Some writers teach that culture is most to be desired. The rapid growth of wealth in this country has forced upwards in the social scale a class of people destitute of culture and refinement. This class dominates society and takes the lead in fashion. Luxury and ostentation are everywhere prominent; extravagant modes of living prevail without the comfort of the former simpler and more genial modes, and this is side by side with poverty and destitution that do not decrease. Patronage, with its demoralizing influence on both classes, is the most conspicuous bond between the wealthy and the poor, and vulgarity of mind characterizes the age. There is little to surprise us in the fact that gentle, refined natures withdraw from public life into a narrow sphere, not necessarily a selfish one, but a sphere bounded and circumscribed by their own personal tastes and temperaments. Finding solace in intellectual pursuits and a pure elevated enjoyment in the study of art and literature, they adopt the theory that culture is the proper business of man. Sweetness and light have been held up as the panacea for all the ills of life and the “elevation of the masses” as the true social progress.
Other teachers, thinking less of intelligence than of moral sentiment, point to perfection of character as the aim of life. They recognize the marked diversity in human nature. Some intellects are slow and dull, incapable of being kindled into fervour or brightened into swift reflection, and culture for such is hopeless. But in God’s sight, surely, all men are equal. Birds without song have brilliant plumage to compensate the defect, and so with man. The “law of compensation” holds throughout humanity they have said, and, for the most part, hearts are deep and tender even when heads are dull. Our finest works of literature and art may fail to give one pleasurable sensation for lack of the special faculty to apprehend their beauty, but kindness makes the whole world kin. When the noble, generous, sympathetic side of human nature is appealed to there comes a quick response. Happiness is the aim of life, but happiness implies excellence of character, the emotional and moral elevation of all mankind.
That Ruskin’s views were similar to the above we learn from his Crown of Wild Olive. “Education,” he says there, “does not mean teaching people to know what they do not know—it means teaching them to behave as they do not behave. It is not teaching the youth of England the shape of letters and the tricks of numbers, and then leaving them to turn their arithmetic to roguery and their literature to lust. It is, on the contrary, training them into the perfect exercise and kingly continence of their body and souls by kindness, by watching, by warning, by precept and by praise—but, above all, by example.”
From the field of modern science there has come as yet no direct teaching on the subject of life’s duties and purpose, but two of our eminent scientists have thrown out hints that are important and significant. The late Professor Huxley says of his own career: “The objects I have had in view are briefly these—To promote the increase of natural knowledge and forward the application of scientific method to all problems of life—in the conviction that there is no alleviation for the sufferings of mankind except veracity of thought and action and the resolute facing of the world as it is when the garment of make-believe by which pious hands have hidden its uglier features is stripped off.” (Methods and Results, Essays by Thomas M. Huxley.)
Professor Sir Oliver Lodge has stated that new paths of investigation are opening up to science. Telepathy, clairvoyance and some other allied psychic states have been tested and found in the range of actual fact. They reveal qualities in man which although special to a few individuals only, are latent it may be in all, and point to an unknown province of nature to which man seems related independently of his five senses. It becomes evident that by the “resolute facing of the world as it is,” science is altering our conception of man’s existence and nature, and extending our vista of his future.
Positivist thinkers, who base their teaching on materialistic philosophy, have bright anticipations for the human race, although ages may elapse before the realization of their hopes; and the existence of poverty and misery in our midst is fully recognized, graphically described, and feelingly deplored. The exponents of Positivism are eloquent, cultured, refined. We want a new religion, they say, and without that, no rapid progress can be made. The public mind is all at sea, floating in a chaos of unfixed beliefs, and to reach settled convictions and formulate a creed is the crying need of our times. Religion is a scheme of thought and life whereby the whole effort of individual men and societies of men is concentrated in common and reciprocal activity with reference to a Superior Being which men and societies alike may serve. The Superior Being is collective humanity, and men’s true business is to understand and seek to perfect human nature and the social state.
A marked feature of present-day French literature, we are told, is a reaction of religious sentiment against the rule of scientific naturalism, and religious sentiment dominates in the strangely pathetic and fascinating journal of the Swiss author, Amiel, which has been widely read. “To win true peace,” says Amiel, “a man needs to feel himself in the right road, i.e., in order with God and the Universe. This faith gives strength and calm. I have not got it. Sybarite and dreamer,” so he addresses himself, “will you go on like this to the end for ever, tossed backwards and forwards between duty and happiness, incapable of choice and action? Is not life the test of our moral force? Are not inward waverings temptations of the soul?” To the question—Will all religions be suppressed by science? he replies: “All those that start from a false conception of nature, certainly,” and adds reflectively: “If the scientific conception of nature prove incapable of bringing harmony to man, what will happen?” To which he answers: “We shall have to build a moral city without God, without an immortality of the soul.” Then, protesting against Emil de Laveleyes’ notion that civilization could not last without belief in God and a future life, he exclaims: “A belief is not true because it is useful; and it is truth alone—scientific, established, proved and rational truth—which is capable of satisfying now-a-days the awakened minds of all classes.”
I have here presented what is only a meagre reflection of portions of our mental atmosphere, but I know of no clearer, more definite thoughts emanating from influential teachers calculated to throw light on the great enigma of life. It may seem to my readers that on these mental heights unanimity exists as little as on the lower planes of man’s discordant impulses, his confused and conflicting actions. Clearly we have no philosophy of life as groundwork to orderly personal and social action, no religion of vital power to bind the nations in one, no moral code adapted to the complexities of our social relations, and, above all, no steady belief in a universal love to sweeten society from end to end and create the requisite medium in which alone the nobler qualities of human nature will bud and blossom.
Nevertheless the diverse opinions held by the above thinkers are not irreconcilable. Carlyle’s “blessedness” is the feeling of harmony with the divine order of development in humanity and the universe, therefore it is identical with Amiel’s “true peace.” The Positivists’ “Supreme Being” is the perfected man whose endowments of sympathetic fellowship, emotional sweetness, intellectual light, moral strength, kingly continence of body and soul, and knowledge of truth are specialized and pointed to by George Eliot, Ruskin, Huxley and others. All have simply given expression to aspiration from the subjective side of their human nature conformably to the evolutionary process within themselves, and the attitude of mind produced thereby in each. Partial, but not contradictory views, characterise those thinkings. Beneath superficial differences there lurks a unanimous belief that harmony of life with conditions—viz., happiness, is the legitimate aim of life. A Humanity steadily moving in a given direction may be infinitely varied in detail, and since the correct philosophy of life must be a wide generalization embracing all, we need not wonder at its slowness to appear. Modern nationalities are only now emerging from the individualistic to pass into the socialistic stage of industrial development. Our popular writers and teachers, springing from a specialized class—not the main body of the people—instinctively show their limitations by individualistic or sectional modes of thought. Mark, for instance, the insufficiency, nay, the pathetic absurdity of the thought—Culture will cure the ills of life, in face of the fact that thousands in our midst to-day possess no intellectual desires whatever, while the appetites belonging to their physical nature which forms the very basis of life have never been properly met and satisfied.
In setting forth a definition of happiness we have to recognize the marvellous complexity of human nature. We have to take into account not only variations distinctive in, and native to, separate individuals, but the gradations and variations within each individual arising from progress, or the reverse, in his or her outward condition and inward development. Contentment means the satisfaction of desire. But desire may be directed to the physical plane, the emotional plane, the mental plane, the spiritual plane. The harmony of all life is happiness, and brings blessedness or peace.