“The man who is looking after himself is useless for revolutionary purposes. The man who believes he is only a fly on the wheel of Natural Selection, of Evolution, or Progress, or Puritanism, or 'some power not ourselves, that makes for righteousness' is not only useless, but obstructive. But the man who believes that there is a purpose in the universe, and 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: that is the effective man and the happy man, whether he calls the purpose the will of God, or Socialism, or the religion of humanity. He is the man who will combine with you in a fellowship, which he may call the fellowship of the Holy Ghost or you may call Democracy, or the Parliament of Man, or the Federation of the World, but which is a real working, and if need be fighting, fellowship for all that. He is the man who knows that nothing intelligent will be done until somebody does it, and who will place the doing of it above all his other interests.
“In short, we must make a religion of Socialism. We must fall back on our will to Socialism, and resort to our reason only to find out the ways and means. And this we can do only if we conceive the will as a creative energy, as Lamarck did; and totally renounce and abjure Darwinism, Marxism, and all fatalistic, penny-in-the-slot theories of evolution whatever.”
FOOTNOTES:
[227] Shaw's philosophy has many points of contact with the Pragmatism of Schiller and James. Shaw sees in truth and justice, not abstract principles external to man, but human passions, which have, in their time, conflicted with higher passions as well as with lower ones. With James he is at one in the belief that “Truth has its palæontology, and its 'prescription' and may grow stiff with years of veteran service and petrified in men's regard by sheer antiquity”; and with Schiller's “humanistic” doctrine that “to an unascertainable extent our truths are man-made products too.” To Shaw, as to James, “'the right' is only the expedient in the way of our behaving.”
[228] Giving the Devil His Due: a review, by Bernard Shaw, of Vols. I. and II. of the works of Friedrich Nietzsche. Supplement to the Saturday Review, May 13th, 1899.
[229] “'Is here,' someone will ask, 'an ideal being erected, or an ideal being broken down?' But have ye ever really asked yourselves sufficiently as to how dearly the erection of all ideals on earth were paid for? How much reality had to be slandered and misconceived for this purpose; how much falsehood sanctioned; how much conscience confused; how much 'God' sacrificed each time? In order that a sanctuary may be erected, a sanctuary must be broken down: this is the law—name me an instance in which it is violated!” Friedrich Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals, translated by William A. Hausemann, p. 122 (Macmillan).
[230] To take a single example, consult My Dream, from The Bab Ballads and Songs of a Savoyard, the first two stanzas of which read:
The other night, from cares exempt,
I slept—and what d'you think I dreamt?
I dreamt that somehow I had come
To dwell in Topsy-Turvydom.
Where vice is virtue—virtue, vice;
Where nice is nasty—nasty, nice;
Where right is wrong and wrong is right;
Where white is black and black is white.
[231] A Dramatic Realist to His Critics, in the New Review (London), July, 1894.
[232] This morality is no new thing under the sun; Maurice Maeterlinck has declared that our morality of to-day has nothing to add to this injunction, found in the Arabian Nights: “Learn to know thyself! And do thou not act till then. And do thou then only act in accordance with all thy desires, but having great care always that thou do not injure thy neighbour.”