CHAPTER VI
CONCLUSION
The radical, when theorizing, considers man in the abstract. He forgets about actual conditions—man with his inequalities. The only thing necessary, in his view, for the reformation of society is to lay before mankind some logical plan of action. He loses sight of the fact that other influences, besides logic, play a part in the moulding of man’s conduct. Newman says teach men to shoot around corners and then you may hope to convert them by means of syllogisms. “One feels,” Emerson writes, “that these philosophers have skipped no fact but one, namely, life. They treat man as a plastic thing, or something that may be put up or down, ripened or retarded, molded, polished, made into solid or fluid or gas at the will of the leader.”[195] The radical sees the millenium dawning upon the land every time a new scheme is proposed for the amelioration of society. They do not apply any tests to determine its adaptability to the needs of the people. It satisfies the rules of logic and for them this is sufficient. Burke considers this point in his speech, “On Conciliation with America.” “It is a mistake to imagine that mankind follow up practically any speculative principle as far as it will go in argument and in logical illation. All government, indeed every human benefit and enjoyment, every virtue and every prudent act is founded on compromise and barter. We balance inconveniences; we give and take; we remit some rights that we may enjoy others. Man acts from motives relative to his interests; and not on metaphysical speculations.”
Shelley could not understand how it is that evils continue so pertinaciously to exist in society. He believed that men had but to will that there would be no evil and there would be none. It seemed to him that he could construct inside twenty-four hours a system of government and morals that would be perfect. “The science,” Burke writes, “of constructing a commonwealth, or renovating it, or reforming it, is, like every other experimental science not to be taught a priori. Nor is it a short experience that can instruct us in that practical science.... The science of government being therefore so practical in itself, and intended for such practical purposes, a matter which requires experience, and even more experience than any person can gain in his whole life, however sagacious and observing he may be, it is with infinite caution that any man ought to venture upon pulling down an edifice which has answered in any tolerable degree for ages the common purposes of society, or on building it up again without having models and patterns of approved utility before his eyes.”[196]
The radical does not distinguish between essentials and non-essentials. He sees some evils in connection with an institution and forthwith would wipe that institution out of existence. Garrison thought there was something in the constitution of the United States that sanctioned slavery and so he described the constitution as “a league with death and a covenant with hell.” As late as 1820 Shelley believed that “the system of society as it exists at present must be overthrown from the foundations with all its superstructures of maxims and of forms.”[197] He sees the evil and misses the good. The radical and the conservative both sin in this, that they take the cause of their adversaries not by its strong end, but by its weakest.
Imaginative people see a few things clearly, and on that account do not see the whole. Their attention is entirely taken up with a few details. Shelley had no connected view of the world. He has brilliant, perhaps exaggerated, pictures of parts of it. He picks out some misery here and some injustice there, and condemns the whole. Again, he does not offer a complete philosophy of life for us to follow. He takes a truth here and another there and deifies them, exaggerates them as he does pictures of the world. His thoughts were so vivid that they outshone the counsels of the more conservative. They impressed him so much that he could not see their limitations. Single views, a simple philosophy suited him. For this reason he made his guides and leaders those philosophers of the eighteenth century who discarded the tortuous philosophy of the past and put forward a simple recipe which was to bring light and happiness to the world.
Radicals do a great deal of good by shaking off our social torpor and disturbing our self-sufficient complacency. But they very often cause a great deal of harm, and then society has a perfect right to defend itself against them. If they ignore the past, if they disregard the wisdom of centuries, if they tend to subvert all that has been already done, they are not effecting the betterment of society, but its destruction. True reformers link themselves with the good already existing in society and war only against its evils. They will start with things as they are. Burke says that “the idea of inheritance furnishes a sure principle of conservation and a sure principle of transmission, without at all excluding a principle of improvement. It leaves acquisition free; but it secures what it acquires.... By preserving the method of nature in the conduct of the state, in what we improve we are never wholly new; in what we retain we are never wholly obsolete.” True, progress in all the arts and sciences requires a certain readiness to experiment with the unknown and try something new. Yet if that readiness be reckless, disaster will surely be the result. Desire to move forward must be moderate, must be harmonized with distrust of the unknown if real progress is to ensue.
To improve society we must understand it, and to do this we must recognize its positive value. The work of social reformers would be more effective if they had a better knowledge of existing laws and institutions. As a rule soap-box orators declaim against things about which they know little or nothing. A clear consciousness then of the good in the world, a clear understanding of the principles which bind this social world together is indispensable to the social reformer. To understand an object is to see through its defects to the positive qualities that constitute it; for nothing is made up of its own shortcomings. Hence we must place our faith in evolution rather than revolution. Any reform that is to be made must be founded in the good at present working in the world.
It cannot be said that Shelley had a clear consciousness of the social forces at work in society or of the good being done by the institutions of his time. He admitted himself that he detested history, and one cannot form a just estimate of institutions without knowing something about their history. Had he known something about the real history of Christianity or of the development of constitutional government in England he would not probably have been the radical that he was. He did not see that the institutions of his time were the product of the efforts of generations of men; he did not realize that the social structure is the most complicated and delicate of all the products of human nature, and consequently did not appreciate the folly of some of the radical changes he proposed.