significance from the fact that all the labour of the
world since the first cooling of its fires has been directed along the
path leading to these three gods. Nothing is more clear than that,
and nothing can be more definitely proved. There is no use at all in
fixing your eyes on the Jurassic period and saying, ‘What monsters are
here!’ or on a London slum and saying, ‘How terrible life is! It can
have no meaning!’ There is no use in fixing your eyes on a thousand
years of history and saying, ‘I see no development. Men were as good
then as they are now.’ You must take a billion years in your purview,
to see the amazing and glorious thing as it is, and then what you will
see will be strangely like the growth and unfolding of a flower—or the
flowering of a bramble.”


[Sidenote: Hard Facts]

“I believe in dreams, but I have no faith except in hard facts. Those
hard facts tell me that the sun, toward which everything grows to-day,
is the same sun toward which the seas and the hills and the rocks grew
before life exhibited itself first, and toward which life has grown
since its birth; and that sun is the sun of Amelioration, Benignity,
Good, and Gentleness. Let us call it by the great good word that
embraces all these things: Good. Well, then, the world, since the
beginning, has grown toward Good.”

“Do you deny the soul?”

“I do not. I know nothing about it. I am quite content to live in a
world that is slowly and steadily developing in benignity, and to
assist that development in my small way by trying to develop the
benignity in myself.

“I do not trouble about my soul one iota, but I am deeply concerned to
keep on that upward path along which earth is ascending.”

[Sidenote: The Imitation of Earth]

“Ah, but how can one do that?”

“By copying what the earth has done; by freeing oneself as much as
possible from ferocity, hatred, lust, and cruelty.”

“But you are neither ferocious nor cruel?”

“Perhaps not actively, but just as I carry in my material brain the
eye of the extinct monster I once was, so do I carry in my mind the
remnants of the passions of the reptile that once was me, the lust of
the reptile and the hatred. I do not tear other human beings with my
teeth, but I have torn them by deeds and words. I have been cruel—who
has not? lustful—who has not? inspired by hatred—who has not? I have
regretted these things—who has not?—and forgotten them—who has not?”

“But since I have taken a broad view of the world, since I have seen
that all these things are part and parcel of the malignity from which
earth is freeing herself in her journey toward the Benign, I have come
to hate those things as a man on the road to some brilliant festival
might hate the obstacles on his path.”

“But since you have no surety that you possess an individual soul, you
have no surety of ever reaching the festival.”

“I cannot help that. My immediate aim is to keep up with the
procession. I leave the rest to chance.”


[Sidenote: The Universal Brain]

“All that,” said she, “seems true. No one can deny that the world has
developed; no one can deny that the world has developed along the path
that leads to gentleness and good. The world is like a big head, isn’t
it? With all its brains on the outside.”

“Just. It began to think like a jelly-fish; then it went on to the
consciousness of the first reptile; then it went on till it thought
like an animal, and finished by thinking like a man. The world, as you
say, is a big head, with its brains on the outside. But during the last
hundred years an astounding development has taken place in the world
of ethics. Philosophically speaking now, there is no such thing as an
individual brain; every brain in the western world is only a cell in
the universal brain. And the universal brain is developing on lines
of its own, and in precisely the same way as the individual brain
developed.

“A hundred—or shall we say eighty?—years ago, the brain of the world
consisted of a number of isolated thought centres. A thought took six
months to reach Australia from England, and two days to reach London
from Manchester. Then came railways, the printing-press, and the
electric telegraph; and in a hundred years the universal brain has
developed from almost nothing into a highly complex organism.

“This new power of man to think universally has not been recognized by
philosophers for what it is. It is practically the fusion of all brains
into one great brain and the creation of a new organism. Formerly there
were men in the world—now there is Man. Roughly speaking, every brain
in the western world is joining, now, with every other brain, and the
universal brain thinks as a whole. You remember, I defined the Benign
as that which assists the elevation of the simple to the complex, and
if, as I fully believe, all evolution is the child of the Benign, ought
we not to look at this evolution of the universal brain with a critical
eye, to discover whether it is following in the same path as the world
followed in its development from seas of fire to hills and plains; and
as the individual brain followed in its evolution from the brain of
the saurian to the brain of the civilised man?

“What do we find?

“We find that the development of the universal brain has followed
in exactly the same path that all matter has followed from the very
beginning of things. The development has been extraordinarily rapid
and the stride toward Good has been mathematically in keeping with the
development. And it is absolutely truthful to say that since joining
this great confederation of thought the individual brain of man has
advanced on the road of ethical progress more in the last hundred years
than in all the years between the birth of Christ and the eighteenth
century.

“To see what has really happened, let us look far back over the
civilisations of the world. Egypt was great, and vanished; Athens
brought art and philosophy and culture to their highest pitch, and
died; Rome arose, and fell thundering in ruins into the night of the
Middle Ages. For all these civilisations were in reality segregated
communities, and even in the communities themselves thought was not
universal. And if you watch civilisation rising from the mist of the
Middle Ages, you will see that it rose not by the power of the word
or of precept, but of the printing-press, the telegraph, and the
train—that is to say, by the universalisation of thought.

“A hundred years ago men were still half bogged in the Middle Ages.
Men, compared to what men are now, were stupid, brutal, and merciless.
Brains there were, and clever brains, but the universal brain was not
born. The individual brain has reached its limit of development as an
individual brain and was preparing for its great development as a part
of the universal brain.

“What happened was this. From the printing-press, from the
steam-engine, and from the electric telegraph station all sorts of
threads began to spin, joining mind to mind. The minds of Birmingham
became linked up with the minds of London, those of London with Paris.
The remotest country village to-day thinks with the greatest town.
A giant of thought has suddenly arisen in the place of a thousand
pigmies; he has developed in the short space of eighty or a hundred
years, and his development has been on the line leading to Beneficence.
And this giant is a new creation, as important as the creation of earth
from fire, and of life from earth.

“There have been, in fact, three creations. The creation of the
material earth; the creation of life, which reached its ultimate form
in men; and the creation of Man from the scattered tribes of men.
Man the giant (whose brain extends to China and Peru, and which will
eventually include China and Peru), and who feels in the London part
of his brain a pain that exists in the Congo or Putumayo part of his
brain. Man, who, though a giant, is still in his infancy and who, when
he has reached his teens, will be a much more perfect being than he is
now.

“Ah, but will he?”

“Look back at the earth struggling up from chaos, and always and always
advancing toward the good; set back now, perhaps, for a million years
by the ferocity of life fighting for its foothold in the age of the
saurians and the monsters, breaking past that fearful period till those
terrible forms are utterly destroyed and there is moulded from them the
kindlier animals, and, from them, animals more kindly still; and until
among them are seen the first vague forms of men.

“Then look at these forms of men, how steadily they have advanced
in perfection and toward the good. Steadily, I say, though at times
the advance has been set back for perhaps a thousand years—till the
highest development of individual man was reached. That is to say, the
highest development that men could reach toward the good as individual
entities.

“Then what happened? From purely material causes all these individual
entities have become, or are becoming, fused into one great universal
entity. The struggle of the world spirit to higher things found itself
held up by the individual brain, just as before the birth of organic
life it found itself held up by the limits of the inorganic world. It
burst that boundary, and now it has burst the narrow limit imposed by
the individual mind and has found a new outlet for its energies in the
mind universal.

“And that mind, though recently formed, is developing hugely in the
direction of the good. It may receive set-backs, but even in the
hundred years since its birth, look at the beneficence displayed in its
working, and look at the effect of that beneficence on the lives of the
individual men it has taken into its great keeping.

“Since Man has arisen to take charge of the world, Justice and Mercy
have marked his dealings with men. All things have improved, and
ferocity and injustice have found themselves under the sway of a cruel
tyrant who is turning them into the wilderness to keep company with
the tigers and the remnants of a world that was once all ferocity and
cruelty.

“Since Man has arisen, he has taken war in his hand; he is weighing it
and finding it wanting. He has taken superstition and is pulling its
vile wings off. He is taking the unjust magistrate by his shoulders and
shewing him the door; and he has put his heel on the tyrant king. He
is freeing the individual man from the odious idea that the individual
man is made of mud, to be burnt forever in hell if there is a flaw in
his making. And he has taught humanity at large that it is an infamous
thing to hang a poor devil for the theft of a sheep.

“Man is only a hundred years old, and he has done all that since his
birth.

“The world spirit has been only a hundred years on this new path of
development. Can you doubt, then, seeing its progression during a
billion years, and how it has spread over ever new fields, that it will
continue so to progress and so to spread into fields newer still?”

“I can not.”


[Sidenote: The Craving for Truth]

“You are a philosopher,” she said.

“No. I am a man who is sick of philosophy, at least transcendental
philosophy. I want matter under my feet all the time. Philosophers make
me giddy, swinging like spiders on threads over abysms of nothing, and
weaving words into webs to catch—words which they mistake for thoughts.

“I am sick of religious theories, doctrines and dogmas, and gods. I
want Truth that a plain man can understand. I never could understand
the Christian creed as distinct from the teachings of Christ, and, what
is more, I believe no one else can. Mahommedanism revolts me. Buddhism
attracts me, yet I feel it to be as unfeeding to the truth-craving
part of my nature as a soap-bubble to a starving man. Materialism that
denies a god revolts me.”

“But you say you are sick of gods.”

“Yes, but I am more sick of materialists—all the rest of the religions
are pretty much the same; they don’t satisfy me. Nothing has ever
satisfied me but the faith I have struck out for myself and the
philosophy that a little child can understand.”

“And that faith?”

[Sidenote: The Essential Goodness of the World]

“Is simply in the essential goodness of the world. That is what I have
been driving at all the time since we began our conversation.”

“But doesn’t Christianity believe in that?”

“No; Christianity believes in the essential badness of the world.”

“Of course!—I forgot. All men are sinners.”

“Yes, that’s it. Christianity believes that the world is bad to the
core, and yet it believes that a God Who is all goodness made man
right at once and thoroughly bad; left him in this condition for an
indefinite time, and then sent His son down to redeem him.

“Now, I have a great reverence for other people’s religious beliefs,
but I have a greater reverence for honest thought, and I cannot—though
I worship Christ—believe that the world followed that line of
development.”

“You worship Christ, yet you deny him!”

“No—I worship Christ because He was entirely lovable. He shines
entirely alone in the world of the Western peoples, just as Buddha
shines in the world of the Eastern. He was goodness itself made visible
and audible. I worship all I can understand of Him. I cannot worship
Him as a mystical figure sent suddenly to earth to be put to a cruel
death in order that I might be saved, simply because my brain cannot
understand that process and proceeding, and I cannot worship what I
cannot understand. It is my defect, perhaps, but that defect is shared
by numerous people.

“And I speak for those people when I say that faith with us is
impossible unless based on a sure foundation of reason; that we must
understand before we can worship, that we do not deny God, but that
we do not _see_ Him, and that if He, the maker of the world, does
exist as an individual entity, we have implicit faith that He is the
fountain and origin of all goodness, and that goodness is His robe;
that we worship goodness and humbly believe that if He does exist
beyond the ken of our purblind eyes, He takes our worship of His robe
as homage to Himself far more profound than homage exacted by fear or
by superstition, and equal to the homage which great and saintly souls
lay at His feet by virtue, perhaps, of their truer sight of Him.

“But we deny, utterly, the essential badness of man, and our denial is
based on the sure fact that as man grows in stature, so, _pari passu_,
he grows in goodness. We believe that man, unaided by miracles, can
increase in goodness just by the virtue of the goodness that is in
life, a seed in the cave man, a flower in the civilised; we believe
that the printing-press, the telegraph, and the steam-engine have
produced better ethical result than all the teaching of the Apostles,
simply because those great fibres of communication have enabled men to
develop by mutual touch and the good in each individual man to rush
upward and find a vast field of new growth in the field of universal
good, a field that shines now, like a star galaxy above the hell of
darkness of a hundred years ago.

[Sidenote: Left-offs and Fissures]

“We believe that the minds of men, like the bodies of men, are filled
with old left-offs and fissures, and that just as some men are born
with the gills of fishes, through whose forms their beings once
passed, so some men are born with the thoughts of the reptiles they
once were, and that the hells of the priests and the sensuous and
painted heavens, the asceticism that kills joy, the persecutions and
mutilations, and mummeries and terrors under which men have groaned
for two thousand years have arisen, not from Religion, but from old
defects in the mind of man equivalent to defects in his body, like,
for instance, the vermiform appendix. These defects have taken the
good food that Christ gave the mind of man and turned it, not into
nourishment, but into causes of inflammation. Saurian hatred is bound
up with Religion; superstitions from the time of the cave men, a spirit
of simian persecution from the times of the tree men, and lust; all
these vile left-overs clinging to the mind of the individual man, as
the Pineal eye and vermiform appendix cling to his body, have made
Religion an impossible food for the advancement of ethics beyond a
certain point.

“Now mark this. The universal mind knows not lust; hates persecution;
abhors cruelty, and is preparing to free itself from superstition.

“How do I prove this? Take the press of the civilised world, which is
an expression of the universal mind. Where is the place of lust there?
Where is the place of Cruelty? Where is the place of Hate? Where is the
place of Tyranny? I tell you this, that the mind universal is as far
above the mind individual as the mind of a man is above the mind of a
chimpanzee—in ethics.

“An ordinary man dare not advance into the pure world of the mind
universal one half of the thoughts, nay, one-fourth of the thoughts
that fill his individual mind. He dare not preach the hatred that is
in him or shew the lust that is in him, or the spirit of persecution,
or even the spirit of intolerance; and the restraint upon him is
not so much the fear of the police, or the fear of public censure,
as a certain recognition in his own soul of ethical values and an
instinctive horror of putting forth into pure light his deformities,—a
recognition, in short, of the essential goodness of the world. Of
course there are extraordinary men not so affected—so are there
murderers and thieves.

[Sidenote: The New Religion]

“Now, I wish to be perfectly explicit about Religion, or, rather,
about the new Religion which the world has received from Man. The new
Religion which has advanced the world more in a hundred years than all
the priest-ridden religions advanced it since the dawn of Time.

“Its miraculous qualities arise from one fundamental fact. It knows not
Individualism.

“It is a simple recognition of fundamental Rights. It is not the
individual laying down the law for other individuals (as in the
churches); it is the universe of Man recognising the laws that brought
it into being, and imposing those laws on the individual. It does not
teach; it accepts.

“The great teachers of the world laid down precepts, they formulated
rules of conduct, and their scholars took precepts and formulæ and
boiled men alive with them for coining, and hanged men with them for
stealing, and burned women with them for witchcraft, and persecuted
men with them for making the sign of the cross—or not making it, and
twisted and bedevilled those precepts and formulæ into every shape that
an individual mind could imagine.

“The new Religion does not discard these precepts.

“Its decalogue, in fact, is longer and more highly developed in parts
than the old, but it does not preach its laws, it breathes them and
lives by them.

“More than that: it lives by the spirit of good, not by the letter.

“The universal mind, for instance, denounces Theft, yet it recognizes
that theft is a multifaced thing, some faces being almost innocent,
others hideously cruel. A hundred years ago, a thief had only one face,
one head, and one neck, by which he was hanged, if the theft amounted
to more than—six-and-eightpence, was it?

“—So, to come to the end of the matter, we have evolved a secular
morality that knows no more of creeds, or threats of future
punishments, or promises of future bliss than I know of Hindustanee;
which lives above all men, yet touches all men; which abhors lust and
cruelty and oppression; which teaches the kindness of Christ to men and
of Buddha to animals, and before which Atheists and Christians, Jews
and Gentiles all bow. A morality which, by the influence of the press,
the telegraph, and the steam-engine, those three Apostles, will spread
to the uttermost depth of China and to the last temple of that hideous
black blot, India; and which, in the course of ages, will change the
individual brain of man and raise it ethically far above its present
advanced position. No; development has not ceased. Development has only
begun. Give the world a thousand years more.”

“A thousand years!”

“I do not want to be unduly optimistical. I foresee set-backs even
in the world of universal thought. Give it a thousand years under
this new influence, and I foresee Man, individual man, on the heights
immeasurably above us.”

“And then?”

“And then—who knows? The world spirit that has reached so many limits,
and broken through them to higher things, will reach the limit of
perfection in man. If there is a field of perfection beyond, it will
break those limits and flow on.”

“And if there is no field beyond?”

“Then this whole business would be as senseless as a farce by M.
Crebillon the younger—whom I hope you have never read.”




PART II

THE HOME AS THE HIGHEST POINT YET REACHED IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE
WORLD


[Sidenote: The Advance on Material Lines]

“I cannot deny the truth of what you have told me,” she said. “I can
see clearly the different steps up which the world has come, but
does it not seem that this new universal mind which is the latest
great stage in the advance of the world has, according to you, been
produced by purely material causes? It is as much as to say that the
printing-press, the telegraph, and the steam-engine have created
Good—that they, surely, never could do?”

“They have not; they have only circulated thought; they have only
created the platform for thought to spread on. They have only created
conditions favourable to collective thinking. Collective thought,
infinitely more powerful and complex than individual thought, has
worked purely on the material given to it by individual brains. It
had no other origin or food. Had that material been essentially evil,
or if the evil in it had been excessive in comparison with the good,
the printing-press, the telegraph, and the steam-engine would have
increased the evil in the world.

“But you have indicated one point I would like to dwell on. The
absolute essentiality of material objects and conditions now in the
advance of the ‘spiritual’ and intellectual world, and the absolute
necessity of discarding dreams and fallacies. In the last great
advance, Hoe’s machine has done what all the doctrines could never
have done, yet Hoe’s object was not to construct a machine for the
improvement of ethics. He was, in his labours, a materialist, pure
and simple; his object was the improvement of a machine for the rapid
production of printed stuff. He did not work at all in the matter with
an eye to great and abstract improvements. He just did his little job
well and with all his energy.

“Stephenson, Watt, Wheatstone,—and ten thousand of others, including
the whole army of Science, Invention, and Labour—whose combined work
has produced the Universal Mind, who have, in fact, created Man, each
one of these had only one object: the extension of material knowledge
and the improvement of certain material objects and conditions. They
were not idealists, they were not teachers; they laboured to produce
no doctrines or airy formulæ. They were honest workmen in the cause of
material progress, each with his eye fixed on his job.

“Contrast with these the preachers and teachers—all excellent, mind
you, and making, in their way, for good, yet all, by their combined
efforts, useless for the great uplift that was coming and that could
only come through the work of Scientific men in the field of Science,
and Mechanicians in the field of material improvement.

“And this fact is a perfect lamp for all who would join in the work of
world development. _He who would assist in the development of the world
must work not in the field of dreams and theories, but in the field of
matter._ That is the doctrine of the spirit of the world whose great
hands laboured to make the hills and seas, and flung the moon to the
skies for a lamp and a tide-maker, who moulded the chimpanzees into
men, and men into civilised men. Dreams and theories and doctrines,
preachers, transcendental philosophers and teachers, and even
priests—we want all of them, but they are by-products. The work of the
world remains the essential thing, and the pioneers of the world are
the workers, not the dreamers.

“For, though the universal brain has subordinated the individual,
as the whole organism subordinates the cell, the universal brain
lives, alone, by the individual, and can only grow through material
means. And though the universal brain is better, infinitely, than the
individual, it can only exercise its power for good on the individual
through material means.

“That an individual brain may participate in the life and light of
the brain universal and feed on and increase with that life, and feed
and increase that life, it must first of all receive that light and
life; and, secondly, it must be in a condition to receive it, and
this can only be done by material means. And I will show you what I
mean by an instance. The man who is crushed beneath ruinous labour,
the man whose poverty condemns him not to think, the man who shivers
without a fire, who goes with an empty stomach—all of that vast crowd
of what we call the Poor—each one of these is cut off, more or less,
from the mind universal and can never receive its light except through
material means. Preaching and teaching, dreams and theories are useless
to these. To participate in universal thought—which is universal
good—they must first have the time to think in, they must be defended
from the wolves that prey on thought, Cold and Hunger; they must be
preached to practically by the two great Apostles, Wheat-flour and
Firewood; they must be treated as Hoe treated the dull steel that made
his press—lifted materially.

“Having lifted them thus with food and firewood, let Education have its
say, and Eugenics, up to a certain point. But education is as useless
to a work-broken or starving man as algebra to an ass. Since Man has
awakened to life, he has begun to recognize this. The old religions of
men looked on the poor as a necessary evil. “The poor are always with
us.” But man, though still only a hundred years old, perceives that the
Poor are his disease, that the criminals are his disease, and that the
idle are his disease.

“The universal mind rejects Poverty just as it has rejected Hate, and
Lust, and Intolerance; and its teaching in this respect is, ‘The poor
shall not be always with us.’ That is one of the greatest triumphs of
the great good giant born of the fusion of intelligences; even though,
as yet, the means toward this great end have not been discovered.”

[Sidenote: Socialism]

“What about Socialism?”

“Socialism, Anarchism, and Syndicalism are as yet the most obtrusive
results of this universal-mind disturbance, due to recognition of the
evils that affect the body of Man. The giant, on opening his eyes, is
furious at his rags and tatters, and the sores which they disclose.
Man, newly awakened, is disgusted at his general condition—and that
disgust is at the bottom of all the ‘revolutionary’ unrest which we see
to-day in the western world.

“I spoke to you of set-backs. Should that unrest develop into a storm,
the progress of the world would receive one of the set-backs it is well
accustomed to.”

“What do you mean by a storm?”

“I mean a revolution. An attempt by sudden and violent means to tear
up the rags and heal the ulcers of Man. For instance, were Socialism in
its extreme form to become the directing power of Man to-morrow, were
every man in the world to be equalized materially, the world would be
put back on its path of progress immeasurably.”

“Why?”

“Because the Socialists’ plan is constructed on a fallacy, and were
it to be followed by Humanity, it would mean utter disruption of all
social communities.”

“What is the fallacy?”


[Sidenote: The Fallacy]

“The fallacy is this: The idea that the individual is the essential
cell of the community, and that the energy and life of any community
spring from the individual. This is not so. The essential cell of the
community is the Family, or, in other words, the Home, and all the
energy and life of the community spring from the Home.

“The reason of this is simple. The Home is bisexual, the individual
unisexual.

“All the vitality of a community arises from the interplay of the two
sexes one upon the other, and this interplay, to be productive of
communal life and good, must take place in the Home. Individual men and
individual women utterly divorced from a home of any sort lose force
and deteriorate, and become warped and dwarfed.

“Sexual force, that is to say, the force that draws man to woman, that
produces Love and Children, and love of children, and the love of
children for their parents and for each other—sexual force, the fiery
grandfather of affection and filial love, can only be developed as a
force for communal good and individual good in the Home.

[Sidenote: The Home Is Everything]

“The Home is _everything_.

“It is the foundation of the community, it is the essential cell of the
world. You cannot injure the community without injuring the home, and
you cannot injure the home without injuring the community. You cannot
improve the condition of the community radically by pooling all the
money and distributing it among the homes, or by pooling all the means
of production and wealth creation and distributing work tickets to the
Home-makers. Such a distribution of the means of living would leave
utterly untouched the diseases that prey on the homes of the nation and
would touch with a killing hand the _vitality_ of the Home.”

“What do you mean by that?”

[Sidenote: Its Construction]

“Simply this. Every home is a tiny nation built exactly on the plan of
the big nation, of which it forms a unit and which, in fact, is its
counterpart in large.

“The home has its head, just as the nation has its head. Like the
nation, it is bisexual; it has its exchequer, its fighting force, its
ethical laws, its ambitions, its alliances, and its frontiers. It
trades with other homes and combinations of homes just as the nation
trades with other nations. It has its imports and its exports. It
has its foreign loans and national credit. It has its internal and
external politics. It has all these, whether it be a man and wife
living in rooms or a family of twenty, and it is the facsimile of the
nation simply because the nation is not a differentiation of it but an
aggregation of it. What is done to the nation is done to the home.

[Sidenote: Its Power]

“A home, or a family, if you like the term better, is a ganglion of
forces. Love and Pride, Economy (or the saving instinct) and Ambition,
not to speak of Affection, are the best of these forces, just as the
best forces in the nation are Love, Pride, Ambition, not to speak of
Patriotism.

“Inseparably connected with these fine forces are other most
powerful forces: Greed, Ostentation, Chauvinism (for a family can be
Chauvinistic as well as a nation), Love of Domination, etc.

[Sidenote: Its Death Blow]

“Now, the forcible toeing the line by _each family_ to a fixed income
and ambition would hit the life of the home a death blow.

“I will give you one instance. Ambition would be tom up by the roots.
God only knows all the fine things that are clinging to the roots of
Ambition. Man knows a few of them. Fathers of families deny themselves
and work hard that they may see their sons and daughters advance in
the world; knowing, as they do, that material advance is bound up with
good conduct, they look to their own conduct and the teaching of their
children. Mothers do the same.

“Look at life as you know it, and tell me frankly, is not this true?
That the destruction of Ambition in the family would tend largely to
destroy the energy and life of the family and its power as a centre of
force.”

“It is true.”

“Yet your Advanced Socialist, with his eyes fixed on what he calls ‘the
State,’ does not reckon on this, and his theory, were it turned to
practice, would destroy Ambition.

“Then, again, Pride, not pride in high deeds, but pure, low-down,
material pride—how nasty it is, but what a tremendous force it is!
From the cock that crows to the State that prospers, it is ubiquitous
as sodium. It is purely human and animal, yet it is one of the major
forces that hold the family together and make it living.

“Yet, if Ambition goes, material Pride must go—absolutely. Then take
the Hoarding Instinct. This would be absolutely destroyed by your
Advanced Socialist, yet without the Hoarding Instinct, which, in a
more or less attenuated form, is the Saving Instinct, family morality
would cut a poor show. Self-denial would vanish and that demi-virtue,
Carefulness.

“You will notice that I am keeping entirely to material instincts and
things, and I will rise to the height of saying that the teaching of
the destruction of the Hoarding Instinct by Socialists is a blasphemous
teaching, and the blasphemy is against the Holy Spirit of Good. I
have left the individual for the family, but the destruction of this
instinct would wreck the individual as well as the family.

“Ambition, Pride, the Hoarding Instinct, are not passions; they are
Laws that govern the growth of life, and they are as immutable as the
laws of gravity.

“Without going further, I shall content myself with the destruction of
Ambition, Pride, and the Hoarding Instinct, and leave the family robbed
of them by the Advanced Socialist—and withered in its growth. I shall
come back to the point I started from—the Home. Your Socialist talks of
the State.

“I say again—There is absolutely no such thing. There is only a
collection of homes.

“Behind the word State he hides his absolute ignorance of fundamentals.
He fancies, as I said before, that the nation is an aggregation of
individuals, and on that assumption he concludes that each individual
should be tuned to the pitch of the mass, so that all should sing in
harmony.

“But the nation in reality is not an aggregation of individuals at
all; it is an agglutination of Families or Homes.

“The word State, as implying a homogeneous and isolated power, is
philosophically meaningless. The State is not a separate entity
from the Home. It is only, in the administrative sense, a name for
the common executive which the homes of the nation have created to
conduct their external affairs individually as between themselves, and
collectively as between other common governments or executives.

“When the Advanced Socialist talks of the welfare of the State he is
talking of the welfare of the majority of individuals. When he talks
of the State seizing the common wealth, he means that the majority
of individuals will seize it and distribute it among themselves and
the minority. He has absolutely forgotten those separate hives of sex
life, industry, ambition, antagonism to other hives, and energy, which
are the real units of the nation, the Families, which are by their
constituent vices and virtues the breeding-grounds of all social energy
and virtues.

“And he would advance the world on its progress by seizing with the
brute force of individuals dominion over the homes of the nation. He
would allow an executive created by force to dictate to each home its
foreign and domestic policy; he would limit its imports and exports,
destroy its ambitions, plunder its hoard, and make slaves of its
individuals.

“That is Socialism pure and simple. Arsenic could not be simpler or
purer as a poison to the common good and the vitality of any social
community.”


[Sidenote: Building, Not Breaking]

“And you?”

“I would push the world on, as I said before, by building from below
and by purely material means. Instead of hitting the family a blow in
its vital part, I would foster its wellbeing. I would give it drains
and ventilation; I would, from the common fund that all the families
have pooled in the taxes, make better the houses; I would even call
upon the more prosperous families to help the poorer, but my one aim
and object would be the protection of the family in all that makes for
its vitality.

“I would foster family ambition and the saving and hoarding instinct,
and cooking and household management and everything that would keep
heads of families by the hearth instead of talking Syndicalism in
pot-houses and scandal in clubs. I can not say all I would do, but
broadly I would do everything possible for material betterment and
everything possible for the betterment of Family Life.

“And that is what will happen, Socialism or no Socialism. We began by
talking of the world as a globe of fire; we went on to hills and seas,
saurians, animals, men, civilised men, Man with a universal mind.

“We have reached the world as it is—a collection of families or
molecules, constituting Man with a universal mind.

[Sidenote: The Danger of Dreams]

“That mind, new-born, is filled with dreams and illusions: Anarchism,
Socialism, Syndicalism, and so forth.

“Let Man remember this: He was built out of facts, not theories;
matter, not fancies; families, not individuals; and that to grow in the
fashion that these new theorists would have him grow, he would have to
destroy the molecules that constitute him and resolve himself into his
original atoms.”

“What is a molecule?”

“A molecule is a family of atoms.”


[Sidenote: The Human Equation]

“You are, then, opposed to any fixed plan for the betterment of the
world. You would simply work by bettering material conditions?”

“I am not opposed to any fixed plan. I only say this, that all the
fixed plans I have seen are unworkable, and from one cause.”

“What is that?”

“The framers of them have forgotten that _any plan for betterment of
the world is absolutely unworkable that leaves out the Human Equation_.

“That is not a saying of mine. It is a Law. And, what is more, it is
part of a universal law. You cannot improve the condition of vegetation
unless you allow for the weakness as well as the virtues and strength
of vegetable life, nor can you improve the condition of mankind unless
you allow for its weaknesses and sins and follies as well as for its
virtues and its strength.

“What I have said to you about Socialism is not an _ex-parte_ statement
by a man opposed to Socialism. I am opposed to nothing but error, and
when I see Laws as fixed and as immutable as Bode’s Law or the law of
gravity disregarded by men who are proposing to reform the world, and
when I point out these fatal flaws in their reasoning, that does not
mean that I am opposed to all plans for reforming the world, but it
does mean that I would test by everyday logic any plan for everyday use.

“Will it work? Will it perform the work for which it was invented as a
kinetic engine?

“Those are the two questions on which the capitalist satisfies himself
first before he invests his money in any invention in mechanics.

“Then he asks, will it wear without undue destruction of parts?

“Then he satisfies himself as to its economics. Any plan of world
reform which leaves out the Human Equation is equivalent to an
engineering plan which leaves out of consideration details like the Law
of the Dead Centre or the Law of Expansion and contraction of metals.

“If you will examine any great engineering plan, whether it be the plan
for a bridge or a marine engine, you will find that it is a simple
bouquet of natural laws, all brought together by the engineer for a
definite purpose, and every law is stamped with the + or - stamp of
nature. They are the laws of weakness and the laws of strength, and
these wonderful laws that preside over matter so interpenetrate one
another that you cannot divorce them one from the other. They may be
said to form alloys. Thus the law that rules over the breaking strain
is at once the law of strength and weakness. The giant that lives in
water springs into steam under the conditions of the + law that gives
him strength, but never for a moment does he escape from the - law of
condensation which is ever ready to reduce him to water again in a
twinkling. And so on.

“Now, the task of the engineer is _not_ to eliminate the - laws from
nature, but to account for them, and, if possible, to make them, by a
trick of genius, work for him. The engineer does not attempt to destroy
Inertia, the weakness that lives in the dead centre of things; he
counteracts the idleness of inertia by means of the fly-wheel.

“The weakness of Steam under the law of condensation becomes in
the hands of the engineer the strength of the steam-engine. The
bursting power of steam, which is ever at war with the weakness of
the boiler metal, he counteracts by the safety-valve. He must allow
for everything, or his machine either will not work or bursts into a
thousand fragments.

“And do you imagine for a moment that human passions and energy,
strength and weakness, are less potent than the forces and weaknesses
which the engineer has to account for in his plan? Do you fancy that
Inertia is confined to metals, and friction to working parts of
machinery? Do you fancy that the social engineer, dealing with powerful
and explosive forces, can plot out a social machine without taking into
consideration the weaknesses which are complementary to the forces with
which he has to deal?

“Yet, in all the plans I have examined, from Socialism to Syndicalism,
not one engineer has submitted to me a plan in which human passions and
energy, strength and weakness, are allowed for.

“That is a fact.

“I shall give you just one little instance, taken from Syndicalism.

“We shall destroy all businesses, says the Syndicalist, by vexatious
strikes. The capitalist, having vanished (struck out), the hands will
work the business.

[Sidenote: Syndicalism]

“Just so. But he forgets that all businesses, like all men, die in
time. Suppose all businesses were converted into Syndicalist businesses
worked by all the hands, in a world of Syndicalist businesses—they
would not escape from the law of decay and death which hangs over
everything material. Businesses would die, and new businesses
would have to be born under Syndicalism, just as in our world. The
competition would be just as keen and the factors of death just as
potent. But the factors of life would not be as potent. How would a new
business be born to live under Syndicalism?

“Let us suppose that six men, by energy, hard work, a little money,
and self-denial (all necessary), found a small business. It grows and
prospers, and in a year’s time they find that they must introduce new
labour to cope with the work. But the new hands are all Syndicalists.
They don’t want wages, they must have their share in the business. They
are taken on, six of them.

“We now have twelve men working a growing and prospering concern.
Unless they are absolute fools, they must recognize that expansion to
them means simply more danger and worry, for expansion is impossible
without more labour, and all the new labour introduced only sops up the
profits like a sponge, and even were the profits to increase out of
proportion to the total labour employed, that increase of individual
profit would in the majority of businesses be small—in numerous
businesses it would be non-existent. Why should they expand and risk
what they have got—for all expansion in business means risk—simply to
benefit potential labourers?

“The law of Inertia comes at once into play, without any flywheel to
counterbalance it. The business ceases to grow, and, a hundred to one,
dies.

“That is only one of the flaws in the Syndicalist’s design. His machine
has not been constructed with a view to this and other human weakness.
In a world of automata it might work; in a world of flesh and blood it
wouldn’t. In short, Syndicalism could destroy all the businesses of the
world quite easily, but it could not build them again.

[Sidenote: The Theories]

“Syndicalism, Socialism, Anarchism cannot stand for a moment under the
eye of analysis without tumbling to pieces as practical inventions.

“They seem daring and ingenious, but they are dishonouring to virile
thought.

“Let us change for a moment and ask ourselves, not what we would say
to the engineer who disregarded natural laws, but what would we say of
a playwright who proposed to present life to us in a play constructed
without a proper view to human passions, weaknesses, and fallibility,
as well as to human virtue, altruism, etc.?

“We would say at once: It is not possible. He may write such a play,
but it would have this fault: it would represent no society that ever
lived in the world, and in a thousand years hence it would be as
valueless as it is to-day.

“And that is, in fact, what you might say of all the Theorists in
Humanity I know. They have written plays for men to act in that are
quite valueless to-day, would have been quite valueless a thousand
years ago, and will be quite valueless a thousand years hence.

“They have left out Human Nature.”



[Sidenote: The Laws of Nature]


“The Statesman who would leave the world better than he found it must
take Human Nature as it is, and, instead of attempting to make it grow
in direct violation of the laws that rule it, he must assist it to grow
in accordance with those laws.

“Those laws are in the main good.

“As I have pointed out to you, they are the laws that cultivated
crocodiles so that at last they became men, that cultivated a hell of
fire until it became a habitable world, and that will cultivate men
until they become better than present-day men.

“The Reformer must study those laws. He must look at the world
generously and widely, and from the very beginning of things. He must
have communion with the great earth spirit which has brought all of us
to where we are, and, humbling himself to the dust, study the working
of that spirit through the ages.

“He will, unless he is blind, inevitably see one truth: that this great
spirit has never meddled with the growth of life and thought, but has
laboured Titanically to prepare the conditions favourable to that
growth.

“It led life by the fin and claw till life developed hands and a mind
wherewith to develop its own conditions favourable to growth. And all
the improvements of the world since then have followed that law, the
Law of Improvement of Conditions, not any vague Law for the Improvement
of Life.

“When Life left the trees and found or dug caves to live in, it left
behind it, as a record of its first shelter and home and improved
condition, the first vague scratchings of Art. You may be sure that
could it have found a record we would discover also in those caves some
sign of the first glimmer of Love.

“The cave was the first home of the germ of civilisation, and the man
who built the first hut laid the foundations of all the palaces and
cathedrals of earth.

“The man who improved the condition of the first square yard of land
laid the foundation of all worldly prosperity, and the man who made the
first hinge of hide for the first door destroyed a barricade and laid
down the first condition for hospitality.

“_Whenever man has fallen away from the teaching of this law, he has
always fallen._

[Sidenote: Athens, Egypt, Rome]

“Athens rose to the heights of the Acropolis, but she failed in the
furtherance of those conditions necessary for the development of
the world—witness her streets. Rome rose to splendour and fell in
ruins simply because of her failure in the development of material
conditions to feed and foster Progress—witness her roads—made for
armies to march on. Egypt destroyed herself with dreams of mysticism
and power useless to the development of life—witness the Pyramids and
the Sphinx.


[Sidenote: The Work of the Barbarians]

“All these so-called civilizations failed because they were inhuman in
the path of progress.

“They were not developments, but essays in development. Their
civilizations had no relation to the broad Human Family, and gave no
platform for that family to develop on. Athens, Rome, Egypt carried
Arts, Power, Mysticism to the heights, while down on the plains the
tillers of the soil, the serfs, and the barbarians carried on Human
Nature.

“Athens, Rome, and Egypt, like some modern philosophers, took no
account of human weaknesses. Examine their laws and codes, their
policy, and their view-points, and you will at once see that their
platform was so narrow that only a class could stand on it, and that
their atmosphere was stifling to Man. Human nature could not develop in
it. There was no liberty for growth. Human nature had reached a certain
point; it made blind attempts to rise higher. It rose to heights of
Egyptian power and mysticism, and fell; to heights of Athenian art and
philosophy, and fell; to heights of Roman splendour, and fell. It was
like an animal trying to leave a sea, and falling back at each attempt
by reason of the crumbling of the shore under its weight.

“It had not found the resting-place of solid rock. The hard rock of
Liberty and material good and material Reason and material development.

[Sidenote: Bacon]

“At last it found the rock by the man’s hand that could only find
and cling to that rock. That hand was Bacon’s. It was so essentially
material and human that it could distinguish rock from friable sand,
and so powerful that, having found a hold, it never let go.

“Bacon was the first modern man to seize the earth spirit’s law that
development is only possible when conditions for development have been
already prepared.

“His ‘Fruit’ was another word for conditions.

“His genius recognized intuitively that the only way to develop Man is
to let Man develop, and the only way to let him develop is to give him
liberty, mentally and physically, and a safe and sheltered platform.

“Better his material conditions.”

       *       *       *       *

“You asked me, was I opposed to any ‘plan’ for the Development of
Humanity, and I replied, and reply, in effect, that I am not, always
providing that it allowed for human development along human lines.

“That is the sum total of the matter, and the first essential of Man in
his relation to the world.”




PART III

WOMAN IN RELATION TO MAN


[Sidenote: No Such Thing as Woman]

“And what about woman’s relationship to the world?”

“There is no such thing as woman.”

“Oh! Oh!”

“There are only women. To talk of Woman as a being apart from man is
absurd. When I used the word Man in talking of the universal mind, I
included women. The word Man as used to represent men is a falsity in
that it excludes women. The word Woman is absurd, however you take it.

“Men and women are cut out of the same piece of stuff—Human Nature. The
woman is cut a bit smaller, and her outline is a bit different, that is
all.

“Mentally it is just the same as physically. She is cut, as a rule, a
bit smaller, and the outline of her mind is a bit different. But it is
only a difference in size and outline. The stuff is the same. And the
outline of the one is complementary to the outline of the other; where
the woman’s outline sinks in the man’s sticks out, and _vice versa_.
Mentally and physically it is the same; they are, in fact, the two
parts of that great jig-saw puzzle, Humanity.

“The Male and Female are not a necessity of Life. They are only a
necessity of higher vegetable and animal life. A large number of lower
organisms propagate unsexually—the monera, the am[oe]bæ, foraminifera,
radiolara, etc. These increase either by splitting in two or putting
out buds. The Male and Female are not, then, a radical necessity of
life, but they are a radical necessity in development and in progress
from a lower to a higher form of life. The Male and Female are not, as
I will try to point out, of the essence of life, but of the essence of
the forms of life.

“We must imagine that the first germ of life was sexless, a cellular
structure that multiplied by splitting in two. We must imagine that
because the rigid law of advance from the simple to the complex imposes
on us the assumption that the first form of life must have been the
simplest, and the simplest is the organism that develops by fission.

“There was a tremendous moment, then, when all earthly life lived and
moved without sign of sex; cellular forms all alike, all developing
alike, and by the same method.

“Had all these forms continued unchanged, the world would now be just
as then. But a change came, due, we must suppose (from analogy), not to
a change in the radical nature of these organisms, but to a change in
the external conditions affecting some of them. The food environment,
or the temperature environment, or the electrical environment
surrounding some of these organisms, or some other unknown but always
external influence, wrought a change in some of these lowly forms of
life. The mother of Form—Differentiation—was the result.

“The organisms affected by Differentiation had to reproduce themselves
by producing other organisms in a slightly different form, either lower
than themselves, or on the same plane as themselves, or higher than
themselves.

“Had they taken the first course, Differentiation would have meant
destruction and death to all the organisms it touched. The second
course was absolutely impossible. A simple organism cannot alter itself
without ascending or descending; if it becomes the least degree more
complex, it ascends; if it becomes the least degree less complex,
it descends. It cannot alter its nature or its form in a horizontal
direction. It is absolutely condemned to the vertical, and must go up
or down.

“These basic simple organisms, then, that formed the foundation for all
life, must have responded to their change in environment by ascending,
that is, by becoming more complex. They must have done this, or else
have descended to death. They were making for the great goal, Sex.

“How they reached that goal may be a story yet to be read by Science,
but reach it they did on the day that two of these simple-minded
organisms reproduced themselves, not by individual fission, but by
mutual union.

“It was not a radical change in the life of the organisms; it was only
a radical change in the method by which that life was reproduced.

“It was a change in business methods. It was co-operation, pure and
simple, between two organisms in the production of other organisms.
Before that day, the whole business had to be done by one individual;
after that day it was done by partners, one called Male, the other
Female.

[Sidenote: Sex a Partnership]

“Now, what is the essence of partnership? Mutual assistance. In a
labour partnership where the business is in the least complex, two men
would be of very little assistance to each other who insisted always
on doing the same job, or the same part of a job. There must always be
a top sawyer and a bottom sawyer, a man who does what the other cannot
do, or gives what the other has not got.

“It is exactly the same in the business of life-production, and the
instant that Form could demonstrate them, the two partners appeared,
and the instant that the new business of Life originated by this
partnership became acute and competitive, the partners found themselves
leagued together not only for the production of life, but for the
defence of that life.

“But that carries us beyond my immediate point, which is that the
terms Male and Female do not connote separate origins for the objects
they apply to, nor essential differences between those objects. The
two partners are essentially the same, only that one has got his hands
horny from doing the rough jobs of the partnership and the other has
kept her hands soft; one has developed mammary glands by doing her
business in the partnership, the other has developed his biceps in
doing his. One has developed certain attributes of mind in fighting the
world, the other certain other attributes in keeping the home. One has
developed certain organs for reproduction, the other—others.”

“Yet you deny the existence of Woman.”

“Absolutely. But I do not deny the existence of Sex, always holding
that, though Sex is the most powerful factor in development, it has
nothing to do with the essence of life. If it had, you would find men
and women different from one another in essentials. They are not.

“As human beings they are exactly the same, _only_ that you find some
passions and attributes more developed in men, others more developed in
women. But there is not a passion or attribute belonging to men that
is not shared in by women, and _vice versa_.”

“But there is a vast difference between women and men.”

“Of course there is, but it is only a difference, not a division;
moreover, it is only a surface difference, for the deeper you go into
their natures, the less apparent is that difference. Use the touchstone
of the profound emotions. Who has not seen a strong man weep like a
woman, or a weak woman show the heroism of a man? Does sorrow affect
men less than women? Does great joy affect women more than men?

“Is love a thing apart from man, and is it woman’s whole existence? It
is not. That claptrap was born of Fancy, and the passion for saying
a catchy thing. The love of men for women is just as powerful and as
intimately connected with their existence as the love of women for men.
Fidelity, the only true sign of real love, is exhibited by men in just
the same proportion (allowing for the greater temptations of men) as it
is by women.

“No; men and women are absolutely the same as human beings in all
things essential, and the man who denies that is the man who sees the
world with only one eye, and only uses the surface of his brain.

“Men and women are _partners_. Partners in a difficult business. They
have been partners for millions of years, and the differences between
them are caused by the exigencies of the partnership.

[Sidenote: Men—Women, and Women—Men]

“Even in those surface mental differences that mark sex a man will
often approximate to a woman in some particulars, and a woman to a man.
These surface differences are not unalterable.

“Take the love of gossip. Listen to the talk of army men and navy men
and club men.

“Take Vanity, and look at the nuts and the dudes and the macaronis.

“Take curiosity, and remember Coventry. Take love of dress—”

“And remember Mr. ——,” said she, laughing.

“Exactly. And let any one who would controvert me consider his friends
and relations critically, and tell me, with his hand on his heart, are
the males destitute of female attributes and the females of male?

“They are not. They are all human beings, and to class them
philosophically under the two divisions, Woman and Man, is a profound
error and a commonplace error.

“It has led men to look on women as mysterious beings with essential
motive springs and essential mental clockwork quite different from that
of men.

“It has led to frightful volumes of gas being generated in certain
skulls, like the skull, for instance, of X——, and some of the leaders
of the Feminist movement, and the escape of this gas is making an
alarming noise.

“When Ellen Key, for instance, says that ‘Human souls can be divided
into organic and inorganic,’ and that ‘Ibsen makes the masculine soul
inorganic, definitive, finished, determined; the feminine soul, on the
other hand, he more often makes organic, growing in evolution,’ what
does she mean?

“All this loose talk about souls being organic and inorganic I would
not exchange for one small concrete fact—such as that Mrs. Jones is a
better man than her husband, or that John Smith ‘ought to have been
born a girl,’ facts that help to prove that not only are men’s and
women’s bodies and ‘souls’ made of the same stuff, but that the sex
difference is so unfixed a quality that we find women who are to all
intents and purposes men, and men women.

“I will be bold enough to lay down a law based on experience, History,
and Common-sense.

“There is not a womanly attribute of either body or soul that has
not been born of the stuff that men are made of, and there is not an
attribute of women that has not been developed to its womanly pitch
_not_ by virtue of any mysterious energy rising from the source of
‘woman,’ but by purely external conditions. And the same with regard
to men.

[Sidenote: Conditions, Again]

“There you have the old ‘conditions’ coming up again. Let us get at
facts.

“The æsthetic sense is pre-eminently womanly. You will say, at once,
‘This is not so. Women are rarely as good artists as men.’ I was not
talking of art, but of the æsthetic sense.

“Every male artist inherits this sense from his mother. I am speaking
from long observation and experience. It is the woman in the artist
that paints; the woman in the poet that feels; the woman in the
novelist that colours the work. Every man has the æsthetic sense more
or less developed, but women have it, _as a mass_, more developed than
men. Who, for instance, puts the flowers in the cottager’s window?

“I do not believe that the æsthetic sense in the greatest artist is
more developed than it is in hundreds of thousands of women who never
touch art. His power of craftsmanship, purely material and mechanical,
and his power of constructive imagination raise him to the heights, and
these powers only come from the superior conditions favourable to them
under which men have dwelt.

“Go into any house, and you can tell if a woman lives there. Some
delightful trace or touch betrays the fact. It may be a few flowers—it
may be this or that, but the æsthetic touch is there; and in the home
it is chiefly the woman who brings it. Now, why has woman developed
this delightful attribute? It is a property of the mind; but men have
it, too. Why has she developed it out of proportion to the man’s
development in this particular?

“Since she shares it with the man, it is a common attribute, and it is
the purest common-sense to believe that she developed it simply because
the conditions affecting her life were more favourable to its growth
than the conditions affecting the life of the man.

“Though the first scratchings of art in the cave-men’s dwellings were,
most likely, the work of a man, who gave him the æsthetic basis of his
artistic sense? Arguing from what we know—his mother.

“And why did his mother cultivate this sense more than his father?

“If you had seen his father tearing through forests after, and
sometimes in front of, infuriated wild beasts, while his mother kept
cave and looked after the children, you would have a complete and
pictorial answer to that question.

“Even the weariness of the chase is disastrous to the æsthetic sense.
Look at all the hunting men and women you know, if you doubt what I say.

“So, then, without any transcendental talk about ‘souls’ being organic
or inorganic, we may say, arguing common-sensically, that women have
developed one of the most distinguishing ‘womanly’ attributes, not
because she is a woman, but because she is a human being, and the
conditions under which she has always lived have tended toward that
development.

“Again—the love of a mother for her offspring, the one attribute of all
attributes most distinctly and profoundly ‘womanly’: is it different
in kind or essence from the love of a father for his offspring? Surely
not, but it is more complex, more intimate, and more tender and more
lovable, simply because the conditions under which it has grown have
been more favourable to the development of this complexity, intimacy,
and tenderness.

“It is the same beautiful thing, but more peculiarly cultivated, and it
has grown in complexity while the man has been hunting, or trading, or
fighting the world in some other way.

“Go through the whole category of those attributes whose superior
development makes woman the flower of the earth. You will find not
one which has developed on its own account owing to some mysterious
chemistry of being peculiar to Woman,—all have developed from the
common soil of humanity, owing to the superior conditions for their
development in women.

“And the chief of those conditions has been Protection. The old
conditions come up again. The man when he was hunting and killing
beasts for his wife and children, and fighting for their existence,
never imagined that he was by his labours founding Art and Poetry. He
was. He was giving their germs conditions to grow in. Love, tenderness,
gentleness, affection, morality: all were there in the cave with the
woman. She suckled them with her children; she trained them in their
growth with kisses—and slaps. They were the man’s no less than the
woman’s, common to both their natures, but he left them in the cave
with her to take care of, while he went hunting.

“Conditions have made woman what she is: the best and most beautiful
thing in the world. And now Feminists want to change those conditions,
just as Socialists want to change the conditions affecting man.

“Both strike at the Home.”


[Sidenote: Feminism]

“‘Woman must have a freer life.’

“‘To evolve her genius, woman has but one need—Freedom.’

“‘She must be free to form her own ideas and morals.’

“‘Woman must reorganize the mind and soul of humanity, for man has
disintegrated it.’

“Those are some of the teachings of the Apostles of Feminism. I take
them from the work of a clever American woman, and they are a fair
statement of the case for Feminism.

“To the first I give an unqualified assent.

“Freedom, within limits, is the basic condition of growth.

“But what does the Feminist mean by Freedom?

“The third dictum answers that.

“‘She must be free to form her own ideas and morals.’

“One would fancy from that that ‘woman’ was an animal capable of
evolving ideas and a moral code different from man. Since woman is just
the same human animal, we may put this aside, and ask again what the
Feminist means.

“She asks, in fact, that women may be free to change their morals (we
shall leave the talk about ideas aside for the present) in any way they
please.

“Now, morals cannot be changed in a horizontal direction. It’s up, or
down, or stationary. Any change in morals is for the better or for the
worse.

“Does the Feminist ask for freedom to change her morals for the better?
She has perfect freedom to do that; most men will applaud her, and most
women, too.

“Does she ask for freedom to change her morals for the worse?

“If she is making that demand, let her frankly avow that what she wants
is license, not freedom.

“There is a lot of difference between the two.

“I am not arguing to get the Feminist in a hole, but simply to clear
the ground of brambles.

“She does want license, as a matter of fact; one would be blind who
looked at her programme and did not see that.

“And the license she wants is not the license to steal, or lie, or
murder, or commit arson. When she talks of forming her own morals, she
has one morality entirely and solely in view—the morality that presides
over Love; and when she asks for license, it is license in Love.

“Men have more license in this matter than women. That is undoubtedly
so.

“Men, since the beginning of the world, have had more license than
women; but that license is a relic of barbarism. It was useful once,
but it is becoming less useful every day, and _pari passu_ men are
becoming more moral.”

“Useful once?”

“In this way. Men in the past were the fertilisers of the world. Who
brought Roman blood to England, Norman blood, Norse blood? Men. Roman,
Norman, and Norse women had nothing to do with the matter. Their duty
was to stay at home and be moral. Armed and roaming men fertilised the
world, just as bees fertilise a field of clover, crossed the races, and
made the vitality of them.

“Roman, Norse, and Norman virtues that make England great were born
of Roman, Norse, and Norman license. The same fact applies to all
Europe. But the day of the free-lance in love is gone. He who was once
a world-maker is now a world-curse. He is not now a world-maker, but a
Home-wrecker and a woman-wrecker.

“Nations no longer require him for a fertiliser. Men no longer travel
in masses, armed with spears; they go in railway carriages, accompanied
by their families, and the world can get all the fertilisation it wants
by immigration.

“License still lives among men, but it lives as a reptile; among men
it is dying, yet Feminists, when they ask for license, would give this
dying thing a new birth among women. They forget that what was once a
bad necessity is now a hideous and dying superfluity.


[Sidenote: The Right of Motherhood]

“I have heard it stated by Feminists that motherhood is the right of
every woman.

“So is fatherhood the right of every man, and on that plea a man might
base a very wide scheme of immorality.

“As a matter of fact, there is something else: the right of the child.

“A woman has _no_ right to motherhood unless she can provide a home for
her child. A father has no right to fatherhood who cannot do likewise.
And by a home I do not mean shelter and food; I mean everything sacred
that lies in that word Home. Love, affection, self-restraint, mutual
respect, and family respect.

“Of course, if the Feminist says, Destroy the home, one has nothing
more to say. She is logical.

“But to say, I shall increase license among women without injuring or
destroying the home, at once reduces her to a person who is not logical.

“As a matter of fact, the Feminist movement, as far as its moral side
goes, is confined to a certain number of men who desire the extension
of license; to a certain number of women who do likewise; and to a
certain number of women who feel acutely that women are put upon by men
in the matter of morals. That men have set up a rule of conduct for
women which they don’t obey themselves.

“This is not so. The sternest moralists are women, and the morality of
these moralists is not an abstract quality; it arises from a profound
and intuitive motherhood instinct that tells them that license is death
to the welfare of the child, whether it develops and is shown in the
mother or the child.

“The child must restrain itself and not steal the jam; the woman must
restrain herself and not let her honour be stolen.”

“And, you will say, the man must restrain himself and not steal her
honour?”

“Certainly.

“And every man, who is a man and not a cur, obeys that law as far as in
him lies.

“Man, you must remember, has a lot to fight against, and nothing so
much as the old rules of license under which he has lived for ages.

“They used to be a royal robe; they are now a beggar’s tatters. He is
ashamed to be seen in them nowadays; he only puts them on in private;
yet they are always crying to him to put them on, just as filth is
always crying to a dog, Roll in me.

“That is all I have to say about the moral side of the Feminist people.
Their claim for equal freedom with man in other respects is far more
pleasant to notice. And it comes to this:

“Since the mass of women is just the same as the mass of men, in the
name of Humanity, why should not the woman mass have the same freedom
in affairs as the man, politically and socially?

[Sidenote: Social and Political]

“Why should the women of the nation not be free to expand their mental
and bodily energy in every social and political path in which the men
expand it?

“Certainly they ought. But they can’t.

“They could, in a nation whose units were individuals; they can’t, in a
nation whose units are homes.

“Every woman is a potential or actual queen-bee. Her duty is to found a
hive, not to make honey. Like a man, she has only a limited quantity of
energy.

“The little nation of the hive or home, which is, in very fact, the
nation itself writ small, makes vast calls upon the man’s energy and
the woman’s. Here alone is the national life as distinct from the
national affairs.

“It is the germinal spot and centre of all national activity; it is
the primary school of all morality; and it is the supreme province of
the woman. Here she is a world Builder.

“This is her kingdom. Her duties here are not only family, but
national. There are no humble duties in a home: they are all great and
national duties, directly determining the advancement of the world.
Like all great duties, they imply great outputs of energy, self-denial,
and restraint, and it is impossible for her to use her energies
effectively in two directions. She cannot be at the hub of the wheel
and the tire both at the same time. In other words, she cannot be at
home and in parliament or the law courts, or the council chambers of
the nation, or the studios or dentists’ parlours at one and the same
time.

“‘_Woman must be free to create her own conduct and to seek her own
experiences for self-development_,’ runs another dictum of our Feminist
sage.

“In the home she is only free to create her own conduct in a manner
conducive to the well-being of the home. If she swerves from this law,
she is a defaulter and an enemy to good. The same may be said of her
freedom in self-development.

“Certainly she must be free to develop herself, and so must the man be
free to develop himself.

“But the man who develops his muscles in golf at the expense of
his business time and energy is a slacker and a defaulter and a
home-injurer. And the woman who develops her political instincts or her
mind power at the expense of her home time and energy is the same.”


[Sidenote: The World-Builders]

“It seems to me,” said my audience, “that you look on women as though
they were all married and with household duties to perform.”

“I look on women as though they were all married women, or women
preparing to enter that state. No other women are of any account at all
as world-builders.

“They may be delightful, charming, pleasant, true women in every way,
but if they are not married they are not true women-factors in the
progress of the world. Simply because they have no hand in the physical
building of the future.

“The child is the future made visible and concrete. When you lay your
finger on a child you are touching not flesh only, but future ages.

“The unmarried woman-genius may influence the art or the thought of
her time; the labourer’s wife who produces a bouncing boy that lives
has produced the future. More than that, she has sent forth her own
attributes to dwell in the future. More than that, by her care and
education of that child she is laying the foundation for vast world
effects.

“That is the woman’s triumphant position in the scheme of things. She
is a partner in world-building, and the duties lying on her share of
the partnership are patent and obvious to the meanest intelligence.

“They are both moral and material, and they imply in their performance
one supreme virtue: self-sacrifice. Not freedom to develop according to
inclination; not freedom to alter her morals; not freedom to imitate
the worst faults of men; but slavery in the interests of her children,
her husband, and her home.

“And what happy people these slaves are! Just as happy as the
men-slaves who, under the dominion of good conduct, love, and the hive
instinct, often work themselves to death, like the bees, that others
may live and prosper.

“But, as you say, all women cannot be mothers. Yet it is essential that
the mothers of the nation should be protected at all costs from the
disease which lurks under the specious word ‘Feminism.’”


“They have come a long journey together, the Man and the Woman, and all
through that long journey across the ages they have been leading the
child by the hand.

“And if the wicked and blasphemous people who talk of sex-hate had but
the scientific and poetic perception enabling them to see those three
grand and mysterious figures as they are on the shores of Time, we
would be spared, perhaps, from the poisonous blight of sexisms.”


“You are so positive,” said she, “that I often haven’t dared to
interrupt you, and you talk so quickly that all you have said, though I
understood it at the time, is now a jumble in my mind.”

“I am positive, because there is no use at all in being negative.
People who believe in what they say are usually positive—even though
they may be wrong.

“If I have talked too quickly, I shall write out what I have said and
send it to you; then you can pick it to pieces as much as you please.”


THE END


NOTE TO PART I OF THE BOOK

In my experience, judging from the men I have met in life and the men
whose lives I have read about, the really strong men of the world have
been men of strong belief—and mostly men with a strong belief in a
personal God.

Faith is a very wonderful thing, call it what you please. There is in
Faith an enormous dynamic energy the origin of which, analyse it as
much as I will, leaves me utterly baffled and bewildered.

One might say that it is an orientation of the mind, a pointing of all
the thoughts in one definite direction by which the mind, as a machine,
gains harmony which is expressed in power of action, and I believe the
co-ordination of the functions of the mind under a common governing
belief does, in part, explain the miraculous power conferred on men by
Faith.

Also one might say that the mind capable of great faith is essentially
a positive mind, a direct mind, and a constructive mind.

Also one might say a great many things, and yet leave the foundation of
the question as deeply involved in darkness as ever, and the mind of a
Newman, a Gladstone, or a Cromwell the same towering mystery.

But the fact remains clear that the man without belief in something
above and beyond this world, or in something _in_ this world, some
tide, or core, or essence of which his own little life is a part, loses
the alliance of that power which we indicate in the word Faith.

There is no doubt at all that the western world has lost power, and
that England is losing power daily by the steady loss of Faith.

The crude, hard faith in a personal God which is vanishing from among
us is a dynamic force that is passing away, and it is being replaced by
what?

It is being replaced by a good many excellent things: by an increase
of tolerance and sympathy; an increased consideration for the
oppressed, and a re-valuation of all the considerations that come under
the title Justice; but all these and many more good things that have
sprung to growth in the universal mind leave the individual mind still
lacking Faith.

Darwinism it was that struck the first real blow at a personal God, and
men, in their minds at least, have nearly extinguished the chemical
hell.

And Darwinism, destroying the old rigid, childlike faith, handed the
world not Atheism, but a new Faith, which the world never seems to have
grasped.

The Faith in a world ever progressing toward the good.

Once you have grasped the great truth that your life is a part of this
miracle of growth, as long as you conform as far as in you lies to the
growth of good in yourself, you will have a Faith that will fill you
with new force.

And it is a faith that no one can refuse, for its teaching is written
across the rocks and the stars, and so plainly that a child can read
it, once it is pointed out to him.




Appendices




APPENDIX A


I have said very little about Anarchism—merely mentioned it by name;
yet the inquiries I have made into this subject reveal an organisation
and a literature astonishing to the everyday mind. To use the words of
that ardent bibliophile, H. Bourdin:

“To most people the word Anarchy is evil-sounding, but it is not the
same to learned men and to collectors and lovers who acquire the desire
of accumulating documents for history’s sake.

“The Anarchist literature has not a determined origin, being not the
expression of a system invented and progressively elaborated, but the
negation of all systems, produced by the desire to batter down the
despotic in all its forms, the rules and duty imposed by prejudice or
by force, and to give impulse to the free development of humanity.
All acts which have been accomplished and all words which have been
pronounced in hatred of this constraint and in favour of this freedom
are consciously or unconsciously the production of Anarchy.

“It is astonishing when one glances at the huge quantity of literature
of all kinds which has been printed in the space of the last
half-century for the exposition of their ideal thought; no other party
or sect, for whatever cause they had to defend, can be compared to
this, except Christianity, which has taken about 2,000 years over it.
Consider the difficulty which they have met in publishing clandestinely
their periodicals, broadsides, etc., hunted by society as wild beasts;
domiciliary perquisitions destroyed their works, which were merely
their thoughts.”

M. Bourdin has courteously allowed me to inspect the huge library
of Anarchistical literature which he has collected, consisting of
journals, broadsides, pamphlets, volumes, songs, theatrical plays, etc.

To give you an idea of the extent and nature of the Anarchistical
press, I enumerate a few of the journals:

_L’Anarchie, Journal de l’Ordre_, May, 1850.

(In 1850, Anarchy had already a press.)

_Le Libertaire_, 1858–1861.

_L’Egalité_, 1869–1872.

_L’Internationale_, 1870–1873.

_La Révolution Sociale_, 1871–1872.

_L’Ami du Peuple_ (Liège), 1873–1875.

_Ni Dieu ni Maître_, 1880. (You see we are getting on in titles.)

_La Révolution Sociale_, 1880.

_Le Drapeau Noir_, 1883.

_L’Emeute_, 1883–1884.

_La Lutte_, 1883.

_Le Défi_, 1884.

_La Guerre Sociale_, 1885. (Brussels).

_La Révolte_, 1894.

_L’Antipatriote_, 1899. (Cat out of the bag.)

_Le Tocsin_, 1892–1894.

_La Débâcle_, 1893.

_L’Insurgé_ (Lyons), 1893.

_Le Cyclone_ (Buenos Aires), 1895–1896.

_La Cravache_, 1898.

_Le Cravacheur_, idem.

_Le Cri de Révolte_, 1898–9.

_Les Crimes de Dieu_, 1898.

_La Bastille_, 1902–3.

_Germinal_, 1904–1910.

_L’Anarchie_, 1905.

_L’Anarchiste_, 1907.

_L’Action Directe_, 1907–1908.

_La Mère Peinard_, 1908.

_La Révolution_, 1909.

_Les Révoltés_, 1909.

_La Bataille Syndicaliste_, 1911.

_The Anarchist_ (Glasgow), 1912.

And these are only a few of the journals in the great Bourdin
collection.* I have only mentioned some of the French journals
devoted to the cause; there are English and German as well, and there
are sure to be Russian and Spanish and Italian journals to match.

  * This collection is for sale, I believe.

It is a big movement. Give me the literature of a movement, and I will
feel its pulse and tell you about its constitution. The literature of
Anarchism tells that it is very much alive.

What is Anarchism? It is really unconstructive Socialism and
Syndicalism.

The Anarchists want to destroy society as it is, and let Human Nature
ramp on the remains.

The Socialist wants to destroy society, and build it again on an
anti-Human-natural plan.

The Syndicalist wants to destroy the Business World and to erect a new
business world on an unbusinesslike basis.

Of the three, I prefer Anarchy.

It is the only one of the three dreams based on common-sense, for it
frankly aims at Anarchy, and Anarchy is exactly what it would get were
it to succeed.

       *       *       *       *

I have said “The three dreams,” and though I have permitted myself
to sneer at some points in the philosophy of some of these dreamers,
I have no sneers at all to expend on their energy, and on their
wholeheartedness. They are all trying to express something, and that
something is the Poverty and the Misery of the world.

Socialism, Syndicalism, and Anarchism are all one voice speaking in
different tones.

And that voice is growing and must be answered, not by Repression, but
by Philosophy.

The world is not all wrong, but it is not all right. Man is speaking
in no uncertain tones, and he wants some reply more apposite to his
argument than the glib chirrup of Pippa.




APPENDIX B

A PASSAGE FROM HAECKEL*


Under the title of _Design in the Living Organism_, the famous
embryologist, Carl Ernst Baer, published a work in 1876 which, together
with the article on Darwinism which accompanied it, proved very
acceptable to our opponents, and is still much quoted in opposition to
evolution. It was a revival of the old teleological system under a new
name, and we must devote a line of criticism to it. We must premise
that, though Baer was a scientist of the highest order, his original
monistic views were gradually marred by a tinge of mysticism with the
advance of age, and he eventually became a thorough dualist. In his
profound work on _The Evolution of Animals_ (1828), which he himself
entitled _Observation and Experiment_, these two methods of
investigation are equally applied. By careful observation of the
various phenomena of the development of the animal ovum, Baer succeeded
in giving the first consistent presentation of the remarkable changes
which take place in the growth of the vertebrate from a simple
egg-cell. At the same time, he endeavoured, by far-seeing comparison
and keen reflection, to learn the causes of the transformation, and
to reduce them to general constructive laws. He expressed the general
result of his research in the following thesis: “The evolution of
the individual is the story of the growth of individuality in every
respect.” He meant that “the one great thought that controls all the
different aspects of animal evolution is the same that gathered the
scattered fragments of space into spheres, and linked them into solar
systems. This thought is no other than life itself, and the words and
syllables in which it finds utterance are the varied forms of living
things.”

  * This translation from Haeckel’s “The Riddle of the
  Universe” is taken from an edition published by The
  Rationalist Press in England, and Harper & Brothers in the
  United States of America, Copyright 1900, to whom grateful
  acknowledgment is made for permission for its use in this
  volume.

Baer, however, did not attain to a deeper knowledge of this great
genetic truth and a clearer insight into the real efficient causes
of organic evolution, because his attention was exclusively given to
one-half of evolutionary science, the science of the evolution of the
individual, embryology, or, in a wider sense, ontogeny. The other half,
the science of the evolution of species, phylogeny, was not yet in
existence, although Lamarck had already pointed out the way to it in
1809. When it was established by Darwin in 1859, the aged Baer was no
longer in a position to appreciate it; the fruitless struggle which he
led against the theory of selection clearly proved that he understood
neither its real meaning nor its philosophic importance. Teleological
and, subsequently, theological speculations had incapacitated the
aging scientist from appreciating this greatest reform of biology.
The teleological observations which he published against it in his
_Species and Studies_, in his eighty-fourth year, are mere repetitions
of errors which the teleology of the dualists has opposed to the
mechanical or monistic system for more than 2,000 years. The “telic”
idea, which, according to Baer, controls the entire evolution of the
animal from the ovum is only another expression for the eternal “idea”
of Plato, and the _entelecheia_ of his pupil, Aristotle.

Our modern biogeny gives a purely physiological explanation of the
facts of embryology, in assigning the functions of heredity and
adaptation as their causes. The great biogenetic law, which Baer
failed to appreciate, reveals the intimate causal connection between
the _ontogenesis_ of the individual and the _phylogenesis_ of its
ancestors; the former seems to be a recapitulation of the latter.
Nowhere, however, in the evolution of animals and plants do we find any
trace of design, but merely the inevitable outcome of the struggle for
existence, the blind controller, instead of the provident God, that
affects the changes of organic forms by a mutual action of the laws of
heredity and adaptation. And there is no more trace of “design” in the
embryology of the individual plant, animal, or man. This _ontogeny_
is but a brief epitome of _phylogeny_, an abbreviated and condensed
recapitulation of it, determined by the physiological laws of heredity.

Baer ended the preface to his classical _Evolution of Animals_ (1828)
with these words: “The palm will be awarded to the fortunate scientist
who succeeds in reducing the constructive forces of the animal body
to the general forces or life-processes of the entire world. The tree
has not yet been planted which is to make his cradle.” The great
embryologist erred once more. That very year, 1828, witnessed the
arrival of Charles Darwin at Cambridge University (for the purpose of
studying theology!)—the “fortunate scientist,” who richly earned the
palm thirty years afterward by his theory of selection.

In the philosophy of history—that is, in the general reflections which
historians make in the destinies of nations and the complicated course
of political evolution—there still prevails the notion of a “moral
order of the universe.” Historians seek in the vivid drama of history
a leading design, an ideal purpose, which has ordained one or other
race or State to a special triumph, and to dominion over the others.
This teleological view of history has recently become more strongly
contrasted with our monistic view in proportion as monism has proved
to be the only possible interpretation of inorganic nature. Throughout
the whole of astronomy, geology, physics, and chemistry there is no
question to-day of a “moral order,” or a personal God, whose “hand hath
disposed all things in wisdom and understanding.” And the same must be
said of the entire field of biology, the whole constitution and history
of organic nature, if we set aside the question of man for the moment.
Darwin has not only proved by his theory of selection that the orderly
processes in the life and structure of animals and plants have arisen
by mechanical laws without any preconceived design, but he has shown
us in the “struggle for life” the powerful natural force which has
exerted supreme control over the entire course of organic evolution for
millions of years. It may be said that the struggle for life is the
“survival of the fittest,” or the “victory of the best”; that is only
correct when we regard the strongest as the best (in a moral sense).
Moreover, the whole history of the organic world goes to prove that,
besides the predominant advance toward perfection, there are at all
times cases of retrogression to lower stages. Even Baer’s notion of
“design” has no moral feature whatever.

Do we find a different state of things in the history of peoples, which
man, in his anthropocentric presumption, loves to call “the history of
the world”? Do we find in every phase of it a lofty moral principle
or a wise ruler guiding the destinies of nations? There can be but one
answer in the present advanced stage of natural and human history: No.
The fate of those branches of the human family, those nations and races
which have struggled for existence and progress for thousands of years,
is determined by the same “eternal laws of iron” as the history of the
whole organic world which has peopled the earth for millions of years.

Geologists distinguish three great epochs in the organic history of
the earth, as far as we can read it in the monuments of the science of
fossils—the primary, secondary, and tertiary epochs. According to a
recent calculation, the first occupied at least 34,000,000, the second
11,000,000, and the third 3,000,000 years. The history of the family
of vertebrates, from which our own race has sprung, unfolds clearly
before our eyes during this long period. Three different stages in
the evolution of the vertebrate correspond to the three epochs: the
_fishes_ characterised the primary (palæozoic) age, the _reptiles_ the
secondary (mesozoic), and the _mammals_ the tertiary (cænozoic). Of
the three groups the fishes rank lowest in organisation, the reptiles
come next, and the mammals take the highest place. We find, on nearer
examination of the history of the three classes, that their various
orders and families also advanced progressively during the three epochs
toward a higher stage of perfection. May we consider this progressive
development as the outcome of a conscious design or a moral order
of the universe? Certainly not. (Certainly yes. Progression toward
the benign is the core of all morality.—H. de V. S.) The theory of
selection teaches us that this organic progress, like the earlier
organic differentiation, is an inevitable consequence of the struggle
for existence. (Struggle for improved conditions.—H. de V. S.)
Thousands of beautiful and remarkable species of animals and plants
have perished during those 48,000,000 years, to give place to stronger
competitors, and the victors in this struggle for life were not always
the noblest or most perfect forms in a moral sense. (No, but they were
the best condition-builders.—H. de V. S.)

It has been just the same with the history of humanity. The splendid
civilisation of classical antiquity perished because Christianity,
with its faith in a loving God and its hope of a better life beyond
the grave, gave a fresh, strong impetus to the soaring human mind. The
Papal Church quickly degenerated into a pitiful caricature of real
Christianity, and ruthlessly scattered the treasures of knowledge
which the Hellenic philosophy had gathered; it gained the dominion
of the world through the ignorance of the credulous masses. In time
the Reformation broke the chains of this mental slavery, and assisted
reason to secure its right once more. But in the new, as in the
older period, the great struggle for existence went on in its eternal
fluctuation, with no trace of a moral order.

And it is just as impossible for the impartial and critical observer
to detect a “wise providence” in the fate of individual human beings
as a moral order in the history of peoples. Both are determined with
iron necessity by a mechanical causality which connects every single
phenomenon with one or more antecedent causes. Even the ancient Greeks
recognised _ananke_, the blind _heimarmene_, the fate “that rules
gods and men,” as the supreme principle of the universe. Christianity
replaced it by a conscious Providence, which is not blind, but sees,
and which governs the world in patriarchal fashion. The anthropomorphic
character of this notion, generally closely connected with belief in
a personal God, is quite obvious. Belief in a “loving Father,” who
unceasingly guides the destinies of 1,500,000,000 men on our planet,
and is attentive at all times to their millions of contradictory
prayers and pious wishes, is absolutely impossible; that is at once
perceived on laying aside the  spectacles of “faith” and
reflecting rationally on the subject.

As a rule, this belief in Providence and the tutelage of a “loving
Father” is more intense in the modern civilised man—just as in the
uncultured savage—when some good fortune has befallen him: an escape
from peril of life, recovery from a severe illness, the winning of the
first prize in a lottery, the birth of a long-delayed child, and so
forth. When, on the other hand, a misfortune is met with, or an ardent
wish is not fulfilled, “Providence” is forgotten. The wise ruler of the
world slumbered—or refused his blessing.

In the extraordinary development of commerce in the nineteenth century
the number of catastrophes and accidents has necessarily increased
beyond all imagination; of that the journal is a daily witness.
Thousands are killed every year by shipwreck, railway accidents, mine
accidents, etc. Thousands slay one another every year in war, and the
preparation for this wholesale massacre absorbs much the greater part
of the revenue in the highest civilised nations, the chief professors
of “Christian charity.” And among these hundreds of thousands of annual
victims of modern civilisation strong, industrious, courageous workers
predominate. Yet the talk of a “moral order” goes on.

Since impartial study of the evolution of the world teaches us that
there are no definite aim and no special purpose to be traced in it,
there seems to be no alternative but to leave everything to “blind
chance.” This reproach has been made to the transformism of Lamarck and
Darwin, as it has been to the previous systems of Kant and Laplace;
there are a number of dualist philosophers who lay great stress on it.
It is, therefore, worth while to make a brief remark upon it.

One group of philosophers affirms, in accordance with its teleological
conception, that the whole cosmos is an orderly system, in which every
phenomenon has its aim and purpose; there is no such thing as chance.
The other group, holding a mechanical theory, expresses itself thus:
The development of the universe is a monistic mechanical process, in
which we discover no aim or purpose whatever (except that it is ever
growing toward the good.—H. de V. S.): what we call design in the
organic world is a special result of biological agencies; neither in
the evolution of the heavenly bodies nor in that of the crust of our
earth do we find any trace of a controlling purpose (O blindness!
before the wonder of development.—H. de V. S.)—all is the result of
chance. Each party is right—according to its definition of chance.
The general law of causality, taken in conjunction with the law of
substance, teaches us that every phenomenon has a mechanical cause;
in this sense there is no such thing as chance. Yet it is not only
lawful, but necessary, to retain the term for the purpose of expressing
the simultaneous occurrence of two phenomena, which are not causally
related to each other, but of which each has its own mechanical cause,
independent of that of the other. Everybody knows that chance, in this
monistic sense, plays an important part in the life of man and in the
universe at large. That, however, does not prevent us from recognising
in each “chance” event, as we do in the evolution of the entire
cosmos, the universal sovereignty of nature’s supreme law, _the law of
substance_.


A NOTE ON THE PASSAGE FROM HAECKEL

I do not suggest, _I affirm_, with the support of all science at my
elbow and all reason at my side, that the world in its development has
exhibited only one constant direction, and that direction is toward
what we call the good or, in other words, progression toward the
complex.

That the development of forms by natural selection is only a part of
the real business of the universe, whose mighty labours have, from the
very beginning of earthly things, been directed toward one distant
ideal.

What is the Ideal? Who knows? We only know that on the covering
directions of the sealed orders, which man may not open till he is fit
to read them, are the words: Advancement, Love, Mercy, Kindliness,
Protection, and every other word which the mind of man has marshalled
under that mysterious and general term, The Good.

Blind matter carried those sealed orders in its body and the first
fishes carried them under their fins, the first claw was made to catch
them and to carry them through ferocious times, till the hand of the
first monkey seized them. “Advancement” was the only word on the cover
then; but, age after age, hitherto invisible directions began to
appear letter by letter, till “Love” stood out, and “Mercy,” and all
those other words that form the basis of Progress.

Accident and the stress of growth have sometimes obliterated those
words for years and centuries. Civilisations have misinterpreted
some of those words and barbarisms have rubbed them out, schools of
Religions and schools of thought have meddled with them and altered
them, yet they have always returned, and not only returned, but brought
other words with them.

The aim and object of life, Haeckel, are the carriage of those sealed
orders, and the implicit obedience of the directions that appear age by
age on their envelope, till, who knows, some day the word “Open” may be
found there, and some glimpse of the great Ideal be permitted to the
eyes of man.




APPENDIX C

THE MYSTERY OF ANALOGY AND SIMILE


My companion likened the present-day world to a big head with the
brains on the outside. The idea is absolutely just; we have even
the two hemispheres of the brain in the eastern and western world.
In future years, when telegraphy and telephony are more highly
developed—and, who knows, telepathy also—the idea will even be more
true than it is to-day.

In this connection: have you ever considered the deep mystery that lies
in Analogy?

In the universe of mind and matter, why do we see the same idea
repeated in widely different forms. The whole world of structure is a
world of plagiarism. The skull and a nut are the structural outcome
of the same idea, so are the cockle and the almond—but imitations of
structure are nothing to the fact that root ideas, like that governing
the structure of the vertebrates, strike upward into the worlds of
thought and action. We have vertebrates in businesses, business with
brains, spinal cords, sympathetic nervous systems all complete. In
states, armies, and more vaguely in philosophies, policies, and all
structures of thought, whether they be theories, or poems, or plays, or
novels, the vertebrate idea is found.

Why is the life history of a man so extraordinarily like the life
history of a nation, and the story of a man’s day a little poetical
simile of a man’s life?

Why does the poetical simile satisfy the mind when, for instance, we
talk of a sea that smiles, or compare a sunset to the fading of a
fortune?

Is it because we have struck, half-unconsciously, on the key to the
riddle of the universe; that the conditions upon which the universe
of mind and matter clings, as snow clings to branches and twigs, are
exceedingly few—are derived from the same trunk and strike upward,
through the material and spiritual world, just as tree branches and
twigs strike upward through denser and lighter layers of air.

The main trellis or branch conditions that run through everything are
the conditions of Life, Death, Growth, and Decay. These are the four
master branches. All others are the twigs subsidiary and derived from
these. Think, if you can find a conception of the mind, exclusive of
mathematical concepts, that does not embody these four in its essence,
and is not, in fact, the child of these. And yet, these four are only
one. For death is complementary to life; it is the absolutely faithful
shadow of life. Nay, it is life itself, for life is perpetual change,
and the essence of death is not death, but change.

And growth, what is it?—change; and decay, what is it?—change.

Change, then, is the one master idea, the trunk from which all ideas
spring—and what is the soul of change?—motion.

And what is motion?—it is the soul of the Universe.





End of Project Gutenberg's The New Optimism, by Henry De Vere Stacpoole

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