# The Religious Aspect of Philosophy/Chapter 7

CHAPTER VII. THE ORGANIZATION OF LIFE.
    Die wahre Freiheit ist als Sittlichkeit dies, dass der Wille nicht subjektive, d. i. eigensüchtige, sondern allgemeinen Inhalt zu seinen Zwecken hat. — Hegel, Encyclopädie.
Unexpectedly we have been saved from our ethical skepticism even in and through the very act of thinking it out. Here, as elsewhere in philosophy, the truth is to be reached, neither by dreading nor by discountenancing the doubt, but by accepting, experiencing, and absorbing the doubt, until, as an element in our thought, it becomes also an element in an higher truth. We do not say, therefore, to commend our moral principle, as it has just been propounded, that it is immediately acceptable to all healthy consciences, or that it is a pious, or a respectable, or a popularly recognized principle. We say only this: Doubt rationally about moral doctrines, and your doubt itself, if real, thorough-going, all-embracing, merciless, will involve this very principle of ours. We find the principle by means of the universal doubt, and it is this method of procedure that distinguishes the foregoing discussion of the basis of morals from many of those that have previously been concerned with this problem. To point out that the average man, or the reputed saint, or the inspired ​prophet, or the great poet, or the reader himself, whenever he is enthusiastic has or has had a given ideal, is not to justify this ideal. Yet of such a nature are the justifications that most moralists have given for their ideals. If we have gained our result by any better method, that was because we were free to doubt all those pretended defenses of the good. We have found the nature of the absolute and universal will, by rigidly questioning the significance of all the individual wills.
But our ideal must be made to do work in the world. It must accomplish something, by solving for us a few concrete moral problems, such as actually trouble men. Even the present discussion must consider some of these consequences of our general principle; for religious philosophy, in seeking an ideal for life, does not want a barren abstraction, but such an ideal as can also be our guide. What does our principle tell a man to do?
The principle, as is plain, may be viewed in two ways. If by moral insight we mean what the last chapter defijied, namely, insight into the fact of the existence of other conscious wills besides our own, coupled with full rational appreciation of this truth, then our principle may be viewed as saying to each of us: Get and keep the moral insight as an experience, and do all that thou canst to extend among men this experience. On the other hand, the principle may be equally well viewed as saying: Act out in each case what the moral insight bids thee do; that is, as before explained, Having made thyself, in so far as thou art able, one with all the ​conflicting wills before thee, act out the resulting universal will as it then arises in thee. Two classes of human duties are thus defined, one formal and provisional, the other permanent. We must explain in some measure each of them, in order that we may show the practical applications of our moral principle.
I.
The first class of duties comprises those that have most especially to do with the moral education of our race. We are, and must long remain, exceedingly imperfect and blind creatures. If there is possible any state of humanity in which all shall be ready to act in accordance with the moral insight, that state must be, morally speaking, better than any other. Therefore the first demand that the moral insight makes of us so soon as we get it is: So act as to increase the number of those who possess the insight. Here, of course, is a precept of a very formal character, and plainly provisional in its nature. It is as if one were to be among blind men, himself blind, and were by some magical act, say by accidentally washing in a miraculous fountain, to get at one stroke and for the first time the power of sight, in all its maturity and perfection. Such an one would perhaps say: “How noble is this new sense! But to what end shall I use it? For the first I must use it to bring these other men to the fountain, to wash their eyes, that they may miraculously learn in one instant to see this glorious world.” But some one might object: “In this way, if the only use to be ​made of a man’s sight is to extend the power of sight to others, of what use is the power itself? The sole aim of seeing cannot be to cause others to see. Else what good would result to any one, if all followed your precept?” The answer would be plain: “When all or the most of us get the power, then indeed we can use it for other ends. But because it is the best of powers for all these other ends, therefore the best provisional use to make of it is, not to spend much time upon these ends, but to spend time upon extending the possession of the power. When this is done, then first will begin the real use of the power for its own sake.” As in this case of the supposed miraculous acquirement of a new sense in all its maturity of power at one stroke, so it is in case of the much more gradual acquirement of the moral insight. To be sure, the ultimate aim of life cannot be merely the extension of the power to realize the wills that are active about us, but must at last be found by defining the course of action that best harmonizes these wills. But, provisionally, we have a task before us that is easily defined, because elementary. Harmony cannot be even partially attained, the best human acti^dty cannot be even imperfectly developed, until a very great number of men have this, the very first, most elementary requisite of conscious morality, namely, the power to see the facts of human life as they are. So long as a man is bound up in his individual will, he may be instinctively upright, he cannot be consciously and with clear intent righteous. So long therefore as this is true of him, he will be dependent on traditions that are often per​nicious, on conscience that is often brutal prejudice, on faith that is often bigotry, on emotion that is the blindest of all guides; and if he does good or if he does evil, the power responsible for his deeds will not be a truly moral impulse. To gain the moral ends of humanity, the indispensable prerequisite is therefore the moral insight in its merely formal aspect, as an human power and as an experience of life. When a good many more men have reached the possession of this power, then more of life will be taken up with concrete duties. Until that time comes, the great aim must be this formal and provisional one: to produce in men the moral mood, and so to prepare the way for the further Iniowledge of the highest good. If we put the matter otherwise we may say: The moral insight, insisting upon the need of the harmony of all human wills, shows us that, whatever the highest human good may be, we can only attain it together, for it involves harmony. The highest good then is not to be got by any one of us or by any clique of us separately. Either the highest good is for humanity unattainable, or the humanity of the future must get it in common. Therefore the sense of conununity, the power to work together, with clear insight into our reasons for so working, is the first need of humanity. Not what good thing men may hereafter come to see, but how they shall attain the only sense whereby they can ever get to see the good, is the great present human concern.
Starting with this duty, we can now examine what rule of life this duty will give us. Extend the moral insight among men, and in thy own life: ​this is the first commandment. The direct consequence is that, so regarded, the first duty of man in the present day cannot be either to get happiness himself, or, in view of this present state of human life, to make other people happy. All that he may indeed be in some measure required to do, but not, in the present state of the world, as an end, but solely as a means to an end. This at all events is not the day for contentment, but for work; and joy is now a proper part of human life chiefly in so far as it tends to preserve, to increase, or to foster the moral insight. Here we have the present practical solution suggested for all the questions about the right and wrong of so-called hedonism. Hedonism is the product of an imperfect understanding of the moral insight. Benevolent hedonism springs from the insight that men like to be happy. Realizing this, the believer in universal hedonism says: Make men happy so far as thou canst. But this principle of hedonism is surely not the immediate truth for this present time, whatever may or may not turn out to be the case in future. For to labor to increase happiness may for the present mean to increase the moral blindness of men Some sorts of happiness tend to make us blind, as has in fact been shown in a former chapter. Unless a man experiences very bitterly the reality of the conflict of wills in this world, the moral insight is apt to forsake him. But until the moral insight becomes practically universal, the highest good for humanity cannot be got. Therefore all forms of happiness that hinder rather than help the moral insight are evil, and we ought to do ​what we can to get rid of them out of the world. And all experiences, however painful, that certainly tend to the increase of the power of moral insight, are good for men; and if we see no other experiences more suitable for this purpose, we ought to do what we can to increase among men the number and the definiteness of these pains.
Yet of course it will at once appear, when we examine human emotional experiences in the light of what we know of men, that there is a decided limit to the morally educative power of painful experiences, and that, on the other hand, very many pleasant experiences are useful to the moral insight, either by directly aiding it, or by preparing a man to attain it. In considering this branch of the subject, we at last reach the point where a scientific psychology can give us a great deal of help. We rejected the so-called “scientific basis” for morals because it founds the ought to be upon brutal physical facts. Now, however, we can turn to science to help us in our present task, because, having defined our ought to be, we are dealing with applied ethics, and are asking how this moral insight is to be attained. Psychology must tell us what it can as to this matter. And here such suggestions as those in Mr. Spencer’s “Data of Ethics” are indeed a useful aid to applied moral doctrine. We reject wholly the notion that Mr. Spencer or any like teacher has even caught a glimpse of the fundamental ethical problem. Mr. Spencer seems to be in the most childlike ignorance that there is any such problem at all. But we are glad to find that Mr. Spencer once having very ​illogically accepted a partially correct fundamental notion about the ideal of life, does suggest a good deal about this problem of applied ethics with which we are now dealing. He does tell us some very sensible things about the attainment of this ideal.
Among these sensible suggestions is the insistence upon the value of pleasure as an indication of the increase of healthy life in the man who has the pleasure; and the further insistence upon the thought that, since pleasure thus indicates in some wise health and efficiency, and since efficiency is an indispensable prerequisite to sound practical morality, there must always be a certain moral presumption in favor of happiness, and in favor of whatever tends to increase happiness. Properly understood and limited, this doctrine of Mr. Spencer’s is an obvious and useful consequence from what we know of psychology. Mr. Spencer dwells on it at tedious and wholly unnecessary length, but he is surely justified when he protests, against the ascetics, that their ideal man must be in general a puny, inefficient, and perhaps wholly burdensome man, whose ill-health may make him, at last, hopelessly selfish. This we know on good scientific grounds, and it is well to have said the thing plainly in an ethical treatise.
But what is the result? Is happiness the only aim of life because the permanently unhappy man is apt to be a poor diseased creature, useless, or even dangerous? No; the consequence of all this is that the first moral aim must be to make a man efficient in possessing and extending the moral insight. Efficiency for moral ends is still oiir proximate goal. ​Happiness is, at least for the present, only a subordinate means. Therefore we say: By all means make men happy, so far as their happiness tends to give them and to preserve in them moral insight. True it is, as scientific psychology shows us, that a man, in order to be as good as possible, must generally be possessed of respectable health, of what he thinks a good place in the world, of friends, and of numerous pleasures. He must digest well, he must enjoy the esteem of his fellows, he must be strong, and he must be frequently amused. All this is true, and is in fact a commonplace. When an ascetic denies this, he maintains a pernicious heresy, that tends to destroy moral insight by depriving men of the physical power to get it. But these facts must not be misinterpreted. Whatever might be true of a society in which moral insight had been attained, nothing is plainer than that happiness at the present time cannot be regarded from our point of view as more than a means to the present great end. If we try to amuse our neighbors, to relieve their woes, to improve their worldly estate, we must do so not as if this were the end of the present life, but as workers in a very vast drama of human life, whose far-off purpose must govern every detail. The good Samaritan must say to himself, as he helps the poor wretch by the wayside: “In so far as I realize only this man’s need, my purpose is indeed simply to relieve him. But my purpose must be higher than that. This man is not alone, but one of a multitude. My highest aim in helping him is not to make him individually happy, but to increase by this, as by all my ​acts, the harmony of mankind. Not alone that he may by and by go away and enjoy himself do I help him now, but because by so doing I hope through him to increase among men moral insight.” Therefore, notwithstanding Schopenhauer’s ridicule, Fichte was right in saying that we ought to treat the individual man not chiefly as an individual, but as an instrument for extending and serving the moral law. Because a certain kind of happiness means efficiency, and efficiency morality, therefore and therefore alone have we the right and duty, in this present generation, to labor for this kind of happiness.
Equally, therefore, it becomes our duty to labor to increase pain, whenever pain is the best means of fostering the moral insight. Therefore, in this present day, it cannot be our duty to labor to diminish pain in the world, simply as pain. Again we must appeal to psychology to guide us aright. The pains that foster moral insight, although limited in number and intensity, are numerous, and still imperfectly defined. It would be a useful task to study more in detail than psychologists have yet done, the moralizing power of pain. This is a task for the psychology of the future. In general, of course, we can say that the range of such pains has been much exaggerated by ascetics. Bodily pain, if severe, is generally brutalizing, at least for most people, and the moral insight is in it only in so far as the past experience of bodily pain helps us to know the significance of the suffering of others, not by giving us that blind emotion of sympathy before criticised, but by giving us the means to form a cool abstract ​estimate of the value of this evil of physical pain. For thus we can realize the strength of the will that seeks to escape it, and can act with due respect to this will. But nature generally gives us enough experience of pain to furnish excellent material for the calculations needed. Therefore, bodily pains, save as punishments, are seldom useful instruments for our great purpose. Not thus can self be duly mortified.
It is different with certain mental pains. All those that tend to make the individual feel his own necessary limitations, and thereby to approach the realization of the great world of life about him, are necessary evils. His will must be overwhelmed, that the Universal Will may have place to establish itself in him. Therefore, without considering whether we are thereby increasing or diminishing the sum of human misery, we all of us unhesitatingly set about the work of contending with blind self-confidence and self-absorption wherever it may appear. Therefore it is right that we ridicule all pretentious mediocrity that is unconscious of its stupidities. Therefore, in fact, it is right that we should criticise unsparingly all pretenders, however much they may be pained by our criticism. Therefore it is well that we should feel not a selfish but a righteous joy whenever pride has a fall, whenever the man who thinks that he is something discovers of a truth that he is nothing. Therefore, also, do we put down excessive forwardness and vanity in growing children, although so to do hurts their sensitive young selfishness very keenly. In all such ways we must ask and we must ​show no mercy, save when these keen pains of wounded vanity are so given as to inflame and increase this vanity itself. All healthy, truthful criticism of individual limitations is a duty, even if it is a present torture to the individual criticised. For this individual is blind to other life because he is wrapped up in himself. If by showing him his insignificance you can open his eyes, you are bound to do so, even though you make him writhe to see his worthlessness. For what we here defends is not that ill-natured criticism whose only aim is to gratify the miserable self of the critic, but the criticism whose edge is turned in earnest against every form of self-satisfaction that hinders insight. Let a man be self-satisfied when he is at rest, after dinner, or in merry company. It is a harmless and even a useful amusement. But when he is at work doing good he ought to hate self-satisfaction, which hinders the moral insight, which exalts his will above the universal will, which takes the half-done task for the whole task, and altogether glorifies the vanity of vanities. If now my critic rids me of such self-satisfaction, he may hurt me keenly, but he is my best friend. My life may often be miserable in consequence, but then I am an instrument, whose purpose it is to attain, to foster, to extend, and to employ the moral insight. My misery is a drop, evil no doubt in itself (since my poor little will must writhe and struggle when it sees its own vanity and the hopelessness of its separate satisfactions), but a relative good, since through it I may attain to the moral insight. All such pains must be dealt with in the same way. Hence the ​utilitarian principle of benevolent hedonism, even if right in its application to the far-off future, has but little direct practical application to a life that must to-day be judged by such standards as these.
II.
But has the principle of hedonism any truth even in its application to a world where all had attained the moral insight as an experience? If we consider the higher human activities, whose worth is not merely provisional, but permanent, the activities that men will carry on when they have freed themselves from selfish strife, is the aggregate happiness as such the goal of the action of this unselfish society?
There are existent already among men activities that belong to spheres where selfish strife is, relatively speaking, suppressed. These activities are foreshadowings of the life of the possible future humanity that may come to possess the moral insight. Art, science, philosophy, are the types of such life. These activities form still but a small part of the aggregate work of men, aud so it must long be; jet, though subordinated in extent to the pressing moral needs of an imperfect state, these activities are already among the highest in our lives. But now, are they valuable because of the aggregate happiness that they cause, or for some other reason? To judge of this we must study the definition of the second, more permanent class of human duties.
Suppose then that the first and provisional aim of human conduct had beeji attained, and that all men ​possessed the moral insight, what would this insight then lead them to do? Here the hedonist will expect to have his revenge for our previous neglect of his advice. “My precepts have been set aside so far,” he may say, “as having no immediate application to the moral needs of the moment. To get this merely formal condition of harmony among men, the moral man has been advised to subordinate all direct efforts towards making people happy, to the end of making them first possess what you have called the moral mood. But now at last, in the supposed case, the great end has been attained, and men are formally moral. Now surely they have nothing to do but to be as happy as possible. So at last my plan will be vindicated, and the ideal man will come to be a seeker of ideal pleasures.”
The hedonist is too sanguine. His ideas of the highest state may have their value, but they are indefinite in at least one respect. When he says that he wants all his ideal men, in the ideal state, to be happy together, he never tells us what he means by the individual man at all, nor what inner relation that individual’s happiness is to have to the happiness of other men. All men, in the ideal state, are to be harmonious and happy together: this the hedonist tells us; but he does not see how many difficulties are involved in the definition of this ideal state. He plainly means and says that in this ideal state the good of the wiiole society is to be an aggregate of a great number of individual happy states, which the various men of the blessed society are to feel. He assumes then that in the ideal state each ​man would be able to say: “I, separately regarded, am happy, and so are all my fellows.” Now possibly the very notion of an ideal state, in which the separate selves are as such happy, and in which the blessedness of the whole is an aggregate of the blessedness of the separate individuals, is a contradictory notion. At all events it is a notion whose meaning and validity every hedonist coolly and unquestioningly assumes. Yet it is an assumption that we must examine with care.
If a man sets before himself and his fellows the goal of individual happiness, as the hedonist wants him to do in the supposed ideal state, can he conceivably attain that goal? The hedonist supposes that the only moral limitation to the pursuit of personal happiness is the moral requirement of altruism, according to which no one ought to seek his own pleasure at the cost of a greater misery to another. In the ideal state, as all would be in the moral mood, and all disposed to help one another, and to get happiness only together, this one limitation would be removed. Then, thinks the hedonist, the highest law would be: Get the most happiness, all of you. This happiness the hedonist conceives as an aggregate of states that would exist in the various separate individuals. So each individual will strive after his own joy, but in such wise as to hinder the joy of nobody else. But we oppose to this the question: Is there not some other limitation than this to individual search for happiness? Is not the ideal of individual happiness as such an impossible ideal, not because the individuals in the imperfect state ​lack harmony, but because, even in the supposed harmonious state, there would be an inner hindrance to the pursuit of this ideal by any individual? Would not the moral insight detect the hindrance, and so reject this ideal? There are at least some very familiar reasons for thinking this to be the case. These reasons do not of themselves prove, but they certainly suggest, that the notion of a progressive individual happiness has in it some strange contradiction.
First, then, we have the old empirical truth that individual happiness is never very nearly approached by any one, so long as he is thinking about it. The happy man ought to be able to say, “I am happy.” He can much more easily say, “I was happy;” for present reflection upon happiness interferes in most cases with happiness. So here is an inner difficulty, very well known, in the way of njaking individual happiness the goal of life. We have no desire to dwell here upon this difficulty, which has so often been discussed. We do not exaggerate its importance. We consider it only the first suggestion that the hedonistic ideal of life has some inner contradiction in its very nature, so that there is some deeper conflict here going on than that between selfishness and altruism.
In the second place, we notice that, if anybody tries to sketch for us the ideal state of human life as the hedonist conceives it, we are struck with a sense of the tameness and insignificance of the whole picture. The result is strange. Here we have been making peace and harmony among men the proximate goal of life, yet when this harmony has to be ​conceived in hedonistic fashion, when the hedonist gives us his picture of a peaceful society, where, in the midst of universal good humor, his ideal, the happiness of everybody concerned, is steadfastly pursued, we find ourselves disappointed and contemptuous. That harmless company of jolly good fellows is unspeakably dull. One listens to the account of their happiness as one might listen to the laughter and merry voices of some evening club of jovial strangers, who had been dining at the hotel in which one happened himself to be eating a late and frugal supper, in sobriety and weariness. Those unknown creatures whose chatter in the next room the traveler dimly hears at such a time, — a confused babble of stupid noises; how insignificant their joys seem to him! Who cares whether that really wretched set of animals yonder, with their full stomachs and their misty brains, think themselves happy or not? To be sure, among them the harmony seems in some sort to have been momentarily realized. One would no doubt seem to enjoy it all jnst as well as they, if he were one of them. But one is viewing it at a distance, from outside; and so looking at it he possibly sees that a mass of individual happiness is not just the ideal of ideals after all.
Just such, however, is the feeling that comes to one in considering Mr. Spencer’s description of his ideal society. And similar feelings have been awakened in many reflective people when they have considered traditional notions of heaven, and have tried to estimate the value of the life of individual bliss therein pictured. Professor William James has recently so ​well stated these objections in a few brilliant sentences, that we cannot do better than to quote from his recent article on “The Dilemma of Determinism”: —
“Every one must at some time have wondered at that strange paradox of our moral nature, that, though the pursuit of outward good is the breath of its nostrils, the attainment of outward good would seem to be its suffocation and death. Why does the painting of any paradise or Utopia, in heaven or on earth, awaken such yawnings for Nnvana and escape? The white-robed, harp-playing heaven of our Sabbath-schools, and the ladylike tea-table elysium represented in Mr. Spencer’s ‘Data of Ethics,’ as the final consummation of progress, are exactly on a par in this respect, — lubberlands, pure and simple, one and all. We look upon them from this delicious mess of insanities and realities, strivings and deadnesses, hopes and fears, and agonies and exultations, which form our present state; and tedium vitæ is the only sentiment they awaken in our breasts. To our crepuscular natures, born for the conflict, the Rembrandtesque moral chiaroscuro, the shifting struggle of the sunbeam in the gloom, such pictures of light upon light are vacuous and expressionless, and neither to be enjoyed nor understood. If this be the whole fruit of the victory, we say; if the generations of mankind suffered and laid down their lives; if prophets confessed and martyrs sang in the fire, and all the sacred tears were shed for no other end than that a race of creatures of such unexampled insipidity should succeed, and protract in sæcula sæculorum their contented and inoffensive lives, — why, at such a rate, better lose than win the battle, or at all events better ring down the curtain before the last act of the play, so that a business ​that began so importantly may be saved from so singularly flat a winding-up.”
Now not only does all this seem true in such cases, but we have similar feelings about even so ideal a picture of happy future life as is Shelley’s, in the last act of the “Prometheus.” There are indeed many deeper elements in that noble ideal of Shelley’s, for he distinctly says that his true ideal is “Man — Oh! not men”; or, as he again expresses it: —
    “One undivided soul of many a soul
    Whose nature is its own diviue control,
    Where all things flow to all, as rivers to the sea.”
And when he says this, he gets far beyond mere hedonism. But yet there are other elements in his account that are not so satisfactory, and that are decidedly hedonistic. Their expression is indeed perfect. Surely if the noblest hedonism could ever succeed with us through the noblest of statements, such an advocate as Shelley would convince us. But when the poet glorifies mere individual pleasure, as he does in part of his picture, our clearest reflection is that, after all, the end of the tragedy is petty when compared with the beginning.
For consider what a world it is in which we begin the poem. At first glance it is a gloomy and terrible world of brutal wrong. But soon the picture grows brighter, even while the wrong is depicted. There is the glorious figure of the suffering Titan, there is the sweetness of the tender love that watches him; and above the tyrant himself one feels that there is somehow a heavenly might, that does not suffer him to do his worst. The world in which ​these tilings live is not intolerable. But then come the spirits that sing to Prometheus, in his anguish, of immortal deeds done on the earth, of great thoughts and lofty passions. All these are born of the conflict, and have their being in the midst of the terrors of the tyrant’s dominion. It is indeed no perfect world, this; and one needs some higher light, such as Prometheus has, to prophesy that the good will ever triumph; but one sees forthwith that from the perfect world, if it ever comes, these great strivings for good, this sublime devotion and love and heroism, must not wholly vanish. These things must not be laid aside like old garments whenever Prometheus wins and is free; their spirit must be preserved as an element in the higher life of the future. If they are worth anything, their true nature must be eternal.
And as for the real worth of this world in which the evil is so far triumphant — we learn something of that from Demogorgon. This mysterious being has indeed no very definite religious philosophy to offer. He meets plain questions with vague answers, when Asia and Panthea catechise him; and one feels it to be well for his reputation as a profound teacher that his questioners are neither men nor Socratic inquirers. But still what he tells of the deep truth that is “imageless,” is enough to make us feel that even this world of horrors is not without a divine significance. Jove reigns, but, whatever the visible world may be, the truth of things is a world of hope and love, where the real God is somehow above all and through all, a Spirit of Eternal Goodness. ​To have found this out in the midst of all the evil is surely not to have found life wholly vain.
But then what happens? By the accident that, according to Shelley, rules the world, the revolution is accomplished, and Zeus is hurled headlong into the abyss. What glorious life shall now begin? When the deep and magnificent truth that was felt to be beneath all the horror of the tyrant’s reign, comes out into full light, what tongue shall be able to sing the glories of that beatific vision? We listen eagerly — and we are disappointed. Prometheus arises grandly from his bed of torture, and then — he forthwith bethinks himself of a very pretty cave, where one might be content to rest a long time in the refined company of agreeable women. There one will lie, and wreathe flowers, and tell tales, and sing songs, and laugh and weep; and the hours will fly swiftly by. And then what will become of the rest of the world? Oh, this world simply becomes a theatre of like individual enjoyments. Everybody to his cave and his flowers and his agreeable companions. And that will then be all. No organization; just good fellowship and fragmentary amusements.
No, that cannot be all. Shelley felt as much, and added the last act of the play. There we are to have depicted grandly and vaguely the life of organized love. The world shall be all alive, and the universal life shall join in the hymn of praise. All the powers of reality shall feel the new impulse of perfect harmony, and what shall spring from their union shall be some higher kind of existence, in which there is no longer to be any talk of thine and ​mine; but the “one undivided soul of many a soul,” “where all things flow to all, as rivers to the sea,” shall enter upon a life of transcendent significance, upon a task of eternal duration, and of a meaning too high for us poor mortals of this present world well to comprehend. But this is no longer pure hedonism, although the verses hereabouts are so full of the joyous outbursts and of the anticipations of rapture. In fine, the outcome is no perfect and harmonious conception at all. We find the joy of the freed and loving, yet still separate selves, and the higher life of the all-pervading universal spirit, both alike glorified; and we never get from the poet any clearness about their actual relation. Is the world blessed just because the tyrant no longer interferes with each man’s flower-wreathing and other amusements? Or is the sole source of bliss the disposition of everybody to give everybody else everything? Or is the real source of the perfection this: that these souls, no longer oppressed by hatred, have at last come to feel not only their freedom, but also some higher aim of universal life? Shelley hints, but does not consistently make us feel, what his real result is. There was in fact always about Shelley that childish innocence of benevolent hope, to which the only evil seemed to be the hatred of men for one another, and the highest good the outburst of universal kindliness. Now that is the beginning of moral insight, but cannot be all of it. As if the benevolence would not turn out to be utter emptiness, unless there is something beyond it! As if there could be any value in this unity of life, unless there ​is something to be done by the one life after it is united! As if the moral insight must not reveal some deeper truth than can be seen in its first moments!
One expects what we are coming to. In discussing this problem of Shelley’s we are reaching the sense that the moral insight must be yet further completed, or else it will be all in vain. The moral insight says to us all: Act as one being. We must come to that point; but we must also go beyond. We must ask: What is this one being to do, after the insight has made all the individuals of one will? And we already begin to see, in opposition to hedonism, that it cannot be the end of this universal will simply to make of us so and so many new separate individuals once more. The mass of tediously happy selves seems insipid to our common sense, just because we all dimly feel the truth that we must now come to understand better, namely, that the universal will of the moral insight must aim at the destruction of all which separates us into a heap of different selves, and at the attainment of some higher positive organic aim. The “one undivided soul” we are bound to make our ideal. And the ideal of that soul cannot be the separate happiness of you and of me, nor the negative fact of our freedom from hatred, but must be something above us all, and yet very positive.
Had we deduced our principle in any other way than the one we chose, we should be unable to take this, our present necessary step forwards. The feeling of sympathy, for instance, is concerned with the ​individual object of our sympathy. To sympatliize with ail men is to wish everybody happy, each after his own fashion. But we rejected that emotional sympathy as such. We said: The facts of life show us a conflict of wills. To realize this conflict is to see that no will is more justified in its separateness than is any other. This realization is ethical skepticism, a necessary stage on the way to the true moral insight. The ethical doubt means and is the realization of the conflict. But this realization means, as we see on reflection, a real will in us that unites these realized wills in one, and demands the end of their conflict. This is our realization of an Universal Will. The rest of our doctrine must be the development of the nature of the universal will. This will first says to each of the individual wills: “Submit thyself to me.” Or otherwise put, let each will be so acted out as if by One Being who combined in himself all the other wills. Hence the universal will must demand, not the indefinitely conceived or dimly and sentimentally desired separate satisfaction of everybody, but an organic union of life; such an union as this our world would try to make of itself if it were already in empirical fact what the universal will demands it to be, namely, one Self. This one Self, however, could no longer will to cut itself up again into the separate empirical selves, any more than it could in any narrow, priggish fashion set itself up for a new specimen of a lofty individual, to be obeyed as an arbitrary law-giver. It would demand all the wealth of life that the separate selves now have; and all the unity that ​any one individual now seeks for himself. It would aim at the fullest and most organized life conceivable. And this its aim would become no longer merely a negative seeking for harmony, but a positive aim, demanding the perfect Organization of Life.
III.
But the postulate of all hedonism, utilitarian or other, this postulate of the absolute worth of individual satisfaction, finds its practical refutation for every growing character in yet another form. Everybody has tried to realize the ideal of individualism, this ideal of a happy or satisfied self, either for himself or for some loved one; and everybody finds, if he tries the thing long enough, what a hollow and worthless business it all is. If there is, or is possible anywhere, a really satisfied self, it certainly has no place in any fleshly body; and the reason is not alone what disappointed people call the “disagreeable order of things in this wicked world,” but the inner contradictions of this notion of a perfected human self. Let us remind ourselves of some of these contradictions.
Hedonism has no meaning, unless the satisfied human self is logically possible. The ideal of hedonism, with all its vagueness, has at least one essential element, in that it demands the satisfaction of human selves by the free supply of all that they desire for themselves. Hedonism therefore must and does assert that what a man desires is his own contentment; so that, if you could, physically speaking, ​give him all that he asks for himself, you would have reached the goal for him. But now, if all this is a delusion, if in fact a man does not really want his own satisfaction alone, but does actually want something more, that is not his individual satisfaction, and that is not to be attained through his satisfaction, then the hedonistic ideal does not express the truth of life. And this paradoxical experience we all get, sooner or later. We find that our little self does desire something that, if gained, would be not its own satisfaction at all, but its own destruction in its separate life as this self. So the aim of life cannot be ultimately hedonistic. For, if possessed of the moral insight, we cannot will that each self should get the greatest possible aggregate of separate satisfactions, when in truth no one of the selves seeks merely an aggregate of self-satisfactions as such, but when each does seek something else that is unattainable in the form of separate self-satisfaction.
But possibly a reader may incredulously demand where the proof is of this self-contradictory desire that all the selves are declared to have. The proof lies in the general fact that to be fully conscious of one’s own individual life as such is to be conscious of a distressing limitation. This limitation every one very shrewdly notices for the first in other people. The knowledge of it expresses itself in personal criticism. One first puts the matter very naïvely thus, that, whereas the rule of life for one’s own person is simply to get all the satisfaction that one can, the appearance of anybody else who pretends to be content with himself must be the signal not for admira​tion at the sight of his success, but for a good deal of coutempt. One sees at once that he is a person of serious limitations. One sees and feels perfections that the other has not. One despises then the other man’s complacency, because it is so plainly founded in illusion. “If he could only see himself as others see him,” one says, “he could not be self-satisfied.” Criticism thus seems to indicate why he ought to be discontented, and why he would, if he knew more, feel a contempt for himself. All such criticism is really an abandonment of the hedonistic principle. If an individual ought to be dissatisfied, although he is actually satisfied, and if he ought to be dissatisfied merely because he has not some perfection that exists in somebody else, then the doctrine that a self reaches its goal in so far as ifc reaches inner contentment is given up. No benevolent hedonist has any business to criticise a happy man who is harming nobody by his happiness. He is at the goal, or approximately so. Let him alone. To do otherwise, by criticising him, is a crime.
But no; every one feels that the true goal is not attained for this man. And this feeling, though in itself as feeling it proves nothing, is the first suggestion to many of some deeper truth. This truth, however, enters like iron into his soid, when somebody else ably and justly and severely criticises him in his turn. Here, for example, I have been for a time content with myself, and have been saying to my soul: “Soul, take thy ease,” and here comes one who says to me, very justly, “Thou fool,” and points out some great lack in my conduct, or in my charac​character, or in my knowledge. And now I have a strange experience of conflicting passions. This critic has caused me a sharp pang. Perhaps I hate him for it; but then, when I go away and think the matter over, I see that as to the fact, he is right. This great limitation does actually exist for me, and perhaps I cannot remove it; so I can but suffer from the sense of it. I was innocent and ignorant before, and therefore happy. If the critic had not showed me to myself, I should have kept this bliss. But it is in vain now to think of returning to that innocence. I am indeed a wretch and a fool; and how shall I escape myself? Alas for my lost pleasure in contemplating my fancied perfection!
But no: cannot I in fact return to that ignorance, and to the blissful illusion of my own worth once more? Surely I can if I but try awhile. To flatter myself, to curse the critic, to talk of his jealousy and of his blindness: surely this will bring me back to my ignorance again in time. He will be forgotten, and I contented. But once more, my enlightened self revolts from this lie. The defect is real, and I know it. Would my ignorance make it less real? To have this defect and to suffer from it is bad enough; but with horror do I now contemplate the state of going on forever with this defect, but still ignorant of it and so not suffering from it. My old innocence seems really pitiful. It actually adds much to my present pang of chagrin, that I previously ought to have felt the chagrin, and yet had it not. I tremble when I reflect how, amid all that selfish complacency, I really was a fool the whole time, and ​appeared so to discerning people, and yet knew it not. And therefore now, through all the pang of the discovery, runs the feeling that I would not if I could, no, not for any delight of complacency, return to that state of hollow, delicious, detestable ignorance. It was a fool’s paradise; but I have escaped from it. I know my nakedness, and I prefer the fruit of the tree of knowledge, with bitter exile, to the whole of the delights of that wretched place. It is a contradictory state, this. My knowledge is torture to my foolish, sensitive self; yet while I writhe with the vainest of pangs, I despise utterly the thought of escaping it by illusion, or by forgetfulness, or by any means save the actual removal or conquest of the defect. And this I feel even when the defect is seen to be utterly irremovable without the destruction of myself. Better go on despising myself, and feeling the contempt of others, than return to the delights of foolishness; or, if the pain of knowing what I am is insupportable, then it were better to die, than to live in despicable ignorance. Oh, wretched man that I am! Who shall deliver me?
Is all this mere emotion? or is it insight? In fact it is a growing, though still imperfect insight, a form of the moral insight. The pangs of this wounded self-love are themselves in truth also vanity, like the complacent self-love that they mourn; but only through the gateway of this pain can most people get beyond these vanities of individualism. For this wounded self-love, that refuses to be comforted by any deliberate return to its old illusions, is, as Adam Smith long since pointed out, an emo​tional expression of the result of putting ourselves at the point of view of our critics. We see our limitations as they see them. Our will conforms itself, therefore, to their contemptuous will concerning us, because we realize the existence of that will. In recognizing and sharing their contempt, we therefore realize in part the universal will that must condemn all individual limitations as such. We practically experience the truth that a perfectly fair judge of us all would not be satisfied merely with our individual contentments as such, but would also demand the destruction of all our individual limitations. We thus get practically far beyond hedonism. We see that as we are weak and wretched in the eyes of one another, we should all be far more so in the eyes of a ofod Our ideal of life must then be the notion of a life where no one being could fairly criticise any other at all. But such a life would be no longer a life of separate individuals, each limited to his petty sphere of work. It would be a life in which self was lost in a higher unity of all the conscious selves.
Singular may appear this conception even now, after all that we have said; but it is a practical conception in our every-day human life. That we criticise the limitations of others, and desire them to sacrifice their pleasures for the sake of removing these limitations, may be regarded at first as our cruel caprice, if you will so regard it. But when the edge of the sword is turned against us, when we, feeling the bitterness of criticism and seeing our limitations, long to be beyond them, hate ourselves for them, and yet refuse to escape from the pain of all this by ​forgetfulness of the defect, we pass from capricious criticism to something higher. We accept with agony the point of view of the one who stands outside of us. And, so doing, we pass in effect to the acceptance of the demands of the universal will. If there were a will that included in one consciousness all our separate wills, it could not will our individual defects as such. It woid.d be absolute critic, as well as absolute harmonizer, of all of us. It would tear down these individual barriers of our petty lives, as the corporation of a great city may tear down wretched old rookeries. It would demand that we be one in spirit, and that our oneness be perfect. But if we experience this universal will, we experience that hedonism, whose life-blood is the insistence upon individual states as such, cannot be upheld by the moral insight, either now, or at any future stage of our human life on this earth. We perceive too that we all have a deep desire for self-destruction, in so far as we recognize that our self-love means absence of perfection.
IV.
We have seen in general the moral outcome of individualism. Let us study some of its forms and fortunes more in detail. Individualism, viewed as the tendency to hold that the ideal of life is the separate happy man, is itself yery naturally the normal tendency of unreflecting strong natures, to whom happiness has been in a fair human measure already given. Children and child-like men, full of vigor, are innocently selfish; or, when they act unselfishly, their ​whole ideal is the making of others like themselves. They fall into a notion about life that the author not long since heard well-expressed by a cheerful young friend, a former fellow-student, who, having early plunged into a busy life, has already won both influence and property. This man, full of the enthusiasm of first success, v/as talking over his life with the writer, and fell to defining his opinions on various subjects, such as young men like to discuss. At last he was asked about the view of life that he had already formed in his little experience. He was quick, honest, and definite in his answer, as he always has been. “My notion of a good life is,” he said, “that you ought to help your friends and whack your enemies.” The notion was older than the speaker remembered; for Socratic dialogues on the Just, with their ingenious Sophists making bold assertions, form no part of his present stock of subjects for contemplation. But what was interesting in the fresh and frank manner of the speech was the clearness of the conviction that a world of successful and friendly selves, whose enemies chanced to be all recently “whacked,” would be at the goal of bliss. Such indeed is and must be the individualism of the successful and unreflecting man, by whom all the world is classified as being either his or not his, as to a cow all is either cow feed or not cow feed. A man in this position has never yet known the burden of Faust’s soul when he says. Cursed he what as possession charms us. If such a man gets any moral insight, it will be on this stage imperfect. He will seek only to multiply himself ​in the forms of other men. These he will call his friends. That in which he does not recognize himself, he will “whack.”
But most men cannot keep this form of the illusion of individualism. They pass most of their lives in the midst of disappointment. The self cannot get its objects. The ideal independence is hampered. The stubborn world asserts itself against us. We feel the littleness of our powers and of our plans. The broken and despairing self has to seek refuge elsewhere. And so individualism most commonly assumes another shape. In inner self-development we seek what the world refuses us in outer self-realization. Thoughts at least are free. Our emotions are our own. The world does not understand them; but the world is cold and unappreciative. Let us be within ourselves what we cannot get in the outer world. Let us be inwardly complete, even if we are outwardly failures. Then we shall outmt the cruel world, and produce the successful self, in spite of misfortunes.
The reader need not be reminded of what vast development individualism has undergone in this direction. Literature is full of accounts of struggles for inward self-realization, made by men whose outer growth is impeded. The Hamlets and the Fausts of poetry, the saints and the self-conscious martyrs of great religious movements, are familiar examples. We have already in a former chapter studied the outcome of this romantic individualism in a few cases. There is no time to dwell here afresh at any length on so familiar a theme, but for the present we may ​point out that all illustrations of the tendency fall into two classes, representing respectively the sentimental and the heroic individualism. These are the forms of that Nobler Selfishness which benevolent hedonism defends. They are efforts to find the contented and perfected self. Their failure is the failure of individualism, and therewith of hedonism.
As for the sentimental individualism, we have seen already how unstable are its criteria of perfection, how full of fickleness is its life. The sentimental self admits that the world cannot understand it, and will not receive it; but it insists that this neglect comes because the world does not appreciate the strength and beauty of the inner emotional life. The ideal, then, is devotion to a culture of the beautiful soul, and to a separation of this soul from all other life. Let other souls be saved m like fashion. One does not object to their salvation; but one insists that each saved soul dwells apart in its own sensitive feelings, in the world of higher artistic pleasures. Now in fact such lives may be not uninteresting to the moralist; but no moralist can be really content with their ideal. Its best direct refutation is after all a sense of humor strong enough to let the sensitive and beautiful soul see once in a while how comical is its demure pursuit of these subjective phantoms. This miserable life of deep inward excitements and longings, how absurd it seems to any critic who, standing outside, sees that there is nothing more than froth and illusion and hypocrisy in it. Heine’s anecdote of the monkey boiling his own tail so as to get an inward sense of the nature and worth of the art of ​cookery, is what first comes to mind when we see such a man as this subjective idealist of the emotions. You have only to get him to laugh heartily once or twice, and his Philistine narrowness can no longer content him. “Why is just my feeling worth so much?” he will say. And then he will wake up to observe that his ideal was all a bad dream; and that an experience has no more or less worth because it happens in connection with the decomposition of his particular brain-stuff. Faust discovered that, as we have seen; and so in time will any other sensible man. The real reason after all why Mephistopheles could not get Faust’s soul was that Faust could understand the Mephistophelean wit, which was throughout destructive of individualism. The sentimentalist who has no humor is once for all given over to the devil, and need sign no contract. He stares into every mirror that he passes, and, cursing the luck that makes him move so fast in this world, he murmurs incessantly, Verweile doch, du hist so schön. And so in the presence of the moral insight he is forthwith and eternally damned, unless some miracle of grace shall save him. It is noteworthy that one or two of our recent and yoimgest novelists in this country have gained a certain reputation by sentimental stories of collegiate and post-graduate life that precisely illustrate this simple-minded but abominable spirit. May these young authors repent while there is time, if indeed they can repent.
Less dangerous to genuine morality, and far higher in the scale of worth, is the Titanic form of individualism, the form that has given birth to such ​expressions as the Everlasting No of “Sartor Resartus.” The name of Prometheus at once springs to our lips when we think of this view of life. Prometheus is so fully the representative of Titanism, that there is no better way of characterizing its whole spirit than to call it the Heresy of Prometheus, the finest of all moral heresies, and the last.
The world will not grant you outward freedom, and you see the hollowness of that inward life of blessed emotions. You despise it in others; you see that the moral insight cannot approve such a form of selfish separation in you or in them. But there is another form of self-development. You must be something. Why not be heroic? Possibly the ideal is a world of courageous selves, that find their perfection in their independence of action. Prometheus gave this ideal a peculiar emphasis by reason of the fact that he had a Zeus to defy. But the same ideal, in a more moderate expression, is the ideal of many a quiet, matter of fact man, who has little happiness, but much spirit and energy, who is too busy and too healthy to be sentimental, who knows little of poetry, who has never heard the name of Prometheus, but who knows what it is to hold his own in the fight with the world. This man you cannot put down; he cares little for the opinions of others. There is no judge above him save God or his conscience. He is no saint; but he is at least an admirable fellow. He belongs to the race of Achilles; he believes in the gospel of eternal warfare against whatever seems to him evil. He respects others; he wants to do good in his way. But he thinks that the best good ​that he could do would be to make other men brave like himself. This lonely, active, indomitable self he thinks the ideal type of perfection. For him the moral insight does not go beyond the approval of such life as this, indefinitely multiplied.
It is always a delight to follow this Titanism in its various shapes. Buddhism, as we know, is a religion wholly founded on self-denial, and it counsels austere self-extinction. And yet, by a strange freak of moral dialectics, it is Buddhism that has given us some of the best expressions of the Titanic individualism. In a Buddhist homily in the Sutta Nipâta one may find such an outburst as the following, — one of the finest of the confessions of the Titans: —
“Having laid aside the rod against all beings, and not hurting any of them, let no one wish for a son, much less for a companion; let him wander alone like a rhinoceros.
“In him who has intercourse with others, affections arise, and then the pain which follows affection; considering the misery that originates in affection, let one wander alone like a rhinoceros.
“He who has compassion on his friends and confidential companions loses his own advantage, having a fettered mind; seeing this danger in friendship, let one wander alone like a rhinoceros.
“Just as a large bamboo-tree, with its branches entangled in each other, such is the care one has with children and wife; but like the shoot of the bamboo not chnging to anything, let one wander alone like a rhinoceros.
“As a beast unbound in the forest goes feeding at pleas​ure, so let the wise man, considering only his own will, wander alone like a rhinoceros. . . .
. . . “Discontented are some ascetics, also some householders, dwelling in houses; let one, caring little about other people’s children, wander alone like a rhinoceros.
“If one acquires a clever companion, an associate righteous and wise, let him, overcoming all dangers, wander about with him glad and thoughtful.
“If one does not acquire a clever companion, an associate righteous and wise, then as a king abandoning his conquered kingdom, let him wander alone like a rhinoceros. . . .
. . . “Seeing bright golden bracelets, well-wrought by the goldsmith, striking against each other when there are two on one arm, let one wander alone like a rhinoceros.
“Thus, if I join myself with another, I shall swear or scold; considering this danger in future, let one wander alone like a rhinoceros. . . .
. . . “Both cold and heat, hunger and thirst, wind and a burning sun, and gadflies and snakes, — having overcome all these things, let one wander alone like a rhinoceros.
“As the elephant, the strong, the spotted, the large, after leaving the herd walks at pleasure in the forest, even so let one wander alone like a rhinoceros. . . .
“Not adorning himself, not looking out for sport, amusement, and the dehght of the pleasure in the world; on the contrary, being loath of a life of dressing, speaking the truth, let one wander alone like a rhinoceros. . . .
. . . “This is a tie, in this there is little happiness, little enjoyment, but more of pain, this is a fishhook, so having understood, let a thoughtful man wander alone like a rhinoceros. ​
“Having torn the ties, having broken the net as a fish in the water, being like a fire not returning to the burnt place, let one wander alone like a rhinoceros. . . .
. . . “Not abandoning seclusion and meditation, always wandering in accordance with the Dhammas, seeing misery in the existences, let one wander alone like the rhinoceros.
“Wishing for the destruction of desire, being careful, no fool, learned, strenuous, considerate, restrained, energetic, let one wander alone like a rhinoceros.
“Like a lion not trembling at noises, like the wind not caught in a net, like a lotus not stained by water, let one wander alone like a rhinoceros.
“As a lion strong by his teeth, after overcommg all animals, wanders victorious as the king of the animals, and haunts distant dwelling-places, even so let one wander alone like a rhinoceros.”
. . . “They cultivate the society of others, and serve them for the sake of advantage; friends without a motive are now difficult to get, men know their own profit and are impure; therefore let one wander alone like a rhinoceros.”
When one contemplates the ideal of the heroic individualism in this its purest form, rugged, empty of sensuous comforts, yet noble and inspiring in all but the highest degree, one feels how hard the decision as to its worth will be, unless the moral insight gives very definitely and authoritatively its ruling in the matter. But fortunately, in trying to judge of even so splendid a caprice as this, we are not left to our individual opinion. The will of the Titan as to the world of life is simply, by hypothesis, not the universal will. The one being that included in his life all ​our petty lives, how must he regard this self-seeking loneliness of disposition? What is this heroic life but an overflow from the great stream of universal life, a pool, that, left to itself by some subsiding flood, slowly dries away in its shallow stagnancy, until it becomes a mud-puddle? And as for the proof of this, what becomes of your hero if you take him at his word, and leave him to himself like a rhinoceros? Then indeed he soon sinks to the level of a peevish animal. His admirable character is what it is by reason of his conflicts with his fellows, and by reason of the respect that he excites in others. Stop talking about him, cease admiring him, do not even fight with him, ignore him utterly; and with these external supports see his inner heroism vanish. He exists as hero, in fact, only because he is in organic relation to the world about him. His boasted loneliness is an illusion. Could not Mephistopheles have his laugh here too?
But the Titan is often properly the hero not only of a comedy, but also of a tragedy; and a tragedy, as we know, always discovers to us the gloomy worthlessness of this individual life as such. Mortal man, once brought to possess the moral insight, finds his destiny not in himself, but in the life about him, or in the ideal life of God. And the tragedy expresses one way of getting this insight.
In short, just what the Heresy of Prometheus asserts to be the perfect, namely, the complete and all-sided development of life, just that can belong only to the general, not to the individual life. Hence Titanism always contradicts itself. It says that I, ​the narrow, limited self, who am dependent for every quality of my life on constant living intercourse with other people, must become perfect, independent, practically infinite. But to ask this is to ask that I destroy myself, and my Titanism with me. Unquiet is and must be the life that seeks perfection in any group of selves. And so the ideal cannot here be found.
V.
Somewhat hastily, as our limits have required, we have pursued the definition of our ideal through the imperfect forms of individualism. And now what must it be that the moral insight, with its Universal Will, demands of the possible future moral humanity, not as the negative task of preparing the way for goodness, but as the positive ideal task of the community in which the moral insight is attained? This demand is: Organize all Life. And this means: Find work for the life of the coming moral humanity which shall be so comprehensive and definite that each moment of every man’s life in that perfect state, however rich and manifold men’s lives may then be, can be and will be spent in the accomplishment of that one highest impersonal work. If such work is found and accepted, the goal of human progress will be in so far reached. There will then be harmony, the negative expression of the moral insight; and there will be work, and organization of work. And this work will be no more the work of so and so many separate men, but it will be the work of man as man. And the separate men will not ​know or care whether they separately are happy; for they shall have no longer individual wills, but the Universal Will shall work in and through them, as the one will of two lovers finds itself in the united life of these twain, so that neither of them asks, as lover, whether this is his perfection or the other’s that he experiences. For their love makes them one. In such wise we must figure to ourselves the ideal state of humanity. And anything short of that we are required by the moral insight to alter in the direction of that end.
The reader may ask, What work can be found that can thus realize the universal will? It is not for us to know the whole nature of that work. We set before us the ideal task to discover such forms of activity as shall tend to organize life. The complete organization we cannot now foresee. But we can foresee in what general direction that human activity will tend, if it is ever discovered. For we have certain human activities that do now already tend to the impersonal organization of the life of those engaged in them. Such activities are found in the work of art, in the pursuit of truth, and in a genuine public spirit. Beauty, Knowledge, and the State, are three ideal objects that do actually claim from those who serve them harmony, freedom from selfishness, and a wholly impersonal devotion. Both in art and in the service of the state, the weakness of human nature makes men too often put personal ambition before the true service of their chosen ideal. The faultiness of all such individualism is, however, generally recognized. The dignity and se​verely impersonal relationships and language of official life are intended to express the sense that no individual has as such the right to recognition at the moment when he exercises an official function. He lives at the time wholly in his office. The state is just then everything. Even so all higher criticism professes to disregard the personal pleasure of the artist, and the personal whim of the critic. The production and the criticism of Art are no amusements of two individuals. They are work done in the service of the one mistress, the divine art itself. But still, notwithstanding the recognition of this ideal devotion to one’s country or to one’s art, our typical politician and our typical ambitious artist show us that these activities still but imperfectly overcome individualism, or lead men to the higher plane of moral life. Better success in organizing life one finds, when one passes to the activity of truth-seeking, especially in fields where human thought is best master of itself, and best conscious of its powers. When one considers the work of a company of scientific specialists, — how each one lives for his science, and how, when the specialty is advanced and well organized, no one in official expressions of his purely scientific purposes dares either to give himself airs of importance as an individual, or to show any benevolence or favoritism or fear in considering and testing the work of anybody else; when one sees how impersonal is this idea of the scientific life, how no self of them all is supposed to have a thought about his science because it pleases him, but solely because it is true, — when one consid​ers all this, one sees faintly what the ideal relation of mankind would be, if the ideal work for all men were found. This devoted scientific spirit is itself only an ideal even to-day; and all sorts of personal motives still interfere to disturb its purity. But here, at all events, one sees dimly in a concrete instance what the organization of life may yet become.
Now suppose a world in which men had some one end of activity that united somehow all the different strivings of our nature, — æsthetic, social, theoretical. Suppose that in the pursuit of this end all the petty, selfish aims of individuals had been forgotten. Suppose that men said no longer: “I have won this good thing for myself and my friends,” but only, “This good is attained,” no matter by whom. Suppose that thus all life was organized in and through this activity, so that a man rose up and lay down to rest, ate and drank, exercised and amused his senses, met his fellows, talked with them, lived and planned with them, built his cities, wandered over the oceans, searched the heavens with his telescopes, toiled in his laboratories, sang his songs, wrote his poems, loved and died, all for the service of this one great work, and knew his life only as the means to serve that one end, then would the ideal of the moral insight be attained. The world of life would be as one will, working through all and in all, seeking the ends of no one individual, caring not for any stupid and meaningless “aggregate” of individual states, but getting what as insight it demands, the absolute Unity of Life. Then ​indeed we should have reached the ideal; and this being the ideal, all is good that helps us in the direction thereof, and all is evil that drives us in the opposing direction.
The imperfection and the relative justification in its place of benevolent hedonism are thus indicated. The moral insight being attained by all men as an experience, this insight could not will for individuals such painful experiences as would degrade the sufferers below the level of the insight itself, back to the struggles and the illusions of individualism. It would be the business of men then as now, to remove useless pain out of the world, not however for any other reason than that pain implies separation of the sufferer from the consciousness of universal life, and consequent disharmony of his will in its relation to other wills. Pain that springs from selfish disappointments we must often temporarily increase, that we may lead a man out of himself. But for the rest, the moral insight rejects pain, though only because it means disharmony of the wills that are in the world.
Thus we have completed the expression of our gen- eral ideal. We must add a few concrete precepts that this ideal has to give us concerning the conduct of our daily life. Plainly, if such a goal as this is what we aim at from afar, the acts of our lives must be influenced by it. What relation between me and my neighbor to-day does this moral law establish?
Thou and I, neighbor, have in this world no rights as individuals. We are instruments. The insight that begins in me when I find thee, must go further. ​I find not only thee, but also Life Universal. Inasmuch as I do anything for thee, I do it also to the life universal; but, even so, it is only because I serve the life universal that I dare serve thee. Thy happiness, however near and dear thou art to me, is but a drop in this vast ocean of life. And we must be ready to sacrifice ourselves to the Whole. But while we live together, and while we may without sin enjoy each other's presence, how shall we treat each other? As mere masses of happy or miserable states? As selves to be made separately perfect! No, that cannot be. We must live united with each other and the world. Therefore must we do our part to find work vast enough to bring us all in so far as may be into unity, without cramping the talent of any of us. Each then is to do his work, but so as to unite with the work of others. How may we accomplish this? By seeking to develop every form of life that does bring men into such oneness. Our vocation, whatever it be, must not end simply in increasing what people call the aggregate happiness of mankind, but in giving human life more interconnection, closer relationship. Therefore we must serve as we can art, science, truth, the state, not as if these were machines for giving people pleasant feelings, but because they make men more united. When we urge or seek independence of character, we must do so only because such independence is a temporary means, whose ultimate aim is harmony and unity of all men on a higher plane. In all this we must keep before us very often the high ideal that we are trying to approach. And when we judge of ​a good action we must say, not that this was good because it made some one happy, but that it was good because it tended directly or remotely to realize the Universal Will.
And so, however much mere harmony may be our aim, we must be ready very often temporarily to fight with disorganizing and separating tendencies, forces, or men. When we fight we must do so for the sake of conquering a peace in the name of the Highest. And so we must fight resolutely, fearlessly, mercilessly. For we care not how many stubbornly disorganizing spirits are crushed on the way. The One Will must conquer. But on the other side we must be very careful of every soul, and of every tendency that may, without destruction, be moulded into the service of the Universal Will. The moral insight desires that no hair fall from the head of any living creature unnecessarily. The one aim is stern to its steadfast enemies, but it is infinitely regardful of all the single aims, however they may seem wayward, that can at last find themselves subdued and yet realized in its presence, and so conformed to its will. All these rivulets of purpose, however tiny, all these strong floods of passion, however angry, it desires to gather into the surging tides of its infinite ocean, that nothing may be lost that consents to enter. Its unity is no abstraction. The One Will is not a one-sided will. It desires the realization of all possible life, however rich, strong, ardent, courageous, manifold such life may be, if only this life can enter into that highest unity. All that has will is sacred to it, save in so far as any will refuses to join with the ​others in the song and shout of the Sons of God. Its warfare is never intolerance, its demand for submission is never tyranny, its sense of the excellence of its own unity is never arrogance; for its warfare is aimed at the intolerance of the separate selves, its yoke is the yoke of complete organic freedom, its pride is in the perfect development of all life. When we serve it, we must sternly cut off all that life in ourselves or in others that cannot ultimately conform to the universal will; but we have nothing but love for every form of sentient existence that can in any measure express this Will.
VI.
We have done for the present with the ideal, and must turn to reality. Our religious consciousness wants support for us in our poor efforts to do right. Is this real world that we have so naively assumed thus far, in any wise concerned to help us in realizing ideals, or to support us by any form of approval in our search for the right? We must face this problem coolly and skeptically, if we want any result. We must not fear the thunders of any angry dogmatic thinker, nor the pain that such researches must cause us if they are unsuccessful. It is something very precious that we seek, and we must run great risks, if need be, to get it.
Let us begin to define a little better what this is that we seek. By a support for moral acts in outer reality, we do not mean merely or mainly a power that will reward goodness. The moral insight cares ​not for individual rewards. Only the good intention is truly moral. Good acts done for pay are selfish acts. So the outer support that we want in our morality is not reward as such. We want to know that, when we try to do right, we are not alone; that there is something outside of us that harmonizes with our own moral efforts by being itself in some way moral. This something may be a person or a tendency. Let us exemplify what we mean by some familiar cases. Job seeks, in his consciousness of moral integrity, for outer support in the midst of his sufferings. Now whatever he may think about rewards, they are not only rewards that he seeks. He wants a vindicator, a righteous, all-knowing judge, to arise, that can bear witness how upright he has been; such a vindicator he wants to see face to face, that he may call upon him as a beholder of what has actually happened. “Oh that I knew where I might find him, that I might come even to his seat. I would order my cause before him, and fill my mouth with arguments. I would know the words which he would answer me, and understand what he would say unto me. . . . There the righteous might dis- pute with him; so should I be delivered forever from my judge. Behold I go forward, but he is not there; and backward, but I cannot perceive him: On the left hand, where he doth work, but I cannot behold him: he hideth himself on the right hand, that I cannot see him : But he knoweth the way that I take: when he hath tried me I shall come forth as gold.”
So again in the great parable of the judgment day, ​in the twenty-fifth chapter of Matthew, the moral force of the story is not expressed by the rewards and punishments described, any more than in Elijah’s vision on Horeb, — the Lord was in the thunder and in the fire. But the moral force of the scene lies in the concluding words that the judge is made to speak to the multitudes of just and unjust. “Inasmuch as ye did it unto the least of these, ye did it unto me.” That is, if we may paraphrase the words of the judge: “I,” he says, “represent all beings. Their good is mine. If they are hungry or naked or sick or imprisoned, so am I. We are brethren; ours is all one universal life. That I sit in this seat, arbiter of heaven and hell, makes me no other than the representative of universal life. Such reverence as ye now bear to me is due, and always was due, to the least of these my brethren.” The infinite sacredness of all conscious life, that is the sense of the story; the rest is the scenic accompaniment, which, whether literally or symbolically true, has no direct moral significance. Now the knowledge such as Job sought, the knowledge that there is in the universe some consciousness that sees and knows all reality, including ourselves, for which therefore all the good and evil of our lives is plain fact, — this knowledge would be a religious support to the moral consciousness. The knowledge that there is a being that is no respecter of persons, that considers all lives as equal, and that estimates our acts according to their true value, — this would be a genuine support to the religious need in us, quite apart from all notions about reward and punishment. A thinking being, a seer of all ​good and evil, is thus desired. This thinking being would still have religious significance, even if it had no other attributes than these. Should we find it necessary to regard this being as without affection, sympathy, or even power to act, as without willingness to avenge wrong-doing, if we had to deprive it of everything else that is human save knowledge; let this be a passionless and perfect knowledge, an absolutely fair judgment of our moral actions, and there would still be in the world something of religious value. It is not affirmed that we ought to rest content with such a conception as this, but at all events this conception would not be valueless. Even so again, the conception of some natural tendency in the world that, being “a power not ourselves,” “makes for righteousness,” this conception, as Mr. Matthew Arnold has so well shown us, would have a religious value. Something of this kind then, more or less definite and full of life, is what we seek. What indication is there that such search is not hopeless? For the author’s part, he professes to be quite willing to accept any result of research, however gloomy or skeptical, to which he is led by genuine devotion to the interests of human thought as thought. But he insists that as moral beings we should make clear to ourselves what are the interests of thought, and that we should see whether they do lead us to results that are not wholly skeptical, nor altogether gloomy. There is no reason for clipping our own wings for fear lest we should escape from our own coops and fly over the palings into our own garden. Let us get all the satisfaction from ​philosophy that we can. In truth we shall never get too much.
But, for the rest, the reader must be reminded of one thing that was said in the opening chapter about the magnitude and boldness of the demands that religious philosophy makes in coming to the study of the world. We said that we will be satisfied only with the very best that we can get. We want to find some reality that our ideal aims can lead us to regard as of Infinite Worth. If we cannot find that, then the best possible aspect of reality must be chosen instead. We will not be satisfied with little, if we can get much. Our religious demands are boundless. We will not falsify the truth; nor yet will we dread any disaster to our ideal aims, however great the disappointment that would result from failure. But, while pursuing the truth with reverence, we will not withdraw our demands until we see that we can get no certain success in them.
We insist, therefore, that the religiously valuable reality in the world shall be, if so we can find it, a Supreme Reality, no mere chance outcome of special circumstances, but an ultimate aspect of things.
Furthermore, the special form that our ideal has taken demands another character in our object of religious satisfaction. It must be such as to support the realization of our particular ideal. If a power, it must aim at the unity of our lives; if in some other way approved as the deepest truth of thiugs, it must show us how our ideal either can be realized by us, or else is already realized at the heart of this truth. ​
Such is the work of our second book. We approach it not as if we expected any mystical revelation, but solely as having for our one desire to find out what a sensible man ought reasonably to think of the world wherein he finds himself.
* ↑ Unitarian Review for September, 1884.
* ↑ Max Müller’s Sacred Books of the East, vol. x., part ii., p. 6 sqq.