Nosce te ipsum—know thyself: this, according to the oracle, is [p467] the beginning, the middle, and the end of the moral and political sciences.
As we have elsewhere remarked, in what concerns man or human society, Harmony can never mean Perfection, but only Improvement. Now improvement or perfectibility implies always, to a certain extent, imperfection in the future as well as in the past. If man could ever find his way into the promised land of absolute Good, he would no longer have occasion to use his understanding and his senses—he would be no longer man.
Evil exists. It is inherent in human infirmity. It manifests itself in the moral as in the material world; in the masses, as in the individual; in the whole as in the part. But because the eye may suffer and be lost, does the physiologist overlook the harmonious mechanism of that admirable organ? Does he deny the ingenious structure of the human body, because that body is subject to pain, to disease, and to death—to such extremity of suffering as caused Job, in the depth of his despair, “to say to corruption, Thou art my father; and to the worm, Thou art my mother and my sister”? In the same way, because the social order will never bring mankind to the fancied haven of absolute good, is the economist to refuse to recognise all that is marvellous in the organization of the social order—an organization prepared with a view to the constantly-increasing diffusion of knowledge, of morality, and of happiness?
Strange! that we should deny to economic science the same right to admire the natural order of things which we concede to physiology. For, after all, what difference is there between the individual and the collective being, as regards the harmony displayed by final causes? The individual, no doubt, comes into existence, grows and is developed, educates and improves himself as life advances, until the time comes when his light and life are to be communicated to others. At that moment everything about him is clothed in the hues of beauty; all breathes grace and joy; all is expansion, affection, benevolence, love, and harmony. For a while, his intelligence continues to be enlarged and confirmed, as if to qualify him to be the guide of those whom he has just called to tread the crooked paths of human existence. But soon his beauty fades, his grace disappears, his senses are blunted, his body becomes feeble, his memory clouded, his thoughts less bright; his affections even (except in the case of some choice spirits) get clogged with egotism, and lose that charm, that freshness, that sincerity and simplicity, that depth and disinterestedness, which distinguished his [p468] earlier days;—the poetry of life has fled. In spite of all the ingenious precautions which nature has taken to retard his dissolution—precautions which physiology sums up in the phrase vis medicatrix—he treads back the path of improvement, and loses, one after another, all his acquisitions by the way; he goes on from privation to privation, until he reaches that which is the greatest of all, because it includes all. The genius of optimism itself can discover nothing consolatory, nothing harmonious in this slow but unavoidable decadence—in seeing that being once so proud and so beautiful descending sadly into the tomb. . . . . . The tomb! . . . . . But is not that the door of another habitation? . . . . . It is thus, when science stops short, that religion[106] renews, even for the individual, in another region, the concordant harmonies which have been interrupted here.[107]
Despite this fatal dénoûment, does physiology cease to see in the human body the most perfect masterpiece which ever proceeded from its Creator’s hands?
But if the social body is liable to suffering, if it may suffer even to death, it is not for that reason finally condemned. Let men say what they will, it has not, in perspective, after having been elevated to its apogee, an inevitable decline. The crash of empires even is not the retrogradation of humanity, and the ancient models of civilisation have only been dissolved in order to make room for a civilisation still more advanced. Dynasties may be extinguished; the forms of government may be changed; yet the progress of the human race may not the less be continued. The fall of States is like the fall of leaves in autumn. It fertilizes the soil; contributes to the return of spring; and promises to future generations a richer vegetation, and more abundant harvests. Nay, even in a purely national point of view, this theory of necessary decadence is as false as it is antiquated. In the life of no people can we possibly perceive any cause of inevitable decline. The analogy which has so frequently given rise to a comparison between a nation and an individual, and led men to attribute to the one as to the other an infancy and an old age, is nothing better than a false metaphor. A community is being incessantly renewed. Let its institutions be elastic and flexible, so that in place of coming in collision with [p469] those new powers to which the human mind gives birth, they shall be so organized as to admit of this expansion of intellectual energy and accommodate themselves to it; and we see no reason why such institutions should not flourish in eternal youth. But whatever may be thought of the fragility and fall of empires, it must never be forgotten that society, which in its aggregate represents the human race, is constituted upon more solid bases. The more we study it, the more we shall be convinced that it too, like the human body, is provided with a curative force, a vis medicatrix, which delivers it from the evils which afflict it; and that it carries in its bosom, moreover, a progressive force; and is by the latter urged on to improvements to which we can assign no limits.
If individual evil, then, does not weaken or invalidate physiological harmony, still less does collective evil weaken or invalidate social harmony.
But how are we to reconcile the existence of evil with the infinite goodness of God? I cannot explain what I do not understand.
All I shall say is, that this solution can no more be exacted from Political Economy than from Anatomy. These sciences, which are alike sciences of observation, study man as he is, without asking the Creator to reveal His impenetrable secrets.
Thus, I again repeat, harmony does not correspond with the idea of absolute perfection, but with that of indefinite improvement. It has pleased God to attach suffering to our nature, seeing that He has designed that in us feebleness should be anterior to force, ignorance to science, want to satisfaction, effort to result, acquisition to possession, destitution to wealth, error to truth, experience to foresight. I submit without murmuring to this ordinance, being able, moreover, to imagine no other combination. But if, by a mechanism as simple as it is ingenious, He has provided that all men should approximate to a common level, which is continually rising, if He assures them—by the very action of what we denominate evil—both of the duration and the diffusion of progress, then am I not only content to bow myself under His bountiful and almighty hand,—I bless that hand, I worship it, I adore it.