There is a pleasure in philosophy, and a lure even in the mirages of metaphysics, which every student feels until the coarse necessities of physical existence drag him from the heights of thought into the mart of economic strife and gain. Most of us have known some golden days in the June of life when philosophy was in fact what Plato calls it, “that dear delight”; when the love of a modestly elusive Truth seemed more glorious, incomparably, than the lust for the ways of the flesh and the dross of the world. And there is always some wistful remnant in us of that early wooing of wisdom. “Life has meaning, to find its meaning is my meat and drink.”
It essential pattern was hammered out in lectures to students of philosophy who were mature, intelligent, articulate, but who were also uninformed, and in particular were unfamiliar with the great inheritance of western philosophical literature.
The “outlines” came because a million voices called for them. Human knowledge had become unmanageably vast; every science had begotten a dozen more, each subtler than the rest; the telescope revealed stars and systems beyond the mind of man to number or to name; geology spoke in terms of millions of years, where men before had thought in terms of thousands; history proved all history false, and painted a canvas which only a Spengler or an Eduard Meyer could vision as a whole; theology crumbled, and political theory cracked; invention complicated life and war, and economic creeds overturned governments and inflamed the world; philosophy itself, which had once summoned all sciences to its aid in making a coherent image of the world and an alluring picture of the good, found its task of coordination too stupendous for its courage, ran away from all these battlefronts of truth, and hid itself in recondite and narrow lanes, timidly secure from the issues and responsibilities of life. Human knowledge had become too great for the human mind.
All that remained was the scientific specialist, who knew “more and more about less and less,” and the philosophical speculator, who knew less and less about more and more. The specialist put on blinders in order to shut out from his vision all the world but one little spot, to which he glued his nose. Perspective was lost. “Facts” replaced understanding; and knowledge, split into a thousand isolated fragments, no longer generated wisdom. The common man found himself forced to choose between a scientific priesthood mumbling unintelligible pessimism, and a theological priesthood mumbling incredible hopes.
For it knowledge became too great for communication, it would be degenerate into scholasticism, and the weak acceptance of authority; mankind would slip into a new age of faith, worshiping at a respectful distance its new priests; and civilization, which had hoped to raise itself upon education disseminated far and wide, would be left precariously based upon a technical erudition that had become the monopoly of an esoteric class monastically isolated from the world by which the high birth rate of terminology.
As quickly as it had come, the fashion changed; no one dared any longer say a word for the humanization of knowledge; the denunciation of outlines was now the easy road to critical repute; it became the style to speak with a delicate superiority of any non-fiction book that could be understood. The snob movement in literature began.
A reputation for humor is disastrous to statesmen and philosophers: Germany could not forgive Schopenhauer his story of Unzelmann, and only France has recognized the depth behind the wit and brilliance of Voltaire.
I trust that the book never misled its readers into supposing that by reading it they would become philosophers overnight, or that they would be saved the trouble, or pleasure, of reading the philosophers themselves. God knows there is no shortcut to knowledge; after 40 years of seeking her one finds “Truth” still veiled, and what she shows of herself most disconcerting.
Spinoza is not to be read, he is to be studied; you must approach him as you would approach Euclid, recognizing that in these brief 200 pages a man has written down his lifetime’s thought with stoic sculptory of everything superfluous. Do not think to find its core by running over it rapidly. Read the book not all at once, but in small portions at many sittings. And having finished it, consider that you have but begun to understand it.
We want to know that the little things are little, and the big things big, before it is too late; we want to see things now as they will seem forever — “in the light of eternity.” We want to learn to laugh in the face of the inevitable, to smile even at the looming of death. We want to be whole, to coordinate our energies by criticizing and harmonizing our desires; for coordinated energy is the last word in ethics and politics, and perhaps in logic and metaphysics too. “To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live, according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust.” We may be sure that if we can find but wisdom, all things else will be added unto us. Truth will not make us rich, but it will make us free.
Science seems always to advance, while philosophy seems always to lose ground. Yet this is only because philosophy accepts the hard and hazardous task of dealing with problems not yet open to the methods of science — problems like good and evil, beauty and ugliness, order and freedom, life and death; so soon as a field of inquiry yields knowledge susceptible of exact formulation it is called science. Every science begins as philosophy and ends as art; it arises in hypothesis and flows into achievement. Philosophy is a hypothetical interpretation of the unknown (as in metaphysics), or of the inexactly known (as in ethics or political philosophy); it is the front trench in the siege of truth. Science is the captured territory; and behind it are those secure regions in which knowledge and art build our imperfect and marvelous world. Philosophy seems to stand still, perplexed; but only because she leaves the fruits of victory to her daughters the sciences, and herself passes on, divinely discontent, to the uncertain and the unexplored.
Science is the analytical description, philosophy is the synthetic interpretation. Science wishes to resolve the whole into parts, the organism into organs, the obscure into the known. It does not inquire into the values and ideal possibilities of things, not into their total and final significance; it is content to show their present actuality and operation, it narrows its gaze resolutely to the nature and process of things as they are. The scientist is as impartial as Nature in Turgenev’s poem: he is as interested in the leg of a flea as in the creative throes of a genius. But the philosopher is not content to describe the fact; he wishes to ascertain its relation to experience in general, and thereby to get at its meaning and its worth; he combines things in interpretive synthesis; he tries to put together, better than before, that great universe-watch which the inquisitive scientist has analytically taken apart. Science tells us how to heal and how to kill; it reduces the death rate in retail and then kills us wholesale in war; but only wisdom — desire coordinated in the light of all experience — can tell us when to heal and when to kill. To observe processes and to construct means is science; to criticize and coordinate ends is philosophy: and because in these days our means and instruments have multiplied beyond our interpretation and synthesis of ideals and ends, our life is full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. For a fact is nothing except in relation to desire; it is not complete except in relation to a purpose and a whole. Science without philosophy, facts without perspective and valuation, cannot save us from havoc and despair. Science gives us knowledge, but only philosophy can give us wisdom.
Specifically, philosophy means and includes 5 fields of study and discourse: logic, esthetics, ethics, politics, and metaphysics.
And indeed, great men speak to us only so far as we have ears and souls to hear them; only so far as we have in us the roots, at least, of that which flowers out in them. We too have had the experiences they had, but we did not suck those experiences dry of their secret and subtle meanings: we were not sensitive to the overtones of the reality that hummed about us. Genius hears the overtones, and the music of the spheres; genius knows what Pythagoras meant when he said that philosophy is the highest music.
The war over, Sparta demobilized her troops, and suffered the economic disturbances natural to that process; while Athens turned her navy into a merchant fleet, and became one of the greatest trading cities of the ancient world. Sparta relapsed into agricultural seclusion and stagnation, while Athens became a busy mart and port, the meeting place of many races of men and of diverse cults and customs, whose contact and rivalry begot comparison, analysis and thought.
The growth of wealth brought the leisure and security which are the prerequisite of research and speculation; men now asked the stars not only for guidance on the seas but as well for an answer to the riddles of the universe.
In politics they divided into two schools. One, like Rousseau, argued that nature is good, and civilization bad; that by nature all men are equal, becoming unequal only by class-made institutions: and that law is an invention of the strong to chain and rule the weak. Another school, like Nietzsche, claimed that nature is beyond good and evil; that by nature all men are unequal; that morality is an invention of the weak to limit and deter the strong; that power is the supreme virtue and the supreme desire of man; and that of all forms of government the wisest and most natural is aristocracy.
Philosophy begins when one learns to doubt — particularly to doubt one’s cherished beliefs, one’s dogmas and one’s axioms. Who knows how these cherished beliefs became certainties with us, and whether some secret wish did not furtively beget them, clothing desire in the dress of thought? There is no real philosophy until the mind turns round and examines itself. Gnothi seauton, said Socrates: Know thyself.
If, for example, good meant intelligent, and virtue meant wisdom; if men could be taught to see clearly their real interests, to see afar the distant results of their deeds, to criticize and coordinate their desires out of a self-cancelling chaos into a purposive and creative harmony — this, perhaps, would provide for the educated and sophisticated man the morality which the unlettered relies on reiterated precepts and external control. Perhaps all sin is error, partial vision, foolishness? The intelligent man may have the same violent and unsocial impulses as the ignorant man, but surely he will control them better, and slip less often into imitation of the beast.
Surely the management of a state is a matter for which men cannot be too intelligent, a matte that needs the unhindered thought of the finest minds. How can a society be saved, or be strong, except it be led by its wisest men?
We are privileged to read for ourselves that simple and courageous (if not legendary) “apology,” or defence, in which the first martyr of philosophy proclaimed the rights and necessity of free thought, upheld his value to the state, and refused to beg for mercy from the crowd whom he had always contemned. They had the power to pardon him; he disdained to make the appeal. It was a singular confirmation of his theories, that the judges should wish to let him go, while the angry crowd voted for his death. Had he not denied the god? Woe to him who teaches men faster than they can learn.
For nothing is so difficult as definition, nor anything so severe a test and exercise of mental clarity and skill.
Verily I laughed many a time over the weaklings who thought themselves good because they had lame paws.
We have here the fundamental problem of ethics, the crux of the theory of moral conduct. What is justice? — shall we seek righteousness, or shall we seek power? — is it better to be good, or to be strong?
Justice would be a simple matter, says Plato, if men were simple; an anarchist communism would suffice.
He answers, because of greed and luxury. Men are not content with a simple life: they are acquisitive, ambitious, competitive, and jealous; they soon tire of what they have, and pine for what they have not; and they seldom desire anything unless it belongs to others. The result is the encroachment of one group upon the territory of another, the rivalry of groups for the resources of the soil, and then war. Trade and finance develop, and bring new class-divisions. “Any ordinary city is in fact two cities, one the city of the poor, the other of the rich, each at war with the other; and in either division there are smaller ones — you would make a great mistake if you treated them as single states.”
These changes in the distribution of wealth produce political changes: as the wealth of the merchant over-reaches that of the land-owner, aristocracy gives way to a plutocratic oligarchy — wealthy traders and bankers rule the state. Then statesmanship, which is the coordination of social forces and the adjustment of policy to growth, is replaced by politics, which is the strategy of party and the lust for the spoils of office.
But even democracy ruins itself by excess — of democracy. Its basic principle is the equal right of all to hold office and determine public policy. This is at first glance a delightful arrangement; it becomes disastrous because the people are not properly equipped by education to select the best rulers and the wisest courses.
Plato complains that whereas in simpler matters — like shoe-making — we think only a specially-trained person will serve our purpose, in politics we presume that everyone who knows how to get votes knows how to administer a city or a state. When we are ill we call for a trained physician, whose degree is a guarantee of specific preparation and technical competence — we do not ask for the handsomest physician, or the most eloquent one; well then, when the whole state is ill should we not look for the service and guidance of the wisest and the best?
Human behavior, says Plato, flows from 3 main sources: desire, emotion, and knowledge. Desire, appetite, impulse, instinct — these are one; emotion, spirit, ambition, courage — these are one; knowledge, thought, intellect, reason — these are one. Desire has its seat in the loins; it is a bursting reservoir of energy, fundamentally sexual. Emotion has its seat in the heart, in the flow and force of the blood; it is the organic resonance of experience and desire. Knowledge has its seat in the head; it is the eye of desire, and can become the pilot of the soul.
Some men are but the embodiment of desire; restless and acquisitive souls, who are absorbed in material quests and quarrels, who burn with lust of luxuries and show, and who rate their gains always as naught compared with their ever-receding goals: these are the men who dominated and manipulate industry. But there are others who are temples of feeling and courage, who care not so much what they fight for, as for victory “in and for itself”; they are pugnacious rather than acquisitive; their pride is in power rather than in possession, their joy is on the battlefield rather than in the mart: these are the men who make the armies and navies of the world. And last are the few whose delight is in meditation and understanding; who yearn not for goods, nor for victory, but for knowledge; who leave both market and battlefield to lose themselves in the quiet clarity of secluded thought; whose will is a light rather than a fire, whose haven is not power but truth: these are the men of wisdom, who stand aside unused by the world.
No man when conscious attains to true or inspired intuition, but rather when the power of intellect is fettered in sleep or by disease or dementia.
But when a man’s pulse is healthy and temperate, and he goes to sleep cool and rational, having indulged his appetites neither too much nor too little, but just enough to lay them to sleep, he is then least likely to be the sport of fanciful and lawless visions. In all of us, even in good men, there is such a latent wild beast nature, which peers out in sleep.
To be merely an athlete is to be nearly a savage; and to be merely a musician is to be “melted and softened beyond what is good.” The two must be combined.
For a freeman should be a freeman too in the acquisition of knowledge. Knowledge which is acquired under compulsion has no hold on the mind.
Those who past this first test will receive 10 more years of education and training, in body and mind and character. And then they will face a second test, far severer than the first. Those who fail will become the auxiliaries, or executive aides and military officers of the state. Now it is just in these great eliminations that we shall need every resource of persuasion to get the eliminated to accept their fate with urbanity and peace. Then religion and faith will be our only salvation: we shall tell these young people that the divisions into which they have fallen are God-decreed and irrevocable — not all their tears shall wipe out one word of it.
Citizens, you are brothers, yet God has framed you differently. Some of you have the power of command; and these has made of gold, wherefore they have the greatest honor; others of silver, to be auxiliaries; others again, who are to be husbandmen and craftsmen, he has made of brass and iron; and the species will generally be preserved in the children. But as you are of the same original family, a golden parent will sometimes have a silver son, or a silver parent a golden son.
But now what of the lucky remnant that ride these successive waves of selection?
They are taught philosophy. They have now reached the age of 30; it would not have been wise to let them “taste the dear delight too early; for young men, when they first get the taste of philosophy in their mouths, argue for amusement, and are always contradicting and refuting, like puppy-dogs who delight to tear and pull at all who come near them.” This dear delight, philosophy, means 2 things chiefly: to think clearly, which is metaphysics; and to rule wisely, which is politics.
Therefore the essence of a higher education is the search for Ideas: for generalizations, laws of sequence, and ideals of development; behind things we must discover their relation and meaning, their mode and law of operation, the function and ideal they serve or adumbrate; we must classify and coordinate our sense experience in terms of law and purpose; only for lack of this does the mind of the imbecile differ from the mind of Caesar.
Well, after 5 years of training in this recondite doctrine of Ideas, this art of perceiving significant forms and causal sequences and ideal potentialities amid the welter and hazard of sensation; after 5 years of training in the application of this principle to the behavior of men and the conduct of states; after this long preparation from childhood though youth and into the maturity of 35; surely now these perfect products are ready to assume the royal purple and the highest functions of public life? — surely they are at last the philosopher-kings who are to rule and to free the human race?
Alas! not yet. Their education is still unfinished. For after all it has bee, in the main, a theoretical education: something else is needed. Let these Ph.D.s’ pass down now from the heights of philosophy into the “cave” of the world of men and things; generalizations and abstractions are worthless except they be test by this concrete world; let our students enter that world with no favor shown them; they shall compete with men of business, with hard-headed grasping individualists, with men of brawn and men of cunning; in this mart of strife they shall learn from the book of life itself; they shall hurt their fingers and scratch their philosophic shins on the crude realities of the world; they shall earn their bread and butter by the sweat of their high brows. And this last and sharpest test shall go on ruthlessly for 15 long years. Some of our perfect products will break under the pressure, and be submerged by this last wave of elimination. Those that survive, scarred and 50, sobered and self-reliant, shorn of scholastic vanity by the merciless friction of life, and armed now with all the wisdom that tradition and experience, culture and conflict, can cooperate and give — these men at last shall automatically become the rulers of the state.
Automatically — without any hypocrisy of voting. Democracy means perfect equality of opportunity, especially in education; not the rotation of every Tom, Dick, and harry in public office. Every man shall have an equal chance to make himself fit for the complex tasks of administration; but only those who have proved their mettle (or, in our myth, their metal), and have emerged from all tests with the insignia of skill, shall be eligible to rule. Public officials shall be chosen not by votes, nor by secret cliques pulling the unseen wires of democratic pretense, but by their own ability as demonstrated in the fundamental democracy of an equal race. Nor shall any man hold office without specific training, nor hold high office till he has first filled a lower office well.
Career will be open to talent wherever it is born. This is a democracy of the schools — a hundredfold more honest and more effective than a democracy of the polls.
And such men as at the end of their stern training will have learned to value the high repute of the statesman above the crass emoluments of the public-seeking politicians or the “economic man.” At their coming the battles of party politics will be no more.
At the same time every precaution must be taken to avoid the occasions of war. The primary occasion is population; the second is foreign trade, with the inevitable disputes that interrupt it. Indeed, competitive trade is really a form of war; “peace is only a name”. It will be well then to situate our ideal state considerably inland, so that it shall be shut out from any high development of foreign commerce.
The most frequent wars are precisely the vilest — civil wars.
The communism of the guardians is impracticable for the economic class; the distinguishing characteristics of this class are powerful instincts of acquisition and competition; some noble souls among them will be free from this fever of combative possession, but the majority of men are consumed with it; they hunger and thirst not after righteousness, nor after honor, but after possessions endlessly multiplied. Now men engrossed in the pursuit of money are unfit to rule a state; and our entire plan rests on the hope that if the guardians rule well and live simply, the economic man will be willing to let them monopolize administration if they permit him to monopolize luxury. In short, the perfect society would be that in which each class and each unit would be doing the work to which its nature and aptitude best adapted it; in which no class or individual would interfere with others, but all would cooperate in difference to produce an efficient and harmonious whole. That would be a just state.
What is justice? There are only 3 things worthwhile in this world — justice, beauty and truth; and perhaps none of them can be defined.
Where men are out of their natural places, where the business man subordinates the statesman, or the soldier usurps the position of the king — there the coordination of parts is destroyed, the joints decay, the society disintegrates and dissolves. Justice is effective coordination.
And in the individual too, justice is effective coordination, the harmonious functioning of the elements in a man, each in its fit place and each making its cooperative contribution to behavior. Every individual is a cosmos or a chaos of desires, emotions and ideas; let these fall into harmony, and the individual survives and succeeds; let them lose their proper place and function, let emotion try to become the light of action as well as its heat (as in the fanatic), or let thought try to become the heat of action as well as its light (as in the intellectual) — and disintegration of personality begins, failure advances like the inevitable night. Justice is a taxis kai kosmos — an order and beauty — of the parts of the soul; it is to the soul as health is to the body. All evil is disharmony: between man and nature, or man and men, or man and himself.
Justice is not mere strength, but harmonious strength — desires and men falling into that order which constitutes intelligence and organization; justice is not the right of the stronger, but the effective harmony of the whole.
Truth changes her garments frequently, but under the new habit she remains always the same. In morals we need not expect startling innovations: despite the interesting adventures of Sophists and Nietzscheans, all moral conceptions revolve about the good of the whole. Morality begins with association and interdependence and organization; life in society requires the concession of some part of the individual’s sovereignty to the common order; and ultimately the norm of conduct becomes the welfare of the group. Nature will have it so, and her judgment is always final; a group survives, in competition or conflict with another group, according to its unity and power, according to the ability of its members to cooperate for common ends. And what better cooperation could there be than that each should be doing that which he can do best? This is the goal of organization which every society must seek, if it would have life. Morality, said Jesus, is kindness to the weak; morality, said Nietzsche, is the bravery of the strong; morality, says Plato, is the effective harmony of the whole. Probably all three doctrines must be combined to find a perfect ethic; but can we doubt which of the elements is fundamental?
The clergy, like Plato’s guardians, were placed in authority not by the suffrages of the people, but by their talent as shown in ecclesiastical studies and administration, by the disposition to a life of meditation and simplicity, and by the influence of their relatives with the powers of state and church.
With this body of doctrine the people of Europe were ruled with hardly any resort to force; and they accepted this rule so readily that for a thousand years they contributed plentiful material support to their rulers, and asked no voice in the government. Nor was this acquiescence confined to the general population; merchants and soldiers, feudal chieftains and civil powers all bent the knee to Rome. It as an aristocracy of no mean political sagacity; it built probably the most marvelous and powerful organization which the world has ever known.
And for a time the Communist Party which ruled Russia after the revolution of November, 1917, took a form strangely reminiscent of the Republic. They were a minority, held together almost by religious conviction, wielding the weapons of orthodoxy and excommunication, as sternly devoted to their cause as any saint to his, and living a frugal existence while ruling half the soil of Europe.
It is very pretty to plan a society in which all men will be brothers; but to extend such a term to all our male contemporaries is to water out of it all warmth and significance. So with common property: it would mean a dilution of responsibility; when everything belongs to everybody nobody will take care of anything. And finally, argues the great conservative, communism would fling people into an intolerable continuity of contact; it would leave no room for privacy or individuality; and it would presume such virtues of patience and cooperation as only a saintly minority possess.
He underestimated the possessive jealousy of males in supposing that a man would be content to have merely an aliquot portion of a wife; he minimized the maternal instinct in supposing that mothers would agree to have their children taken from them and brought up in a heartless anonymity. And above all he forgot that in abolishing the family he was destroying the great nurse of morals and the chief source of those cooperative and communistic habits which would have to be the psychological basis of his state; with unrivaled eloquence he sawed off the branch on which he sat.
This is a very fundamental objection, and perhaps a fatal one. The answer might be made that the power of the Roman Catholic Church, which brought even kings to kneel at Canossa, was based, in its earlier centuries of rule, rather on the inculcation of dogmas than on the strategy of wealth. But it may be that the long dominion of the Church was due to the agricultural condition of Europe: an agricultural population is inclined to supernatural belief by its helpless dependence on the caprice of the elements, and by that inability to control nature which always leads to fear and thence to worship; when industry and commerce developed, a new type of mind and man arose, more realistic and terrestrial, and the power of the Church began to crumble as soon as it came into conflict with this new economic fact. Political power must repeatedly readjust itself to the changing balance of economic forces.
His state is static; it might easily become an old-fogey society, ruled by inflexible octogenarians hostile to invention and jealous of change. It is mere science without art; it exalts order, so dear to the scientific mind, and quite neglects that liberty which is the soul of art; it worships the name of beauty, but exiles the artists who alone can make beauty or point it out. It is a Sparta or a Prussia, not an ideal state.
Essentially he is right — is he not? — what this world needs is to be ruled by its wisest men. It is our business to adapt his thought to our own times and limitations.
He admits that he has described an ideal difficult of attainment; he answers that there is nevertheless a value in painting these pictures of our desire; man’s significance is that he can image a better world, and will some part of it at least into reality; man is an animal that makes Utopia.
Plato recognized the greatness of this strange new pupil from the supposedly barbarian north, and spoke of him once as the Nous of the Academy — as if to say, Intelligence personified. Aristotle had spent money lavishly in the collection of books; he was the first, after Euripides, to gather together a library; and the foundation of the principles of library classification was among his many contributions to scholarship.
Life is the gift of nature, but beautiful living is the gift of wisdom.
See, here, how inventions make history: for lack of a telescope Aristotle’s astronomy is a tissue of childish romance; for lack of a microscope his biology wanders endlessly astray.
Here, evidently, is the Encyclopedia Britannica of Greece: every problem under the sun and about it finds a place; no wonder there are more errors and absurdities in Aristotle than in any other philosopher who ever wrote.
Instead of giving terms to literature, as Plato did, he built the terminology of science and philosophy; we can hardly speak of any science today without employing terms which he invented: faculty, mean, maxim, category, energy, actuality, motive, end, principle, form — these indispensable coins of philosophic thought were minted in his mind.
Renan speaks of “the ill training of every mind that has not, directly or indirectly, come under Greek discipline”; but in truth the Greek intellect itself was undisciplined and chaotic till the ruthless formulas of Aristotle provided a ready method for the test and correction of thought.
Logic means, simply, the art and method of correct thinking. It is the logy or method of every science, of every discipline and every art; and even music harbors it.
How many a debate would have been deflated into a paragraph if the disputants had dared to define their terms! This is the alpha and omega of logic, the heart and soul of it, that every important term in serious discourse shall be subjected to strictest scrutiny and definition. It is difficult, and ruthlessly tests the mind; but once done it is half of any task.
A universal, to Aristotle, is any common noun, any name capable of universal application to the members of a class: so animal, man, book, tree, are universals. But these universals are subjective notions, not tangibly objective realities; they are nomina (names), not res (things); all that exists outside us is a world of individual and specific objects, not of generic and universal things; men exist, and trees, and animals; but man-in-general, or the universal man, does not exist, except in thought; he is a handy mental abstraction, not an external presence or reality.
A hostile commentator might remark that Aristotle (like Nietzsche) criticizes Plato so keenly because he is conscious of having borrowed from him generously; no man is a hero to his debtors.
As only similars can be profitably contrasted, so only similar people quarrel, and the bitterest wars are over the slightest variations of purpose or belief.
But no man ever lived who could lift logic to a lofty strain: a guide to correct reasoning is as elevating as a manual of etiquette; we may use it, but it hardly spurs us to nobility.
Socrates gave philosophy to mankind, and Aristotle gave it science. There was philosophy before Socrates, and science before Aristotle; and since Socrates and since Aristotle, philosophy and science have made immense advances. But all has been built upon the foundation which they laid.
Through strife, all things arise and pass away. War is the father and king of all: some he has made gods, and some men; some slaves, and some free. Where there is no strife there is decay: the mixture which is not shaken decomposes.
Sometimes these vast effects occur suddenly, and destroy the geological and material bases of civilization and even of life; great catastrophes have periodically denuded the earth and reduced man again to his first beginnings; like Sisyphus, civilization has repeatedly neared its zenith only to fall back into barbarism and begin da capo its upward travail.
But in the midst of this bewildering richness of structures certain things stand out convincingly: that life has grown steadily in complexity and in power, that intelligence has progressed in correlation with complexity of structure and mobility of form; that there has been an increasing specialization of function, and a continuous centralization of physiological control. Slowly life created for itself a nervous system and a brain; and mind moved resolutely on towards the mastery of its environment.
He reaches out across 2000 years to anticipate Spencer’s generalization that individuation varies inversely as genesis — that is, that the more highly developed and specialized a species or an individual happens to be, the smaller will be the number of its offspring. He notices and explains reversion to type — the tendency of a prominent variation (like genius) to be diluted in mating and lost in successive generations.
Prudens quaestio dimidium scientice — to know what to ask is already to know half.
But above all, the function of art is catharsis, purification: emotions accumulated in us under the pressure of social restraints, and liable to sudden issue in unsocial and destructive action, are touched off and sluiced away in the harmless form or theatrical excitement; so tragedy, “through pity and fear, effects the proper purgation of these emotions.”
Excellence is an art won by training and habituation: we do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have these because we acted rightly; “these virtues are formed in man by his doing the actions”; we are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.
Youth is the age of extremes: “if the young commit a fault it is always on the side of excess and exaggeration.” The great difficulty of youth (and of many of youth’s elders) is to get out of one extreme without falling into its opposite.
Perhaps, as Nietzsche claims, all these were attempts of the Greeks to check their own violence and impulsiveness of character; more truly, they reflected the Greek feeling that passions are not of themselves vices, but the raw material of both vice and virtue, according as they function in excess and disproportion, or in measure and harmony.
But the golden mean, says our matter-of-fact philosopher, is not all of the secret of happiness. We must have, too, a fair degree of worldly goods: poverty makes one stingy and grasping; while possessions give one that freedom from care and greed which is the source of aristocratic ease and charm. The noblest of these external aids to happiness is friendship. Indeed, friendship is more necessary to the happy than to the unhappy, for happiness is multiplied by being shared.
Yet friendship implies few friends rather than many; “he who has many friends has no friend”; and “to be a friend to many people in the way of perfect friendship is impossible.”
He prefers to believe that the greater tenderness of the benefactor is to be explained on the analogy of the artist’s affection for his work, or the mother’s for her child. We love that which we have made.
And yet, though external goods and relationships are necessary to happiness, its essence remains within us, in rounded knowledge and clarity of soul.
To confer a kindness is a mark of superiority; to receive one is a mark of subordination. He does not take part in public displays. He is open in his dislikes and preferences, he talks and acts frankly, because of his contempt for men and things. He is never fired with admiration, since there is nothing great in his eyes. He cannot live in complaisance with others, except it be a friend; complaisance is the characteristic of a slave. He never feels malice, and always forgets and passes over injuries. He is not fond of talking. It is no concern of his that he should be praised, or that others should be blamed. He does not speak evil of others, even of his enemies, unless it be to themselves. His carriage is sedate, his voice deep, his speech measured; he is not given to hurry, for he is concerned about only a few things; he is not prone to vehemence, for he thinks nothing very important. A shrill voice and hasty steps come a man through care. He bears the accidents of life with dignity and grace, making the best of his circumstances, like a skillful general who marshals his limited forces with all the strategy of war. He is his own best friend, and takes delight in privacy whereas the man of no virtue or ability is his own worst enemy, and is afraid of solitude.
It was not to be expected that the tutor of an emperor and the husband of a princess would have any exaggerated attachment to the common people, or even to the mercantile bourgeoisie; our philosophy is where our treasures lies. But further, Aristotle was honestly conservative because of the turmoil and disaster that had come out of Athenian democracy; like a typical scholar he longed for order, security, and peace; this, he felt, was no time for political extravaganzas. Radicalism is the luxury of stability; we may dare to change things only when things lie steady under our hands. And in general, says Aristotle, “the habit of lightly changing the laws is an evil; and when the advantage of change is small, some defects whether in the law or in the ruler had better be met with philosophic toleration. The citizen will gain less by the change than he will lose by acquiring the habit of disobedience.” The power of the law to secure observance, and therefore to maintain political stability, rests very largely on custom; and “to pass lightly from old laws to new ones is a certain means of weakening the inmost essence of all law whatever.” “Let us not disregard the experience of ages: surely, in the multitude of years, these things, if they were good, would not have remained unknown.”
He would not care to call every contemporary brother or sister, nor every elder person father or mother; if all are your brothers, none is; and “how much better it is to be the real cousin of somebody than to be a son after Plato’s fashion!” In a state having women and children in common, “love will be watery. Of the two qualities which chiefly inspire regard and affection — that a thing is your own, and that it awakens real love in you — neither can exist in such a state” as Plato’s.
But “in a more divided state of society,” where the division of labor into unequally important functions elicits and enlarges the natural inequality of men, communism breaks down because it provides no adequate incentive for the exertion of superior abilities. The stimulus of gain is necessary to arduous work; and the stimulus of ownership is necessary to proper industry, husbandry and care. When everybody owns everything, nobody will take care of anything. “That which is common to the greatest number has the least attention bestowed upon it. Everyone thinks chiefly of his own, hardly ever of the public interest.”
Men readily listen to Utopias, and are easily induced to believe that in some wonderful manner everybody will become everybody’s friend, especially when someone is heard denouncing the evils now existing, which are said to arise out of the possession of private property. These evils, however, arise from quite another source — the wickedness of human nature. Political science does not make men, but must take them as they come from nature.
And human nature, the human average, is nearer to the beast than to the god. The great majority of men are natural dunces and sluggards; in any system whatever these men will sink to the bottom; and to help them with state subsidies is “like pouring water into a leaking cask.” Such people must be ruled in politics and directed in industry; with their consent if possible, without it if necessary. “From the hour of their birth some are marked out for subjection, and others for command.” “For he who can foresee with his mind is by nature intended to be lord and master; and he who can work only with his body is by nature a slave.” The slave is to the master what the body is to the mind; and as the body should be subject to the mind, so “it is better for all inferiors that they should be under the rule of a master.”
Manual labor, he believes, dulls and deteriorates the mind, and leaves neither time nor energy for political intelligence; it seems to Aristotle a reasonable corollary that only persons of some leisure should have a voice in government. “The best form of state will not admit mechanics to citizenship. At Thebes there was a law that no man could hold office who had not retired from business 10 years before.”
Women should not be made more like men, as in Plato’s republic; rather the dissimilarity should be increased; nothing is so attractive as the different. “The courage of a man and that of a woman are not, as Socrates supposed, the same: the courage of a man is shown in commanding; that of a woman in obeying. As the poet says, ‘Silence is a woman’s glory.’”
Man, when perfected, is the best of animals; but when isolated he is the worst of all; for injustice is more dangerous when armed, and man is equipped at birth with the weapon of intelligence, and with qualities of character which he may use for the vilest ends. Wherefore if he have not virtue he is the most unholy and savage of animals, full of gluttony and lust. And only social control can give him virtue. Through speech man evolved society; through society, intelligence; through intelligence, order; and through order, civilization. In such an ordered state the individual has a thousand opportunities and avenues of development open to him which a solitary life would never give. “To live alone,” then, “one must be either an animal or a god.”
“Young men are easily deceived, for they are quick to hope.” The suppression of long-established habits brings the overthrow of innovating governments because the old habits persist among the people; characters are not so easily changed as laws. If a constitution is to be permanent, all the parts of a society must desire it to be maintained. Therefore a ruler who would avoid revolution should prevent extremes of poverty and wealth — “a condition which is most often the result of war”; he should (like the English) encourage colonization as an outlet for a dangerously congested population; and he should foster and practice religion. An autocratic ruler particularly “should appear to be earnest in the worship of the gods; for if men think that a ruler is religious and reveres the gods, they are less afraid of suffering injustice at his hands, and are less disposed to conspire against him, since they believe that the gods themselves are fighting on his side.”
Theoretically, the ideal form of government would be the centralization of all political power in the one best man. Homer is right: “Bad is the lordship of many; let one be your ruler and master.” For such a man law would be rather an instrument than a limit: “for men of eminent ability there is no law — they are themselves a law.” Anyone would be ridiculous who should attempt to make laws for them; they would probably retort what, in the fable of Antisthenes, the lions said to the hares when, in the council of beasts, the latter began haranguing and claiming equality for all — “Where are your claws?”
But in practice, monarchy is usually the worst form of government, for great strength and great virtue are not near allied. Hence the best practicable polity is aristocracy, the rule of the informed and capable few.
The difficulty with hereditary aristocracy is that it has no permanent economic base; the eternal recurrence of the nouveaux riches put political office sooner or later at the disposal of the highest bidder.
What we need is a combination of aristocracy and democracy.
Constitutional government offers this happy union. It is not the best conceivable government — that would be an aristocracy of education — but it is the best possible state.
Our state will be sufficiently democratic if the road to every office is open to all; and sufficiently aristocratic if the offices themselves are closed except for those who have traveled the road and arrived fully prepared. From whatever angle we approach our eternal political problem we monotonously reach the same conclusion: that the community should determine the ends to be pursued, but that only experts should select and apply the means; that choice should be democratically spread, but that office should be rigidly reserved for the equipped and winnowed best.
He supposes that thought begins with premises and seeks their conclusions, when actually thought begins with hypothetical conclusions and seeks their justifying premises, — and seeks them best by the observation of particular events under the controlled and isolated conditions of experiment.
It is again the absence of experiment and fruitful hypothesis that leaves Aristotle’s natural science a mass of undigested observations. His specialty is the collection and classification of data; in every field he wields his categories and produces catalogues. But side by side with this bent and talent for observation goes a Platonic addiction to metaphysics; this trips him up in every science, and inveigles him into the wildest presuppositions. Here indeed was the great defect of the Greek mind: it was not disciplined; it lacked limiting and steadying traditions; it moved freely in an uncharted field, and ran too readily to theories and conclusions. So Greek philosophy leaped on to heights unreached again, while Greek science limped behind. Our modern danger is precisely the opposite; inductive data fall upon us from all sides; we suffocate with uncoordinated facts; our minds are overwhelmed with sciences breeding and multiplying into specialistic chaos for want of synthetic thought and a unifying philosophy. We are all mere fragments of what a man might be.
He is so fearful of disorder that he forgets to be fearful of slavery; he is to timid of uncertain change that he prefers a certain changelessness that near resembles death. He forgets that Plato’s communism was meant only for the elite, the unselfish and ungreedy few; and he comes deviously to a Platonic result when he says that though property should be private, its use should be as far as possible common. He does not see (and perhaps he could not be expected in his early day to see) that individual control of the means of production was stimulating and salutary only when these means were so simple as to be purchasable by any man; and that their increasing complexity and cost lead to a dangerous centralization of ownership and power, and to an artificial and finally disruptive inequality.
In this turmoil we get an impression of Aristotle quite contrary to that left upon us by his Ethics: here is a man not cold and inhumanly calm, but a fighter, pursuing his Titanic work in a circle of enemies on every side.
The broken dykes let in the ocean of Eastern thought upon the lowlands of the still adolescent European mind. The mystic and superstitious faiths which had taken root among the poorer people of Hellas were reinforced and spread about; and the Oriental spirit of apathy and resignation found a ready soil in a decadent and despondent Greece. The introduction of the Stoic philosophy into Athens was but one of a multitude of Oriental infiltrations.
As Schopenhauer deemed it useless for the individual will to fight the universal will, so the Stoic argued that philosophic indifference was the only reasonable attitude to a life in which the struggle for existence is so unfairly doomed to inevitable defeat. If victory is quite impossible it should be scorned. The secret of peace is not to make our achievements equal to our desires, but to lower our desires to the level of our achievements.
Nations, too, like individuals, slowly grow and surely die: “some nations wax, others wane, and in a brief space the races of living things are changed, and like runners hand over the lamp of life.” In the face of warfare and inevitable death, there is no wisdom but in ataraxia, — “to look on all things with a mind at peace.”
Paper now came cheaply from Egypt, replacing the costly parchment that had made learning the monopoly of priests; printing, which had long awaited an inexpensive medium, broke out like a liberated explosive, and spread its destructive and clarifying influence everywhere.
The discovery of America had diverted trade from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic, had raised the Atlantic nations — Spain and France and Holland and England — to that commercial and financial supremacy which had been Italy’s when half of Europe had made her its port of entry and exit in the Eastern trade; and with this change the Renaissance had passed from Florence and Rome and Milan and Venice to Madrid and Paris and Amsterdam and London.
I possessed a passion for research, a power of suspending judgment with patience, of mediating with pleasure, of assenting with caution, of correcting false impression with readiness, and of arranging my thoughts with scrupulous pains. I had no hankering after novelty, no blind admiration for antiquity. Imposture in every shape I utterly detested. For all these reasons I considered that my nature and disposition had, as it were, a kind of kinship and connection with truth.
It was his motto that one lived best by the hidden life. He could not quite make up his mind whether he liked more the contemplative or the active life. His hope was to be philosopher and statesman, too, like Seneca; though he suspected that this double direction of his life would shorten his reach and lessen his attainment. “It is hard to say whether mixture of contemplations with an active life, or retiring wholly to contemplations, do disable or hinder the mind more.” He felt that studies could not be either end or wisdom in themselves, and that knowledge unapplied in action was a pale academic vanity. “To spend too much time in studies is sloth; to use them too much for ornament is affectation; to make judgment wholly by their rules is the humor of a scholar. Crafty men condemn studies, simple men admire them, and wise men use them; for they teach not their own use; but that is a wisdom without them, and above them, won by observation.”
My praise shall be dedicate to the mind itself. The mind is the man, and knowledge mind; a man is what he knoweth. Are not the pleasures of the affections greater than the pleasures of the senses, and are not the pleasures of the intellect greater than the pleasures of the affections?
In the “Essay of Honor and Reputation” he gives all the degrees of honor to political and military achievements, none to the literary or the philosophical. But in the essay “Of Truth” he writes: “The inquiry of truth, which is the love-making or wooing of it; the knowledge of truth, which is the praise of it; and the belief of truth, which is the enjoying of it, is the sovereign good of human natures.” In books “we converse with the wise, as in action with fools.”
The Essays are like rich and heavy food, which cannot be digested in large quantities at once; but taken four or five at a time they are the finest intellectual nourishment in English.
Nothing could be so injurious to health as the Stoic repression of desire; what is the use of prolonging a life which apathy has turned into premature death?
We are beholden to Machiavel, and writers of that kind, who openly and unmasked declare what men do in fact, and not what they ought to do; for it is impossible to join the wisdom of the serpent and the innocence of the dove, without a previous knowledge of the nature of evil; as, without this, virtue lies exposed and unguarded.
He does not admire the merely contemplative life; like Goethe he scorns knowledge that does not lead to action: “men ought to know that in the theatre of human life it is only for Gods and angels to be spectators.”
He that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune; for they are impediments to great enterprises, either of virtue or mischief.
Young men are fitter to invent than to judge, fitter for execution than for counsel, and fitter for new projects than for settled business; for the experience of age in things that fall within the compass of it, directeth them; but in new things abuseth them. Young men, in the conduct and management of actions, embrace more than they can hold, stir more than they can quiet; fly to the end without consideration of the means and degrees; pursue absurdly some few principles which they have chanced upon; care not to innovate, which draws unknown inconveniences. Men of age object too much, consult too long, adventure too little, repent too soon, and seldom drive business home to the full period, but content themselves with a mediocrity of success.
Like Aristotle, he had some advice on avoiding revolutions. “The surest way to prevent seditions is to take away the matter of them; for if there be fuel prepared, it is hard to tell whence the spark shall come that shall set it on fire. Neither doth it follow that the suppressing of flames (i.e., discussion) with too much severity should be a remedy of troubles; for the despising of them many times checks them best, and the going about to stop them but makes a wonder long-lived. The matter of sedition is of two kinds: much poverty and much discontentment. The causes and motives of seditions are, innovation in religion; taxes; alteration of laws and customs; breaking of privileges; general oppression; advancement of unworthy persons, strangers; dearths; disbanded soldiers; factions grown desperate; and whatsoever in offending a people joineth them in a common cause.” The cue of every leader, of course, is to divide his enemies and to unite his friends. A better recipe for the avoidance of revolutions is an equitable distribution of wealth: “Money is like muck, not good unless it be spread.”
The lowest of all flatteries is the flattery of the common people.
Phocion took it right, who, being applauded by the multitude, asked, What had he done amiss?
Knowledge is power, not mere argument or ornament; “it is not an opinion to be held, but a work to be done; and I am laboring to lay the foundation not of any sect or doctrine, but of utility and power.”
In psychology he is almost a “behaviorist”: he demands a strict study of cause and effect in human action, and wishes to eliminate the word chance from the vocabulary of science. “Chance is the name of a thing that does not exist.” And “what chance is in the universe, so will is in man.” Here is a world of meaning, and a challenge of war, all in a little line: the Scholastic doctrine of free will is pushed aside as beneath discussion; and the universal assumption of a “will” distinct from the “intellect” is discarded.
Alchemy may be compared to the man who told his sons he had left them gold buried somewhere in his vineyard; where they, by digging, found no gold, but by turning up the mould about the roots of the vines, procured a plentiful vintage. So the search and endeavors to make gold have brought many useful inventions and instructive experiments to light.
Still another science grows to form in Book VIII: the science of success in life. Not yet having fallen from power, Bacon offers some preliminary hints on how to rise in the world. The first requisite is knowledge: of ourselves and of others. Know thyself is valuable chiefly as a means of knowing others. We must diligently inform ourselves of the particular persons we have to deal with — their tempers, desires, views, customs, habits; the assistances, helps and assurances whereon they principally rely, and whence they receive their power; their defects and weaknesses, whereat they chiefly lie open and are accessible; their friends, factions, patrons, dependants, enemies, enviers, rivals; their times and manners of access. But the surest key for unlocking the minds of others turns upon searching and sifting either their tempers and natures, or their ends and designs; and the more weak and simple are best judged by their temper, but the more prudent and close by their designs.
Here again one is reminded of Napoleon; Bacon, like the little Corsican, was a simple man enough within his walls, but outside them he affected a ceremony and display which he thought indispensable to public repute.
“For as no perfect view of a country can be taken from a flat; so it is impossible to discover the remote and deep parts of any science by standing upon the level of the same science, or without ascending to a higher.” He condemns the habit of looking at isolated facts out of their context, without considering the unity of nature; as if, he says, one should carry a small candle about the corners of a room radiant with a central light.
Government suffers, precisely like science, for lack of philosophy. Philosophy bears to science the same relationship which statesmanship bears to politics: movement guided by total knowledge and perspective, as against aimless and individual seeking. Just as the pursuit of knowledge becomes scholasticism when divorced from the actual needs of men and life, so the pursuit of politics becomes a destructive bedlam when divorced from science and philosophy.
All these medieval theories, theorems and disputations must be cast out and forgotten; to renew herself philosophy must begin again with a clean slate and a cleansed mind.
“For every one has a cave or den of his own, which refracts and discolors the light of nature”; this is his character as formed by nature and nurture, and by his mood or condition of body and mind. Sow we have the scientist and the painter on one hand, and on the other hand the poet and the philosopher.
Philosophers deal out infinites with the careless assurance of grammarians handling infinitives; and yet does any man know what this “infinite” is, or whether it has even taken the precaution of existing? Philosophers talk about “first cause uncaused,” or “first mover unmoved”; but are not these again fig-leaf phrases used to cover naked ignorance, and perhaps indicative of a guilty conscience in the user? Every clear and honest head knows that no cause can be causeless, nor any mover unmoved. Perhaps the greatest reconstruction in philosophy would be simply this — that we should stop lying.
The world as Plato describes it is merely a world constructed by Plato, and pictures Plate rather than the world.
We shall never get far along towards the truth if these idols are still to trip us up, even the best of us, at every turn. We need new modes of reasoning, new tools for the understanding.
Ultimately, our troubles are due to dogma and deduction; we find no new truth because we take some venerable but questionable proposition as an indubitable starting-point, and never think of putting this assumption itself to the test of observation or experiment. Now “if a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin in doubts he shall end in certainties.”
Of theory and of practice; one without the other is useless and perilous; knowledge that does not generate achievement is a pale and bloodless thing, unworthy of mankind. We strive to learn the forms of things not for the sake of the forms but because by knowing the forms, the laws, we may remake things in the image of our desire.
The dream of every thinker is to replace the politician by the scientist; why does it remain only a dream after so many incarnations? Is it because the thinker is too dreamily intellectual to go out into the arena of affairs and build his concept into reality? Is it because the hard ambition of the narrowly acquisitive soul is forever destined to overcome the gentle and scrupulous aspirations of philosophers and saints?
No: generally, science has used, with best result, not the accumulation of data and their manipulation by the complicated tables of the Novum Organum, but the simpler method of hypothesis, deduction and experiment.
Carlyle calls Shakespeare the greatest of intellects; but he was rather the greatest of imaginations, and the keenest eye. He is an inescapable psychologist, but he is not a philosopher: he has no structure of thought unified by a purpose for his own life and for mankind. He is immersed in love and its problems, and think of philosophy only when his heart is broken. Otherwise he accepts the world blithely enough; he is not consumed with the reconstructive vision that ennobled Plato, or Nietzsche, or Bacon.
He is the voice of all those Europeans who have changed a continent from a forest into a treasure-land of art and science, and have made their little peninsula the center of the world. “Men are not animals erect,” said Bacon, “but immortal gods.”
Yet, without any political structure, without any legal compulsion to social unity, without even a common language, this wonderful people has maintained itself in body and soul, has preserved its racial and cultural integrity, has guarded with jealous love its oldest rituals and traditions, has patiently and resolutely awaited the day of its deliverance, and has emerged greater in number than ever before, renowned in every field for the contributions of its geniuses, and triumphantly restored, after 2,000 years of wandering, to its ancient and unforgotten home. What drama could rival the grandeur of these sufferings, the varieties of these scenes, and the glory and justice of this fulfillment? What fiction could match the romance of this reality?
To his French followers and English enemies the central notion in Descartes was the primacy of consciousness — his apparently obvious proposition that the mind knows itself more immediately and directly than it can ever know anything else; that it knows the “external world” only through that world’s impress upon the mind in sensation and perception; that all philosophy must in consequence (though it should doubt everything else) begin with the individual mind and self, and make its first argument in three words: “I think, therefore I am” (Cogito, ergo sum).
Hereby then are all admonished that none hold converse with him by word of mouth, none hold communication with him by writing; that no one do him any service, no one abide under the same roof with him, no one approach within four cubits length of him, and no one read any document dictated by him, or written by his hand.
If they had had their own state, their own civil law, their own establishments of secular force and power, to compel internal cohesion and external respect, they might have been more tolerant; but their religion was to them their patriotism as well as their faith, the synagogue was their center of social and political life as well as of ritual and worship; and the Bible whose veracity Spinoza had impugned was the “portable Fatherland” of their people; under these circumstances, they thought, heresy was treason, and toleration suicide.
Those who wish to seek out the causes of miracles, and to understand the things of nature as philosophers, and not to stare at them in astonishment like fools, are soon considered heretical and impious, and proclaimed as such by those whom the mob adore as the interpreters of nature and the gods. For these men know that once ignorance is put aside, that wonderment would be taken away which is the only means by which their authority is preserved.
Those who have suffered much become very bitter or very gentle.
These were years of plain living and high thinking. Many times he stayed in his room for 2 or 3 days together, seeing nobody, and having his modest meals brought up to him.
Spinoza answered that a man was never the better for having a fine gown, and added, “It is unreasonable to wrap up things of little or no value in a precious cover.”
It is unwise of an author to prove his point too thoroughly; his conclusions pass into the currency of all educated minds, and his works no longer have that mystery about them which draws us ever on.
Scripture does not explain things by their secondary causes, but only narrates them in the order and style which has most power to move men, and especially uneducated men, to devotion. Its object is not to convince the reason, but to attract and lay hold of the imagination. Hence the abundant miracles and the repeated appearances of God.
Sober and literal statement do not move the soul; if Moses had said that it was merely the East wind that cleared a path for them through the Red Sea, it would have made little impression on the minds of the masses he was leading.
The greater influence of such men as compared with philosophers and scientists is largely attributable to the vidid and metaphorical forms of speech which the founders of religion, by the nature of their mission and their own emotional intensity, are driven to adopt.
The people will always demand a religion phrased in imagery and haloed with the supernatural; if one such form of faith is destroyed they will create another.
The Jews have survived chiefly because of Christian hatred of them; persecution gave them the unity and solidarity necessary for continued racial existence; without persecution they might have mingled and married with the peoples of Europe, and been engulfed in the majorities with which they were everywhere surrounded.
Fame has also this great drawback, that if we pursue it we must direct our lives in such a way as to please the fancy of men, avoiding what they dislike and seeking what pleases them. But the love towards a thing eternal and infinite alone feeds the mind with a pleasure secured from all pain. The greatest good is the knowledge of the union which the mind has with the whole of nature.
Order is against the grain of our minds; we prefer to follow the straggling lines of fantasy, and to weave our philosophy precariously out of our dreams. But Spinoza had but one compelling desire — to reduce the intolerable chaos of the world to unity and order. He had the northern hunger for truth rather than the southern lust for beauty; the artist in him was purely an architect, building a system of thought to perfect symmetry and form.
Whenever, then, anything in nature seems to us ridiculous, absurd or evil, it is because we have but a partial knowledge of things, and are in the main ignorant of the order and coherence of nature as a whole, and because we want everything to be arranged according to the dictates of our own reason; although in fact, what our reason pronounces bad is not bad as regards the order and laws of universal nature, but only as regards the laws of our own nature taken separately. As for the terms good and bad, they indicate nothing positive considered in themselves. For one and the same thing can at the same time be good, bad, and indifferent. For example, music is good to the melancholy, bad to mourners, and indifferent to the dead.
Every instinct is a device developed by nature to preserve the individual. Pleasure and pain are the satisfaction or the hindrance of an instinct; they are not the causes of our desires, but their results; we do not desire things because they give us pleasure; but they give us pleasure because we desire them; and we desire them because we must.
There is, consequently, no free will; the necessities of survival determine instinct, instinct determines desire, and desire determines thought and action.
Ultimately there are but three systems of ethics, three conceptions of the ideal character and the moral life. One is that of Buddha and Jesus, which stresses the feminine virtues, considers all men to be equally precious, resists evil only by returning good, identifies virtue with love, and inclines in politics to unlimited democracy. Another is the ethics of Machiavelli and Nietzsche, which stresses the masculine virtues, accepts the inequality of men, relishes the risks of combat and conquest and rule, identifies virtue with power, and exalts an hereditary aristocracy. A third, the ethic of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, denies the universal applicability of either the feminine or the masculine virtues; considers that only the informed and mature mind can judge, according to diverse circumstance, when love should rule, and when power; identifies virtue, therefore, with intelligence; and advocates a varying mixture of aristocracy and democracy in government.
He begins by making happiness the goal of conduct; and he defines happiness very simply as the presence of pleasure and the absence of pain. But pleasure and pain are relative, not absolute; and they are not states but transitions. “Pleasure is man’s transition from a lesser state of perfection to a greater.” “Joy consists in this, that one’s power is increased.” Transition, for pleasure is not perfection itself: if a man were born with the perfection to which he passes he would be without the emotion of pleasure. All passions are passages, all emotions are motions, towards or from completeness and power.
He thinks that egoism is a necessary corollary of the supreme instinct of self-preservation; “no one ever neglects anything which he judges to be good, except with the hope of gaining a greater good.” Since reason demands nothing against nature, it concedes that each man must love himself, and seek what is useful to him, and desire whatever leads him truly to a greater state of perfection; and that each man should endeavor to preserve his being so far as in him lies. So he builds his ethic no on altruism and the natural goodness of man; nor on selfishness and the natural wickedness of man, but on what he considers to be an inevitable and justifiable egoism. A system of morals that teaches a man to be weak is worthless. The foundation of virtue is no other than the effort to maintain one’s being; and man’s happiness consists in the power of so doing.
Like Nietzsche, Spinoza has not much use for humility; it is either the hypocrisy of a schemer or the timidity of a slave; it implies the absence of power — whereas to Spinoza all virtues are forms of ability and power. So is remorse a defect rather than a virtue: “he who repents is twice unhappy and doubly weak.” But he does not spend so much time as Nietzsche in inveighing against humility; for humility is very rare. Even the philosophers who write books in its praise take care to put their names on the title-page.
Conceit makes men a nuisance to one another: “the conceited man relates only his own great deeds, and only the evil ones of others”; he delights in the presence of his inferiors, who will gape at his perfections and exploits; and becomes at last the victim of those who praise him most; for “none are more taken in by flattery than the proud.”
It is a simple matter to show that hatred, perhaps because it trembles on the verge of love, can be more easily overcome by love than by reciprocated hate. For hatred is fed on the feeling that it is returned; whereas he who believes himself to be loved by one whom he hates is a prey to the conflicting emotions of hatred and love, since love tends to beget love; so that his hatred disintegrates and loses force. To hate is to acknowledge our inferiority and our fear; we do not hate a foe whom we are confident we can overcome.
Minds are conquered not by arms but by greatness of soul.
We think we are most ourselves when we are most passionate, whereas it is then we are most passive, caught in some ancestral torrent of impulse or feeling, and swept on to a precipitate reaction which meets only part of the situation because without thought only part of a situation can be perceived. A passion is an “inadequate idea”; thought is a response delayed till every vital angle of a problem has aroused a correlative reaction, inherited or acquired; only so is the idea adequate, the response all that it can be.
Passion without reason is blind, reason without passion is dead.
Thought should not lack the heat of desire, nor desire the light of thought. A passion ceases to be a passion as soon as we form a clear and distinct idea of it, and the mind is subject to passions in proportion to the number of adequate ideas which it has.
The great obstacle to intelligent behavior is the superior vividness of present sensations as compared with those projected memories which we call imagination. By imagination and reason we turn experience into foresight; we become the creators of our future, and cease to be the salves of our past.
So we achieve the only freedom possible to man. The passivity of passion is “human bondage,” the action of reason is human liberty. Freedom is not from causal law of progress, but from partial passion or impulse; and freedom not from passion, but from uncoordinated and uncompleted passion. We are free only where we know. To be a superman is to be free not from the restraints of social justice and amenity, but from the individualism of the instincts.
To be great is not to be placed above humanity, ruling others; but to stand above the partialities and futilities of uninformed desire, and to rule one’s self.
Whether our actions are free or not, our motives still are hope and fear. Therefore the assertion is false that I would leave no room for precepts and commands. On the contrary, determinism makes for a better moral life: it teaches us not to despise or ridicule anyone, or be angry with anyone; men are “not guilty”; and though we punish miscreants, it will be without hate; we forgive them because they know not what they do.
Above all, determinism fortifies us to expect and to bear both faces of fortune with an equal mind.
He learns the old lesson that God is no capricious personality absorbed in the private affairs of his devotees, but the invariable sustaining order of the universe.
And perhaps in the like manner, immortality is not the reward of clear thinking, it is clear thought itself, as it carries up the past into the present and reaches out into the future, so overcoming the limits and narrowness of time, and catching the perspective that remains eternally behind the kaleidoscope of change; such thought is immortal because every truth is a permanent creation, part of the eternal acquisition of man, influencing him endlessly.
Spinoza supposes that men once lived in comparative isolation, without law or social organization; there were then, he says, no conception of right and wrong, justice or injustice; might and right were one.
We get an inkling of this law of nature, or this lawlessness of nature, by observing the behavior of states; “there is no altruism among nations,” for there can be law and morality only where there is an accepted organization, a common and recognized authority. The “rights” of states are now what the “rights” of individuals used to be (and still often are), that is, thay are mights, and the leading states, by some forgetful honesty of diplomats, are very properly called the “Great Powers.” So it is too among species: there being no common organization, there is not among them any morality or law; each species does to the other what it wishes and can.
Since fear of solitude exists in all men, because no one in solitude is strong enough to defend himself and procure the necessaries of life, it follows that men by nature tend towards social organization. To guard against danger the force or strength of one man would hardly suffice if men did not arrange mutual aid and exchange. Men are not by nature, however, equipped for the mutual forbearance of social order; but danger begets association, which gradually nourishes and strengthens the social instincts: “men are not born for citizenship, but must be made fit for it.”
Most men are at heart individualistic rebels against law or custom: the social instincts are later and weaker than the individualistic, and need reinforcement; man is not “good by nature.” But through association, if even merely in the family, sympathy comes, a feeling of kind, and at last of kindness.
Part of the individual’s natural might, or sovereignty, is handed over to the organized community, in return for the enlargement of the sphere of his remaining powers. We abandon, for example, the right to fly from anger to violence, and are freed from the danger of such violence from others. Law is necessary because men are subject to passions; if all men were reasonable, law would be superfluous. The perfect law would bear to individuals the same relation which perfect reason bears to passion: it would be the coordination of conflicting forces to avoid the ruin and increase the power of the whole. Just as, in metaphysics, reason is the perception of order in things, and in ethics the establishment of order among desires, so in politics it is the establishment of order among men. The perfect state would limit the powers of its citizens only as far as these powers were mutually destructive; it would withdraw no liberty except to add a greater one.
Laws against free speech are subversive of all law; for men will not long respect laws which they may not criticize.
Democracy is the most reasonable form of government; for in it everyone submits to the control of authority over his actions, but not over his judgment and reason; i.e., seeing that all cannot think alike, the voice of the majority has the force of law.
The defect of democracy is its tendency to put mediocrity into power; and there is no way of avoiding this except by limiting office to men of “trained skill.” Numbers by themselves cannot produce wisdom, and may give the best favors of office to the grossest flatterers.
One must give one’s self all the occupation one can to make life supportable in this world. The further I advance in age, the more I find work necessary. It becomes in the long run the greatest of pleasures, and takes the place of the illusions of life. If you do not want to commit suicide always have something to do.
These two men have destroyed France. The Bourbons might have preserved themselves, if they had controlled the writing materials. The advent of cannon killed the feudal system; ink will kill the modern social organization. Books rule the world, or at least those nations in which have a written language; the others do not count. When once a nation begins to think, it is impossible to stop it.
He respected the classic adage that one must live before one can philosophize.
He is one who does not carry a great name, but wins respect for the name he has.
They talked about everything, and said what they thought. Frederick’s wit was almost as sharp as Voltaire’s; and only Voltaire dared to answer him, with that finesse which could kill without giving offense.
I have read with pleasure the history of the Greeks and the Romans; they offered me certain pictures which attracted me. But I have never yet been able to finish any long history of our modern nations. I can see scarcely anything in them but confusion; a host of minute events without connection or sequence, a thousand battles which settled nothing. I renounced a study which overwhelms the mind without illuminating it.
History is after all nothing but a pack of tricks which we play upon the dead. We transform the past to suit our wishes for the future, an in the upshot history proves that anything can be proved by history.
“He is a great man, a great poet, a great naturalist, a great philosopher, almost a universal genius.” “What you say, sir, is the more admirable, as Mr. Haller does not do you the same justice.” “Ah,” said Voltaire, “perhaps we are both mistaken.”
All action is dictated by egoism, self-love; even the hero follows the feeling which for him is associated with the greatest pleasure; and virtue is egoism furnished with spy-glass. Conscience is not the voice of God, but the fear of the police; it is the deposit left in us from the stream of prohibitions poured over the growing soul by parents and teachers and press. Morality must be founded not on theology but on sociology; the changing needs of society, and not any unchanging revelation or dogma, must determine the good.
**
He rejected all systems, and suspects that “every chief of a sect in philosophy has been a little of a quack.” “The further I go, the more I am confirmed in the idea that systems of metaphysics are for philosophers what novels are for women.”
I express myself clearly enough: I am like a little brooks, which are transparent because they are not deep.
Nobody thinks of giving an immortal soul to the flea; why then to an elephant, or a monkey, or my valet? A child dies in its mother’s womb, just a the moment when it has received a soul. Will it rise again foetus, or boy, or man?
I want my lawyer, my tailor, and my wife to believe in God. If God did not exist it would be necessary to invent him.
He knew how complex a matter political philosophy can become, and he shed his certainties as he grew. “I am tired of all these people who govern states from the recesses of their garrets; these legislators who rule the world at two cents a sheet; unable to govern their wives or their households they take great pleasure in regulating the universe.”
In general, men are rarely worthy to govern themselves. Republics are transient at best; they are the first form of society, arising from the union of families; the American Indians lived in tribal republics, and Africa is full of such democracies.
As the rich for an answer — they all want aristocracy. Ask the people — they want democracy. Only the monarchs want monarchy.
War is the greatest of all crimes; and yet there is no aggressor who does not color his crime with the pretext of justice. It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.
Those who say that all men are equal speak the greatest truth if they mean that all men have an equal right to liberty, to the possession of their goods, and to the protection of the laws. But equality is at once the most natural and the most chimerical thing in the world: natural when it is limited to rights, unnatural when it attempts to level goods and powers. Not all citizens can be equally strong; but they can all be equally free; it is this which the English have won. To be free is to be subject to nothing but the laws.
Voltaire was convinced that all this denunciation of civilization was boyish nonsense; that man was incomparably better off under civilization under savagery; he informs Rousseau that man is by nature a beast of prey, and that civilized society means a chaining of this beast, a mitigation of his brutality, and the possibility of the development, through social order, of the intellect and its joys.
After all, when one tries to change institutions without having changed the nature of men, that unchanged nature will soon resurrect those institutions.
Here was the old vicious circle; men form institutions, and institutions form men; where could this change break into this ring? Voltaire and the liberals thought that intellect could break the ring by educating and changing men, slowly and peacefully. Rousseau and the radicals felt that the ring could be broken only by instinctive and passionate action that would break down the old institutions and build, at the dictates of the heart, new ones under which liberty, equality and fraternity would reign.
Schopenhauer calls the Critique “the most important work in German literature,” and considers any man a child until he has understood Kant; Spencer could not understand Kant, and for precisely that reason, perhaps, fell a little short of the fullest philosophic stature. To adapt Hegel’s phrase about Spinoza: to be a philosopher, one must first have been a Kantian.
But see how obvious it is, said the Bishop: has not Locke told us that all our knowledge is derived from sensation? Therefore all our knowledge of anything is merely our sensations of it, and the ideas derived from these sensations. A “thing” is merely a bundle of perceptions — i.e., classified and interpreted sensations.
David Hume at the age of 26 shocked all Christendom with his highly heretical Treatise on Human Nature — one of the classics and marvels of modern philosophy. We know the mind, said Hume, only as we know matter: by perception, though it be in this case internal. Never do we perceive any such entity as the “mind”; we perceive merely separate ideas, memories, feelings, etc. The mind is not a substance, an organ that has ideas; it is only an abstract name for the series of ideas; the perceptions, memories and feelings are the mind; there is no observable “soul” behind the processes of thought. The result appeared to be that Hume had as effectually destroyed mind as Berkeley had destroyed matter. Nothing was left; and philosophy found itself in the midst of ruins of its own making.
Only mathematical formulas have necessity — they alone are inherently and unchangeably true; and this merely because such formulae are tautological — the predicate is already contained in the subject; “3x3=9” is an eternal and necessary truth only because “3x” and “9” are one and the same thing differently expressed.
To the argument of the Enlightenment, the reason makes for materialism, Berkeley had essayed the answer that matter does not exist. But this had led, in Hume, to retort that by the same token mind does not exist either. Another answer was possible — that reason is no final test. There are some theoretical conclusions against which our whole being rebels; we have no right to presume that these demands of our nature must be stifled at the dictates of a logic which is after all but the recent construction of a frail and deceptive part of us. How often our instincts and feelings push aside the little syllogisms which would like us to behave like geometrical figures, and make love with mathematical precision! Sometimes, no doubt, reason is the better guide; but in the great crises of life, and in the great problems of conduct and belief, we trust to our feelings rather than to our diagrams. If reason is against religion, so much the worse for reason!
Culture is much more of an evil than a good, he argued — with all the intensity an sincerity of one who, finding culture out of his reach, proposed to prove it worthless. Consider the frightful disorders which printing has produced in Europe. Wherever philosophy arises, the moral health of the nation decays. “It was even a saying among philosophers themselves that since learned men had appeared, honest men were nowhere to be found.” “I venture to declare that a state of reflection is contrary to nature; and that a thinking man is a depraved animal.” It would be better to abandon our over-rapid development of the intellect, and to aim rather at training the heart and the affections. Education does not make a man good, it only makes him clever — usually for mischief. Instinct and feeling are more trustworthy than reason.
In 1755 Kant began his work as private lecturer at the University of Konigsberg. For 15 years he was left in this lowly post; twice his applications for a professorship were refused.
Nobody expected him to startle the world with a new metaphysical system; to startle anybody seemed the very last crime that this timid and modest professor would commit.
So we see the slow growth of this simple little man, hardly 5 feet tall, modest, shrinking, and yet containing in his head, or generating there, the most far-reaching revolution in modern philosophy.
What is meant by this title? Critique is not precisely a criticism, but a critical analysis; Kant is not attacking “pure reason,” except, at the end, to show its limitations; rather he hopes to show its possibility, and to exalt it above the impure knowledge which comes to us through the distorting channels of sense. For “pure” reason is to mean knowledge that does not come through out senses, but is dependent of all sense experience; knowledge belonging to us by the inherent nature and structure of the mind.
The Critique comes to the point at once. “Experience is by no means the only field to which our understanding can be confined. Experience tells us what is, but not that it must be necessarily what it is and not otherwise. It therefore never gives us any really general truths; and our reason, which is particularly anxious for that class of knowledge, is roused by it rather than satisfied. General truths, which at the same time bear the character of an inward necessity, must be independent of experience — clear and certain in themselves.”
They do not depend on experience past, present, or to come. Therefore they are absolute and necessary truth; it is inconceivable that they should ever become untrue. But whence do we get this character of absoluteness and necessity? Not from experience; for experience gives us nothing but separate sensations and events, which may alter their sequence in the future. These truths derive their necessary character from the inherent structure of our minds, from the natural and inevitable manner in which our minds must operate. For the mind of man (and here at last is the great thesis of Kant) is not passive wax upon which experience and sensation write their absolute and yet whimsical will; nor is it a mere abstract name for the series or group of mental states; it is an active organ which moulds and coordinate sensations into ideas, an organ which transforms the chaotic multiplicity of experience into the ordered unity of thought.
By itself a sensation is merely the awareness of a stimulus; we have a taste on the tongue, an odor in the nostrils, a sound in the ears, a temperature on the skin, a flash of light in the retina, a pressure on the fingers: it is the raw crude beginning of experience; it is what the infant has in the early days of its groping mental life; it is not yet knowledge. But let these various sensations group themselves about an object in space and time unite and group themselves about this “thing”: and there is now an awareness not so much of a stimulus as of a specific object; there is a perception. Sensation has passed into knowledge.
For these varied sensations come to us through varied channels of sense, through a thousand “afferent nerves” that pass from skin an eye and ear and tongue into the brain; what a medley of messengers they must be as they crowd into the chambers of the mind, calling for attention!
Association of sensations or ideas is not merely by contiguity in space or time, nor by similarity, nor recency, frequency or intensity of experience; it is above all determined by the purpose of the mind. Sensations and thoughts are servants, they await our call, they do not come unless we need them. There is an agent of selection and direction that uses them and is their master. In addition to the sensations and the ideas there is the mind.
Space and time are not things perceived, but modes of perception, ways of putting sense into sensation; space and time are organs of perception.
They are a priori, because all ordered experience involves and presupposes them. Without them, sensations could never grow into perceptions. They are a priori because it is inconceivable that we should ever have any future experience that will not also involve them.
Just as perceptions arranged sensations around objects in space and time, so conception arranges perceptions (objects and events) about the ideas of cause, unity, reciprocal relation, necessity, contingency, etc.; these and other “categories” are the structure into which perceptions are received, and by which they are classified and moulded into the ordered concepts of thought. These are the very essence and character of the mind; mind is the coordination of experience.
Can you now conceive these scattered cards pulling themselves up from their disarray, passing quietly into their alphabetical and topical places in their proper boxes, and each box into its fit place in the rack, — until all should be order and sense and purpose again? What a miracle-story these sceptics have given us after all!
Sensation is unorganized stimulus, perception is organized sensation, conception is organized perception, science is organized knowledge, wisdom is organized life: each is a greater degree of order, and sequence, and unity. Whence this order, this sequence, this unity? Not from the things themselves; for they are known to us only by sensations that come through a thousand channels at once in disorderly multitude; it is our purpose that put order and sequence and unity upon this importunate lawlessness; it is ourselves, our personalities, our minds, that bring light upon these seas.
Perceptions without conceptions are blind.
Not that Kant ever doubts the existence of “matter” and the external world; but he adds that we know nothing certain about them except that they exist. Our detailed knowledge is about their appearance, their phenomena, about the sensations which we have of them. Idealism does not mean, as the man in the street thinks, that nothing exists outside the perceiving subject; but that a goodly part of every object as transformed into idea; what it is before being so transformed we cannot know. Science, after all, is naive; it supposes that it is dealing with things in themselves, in their full-blooded external and uncorrupted reality; philosophy is a little more sophisticated, and realizes that the whole material of science consists of sensations, perceptions and conceptions, rather than of things. “Kant’s greatest merit,” says Schopenhauer, “is the distinction of the phenomenon from the thing-in-itself.”
It follows that any attempt, by either science or religion, to say just what the ultimate reality is, must fall back into mere hypothesis; “the understanding can never go beyond the limits of sensibility.”
We shall never have any experience which we shall not interpret in terms of space and time and cause; but we shall never have any philosophy if we forget that these are not things, but modes of interpretation and understanding.
Transcendental dialectic must remind theology that substance and cause and necessity are finite categories, modes of arrangement and classification which the mind applies to sense-experience, and reliably valid only for the phenomena that appear to such experience; we cannot apply these conceptions to the noumenal world. Religion cannot be proved by theoretical reason.
What had the book really done? It had destroyed the naive world of science, and limited it, if not in degree, certainly in scope — and to a world confessedly of mere surface and appearance, beyond which it could only in farcical “antinomies”; so science was “saved”! The most eloquent and incisive portions of the book had argued that the objects of faith — a free and immortal soul, a benevolent creator — could never be proved by reason; so religion was “saved”!
We know, not by reasoning, but by vivid and immediate feelings, that we must avoid behavior which, if adopted by all men, would render social life impossible. Do I wish to escape from a predicament by a lie? But “while I can will the lie, I can by no means will that lying should be a universal law. For with such a law there would be no promises at all.” Hence the sense in me, that I must not lie, even if it be to my advantage. Prudence is hypothetical; its motto is, Honesty when it is the best policy; but the moral law in our hearts is unconditional and absolute.
And an action is good not because it has good results, or because it is wise, but because it is done in obedience to this inner sense of duty, this moral law that does not come from our personal experience, but legislates imperiously and a priori for all our behavior, past, present, and future. The only thing unqualifiedly good in this world is a good will — the will to follow the moral law, regardless of profit or loss for ourselves. Never mind your happiness; do your duty.
It is a hard ethic, you say — this placing of duty above beauty, of morality above happiness; but only so we can cease to be beasts, and begin to be gods.
We perceive that life is not like those dramas so beloved by the people — in which every villain is punished, and every act of virtue meets with its reward; we learn anew every day that the wisdom of the serpent fares better here than the gentleness of the dove, and that any thief can triumph if he steals enough. If mere worldly utility and expediency were the justification of virtue, it would not be wise to be too good. And yet, knowing all this, having it flung into our faces with brutal repetition, we still feel the command to righteousness, we know that we ought to do the inexpedient good.
Many objects in nature show such beauty, such symmetry and unity, as almost to drive us to the notion of supernatural design. But on the other hand, says Kant, there are also in nature many instances of waste and chaos, of useless repetition and multiplication; nature preserves life, but at the cost of how much suffering and death!
Finally, the nadir of perversion is reached when the church becomes an instrument in the hands of a reactionary government; when the clergy, whose function it is to console and guide a harassed humanity with religious faith and hope and charity, are made the tools of theological obscurantism and political oppression.
Kant begins by recognizing, in that strife of each against all which had so shocked Hobbes, nature’s method of developing the hidden capacities of life; struggle is the indispensable accompaniment of progress. If men were entirely social, man would stagnate; a certain alloy of individualism and competition is required to make the human species survive and grow. “Without qualities of an unsocial kind, men might lead an Arcadian shepherd life in complete harmony, contentment, and mutual love; but in that case all their talents would have forever remained hidden in their germ.”
Standing armies excite states to outrival one another in the number of their armed men, which has no limit. Through the expense occasioned thereby, peace becomes in the long run more oppressive than a short war; and standing armies are thus the cause of aggressive wars undertaken in order to get rid of this burden. For in time of war the army would support itself on the country, by requisitioning, quartering, and pillaging; preferably in the enemy’s territory, but if necessary, in one’s own land; even this would be better than supporting it out of government funds.
America, the negro lands, the Spice Islands, the Cape of Good Hope, etc., on being discovered, were treated as countries that belonged to nobody; for the aboriginal inhabitants were reckoned as nothing. And all this has been done by nations who make a great ado about their piety, and who, while drinking up iniquity like water, would have themselves regarded as the very elect of the orthodox faith.
If democracy were established, and all shared in political power, the spoils of international robbery would have to be so subdivided as to constitute a resistible temptation.
After all, the function of government is to help and develop the individual, not to use and abuse him. “Every man is to be respected as an absolute end in himself; and it is a crime against the dignity that belongs to him as a human being, to use him as a mere means for some external purpose.”
The 19th century dealt rather hardly with Kant’s ethics, his theory of an innate, a priori, absolute moral sense. The philosophy of evolution suggested irresistibly that the sense of duty is a social deposit in the individual, the content of conscience is acquired, though the vague disposition to social behavior is innate. The moral self, the social man, is no “special creation” coming mysteriously from the hand of God, but the late product of a leisurely evolution. Morals are not absolute; they are a code of conduct more or less haphazardly developed for group survival, and varying with the nature and circumstances of the group. No action is good in itself, as Kant supposes.
His pietistic youth, and his hard life of endless duty and infrequent pleasure, gave him a moralistic bent; he came at last to advocate duty for duty’s sake, and so fell unwittingly into the arms of Prussian absolutism.
After Kant, all Germany began to talk metaphysics: Schiller and Goethe studied him; Beethoven quoted with admiration his famous words about the two wonders of life — “the starry heavens above, the moral law within”.
The youth was a tireless student: he made full analyses of all the important books he read, and copied out long passages. True culture, he said, must begin with resolute self-effacement; as in the Pythagorean system of education, where the pupil, for the first 5 years, was required to keep his peace.
Of all relations, the most universal is that of contrast or opposition. Every condition of thought or of things — every idea and every situation in the world — leads irresistibly to its opposite, and then unites with it to form a higher or more complex whole. This “dialectical movement” runs through everything that Hegel wrote. It is an old thought, of course, foreshadowed by Empedocles, and embodied in the “golden mean” of Aristotle, who wrote that “the knowledge of opposites is one.”
The movement of evolution is a continuous development of oppositions, and their merging and reconciliation. Schelling was right — there is an underlying “identity of opposites”; and Fichte was right — thesis, antithesis and synthesis constitute the formula and secret of all development and reality.
The function of the mind, and the task of philosophy, is to discover the unity that lies potential in diversity; the task of ethics is to unify character and conduct; and the task of politics is to unify individuals into a state.
Not that strife and evil are mere negative imaginings; they are real enough; but they are, in wisdom’s perspective, stages to fulfilment and the good. Struggle is the law of growth; character is built in the storm and stress of the world; and a man reaches his full height only through compulsions, responsibilities, and suffering. Even pain has its rationale; it is a sign of life and a stimulus to reconstruction. Passion also has a place in the reason of things: “nothing great in the world has been accomplished without passion”; and even the egoistic ambitions of a Napoleon contribute unwittingly to the development of nations. Life is not made for happiness, but for achievement. “The history of the world is not the theatre of happiness; periods of happiness are blank pages in it, for they are periods of harmony”; and this dull content is unworthy of a man. History is made only in those periods in which the contradictions of reality are being resolved by growth, as the hesitations and awkwardness of youth pass into the ease and order of maturity. History is a dialectical movement, almost a series of revolutions, in which people after people, and genius after genius, become the instrument of the Absolute. Great men are not so much begetters, as midwives, of the future; what they bring forth is mothered by the Zeitgeist, the Spirit of the Age.
The dialectical process makes change the cardinal principle of life; no condition is permanent; in every stage of things there is a contradiction which only the “strife of opposites” can resolve. The deepest law of politics, therefore, is freedom — an open avenue to change; history is the growth of freedom, and the state is, or should be, freedom organized. On the other hand, the doctrine that “the real is rational” has a conservative color: every condition, though destined to disappear, has the divine right that belongs to it as a necessary stage in evolution: in a sense it is brutally true that “whatever is, is right.” And as unity is the goal of development, order is the first requisite of liberty.
If Hegel inclined, in his later years, to the conservative rather than to the radical implications of his philosophy, it was partly because the Spirit of the Age was weary of too much change. After the Revolution of 1830 he wrote: “Finally, after 40 years of war and immeasurable confusion, an old heart might rejoice to see an end of it all, and the beginning of a period of peaceful satisfaction.” It was not quite in order that the philosopher of strife as the dialectic of growth should become the advocate of content; but at 60 a man has a right to ask for peace.
How long, O Lord, and Why? Was this almost universal calamity the vengeance of a just God on the Age of Reason and unbelief? Was it a call to the penitent intellect to bend before the ancient virtues of faith, hope and charity? Some others made harsher answer: that the chaos of Europe but reflected the chaos of the universe; that there was no divine order after all, nor any heavenly hope; that God, if God there was, was blind, and Evil brooded over the face of the earth.
He could not bear noise: “I have long held the opinion that the amount of noise which anyone can bear undisturbed stands in inverse proportion to his mental capacity, and may therefore be regarded as a pretty fair measure of it. Noise is a torture to all intellectual people.” He had an almost paranoiac sense of unrecognized greatness; missing success and fame, he turned within and gnawed at his own soul.
“Would a musician feel flattered by the loud applause of an audience if he knew that they were nearly all deaf, and that to conceal their infirmity he saw one or two persons applauding? And what would he say if he discovered that those one or two persons had often taken bribes to secure the loudest applause for the poorest player?” — In some men egotism is a compensation for the absence of fame; in others, egotism lends a generous cooperation to its presence.
So the great pessimist became almost an optimist in his old age; he played the flute assiduously after dinner, and thanked Time for ridding him of the fires of youth.
What is modesty by hypocritical humility, by means of which, in a world swelling with envy, a man seeks to obtain pardon for excellences and merits from those who have none? No doubt, when modesty was made a virtue, it was a very dangerous thing for the fools; for everybody is expected to speak of himself as if he were one.
Consciousness is the mere surface of our minds, of which, as of the earth, we do not know the inside but only the crust. Under the conscious intellect is the conscious or unconscious will, a striving, persistent vital force, a spontaneous activity, a will of imperious desire.
“Nothing is more provoking, when we are arguing with a man with reasons and explanations, and taking all pains to convince him, than to discover at last that he will understand, that we have to do with his will.” Hence the uselessness of logic: no one ever convinced anybody by logic; and even logicians use logic only as a source of income. To convince a man, you must appeal to his self-interest, his desires, his will. Observe how long we remember our victories, and how soon we forget our defeats; memory is the menial of will.
Men are only apparently drawn from in front; in reality they are pushed from behind; they think they are led on by what they see, when in truth they are driven on by what they feel, — by instincts of whose operation they are half the time unconscious. Intellect is merely the minister of foreign affairs; nature has produced it for the service of the individual will. Therefore it is only designed to know things so far as they afford motives for the will, but not to fathom them or to comprehend their true being. The will is the only permanent and unchangeable element in the mind; it is the will which, through continuity of purpose, gives unity to consciousness and holds together all its ideas and thoughts, accompanying them like a continuous harmony.
Character lies in the will, and not in the intellect; character too is continuity of purpose and attitude: and these are will. Popular language is correct when it prefers the “heart” to the “head”; it knows (because it has not reasoned about it) that a “good will” is profounder and more reliable than a clear mind; and when it calls a man “shrewd,” “knowing,” or “cunning” it implies its suspicion and dislike. Brilliant qualities of mind win admiration, but never affection; and all religions promise a reward for excellences of the will or heart, but none for the excellence of the head or understanding.
Teeth, throat and bowels are objectified hunger; the organs of generation are objectified sexual desire. The whole nervous system constitutes the antennae of the will, which it stretches within and without. As the human body generally corresponds to the human will generally, so the individual bodily structure corresponds to the individually modified will, the character of the individual.
The intellect tires, the will never; the intellect needs sleep, but the will works even in sleep. Fatigue, like pain, has its seat in the brain; muscles not connected with the cerebrum (like the heart) never tire.
Unconsciousness is the original and natural condition of all things, and therefore also the basis from which, in particular species of beings, consciousness results as their highest effloresence; wherefore even then unconsciousness always continue to dominate. Accordingly, most existences are without consciousness; but yet they act according to the laws of their nature, — i.e., of their will.
The will is a will to live; and its eternal enemy is death.
Reproduction is the ultimate purpose of every organism, and its strongest instinct; for only so can the will conquer death. And to ensure this conquest of death, the will to reproduce is placed almost entirely beyond control of knowledge or reflection: even a philosopher, occasionally, has children.
Each seeks a mate that will neutralize his defects, lest they be inherited; a physically weak man will seek a strong woman. Each one will especially regard as beautiful in another individual those perfections which he himself lacks, nay, even those imperfections which are the opposite of his own.
Since love is a deception practiced by nature, marriage is the attrition of love, and must be disillusioning. Only a philosopher can be happy in marriage, and philosophers do not marry.
Procreation is the highest point; and after attaining to it, the life of the first individual quickly or slowly sinks, while a new life ensures to nature the endurance of the species, and repeats the same phenomena. Thus the alternation of death and reproduction is as the pulsebeat of the species. Death is for the species what is sleep for the individual; this is nature’s great doctrine of immortality.
Only in space and time do we seem to be separate beings; they constitute the “principle of individuation” which divides life into distinct organisms as appearing in different places or periods; space and time as the Veil of Maya, — Illusion hiding the unity of things. In reality there is only the species, only life, only will.
The more things change, the more they remain the same.
We like to believe that all history is a halting and imperfect preparation for the magnificent era of which we are the salt and summit; but his notion of progress is mere conceit and folly. In general, the wise in all ages have always said the same things, and the fools, who at all times form the immense majority, have in their way too acted alike, and done the opposite; and so it will continue. For, as Voltaire says, we shall leave the world as foolish and wicked as we found int.
Everyone believes himself a priori to be perfectly free, even in his individual actions, and thinks that at every moment he can commence another manner of life, which just means that he can become another person. But a posteriori, through experience, he finds to his astonishment that he is not free, but subjected to necessity; that in spite of all his resolutions and reflections he does not change his conduct, and that from the beginning of his life to the end of it, he must carry out the very character which he himself condemns, and as it were, play the part which he has undertaken, to the very end.
For every wish that is satisfied there remain 10 that are denied. Desire is infinite, fulfilment is limited — “it is like the alms thrown to a beggar, that keeps him alive today in order that his misery may be prolonged tomorrow. As long as our consciousness is filled by our will, so long as we are given up to the throng of desires with their constant hopes and fears, so long as we are subject to willing, we can never have lasting happiness or peace.” And fulfilment never satisfies; nothing is so fatal to an ideal as its realization. The satisfied passion oftener leads to unhappiness than to happiness. For its demands often conflict so much with the personal welfare of him who is concerned that they undermine it.
Again, life is evil because pain is its basic stimulus and reality, and pleasure is merely a negative cessation of pain. Aristotle was right: the wise man seeks not pleasure, but freedom from care and pain.
Even if the socialist Utopia were attained, innumerable evils would be left, because some of them — like strife — are essential to life; and if every evil were removed, and strife were altogether ended, boredom would become as intolerable as pain. The more successful we become, the more we are bored.
Life is evil because the higher the organism the greater the suffering. The growth of knowledge is no solution.
Thus, in proportion as knowledge attains to distinctness, as consciousness ascends, pain also increases, and reaches its highest degree in man. And then, again, the more distinctly a man knows — the more intelligent he is — the more pain he has; the man who is gifted with genius suffers most of all.
He that increaseth knowledge, therefore, increaseth sorrow. Even memory and foresight add to human misery; for most of our suffering lies in retrospect or anticipation; pain itself is brief. How much more suffering is caused by the thought of death than by death itself!
For whence did Dante take the materials of his hell but from our actual world? And yet he made a very proper hell out of it. But when, on the other hand, he came to describe heaven and its delights, he had an insurmountable difficulty before him, for our world affords no materials at all for this. Every epic and dramatic poem can only represent a struggle, an effort, a fight for happiness; never enduring and complete happiness itself. It conducts its heroes through a thousand dangers and difficulties to the goals: as soon as this is reached it hastens to let the curtain fall; for now there would remain nothing for it to do but to show that the glittering goal in which the hero expected to find happiness had only disappointed him, and that after its attainment he was not better off than before.
The final refuge is suicide. Here at last, strange to say, thought and imagination conquer instinct. Diogenes is said to have put an end to himself by refusing to breath; — what a victory over the will to live! But this triumph is merely individual; the will continues in the species. Life laughs at suicide, and smiles at death; for every deliberate death there are thousands of indeliberate births. Suicide, the wilful destruction of the single phenomenal existence, is a vain and foolish act, for the thing-in-itself — the species, and life, and will in general — remains unaffected by ti, even as the rainbow endures however fast the drops which support it for the moment may chance to fall. Misery and strife continue after the death of the individual, and must continue, so long as will is dominant in man. There can be no victory over the ills of life until the will has been utterly subordinated to knowledge and intelligence.
Consider, first, the absurdity of the desire for material goods. Fools believe that if they can only achieve wealth, their wills can be completely gratified; a man of means is supposed to be a man with means for the fulfilment of every desire. People are often reproached for wishing for money above all things, and for loving it more than anything else; but it is natural and even inevitable for people to love that which, like an unwearied Proteus, is always ready to turn itself into whatever object their wandering wishes or their manifold desires may fix upon. Everything else can satisfy only one wish; money alone is absolutely good, because it is the abstract satisfaction of every wish. Nevertheless, a life devoted to the acquisition of wealth is unless we know how to turn it into joy; and this is an art that requires culture and wisdom. A succession of sensual pursuits never satisfies for long; one must understand the end of life as well as the art of acquiring means. Men are a thousand times more intent on becoming rich than on acquiring culture, though it is quite certain that what a man is contributes more to this happiness than what he has.
So philosophy purifies the will. But philosophy is to be understood as experience and thought, not as mere reading or passive study.
The constant streaming in of the thoughts of others must confine and suppress our own; and indeed in the long run paralyze the power of thought. It is dangerous to read about a subject before we have thought about it ourselves. When we read, another person thinks for us; we merely repeat his mental process. So it comes about that if anyone spends almost the whole day in reading, he gradually loses the capacity for thinking.
Within these limitations, the pursuit of culture, even through books, is valuable, because our happiness depends on what we have in our heads rather than on what we have in our pockets. Even fame is folly; “other people’s heads are a wretched place to be the home of a man’s true happiness.”
What one human being can be to another is not a very great deal; in the end everyone stands alone; and the important thing is, who it is that stands alone. The happiness which we receive from ourselves is greater than that which we obtain from our surroundings. The world in which a man lives shapes itself chiefly by the way in which he looks at it.
To be happy means to be self-sufficient.
Most men never rise above viewing things as objects of desire — hence their misery; but to see things purely as objects of understanding is to rise to freedom.
Genius is the highest form of this will-less knowledge. The lowest forms of life are entirely made up of will, without knowledge; man in general is mostly will and little knowledge; genius is mostly knowledge and little will.
The secret of genius, then, lies in the clear and impartial perception of the objective, the essential, and the universal.
It is this removal of the personal equation which leaves the genius so maladapted in the world of will-full, practical, personal activity. By seeing so far he does not see what is near; he is imprudent and “queer”; and while his vision is hitched to a star he falls into a well. Hence, partly, the unsociability of the genius; he is thinking of the fundamental, the universal, the eternal; others are thinking of the temporary, the specific, the immediate; his mind and theirs have no common ground, and never met.
The result, however, is that the genius is forced into isolation, and sometimes into madness; the extreme sensitiveness which brings him pain along with imagination and intuition, combines with solitude and maladaptation to break the bonds that hold the mind to reality. Aristotle was right again: “Men distinguished in philosophy, politics, poetry or art appear to be all of a melancholy temperament.”
The object of science is the universal that contains many particulars; the object of art is the particular that contains a universal. “Even the portrait ought to be the ideal of the individual.” In painting animals the most characteristic is accounted the most beautiful, because it best reveals the species. The portrait of a man must aim not at photographic fidelity, but at exposing, as far as possible, through one figure, some essential or universal quality of man. Art is greater than science because the latter proceeds by laborious accumulation and cautious reasoning, while the former reaches its goal at once by intuition and presentation; science can get along with talent, but art requires genius.
Christianity is a profound philosophy of pessimism; the doctrine of original sin (assertion of the will) and of salvation (denial of the will) is the great truth which constitutes the essence of Christianity. Fasting a remarkable expedient for weakening those desires that lead never to happiness but either to disillusionment or to further desire.
Buddhism is profounder than Christianity, because it makes the destruction of the will the entirety of religion, and preaches Nirvana as the goal of all personal development. The Hindus were deeper than the thinkers of Europe, because their interpretation of the world was internal and intuitive, not external and intellectual; the intellect divides everything, intuition unites everything; the Hindus saw that the “I” is a delusion; that the individual is merely phenomenal, and that the only reality is the Infinite One — “That art thou.”
With young girls Nature seems to have had in view what, in the language of the drama, is called a striking effect; as for a few years she dowers them with a wealth of beauty and is lavish in her gift of charm, at the expense of all the rest of their lives; so that during those years they may capture the fancy of some man to such a degree that he is hurried away into undertaking the honorable care of them. Here, as elsewhere, Nature proceeds with her usual economy; for just as the female ant, after fecundation, loses her wings, which are then superfluous, nay, actually a danger to the business of breeding; so, after giving birth to one or two children, a woman generally loses her beauty; probably, indeed, for similar reasons.
Young men ought to reflect that “if the object which inspires them today to write madrigals and sonnets had been born 18 years earlier, it would scarcely have won a glance from them.”
It is characteristic of the East to see the external Will in nature as so much more powerful than the will in man, and to come readily to a doctrine of resignation and despair. As the decay of Greece brought the pallor of Stoicism and the hectic flush of Epicureanism upon the cheeks of Hellas, so the chaos of the Napoleonic wars brought into the soul of Europe that plaintive weariness which made Schopenhauer its philosophic voice.
One must have leisure to be a pessimist; an active life almost always brings good spirits in body and in mind.
Perhaps the tendency of philosophers toward melancholy is due to the unnaturalness of sedentary occupations; too often an attack upon life is merely a symptom of the lost art of excretion.
There is, of course, a large element of egotism in pessimism: the world is not good enough for us, and we turn up our philosophic noses to it. Perhaps our supercilious disgust with existence is a cover for a secret disgust with ourselves: we have botched and bungled our lives, and we cast the blame upon the “environment,” or the “world,” which have no tongues to utter a defense. The mature man accepts the natural limitation of life; he does not expect Providence to be prejudiced in his favor; he does not ask for loaded dice with which to play the game of life.
Part of the cause of pessimism, in Schopenhauer and his contemporaries, lay in their romantic attitudes and expectations. Youth expects too much from the world; pessimism is the morning after optimism, just as 1815 had to pay for 1789. The romantic exaltation and liberation of feeling, instinct and will, and the romantic contempt for intellect, restraint, and order, brought their natural penalties; for the world is a comedy to those who think, but a tragedy for those who feel.
Perhaps no movement has been so prolific of melancholy as emotional romanticism. When the romanticist discovers that his ideal of happiness works out into actual unhappiness, he does not blame his ideal. He simply assumes that he world is unworthy of a being so exquisitely organized as himself.
It never occurred to Schopenhauer that it was better to have fought and lost than never to have fought at all; he did not feel, like the more masculine and vigorous Hegel, the glory and desirability of strife; he longed for peace, and lived in the midst of war. Everywhere he saw strife; he could not see, behind strife, the friendly aid of neighbors, the rollicking joy of children and young men, the dances of vivacious girls, the willing sacrifices of parents and lovers, the patient bounty of the soil, and the renaissance of spring.
And what if desire, fulfilled, leads on ly to another desire? Perhaps it is better that we should never be content. Happiness, says an old lesson, lies rather in achievement than in possession or satiation. The healthy man asks not so much for happiness as for an opportunity to exercise his capacities; and if he must pay the penalty of pain for this freedom and this power he makes the forfeit cheerfully; it is not too great a price. We need resistance to raise us, as it raises the airplane and the bird; we need obstacles against which to sharpen our strength and stimulate our growth. Life without tragedy would be unworthy of a man.
Is it true that “he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow,” and that it is the most highly organized beings that suffer most? Yes; but but it is also true that the growth of knowledge increases joy as well as sorrow, and that the subtlest delights, as well as the keenest pains, are reserved for the developed soul. Voltaire rightly preferred the Brahmin’s “unhappy” wisdom to the blissful ignorance of the peasant woman; we wish to experience life keenly and deeply, even at the cost of pain; we wish to venture into its innermost secrets, even at the cost of disillusionment. Virgil, who had tasted every pleasure, and knew the luxuries of imperial favor, at last “tired of everything except the joy of understanding.” When the senses cease to satisfy, it is something to have won access, however arduously, to comradeship with those artists, poets and philosophers whom only the mature mind can comprehend. Wisdom is a bitter-sweet delight, deepened by the very discords that enter into its harmony.
And why is death terrible if not because life is sweet?
No man, said Goethe, is a pessimist after 30. And hardly before 20; pessimism is a luxury of self-conscious and self-important youth; youth that comes out of the warm bosom of the communistic family into the cold atmosphere of individualistic competition and greed, and then yearns back to its mother’s breast; youth that hurls itself madly against the windmills and evils of the world, and sadly sheds utopias and ideals with every year. But before 20 is the joy of the body, and after 30 is the joy of the mind; before 20 is the pleasure of protection and security; and after 30, the joy of parentage and home.
At the bottom of Schopenhauer’s unhappiness was his rejection of the normal life — his rejection of women and marriage and children. He finds in parentage the greatest of evils, where a healthy man finds in it the greatest of life’s satisfactions. He thinks that the stealthiness of love is due to shame in continuing the race — could anything be more pedantically absurd? He sees in love only the sacrifice of the individual to the race, and ignores the delights with which the instinct repays the sacrifice — delights so great that they have inspired most of the poetry in the world.
What if the proper function of intellect and philosophy is not the denial of the will but the coordination of desires into a unified and harmonious will? What if “will” itself, except as the unified product of such coordination, is a mythical abstraction, as shadowy as “force”?
After all, Schophenhauer opened the eyes of psychologists to the subtle depth and omnipresent force of instinct. Intellectualism — the conception of man as above all a thinking animal, consciously adapting means to rationally chosen ends — fell sick with Rousseau, took to its bed with Kant, and died with Schopenhauer. After two centuries of introspective analysis philosophy found, behind thought, desire; and behind the intellect, instinct; — just as, after a century of materialism, physics finds, behind matter, energy.
For metaphysics had meant, throughout the history of thought, an attempt to discover the ultimate nature of reality; now men learned, on the most respectable authority, that reality could never be experienced; that it was a “noumemon,” conceivable but not knowable; and that even the subtlest human intelligence could never pass beyond phenomena, could never pierce the veil of Maya.
But, like most of us who set out to reform the world, Comte found it difficult enough to manage his own home; in 1827, after 2 years of marital infelicity, he suffered a mental break-down, and attempted suicide in the Seine.
Therefore sociology was the apex of the sciences, and the others had their reason for existence only in so far as they could provide illumination for the science of society. Science, in the sense of exact knowledge, had spread from one subject-matter to another in the order given; and it was natural that the complex phenomena of social life should be the last to yield to scientific method.
The “Will of God” yields to such airy entities as Plato’s “Ideas” or Hegel’s “Absolute Idea,” and these in turn yield to the laws of science. Metaphysics is a stage of arrested development: the time had come, said Comte, to abandon these puerilities. Philosophy was not something different from science; it was the coordination of all the sciences with a view to the improvement of human life.
He was so busy analyzing and describing life that he had no time to live it.
He had an exceptionally logical mind; he marshalled his a prioris and his a posterioris with the precision of a chess player. He is the clearest expositor of complex subjects that modern history can show; he wrote of difficult problems in terms so lucid that for a generation all the world was interested in philosophy.
Buckle had taken in a much larger quantity of matter than he could organize. With Spencer it was the other way: he organized much more than he had taken in. He was all for coordination and synthesis. The fondness of order became in him an enslaving passion; a brilliant generalization overmastered him. But the world was calling for a mind like his; one who could transform the wilderness of facts with sunlit clarity into civilized meaning.
Motion is wrapped in a triple obscurity, since it involves matter changing, in time, its position in space. When we analyze matter resolutely we find nothing at last but force — a force impressed upon our organs of sense, or a force resisting our organs of action; and who shall tell us what force is? Turn from physics to psychology, and we come upon mind and consciousness: and here are greater puzzles than before. “Ultimate scientific ideas are all representations of realities that cannot be comprehended. In all directions the scientist’s investigations bring him face to face with an insoluble enigma; and he ever more clearly perceives it to be an insoluble enigma. He learns at once the greatness and the littleness of the human intellect — its power in dealing with all that comes within the range of experience, its impotence in dealing with all that transcends experience. He, more than any other, truly knows that in its ultimate nature nothing can be known.”
indestructible belief in that Actuality. But what that Actuality is we cannot know.
Having indicated the unknowable, philosophy surrenders it, and turns its face to what can be known. Metaphysics is a mirage: the art of befuddling one’s self methodically. The proper field and function of philosophy lies in the summation and unification of the results of science. “Knowledge of the lowest kind is un-unified knowledge; science is partially-unified knowledge; philosophy is completely-unified knowledge.”
Whatever passes from diffusion to integration and unity, and from a homogeneous simplicity to a differentiated complexity (America, 1600-1900), is in the flow of evolution; whatever is returning from integration to diffusion, and from complexity to simplicity (Europe, 200-600), is caught in the ebb of dissolution.
Gradually, and then rapidly, equilibration will become dissolution, the unhappy epilogue of evolution. Societies will disintegrate, masses will migrate, cities will fade into the dark hinterland of peasant life; no government will be strong enough to hold the loosened parts together; social order will cease to be even remembered. And in the individual too, integration will give way to disruption; and that coordination which is life will pass into that diffuse disorder which is death. The earth will be a chaotic theatre of decay, a gloomy drama of energy in irreversible degradation; and it will itself be resolved into the dust and nebula from which it came. The cycle of evolution and dissolution will be complete. The cycle will begin again, and endless times again; but always this will be the denouement. Memento mori is written upon the face of life; and every birth is a prelude to decay and death.
Hence the growth of the individual organism beyond a certain point is dangerous; and normally growth gives way, after a time, to reproduction.
Men prepare themselves with life-long study before becoming authorities in physics or chemistry or biology; but in the field of social and political affairs every grocer’s boy is an expert, knows the solution, and demands to be heard.
God was, at first, only “a permanently existing ghost.”
Something of this belief entered into the bravery of the Japanese in the war of 1905; death was made easier for them by the thought that their ancestors were looking down upon them from the skies.
Religion is probably the central feature in the life of primitive men; existence is so precarious and humble among them that the soul lives rather in the hope of things to come than in the reality of things seen.
The military state is always centralized in government, and almost always monarchical; the cooperation it inculcates is regimental and compulsory; it encourages authoritarian religion, worshipping a warrior god; it develops rigid class distinctions and class codes; it props up the natural domestic absolutism of the male. Because the death rate in warlike societies is high, they tend to polygamy and a low status of women. Most states have been militant because war strengthens the central power and makes for the subordination of all interests to those of the state.
Industry makes for democracy and peace: as life ceases to be dominated by war, a thousand centers of economic development arise, and power is beneficently spread over a large portion of the members of the group. Since production can prosper only where initiative is free, an industrial society breaks down those traditions of authority, hierarchy, and caste, which flourish in military states, and under which military states flourish. The occupation of the soldier ceases to be held in high repute; and patriotism becomes a love one’s country rather than a hatred of every other. Peace at home becomes the first need of prosperity, and as capital becomes international, and a thousand investments cross every frontier, international peace becomes a necessity as well.
History begins to study the people at work rather than the kings at war; it ceases to be a record of personalities and becomes the history of great inventions and new ideas. The power of government is lessened, and the power of productive groups within the states increases; there is a passage “from status to contract,” from equality in subordination to freedom in initiative, from compulsory cooperation to cooperation in liberty. The contrast between the militant and the industrial types of society is indicated by “inversion of the belief that individuals exist for the benefit of the State into the belief that the State exists for the benefit of the individuals.”
As this passage indicates, Spencer believes that socialism is a derivative of the militant and feudal type of state, and has no natural affiliation with industry. Like militarism, socialism involves the development of centralization, the extension of governmental power, the decay of initiative, and the subordination of the individual.
It is the law of all organization that as it becomes complete it becomes rigid. Socialism would be in industry what a rigid instinctive equipment is in animals; it would produce a community of human ants and bees, and would issue in a slavery far more monotonous and hopeless than the present condition of affairs.
Economic relationships are so different from political relationships, and so much more complex, that no government could regulate them all without such an enslaving bureaucracy. State interference always neglects some factor of the intricate industrial situation, and has failed whenever tried; note the wage-fixing laws of medieval England, and the price-fixing laws of Revolutionary France. Economic relations must be left to the automatic self-adjustment (imperfect though it may be) of supply and demand. What society most wants it will pay for most heavily; and if certain men, or certain functions, receive great rewards it is because they have taken, or have involved, exceptional risks or pains. Men as now constituted will not tolerate a compulsory equality. Until an automatically-changed environment automatically changes human character, legislation enacting artificial changes will be as futile as astrology.
Spencer was almost made sick by the thought of a world ruled by the wage-earning class. He was not enamored of trade-union leaders so far as he could know them through the refractory medium of the London Times. He pointed out that strikes are useless unless most strikes fail; for if all workers should, at various times, strike and win, prices would presumably rise in accord with the raised wages, and the situation would be as before.
Huxley argued that biology could not be taken as an ethical guide; that “nature red in tooth and claw” exalted brutality and cunning rather than justice and love; but Spencer felt that a moral code which could not meet the tests of natural selection and the struggle for existence, was from the beginning doomed to lipservice and futility. Conduct, like anything else, should be called good or bad as it is well adapted, or maladapted, to the ends of life; “the highest conduct is that which conduces to the greatest length, breadth, and completeness of life.” Or, in terms of the evolution formula, conduct is moral according as it makes the individual or the group more integrated and coherent in the midst of a heterogeneity of ends. Morality, like art, is the achievement of unity in diversity; the highest type of man is he who effectively unites in himself the widest variety, complexity, and completeness of life.
A militant society exalts certain virtues and condones what other peoples might call crimes; aggression and robbery and treachery are not so unequivocally denounced among peoples accustomed to them by war, as among peoples who have learned the value of honesty and non-aggression through industry and peace. Generosity and humanity flourish better where war is infrequent and long periods of productive tranquility inculcate the advantages of mutual aid. The patriotic member of a militant society will look upon bravery and strength as the highest virtues of a man; upon obedience as the highest virtue of the citizen; and upon silent submission to multiple motherhood as the highest virtue of a woman.
During immaturity benefits received must be inversely proportionate to capacities possessed. Within the family-group most must be given where least is deserved, if desert is measured by worth. Contrariwise, after maturity is reached benefit must vary directly as worth: worth being measured by fitness to the conditions of existence. The ill-fitted must suffer the evils of unfitness, and the well-fitted profit by their fitness. There are two laws which a species must conform to if it is to be preserved. If, among the young, benefit were proportioned to efficiency, the species would disappear forthwith; and if, among adults, benefit were proportioned to inefficiency, the species would disappear by decay in a few generations. The only justification for the analogy between parent and child, and government and people, is the childishness of the people who entertain the analogy.
Liberty contends with Evolution for priority in Spencer’s affections; and Liberty wins. He thinks that as war decreases, the control of the individual by the state loses most of its excuse; and in a condition of permanent peace the state would be reduced within Jeffersonian bounds, acting only to prevent breaches of equal freedom. Such justice should be administered without cost, so that wrong-doers might know that the poverty of their victims would not shield them from punishment; and all the expenses of the state should be met by direct taxation, lest the invisibility of taxation should divert public attention from governmental extravagance. But “beyond maintaining justice, the state cannot do anything else without transgressing justice”; for it would then be protecting inferior individuals from that natural apportionment of reward and capacity, penalty and incapacity, on which the survival and improvement of the group depend.
Spencer, living in a world o machines, took mechanism for granted; just as Darwin, living in an age of ruthless individual competition, saw only the struggle for existence.
Gothic architecture is surely more complex than that of the Greeks, but not necessarily a higher state of artistic evolution.
Perhaps (imperfect though this too would be) a description of history as a struggle for existence and a survival of the fittest — of the fittest organisms, the fittest societies, the fittest moralities, the fittest languages, ideas, philosophies — would be more illuminating than the formula of incoherence and coherence, of homo- and heterogeneity, of dissipation and integration?
The volumes on psychology formulate rather than inform. What we knew is reshaped into an almost barbarously complex terminology, which obscures where it should clarify. The reader is so fatigued with formulas and definitions and questionable reductions of psychological facts to neutral structures that he may fail to observe that the origin of mind and consciousness is left quite unexplained.
No man is equal to his book. All the best products of his mental activity go into his book, where they come separated from the mass of inferior products with which they are mingled in his daily talk.
He began to realize that religious beliefs and political movements are built upon needs and impulses beyond the reach of intellectual attack; and he reconciled himself to seeing the world roll on without much heeding the heavy books he hurled in its direction. Looking back over his arduous career, he thought himself foolish for having sought literary fame instead of the simpler pleasures of life. When he died, he had come to think that his work had been done in vain.
Nietzsche was the child of Darwin and the brother fo Bismarck.
It does not matter that he ridiculed the English evolutionists and the German nationalists: he was accustomed to denounce those who had most influenced him; it was his unconscious way of covering his debts.
If life is a struggle for existence in which the fittest survive, then strength is the ultimate virtue, and weakness the only fault. Good is that which survives, which wins; bad is that which gives way and fails.
Men who could think clearly soon perceived what the profoundest minds of every age had known: that in this battle we call life, what we need is not goodness but strength, not humility but pride, not altruism but resolute intelligence; that equality and democracy are against the grain of selection and survival; that not masses but geniuses are the goal of evolution; that not “justice” but power is the arbiter of all differences and all destinies. — So it seemed to Friedrich Nietzsche.
Now if all this were true, nothing could be more magnificent or significant than Bismarck. Here was a man who threw the realities of life, who said bluntly that “there is no altruism among nations,” and that modern issues are to be decided not by votes and rhetoric, but by blood and iron. What a cleansing whirlwind he was for a Europe rotten with delusions and democracy and “ideals”!
It was a typical incident: all his life long he was to seek physical and intellectual means of hardening himself into an idealized masculinity. “What I am not, that for me is God and virtue.”
He became cynical, like one who had staked all on a single throw of the dice, and had lost; religion had been the very marrow of his life, and now life seemed empty and meaningless. He passed suddenly into a period of sensual riot with his college mates and even overcame the fastidiousness that had made so difficult for him the male arts of smoking and drinking. But soon wine, woman and tobacco disgusted him; he reacted into a great scorn the whole biergemutlichkeit of his country and his time; people who drank beer and smoked pipes were incapable of clear perception and subtle thought.
Nietzsche never quite recovered from that hurt. His military experience was so brief that he left the army with almost as many delusions about soldiers as he had had on entering it; the hard Spartan life of commanding and obeying, of endurance and discipline, appealed to his imagination, now that he was free from the necessity of realizing this ideal himself; he came to worship the soldier because his health would not permit him to become one.
At Frankfort, on his way to the front, he saw a troop of cavalry passing with magnificent clatter and display through the town; there and then, he says, came the perception, the vision, out of which was to grow his entire philosophy. “I felt for the first time that the strongest and highest Will to Life does not find expression in a miserable struggle for existence, but in a Will to War, a Will to Power, a Will to Overpower!” Bad eyesight disqualified him from active soldiering, and he had to be content with nursing; and though he saw horrors enough, he never knew the actual brutality of those battlefields which is timid soul was later to idealize with all the imaginative intensity of inexperience.
The Greeks were not the cheerful and optimistic people whom we meet in modern rhapsodies about them; they knew the stings of life intimately, and its tragic brevity. But the Greeks overcame the gloom of their disillusionment with the brilliance of their art: out of their own suffering they made the spectacle of the drama, and found that “it is only as an esthetic phenomenon,” as an object of artistic contemplation or reconstruction, “that the existence of the world appear justified.” The sublime is the artistic subjugation of the awful. Pessimism is a sign of decay, optimism is a sign of superficiality; “tragic optimism” is the mood of the strong man who seeks intensity and extent of experience, even at the cost of woe, and is delighted to find that strife is the law of life.
The German spirit has too long reflected passively the Apollonian art of Italy and France; let the German people realize that their own instincts are sounder than these decadent cultures; let them make Revolution in music as in religion, pouring the wild vigor of Luther again into art and life. Who knows but that out of the war-throes of the German nation another age of heroes dawns, and that out of the spirit of music tragedy may be reborn?
I have before me work enough for 50 years, and I must mark time under the yoke.
The victory of 1871 had brought a certain coarse conceit into the soul of Germany; and nothing could be more hostile to spiritual growth.
Already in these essays two of his distinctive ideas found expression: that morality, as well as theology, must be reconstructed in terms of the evolution theory; and that the function of life is to bring about “not the betterment of the majority, who, taken as individuals, are the most worthless types,” but “the creation of genius,” the development and elevation of superior personalities.
There was so much of Plato in Nietzsche, he feared that art would unteach men to be hard; being tender-minded, he supposed that all the world was like himself, —dangerously near to practicing Christianity. There had not been wars enough to suit this gentle professor.
And the publisher refused to print the last part at all, as quite worthless from the point of view of shekels; so that the author had to pay for its publication himself. 40 copies of the book were sold; 7 were given away; one acknowledged it; no one praised it. Never was a man so much alone.
Even for the ordinary Roman, virtue was virtus — manhood, courage, enterprise, bravery. But from Asia, and especially from the Jews in the days of their political subjection, came the other standard; subjection breeds humility, helplessness breeds altruism — which is an appeal for help. Under this herd-morality love of danger and power gave way to love of security and peace; strength was replaced by cunning, open by secret revenge, sternness by pity, initiative by imitation, the pride of honor by the whip of conscience. Honor is pagan, Roman, feudal, aristocratic; conscience is Jewish, Christian, bourgeois, democratic. It was the eloquence of the prophets, from Amos to Jesus, that made the view of a subject class an almost universal ethic; the “world” and the “flesh” became synonym of evil, and poverty a proof of virtue.
This valuation was brought to a peak by Jesus: with him every man was of equal worth, and had equal rights; out of his doctrine came democracy, utilitarianism, socialism; progress was now defined in terms of these plebeian philosophies, in terms of progressive equalization and vulgarization, in terms of decadence and descending life. The final stage in this decay is the exaltation of pity and self-sacrifice, the sentimental comforting of criminals, “the inability of a society to excrete.” Sympathy is legitimate if it is active; but pity is a paralyzing mental luxury, a waste of feeling for the irremediably botched, the incompetent, the defective, the vicious, the culpably diseased and the irrevocably criminal. There is a certain indelicacy and intrusiveness in pity; “visiting the sick” is an orgasm of superiority in the contemplation of our neighbor’s helplessness.
Behind all this “morality” is a secret will to power. Love itself is only a desire for possession; courtship is combat and mating is mastery. People imagine that they are unselfish in love because they seek the advantage of another being, often in opposition to their own. But for so doing they want to possess the other being. Even in the love of truth is the desire to possess it, perhaps to be its first possessor, to find it virginal. Humility is the protective coloration of the will to power.
Against this passion for power, reason and morality are helpless; they are but weapons in its hands, dupes of its game. Philosophical systems are shining mirages; what we see is not the long-sought truth, but the reflection of our own desires. The philosophers all pose as though their real opinions had been discovered through the self-evolving of a cold, pure, divinely indifferent dialectic; whereas in fact a prejudicial proposition, idea or “suggestion,” which is generally their heart’s desire abstracted and refined, is defended by them with arguments sought out after the event.
The greater part of our intellectual activity goes on unconsciously, and unfelt by us; conscious thinking is the weakest. Because instinct is the direct operation of the will to power, undisturbed by consciousness, instinct is the most intelligent of all kinds of intelligence which have hitherto been discovered. Indeed, the role of consciousness has been senselessly overestimated; consciousness may be regarded as secondary, almost as indifferent and superfluous, probably destined to disappear and to be superseded by perfect automatism.
In strong men there is very little attempt to conceal desire under the cover of reason; their simple argument is, “I will.”
Different functions require different qualities; and the “evil” virtues of the strong are as necessary in a society as the “good” virtues of the weak. Severity, violence, danger, war, are as valuable as kindliness and peace; great individuals appear only in times of danger and violence and merciless necessity. The best thing in man is strength of will, power and permanence of passion; without passion one is mere milk, incapable of deeds. Greed, envy, even hatred, are indispensable items in the process of struggle, selection, and survival. Evil is to good as variation to heredity, as innovation and experiment to custom; there is no development without an almost-criminal violation of precedents and “order.” If evil were not good it would have disappeared. We must beware of being too good; “man must become better and more evil.”
Man is the cruelest animal. When gazing at tragedies, bullfights and crucifixions he hath hitherto felt happier than at any other time on earth. And when his invented hell… lo, hell was his heaven on earth. He could put up with suffering now, by contemplating the eternal punishment of his oppressors in the other world.
The ultimate ethic is biological; we must judge things according to their value for life; we need a physiological “transvaluation of all values.” The real test of a man, or a group, or a species, is energy, capacity, power. We may be partly reconciled to the 19th century — otherwise so destructive of all the higher virtues — by its emphasis on the physical. The soul is a function of an organism. One drop of blood too much or too little in the brain may make a man suffer more than Prometheus suffered from the vulture. Varying foods have varying mental effects: rice makes for Buddhism, and German metaphysics is the result of beer. A philosophy therefore is true or false according as it is the expression and exaltation of ascending or of descending life. The decadent says, “Life is worth nothing”; let him rather say, “I am worth nothing.” Why should life be worth living when all the heroic values in it have been permitted to decay, and democracy — that is, disbelief in all great men — ruins, with every decade, another people?
The very last thing a sensible man would undertake would be to improve mankind: mankind does not improve, it does not even exist — it is an abstraction; all that exists is a vast anthill of individuals. The aspect of the whole is much more like that of a huge experimental workshop where some things in every age succeed, while most things fail; and the aim of all the experiments is not the happiness of the mass but the improvement of the type. Better that societies should come to an end than that no higher type should appear. Society is an instrument for the enhancement of the power and personality of the individual; the group is not an end in itself. “To what purpose then are the machines, if all individuals are only of use in maintaining them? Machines — or social organizations — that are ends in themselves — is that the umana commedia?”
At first Nietzsche spoke as if his hope were for the production of a new species; later he came to think of his superman as the superior individual rising precariously out of the mire of mass mediocrity, and owing his existence more to deliberate breeding and careful nurture than to the hazards of natural selection. For the biological process is biased against the exceptional individual; nature is most cruel to her finest products; she does rather, and protects, the average and the mediocre; there is in nature a perpetual reversion to type, to the level of the mass, — a recurrent mastery of the best by the most. The superman can survive only by human selection, by eugenic foresight and an ennobling education.
How absurd it is, after all, to let higher individuals marry for love — heroes with servant girls, and geniuses with seamstresses!
Without good birth, nobility is impossible. “Intellect alone does not ennoble; on the contrary, something is always needed to ennoble intellect. What then is needed? Blood.” But given good birth and eugenic breeding, the next factor in the formula of the superman is a severe school; where perfection will be exacted as a matter of course, not even meriting praise; where there will be few comfort and many responsibilities; where the body will be taught to suffer in silence, and the will many learn to obey and to command.
A man so born and bred would be beyond good and evil; he would not hesitate to be bose if his purpose should require it; he would be fearless rather than good. “What is good? To be brave is good. What is good? All that increases the feeling of power, the will to power, power itself, in man. What is bad? All that comes from weakness.” Perhaps the dominant mark of the superman will be love of danger and strife, provided they have a purpose; he will not seek safety first; he will leave happiness to the greatest number.
Energy, intellect, and pride, — these make the superman. But they must be harmonized: the passion will become powers only when they are selected and unified by some great purpose which moulds a chaos of desires into the power of a personality. Who is it that follows his impulses? The weakling: he lacks the power to inhibit; he is not strong enough to say No; he is a discord, a decadent. To discipline one’s self — that is the highest thing. “The man who does not wish to be merely one of the mass only needs to cease to be easy on himself.” To have a purpose for which one can be hard upon others, but above all upon one’s self; to have a purpose for which one will do almost anything except betray a friend — that is the final patent of nobility, the last formula of the superman.
“He that is greatest among you, let him be your servant” — this is the inversion of all political wisdom, of all sanity. Only among the lowly could such notions take root; and only in an age whose rulers had degenerated and ceased to rule.
The dream is dispelled which made the State begin with a contract. What has he to do with contracts who can command, who is master by nature, who comes on the scene with violence in deed and demeanor?
This splendid ruling stock was corrupted, first by the Catholic laudation of feminine virtues, secondly by the Puritan and plebeian ideals of the Reformation, and thirdly by inter-marriage with inferior stock.
Yet there is a natural seriousness and depth in the Germans that gives ground for the hope that they may yet redeem Europe; they have more of the masculine virtues than the French or the English; they have perseverance, patience, industry — hence their scholarship, their science, and their military discipline; it is delightful to see how all Europe is worried about the German army. If the German power of organization could cooperate with the potential resources of Russia, in materials and in men, then would come the age of great politics.
The trouble with Germany is a certain stolidity of mind which pays for this solidity of character; Germany misses the long traditions of culture which have made the French the most refined and subtle of all the peoples of Europe. “I believe only in French culture, and I regard everything else in Europe which calls itself culture as a misunderstanding.”
Russia is the blond beast of Europe. Its people have a “stubborn and resigned fatalism which gives them even nowadays the advantage over us Westerners.” Russia has a strong government, without “parliamentary imbecility.” Force of will has long been accumulating there, and now threatens to find release; it would not be surprising to find Russia becoming master of Europe.
Democracy means drift; it means permission given to each part of an organism to do just what it pleases; it means the lapse of coherence and interdependence, the enthronement of liberty and chaos. It means the worship of mediocrity, and the hatred of excellence. It means the impossibility of great men — how could great men submit to the indignities and indecencies of an election? What chance would they have?“ And how can a nation become great when its greatest men lie unused, discouraged, perhaps unknown? Such a society loses character; imitation is horizontal instead of vertical — not the superior man but the majority man becomes the ideal and the model; everybody comes to resemble everybody else; even the sexes approximate — the men become women and the women become men.
Feminism, then, is the natural corollary of democracy and Christianity. “Here is little of man; therefore women try to make themselves manly. For only he who is enough of a man will save the woman in woman.”
When a man woos a woman he offers to give all the world for her, and when she marries him he does, he must forget the world as soon as the child comes; the altruism of love becomes the egoism of the family. Honesty and innovation are luxuries of celibacy.
With feminism come socialism and anarchism; all of them are of the litter of democracy; if equal political power is just, why not equal economic power? Why should there be leaders anywhere?
War is an admirable remedy for peoples that are growing weak and comfortable and contemptible; it excites instincts that rot away in peace. War and universal military service are the necessary antidotes to democratic effeminacy. “When the instincts of a society ultimately made it give up war and conquest, it is decadent; it is ripe for democracy and the rule of shopkeepers.”
The problem of politics is to prevent the business man from ruling. For such a man has the short sight and narrow grasp of a politician, not the long view and wide range of the born aristocrat trained to statesmanship. The finer man has a divine right to rule — i.e., the right of superior ability. The simple man has his place, but it is not on the throne. In his place the simple man is happy, and his virtues are as necessary to society as those of the leader. Industriousness, thrift, regularity, moderation, strong conviction — with such virtues the mediocre man becomes perfect, but perfect only as an instrument. “A high civilization is a pyramid; it can stand only upon a broad base; its prerequisite is a strongly and soundly consolidated mediocrity.” Always and everywhere, some will be leaders and some followers; the majority will be compelled, and will be happy, to work under the intellectual direction of higher men.
But this is the third I heard: to command is more difficult than to obey. And not only that the commander beareth the burden of all who obey, and that this burden easily crusheth him: — an effort and a jeopardy appeared unto me to be contained in all commanding; and whenever living things command they risk themselves.
The ideal society, then, would be divided into 3 classes: producers (farmers, proletaires and business men), officials (soldiers and functionaries), and rulers. The latter would rule, but they would not officiate in government; the actual work of government is a menial task. The rulers will be philosopher-statesmen rather than office-holders. Their power will rest on control of credit and the army, but they themselves will live more like soldiers than like financiers. They will be Plato’s guardians again; Plato was right — philosophers are the highest men. They will be men of refinement as well as of courage and strength; scholars and generals in one.
But nothing can so contaminate and weaken an aristocracy as marrying rich vulgarians, after the habit of the English aristocracy; it was such intermarriage that ruined the greatest governing body the world has ever seen — the aristocratic Roman senate. There is no “accident of birth”; every birth is the verdict of nature upon a marriage; and the perfect man comes only after generations of selection and preparation; “a man’s ancestors have paid the price of what he is.”
Does this offend too much our long democratic ears? But “those races that cannot bear this philosophy are doomed; and those that regard it as the greatest blessing are destined to be the maters of the world.”
There is a time when we tire of sentimentality and delusion, and relish the string of doubt and denial; and the Nietzsche comes to us as a tonic, like open spaces and fresh winds after a long ceremony in a crowded church. “He who knows how to breathe in the air of my writings is conscious that it is the air of the heights, that it is bracing. A man must be built for it; otherwise the chances are that it will kill him.” Let none mistake this acid for infant’s milk.
But on rereading him we perceive that something of this brilliance is due to exaggeration, to an interesting but at least neurotic egotism, to an over-facile inversion of every accepted notion, the ridicule of every virtue, the praise of every vice; he takes, we discover, a sophomore’s delight in shocking; we conclude that it is easy to be interesting when one has no prejudices in favor of morality. These dogmatic assertions, these unmodified generalizations, these prophetic repetitions, these contradictions — of others not more than of himself — reveal a mind that has lost its balance, and hovers on the edge of madness. At last this brilliance tires us out and exhausts our nerves, like whips upon the flesh, or loud emphasis in conversation. There is a sort of Teutonic bluster in this violence of speech; none of that restraint which is the first principle of art; none of that balance, harmony, and controversial urbanity, which Nietzsche so admired in the French.
The attack on Socrates was the disdain of a Wagnerian for logical thought; the admiration for Dionysus was a sedentary man’s idolatry of action, and a bashful bachelor’s secret envy of masculine bibulousness and sexuality.
With all his philology, Nietzsche never quite penetrated to the spirit of the Greeks; never learned the lesson that moderation and self-knowledge must bank, without extinguishing, the fires of passion and desire; that Apollo must limit Dionysus. Soem have described Nietzsche as a pagan; but he was not that: neither Greek pagan like Pericles nor German pagan like Goethe; he lacked the balance and restraint that made these men strong. “I shall give back to men the serenity which is the condition of all culture,” he writes, but alas, how can one give what one has not?
But who, reading this philosophy, will classify himself as servant, and not as superman?
We acknowledge the need of asking men to be braver, and harder on themselves — almost all ethical philosophies have asked that; but there is no urgent necessity for asking people to be crueler and “more evil” — surely this is a work of supererogation? And there is no great call to complain that morality is a weapon used by the weak to limit the strong; the strong are not too deeply impressed by it, and make rather clever use of it in turn: most moral codes are imposed from above rather than from below; and the crowd praises and blames by prestige imitation.
This supposedly universal “will to power” hardly expresses the quiescence of the Hindu, the calm of the Chinese, or the satisfied routine of the medieval peasant. Power is the idol of some of us; but most of us long rather for security and peace.
In general, as every reader will have perceived, Nietzsche fails to recognize the place and value of the social instincts; he thinks the egoistic and individualistic impulses need reinforcement by philosophy!
Made solitary by illness and nervousness, and forced into war against the sluggishness and mediocrity of men, Nietzsche was led to suppose that all the great virtues are the virtues of men who stand alone. He reacted from Schopenhauer’s submergence of the individual int he species to an unbalanced liberation of the individual from social control. Foiled in his search for love, he turned upon woman with a bitterness unworthy of a philosopher, and unnatural in a man; missing parentage and losing friendship, he never knew that the finest moments of life come through mutuality and comradeship, rather than from domination and war. He did not live long enough, or widely enough, to mature his half-truth into wisdom. Perhaps if he had lived longer he would have turned his strident chaos into a harmonious philosophy. Truer of him than of the Jesus to whom he applied them, were his own words: “He died too early; he himself would have revoked his doctrine had he reached a riper age; noble enough to revoke he was!” But death had other plan.
Perhaps in politics his vision is sounder than in morals. Aristocracy is the ideal government: who shall deny it? But who are the best? Do the best appear only in certain families, and must we therefore have hereditary aristocracy? But we had it; and it led to clique-pursuits, class-irresponsibility, and stagnation. Perhaps aristocracies have been saved, as often as destroyed, by intermarriage with the middle classes; how else has the English aristocracy maintained itself?
Hereditary aristocracies do not like world-unification; they tend to a narrowly nationalistic policy, however cosmopolitan they may be in conduct; if they abandoned nationalism they would lose a main source of their power — the manipulation of foreign relations. And perhaps a world-state would not be so beneficial to culture as Nietzsche thinks; large masses move slowly; and Germany probably did more for culture when she was merely “a geographical expression,” with independent courts rivaling one another in the patronage of art, than in her days of unity and empire and expansion; it was not an emperor who cherished Goethe and rescued Wagner.
It is a common delusion that the great periods of culture have been ages hereditary aristocracy: on the contrary, the efflorescent periods of Pericles and the Medici and Elizabeth and the Romantic age were nourished with the wealth of a rising bourgeoisie; and the creative work in literature and art was done not by aristocratic families but by the offspring of the middle class; — by such men as Socrates, who was the son of a midwife, and Voltaire, who was the son of an attorney, and Shakespeare, who was the son of a butcher. It is ages of movement and change that stimulate cultural creation; ages in which a new and vigorous class is rising to power and pride. And so in politics: it would be suicidal to exclude from statesmanship such genius as lacked aristocratic pedigree; the better formula, surely, is a “career open to talent” wherever born; and genius has a way of getting born in the most outlandish places. Let us be ruled by all the best. An aristocracy is good only if it is a fluent body of men whose patent to power lies not in birth but in ability, — an aristocracy continually selected and nourished out of a democracy of open and equal opportunity to all.
He spoke with bitterness, but with invaluable sincerity; and his thought went through the clouds and cobwebs of the modern mind like cleansing lightning and a rushing wind. The air of European philosophy is clearer and fresher now because Nietzsche wrote.
Towards the end Nietzsche’s work grew in bitterness; he attacked persons as well as ideas, — Wagner, Christ, etc. “Growth in wisdom,” he wrote, “may be exactly measured by decrease in bitterness”; but he could not convince his pen.
They took him at first to an asylum, but soon his old mother came to claim him and take him under her own forgiving care. What a picture! — the pious woman who had borne sensitively but patiently the shock of her son’s apostasy from all that he held dear, and who, loving him none the less, received him now in her arms, liken another Pieta.
Despite Descartes’ insistence that philosophy should begin with the self and travel outward, the industrialization of Western Europe drove thought away from thought and in the direction of material things.
It is a remarkable thing that Bergson, the David destined to slay the Goliath of materialism, was in youth a devotee of Spencer. But too much knowledge leads to scepticism; early devotees are the likeliest apostates, as early sinners are senile saints.
But life was not content with this stay-at-home existence of the plant; always its advances have been away from security toward freedom; away from carapaces, scales and hides, and other burdensome protections, to the ease and perilous liberty of the bird. “So the heavy hoplite was supplanted by the legionary; the knight, clad in armor, had to give place to the light free-moving infantryman; and in a general way, in the evolution of life, just as in the evolution of human societies and of individual destinies, the greatest successes have been for those who accepted the heaviest risks.” So, too, man has ceased to evolve new organs on his body; he makes tools and weapons instead, and lays them aside when they are not needed, rather than carry all his armament at every step, like those gigantic fortresses, the mastodon and the megatherium, whose heavy security lost them the mastery of the globe. Life may be impeded, as well as aided, by its instruments.
Instinct comes ready-made, and gives decisive — and usually successful — responses to stereotyped and ancestral situations; but it does not adapt the organism to change, it does not enable man to meet flexibly the fluid complexities of modern life. It is the vehicle of security, while intellect is the organ of an adventurous liberty. It is life taking on the blind obedience of the machine.
Man exists by instinct, but he progresses by intelligence.
Materialism is like a grammar that recognizes only nouns; but reality, like language, contains action as well as objects, verbs as well as substantives, life and motion as well as matter.
Italy might be described as the land that had a Renaissance, but never a Reformation; it will destroy itself for beauty’s sake, but it is as sceptical as Pilate when it thinks of truth. Perhaps the Italians are wiser than the rest of us, and have found that truth is a mirage, while beauty — however subjective — is a possession and a reality. The artists of the Renaissance never worried their heads about morals or theology; it was enough for them that the Church recognized their genius, and paid their bills. It became an unwritten law in Italy that men of culture would make no trouble for the Church.
Croce wants every idea to be as pure as possible — which seems to mean as ideological as possible, as abstract and unpragmatic as possible; there is nothing here of that passion for clarity and practical content which made William James a beacon-light amid the mists of philosophy. Croce does not care to define an idea by reducing it to its practical consequences; he prefers to reduce practical affairs to ideas, relations, and categories.
Rousseau’s definition of history is “the art of choosing, from among many lies, that one which most resembles the truth.”
Does this help us to answer that baffling question, What is beauty? Here certainly there are as many opinions as there are heads; and every lover, in this matter, thinks himself an authority not to be gain-said. Croce answers that beauty is the mental formation of an image that catches the essence of the thing perceived. The beauty belongs, again, rather to the inward image than to the outward from in which it is embodied.
Beauty is adequate expression: and since there is no real expression if it be not adequate, we may answer very simply the ancient question, and say, Beauty is expression.
It would be interesting, and no doubt disconcerting, to know what artists think of these philosophers who tell them what beauty is. The greatest living artist has abandoned the hope of answering the question. “I believe that we shall never know exactly why a thing is beautiful.” But the same mellow wisdom offers us a lesson which we learn, usually, too late. “No one has ever been able to show me precisely the right way. As for me, I follow my feeling for the beautiful. What man is certain of having found a better guide? If I had to choose between beauty and truth, I should not hesitate; it is beauty I should keep. There is nothing true in the world except beauty.”
His passion for clarity drove him inevitably to mathematics; he was almost thrilled at the calm precision of this aristocratic science. “Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth but supreme beauty — a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture, without appeal to any part of our weaker nature, without the gorgeous trappings of painting or music, yet sublimely pure, and capable of a stern perfection such as the only greatest art can show.”
We think of education as the transmission of a certain body of settled knowledge, when it should be rather the development of a scientific habit of mind. The distinctive feature of the unintelligent man his the hastiness and absoluteness of his opinions; the scientist is slow to believe, and never speaks without modification.
Here, after all, is a remarkable phenomenon — that men everywhere have had religions; how can we understand man if we do not understand religion? “Such studies would bring the sceptic face to face with the mystery and pathos of mortal existence. They would make him understand why religion is so profoundly moving and in a sense so profoundly just.”
The Germans — the “northern barbarians” — had never really accepted Roman Christianity. A non-Christian ethics of valor and honor, a non-Christian fund of superstition, legend and sentiment, subsisted always among medieval peoples.” The Gothic cathedrals were barbaric, not Roman. The warlike temper of the Teuton raised its head above the peacefulness of the Oriental, and changed Christianity from a religion of brotherly love to a stern inculcation of business virtues, from a religion of poverty to a religion of prosperity and power.
Love has its recompenses; and in his greatest sacrifice man finds his happiest fulfilment. Laplace is reported to have said on his deathbed that science was mere trifling, and that nothing was real but love. After all, romantic love, despite its poetical delusions, ends normally in a relationship — of parent and child — far more satisfying to the instincts than any celibate security.
The state may be a monster, as Nietzsche called it; a monster of unnecessary size; but its centralized tyranny has the virtue of abolishing the miscellaneous and innumerable petty tyrannies by which life was of old pestered and confined. One master pirate, accepting tribute quietly, is better than a hundred pirates, taking toll without warning and without stint.
Hence, in part, the patriotism of the people; they know that the price they pay for government is cheaper than the cost of chaos.
There is no tyranny so hateful as a vulgar, anonymous tyranny. It is all-permeating, all-thwarting; it blasts every budding novelty and sprig of genius with its omnipresent and fierce stupidity.
Revolutions are ambiguous things. Their success is generally proportionate to their power of adaptation and to the reabsorption within them of what they rebelled against. A thousand reforms have left the world as corrupt as ever, for each successful reform has found a new institution, and this institution has bred its new and congenial abuses.
What form of society, then, shall we strive for? Perhaps for none; there is not much difference among them. But if for any one in particular, for “timocracy.” This would be government by men of merit and honor; it would be an aristocracy, but not hereditary; every man and woman would have an open road according to ability, to the highest offices in the state; but the road should be closed to incompetence, no matter how richly furnished it might be with plebiscites.
There is in all these pages something of a melancholy of a man separated from all that he loves and was accustomed to, a man deracine, a Spanish aristocrat exiled to middle-class America. A secret sadness sometimes breaks forth: “That life is worth living, is the most necessary of assumptions, and, were it not assumed, the most impossible of conclusions.”
There is tragedy in perfection, because the universe in which perfection arises is itself imperfect.
But perhaps this constant memento mori is a knell to joy; to live, one must remember life more than death; one must embrace the immediate and actual thing as well as the distant and perfect hope. “The goal of speculative thinking is none other than to live as much as may be in the eternal, and to absorb and be absorbed in the truth.”
Wisdom comes by disillusionment, but again that is only the beginning of wisdom, as doubt is the beginning of philosophy; it is not also the end and fulfilment. The end is happiness, and philosophy is only a means; if we take it as an end we become like the Hindu mystic whose life-purpose is to concentrate upon his navel.
But perhaps the butterflies, if they could speak, would remind us that a museum is only a showcase of lifeless things; that the reality of the world eludes these tragic preservations, and resides again in the pangs of passion, in the ever-changing and never-ending flow of life.
Brought in the school of French clarity, he abominated the obscurities and pedantic terminology of German metaphysics. He was convinced that both the terms and the problems of German metaphysics were unreal; and he cast about him for some test of meaning which would show, to every candid mind, the emptiness of these abstractions.
Instead of asking whence an idea is derived, or what are its premises, pragmatism examines its results; it “shifts the emphasis and looks forward”; it is “the attitude of looking away from first things, ‘categories,’ supposed necessities, and of looking towards last things, fruits, consequences, facts.”
This is magnificent; what deity would not be proud of such a definition? But what does it mean? — what are its consequences for mankind? If God is omniscient and omnipotent, we are puppets; there is nothing that we can do to change the course of destiny which His will has from the beginning delineated and decreed; Calvinism and fatalism are the logical corollaries of such a definition. The same test applied to mechanistic determinism issues in the same results: if we really believed in determinism we would become Hindu mystics and abandon ourselves at once to the immense fatality which uses us as marionettes. Of course we do not accept these sombre philosophies; the human intellect repeatedly proposes them because of their logical simplicity and symmetry, but life ignores and overflows them, and passes on.
The history of philosophy is to a great extent that of a certain clash of human temperaments. Of whatever temperament a professional philosopher is, he tries, when philosophizing, to sink the fact of his temperament. Temperament is no conventionally recognized reason, so he urges impersonal reasons only for his conclusions. Yet his temperament really gives him a stronger bias than any of his more strictly objective premises.
These temperaments which select and dictate philosophies may be divided into the tender-minded and the tough-minded. The tender-minded temperament is religious, it likes to have definite and unchanging dogmas and a priori truths; it takes naturally to free will, idealism, monism and optimism. The tough-minded temperament is materialistic, irreligious, empiricist (going only on “facts”), sensationalistic (tracing all knowledge to sensation), fatalistic, pluralistic, pessimistic, sceptical. In each group there are gaping contradictions; and no doubt there are temperaments that select their theories partly from one group and partly from the other.
The cosmos is not a close and harmonious system; it is a battle-ground of cross-currents and conflicting purposes; it shows itself, with pathetic obviousness, as not a uni- but a multi-verse. It is useless to say that this chaos in which we live and move is the result of one consistent will; it gives every sign of contradiction and division within itself. Perhaps the ancients were wiser than we, and polytheism may be truer than monotheism to the astonishing diversity of the world. Such polytheism “has always been the real religion of common people, and is so still today.” The people are right, and the philosophers are wrong. Monism is the natural disease of philosophers, who hunger and thirst not (as they think) for truth, but for unity.
Pragmatism has its roots in Kant’s “practical reason”; in Schopenhauer’s exaltation of the will; in Darwin’s notion that the fittest is what which survives; in utilitarianism, which measured all goods in terms of use; in the empirical and inductive traditions of English philosophy; and finally in the suggestions of the American scene.
He has not great regard for a “liberal” education; the term was used, originally, to denote the culture of a “free man,” — i.e., a man who never worked; and it was natural that such an education should be fitted rather to a leisure class in an aristocracy than to an industrial and democratic life. Now that we are nearly all of us caught up in the industrialization of Europe and America, the lessons we must learn are those that come through occupation rather than through books. Scholastic culture makes for snobbishness, but fellowship in occupations makes for democracy. And finally, education must be re-conceived, not as merely a preparation for maturity but as a continuous growth of the mind and a continuous illumination of life. In a sense, the schools can give us only the instrumentalities of mental growth; the rest depends upon our absorption and interpretation of experience. Real education comes after we leave school; and there is no reason why it should stop before our death.
Like a good positivist, scion of the stock of Bacon and Hobbes and Spencer and Mill, Dewey rejects metaphysics as the echo and disguise of theology. The trouble with philosophy has always been that its problems were confused with those of religion. “As I read Plato, philosophy began with some sense of its essentially political basis and mission — a recognition that is problems were those of the organization of a just social order. But it soon got lost in dreams of another world.”
Complete adaptation to environment means death. The essential point in all response is the desire to control the environment. The problem of philosophy is not how we can come to know an external world, but how we can learn to control it and remake it, and for what goals. Philosophy is not the analysis of sensation and knowledge (for that is psychology), but the synthesis and coordination of knowledge and desire.
What Dewey sees and reverences as the finest of all things, is growth; so much so, that he makes this relative but specific notion, and no absolute “good,” his ethical criterion.
Not perfection as a final goal, but the ever-enduring process of perfecting, maturing, refining, is the aim of living. The bad man is the man who, no matter how good he has been, is beginning to deteriorate, to grow less good. The good man ins the man who, no matter how morally unworthy he has been, is moving to become better. Such a conception makes one severe in judging himself and humane in judging others.
And to be good does not merely mean to be obedient and harmless; goodness without ability is lame; and all the virtue in the world will not save us if we lack intelligence. Ignorance is not bliss, it is unconsciousness and slavery; only intelligence can make us sharers in the shaping of our fates.
Let us remember that England needed 800 years between her foundation and her Shakespeare; and that France needed 800 years between her foundation and her Montaigne. We have drawn to us from Europe, and selected fro survival and imitation among ourselves, rather than the initiative individualist and the acquisitive pioneer than the meditative and artistic souls; we have had to spend our energies in clearing our great forests and tapping the wealth of our soil; we have had no time yet to bring forth a native literature and a mature philosophy.
But we have become wealthy, and wealth is the prelude to art. In every country where centuries of physical effort have accumulated the means for luxury and leisure, culture has followed as naturally as vegetation grows in a rich and watered soil. To have become wealthy was the first necessity; a people too must live before it can philosophize.