I
If any lesson can be learned from history, which historians tell us is not the case, it would seem to be that what we call "goodness" is on the whole ineradicable. By goodness the race survives. Every one of us, struggle as he may, is constrained in his degree to be less bad than he might be. Many of us confess freely that we do not know why this is so. We do not know whether there is a moral law. If there is a moral law, we do not know whether its origin is transcendental and arbitrary, biological and definitely ascertainable, or social and fluctuating. Moreover we do not so much as know whether we are free agents, choosing continually between good and evil, or automata, feeling, to be sure, the stress of conflicting forces, but bound mathematically to follow the line of their compromise. We are of course comfortably able to ignore all these considerations in our everyday trains of thought. Just as the schoolboy learns to say parrotwise that the sun sits still and swings us round, though he sees him every evening descend to rest in New Jersey like a tired commuter; and just as the uncompromising idealist behaves exactly like the man who believes in the knowable reality of the world; so the most convinced determinist must act from morning to night as though he were a free agent, and must judge his fellowmen as though they too were choosers. Moreover almost all of us adopt instinctively some concrete reason for the choices we assume we are making. These reasons being inevitably partial and ludicrously incommensurate with the cosmic results that we hang upon them, are constantly in process of giving way under the strain. The so-called "religious" reasons land us in the position of having to give an immoral basis for morality. Either they involve the doctrine of a future life, and so vitiate the moral impulse with egoism at its source, or, with a diminished confidence in the sureness of reward, which is all to the good, they tend to perpetuate affirmations that have lost their meaning, which is all to the bad. It seems to have been on the whole a misfortune that religion and morality, which historically and logically have neither more nor less to do with each other than marriage and love, should have become profoundly associated in Europe in the last two thousand years. The most pressing duty of the moralist—and every man is a moralist—is to dissolve the merger, and there are circumstances connected with its origin which may lessen our estimate of the inconvenience involved in the dissolution. The mythology, cult, doctrine, exegesis and ethics of Christianity are considerably more Greek than Hebraic in origin, and the Greeks in their prime had excellent ways of their own of dealing with all these matters. They managed to be profoundly religious while avoiding the two pits into which the Hebrews fell, first, the confounding of myth with history, and, second, the erection of morals on a supernatural, jural and egoistic basis. Let us then consider the Greeks.