Reason and the Tree of Mankind.—What you all fear in your senile short-sightedness, regarding the over-population of the world, gives the more hopeful a mighty task. Man is some day to become a tree overshadowing the whole earth, with millions upon millions of buds that shall all grow to fruits side by side, and the earth itself shall be prepared for the nourishment of this tree. That the shoot, tiny as yet, may increase in sap and strength; that the sap may flow in countless channels for the nutrition of the whole and the parts—from these and similar tasks we must derive our standard for measuring whether a man of to-day is useful or worthless. The task is unspeakably great and adventurous: let us all contribute our share to prevent the tree from rotting before its time! The historically trained mind will no doubt succeed in calling up the human activities of all the ages before its eyes, as the community of ants with its cunningly wrought mounds stands before our eyes. Superficially judged, mankind as a whole, like ant-kind, might admit of our speaking of “instinct.” On a closer examination we observe how whole nations, [pg 290] nay whole centuries, take pains to discover and test new means of benefiting the great mass of humanity, and thus finally the great common fruit-tree of the world. Whatever injury the individual nations or periods may suffer in this testing process, they have each become wise through this injury, and from them the tide of wisdom slowly pours over the principles of whole races and whole epochs. Ants too go astray and make blunders. Through the folly of its remedies, mankind may well go to rack and ruin before the proper time. There is no sure guiding instinct for the former or the latter. Rather must we boldly face the great task of preparing the earth for a plant of the most ample and joyous fruitfulness—a task set by reason to reason!
190.
The Praise of Disinterestedness and its Origin.—Between two neighbouring chieftains there was a long-standing quarrel: they laid waste each other's territories, stole cattle, and burnt down houses, with an indecisive result on the whole, because their power was fairly equal. A third, who from the distant situation of his property was able to keep aloof from these feuds, yet had reason to dread the day when one of the two neighbours should gain a decisive preponderance, at last intervened between the combatants with ceremonial goodwill. Secretly he lent a heavy weight to his peace proposal by giving either to understand that he would henceforth join forces with the other against the one who strove to break the peace. [pg 291] They met in his presence, they hesitatingly placed into his hand the hands that had hitherto been the tools and only too often the causes of hatred—and then they really and seriously tried to keep the peace. Either saw with astonishment how suddenly his prosperity and his comfort increased; how he now had as neighbour a dealer ready to buy and sell instead of a treacherous or openly scornful evil-doer; how even, in unforeseen troubles, they could reciprocally save each other from distress, instead of, as before, making capital out of this distress of his neighbour and enhancing it to the highest degree. It even seemed as if the human type had improved in both countries, for the eyes had become brighter, the forehead had lost its wrinkles; all now felt confidence in the future—and nothing is more advantageous for the souls and bodies of men than this confidence. They saw each other every year on the anniversary of the alliance, the chieftains as well as their retinue, and indeed before the eyes of the mediator, whose mode of action they admired and revered more and more, the greater the profit that they owed to him became. Then his mode of action was called disinterested. They had looked far too fixedly at the profit they had reaped themselves hitherto to see anything more of their neighbour's method of dealing than that his condition in consequence of this had not altered so much as their own; he had rather remained the same: and thus it appeared that the former had not had his profit in view. For the first time people said to themselves that disinterestedness was a virtue. It is true that in minor private matters similar circumstances [pg 292] had arisen, but men only had eyes for this virtue when it was depicted on the walls in a large script that was legible to the whole community. Moral qualities are not recognised as virtues, endowed with names, held in esteem, and recommended as worthy of acquisition until the moment when they have visibly decided the happiness and destiny of whole societies. For then the loftiness of sentiment and the excitation of the inner creative forces is in many so great, that offerings are brought to this quality, offerings from the best of what each possesses. At its feet the serious man lays his seriousness, the dignified man his dignity, women their gentleness, the young all the wealth of hope and futurity that in them lies; the poet lends it words and names, sets it marching in the procession of similar beings, gives it a pedigree, and finally, as is the way of artists, adores the picture of his fancy as a new godhead—he even teaches others to adore. Thus in the end, with the co-operation of universal love and gratitude, a virtue becomes, like a statue, a repository of all that is good and honourable, a sort of temple and divine personage combined. It appears thenceforward as an individual virtue, as an absolute entity, which it was not before, and exercises the power and privileges of a sanctified super-humanity.—In the later days of Greece the cities were full of such deified human abstractions (if one may so call them). The nation, in its own fashion, had set up a Platonic “Heaven of Ideas” on earth, and I do not think that its inhabitants were felt to be less alive than any of the old Homeric divinities.
191.
Days of Darkness.—“Days of Darkness” is the name given in Norway to the period when the sun remains below the horizon the whole day long. The temperature then falls slowly but continually.—A fine simile for all thinkers for whom the sun of the human future is temporarily eclipsed.
192.
The Philosophy of Luxury.—A garden, figs, a little cheese, and three or four good friends—that was the luxury of Epicurus.
193.
The Epochs of Life.—The real epochs of life are those brief periods of cessation midway between the rise and decline of a dominating idea or emotion. Here once again there is satisfaction: all the rest is hunger and thirst—or satiety.