To Bernard Shaw, the universe is God in the act of making Himself. At the back of the universe, according to his mystical conception, there is a great purpose, a great will. This force behind the universe is bodiless and impotent, without executive power of its own; after innumerable tentatives—experiments and mistakes—the force has succeeded in changing inert matter into the amœba, the amœba into some more complex organism; this again into something still more complex, and finally has evolved a man, with hands and a brain to accomplish the work of the Will. Man is not the ultimate aim of the Life Force, but only a stage in the scale of evolution. The Life Force will go still further and produce something more complicated than Man, that is, the Superman, then the Angel, the Archangel, and last of all an omnipotent and omniscient God.[240]
Shaw has startled and shocked many people during his lifetime by asserting vehemently that he was an atheist.[241] And so indeed he is, if orthodoxy connotes belief in the early-Victorian God of cruelty and barbarity—the Almighty Fiend of Shelley's characterization. The idea of God as a cruel Designer, vindictive in punishment of the unbeliever, then held full sway.
“Neither science on the one hand, nor the moral remonstrances of Shelley and his school on the other, were able to shake the current belief in that old theology that came back to the old tribal idol, Jehovah.” Then came Darwin with his theory of natural selection, involving the corollary that all the operations of the species can be accounted for without consciousness, intelligence or design. After rapturously embracing Darwinism for six weeks, Samuel Butler turned upon Darwin and rent him—he had discovered that Darwin had actually banished mind from the universe.[242] Butler saw clearly that natural selection had no moral significance, that it did away not only with the necessity for purpose and design in the universe, but actually with the necessity for consciousness.
Philosophically and scientifically, Shaw derives directly from Schopenhauer, Lamarck and Butler. He recognizes purpose and will in the world because he is himself conscious of purpose and will. Woman brings children into the world, not for herself or for her husband, but to fulfil the end in view of which the Life Force has created her. Man produces great works just as woman brings men into the world, with travail and pain; man is continually engaged in doing things which do not benefit him. He works just as hard when there is no chance of profit as when there is. Shaw, then, is a confirmed Neo-Lamarckian in the view that “where there's a will there's a way.” Just as Lamarck, with his theory of functional adaptation, virtually maintained that living organisms changed because they wanted to, so Shaw believes that there is a purpose in the universe; identifies his own purpose with it, and makes the achievement of that purpose an act, not of self-sacrifice for himself, but of self-realization. In Shaw's view, Schopenhauer's treatise on the World as Will is the complement to Lamarck's natural history; for Will is the driving force of Lamarckian evolution.[243]
Bernard Shaw's religion is the expression of his faith in Life and in the Will. He regards man as divine because, actually, he is the last effort of the Will to realize itself as God. And yet he does not believe in the doctrine of personal immortality. “I have a strong feeling that I shall be glad when I am dead and done for—scrapped at last to make room for somebody better, cleverer, more perfect than myself,” Mr. Shaw once remarked to me. “This, I believe, is the clue to my views on immortality. The idea of personal salvation is intensely repugnant to me when it is not absurd. Imagine Roosevelt, the big brute, preserving his personality in a future state and swaggering about as a celestial Rough Rider! Or imagine me in heaven, giving forth all sorts of epigrams and paradoxes, startling Saint Peter with my iconoclasm, being paragraphed in the Eternal Herald and cartooned in the Æon Review! No, I think the trouble has come about through imagining that there are only two attributes—eternal life and utter extinction at death. I believe neither of these theories to be correct. Life continually tends to organize itself into higher and better forms. There is no such thing as personal immortality; and death, as Weismann says, is only a means of economizing life. The vital spark, the Life principle within us, goes on in spite of personal annihilation.
“As I told Mrs. Besant the other night,” he added, “I am looking for a race of men who are not afraid to die.”
A popular error into which many able critics fall is involved in the oft-repeated assertion that Shaw derives his philosophy directly from Ibsen, Strindberg, Stirner and Nietzsche. It is quite true that The Quintessence of Ibsenism might have been written by an ardent disciple of Nietzsche; and yet the first time Shaw ever heard Nietzsche's name was from a German mathematician, a Miss Borchardt, who had read Shaw's brochure on Ibsen, and who told him she knew where he had got it all. On being asked where, she replied “From Nietzsche's Jenseits von Gut und Böse.” Shaw at once understood and appreciated the title, and thereafter took an interest in Nietzsche; but he could not read much of the few English translations that were attempted except Thomas Common's book of selections; the German originals he never even attempted to read. “If all this talk about Schopenhauer and Nietzsche continues,” Shaw laughingly said to me one day, “I really will have to read their works, to discover just what we have in common. This habit of referring every idea of mine to Schopenhauer and Nietzsche comes about partly because, to people without philosophy, all philosophies seem the same, and partly because I have often referred to them to remind my readers that what they called my eccentricities and paradoxes are part of the common European stock.” As for Stirner, I have never heard Mr. Shaw mention Stirner. I recall no mention of Stirner in all of Shaw's works, and I have no reason to believe that Shaw is indebted to him in the slightest degree. It is quite true that, like Stirner, Shaw is an intellectual anarch; but he has no real sympathy for Stirner's “Eigentum,” for the reason that though Shaw is an individualist, he is likewise a constitutional collectivist. He sees no real conflict between Individualism and Socialism, and has actually given the striking definition: “Socialism is merely Individualism rationalized, organized, clothed and in its right mind.” Shaw has been accused of indebtedness to Strindberg also; the truth is, that he has all along been perfectly familiar with the idea of hatred of woman-idolization through the writings and conversation of Mr. Ernest Belfort Bax, whose essays attacking bourgeois morality were published before Strindberg, or Nietzsche, for that matter, had been heard of in England. But although Shaw has read very little of the marvellously prolific Strindberg, he admires him greatly, and once told me that he thought Strindberg would prove to be “the noblest Roman of us all.” Nietzsche's view of Christianity as a slave-morality was advanced in England by Mr. Stuart-Glennie, a Scotch historical philosopher, still living and much neglected, in what appealed to Shaw as a far more sensible way, Stuart-Glennie regarding it as the means by which the white races (the Supermen) enslaved the dark races and mean whites, while Nietzsche regarded it as an imposition by the slaves themselves.[244] Shaw, Stuart-Glennie and Bax are all Socialists; if “the physiologist of the mind” would seek to trace in Shaw's work early influences upon his philosophy, he must look for them in the works of Stuart-Glennie and Bax, rather than in the works of Nietzsche and Strindberg. And as for Shaw's strange complex of Socialism and individualism, I personally find it to be a mean between the extravagant individualism of Max Stirner, the intellectual anarchy of Elisée Reclus, and the practical collectivism of Jaurès and Vandervelde.
The English critics, however, continue to refer Shaw's philosophy to Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, “knowing nothing about them,” as Shaw says, “except that their opinions, like mine, are not those of the Times or the Spectator.” Indeed, Shaw is an unwilling impostor as a pundit in the philosophy of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. What, for example, could be more foreign to the Shavian philosophy than Nietzsche's repudiation of Socialism, his admiration of the Romans, or his notions about art? Shaw's Superman is mere man to Nietzsche; whilst Nietzsche's Superman is God to Shaw. “Nietzsche's erudition I believe to be all nonsense,” Shaw recently remarked to me. “I think he was academic in the sense of having a great deal of second-hand book-learning about him, and don't care for him except when he is perfectly original—that is, when he is dealing with matters which a peasant might have dealt with if he had brains enough, and had had the run of a library. You feel how clever and imaginative he is, and how much he has derived from writers of genius and from his own humanity about men and nations; but there is a want of actual contact knowledge about him; he is always the speculative university professor or the solitary philosopher and poet, never quite the worker and man of affairs or the executive artist in solid materials. It annoys me to see English writers absolutely ignoring the work of British thinkers, and swallowing foreign celebrities—whether philosophers or opera-singers—without a grain of salt. It shows an utter want of intellectual self-respect; and the result of it is that Nietzsche's views, instead of being added solely to the existing body of philosophy, are treated as if they were a sort of music-hall performance.”
Bernard Shaw is endowed with that persistent strain of British practicality which makes him employ philosophy as an instrumentality for the achievement of the purposes of life. In a word, Shaw is fundamentally an ethicist: philosophy to him means a guide for life. His metaphysic is basically moralistic, consisting of a series of postulates in respect to conduct.
In the manuscript of an unfinished work which Mr. Shaw once loaned to me, I discovered a notable passage which throws a flood of light upon Shaw's philosophy as an index to his entire life and career. Perhaps it may distil the quintessence of the Shavian philosophy: