We have heard much of late years—and rightly—of the exploitation of women by men. Let us not celebrate our growing enfranchisement by becoming ourselves the exploiters; and that, not of men, but of babes.
IV
THE TRUE BASIS OF MORALITY
"Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever fixed mark
That looks on tempests, and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out ev'n to the edge of doom:—
If this be error, and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved."
W. Shakespeare.
"He that committeth fornication sinneth against his own body.
What? know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy
Ghost which is in you, which ye have of God, and ye are not
your own?" (I. Cor. vi., 18-19.)
I said in an earlier chapter that I wanted to find a moral standard which should be based on the realities of human nature, and in order to do that we must first have a clear idea of what human nature really is, and by what law it lives. We have been passing during the last generation from an idea of law which belonged to our forefathers to a new idea of law which has been given to us by modern science; and in transition we still talk in ambiguous terms about "law"—moral "law," for instance—confusing ourselves between a law that is imposed on us from outside, a law that is passed by Parliament, for instance, or a law that has been the common custom of the country through its judges, and that kind of "law" which science has revealed to us. Scientific "law" is not imposed from without; it is the law of our being. When you talk of the "law" of gravitation, you do not mean that somebody outside has laid it down that mass shall act in a certain way with regard to other masses; you mean that mass-material—being what it is—behaves in a certain way. That is to say, a scientific law is the law of being of that which obeys the law. It obeys it because it is its nature to do so. If we could get a firm, hold of that idea of law, our own legislation would not be so senseless as it often is; for we should try to discover what is the nature of human beings—their real nature, about which we are often deceived—and we should try to make our laws, including our moral laws, those to which human nature, at its best, would most naturally and fully respond. That is the conception that is at the back of the great phrase which sounds like a paradox in one of the Collects of the English Prayer Book: "Whose service is perfect freedom." "Whose service is perfect freedom"; that is to say, when you obey God, you find perfect freedom because you are doing what it is your true nature to do. And that is why I want to base our moral law, our moral standard, on the realities of human nature. But, you will reply, when people are free to act as they choose they sometimes choose to violate their own nature. I cannot say how that happens; it involves the entire problem of evil; and I do not propose even to attempt to deal with it in this book. I will only say that our confusion has arisen, as I think, out of the very fact that instead of obeying the law of our being we have violated it; and now are so confused that we hardly know what "human nature" really is, or of what it is capable. That is why we get such extraordinarily different ideas about morals, and why, as I think, we get such arbitrary judgments on human beings.
Before, then, we can rightly establish our moral standard we have to decide what human nature really is, and when we have done that we shall know what is really moral. I suppose that sounds like a paradox to many, because they think that morality is always "going against" human nature. If people do anything that is generally called "immoral," they will excuse themselves on the grounds of human nature; they will say: "After all, human nature being what it is, you must expect this, that and the other kind of licence and immorality"; and to say that morality, real morality, can only be based on the realities of human nature will therefore sound to many of you the wildest kind of paradox. But I want to pursue it just as though it were true, because I believe it is true.
What, then, are the realities of our nature? Here is one: a human being is not and never can be cut off from other human beings. He is not alone. He cannot consider himself only. If he does so he violates his own nature, because it is not his nature to be alone, and he cannot act without his actions affecting other people. He cannot think, he cannot feel, he cannot act or speak without affecting other people, and it is futile for anyone to say: "It does not matter to others what I do; nobody knows; it concerns only myself." Your innermost thought affects the whole world in which you live, and whatever moral standard you are going to adopt, you must take it for granted that your standard will affect other people, and that it is absolutely impossible for you to act or think alone.
And then human beings are three-fold in nature. They have a body, a mind—or what St. Paul calls a "soul"—and a spirit. "Soul" is a word whose meaning we have altered so much that I must define what I mean by it and what I think St. Paul meant by it. The soul includes the emotions and the intellect, that part of a man which is not wholly physical and which is not entirely spiritual. Everyone has a soul. And every one of you, however much you ignore your body, however much you may tell me your body does not really exist, have got a body too. You have to eat and drink and sleep, just like the most material alderman, though you may eat less. And you cannot base a real moral standard on the pretence that you have not got a body. You are, on one side of your nature, physical, material, animal; but you have got a mind and emotions or "soul"; and you have got a spirit. To act as though you had not is just as futile as to pretend that you have not got a body. "Where there is no vision the people perish." "Mankind is incurably religious." "All the world seeks after God." Those proverbs, those sayings, which are familiar to all, crystallize the world's experience that human beings are spiritual beings. If there is any person who thinks that he is merely an intellect and a body, I will direct the attention of that intellect of his away from himself to the race, and I will remind him that practically no race in the world has ever been entirely without the sense of God; that, however hard men try, they have never been able to cure humanity of its spiritual hunger; that though our gods are often gross and earthy, even diabolical, yet they are spiritual, and they are the proof that man is spiritually aware; that he is a spirit as well as a body and a soul. Now I say that anyone who tries to base his morality on the assumption that he is only a body, or only an intelligence, or only a spirit, has got a false standard, and his morality is a dishonest kind of morality. The body will avenge itself on those who ignore it. Psychologists are teaching us that the mind will avenge itself on those who ignore it. And this is just as true of the spirit. Where there is no vision the people do perish. Your spiritual nature avenges itself on those who try to rule it out. Base your morality either on the exclusion of any part of your being, or on the assumption that what you do concerns yourself alone; and you will find that you are violating human nature. It is useless for you to act wrongly and to affirm that you do it "because human nature is what it is." When you do so, you are assuming that human nature is not what it is; that is to say you assume that it is purely physical, when, in fact, it is three-fold—body, soul and spirit. You can see for yourselves, I think, how this violation of human nature works itself out. For animals promiscuity is not wrong. When they treat themselves as purely animals they are basing their moral standard, if I may put it so, on bed-rock; they are animals, and therefore they behave as animals without violating any law of their being. As they rise higher in the scale of evolution their morals become nobler. There are moral standards among the lower animals, but they remain at a certain level, and rightly so. No animal is harmed by behaving like an animal, for in doing so he obeys the law of his being; but if human beings behave as though they were animals, what happens? They find to their horror that they have let loose upon the world detestable, hideous and devastating diseases. Do you think that medicine will ever be able to rid the world of what are called the diseases of immorality as long as immorality remains? I do not believe it. I know that you can do much for individual sufferers, though you cannot do one-tenth part of what doctors thought they were going to be able to do, eight or nine years ago. And, of course, whatever we can do, we must and ought to do. But we do not reach the root of the matter by medicine.