The Nature of Goodness

by George Herbert Palmer

Perhaps there was only one farther step possible. Philosophy itself, the study of mind, might be regarded as a study of the unconscious. And this step has been taken. Books now bear the paradoxical title "Philosophy of the Unconscious," and investigation of the sub- conscious processes is perhaps the most distinctive trait of philosophy to-day. More and more it is believed that we cannot adequately explore a person without probing beneath consciousness. The blind processes can no longer be ruled out. Nature and spirit cannot be parted as our fathers supposed they might. Probably Kant is the last great scholar who will ever try to hold that distinction firm, and he is hardly successful. In spite of his vigorous antitheses, hints of covert connection between the opposed forces are not absent. Indeed, if the two are so widely parted as his usual language asserts, it is hard to see how his ethics can have mundane worth. Curiously enough too, at the very time when Kant was reviving this ancient distinction, and offering it as the solid basis of personal and social life, the opposite belief received its most clamorous announcement, resounding through the civilized world in the teachings of Rousseau. Rousseau warns us that the conscious constructions of man are full of artifice and deceit, and lead to corruption and pain. Conscious guidance should, consequently, be banished, and man should return to the peace, the ease, and the certainty of nature.

V

Now I do not think it is worth while to blame or praise a movement so vast as this. If it is folly to draw an indictment against a nation, it is greater folly to indict all modern civilization. We must not say that philosophy and the fine arts took a wrong turn at the Renaissance,—at least it is useless to call on them now to turn back. The world seldom turns back. It absorbs, it re-creates, it brings new significance into the older thought. All progress, Goethe tells us, is spiral,—coming out at the place where it was before, but higher up. No, we cannot wisely blame or praise, but we may patiently study and understand. That is what I am attempting to do here. The movement described is no negligible accident of our time. It is world-wide, and shows progress steadily in a single direction.

In order, however, to prove that such a change in moral estimates has occurred, it was hardly necessary to survey the course of history. The evidence lies close around us, and is found in the standards of the society in which we move. Who are the people most prized? Are they the most self-conscious? That should be the case if our long argument is sound. Our preceding chapters would urge us to fill life with consciousness. In proportion as consciousness droops, human goodness becomes meagre; as our acts are filled with it, they grow excellent. These are our theoretic conclusions, but the experience of daily life does not bear them out. If, for example, I find the person who is talking to me watches each word he utters, pauses again and again for correction, choosing the determined word and rejecting the one which instinctively comes to his lips, I do not trust what he says, or even listen to it; while he is shaping his exact sentences I attend to something else. In general, if a man's small actions impress us as minutely planned, we turn from him. It is not the self-reflecting persons, cautious of all they do, say, or think, who are popular. It is rather those instinctively spontaneous creatures characterized by abandon—men and women who let themselves go, and with all the wealth of the world in them, allow it to come out of itself—that we take to our hearts. We prize them for their want of deliberation. In short, we give our unbiased endorsement not to the spiritual or consciously guided person, but to him, on the contrary, who shows the closest adjustment to nature.

VI

Yet even so, we have gone too far afield for evidence. First we surveyed the ages, then we surveyed one another. But there is one proof-spot nearer still. Let us survey ourselves. I am much mistaken if there are not among my readers persons who have all their lives suffered from self-consciousness. They have longed to be rid of it, to be free to think of the other person, of the matter in hand. Instead of this, their thoughts are forever reverting to their own share in any affair. Too contemptible to be avowed, and more distressing than almost any other species of suffering, excessive self-consciousness shames us with our selfishness, yet will not allow us to turn from it. When I go into company where everybody is spontaneous and free, easily uttering what the occasion calls for, I can utter only what I call for and not at all what the occasion asks. Between the two demands there is always an awkward jar. When tortured by such experiences it does not soothe to have others carelessly remark, "Oh, just be natural!" That is precisely what we should like to be, but how? That little point is continually left unexplained. Yet obviously self- consciousness involves something like a deadlock. For how can one consciously exert himself to be unconscious and try not to try? We cannot arrange our lives so as to have no arrangement in them, and when shaking hands with a friend, for example, be on our guard against noticing. Once locked up in this vicious circle, we seem destined to be prisoners forever. That is what constitutes the anguish of the situation. The most tyrannical of jailers—one's self—is over us, and from his bondage we are powerless to escape. The trouble is by no means peculiar to our time, though probably commoner forty years ago than at any other period of the world's history. But it had already attracted the attention of Shakespeare, who bases on it one of his greatest plays. When Hamlet would act, self-consciousness stands in his way. The hindering process is described in the famous soliloquy with astonishing precision and vividness, if only we substitute our modern term "self-consciousness" for that which was its ancient equivalent:—

"Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought;
And enterprises of great pith and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action."

And such is our experience. We, too, have purposed all manner of important and serviceable acts; but just as we were setting them in execution, consideration fell upon us. We asked whether it was the proper moment, whether he to whom it was to be done was really needy, or were we the fit doer, or should it be done in this way or that. We hesitated, and the moment was gone. Self-consciousness had again demonstrated its incompetence for superintending a task. Many of us, far from regarding self-consciousness as a ground of goodness, are disposed to look upon it as a curse.

VII

Before, however, attempting to discover whether our theoretic conclusions may he drawn into some sort of living accord with these results of experience, let us probe a little more minutely into these latter, and try to learn what reasons there may be for this very general distrust of self-consciousness as a guide. Hitherto I have exhibited that distrust as a fact. We always find it so; our neighbors find it so, the ages have found it so. But why? I have not pointed out precisely the reasons for the continual fact. Let me devote a page or two to rational diagnosis.