The Making of a Man

by James W. Lee

In the preamble to the Constitution, they specified certain objects for which, in their esteem, this government should be formed—union, domestic tranquillity, justice, liberty, welfare. Any government constituted by a document like that has for the basis of its existence the facts of human nature, as really as the law of gravity has for the basis of its existence the facts of the stars.

VII.

If it is necessary that man grasp the truth of things before he can determine the laws of things, we cannot fail to see how important it is that he have a proper theory of knowledge.

Man’s idea of law will correspond to his theory of knowledge. When the French people accepted Locke’s theory of knowing they immediately applied it to the laws, establishments, and institutions of the nation. They concluded logically, if all knowledge is of sensations, then there can be no authority for the belief in God, the immortality of the soul, or the divinity of law. These are universal and transcendent facts, but the mind has no capacity to know universal or transcendent facts. So society was to be dissolved into its constituent atoms, in order that individuals could arrange their lives on a universal, go-as-you-please principle. All existing laws and institutions were to be obliterated. Everything that was up was to be put down. There are to-day, scattered through the civilized states of Europe and in some parts of the United States, men who want to emancipate the people from the dominion of all authority. All this grows out of the fashionable and sensational theory of knowledge taught first by John Locke and David Hume, and within recent years by John Stuart Mill and Herbert Spencer. Here is the source of anarchy. There is not an influential anarchist in the world, but is one upon the basis of the physiological theory of knowledge. There is no objective reality, but such as is composed of material atoms. These have got their arrangement and collocations without the agency of any great co-ordinating mind. They come together in pairs and clusters and groups, by the aid of no power but such as issues from the unknowable. A man is no more a criminal for killing people than is the Mississippi River for overflowing its banks and drowning people. Men are mere products of nature, and their thoughts are only secretions of the brain. Laws and institutions are just the brain deposits of animals we call men, as dams across rivers and cells in gums are the deposits of the brains of beavers and bees.

In a document found on the person of a recent anarchist arrested by the authorities in England, it is asserted that the purpose of the anarchists is to put down all political, religious, and military authority; to burn all churches, palaces, soldier-barracks, fortresses, provisions, and to destroy all that has lived till now by business-work without contributing to it. From such documents we are to understand that the anarchists take it for granted that all laws and institutions among civilized peoples have been imposed arbitrarily by those who govern upon those who are governed; that the parties to be governed have as much right to ignore them as the governing parties had to make them; that there is in the universe no moral order to which the political and social orders among men correspond; that every man has the privilege of setting up his own order; that every engineer has the right to ignore the rails laid for the flanges of his wheels on the long roads leading out from the turntable, and the inestimable subjective liberty of pulling open the throttle valve and running out into the country according to his own sweet will. Suppose all the anarchists in the world should be sent to some great island so that they could test their own theories, would they not be under the necessity of founding some sort of a government? They would have to construct roads, devise ways and means for lights, water, and for protection against individual violence. Would they not have to bind themselves together by some kind of social contract, or compact? If a number of men should unite themselves into a syndicate for the purpose of building houses without reference to the laws of gravity, if they should declare it as their set purpose to so build houses as that the center of gravity should fall in a line outside the base, the whole company would be tried for lunacy and confined in the insane asylum. So the most summary and straightforward methods should be adopted for ridding society of all that class of men who propose to manage human affairs without reference to the facts of man’s nature and the laws of the universe. It is a question whether they should be put into an insane asylum or into a jail, for it is hard to determine which they have the most of: insane stupidity or insane meanness.

Society has made great advances, but every increment of progress has been along the lines of the eternal laws of the universe. Those laws were here before man appeared upon the stage of action; they will be here when he is gone. Men may doctor themselves with error about truth, and error about right, until they come to be great imbeciles; but the truth and the right will remain clear and immortal for the intellect and the will of the wise and the good.

VIII.

It is important, as never before, for those who see the truth and recognize the right to declare the same with all authority. It is said that the Emperor Henry IV. stood shivering two whole days and nights in the snows of the courtyard of Canossa Castle, suing piteously for permission to throw himself, in agonized submission, at the feet of Hildebrand. That he was shunned by his subjects more absolutely because of the ban that was upon him than he would have been had he been afflicted with the smallpox. This incident illustrates for us the authority wielded by the Church of the Middle Ages. The Church was then felt to be in touch with tremendous power. Its fulminations carried terror to the hearts of kings and subjects. What the Church declared should be done, or should be left undone, the people felt could only be disregarded at the peril of all hope for time and eternity. It not only declared the duties men were under the necessity of observing in order to save their souls, but the kind of thoughts men were under the necessity of thinking concerning the shape of the earth, the movements of the stars, and the structure of the human body, in order to save themselves from the odium of heresy. The Church reigned without a rival in all the civilized world. She was not expected to give any reason for her actions or her utterances. When she determined what the order of the solar system was, the brains of men were compelled, without question, to acquiesce. Even to doubt was to deny the faith. The Church dictated the policy of the stars without being at the trouble of studying the stars; and no other sidereal opinions were tolerated but such as she formulated and published.