CONTENTS
| [BOOK I] | ||
| AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION | ||
| CHAPTER | PAGE | |
| I. | Prelude | [3] |
| II. | The Hebrew Religion | [14] |
| III. | Emerson | [27] |
| IV. | The Teachings of Jesus | [30] |
| V. | Social Reform | [43] |
| VI. | The Influence of My Vocation on Inner Development | [58] |
| [BOOK II] | ||
| PHILOSOPHICAL THEORY | ||
| I. | Introductory Remarks: Critique of Kant | [73] |
| II. | Critique of Kant (Continued) | [82] |
| III. | Preliminary Remarks on Worth, and on the ReasonsWhy the Method Employed by EthicsMust Be the Opposite of That Employed bythe Physical Sciences | [91] |
| IV. | The Ideal of the Whole | [100] |
| V. | The Ideal of the Whole and the Ethical Manifold | [114] |
| VI. | The Ideal of the Spiritual Universe and the God-Ideal | [125] |
| [BOOK III] | ||
| APPLICATIONS: THE THREE SHADOWS, SICKNESS,SORROW AND SIN, AND THE RIGHT TO LIFE,PROPERTY AND REPUTATION | ||
| I. | Introduction | [147] |
| II. | The Three Shadows: Sickness, Sorrow, Sin | [154] |
| III. | Bereavement | [162] |
| IV. | The Shadow of Sin | [171] |
| V. | The Spiritual Attitude to be Observed towardsFellow-Men in General, Irrespective of theSpecial Relations Which Connect Us MoreClosely with Some than Others | [179] |
| VI. | The Meaning of Forgiveness | [202] |
| VII. | The Supreme Ethical Rule: Act so as to Elicitthe Best in Others and Thereby in Thyself | [208] |
| VIII. | The Supreme Ethical Rule (Continued) | [220] |
| IX. | How to Learn to See the Spiritual Numen inOthers | [223] |
| [BOOK IV] | ||
| APPLICATIONS: THE ETHICS OF THE FAMILY, THESTATE, THE INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS, ETC. | ||
| I. | The Collective Task of Mankind and the Three-foldReverence | [241] |
| II. | The Family | [249] |
| III. | The Vocations | [260] |
| IV. | The Practical Vocations | [270] |
| V. | The Vocation of the Artist: Outline of a Theoryof the Relation of Art to Ethics | [277] |
| VI. | Educational Vocations, or Vocations Connectedwith the State | [289] |
| VII. | The State | [305] |
| VIII. | The National Character Spiritually Transformed:the International Society, or theOrganization of Mankind | [324] |
| IX. | Religious Fellowship as the Culminating SocialInstitution | [341] |
| X. | The Last Outlook on Life | [354] |
| APPENDIX | ||
| Appendix I: Spiritual Self-Discipline | [365] | |
| Appendix II: The Exercise of Force in the Interest ofFreedom | [369] | |
| INDEX | [375] | |
BOOK I
AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER I
PRELUDE
What this book offers is a system of thought and of points of view as to conduct, as these have jointly grown out of personal experience. It will be useful to introduce them with an autobiographical statement. The ideas which follow are such as have been found by me, the author, to be fruitful. Certainly I claim for them objectivity; but I do so because of what I have found them to mean in my own life. He who has been scorched by lightning knows that the effects of the lightning will be felt by all who are exposed to the same experience. I narrate my experience; let others compare with it theirs.
There is, however, a serious, and most embarrassing difficulty in the way of discussing the phases and vicissitudes of one’s ethical development. Self-appraisement is necessarily involved in the narration. The outstanding subject of ethics is the self and its relations. The physicist, the chemist, the biologist, however the methods they use may differ in other respects, agree in the endeavor to eliminate the personal equation. The psychologist likewise does his best to see the procession that moves across the inner stage like an interested but detached spectator. In the case of ethics, however, the personal factor cannot be eliminated, because the personal factor is just the Alpha and the Omega of the whole matter; and if this be left out of account, the very object to be studied disappears.
Ethical standards are exacting, separated often from performance by the widest interval. To set up a standard, therefore, is to reflect upon oneself, to expose oneself to the backstroke of one’s own deliverances, to be plunged perhaps into deep pits of self-humiliation. How shall anyone have the courage to face so searching a test, or the hardihood to discuss with a lofty air, and to recommend to others ideals of conduct against which he knows that he daily offends? How can anyone teach ethics or write about it? The words of the Sermon on the Mount, “Judge not that ye be not judged,” seem to apply very closely. Do not judge others, do not lay down the law for others, because in so doing you will be judged in the inner forum, becoming a repulsive object in your own eyes, or standing forth a whited sepulcher. In brief, to touch the subject of ethics is to handle a knife that cuts both ways, to cast a weapon which returns upon him who sends it.
The difficulty then which confronts the ethical writer is that the attitude of detachment possible in other branches of investigation is found to be impossible when one attempts to sound the profundities of that kind of inner experience which is called ethical. The self obtrudes itself at every point, and it instinctively refuses to be humbled. What may be denominated the struggle for self-esteem has indeed played a leading rôle both in the outer and inner history of mankind. This struggle, whose immense importance is often overlooked, accounts for even more interesting facts than the biological struggle for existence. The desire to exercise power over others, often ruthless in the means adopted, is frequently nothing more than a miserable attempt to save self-esteem by covering up the inner sense of the weakness of the self. But the same struggle penetrates also into the realm of theoretical ethics with which we are concerned. Here it tampers with the standards which mortify self-esteem, by inventing such ethical theories as seem to make the problems of personality easy of solution, and by blinking the tragic facts of guilt, remorse, etc. Various ethical systems that are in vogue at the present time are, at least in part, exemplars of this process—the theory for instance that ethics is nothing more than a calculus of self-interest, or a matter of sympathetic feeling, or a balancing of the more refined against the grosser pleasures. The instinct of self-preservation, in the shape of the preservation of self-esteem, is quite incorrigible, and against its insidious suggestion we have reason to be particularly on our guard in the discussion which we are entering.
Are we then to refrain, out of sheer regard for decency, from touching on this subject at all? Is everyone who writes on ethics, or attempts to teach it, either a pedant or a hypocrite? But we cannot avoid discussing it, nor resist the impulse to teach and write about it, for it is the subject on which more than any other we and others sorely need help and enlightenment. And we shall get help in the endeavor to afford it to others. This, then, is my position: I do not presume to lay down the law for anyone. I find that I can set forth the better standards which in the course of trial and error I have come to recognize. I would not shamelessly expose mere private failures and failings after the manner of Rousseau in the “Confessions”; for there is a tract of the inner life which ought to be kept from publicity and prying intrusion. I shall then deal with deflections only in so far as they can be traced to false standards or principles, and as they tend to illustrate the flaw in those standards and principles.
What I state as certain is certain for me. It has approved itself as such in my experience. Let others consult their experience, and see how far it tallies with that which is here set forth. A distinction, however, I wish to call attention to between the theory as expounded in the second part of this volume, and the practical applications to be found in the third and fourth parts. Persons who are not trained in metaphysical thinking or interested in it, may do well to omit the reading of the second part. To those who are competent in philosophical thinking, and who disagree with the positions there taken, I may perhaps be permitted to suggest that one can dissent from a philosophy and yet find help in the applications to which it leads. And, after all, it is the practice that counts.
With these preliminaries, I now proceed to delineate briefly the stages of inner development which have led me slowly and with much labor to the system of thought described in the following pages.
One of the leading principles to which I early gave assent, and to which I have ever since adhered as a correct fundamental insight, is expressed in the statement that every human being is an end per se, worth while on his own account.[2]
Every human personality is to be safe against infringement and is, in this sense, sacred. There is a certain precinct which may not be invaded. The experience which served me especially as the matrix of this idea was the adolescent experience of sex-life,—the necessity felt of inhibiting, out of reverence for the personality of women, the powerful instincts then awakened.[3]
The fact that I had lived abroad for three years in frequent contact with young men, especially students, who derided my scruples, and in the impure atmosphere of three capital cities of Europe, Berlin, Paris and Vienna, where the “primrose path” is easy, tended to make the retention of my point of view more difficult, and at the same time to give it greater fixity, also to drive me into a kind of inward solitude. I felt myself in opposition to my surroundings, and acquired a confidence, perhaps exaggerated, to persevere along my own lines against prevailing tendencies.
I ought next to mention the decay of theism which took place in my mind in consequence of philosophic reading. Already at an early age I had stumbled over the doctrine of Creation. I remember asking my Sunday School teacher—How is creation possible? How can something originate out of nothing? The answer I received was evasive, and left me uneasy and unsatisfied. On another occasion I ventured to suggest to the same authority—a revered and beloved authority—that the conception of God seemed to me too much like that of a man, too much fashioned on the human model; and he amazed me beyond words by replying that he himself sympathized more or less with the ideas of Spinoza. This chance remark set me thinking, and seemed to open wide spaces in which my mind felt free to travel—though I never tended in the direction of Spinoza.[4]
My thoughts were driven still further by reaction against the narrow theology of the lectures on Christian Evidences as taught at that time in Columbia College, where I was a student. And all these influences came to a head in the atmosphere of the German university at Berlin. There I heard Zeller, Duhring, Steinthal, Bonitz. Above all I came into contact with Herman Cohen, subsequently and for many years professor of philosophy at the University of Marburg, and undertook to grapple in grim earnest with the philosophy of Immanuel Kant. The net outcome was not atheism in the moral sense,—I have never been what is called an atheist,—but the definite and permanent disappearance of the individualistic conception of Deity. I was attracted by the rigor, the sublimity, of Kant’s system, and especially by his transcendental derivation of the moral law. The individualistic basis of his ethics, which is quite uncongenial to me, I ignored, and for a time simply accounted myself a follower of Kant. Very often since then I have discovered that men, unbeknown to themselves, are apt to sail under false flags, ranking themselves Kantians, Socialists, or what not, because the system to which they give their adherence attracts them at some one outstanding point, the point namely, where it sharply conflicts with views which they themselves strongly reprobate; and they are thus led to overlook other features no less important in which the system is really uncongenial to them. Thus a person who recognizes the evils of the present wage system may label himself a Socialist, simply because Socialism is most in evidence as an adversary of the wage system, while he may by no means agree with the positive principles that underlie Socialism, when he comes to examine them dispassionately.
I thought at that time of the Moral Law as that which answers to or should replace the individualistic God-idea. I believed in an unknown principle or power in things of which the Moral Law is the manifestation, and I found the evidence of the moral law in man’s consciousness. Matthew Arnold’s “the power that makes for righteousness” is a phrase which at that time would have suited me,—though perhaps not entirely even at that time. I have since come to see that “making for righteousness” is a conception inapplicable to the ultimate reality, and is properly applied only to human effort; since purpose implies that the end sought has not as yet been realized, and non-realization and ultimate reality are contradictory ideas. The power that only makes for righteousness cannot be the ultimate truth in things. The utmost we can say is that the ultimate reality expresses itself in the human world as the power that inspires in men moral purpose.
To return to my personal experiences, there fell into my hands, while still a student abroad, a book by Friedrich Albert Lange entitled Die Arbeiterfrage (The Labor Question), which proved epoch-making in my life. Bacon says in his essay Of Studies: “Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.” He might have added that there are books that make a man over, changing the current of his existence, or at least opening channels which previously had been blocked.[5]
Die Arbeiterfrage is not a great book. In the literature of the subject it has long since been superseded. Yet it opened for me a wide and tragic prospect, an outlook of which I had been until then in great measure oblivious, an outlook on all the moral as well as economic issues involved in what is called the Labor Question. My teacher in philosophy, Cohen, once said to me sharply, that if there is to be anything like religion in the world hereafter, Socialism must be the expression of it. I did not agree with his statement that Socialism spells religion, and have not seen my way to this day toward identifying the two. But I realized that there was a measure of truth in what he said,—and that I must square myself with the issues that Socialism raises. Lange helped me to do this.
He aided me in other respects as well. His History of Materialism dispelled some of the fictitious glamor that still hung about the materialistic hypothesis at that time,—though the last chapter on the ultimate philosophy of life, in which he identifies religion with poetry, is distinctly weak. I read his book on the Labor Question with burning cheeks; no work of fiction ever excited me as did this little treatise. It was ethical in spirit, if not in its ruling ideas. It favored productive co-operation, and seemed to point a way to immediate action, as Socialism did not.
The upshot of it was that I now possessed a second object, namely, the laborer, to whom I could apply my non-violation ethics. I had always felt an instinctive, idealizing reverence for women, and this had its influence in the first practical outcome of the philosophy of life with which I started on my career. I would go out as the minister of a new religious evangel. Instead of preaching the individual God, I was to stir men up to enact the Moral Law; and to enact the Moral Law meant at that time primarily to influence the young men with whom I came into contact to reverence womanhood, and to keep inviolate the sacred thing, woman’s honor. And now I had a second arrow in my quiver. I was to go out to help to arouse the conscience of the wealthy, the advantaged, the educated classes, to a sense of their guilt in violating the human personality of the laborer. My mother had often sent me as a child on errands of charity, and had always impressed upon me the duty of respecting the dignity of the poor while ministering sympathetically to their needs. I was prepared by this youthful training to resent the indignity offered to the personality of the laborer, as well as the suffering endured by him in consequence of existing conditions.
Accordingly, on returning from abroad, my first action consisted in founding among men of my own or nearly my own age a little society which we ambitiously called a Union for the Higher Life, based on three tacit assumptions: sex purity, the principle of devoting the surplus of one’s income beyond that required for one’s own genuine needs to the elevation of the working class, and thirdly, continued intellectual development. A second practical enterprise attempted was the establishment of a co-operative printing shop. This having failed because of the selfishness actuating the members, the Workingman’s School was founded, with the avowed object of creating a truly co-operative spirit among workingmen.
I must, however, pause at this point to explain how the development described led me to separation from the Hebrew religion, the religion in which I was born, and to the service of which as a Jewish minister it was expected that I should devote my life.
CHAPTER II
THE HEBREW RELIGION
The separation was not violent. There was no sudden wrenching off. There were none of those painful struggles which many others have had to undergo when breaking away from the faith of their fathers. It was all a gradual, smooth transition, the unfolding of a seed that had long been planted. I have never felt the bitterness often characteristic of the radical, nor his vengeful impulse to retaliate upon those who had imposed the yoke of dogmas upon his soul. I had never worn the yoke. I had never been in bondage. I had been gently guided. And consequently the wine did not turn into vinegar, the love into hate. The truth is, I was hardly aware of the change that had taken place until it was fairly consummated. One day I awoke, and found that I had traveled into a new country. The landscape was different; the faces I encountered were different; and looking casually into a mental mirror, as it were, I perceived that I too had become different. And I was sure also that I had gained, not lost, that into my new spiritual home I had taken with me, not indeed the images of my gods, like Æneas, fleeing from Troy, but something for which those images had stood, and which in other ways would remain for me a permanent possession.
It has been said that the science of today lives only in so far as it supersedes the science of yesterday. Whatever may be true of science (and the statement is certainly not true without large qualifications—the science of Newton and Darwin has not been “superseded”—and it may even come to pass that outreachings of a more ancient science frustrated at the time will hereafter be taken up anew with fairer results than formerly were attainable), in religion at all events there is no such thing as the bare substitution of the new for the old. The religions of the past, at least the more advanced religions, are not simply to be cast on the scrap heap, or treated as exploded superstitions. There is in all of them a certain fund of truth which may not be allowed to perish, but should be rescued out of the wreck.
On the other hand, even the most advanced religions contain a large admixture of error, survivals of primitive taboos, mythological elements having their root in polytheism, while the very truths which I have just admitted to be infinitely precious require to be restated so as to fit them into a larger synthesis.
It is not easy to define my attitude toward the Old Masters, I mean the Old Masters in religion, the incomparably great religious teachers of the past, who tower above us like giants. My attitude is one of profoundest reverence—toward the Hebrew prophets and Jesus especially. The Hebrew religion first sounded the distinctively spiritual note. Zoroaster had emphasized the struggle of the powers of Light and the powers of Darkness, but the conception of light in his system remained to a considerable extent materialistic. Buddha emphasized Enlightenment in the sense of escape from Illusion, and in conjunction with it sympathy for all who remain under the spell of illusion. Confucius endeavored to walk, and taught his followers to walk, with equipoise in the Middle Path; he emphasized what he thought to be the cosmic principle of balance or equilibrium. Plato, taking his stand on the highest terrestrial platform, caught, or believed himself to have caught, sight of transcendental beauty as the ultimate principle in things. But the prophets of Israel assigned to the ethical principle the highest rank in man’s life and in the world at large. The best thing in man, they declared, is his moral personality; and the best thing in the world, the supreme and controlling principle, is the moral power that pervades it.
The predominance of the ethical principle in religion dates from the prophets of Israel. The religious development of the human race took a new turn in their sublime predications, and I for one am certainly conscious of having drawn my first draught of moral inspiration from their writings.[6]
But nevertheless I found myself compelled to separate from the religion of Israel. Now why was it necessary for me to take this step? Why not continue along the path first blazed by the Hebrew prophets—smoothing it perhaps and widening it? Why not separate the dross from the gold, the error from the truth, explicating what is implicit in that truth, and adapting it to the needs and conditions of the modern age? The answer is that the truth contained in the Hebrew, and as I shall presently show, in the Christian religion, is not capable of such adaptation. It claims finality. I have mentioned that there is an element of permanent value in both the Hebrew and the Christian religion, and that it should be restated and fitted into a larger synthesis. But this is impossible unless the Hebrew or Christian setting be broken, unless the element to be preserved is taken out of its context, and treated freshly and with perfect freedom. A religion like the two I am concerned with is a determinate thing. It is a closed circle of thoughts and beliefs. It is capable of a certain degree of change but not of indefinite change. The limits of change are determined by its leading conceptions—the monotheistic idea in the one case, and the centrality of the figure of Christ in the other. Abandon these, and the boundaries by which the religion is circumscribed are passed.
The great religious teachers are men who see the spiritual landscape from a certain point of view, including whatever is visible from their station, excluding whatever is not. The religion which they originate is thus both inclusive and sharply exclusive. What they see with their rapt eyes they describe with a trenchancy and fitness never thereafter to be equaled.[7] But in order to progress in religion it is necessary to advance toward a different station, to reach a different, a higher eminence, and from that to look forth anew upon the spiritual landscape, comprehending the outlook of one’s predecessors in a new perspective, seeing what they saw and much besides.
Religious growth may also be compared to the growth of a tree. To expect that development shall continue along the Hebrew or Christian lines is like expecting that a tree will continue to develop along one of its branches. There is a limit beyond which the extension of a branch cannot go. Then growth must show itself in the putting forth of a new branch.
But let me now state with somewhat greater particularity the reasons that compelled me to depart from the faith of Israel, and to leave my early religious home, cherishing pious memories of it, but nevertheless firmly set in my course towards new horizons.[8]
1. The difficulty created by the claim that Israel is an elect people, that it stands in a peculiar relation to the Deity. This claim, at the time when it was put forth, was neither arrogant nor unfounded. It was not arrogant because the mission was understood to be a heavy burden not a privilege: or if a privilege at all, then the tragic privilege of martyrdom, a martyrdom continued through generations. And the claim was not unfounded or preposterous at the time when it was put forth because the Hebrews were in reality the only people who conceived of morality in terms of holiness. It was not absurd for them to assert their mission to be the teachers of mankind in respect to the spiritual interpretation of morality, since there was something, and that something infinitely important, which they actually had to teach. Moral thinking and moral practices of course had existed from immemorial times everywhere, but the conception of morality as divine in its source, as spiritual in its inmost essence,—this immense idea was the offspring of the Hebrew mind. On the other hand, I asked myself, has not the task of Israel in this respect been accomplished? Have not its Scriptures become the common property of the civilized nations? And does not that teacher mistake his office who attempts to maintain his magisterial authority after his pupils have come to man’s estate, and are capable of original contributions? The “nations” are not to be looked upon in the light of mere pupils. The ethical message of Israel so far as it is sane is universalistic. It is founded on the conviction that there is a moral nature in every human being, and that the moral nature is a spiritual nature. And if this be so, then the utterances, the insights, the new visions with which the spiritual nature is pregnant, cannot be supposed to be restricted to members of the Jewish people. If the teaching function is to be maintained it must be exercised by all who have the gift. If there is to be an elect body (a dangerous conception, the meaning of which is to be carefully defined), it must consist of gentiles and Jews, of men of every race and condition in whom the spiritual nature is more awakened than in others, peculiarly vivid, pressing towards utterance.
2. Aside from the spiritual interpretation of morality, the mission of the Jewish people has been said to consist in holding aloft the standard of pure monotheism as against trinitarianism. But pure monotheism is a philosophy rather than a religion. Taken by itself it is too pure, too empty of content to serve the purposes of a living faith. The attributes of omniscience, omnipotence, etc., ascribed to Deity are highly abstract, too abstruse to be even thinkable, save indirectly, and they certainly fail to touch the heart. As a matter of fact it was the image of the Father projected upon the background of these abstractions, that made the object of Jewish piety. Jahweh is the heavenly spouse; Israel is to be his faithful earthly spouse. The Children of Israel are pre-eminently his children. Other nations likewise are his children,—some children of wrath to be cast out and destroyed like the rebellious son in Deuteronomy, others to be eventually gathered into the patriarchal household. But this view comes back to the same general conception of the relations of Israel to other nations which has just been discussed. Moreover, the Father image, as representing the divine life in the world, even when extended so as to include all mankind on equal terms, is open to a serious objection.[9]
3. If, nevertheless, the Jews have a mission, is it perhaps this: to rehabilitate the prophetic ideal of social justice? Is it not social justice that the world is crying for today? Were not the prophets of Israel the great preachers of righteousness in the sense of social justice? Did they not affirm that religion consists in justice and in its concomitant mercifulness, but above all in justice? Did not Isaiah say: “When ye come to tread my courts, who has demanded this of you? Go wash you, make you clean. Put away the evil that is in your hands. Cease to do evil; learn to do good.” And later on, “That ye let the oppressed go free, and that ye break every yoke.” These are solemn, marvelous words assuredly! They have been ringing down through the ages, and still find their echo in our hearts. And yet the justice idea of the prophets is inadequate to serve the purpose of social reconstruction today. To go back to it would mean repristination, not renovation. It is sound as far as it goes, but it does not go far enough. It is negative, rather than positive; it is based on the idea of non-violation. What we require today is a positive conception, and this implies a positive definition of that holy thing in man that is to be treated as inviolable. To the mind of the prophets justice meant chiefly resistance to oppression, since oppression is the most palpable exemplification of the forbidden violation. The prophets in their outlook on the external relations of their people stood for the weak, the oppressed, against the strong, the oppressor. They stood for their own weak little nation, the Belgium of those days, against the two over-mighty empires, Egypt and Assyria, that bordered it on either side. In the internal affairs of Israel they espoused the cause of the weak against the rich and strong: “Woe unto them that add house to house and field to field, that grind the faces of the poor.” Ever and ever again the same note resounds, the same intense, passionately indignant feeling against violation in the form of oppression. But this aspect of justice, as I have said, is the negative aspect,—inestimably important, but insufficient. Where oppression does not occur, have the claims of justice ceased? Is there not something even greater than mere non-infringement, greater than mercifulness or kindness, which in justice we owe to the personality of our fellows, namely, to aid in the development of their personality? Righteousness, yes, by all means,—but does the righteousness of the prophets of Israel exhaust or begin to exhaust the content of that vast idea?
The universalistic ethical idea in the Hebrew religion is bound up with and bound down by racial restrictions. The issue between monotheism and trinitarianism is no longer a vital issue of our day. The Father image as the symbol of Deity raises expectations which experience does not confirm. The ideal of social justice as conceived by the prophets of Israel is a valid but incomplete expression of what is implied in social justice. These are weighty considerations that make it difficult to retain the belief in the elect character attributed to the people of Israel. There is one other, of very deep-reaching importance, that must be noticed. An elect people is supposed to be an exemplary people, one that sets a moral example which other nations are expected to copy. But it has become more and more clear to me that the value of example in the moral life has been overestimated and misunderstood. No individual, for instance, can really serve as an example to others so as to be copied by them. The circumstances are always somewhat different, the natures are different, and the obligations, finely examined, are never quite the same. In fact, the best that anyone can do for another by his example is to stimulate him to express with consummate fidelity his different nature in his own different way. I do not of course deny that there are certain uniformities, chiefly negative, in moral conduct, but I have come to think that the ethical quality of moral acts consists in the points in which they differ rather than in those in which they agree. The ideally ethical act, to my mind, is the most completely individualized act.
And what is true of individuals is no less true of peoples. No people can really be exemplary for other peoples, and in this sense elect. Every people possesses a character of its own to which it is to give expression in ways which I shall indicate in the last part of this work. But the way rightly adopted by one nation cannot be a law or a model for its sister nations. If the ideal of the modern Zionists were realized, if the Jews were to return to Palestine, to speak once more the language of the Bible, to cultivate their distinctive gifts, they would not therefore produce a pattern which could be copied in Japan, or among the 400 millions of China, or in the United States, or among the Slavic or Latin peoples.
In concluding these reflections, I may not conceal from myself or from others that the objection to the function of exemplariness, if sustained, affects at the root both the theology and the ethics of the past. If no individual can be in the strict sense an example to others, neither can an individual Deity be an example to be copied by men, neither can Christ be the perfect exemplar to be imitated. There can be no single perfect exemplar. Virtues that bear the same name are not therefore the same virtues. Often it is only the name that is the same, not the substance; and where they are in a broad way the same, yet there remains a difference of accent. The natures of men are unlike. Their moral destiny is to work out the unlikeness of each in harmony with that of the others. The moral equivalence of men, rather than their moral equality, is for me the expression of the fundamental moral relation.[10]
At the early stage of my career to which I am still adverting it was urgently put to me that with all the changes that had taken place in my inner life, I need not separate myself from the religion of the Fathers, nay, that I might remain a servant and teacher of religion within the Jewish fold, gradually weaning away from the beliefs which they held those whom I might contrive to influence, and drawing them up—such was the phrase used—to my own “higher level.” But this advice was repelled by every inmost fibre of my being, and could not but be utterly rejected. I was to publicly represent a certain belief with the purpose of undermining it. I was to trade upon the simplicity of my hearers in order to rob them of what they, crudely and mistakenly perhaps, considered their most sacred truth, by feigning provisionally, until I could alter their views, to be in agreement with them. Would this be fair to them or to myself? Was I to act a lie in order to teach the truth? There was especially one passage in the Sabbath service which brought me to the point of resolution: I mean the words spoken by the officiating minister as he holds up the Pentateuch scroll, “And this is the Law which Moses set before the people of Israel.” I had lately returned from abroad where I had had a fairly thorough course in Biblical exegesis, and had become convinced that the Mosaic religion is so to speak a religious mosaic, and that there is hardly a single stone in it which can with certainty be traced to the authorship of Moses. Was I to repeat these words? It was impossible. I was certain that they would stick in my throat. On these grounds the separation was decided on by me, and became irremediable.
CHAPTER III
EMERSON
I find on looking backward that my development proceeded with the help of a series of definitions fixing my attitude toward teachers who made a special appeal to me, and toward great historic tendencies past and present. I was helped both by what I was able to appreciate in them, and, where I diverged, by what they forced me to think out for myself. Here let me acknowledge a passing debt to Emerson. As in the case of Kant, a strong attraction drew me toward Emerson with temporary disregard of radical differences,—although the spell was never so potent or so persistent in the latter instance as in the former. I made Emerson’s acquaintance in 1875. I came into touch with the Emerson circle and read and re-read the Essays. The value of Emerson’s teaching to me at that time consisted in the exalted view he takes of the self. Divinity as an object of extraneous worship for me had vanished. Emerson taught that immediate experience of the divine power in self may take the place of worship. His doctrine of self-reliance also was bracing to a youth just setting out to challenge prevailing opinions and to urge plans of transformation upon the community in which he worked. But I soon discovered that Emerson overstresses self-affirmation at the expense of service. For a time indeed I reconciled in my own fashion the two contrary tendencies. The divine power, I argued, flows through me as a channel—hence the grandeur which attaches to my spiritual nature. But the divine power manifests itself in redressing the wrongs that exist in the world, and in putting an end to such violations of personality as the sexual and economic exploitations which disgrace human society. So for a time I continued to walk on air with Emerson, and had my head in the clouds,—the clouds in which Emerson enveloped me.
Out of this false sense of security, this quasi-pantheistic self-affirmation, the experiences of the next few years effectually roused me. I came to see that Emerson’s pantheism in effect spoils his ethics. Be thyself, he says, not a counterfeit or imitation of someone else. Be different. But why! Because the One manifests itself in endless variety. Penetrating below the surface, however, one finds that in this kind of philosophy the value of difference, to which I attach essential importance on ethical grounds, is nothing more than that of a foil. According to Emerson life is a universal masquerade, and the interest of the whole business of living consists in the ever-renewed discovery that the face behind the different masks is still the same. Difference is not cherished on its own account. And here, as in the case of the uniformity principle of Hebraism, I found myself dissenting.
Emerson is a kind of eagle, circling high up in the ether—non soli cedit.
Emerson with his oracular sayings might have served as a priest at Dodona or led the mysteries at Eleusis. Yet, withal, he is genuinely American,—a rare blend of ancient mystic and modern Yankee,—a valued poet too, but as an ethical guide to be accepted only with large reservations.
CHAPTER IV
THE TEACHINGS OF JESUS
At about this time I began to occupy myself more seriously than I had done before, with the study of the New Testament. I had, I think a great advantage in my approach to it, for the very reason that I had not been brought up in the Christian tradition. I came from the outside, with a mind fresh to receive first-hand impressions. I had not had instilled into me from childhood the kind of hesitant awe that prevents impartial appraisement of excellences and of possible deficiencies. On the other hand, as a searcher I was deeply interested to ascertain what Christianity could give me, and to what extent it could further my spiritual development. I had not the enforcedly apologetic attitude; I did not come prepared to accept without question nor yet to find fault; I came to test for my own use. Here am I, with life and its problem before me—how can the teachings of Jesus help me in my search, in my dire perplexities?
I must say to begin with that I was particularly struck with the originality of Jesus’ teachings, a quality in them which to my amazement I had found disputed, not only by Jews, but by representative Christians. In Jewish circles it is not uncommon to speak almost condescendingly of Christianity as of a daughter religion commissioned to spread abroad the truths of Judaism, with such alloy as may be needed to suit them to the apprehension of the gentiles. But Christian teachers likewise—I remember particularly a recent sermon to that effect—have taken the ground that Jesus added nothing new to the ethical insight of mankind. His work, it is said, consisted merely in supplying a sufficient motive for performing the duties which everyone knows, but which, lacking this motive, we are supposedly impotent to practice. This strange misapprehension of the intimate nature of Jesus’ contribution to ethical progress is largely due, I take it, to the poverty of our moral vocabulary. Language puts at our disposal only a few terms, such as Justice, Righteousness, Love,—which must needs stand for a great variety of moral ideas. Thus Justice in Plato’s use of the word, implies that “a shoemaker shall stick to his last,” that those who perform the humble functions shall be content to perform them in due subservience to their superiors. A very different meaning was attached to justice by the Hebrew prophets as I have explained in the last chapter. Again, a quite different conception of justice is framed and stressed by modern social reformers. Now it is this ambiguity of the moral vocabulary that conceals the novelty of Jesus’ precepts. Thus, to mention only a single capital instance, it has been asserted that the Golden Rule as taught by Jesus is not original, but substantially the same rule that had been laid down by Confucius 500 years before the time of Jesus. But on closer scrutiny it will be seen that the two Golden Rules are by no means the same. As propounded by the Chinese sage the rule appears to mean: Keep the balance true between thyself and thy neighbor; illustrate in thy conduct the principle of equilibrium. As impressed upon his disciples by Jesus it means: Look upon thy neighbor as thy other self; act towards him as if thou wert he.
To return to my point, the impression of novelty which I received in reading the Gospels was definite and striking. The mythological idealization of Jesus, indeed, I put aside as a thing that did not concern me. On the other hand, to say with certain modern liberals that he was just a man, an infinitely gracious personality, one who exemplified in his life the virtues of forgiveness and self-sacrifice, did not satisfy me either. Buddha too had taught forgiveness: “For hatred is not conquered by hatred at any time; hatred is conquered by love.” It could not then be the bare precept of forgiveness that lets light on the secret of Jesus. And self-sacrifice—“Greater love hath no man than this, that he should lay down his life for his friend”—had been practiced within and without the pale of Hebraism.
That he continued the work of his Hebrew predecessors I made no doubt. On the Hebrew side he was a prophet, or rather, a saint in Israel. But I had just as little doubt that he took a step beyond his predecessors, that his teachings bear upon them the signature of originality.
To put my thought briefly, I came to conclude that the ethical originality of Jesus consists in a new way of dealing with the problem of evil, that is, of evil in the guise of oppression. The prophets, his predecessors, as we have seen, identified injustice with oppression; and in the first flush of their moral enthusiasm the more optimistic among them believed that justice as they conceived of it would presently triumph and that oppression would cease altogether—“Arise, shine, for thy light is come.” God would miraculously interfere, and bring about on earth a state of righteousness. But years and centuries passed by, and oppression, far from ceasing, became under the ruthless administration of Rome ever more grinding and terrible. The yoke of Rome weighed upon the Jews as it did upon other peoples; but perhaps, because they were more independent in spirit, it galled them more sorely. The fiery zealots among the Jews persisted in hoping that by supreme desperate efforts, God coming to their aid, they might yet succeed in shaking off this yoke—efforts which culminated in the horrors of the last siege of Jerusalem. Jesus was not of their way of thinking. He seems indeed to have believed that the end of the existing order was near. It was too incredibly bad to last. The world would be consumed by fire. A new earth and a new heaven would appear. But in the meantime how accommodate oneself to the intolerable fact of oppression? Jesus said, Resist not evil in the guise of oppression, it is irresistible. He mentions in particular three forms of intolerable oppression: a blow in the face, the stripping of a man of his garment, and the coercing him to do the arbitrary bidding of another. He says, Resist not evil, resist not oppression. Shall then evil triumph? Is the victim helplessly at the mercy of the injurer? Shall he even be told that in a servile spirit he must accept the indignities that are put upon him? No; this is not the meaning. Quite a different meaning is implied. And here the teaching of Jesus takes its novel turn. There is a way, he says to the victim, in which you can spiritually triumph over the evildoer, and make your peace with irresistible oppression. Use it as a means of self-purification; pause to consider what the inner motives are that lead your enemy, and others like him, to do such acts as they are guilty of, and to so violate your personality and that of others. The motives in them are lust, greed, anger, wilfulness, pride. Now turn your gaze inward upon yourself, look into your own heart and learn, perhaps to your amazement, that the same evil streams trickle through you; that you, too, are subject, even if it be only subconsciously and incipiently, to the same appetites, passions, and pride, that animate your injurers. Therefore let the sufferings you endure at the hands of those who allow these bad impulses free rein in their treatment of you lead you to expel the same bad impulses that stir potentially in your breast; let this experience fill you with a deeper horror of the evil, and prove the incentive to secure your own emancipation from its control. In this way you will achieve a real triumph over your enemy, and will be able to make your peace with oppression. There are other intolerable evils in the world besides oppression which nevertheless must be tolerated. The method of Jesus can be applied to these also. This method I regard as a permanent contribution to the ethical progress of humanity.
A second original trait in Jesus’ teaching I found in his conception of the spiritual nature, and of his doctrine of love as dependent on that conception. The conception or definition is still negative as in the non-violation ethics of the Hebrew prophets. The spiritual element in man is hidden. It cannot be apprehended as to what it is substantively. The attributes ascribed to it are the effects in which it manifests itself; this goes without saying. To define the spiritual nature means to describe these effects, these manifestations. According to the Hebrew predecessors of Jesus the spiritual power is to be conceived of as that which prompts a man to respect the holy precinct of personality in others and in himself. What the holy thing is remains unknown. This view leads to acts of justice and mercy, as above explained. According to Jesus the spiritual essence in man bids him expel the inner, impure impulses that lead to external violations. In brief, the spiritual power is conceived of in terms of purity. It is the pure thing in man that thrusts out as alien to itself whatever is impure—whatever is of the world, the flesh, and, in mythological language, whatever is Satanic. In this sense I say that the definition is negative. It marks out, indeed, a definite line of conduct; and it even leads, as we shall presently see, to active efforts in a specific direction. A negative principle may have certain positive results. But in the main, nevertheless, the teaching of Jesus enlightens us as to what shall not be rather than as to what shall be. From the Hebrew prophets we learn that there shall not be violation of personality or injustice, the positive concomitant being mercy; from Jesus’ teachings we learn that there shall not be impurity in the inner forum, the positive by-product being the doctrine of love.
Taking over the Hebrew heritage, Jesus affirmed that the spiritual nature exists in all human beings. In every man there is presumed to be this inner power to reject the unclean admixtures, to ward off and repel the carnal solicitations, to withdraw from the “world,” and to move upward toward the source of purity, which is God. The spirituality of man consisting of purity, the Father-God, the Father of Lights, is likewise conceived as the absolutely pure, in this sense as the most holy. In every man there is a ray of the eternal light emanating from the eternal luminary, and all men are one in so far as their rays converge at the focus of Godhead. To love men is to be conscious of one’s unity with them in the central life, and to give effect to this consciousness. Hence Christian love, the love that Jesus taught, is no earthly love, no mere sentiment, or outreaching of the human affections. On the contrary, the natural human ties are repeatedly set aside in the logia. To love another is to love him in God. Later the current phrase became, to love him in Christ; that is, to think of him, and act towards him, as if he possessed the same capacity for purity with oneself.
The love of others in God or Christ encouraged a particular kind of earthly beneficence, and it especially inspired the followers of Jesus with an unparalleled zeal in works of remedial (though never of preventive) charity. This may at first sight seem paradoxical. The young man is advised to dispossess himself of all he has, and in the same breath is told to distribute his possessions among the poor. Why not rather scatter them to the winds? Why should not the poor too cease to toil and spin and take heed for the morrow? For their simple necessities God would provide. The two-fold attitude, however, is easy to understand if we remember that certain acts of helpfulness have a symbolic significance, as attesting the value we set upon the person to whose needs we minister, much as a flower offered to a beloved person emblematically intimates our sense of the beauty and worth of the one to whom the tribute is offered. Christian charity, on its earthly side, has a similar meaning and purpose. It is intended to efface the indignity to which human beings are subjected when reduced to extreme indigence or allowed to suffer without relief, for it is the disdain of the spiritual personality thus evinced which Jesus disallows. He bids his followers intimate by earthly tokens their consciousness of the super-earthly worth of their fellow-beings. But the pursuit of riches as such he nowhere encourages—quite the contrary. And it is certainly a mistake to represent Jesus, as has recently been done, as a kind of precursor of modern Socialism, and to think of him as one who, if he had lived in our time, would have laid stress on equality of opportunity for all to gain earthly possessions. He who advocated wealth for none could not be supposed to have sympathized with a social movement whose first object it is to secure wealth for all.
It is this interpretation of love that helped me to understand the interior meaning of the doctrine of the forgiveness of enemies as taught by Jesus, and to perceive wherein it differs from the apparently identical mode of behavior enjoined by Buddha and the Stoic Seneca. It plays a capital rôle in Jesus’ teaching. As illustrated by the proto-martyr Stephen it probably effected the conversion of Paul. Jesus says: “Bless them that curse you.” But how is it possible to bless those that curse us? How, for instance, was it possible for Stephen to bless the men of blood at the very moment when they were crushing him under stones? To bless them that curse you, to bless them that despitefully use you, means to distinguish between the spiritual possibilities latent in them and their overt conduct, to see the human, the potentially divine face behind the horrible mask, and to invoke the influence of the divine power upon them in order that it may change them into their purer, better selves.
With complete and eager appreciation of the points of excellence contained in these teachings, with a reverence which it is impossible to express in words for their incomparable Author, and with a large sense of the beneficent influence which they have exercised on human history, I still could not avoid the question, so vital for me, Have these ethical teachings of the great Master the stamp of finality upon them? Has Jesus really spoken the last word in ethics? Is nothing left for us but further to expand and apply the truth which he laid down once and for all? When theology goes, the last stand of apologetic writers is apt to be made on the ethics. The instinct to claim finality for the religion in which one has been brought up asserts itself in the claim that the moral teachings at least are unexceptionable and valid for all time to come. The searcher who is in great moral perplexities and who seeks help for others and himself, is bound to ask and will ask in no captious spirit, is this so?
The decisive point is whether the ethical teachings of Jesus supply a principle which enables us to work with zest in the world, to take the keenest interest in all the manifold activities of human society, to embrace the world with the view of penetrating it with a spiritual purpose and of thus transforming it. Do these teachings exhibit a way of making the world and the flesh instrumental to the spirit, or do they serve to turn us away from the world and its interests, to abandon the world in despair? Is the conception of spirituality as purity adequate? Purity is certainly one aspect of morality; is it the sole or the principal factor in it? The other-worldly attitude in the Gospels is certainly clearly marked. It is the background on which the ethical precepts stand forth. Tyrrel has argued as against Harnack for the close connection between the thought of Jesus and the apocalyptic vision. I asked myself, Can the apocalyptic vision, that is to say the other-worldliness, be dissociated from the ethics, or is the relation between them necessary?[11] If the world is speedily, almost immediately, coming to an end, then it is justifiable to prefer celibacy to marriage, to ignore the state, to counsel disregard of the toiling and the spinning. All of this is warranted on the assumption that the order of things in which these institutions and activities have their place is about to disappear.
But if this expectation is deceived, if things continue in their ancient course, if the world and the flesh persist, taking on ever new and more baffling shapes, how is a system of ethics which is based on the assumption of one state of things to be reconciled with a state of things exactly the opposite? How shall an ethical person conduct himself in a world which his philosophy of life teaches him to reject, but with which the necessities of his existence compel him to come to terms day by day and hour by hour? There must then be compromise. And the history of Christianity up to the present moment is the record of such compromises. Monasticism was one of the earliest. A distinction was made, so to speak, between perfect and imperfect Christians, between a class of men and women who lived in ascetic seclusion, as if the world did not exist, and another class, the greater number, who managed ethically as best they could, dependent on the supererogatory merits of the real Christians or saints to eke out their unholiness. Another species of compromise is illustrated, especially in Protestant countries. It appears as a division between the contracted sphere of holiness and the circumambient sphere of the practical life, in both of which, however, the same individual has his place. Chastity, forgiveness of personal enemies, and the like virtues are to be practiced in the contracted sphere of private life, the ability to practice these virtues being derived from mystical identification with Jesus. In the Christian’s public life no such identification is possible, and he is left to be consciously or unconsciously unholy. As a politician, as a competitor in the struggle for wealth, he remains without ethical direction. The ethical ideal of the Gospels requires for its setting the apocalyptic vision. It derives its cogency from the belief that the world is about to perish. Can it serve as a sufficient guide to those who must live in the world, and affirm their ethical personality in dealing with it? In politics, in business, in science, in art, must we not somehow see our way to the conception that these great interests are not alien to the spiritual nature, introducing perchance impure admixtures into it, but rather can be made subservient or instrumental to it? Yes; but instrumental in what way? At this point, not only the Christian system, but every one of the systems of ethics that have arisen since then has failed. And it is, moreover, perfectly evident that the instrumental function of the sex relation or of the pursuit of knowledge or of patriotism cannot be determined unless we first answer the one question which the ethical writers are in the habit of evading—Instrumental to what end? What is the ethical end? Instruments are means to ends—how can the means be rightly appraised without a definite conception of the end? And if the end be the affirmation of our ethical personality, of our spiritual nature, of that holy thing in us without which man loses his worth (and without which the rule of non-violation itself falls to the ground, since where there is nothing inviolable there can be no infringement), it is plain that we must seek a positive definition of the spiritual nature which shall serve as a principle of regulation where the empty concept of purity has manifestly failed.
Christian ethics has promoted the moral development of mankind in a thousand ways. It has helped even by its mythological embodiment of a transcendental idea to place the individual more firmly on his feet. It has emphasized the inner springs of conduct; it has given prominence to certain principal virtues of the private life; but, like every product of the mind and aspirations of man, it exhibits the limitations of the time and of the social conditions under which it arose. The conditions have since changed. Society has become infinitely more complex, and in consequence new moral problems have forced themselves upon men’s attention; and with the help of Christianity itself the human race has advanced beyond the point of view for which Christianity stands.[12]
Speaking again only for myself I could not assent to the position that finality appertains to the ethical teachings of the Gospel, that they or their Author have spoken the last word in ethics. I could not persuade myself that this is so because I failed to get from these teachings, inestimably precious as they are, an answer to the question that most pressed upon me—Instrumental in what sense, instrumental to what end?
CHAPTER V
SOCIAL REFORM
My position at that time may be summarized as follows: There is a divine power in the world, not individual, manifest in the moral law as revealed in human experience. The moral law involves recognition of the presence of a something holy in each human being. Since the world presents innumerable examples of the grossest violation of human personality (e.g., prostitution and exploitation of laborers), the business immediately in hand is to make an end of these violations. There was as yet in my mind no positive definition of personality. Clarification and further development were promoted by the necessity of grappling with the problems of poverty and with the attempted solutions of the Socialists and of other social reformers. At this period, the notion of personality in my mind being still without determinate content, empirical matter intruded, and a species of millennialism for a time vitiated my thinking. In order to set up a goal for humanity, I dallied with Utopias, and flattered my imagination with the vision of something like a state of ultimate earthly felicity. The cheap cry of “Let us have heaven on earth” was also on my lips, though the delusion did not last long and perhaps never penetrated very deeply.
The problem of poverty, as mentioned above, engrossed me early. I acted as chairman of the meeting at which Henry George was first introduced to the public in New York City. But Henry George’s remedy,—a single draught of Socialism with unstinted individualism thereafter—never attracted me, while his descriptions of the misery of the poor, eloquent as they were, and fitted to awaken persons unacquainted with actual conditions, conveyed to me no novel message. I had before then been profoundly stirred by the chapters in Karl Marx’s Kapital in which he collects from the English Blue Books frightful evidence of the mistreatment of laborers and especially of children in the early part of the nineteenth century. My errands in the tenement slums of New York had also made me fairly familiar with the bitter facts, and throughout my life I have been in touch in a practical way with the appalling complexus of misery and wrong which we abstractly designate as the Labor Question. I shall not here take time to discuss Socialism or other social reform movements in detail. My intention is to sketch a certain philosophy of life, and to trace the steps by which I reached it. My reaction against Socialism and related movements, however, was a prime factor in this inner development; and it is of this reaction and the causes of it that I must speak.
The evils inherent in poverty are, in the first place, obviously, the privations entailed by it; secondly, the fact that the greater part of the life of the poor is consumed in efforts to provide the bare necessaries, the mind being thus kept in bondage to bodily needs and prevented from rising to other interests more appropriate to rational beings; thirdly, the fact that the first two wrongs are caused, not wholly it is true, but yet in a large measure, by fellow human beings.[13] The sting in poverty is not so much the hardships suffered, as the contempt for the manhood of the poor, exhibited by their exploiters,—the inequity being thus turned into iniquity.
Now my reaction against Socialism was and is that it neglects the third, the moral evil, and stresses only the first and second. I am now speaking of Marxian Socialism, with which in its rigid form I early acquainted myself. The Marxian Socialist does not deny the pain felt in consequence of the inequity, nor the desire of those who suffer to become the equals of their masters; but he regards this desire as a fact of nature explicable on deterministic grounds, a consequence of improvement in the technique or tools of industry. He does not deny that there are so-called moral ideas, but he considers them epiphenomena or by-products of economic development. The tendency toward equilibrium of power in human society, termed democracy, is to him just a fact and nothing more. The mere desire for it apart from the rightness of the desire is the efficient cause which leads to social readjustments. But evidently this account of the matter will be persuasive only in case the efficient cause proves to be really efficient, that is to say, in case the desire for equilibration is on the point of effectuating itself. If it is not, if the desire of the masses for power is thwarted, if the realization of their hopes is indefinitely postponed, then the foundations of the theory are undermined. Hence Marxian Socialism has been coupled with and depends on a belief which is a kind of materialistic parallel of the apocalyptic vision of Jesus,—the belief that the end of the present world (the world of the wage system) is close at hand, only with the difference that the end is to be brought about not by divine interference but automatically by the acquisition of power on the part of the masses.
To me neither hunger nor the bondage of the mind to physical necessities nor the bare fact of inequity seem sufficient to justify the demand for social reconstruction, apart from moral right. If there be no such thing as morality, or if morality be but an epiphenomenon of economic conditions, what warrant have the hungry or the disadvantaged for complaining? Animals, too, hunger and sicken. If man be like them a mere chance product of nature, why should he not share their fate? Let the weak succumb! Surely the bald fact that the democratic masses today chafe under the yoke of their masters and demand a better state of things, is no more a ground of obligation for the former than the tendency toward an ultimate equilibrium in nature of which scientists speak can be a ground of obligation. The tendency will effectuate itself or not as the acting forces determine. There is in truth no such thing as obligation from this point of view. Then why not fold our arms and wait for what will happen? The notion of democracy currently held is obnoxious to the same criticism. Leave out the moral basis in the claim to equity, and nothing remains but the brute fact that men, being egotists, fret under the exercise of superior power by their fellow egotists. But let Nietzsche or some one else demonstrate that certain higher values, higher merely because subjectively relished as higher, are incompatible with equilibrium of power, and he will be justified at least in his own eyes in scoffing at equality and scourging the democratic dogs back to their kennels. No one denies that the masses have the desire to be treated as the equals of their masters (very inconveniently for the latter), but it is quite another matter whether their desire ought to be gratified. Social reconstruction, in other words, must be motivated by other considerations than those by which according to Marx the great change is to come about.
I have not stopped to consider whether the Socialistic scheme is workable, whether the run of mankind are capable of coöperative effort on a large scale without the preëminent leadership of master minds; whether Socialism, if carried out, would really breed, as it is expected to, the sentiment of ideal brotherhood; whether the sentiment of brotherhood itself, unless it be rooted in the closer family and national ties, is morally sound, whether the emotional forces that sweep through and overwhelm large aggregations of men, can be bridled and sufficiently enlightened to promote the ends of Socialism. All such questions as these touch the feasibility of the ideal proposed; my own reaction was and is against the ideal itself. Instead of pronouncing as some do that mankind are not yet ripe to carry out so high an ideal, I found myself seriously challenging and finally rejecting the very ideal on the ground that it is not a genuine moral ideal at all. It is ethically spurious, because it omits the notion of right and substitutes for it that of power.
A different objection lies against certain modifications of Socialism and against many of the social reform movements of our time. In these movements the idea of personality is not absent as in Marx’s theory. The inherent dignity of every human being is deeply felt, and per contra the indignity of the present condition of the greater number. Man is worth while; and for the sake of the worth in him, the unfavorable circumstances which stifle the promise of his nature are to be changed. My objection in this case is that the higher spiritual nature of man, or the notion of personality, is left indefinite and remains vaguely in the background. It supplies indeed the initial motive for practical efforts; but the instrumental relation of the goods of life to the supreme good is not apprehended positively. And thus the door is left open, as we shall presently see, for corrupting influences to enter in.
There seems, it is true, at first sight, considerable warrant for demanding certain instant reforms without troubling about ulterior spiritual ends. We are confronted in modern society with evils which seem to require immediate abolition. Exploitation is palpably one of them. It is the clearest possible case of trespass on personality. Why not then demand respect simply for personality in general, without inquiring into the nature of personality? Is it not beyond all question dishonoring to human nature that some should be on the verge of starvation while others are even themselves injured by excessive possessions; that the energies of children should be exhausted by premature toil; that adults should be worked like beasts of burden? Why not leave in abeyance the definition of the supreme end, and concentrate effort on the removal of these incontestable evils?
My answer to this is, in the first place, that we cannot gain the best leverage even for these initial reforms without a high and defined conception of man as a spiritual being. Efforts directed toward improving even material conditions are apt to be fluctuating, spasmodic, and are ever in danger of dying down, unless material improvement is seen in its relation towards something else that commands the highest respect—implicit respect. Sympathy alone is altogether inadequate. It often works grave harm; it is notoriously intermittent, at one time broadly expansive and then again contracting upon the nearest objects. Furthermore, we can at best sympathize genuinely with only a very limited number of persons. If anyone were to open his heart to the sufferings of all the millions of human beings at present engaged in conflict on the battlefields of Europe; if he were to try to realize the indirect consequences of this war; if he were to take a still wider sweep and embrace in his imagination the populations of India, China, and the races of Africa, the effect upon him would be simply paralyzing. The possible effect of one’s sympathetic action upon this huge volume of human suffering would appear so insignificant as to make exertion on his part seem quite irrational. We are assisted by sympathy in the matter of social reform by the narrowness of our horizons; and even within these narrow boundaries the efficiency of the motive depends largely upon the transciency of the sympathetic mood. Sympathy as a permanent attitude would disintegrate the self.[14]
The second answer is that by ignoring the ultimate end we install proximate ends in its place. The reform movements of our day abstain from attempting to set up an ultimate good. They are content, as they say, “to evaluate the tangible goods ready at hand.” In consequence these tangible goods inevitably usurp the place of the supreme good. Begin as we may with the high notion of personality, we become materialists before we have proceeded very far, and we infect the laboring masses with our materialism if we omit to define the relation of proximate ends to the ultimate aim. For remember that the ultimate end is that which prescribes the limits within which the nearer aims are to be sanctioned,—the limit for each being the degree in which it conduces toward the highest end. Without a goal set up, without an explicit conception of its regulative function, the proximate ends abound, and are likely to expand ad indefinitum. This is evident, for instance, in the case of wealth-getting. The poor have not enough wealth, the rich have too much. “Let us then redress the balance by at least securing enough for the poor. The necessary limitations we can discuss after they shall have at least reached the limit of sufficiency.” But we are thus kindling the desire for wealth; and this desire and its possible gratifications are boundless. It is in the nature of desire to be prolific of new desire, and to aim unceasingly at new satisfactions. First, a decent dwelling, sufficient food, education for the children, are wanted, then luxury, then millions, then multi-millions. Secondary motives take the place of primary ones. Wealth becomes a token; the satisfactions it gives are no longer related to actual wants or needs, but solely to a fantastic desire for preëminence. Has not this been the actual history of many of those who have risen from poverty to great riches? But the same desires are present, though suppressed, unsatisfied, in the masses, who look up to the few with admiration or envy. And suppressed desires are often even more insidiously poisoning, more contaminating in their effects than satisfied desires.
The psychological fact is that human volition as expressed in action is always determined by some end. A means is never adopted without there being some object or purpose in view. Leave out the ultimate aim and the means become themselves the ends. A decent subsistence should be treated as related to the ultimate end,— a decent living, for example, as a means to fit the worker for the duties of fatherhood and citizenship.
It may again be urged that what has been said is true only of the ambitious minority, and that the masses would be quite content with a decent subsistence if only that much could be assured them. But the prevalence of cheap imitations of luxury among the poor points in the opposite direction. At least in a democratic community, the ambitions of the few are apt to be contagious. And where this is not the case, as in some of the older countries of Europe, a certain sordid Philistinism is apt to manifest itself. The life of the middle class in Europe is without the restless brilliance that characterizes the upward-striving class in America,—is not daringly but meanly materialistic. Redeeming features are, of course, not wanting, yet how anyone can conceive the social ideal as a state of things in which the laboring people shall be raised to the level at present occupied by the “middle class” is difficult for me to understand. Nor is it a sufficient rejoinder to say that the present complexion of the middle class, its narrowness and Philistinism, are due to isolation from the social classes beneath them, and that the broad sentiment of universal fellowship and fraternity, when it shall have come to prevail, will purify the atmosphere on the middle level. I have sufficiently indicated my doubts as to the efficiency and soundness of what is called fraternalism.
In brief, if we are to preserve a man’s respect for himself as a moral being, we must find a ground on which he can maintain his self-esteem apart from the material conditions in which he is placed, and in the interval before the desirable material changes can possibly be accomplished. This interval is certain to be long. The betterment of social conditions is sure to be gradual. The slum ought to be abolished immediately, but until it goes we must find a reason to respect the man in the slums even now, and a reason why he should respect himself even now. This reason can only be derived from the spiritual nature of man, from the spiritual end for which he exists; and on this account, above all others, it is indispensable that the spiritual end be defined. How painfully social reformers may be led into error by slighting this consideration is seen in the readiness with which some have subscribed to the amazing opinion that the issue between chastity and dishonor for the working-girl depends ultimately on the amount of her wages.
There are two fallacies that affect the social reform movements of today. The substitution of power for right is one. What I venture to call the fallacy of provisionalism is the second. This is the fallacy of the opportunist movements. “Lead the laboring classes provisionally up to the level of sufficiency, or of decent existence, and then we shall see.” But man does not act without ends, and unless we define the ultimate end, we give license to the proximate ends. In other words, we simply cannot act provisionally. We cannot ignore our spiritual nature without offending against it. We may start with the idea of serving it, but without explicit definition of it we shall presently find ourselves disgraced in all sorts of idolatries.
What I am trying to show is how I came to perceive the inadequacy of the non-violation ethics. Its formula is: “Admit the existence of personality; do not infringe upon it. In your actions for the good of others, try to abolish the manifest infringements or violations. Since there must be some positive content to the idea of good, accept the material or empirical goods as the provisional content with the general understanding that they are to be instrumental to the higher life but without troubling to define exactly how.”
The aberrations to which this view leads on the side of action toward others I have pointed out. A word now as to the injurious effect on self. Of these the following are the most important:
1. The leader in social reform is apt to be regarded by his followers and to think of himself as a kind of savior. It is his sincere intention to save society from some of the glaring evils with which it is afflicted. But if salvation is sought in the betterment of external conditions, the social savior is apt to become the victim of a false sense of moral security. He is likely to be off his guard at the weak points of his own character, and to fall abruptly from high levels into the ditch.
2. The social reformer who adopts the fallacy of provisionalism is apt to be absorbed in the mechanical details of his work,—the settlement or the municipal reform society, or the charitable association tend to become highly organized and efficient pieces of machinery. But moral idealism declines in proportion as this kind of efficiency increases,—the salt loses its savor.
3. The social reformer who sets his heart on external changes is apt to become impatient to bring about those changes. For since he attempts to work from without inwardly, and not at the same time from within outwardly, he has nothing to show for his pains unless the desired outward changes are actually effected. In this way may be explained a certain dictatorial manner, a certain arbitrariness sometimes observed in social workers of whose earnestness and devotion there can be no question, the preposterous outcome being that in attempting to carry out plans of reform in a democratic community such reformers offend against the very principle of democracy by over-riding the personality of others.
4. The Social reformer who concentrates his attention on external changes is apt to be ambitious of large results, to measure betterment by statistical standards. Though quality be not overlooked, quantity is likely to be over-emphasized.
5. The painful spectacle is sometimes presented of a leader in social movements who goes to pieces morally in his private relations (becomes a bad father, a worthless husband, an unscrupulous sponge on his friends, etc.). Absorption in extensive public movements has this danger in it that it often tends to make men neglectful of the nearer duties.
Facts of this kind, which came repeatedly under my observation in the course of years, drove home to my mind the conviction that the provisional method in social reform (the method of working for external changes without definition of the end) is morally perilous, both in its effects on those who are to be benefited, and in its reaction on the character of the reformer himself. I parted company with opportunism in every one of its forms; I became more and more imbued with the belief that no one can really help others who in the effort to do so is not himself morally helped, i.e., whose character is not improved in every respect, who does not become a better father, husband, citizen, a more upright man in all his relations in and because of his endeavors to benefit society. I became convinced that the ethical principle must run like a golden thread through the whole of a man’s life, in a word, that social reform unless inspired by the spiritual view of it, that is, unless it is made tributary to the spiritual, the total end of life, is not social reform in any true sense at all.[15]
The fundamental question, therefore, echoed and re-echoed with ever intenser insistence: “What then is the holy thing in others? What is the supreme end or good to which all the lesser goods should be subordinate and subservient? And what is the holy thing in me?—for I may not spiritually sacrifice myself. My own highest good must be achievable in agreement with that of others. What definition of the essential end is possible that shall reconcile egoism and altruism by transforming and transcending them? And if there be such end thinkable and definable, how establish the applicability of this end to empirical man, either in the person of others or in my own?”
I shall have to dwell on this subject at length in the sequel. Here at the outset I cannot forbear expressing my sense of the obliquities, the folly, the meanness, the cruelties which human nature often exhibits on the empirical side when dispassionately contemplated. That there are also finer traits in people, gleams of gold in the quartz, I do not deny. But even in the best exemplars of the race the alloy is not wanting. And it is an open question how far any human being, if his whole make-up and all the circumstances that influenced him be considered, can be called predominantly good, assuming that goodness is a matter of desert and not of chance. How, therefore, a being that to actual, impartial observation reveals himself as so dubiously worth while, can be regarded as possessing the quality of transcendent worth (which seems to be implied in the idea of personality as inviolable and precious) will be the starting point of my inquiry into the philosophical first principle in the second part of this volume.
CHAPTER VI
THE INFLUENCE OF MY VOCATION ON INNER DEVELOPMENT
The present chapter deals with my inner development as I believe it to have been furthered by my connection with the Society for Ethical Culture. The functions intrusted to me in this connection were, first, various forms of so-called philanthropic activity. The effects of the experience gathered in them has been described in a preceding chapter; they may be summed up in the formula: littleness in the external results achieved, consciousness of moral danger to self.
Secondly, the ministerial function of offering “edification” in public addresses to Sunday assemblies, the solemnizing of marriages, and the conducting of funeral services,—while in addition a large part of my vocational life consisted in the building up of an educational institution.[16]
The Public Addresses. Edification, or building up, as I understood it, involved the profoundly difficult task of supplying a working philosophy of life without traveling into the field of metaphysics, teaching the practicable counterpart of a connected system of thought concerning the problems of life,—the system being so firmly knit as to make the appropriate feelings and impulses more or less natural to its exponent. In my case, not having fallen heir to such a system, the task of edification became doubly difficult. It meant from the beginning unceasing self-edification, with a view to edifying others.[17] Setting out with a general scheme along Kantian lines, I proceeded to fill in the outline in the course of my public teachings, with the result that the content filled in eventually disrupted the scheme, and compelled a thoroughgoing reconstruction. The Holiness conception had been my starting point. I never gave it up. I was attracted to Kant because he affirmed it. I broke with him because he does not make good his affirmation.
I began with Kantianism, which is predominantly individualistic, and I found that in dealing with the problems of the family, with the labor question, and in the attempt to reach an ideal of democracy beyond the materialistic conception of it which is at present current—I was introducing into my initial sketch elements incompatible with individualism, and necessitating formulation in social terms. And since I retained and stressed the notion of personality, I had to seek a way of interpreting the term Social spiritually, as Kant had undertaken to interpret the term individual spiritually. I certainly could not fall in with Darwinism or other evolutionary interpretations of sociality, inasmuch as they all leave out the concept of inviolable personality, the indefeasible factor in my ethical thinking.
These things are here alluded to in order to emphasize the influence of the public Sunday addresses delivered by me regularly for more than forty years in stimulating, I had almost said forcing, my ethical growth. To care for anyone else enough to make his problem one’s own is ever the beginning of one’s real ethical development. To care for a group of people in the sense of being challenged to suggest to them ideas and ways of behavior that shall really be of use to them in the storm and stress of life, is the most searching incentive to self-development imaginable. It is more powerful than the desire to get truth for one’s own sake. The closet philosopher may be serious enough in his search for truth, and he may succeed in constructing a symmetrical system which at the time seems complete. Will it stand wear and tear? Will it in the bitter moments of his life hold together? If not, he has failed; but then he only is the loser, it is only his ship that has gone down. But the situation is different when a company of people venture with you on the same voyage, and trust to you as in a way their pilot.
The challenge that comes from the expectant eyes of those who are in trouble, of those whose relations to their friends or the members of their family have become tangled, the challenge that comes from the larger public towards which every public speaker has a certain ethical duty—all these challenges press home the question: are the things that you believe true, so true that you may confidently expect them to be confirmed by the experience of those who in some measure depend upon you? Are they genuinely of use?
There is also another kind of challenge that in a way is even more taxing and searching: the silent appeal that comes from those who are spiritually dead, from those who are sunk in sloth or sensuality, or who waste their precious days in the pursuit of trivial, frivolous ends, and from the insensitive consciences of the self-righteous and the self-complacent. In the Bible we read that the prophet Elisha once threw himself on the body of a dead child, in order with his own life to kindle there the life that seemed extinct. In some such way in public addresses, in which it is not the word but the personality behind the word that counts, the speaker is bound to throw himself body and soul, as it were, upon those who are spiritually numbed, and to enhance the life within himself in order to stir up life in them. All of which means that the task of edifying others involves continuous efforts at self-edification.
The Solemnizing of Marriages. In solemnizing marriages I had the experience that some of those at which I had officiated ended disastrously,—there had been no real marriage at all. Though such instances were not numerous in my own experience, yet the statistics of divorce prove that the number of unfortunate marriages in this and other countries is very large, and is increasing. What are the foundations of a permanent relation such as would tend to the development of personality in and through marriage? was the question urged upon me. Here is a social tie in which two individuals, and later the offspring, are combined in the closest propinquity. How can an ethical theory of marriage be reached, that is, a theory dependent on the idea of the joint realization of the highest end of life by the members of the family group? This ethical theory of marriage will be set forth in a subsequent part of this volume. Here I wish again to mark the retroactive effect of the function I was called upon to exercise in the Ethical Society on the development of theory. The most incisive effect of my practical experience, however, was the being compelled to encounter the effect of frustration. How reluctant is the natural man to face this fact! How he shrinks, and puts up screens between his face and the head of Medusa! In my earliest marriage addresses I remember how I used to describe the relation as one in which each of the partners receives the cup of happiness at the hands of the other. The second time I performed the ceremony, the bride was the only child of excellent friends, whose life was completely wrapped up in their one daughter. She was a charming young girl, and the bridegroom was a fine-grained person entirely devoted to her. That marriage feast I shall never forget. A little less than a year after, the young wife having died in child-birth, I was called in to speak at her bier. Where, then, was the exchange of happiness? How suddenly had the house of bliss fallen into ruins! A similar experience that touched me even more deeply was that of a friend, the first one among my associates who believed with me in the possibility of a religious society without a dogmatic creed. The course of love in his case had not run smooth. The marriage between himself and the lovely young woman he wedded was the happy culmination of many trials, a haven of peace after storms. Hardly more than two years elapsed when he suddenly developed a fatal form of mental disease, and lingered for ten years in a long, slow, degrading decline. I thus became acquainted with frustration in one of its most woeful shapes. I remember how the poor young wife, during those ten years, widow in all but name, sought alleviation in various directions for her intolerable grief. Work to occupy her mind was one; caring for the needs of the poor another. I remember also how futile these devices seemed. She had lived “on the heights”; she must now descend to lower levels; she had had first best, she must now put up with second or third best. Gladly indeed would she have exchanged places with some of the poor women whom she assisted, could she have kept her husband at her side as they had theirs. It was well enough for her to try to alleviate the troubles of these people, but what were their sorrows compared to hers? And to keep the mind occupied by work, what was it at best but a temporary anodyne? When the work was over, in the still, lonely hours of the night, the storm of grief would break with all the greater violence. I had not taught these my friends a really valid spiritual conception of the purpose of marriage: I had failed in that: and when they were in need of it they did not have it to support them. They had looked on marriage as a scene of felicity; they had not been taught to make allowance for the frustration.
I had not made preparation for the palpable frustrations just mentioned, nor yet for others, for the discovery that the beloved person is faulty, that the nimbus of divine personality does not coincide with the character. And especially did the lack of any explicit idea of personality prove fatal in those cases where the frustration is most serious, where real or apparent incompatibilities appear, or where actual degeneration occurs, and the hope of regeneration becomes remote.
Bereavement was the second shape in which the fact of frustration most often came home to me. Hundreds of times I have spoken to people in the moment of the last leave-taking. The usual consolations, aside from those that depend on mythological beliefs, are: Submit to the inevitable; clinch your teeth and face the storms of fate. Remember the debt you owe to the living. There is work that remains for you to do. See to it that you do not by excessive grieving destroy your capacity for work. Instead of indulging in sorrow for your own loss, take upon yourself the sorrows of others. In particular it is uplifting for one who has been more severely afflicted to take upon himself the sorrow of those whose burden is lighter. Be grateful for what you have possessed. Think not so much of what you have lost, as of what you were privileged for a season to call your own. Make the virtues of those who are no longer living a force for good in your own life. Paint the portrait of your friend incessantly. Retouch it. Eliminate what was of merely transient value in him. Remember him in the light of his best qualities, and live so as to be able to endure his purified glance. Or, in the case of those whose lives were stained, seek to expiate their faults in your life. Purify and perpetuate them in this way in yourself. Memory is not a mere passive receptacle, it is rather a creative faculty. Let it play upon the lives that are no longer sensibly present, and thus maintain the connection with them. A friend living across the sea, whom you will never see again, may yet be a living presence for you if you continue by the aid of memory to be in communication with him. In the case of the departed, likewise, their effectual influence may remain none the less real.
These various modes of consolation have each a certain value. To the one last mentioned I attach the greatest value. Bereavement is a challenge for a fresh start in spiritual development. It should not mean putting up with the second best, but reaching out toward first best. The object to be achieved by the ethical teacher on such occasions is to help the bereaved to tie anew the threads that have been sundered, or rather to substitute a more ethereal but firmer tie for the contacts mediated by the senses. But this task of the reweaving of ties, spiritually, not sensibly, depends entirely for its success upon a spiritual conception of personality. And if this be lacking, the attempt is hopeless. Frustration itself must be recognized as partial if it is to lead beyond itself. There must be found in man that which cannot be defeated if the defeat is not to be accepted as final.
A third kind of frustration was brought home to me by the problem of specialization, as it presented itself in the course of my efforts to work out an ethical theory true to the facts of life. To discharge competently my own special function, I saw that I ought to be acquainted with the best ethical thought of the past. This meant an exhaustive study of the philosophical systems of which the ethical thought of the philosophers is the fruit. I ought further to be familiar with the great religions, in which so much of the ethical insight of mankind is incorporated. I ought to acquaint myself with the moral history of mankind in so far as it is accessible, including that of the primitive races. I ought to gain a survey of the variations of moral opinion that have so staggered belief in the possibility of ethical truth. I ought to master at least the general principles of the physical and biological sciences, since it is impossible that the first principles of ethics should not be related to the governing principles that obtain in other departments of knowledge. I ought in addition to master in their ethical aspect the economic and political problems of the present day, as well as the psychology of individual and social life, in order to be able to apply with some degree of competence the directives of ethics to actual conduct. There are in addition other subjects, such as jurisprudence, poetry and the fine arts, that have ultimate relation to ethics, and that may not safely be neglected. Behold, then, the problem of specialism in one of its most appalling forms. For how can any one individual hope to adequately fill out such a programme? And what I have said is but my own personal illustration of a general problem that more and more besets every reflective person in our time. And it is a problem that has direct bearings upon the question of human personality. The personality is not a detached and isolated thing. It is a center that radiates out in every possible direction, and depends for the release of its energy on the influences received in turn from all directions. On the one hand, to have a footing at all in reality one must be a specialist, and the fields of specialism are becoming more and more restricted. To know one thing well is the indispensable condition of the sense of mastery, yes, of self-respect. And yet it seems to be becoming increasingly clear that one cannot really master a single specialty without knowing of other specialties whatsoever is related to one’s own. Narrowness, and loss of power, and consequent decay of the special function itself, seems the one alternative. Dilettantism, the other. But again I ask, who can actually fill out such a programme? The frustration of effort thus appears, in its intellectual guise, as one more manifestation of that general fact of frustration which we meet with wherever we turn.[18]
On the side of character the same reflections occur. Unity in the direction of distinctiveness or uniqueness is the end and aim. But instead of unity of character, conflict of inner tendencies, ever-recurrent rupture of provisional harmonies, a duality of self or multiplicity of selves, are the facts attested by one’s inner experience. And frustration here, at the core of a man’s being, is perhaps more painful and more seemingly contradictory of the very ideal and purpose of ethical development than in any of the forms previously recorded.
The last instance of frustration that I will mention appears in connection with the cosmic relation of our race. The thought of the death of the individual may be overcome by the idea of perpetuity in the lives of successors. The death of the human race, its eventual extinction, is capable of no such assured compensation. We are ethical beings, committed to the pursuit of an ideal end, yet the cosmic conditions are such as to make the end unattainable within the limits of a finite world. This unattainableness of the end it is true is the very ground and foundation of the supersensible interpretation of ethical experience. Yet this thought itself can only be made good by a positive interpretation of personality (of the spiritual nature), which we are yet to seek. As viewed empirically, the human generations are but accidents of nature, waves on the sea of life, passing shadows. And viewing ourselves in this manner our self-respect goes to pieces. The idea of obligation vanishes. Man’s claim to infinite worth is bitterly mocked. Unless we can reach the spiritual view of life, the frustration of purpose in the large, that is, of humanity as a whole, is final.
These then, summarily stated, are the problems with which an ethical philosophy of life has to deal.
1. How to remedy the belittlement of man, the infinitesimal insignificance of him as a creature of time and space, when compared with the immensities of the world around him—its spatial and temporal immensities. What is man in the presence of these myriads of worlds, of this unending procession of time that he should attribute to himself significance, nay, worth? Is he perhaps an infinitesimal member of an Infinite?—preserving in this way the sense of his littleness, and of the vastness that bears down upon him, and yet maintaining himself irrefragably at his station, as indispensable to the perfection of the whole.
2. How to discover a way of retaining the connection between man and the lower forms of life that preceded him, not doing violence to the facts which the evolutionists have brought out, and yet at the same time assuring man’s spiritual distinction? Does he perhaps possess in his ethical nature a window, so to speak, through which he can catch at least a glimpse of the ultimate reality, of the infinite life which is the real life, behind the picture screen of sea and mountain, plants and animals?
3. How to overcome the various types of frustration mentioned above: frustration on its intellectual side, or the reconciliation of specialist efficiency with breadth and relatedness; frustration on the character side.
Frustration in the social relations, as in marriage, or as in the case of defective children.
Frustration through bereavement, or the privation suffered by the going out of our life of lives with which we are inseparably connected by ethical as well as affectional ties.
Frustration in the attempt to carry out projects of social betterment; on what moral ground to assert the possible moral value of life in the slums today, and at the same time to put forth and to stimulate the most assiduous efforts to abolish the slum; on what grounds to affirm that the best life is possible under the worst conditions, and yet not to cease or for an instant relax the effort to change the conditions.
The problem of how to support and console the wretched multitudes of mankind in the interval that must elapse before the reform of conditions can take real effect; the problem of support and consolation in fatal sickness, on the deathbed, and in the harrowing recollection of irremediable and irrevocable wrong done to others; the problem raised by the prospective extinction, or the possible old age and degeneration before extinction of mankind—all these problems should be taken together, not one, for instance the so-called social problem, accentuated, leaving the rest out of sight. From one peg they all hang, on one cardinal idea they all depend—the idea of personality as positively defined, of the holy thing as not merely inviolable without regard to its content, but inviolable because of a certain positive content. The ascription of worth to man, in this sense, is the fundamental problem of all, and to the full discussion of this we shall turn in the constructive part of the volume which is now to follow.
BOOK II
PHILOSOPHICAL THEORY
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTORY REMARKS: CRITIQUE OF KANT
I begin my statement of the ethical ideal with a critique of Kant. The reason for this is that Kant stands forth preëminent among all philosophers as the one who emphatically asserts that the attribute of inviolability attaches to every human being, in his formula that every man is to be treated as an end per se, and never to be used as a mere tool by others. The formula as thus worded by him is subject to grave objections which will be dealt with later on. But the grand conception of the moral worthwhileness of all men is specially connected with the name of Kant. Did he succeed, on the basis of his system, in establishing this conception? He seems to make it the corner-stone of his ethics. Is the corner-stone secure?
Referring again to my individual development, I should find it difficult to express how much Kant’s Metaphysik der Sitten and Kritik der praktischen Vernunft at one time meant to me.
The one ethical fact of which I was so to speak perfectly assured, the “inviolability” so often mentioned in previous chapters, is extremely hard to justify to the thinking mind. The empirical school of philosophers scoff at the very notion of it. The practice of the world is a perpetual, painful evidence of the small attention paid to it, and even idealistic philosophers from Plato down have found it quite possible to construct quasi-ethical systems based on the idea, not of human equality, but of the inferiority of the greater number. In Kant, however, one encounters an epoch-making philosopher who not only accepts as a fact the idea of inviolability, and of the kind of equality that goes with it, but who undertakes to set it forth in such a manner as to command the assent of the reason. For a long time I believed that he had succeeded in his great enterprise; and it was only after years of discipleship, not indeed without suppressed misgivings, that I began to see that I had been mistaken.
My eyes were opened when I realized certain extremely questionable moral consequences to which his doctrine led him: for instance, his unspeakable theory of marriage, his defense of capital punishment, the stiff individualism of his system, and his failure to establish an instrumental connection between the empirical goods, of wealth, culture, and the like, and the supreme good or supreme end as defined by him. I was forced by these unsound conclusions to ask myself whether the foundations of the system are sound. Surely if it is true of any system of thought, it is true of an ethical system that it must be judged by its fruits. The Kantian system is indeed vastly impressive, and even sublime in some of its aspects. We travel on the road along which Kant leads with a certain sense of exaltation, but when at the end of our journey we find that we have reached a goal at which we cannot consent to abide, it is imperative to inquire whether the point of departure was well taken.
The point of departure in Kant’s exposition is the existence in all men of a sense of duty. Moral relations subsist only between moral beings. All men possess a sense of duty,—therefore all men are moral beings, therefore all are morally equal,—therefore no one may be used as a mere tool for the benefit of others, but is to be treated as worth while on his own account. Thus runs the argument.
The sense of duty is the consciousness of being bound to render implicit obedience to a categorical imperative. Our rational nature tells us categorically what is right to do. Our rational nature issues absolute commands. The sense of duty is man’s response to them. Kant does not for a moment imply that either he or anyone else has ever adequately obeyed. The moral dignity, the moral equality of men, does not depend on the obedience but on the consciousness of the obligation to obey—on acknowledged subjection to the command. The actual moral performances of some men are certainly better than those of others; but of no one, not even of the best of men, can it be shown that the moral principle in its purity, that is, unadulterated by baser incentives, was ever the actuating motive of his conduct. The different members of the human species differ morally in degree, but are of the same moral kind, being distinguished from the lower animals not because they obey the moral law, but because they recognize the obligation to obey it. This sort of consciousness may be dim in some, but it exists in all. The most brutal murderer is dimly aware of the holy law which he has transgressed.
The great dictum of the universal moral equality of mankind is thus made to depend on an assumed fact. If this fact can be successfully disputed, the dictum itself is imperilled. It has been disputed, not flippantly, but most seriously, and it is in my opinion obnoxious to fatal objections. I do not indeed believe it possible to establish the negative, to wit, that the sense of duty does not lurk somewhere, is not latent somewhere in the consciousness of persons morally the most obtuse; but I hold it to be impossible to prove the affirmative, to wit, that a sense of duty does exist in all human beings, even in the most degraded. Kant’s dictum of equality depends on making good the affirmative proposition, but this he has failed to do.
One circumstance especially which at first sight seems favorable to Kant’s contention turns against him. He has been assailed on the ground that his categorical imperative is a fiction, that no such an imperative plays a rôle in the actual experience of men. On the contrary, the actual experience of men is replete with categorical imperatives. Nothing in the life of man plays a greater rôle than these imperatives. The danger that threatens Kant’s demonstration is due to the number of rival categoricals that compete with his, and from which the one he sets up is not with certainty distinguishable. To put the matter simply, what is called in technical language a categorical imperative is nothing else than a way of acting somehow felt by the individual to be obligatory upon him, whether he likes it or dislikes it. It is a constraint in which he is bound to acquiesce, a public rule of some sort which overrides his private propensities.
Constraints of this sort are numerous. Many of them no one would think of designating as moral. Some are distinctly antimoral. I will mention a few:—for instance, the rules of behavior derived from the tabu notion. Certain kinds of food may not be eaten; certain objects like the Ark of the Covenant in David’s time may not be touched.[19] Strict tabus obtain in regard to marriage such as the rules of endogamy and exogamy. Certain persons may not even be looked at. A feeling of horror is felt toward those who transgress these rules; and the transgression of them is often considered far more reprehensible than a moral sin. It would evidently be absurd to characterize a Hottentot or a Fiji Islander as the moral equal of a civilized man on the ground that, like the latter, he possesses the sense of duty, consisting in his case of an unquestioning acknowledgment of the categorical imperative of tabus.
Gang loyalty is another instance in point. In one of our prisons a certain convict is at present paying the penalty of a crime which was really committed by one of his pals. He could have got off scot free if he had “squealed.” But “squealing” is contrary to the honor code of the gang and he preferred to sacrifice his liberty rather than prove recreant to the claims of gang loyalty. There are some writers who hold that this is an instance of morality, genuine as far as it goes, but restricted within too narrow a circle. The fact that it is restricted within too narrow a circle, that fidelity to a few is compatible with violent hostility against the community at large, seems to me to prove that the moral quality is absent. Morality is either universal or nothing. Gang loyalty is a social phenomenon, but not an ethical phenomenon. The distinction between the two terms will be enforced later on. In any event the sense of constraint is manifest. The moral character of the constraint I deny.
Another example of an imperative which is categorical enough but at the same time non-ethical is furnished by Darwin’s well-known explanation of the original of conscience. He assumes that certain ways of behaving which our ancestors found to be socially useful, have become registered as it were in our organisms, and constitute a kind of race-consciousness which persists in each individual. This latent consciousness is potent as a tendency, though often not masterful enough to repress the recalcitrant egoistic impulses. A conflict ensues. The deep ingrained tendency makes itself felt. And as social beings we are aware that we ought to side with it. But the egoistic impulses break out on the surface of consciousness and vehemently urge us in the opposite direction. The feeling of obligation, and thereafter of remorse, are the record of the inner struggle. I do not here undertake to discuss at length the truth of Darwin’s theory. There are a number of weak spots in it, to which I shall merely allude in passing. First, he speaks of acts found to be socially useful in primitive communities. Is it possible to show that the same or similar acts retain their utility in a developed industrial society like that of the present day? Is not the term “socially useful” extremely vague, and can the notion implied in it be expanded without the assistance of a truly ethical principle?[20] Then again, why should the thing called social utility overawe the individual mind and thwart individual purpose? Why should not the daring egotist affirm his right to be and flourish in the present hour, in the teeth of social utility? It will be said that the claims are insistent, that the tendency is ingrained, that it has become instinctive in him, and that he cannot release himself from the control it exercises over him. But instincts can be weakened and in time extinguished, like the fear of the dark, when the absence of an objective cause is recognized. Why should not the altruistic impulse likewise, by the method of Freudian analysis, if you please, be exposed to the light, and the egotist thereby be enabled to disembarrass himself of the interference of dead ancestors in his life purposes, and to proceed on his way undisturbed by any inward qualms?
These examples serve to illustrate the point with which we are here concerned, namely, that the presence and operation of undoubted constraints does not establish the existence in all men of the sense of duty on which Kant founds universal moral equality. Kant would indeed object that all these so-called constraints or imperatives are hypothetical, and not really categorical. By an hypothetical imperative he understands one in which the command depends upon an “if”—if there be invisible spirits such as primitive men imagined, then the rules of tabu follow. If the safety of the gang is an object of commanding interest, then gang loyalty is obligatory. If the preservation and prosperity of human society in general (a society superior to that of ants and of bees indeed but like them a product of nature and not radically distinct from them) be regarded as the supreme end of desire and endeavor, then the rules of social behavior are to be obeyed. But, he would say, none of these objects are fit to rank so high. They all are optional ends. An hypothetical imperative is one in which the end pursued is optional, the imperative extending only to the means. If the end be desired, then it is reasonable, and in so far imperative, that we adopt the means that lead to its attainment. An imperative truly categorical, however, is one in which the obligation extends to the end proposed as well as to the means. It is not left to our inclination to embrace or to refuse the end, it being of such a kind as absolutely to constrain us to accept it.
But if this be so, then in this first part of our criticism we turn upon Kant and declare that he has nowhere given us reason to believe that the acceptance of an absolute end is implied in the kind of constraints to which the generality of men submit. And again if such acceptance cannot be proved, then the universal moral equality of men based by him on the presence in all of the sense of duty disappears, and his lofty ethical structure breaks down at this point.
CHAPTER II
CRITIQUE OF KANT (Continued)
I now proceed to the second point of criticism, which strikes at the heart of Kant’s ethics. Man according to Kant is worth while on his own account (an end per se), never to be used as a mere tool or thing. He is a person, an object towards whom we are bound to evince absolute respect. Yet Kant immediately goes on to say that there is no object in all the world, neither man nor any other, that is worth while on its own account, that deserves such respect. Kant’s views of actual human nature are tinged with somber pessimism. (Compare the chapter on Radical Evil in his Religion Within the Limits of Pure Reason.) A strange paradox is thus presented to us. Man is to be accepted as a worth while object, and yet there is no worth while object. How does Kant seek to escape from this predicament? He says, not the man primarily, but something that happens in the man, is supremely significant: certain acts are worth while on their own account,—the agent only in so far as he performs such acts (or, let us add with a sigh, as he tries to perform them)—namely, acts which have as their sole motive respect for universal law. Then he informs us that similar processes occur in other agents, in fellow human beings, or, more precisely, that these others are capable of trying to act as I myself feel bound to try to act. Consider how far fetched is the argument, on what wavering foundations has been placed the ethical pronouncement of human worth and human equality in which our interest is so profoundly engaged. We do wish to be assured of this cardinal truth. No other truth is practically and theoretically of greater importance. As against the iniquitous practices of the world, as against the exploitation of labor, as against the degradation of woman, as against political tyranny whether exercised by kings or by mobs, we raise up for our shield the indefeasible worth of men—not of some men but of all men. And now, behold! the thinker to whom we owe the forcible expression of this truth seems to have left it in the air. I scrutinize my neighbors, and find in their behavior no sure sign of real worth. I fall back on myself and I discover what? The idea of an act which, if I could perform it, would stand on its own merits (would be self-justified). I then find that I am bound to try to perform such acts. I cannot affirm that in a single instance I have ever performed such an act. I next infer—on what tenuous ground has been shown in the last chapter—that my fellow-beings have the same inner experience as mine. And it is for this reason that by a circuitous inference I declare them to be worth while objects.
That Kant has formulated a truth of the utmost importance for mankind (that no man is to be treated as a mere tool), seems to me incontestable. That he has not made good his own proposition is my contention, and that the whole problem must therefore be taken up de novo. It will assist us in doing so to expose the flaw in his categorical imperative, or the formal principle of universality and necessity applied to human actions, which in his view imprints upon them the character of absolute rightness.
Note that Kant approaches the problems of ethics from the side of physical science, and with the bias of the physical scientist. The ethical principle he sets up, the bare idea of universal necessity or of law in general, is derived by way of abstraction from the particular laws of nature. It is a physical principle in disguise. To understand Kant’s system, it is simply indispensable to keep this point in mind. He was pre-occupied during the major portion of his life with profound speculations on scientific subjects. The title of the Critique of Pure Reason might not be inappropriately changed into “A treatise on the fundamental assumptions of science, as handled by Newton and his successors.” He was undeniably interested in ethics. His ultimate aim was to clear the way for the confident holding of ethical principles. (See the Preface to the Critique of Pure Reason.) But he could not divest himself of the prejudice of his temperament and of his lifelong pursuit. He is not singular in this respect. To borrow the first principle of ethics from some other field is a common and apparently ineradicable error. Mechanics, æsthetics, and recently biology, have been laid under contribution for this purpose. A consistent attempt to study ethical phenomena on their own ground, to mark off what is really distinctive in the data of ethical experience, and then to search for some principle which shall serve to give a coherent account of them, has to my knowledge never yet been undertaken. Always ethics has been treated as an annex to some other discipline. Always we behold the attempt to assimilate before the distinctive traits and characteristics have been carefully investigated. Never yet has the independence of this wonderful aspect of human nature been truly acknowledged. Kant indeed freed ethics from its long tutelage to theology; but he left it still in subjection, subject to his own favorite study, physical science.
But though the notion of necessity, together with that of universality, which he derived from physics was employed by him as a fundamental principle of rightness in conduct, the principle itself insensibly, and as it would seem unbeknown to himself, underwent a remarkable change in the course of his undertaking to give it a new application. The following brief comments will serve to elucidate this point.
In physics, whenever an antecedent phenomenon has been exactly described, and a sequent phenomenon is defined in the same fashion, the connection is pronounced to be necessary—as for instance the transformation of mechanical energy into heat, and conversely. A single carefully guarded experiment may suffice to establish the necessary nexus between two phenomena. And after having established the necessity, we are confident of the universality. If exceptions should occur and contravene the supposed law, the calculations or the observations are to be corrected. But never in physical science do we start from universality and predict necessity therefrom. Kant in his ethics invariably couples together the two terms Universal and Necessary. But he reverses the procedure of science, he begins with the universality and thereupon affirms the necessity.
Universality is for him the test of moral necessity. If an act can be universalized, the performance of it, according to him, is morally necessary. For instance, the question is asked, Is it right to kill? Look at the act of killing, says Kant, and see whether it can be universalized, that is to say, whether if everybody felt at liberty to kill, the act of the murderer would or would not be self-defeating? He kills in order to affirm his life at the expense of another’s. If his action were to be generally imitated, his own life would be forfeit, or at least in danger, and he would be annulling what he intends to affirm. Hence murder is morally wrong: to sacredly respect the life of others is right.
But not only is the order reversed, so that necessity follows on the heels of universality, but the very meaning of the term necessity is altered. A logical necessity is substituted for a physical necessity. The idea of necessity as handled by physical science denotes the connection between one thing and something else. It is not the thing itself but its relation to some other thing that is necessary. It is not the phenomenon A nor the phenomenon B, in the case of a cause and its effect, that is declared to be necessary, but the sequence of B on A, the circumstance that B is tied up to A, must follow in its wake. But the term Necessity as used by Kant in his Ethics, denotes a relation of a thing to itself. It is in fact equivalent to self-consistency, which is a logical notion derived from the principle of self-identity. A is A, and it is not thinkable that it should be non-A. Similarly Kant says: If a man desires to affirm his life, that is, to be self-preserving, it is not thinkable, it would not be rational or logical on his part, to perform an act which would be self-defeating. Kant does not say that a man might not irrationally take another man’s life, regardless of the consequences to himself; he says that as a rational intelligence acting on purely logical motives he could not do so.[21] To repeat, then, physical necessity is a relation of one thing to another thing: the logical necessity involved in self-consistency is a relation of a thing to itself.
My next contention, and this touches the root of the matter, is that the notion of end is incompatible with self-consistency as the paramount principle in ethics. For a self-consistent rational being is a being in harmony with himself, one who if this harmony should in some unaccountable way ever be broken would by his own endeavor seek to return to himself. (Kant declares that the morality of any one man cannot be affected by his fellows, by any influence from the outside; it must be his own act.) But an end presupposes some outside object as a means: means and ends are inseparable correlatives. On the other hand, an entity which merely affirms itself, or if somehow alienated from self endeavors without assistance from beyond its sphere to return to itself, is no true end at all, and cannot be designated as such. It is no end because it employs no means.
What warrant then has Kant for introducing the foreign notion of end into a world of pure self-consistency? When we use the term Necessity in relation to physical phenomena, as of cause and effect, we assert unalterable sequence, unity of temporal and spatial differentiæ. When we use the same term as Kant uses it, we assert the unity of a thing with itself. But this in the nature of the case does not admit the intrusion of the alien concept of the outside. The spiritual society or pattern to which human society ought to be conformed, is according to Kant a society of ends, of ends per se. This is his great pronouncement. But the very idea on which he lays so much stress, the idea of end, on closer scrutiny of his premises disappears. The entities composing that society are self-sufficing, and moreover intrinsically unrelated to each other. Rational self-preservation is the only character that can be predicated of any of them.
I have laid stress on the fact that Kant derived his ethical principle from his physics. The passage in which he speaks of the ethical order as a universal and necessary order like that of nature is to my mind conclusive. I now urge in addition that this sort of second nature superimposed upon existing nature would not have to our contemplating minds a dignity superior to that of physical nature. The moral order as thus exhibited would not possess the worth we attribute to it as exalted above what is called the natural order. The falling stone is a perfect illustration of physical necessity. Necessity passed through human consciousness, or bathed in human consciousness, is not on that account a more eligible principle. Nay, since human consciousness interferes and causes contingent actions, due to passion, appetite, etc., the moral order constructed by men should be even less worth while than the physical order of nature, if indeed necessity be the touchstone of worth.[22]
To summarize: according to Kant man as an object is unfit to warrant the claim of unconditional obligation on the part of others toward himself. An abstract principle must be sought. This principle is universality, and necessity based on universality. Respect for this purely abstract notion is that which alone imparts a moral quality to so-called moral acts. We start, according to Kant, with the declaration that man is an end per se. But we reject him as an object, and take refuge in a formal principle. We then assume that every human being is conscious of the working within himself of this formal principle and acknowledges his subjection to it, whether he is able to analyze it out or not. And thus indirectly we derive out of emptiness a ray of glory which we allow to fall upon each and every man.
The question now is, since this approach to the ethical problem manifestly fails, must we not begin at the opposite end, and take the attribution of worth to men, however unworthy they may actually be, as our starting-point?