Chapter VII: Part 7

“Et veniunt hederae sponte sua melius,
Surgit et in solis formosior arbutus antris,
Et volucres nulla dulcius arte canunt.

“All our endeavor or wit cannot so much as reach to represent the nest of the least birdlet, ... no, nor the web of a silly spider....

“Those nations seem therefore so barbarous unto me because they have received very little fashion from human wit, and are yet near their original naturality. The laws of nature do yet command them which are but little bastardized by ours, and that with such purity as I am sometimes grieved the knowledge of it came not sooner to light, what time there were men that, better than we, could have judged of it. I am sorry Lycurgus and Plato had it not; for me seemeth that what in these nations we see by experience doth not only exceed all the pictures wherewith licentious poesy hath proudly embellished the Golden Age, but also the conception and desire of philosophy.... It is a nation, would I answer Plato, that hath no kind of traffic, no knowledge of letters, no name of magistrate nor of politic priority, no use of service, of riches or of poverty, no occupation but idle, no respect of kindred but common, no apparel but natural, no measuring of lands, no use of wine, corn or metal.... The very words that import lying, falsehood, treason, dissimulation, covetousness, envy, detraction and pardon were never heard of amongst them. How dissonant would Plato find his imaginary commonwealth from this perfection?

“Hos natura modos primum dedit.”

I had thought to begin a sound philosophical account of the nature of progress with a picture, not, if I could help it, unsympathetic, of man’s condition before he had felt its benefits. The plan would recommend itself to any philosopher as suitable and convenient to its purpose, yet here am I well beyond the beginning of my discourse, still lingering with the cannibals, and, what is worse, sensible that I have not been diligent to uncover the many causes there must be for rejoicing that we are not as they were. Not that there is any difficulty in pointing to the host of things we can do which they could not. We have only to mount in one of our winged ships and look down on the simple Typee rubbing two sticks together for their spark, to see in all the distance that lies between us the like of what Prometheus scaled Heaven for. But what in all this is there to rejoice over?

It is singular how many have asked this question and found no answer, or have answered--Nothing. I do not cite the licentious poets Montaigne refers to as having invented a Golden Age and feigned a happy condition of man before progress had spoiled the world for him; although these are many, and if their wisdom is not of the philosopher’s kind, yet is it all the closer to that “ancient wisdom of childhood” a wise man does well to keep near him. But even learned academies have thought the question not beyond their interest and study. In 1749, the Academy of Dijon set for the prize competition of the following year the question, “Whether the progress of the arts and sciences had contributed to the purification of life?” The prize was won by J.-J. Rousseau. His little essay, generally known as the “Discours sur les Sciences et les Arts,” worked on the thought of its time as seldom so casual a thing. “One cannot,” Jean-Jacques wrote then, “one cannot reflect on the ways of life without finding pleasure in recalling the image of its first simplicity. That was a fair shore, bedecked by only Nature’s hand, toward which our eyes are ever turning back regretfully as we watch it fade in the distance.”

There may be, nay, I think there must be, a meaning and a moral to this disgust of the enlightened here and now, this longing for a life not all “sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought.” But the interpretations of this feeling we most commonly meet with are not I hope to be taken very seriously, for if they are, there is no counsel for us but one of despair. Thus, whatever could come of the lament for the good old days, the golden days, before science had done this or that to cloud our first innocence? No history written in such ancient times but that it can recall times still more ancient when things went better with the sons of the gods because then they knew less. And it is still open to any one--traveler, philosopher, poet--to draw what picture he will of far away lands wherein, for that nobody wanted very much, everybody found all he wanted. The subject of this sketch may vary from Diogenes snarling in his tub to a Typee girl dancing in her flowers; from the desert to which the Christian cenobites withdrew to Tasso’s bosky places, where, before that vain word Onore had mingled its grief with love,

Sedean pastori e ninfe,
Meschiando alle parole
Vezzi e susurri, ed ai susurri i baci
Strettamente tenaci ...

But of all this, nothing is serious, nothing sincere,--of all those who lament the past not one would take the first step toward it, so little is it in man’s nature to retreat. Or if anyone would, yet what could he do, save drag his own sadness into the desert with him? As for the world, it must even go on with its science, though it be but the science of hurting itself.

Wherefore, no less futile than regret for a past we cannot recover, is fear for a future we cannot avert. It is natural that certain conditions arising out of the progress of science should make gentle souls anxious for what is to come. Science is power, and as no man can commit the sins he is impotent to commit, there is a certain safeguard for innocence in ignorance. Only after having eaten of the Tree of Knowledge did our first parents come to mourn outside the gates. No shepherds and shepherdesses conceived the iniquity of Babel’s tower, and Egypt and great Babylon were of no children’s dreaming. Yet must man go on gathering unto himself knowledge with all its power for harm and no warning gesture of the fearful can stay him. Our only comfort can be that however great a power for harm science may bring, it ought to enhance in equal measure the power for good,--did we but know what good and evil were.

Did we but know good and evil! In the suggestion that perhaps we do not, in the suspicion that this is just the knowledge to which science does not help us,--yes, in the fear that it is science itself which throws doubt on ethical standards--is, I conceive, a motive for deprecating the progress of science more serious than the others, and more sincere. Science is, indeed, endlessly critical; no authority of tradition or of general acceptance imposes upon it; nothing for it is finished, nothing fixed; and to those to whom all goodness is in danger the moment one asks, What is good? science may well seem a dangerous growth,--unhallowed in its origin, curiosity; damnable in its outcome, unrest. And yet if as we assume science must progress, stayed neither by regret for the past nor by fear for the future, then must its questioning spirit invade every realm of opinion, examine the most sacred of beliefs, look into the very meaning of good and evil.

For this reason we did well, I conceive, to begin a consideration of progress with some account of the skeptics. Science itself cannot quarrel with those who meet its advances with the question, What is the good of you? But it can only begin its answer by asking another, What do you take to be good?

* * * * *

What do you take to be good? Evidently there cannot be two minds, one of which points to the advance of civilization with every confidence that it means the world’s betterment, the other conceiving that men may grow wiser and none the better for that, unless _the good_ is understood by them in different senses. What are these two meanings tangled in the single word,--_the good_?

It is this question that Immanuel Kant has studied with peculiar care and thoughtfulness in his ethical writings, and there he has made a distinction between two such meanings that seems very much to our purpose. The first, in his stiff academic way, he calls the _hypothetical_ use. Thus, if you were to enquire what would be the best thing to do in order to attain a certain object, your answer would recommend a certain procedure as “good,” certainly, but good only on the hypothesis that such and such is your end. Your hypothetical good washes its hands of any responsibility for what, if anything, of some other kind of good or evil may attach to your purpose; it only places its wits at your disposal in devising the best means to this end. Is your purpose to rob a bank?--Then will science set itself to think out for you the best way of robbing a bank. After that, let who will complain that bank-robbing is not a good thing to set about, he cannot deny that you have set about it in a good way.

But it seemed to Kant, as I suppose it would to anyone, that we do not restrict ourselves to this hypothetical use of the term good. There seems to us to be a distinction between a good way of thieving and a way of being good. If so, must there not be a good that is sought for its own sake and not merely for the sake of what it may lead to? Is there not a _categorical_, an _absolute_ good? And surely Kant was not very far from the thought of all of us when he sought to identify this absolute good with the moral good and with the object of virtue. Plainly we see that however good a thief a man may become, he does not increase in virtue as he advances in science. And have we not here come upon the ultimate meaning of those who contend that, let the world advance never so in its science, it grows no whit better? Its increase is altogether measured in those hypothetical goods thanks to which the thieves of today are indeed better thieves than the crude ones that used to be; but as little as ever do they know, and still less do they care, for that absolute good, that moral world, to have progressed away from which is to have gone backward indeed.

What, we asked of the critics of civilization, do you take to be good? And setting aside those who have idly answered, It was good when the world was young, before Onor “bound in nets the tresses Zephyr used to scatter,”--setting aside “licentious poesy” we have found the answer of serious men to be, The world will only be good when it has become moral. Not the growth of science, but the increase in morality is real progress, progress toward the absolute good. We have then only to make plain morality’s meaning to have found what progress is.

Morality no doubt first presents itself to most of us as a set of laws or maxims of conduct to follow which is virtue. These laws we may think of as delivered unto man in God’s own voice, and carved upon tables of stone. Or, if our image of their origin and authority be not so definite, we may still find moral peace in the thought that what words the still small voice of conscience whispers to us are no less God’s words. They are what Antigone took them to be--

The immutable unwritten law of Heaven.
They were not born today or yesterday;
They die not, and none knoweth whence they sprang.

If many have been unable to keep the sweet moral confidence of childhood until the end, it is because riper experience has not confirmed to them Antigone’s premises, nor mature reflection born out her conclusions. Do they _not_ die, these unwritten laws: are new ones, indeed, never born? For a little searching we may find that not a precept marks a virtue for one people at one time, but that elsewhere or elsewhen its ordinance is taken to be vicious. And conversely, we do not have to travel far to find vice turning into virtue. Antigone’s own people are not so remote from us as the Mingrelians and Topinamboues; we owe them much that we prize most in our culture, and would be proud to match them in more ways than one. And yet, consider their admiration in the way of a man, which, if it was any one, was surely the Wise Ulysses. Now, if there are any two principles of Christian morals more firmly planted in our souls than others, they are the maxims, Be truthful, and, Be kind. But was Ulysses truthful? was Ulysses kind? To leave for one’s unconquered enemies a wooden horse as it were a parting token may be an innocent enough thing to do, however pagan. But to make of this wooden horse a disguised troop ship is not within the strict letter of truthfulness; and to sally forth therefrom to slay your quondam foes while they sleep in the security of your peace does not show a kindly spirit. Yet it does not appear that the Greek gods resented any more than did the Greek people Ulysses’ cruel craft: all of which would lead one to suspect that the unwritten law of peoples, if indeed it come from Heaven, must come from only that part of it which is directly overhead at the time.

But let time and place be never so circumscribed, and men never so in accord as to their moral maxims, are these maxims at least consistent with one another? Does one bid us be truthful?--then another bids us be kind! But how in this vale of perplexities is one always to be truthful yet never unkind? “Yes I know,” writes an old gossip of mine and fellow philosopher, “I know. Morality; Duty. But how hard it is to discover what is duty! I assure you that for three quarters of my time I do not know where duty lies. It is like the hedgehog that belonged to our English governess at Joinville. We used to spend the evening looking for it under the furniture, and when we had found it, it was time to go to bed.”[15]

For these reasons, most have abandoned the attempt to define the moral good in terms of maxims, which they take rather to be hypothetical goods in disguise. They are rules indeed, but only rules of thumb holding “for the most part.” If they vary with the time and place, if within the most circumscribed communities they contradict one another, this is because they cannot pretend to be good in themselves, but are only the means which the community accepting them has found by experience to be best fitted for attaining a certain end. It is indeed the end that justifies the means, it alone is the categorical good, and the whole meaning of morality is to be sought in its purpose.

But those who, like David Hume, have sought the purpose common to all the discordant moral maxims of history, have found it not in some quality this purpose might be assumed to have, without question of him whose purpose it was. No, the moral purpose founds its right to have all other purposes bow to it on nothing but the authoritative position of the one that has chosen this purpose as his. Suppose, with Hume, we found no harmony in the moral ordinances of all the many peoples of history save that each maxim at the time and under the conditions of its acceptance was held to serve the well-being of the community. Now communities are not so different from particular men but that they must, like men, hold their well-being to lie in having the objects of their desire accorded to them. From which it follows that to act virtuously is to make your will conform to the will of the community to which you belong. Descartes has somewhere said that God did not choose this world because it was good, but the world is good because God chose it. Just so, a community does not choose its purpose because it is good, but that purpose is good which the community chooses. We might say that, not the good will, but the Good Willer is morality’s last word on the subject of the categorical good.

Thus it would seem that all virtues melt into one, and that one is what the late Professor Royce was fond of calling “loyalty,” the devotion of my will to the will of another. I am aware that not just _any_ other-will, whosesoever it may be, is contemplated by moralists as a fit object of loyalty’s devotion. The Other to whom my will should bow, if I would be moral, is generally conceived to be more numerous than I (_e.g._ the majority), or more inclusive (the family, the state, the cause), or in some sense higher (God). In short, the Other-will is taken to be, in one way or another, an Over-will, and moralists may differ widely as to which one of several conceivable Over-wills should be recognized as the Absolute. But for the purpose of this discussion, one illustration of moral loyalty is as good as another, for the difficulty that morality has found in making good its claim to have laid hold on the absolute good lies not, I conceive, in deciding _which_ Other-will is sovereign, but in convincing a man that he ought to acknowledge as sovereign _any_ other will than his own. One who is told that it is not good for him to remain captain of his soul is bound to ask, Why not? It is morality’s way of dealing with this _why_ that I would consider in an example which, for being simple, loses nothing that I can think essential to the issue.

* * * * *

In Thomas Hobbes’s “Leviathan,” one finds an account, clear, legalistic, unsentimental, of the meaning of duty interpreted as the obligation of your will and mine to bow to a Sovereign-will. The title-page of the first edition (1651) of this work bears the image of a man of heroic size whose body is made up of little men. The little men stand for you and me, the big man is Leviathan. The story of the generation of the living giant made up of living men is in this wise:

“Nature it seems hath made men so equal ... as though there be found one man manifestly stronger in body or quicker in mind than another, yet when all is reckoned together the difference between man and man is not so considerable as that one man can therefore claim to himself any benefit to which another man may not pretend as well as he.... From this equality of ability arises equality of hope in attaining of our ends. And therefore if any two men desire the same thing, they become enemies, and in the way to their end ... endeavor to destroy or subdue one another.... From this diffidence of one another, there is no way for any man to secure himself so reasonable as anticipation; that is, by force or wiles to master the persons of all the men he can, so long till he see no other power great enough to endanger him....

“Hereby is manifest that during the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called war, and such a war as is of all against all.... In such condition there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain, ... no arts, no letters, no society, and, what is worst of all, continued fear and danger of violent death, and the life of man solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short....

“And consequently, it is a precept, or general rule of reason, _that every man ought to endeavor peace, as far as he has hope of obtaining it; and when he cannot obtain it, that he may seek and use all helps and advantages of war_.... From this fundamental law of nature, by which men are commended to endeavor peace, is derived this second law; _that a man be willing when others are so too, as far forth as for peace and defence of himself he shall think it necessary, to lay down this right to all things, and be contented with so much liberty against other men as he would allow other men against himself._”

Thus “the final cause, end, or design of men, who naturally love liberty and dominion over others, in the introduction of restraint upon themselves in which we see them live in commonwealths, is the foresight of their own preservation, and of a more contented life thereby; that is to say, of getting themselves out from the condition of war, which is necessarily consequent to the natural passions of men when there is no visible power to keep them in awe and tie them by fear of punishment to the performance of their covenants.”

Now “the only way to erect such a common power ... is to confer all their power and strength upon one man or upon an assembly of men that may reduce all their wills ... unto one will, ... which is as much as to say, to appoint one man or an assembly of men to bear their person, and every one to own and acknowledge himself to be author of whatsoever he that so beareth their person shall act ... in those things which concern the common peace and safety; and therein submit their wills every one to his will, and their judgments to his judgment.... This done, the multitude so united in one person is called a Commonwealth, in Latin, Civitas. This is the generation of that great Leviathan, or rather, to speak more reverently, of that _mortal god_ to which we owe under immortal God our peace and defence.”

Seldom has the “generation” of an Absolute been so clearly set forth. We do not suppose, any more than Hobbes himself did, that this word “generation” has any historical significance. Men never lived in the state of nature here defined, they never foregathered to reason out in this way the advisability of organizing themselves into commonwealths. Instead of “generation,” read, if you will, “justification,” _i.e._, the justification in reason for the commonwealth’s existence and dominion. Then observe that not only does this great loyalist (the whole Leviathan is one of the loyalist documents of the Civil Wars)--not only does he demand a reason for the loyal faith that is in him, but in the development of this reason it turns out that the absolute _is not another will at all_, but only one’s own will thoughtfully dealing with others to win for itself a “more contented life.”

Now of course it is an absurdity to try to give a reason why any will whatever should be taken for absolute and expect to keep it so; for the very function of this reason is to show what more ultimate end is served by acknowledging this will as master. But if we do follow Hobbes’s reason for bowing as deep as we do bow to Leviathan, this reason is that our own deepest desire--or what Hobbes takes to be such--is thereby best served. “For it is,” says he, “a voluntary act; and of the voluntary acts of every man, the object is some good to himself.”

Why then, that morality which promised to give us a meaning of the good that would enable us to understand how the progress of science with its hypothetical goods might let us stray from or even lead us away from _the_ good, has turned out to be itself offering us a hypothetical good, _to be itself an effort of science_,--the science of many wills meeting in presence of but a single world. And this I take to be the fate, not only of Hobbes’s but of all moralities: differ as they may respecting that Other-will they take to be absolute, they all alike recommend a sacrifice of my will to another will, not indeed for the sacrifice’ sake, nor yet for that other will’s sake when all is said, but that my own will may find “a more contented life thereby.”

* * * * *

Most of us have let our thoughts respecting the good of life stop with the acceptance of those moral goods that the opinion of our time takes to be absolute. These standard objects of loyalty, the state, the hearth, the cause, we serve with devotion and to them make our sacrifice. It is natural we should look with distrust, even with hostility, upon those who have let their thought go further and have asked, How in serving these Other-wills is our own deeper desire the better fulfilled? And yet, if our analysis is so far correct, this is the most intelligent, the most dignified of questions; for no historic morality has really meant to present itself as a system of sacrifices with no corresponding satisfactions.

But if we ask of the current morality of loyalty, What is the greater contentment bought by each of us at the price of the sacrifices we make in loyalty’s name? we come upon serious matters for reflection. There have been those who maintain that current morality cannot meet the demands of intelligence, and as there are two ways in which in buying a thing for a price one may drive an unprofitable bargain, so there are two critics of current morality. The one thinks the price morality asks too high; the other esteems the thing bought of no value. Let me call the one the _Reforming Moralist_; the other the _Amoralist_.

Now the reward morality holds out to all who make sacrifice to it is some ideal of peace, whether it be peace on earth and good will among men, or that peace which passeth understanding. Our reforming moralist then holds fast to the ideal of peace as the deepest of human desires, but questions whether current morality in its uncritical acceptance of traditional loyalties has found the most intelligent, _i.e._, the least sacrificial way of peace. Thus if he is not blind to the citizen-peace that comes from living in Commonwealths to whose Over-will we particular men make our loyal sacrifices, neither will he accept such nationalism as refuses to sanction covenants of nation with nation to the establishment of their more peaceful, if less autonomous, relations. He sees in that group-will we call the national-will but an historic device for improving the conditions of private life. He sees nothing but unreformed, that is, atavistic and stupid morality in such nationalism as would make the autonomy of the state an end in itself to which private life must forever yield its contentment. There is a sense in which he would say with Remy de Gourmont--

“The life of nations, of groups, of individuals is one struggle against morality. Man pushes on toward liberty, and can accept only such discipline as assures him at the cost of temporary subjection a more agreeable and more complete exercise of this supreme good. All discipline that is not founded in liberty is caduque, and it is for this reason that civilization has always succeeded in surmounting systems of morals.”[16]

But if our reforming moralist acknowledges the supreme value of peace and would only make the pursuit of it more intelligent, our amoralist denies that the human heart can ever rest in peace or even really wants to. Peace, if it were complete, would mean stagnation, will-less apathy, that ennui of life Schopenhauer judges to be worse than any misery the war of aggressive wills can engender. In the Nietzschian man-of-might our amoralist sees his ideal, a will that knows no Over-will, acknowledges no loyalty, but whose motto is “Weltmacht oder Untergang.” For him, life shall at least know nothing of ennui, no static stagnant peace, no Nirvana.

Thus if we approach in an historian’s spirit the attempt to think out the world-desirable to make for which is to progress in the only sense the word can have, we find humanity divided between those who desire peace and those who want war.

On behalf of peace the moralist points not alone to the misery war brings to the vanquished, not alone to its cost to the victor and to the vanity of his ephemeral winnings; but to that utter loneliness which the war of all upon all makes the only lasting portion of each. A solitude of struggle, without one to cheer the effort, without one to share the joy (if joy it can then be called) of triumph--can any human heart endure, let alone desire war?

But the amoralist, full of the _certaminis gaudia_, turns in disgust from the hopeless state of the peaceful who having nothing more to fear can have nothing left to hope for. Our longing for peace is an illusion of certain moments of war-weariness, but a picture of eternal peace, stagnant, ambitionless, dead--and yet not dead enough--who could endure it, who could really desire peace?

Lonely ambition--peaceful acquiescence in a common lot! The history of human relations is a struggle, more often than not a compromise between these ideals. There is enough inspiring in each to make any man of understanding long for it, there is enough repulsive in each to turn any thoughtful soul against it. Wherefore the gruesome spectacle of world war is but the outer and visible sign of the struggle that goes on every silent moment within the heart of each, as the volcano is but the overt violence of long sullen rumblings that have gone before. And so things must last if and so long as we really want two irreconcilable ideals: compromise must follow makeshift, war must punctuate peace, world without end.

* * * * *

Into a world so distraught comes that child of God, that messenger of heaven, the modest philosopher. His cheerful gospel is that all men’s ills are curable by taking thought, that men suffer only for their false philosophy. Now, of all philosophies none is so false as that which pretends one cannot have his penny and his cake. True it may be in the letter that I cannot keep a certain copper in my pocket and honestly entice a sweet-meat out of the baker’s window. But I must be a sorry philosopher if I cannot keep all the potentiality of future enjoyment the penny stands for, and yet have all the actual satisfaction I happen for the moment to visualize in the form of cake. Or to put the thought in less poetic and more general terms, the heart that thinks itself torn by conflicting desires owes its plight to the failure of its imagination to realize that only the formulas in which it has so far expressed its desires are in contradiction; the desires themselves may well enough be reconciled in a larger world-view.

Take our present problem for example. It is impossible, you say, that I should deny the ambition to conquer for the sake of the love of my neighbor without killing what is most vital in myself. And it is equally impossible that I should give play to my ambition to conquer without losing my neighbor’s love and living a lonely struggle. These things are indeed impossible in the world to which the imagination of the past has been fettered,--this little finite earth the fulness whereof is so easily emptied. If to have all that I can win of such meagre fulness is the only meaning I can give to ambition, either I must kill ambition and love my neighbor across a fence, or I must tear down the fence and kill my neighbor. But what if the fault of all this lay not with the darkness of reality, but with the blindness of untrained imagination? What if we could set before ambition a boundless prospect, so that never, far as conquest might reach, could it find cause to weep for lack of more to conquer? What if, in the very conquering of such a world, the gain of one, so far from being another’s loss, were the equal spoil of all, yes, and a weapon forged to the hand of all for new victories? Wherefore _then_ should ambition yield or love be denied?

But perhaps you will say, this _is_ but an imagining and a dream. Our humdrum world, the only real one, offers no such object of ambition; and if it did, our nature, just human nature, is not such as could understand, still less be fascinated and inspired by it.

Does it sound ridiculous to say that our world _is_ one that holds out just such a prospect to all who will but see? Aye, and that many a human eye has seen, and having seen remained single to this vision? I will call the promised land the Kingdom of Nature Subdued: I will call the vision the Vision of Science.

* * * * *

In the beginning, Man was Nature’s creature and her plaything. Sometimes she seems to have fondled her toy and been good to it, given it pleasant places to dwell in and let the light of her countenance shine upon it. Those who think only of these rare moments may sing, O bella età dell’ oro! O Paradise; O Paradise! They forget how rare were these moments and how capriciously bestowed. Elsewhere were many griefs of which man could not so much as guess the reason, and if he dared raise his questioning gaze to God he was mocked for his impotence and nothingness: “Where wast thou when I laid the foundation of the earth? declare, if thou hast understanding.”

But need makes for perspicuity. Time passed, and some few caught a glimpse of the vision of science; caught it, widened it, brightened it and passed it on. Perhaps their lives were not very happy in a world where they were much alone; but it is easier to tell of their ostensible hardships than of their enthusiasms--who knows but that even they found here their compt? Time went on, and that Nature which had begun by being so cruel and capricious a mistress became through man’s science more and more his slave. Human eyes were not so often turned to the gods in supplication. A Greek slave rang out to his fellows, “Why call ye upon the gods? Ye have hands? Wipe your own nose.”

The earth yields; step by step death itself gives ground; and shall we think of the stars only to fear them and to read our fate in them? Shall they forever whisper to us their old taunting questions: “Canst thou bind the sweet influences of the Pleiades, or loose the bands of Orion? Canst thou bring forth Mazaroth in his season? or canst thou guide Arcturus with his sons? Knowest thou the ordinances of heaven? canst thou set the dominion thereof on the earth?”--And shall we always answer, Alas!

But I am dreaming a dream. Is it though so ill a thing to dream, if one does not forget how to laugh the while? Yes, I know, the stars are rather big for our frail hands to play with even as all Nature once played with us. But how else am I to say that there is nothing in Nature that can forever resist the onward march of science? What else am I to say when the same master equations hold in heaven as on the earth, and Arcturus with all his sons is but a falling pebble painted large?

Let us dream then and laugh with Aesop at his frog. It is certain that neither our laughter nor our dreams can hurt our wise neighbor very much, and if we go the toilsome way toward the conquest we dream of, he or one that comes after may sometime look back on us and say, Yes, that was Progress. _The measure of man’s coöperation with man in the conquest of nature measures progress._

X

ROYCE ON LOVE AND LOYALTY

A Footnote in Illustration

[Something we had to say, in clarifying the thought of Kant, of a quality of human _love_ that holds its object single and unique. And again, in estimating the part played by morality in the ideal of progress, we had occasion to remark the unwillingness of some to admit the finality of those sacrifices _loyalty_ calls for.

These matters are not so simple but that history, in dealing with them, shows sharp discord where it does not uncover sheer confusion. The love that sets its heart on _one_ has been held the highest; it has also been put the lowest of all loves. Loyalty that lives on sacrifice has been prized as an enduring condition of all worth; it has not escaped disparagement as a human makeshift. Above all, “love” and “loyalty” are so mixed in men’s minds that, although any pair of lovers could tell a service of love from a servitude to loyalty, philosophers cannot always.

The brief discussion that follows seemed to the writer to illustrate a difficulty it may not have removed. He considered that it could not lack point for those who in foregoing passages on love and loyalty have found themselves more involved than enlightened. For the rest, it has seemed best to leave this “footnote” in the form and wording its original occasion inspired.[17]]

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One who like me has gone to Royce for wisdom now this long time and never come away empty, may yet live to know that some of his receivings are more his belongings than others. Thus, if it ever happen to me that I find my hold on the ‘Absolute’ slackening and the thing slipping from me, I cannot think that even in that day I shall have forgotten two words I have heard. Love and loyalty, loyalty and love: this pair I expect will still be singing its burden in my soul after other things have left off singing there. But I hope that when this day comes I shall know better than I do now whether love and loyalty are two names for the same thing; or whether they are not the same, yet brothers and friends; or whether in the end they are not rather enemies, of which one can survive only if the other doesn’t. Nor do I know, though I should very much like to, how Royce himself would answer these questions. Sometimes the words fall in such close juxtaposition in his writings that I wonder whether they do not express a single idea whose peculiar quality is just unselfishness. But again I bethink me that to be just unselfish is not enough for an absolutist, if for anyone; that giving up can only be justified when it is a means of acquiring; and I wonder what loyalty can have to say for itself half as convincing as the things love could point to. Until at last I find myself speculating whether if love had its perfect way with us there would be any place left for loyalty in our lives, and whether we could not look back on it then as on a virtue happily outlived.

And this may be my matter in a nutshell--is not loyalty a thing to be outlived, and is not that which alone can enable us to live it down a love so perfect it calls for no sacrifices? Some such thought has long been with me, but if I am to lay my troubles before you, it is time I put aside a language too rich in sentimental associations and took up the idiom I love best, that of cold and, if may be, mathematical definition.

Any definition of loyalty that could have meaning for me must assume the existence of something many deny to have either existence or meaning, and which I shall call in my own way the mind of a group, or a group mind. The conception of a mind belonging to a group of beings each one of which has a mind of its own, yet such that the mind of the group is no more to be known from a study of its parts than is the mentality of Peter from the psychology of Paul, is a very old conception and perhaps for that reason supposed by some to be old-fashioned and out-worn. It is a mere analogy, they say, and a very thin one at that, to speak of a group of organisms as itself an organism; it is Plato, it is Cusanus, if you will, but it is not modern. Benedetto Croce even goes so far as to be polite about the matter. “The State,” he writes, “is not an entity, but a fluid complex of various relations among individuals. It may be convenient to delimit this complex and to entify it for the sake of contrasting it with other complexes. No doubt this is so; but let us leave to the jurist the excogitation of this and the like distinctions--fictions, but opportune fictions--being careful not to call his work absurd. It is enough for us to be sure we do not forget that a fiction is a fiction.”

To Royce the group mind is far from being a fiction, though he may prefer to call it by some other name than group mind--maybe universal mind or universal will. But if to him it seems natural, as it does to me, to recognize group minds, while to Croce the entity is but a polite fiction to be pleasantly dismissed, there must be some lack of definition befogging our issue. Nor can I think of any way in which old issues can better be made clear than by recalling old images.

Aristotle would not have asked when and where do new _entities_ appear, but where and when must we take account of new _forms_. Now matter was informed for Aristotle when the behavior of some class of beings was recognized to be predictable in terms of purpose. Thus earth, water, air and fire sought their proper places, one below, another above, and the others in between. But we remember how no sooner had these elements reached their proper places than, transformed by the sun’s heat, they were no longer at home where they found themselves, but must needs seek their new homes anew. Thus homeward bound in opposite directions, they collided and became entangled, so that mixtures of the four appeared, which, as it proved, kept their proportions for a longer or shorter while ere they lost their equilibrium and fell apart again. Among these mixtures were vegetables and animals and men, but Aristotle is very far from defining this new class, organisms, in terms of the quantities of the elements that enter into their bodily composition. No, what they have in common and all they have in common is a new purpose, that of self-preservation (and, if we are to follow Aristotle rigorously, that of type-preservation). But why in this class of beings does a new form appear when there is nothing in any one of them but so much earth, so much water and so much of the rest? Because, I take it, in order that the purpose of the group may be realized, the purpose of each constituent of that group must be defeated: when the earth in us finds its way back to earth and our fire to fire, then we are no more. Which is the fundamental difference between us and them: if we win they lose; if they win we are done for. The whole has a purpose whose realization is only possible if the purposes defining the parts are given up for it.

I suppose Croce would say that nothing better could be offered in support of a modern fiction than an ancient fable; and I confess that I can think of nothing better fitted to set forth the complex problem of how beings of one mind can combine to form groups of another mind, than Aristotle’s account of the way elements in the form of mechanism combine to produce a group with that other form, life. Perhaps I can make out the connection between old and new ideas by a single example. I know of no fellow easier to get along with than your average Parisian: many a time have I sat at his board, looked in his eyes, listened to his amusing wit and wondered how the great-grandfather of my host could have been part of the Reign of Terror. And yet I suppose the Parisian of today is not very different from the Parisian of four generations ago, when groups of these same Parisians were ranging the streets of Paris crying, “A la lanterne!” However much it was in the character of the Pierre, Paul, Jean and Jacques Bonhomme of those old days to steer for home, their distributive tendency was contradicted by their collective tendency. A new form, a new entity had appeared; it was the spirit of the mob. It may be pleasant to call such new entities fictions; but it would be a most dangerous fiction to suppose pleasant men made pleasant mobs.

I must let this single illustration take the place of what might at some other time grow into a systematic account of the varieties of group minds that history and personal experience reveal to us. For my world is highly organized--groups within groups and groups within these in a way one might have learned at the feet of Nicolaus or by gathering one’s history from Gierke’s “Geschichte des Deutschen Rechts.” But on this occasion, instead of going into all this literature and all this philosophy, let me come back to the matter of loyalty’s worth. There would be no such thing as a demand for loyalty were there no call for a man to deny his wish for home--whether home be on earth or on high for him--for the sake of organizing himself into a group; which means, as we have seen, sacrificing his purpose for the group purpose. Now, what you think of the value of this sacrifice depends altogether on the esteem in which you hold group minds. If you can find some principle on which to estimate their dignity as something worth dying for in part or altogether, then loyalty may be the last word of virtue. But if you find that at their very best there is something rather primitive, sometimes amoeboid, sometimes tigerish about such minds, then you should seriously consider whether your biped soul owes anything more to this polypod entity than the entity owes to it. Merging oneself into something big may not be just the same as reaching for something high.

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But I am not belittling loyalty. It is a great virtue so long as it understands itself to be making a virtue of necessity. Just so is it a great virtue to acquire equanimity in the face of death, in such wise that not being able to invent a way of getting around the thing one may accept it for the time being without disturbing oneself or one’s friends more than the episode calls for. Still, if I had some genius to spend, I should rather contribute it to the suppression of dying than to the cultivation of a cheerful manner in dying. So should I rather spend my time, if it were worth while, in wearing away the conditions that make loyalty necessary than in developing a spirit of loyalty. And so, or I mistake him, would Royce; for I can not get over the impression that for him, too, loyalty is but a half-way house on the road to something better--which something better is _love_.

It is with relief I find a definition of love can be effected which makes no very heavy demands upon one’s sentimental experience; in fact, requires no more in that way than a fair understanding of the theory of substitutions. For the peculiar quality Royce finds in the idea of love is that _love individuates_. This its quality is for him its virtue also and its excellence, so that the more love individuates the more is it love. We are far enough from the days when a Plato could hold the love to be higher that had detached itself from the individual and attached itself to the quality, had forgotten the beautiful being to think only of his beauty. For Royce, love is not love unless it has succeeded in making its object irreplaceable.

Now I do not know whether this constitutes a complete definition of love. There is something hopeful about the suggestion that it may do so; for if no one has been able to say anything very articulate about love, neither has anyone said much that is intelligible about individuation. But certain difficulties occur to one. Is love the only thing that individuates? If there is such a thing as Platonic hate, which I suppose would be the sort of hate that hates the sin and not the sinner, why should there not be such a thing as a romantic hate whose object would be just the sinner and not his fault? Or may not a process of individuation go on, cold and impassible, untouched by either hate or love?

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One day Flaubert took his disciple by the hand and led him into the secret places of art. The talent of the artist, he said, is a long patience spent in learning how to portray so that your portrayal leaves the object it offers just as individual as the thing is found. “When you pass a grocer sitting at his door, or a concierge smoking his pipe, or a stand of cabs, show me this grocer and this concierge, their pose, their physical appearance, suggesting also by the skill of your image all their moral nature in such wise that I do not confuse them with any other grocer or with any other concierge. And make me see with a single stroke in what a certain cab horse is unlike fifty others following him or going before.”

Why, then, besides love and hate, art too claims to be that which individuates--and not because, if we may believe a certain philosophically minded critic, art has borrowed anything of love or hate. This disciple of Flaubert, this Maupassant, carried out his master’s teachings if ever an artist did, but there is that in his way of doing it which makes one feel that Anatole France’s account of him is not altogether wanting: “He is the great painter of the human grimace. He paints without hate and without love, without anger and without pity--hard-fisted peasants, drunken sailors, lost women, obscure clerks dried up in the air of the office, and all the humble folk whose humility is without beauty and without merit. All these grotesques and all these unfortunates he shows us so distinctly that we think we see them with our own eyes and find them more real than reality itself. He is a skillful artist who knows he has done all there is to do when he has given life to things. His indifference is as indifferent as nature.”

I am not so very confident that all these claimants to the right of individuating--love, hate, art--are equal claimants. As for hate, some poverty of experience may account for the fact that all I know of this romantically valued emotion has sometime been directed against persons unknown, whose manner of conducting themselves on the earth beneath and in the waters under the earth showed nothing more clearly than that they had forgotten the human being and were utterly lost in loyalty. A hate of such poor quality cannot well be said to individuate, and it is certainly not any experience of my own that would lead me to suppose romantic hate, as we have imagined it, to be real. Respecting the impassibility of the creative artist, I am no less skeptical, and so I think is France at bottom; for of this same artist whose indifference is as indifferent as nature, he says in another passage of the same appreciation that his hardened hero “is ashamed of nothing but his large native kindliness, careful to hide what is most exquisite in his soul.”