3. We Judge Others by Ourselves Because We Have No Other Way to Judge.—It is impossible for a man who conceives his own good to be in "going without," in just restricting himself, to have any large or adequate idea of the good of others. Unconsciously and inevitably a hardening and narrowing of the conditions of the lives of others accompanies the reign of the Puritanic ideal. The man who takes a high view of the capacities of human nature in itself, who reverences its possibilities and is jealous for their high maintenance in himself, is the one most likely to have keen and sensitive appreciation of the needs of others. There is, moreover, no selfishness, no neglect of others more thoroughgoing, more effectively cruel than that which comes from preoccupation with the attainment of personal goodness, and this interest is an almost inevitable effect of devotion to the negative ideal of self-denial.
4. The Principle Radically Violates Human Nature.—This indeed is its claim—that human nature, just as human nature, requires to have violence done it. But the capacities which constitute the self demand fulfillment. The place, the time, the manner, the degree, and the proportion of their fulfillment, require infinite care and pains, and to secure this attention is the business of morals. Morals is a matter of direction, not of suppression. The urgency of desires and capacities for expression cannot be got rid of; nature cannot be expelled. If the need of happiness, of satisfaction of capacity, is checked in one direction, it will manifest itself in another. If the direction which is checked is an unconscious and wholesome one, that which is taken will be likely to be morbid and perverse. The one who is conscious of continually denying himself cannot rid himself of the idea that it ought to be "made up" to him; that a compensating happiness is due him for what he has sacrificed, somewhat increased, if anything, on account of the unnatural virtue he has displayed.[170] To be self-sacrificing is to "lay up" merit, and this achievement must surely be rewarded with happiness—if not now, then later. Those who habitually live on the basis of conscious self-denial are likely to be exorbitant in the demands which they make on some one near them, some member of their family or some friend; likely to blame others if their own "virtue" does not secure for itself an exacting attention which reduces others to the plane of servility. Often the doctrine of self-sacrifice leads to an inverted hedonism: we are to be good—that is, to forego pleasure—now, that we may have a greater measure of enjoyment in some future paradise of bliss. Or, the individual who has taken vows of renunciation is entitled by that very fact to represent spiritual authority on earth and to lord it over others.
§ 2. SELF-ASSERTION
The idea that morality consists in an unbridled assertion of self, in its forceful aggressive manifestation, rarely receives consistent theoretical formulation—possibly because most men are so ready to act upon it practically that explicit acknowledgment would be a hindrance rather than a help to the idea. But it is a doctrine which tends to be invoked more or less explicitly as a reaction from the impotency of the self-denial dogma. In reference to some superior individual or class, some leader or group of aristocratically ordained leaders, it is always a more or less conscious principle. Concerning these it is held that ordinary morality holds eventually only for the "common herd," the activities of the leader being amenable to a higher law than that of common morality.[171] Moreover, since the self-sacrifice morality is almost never carried out consistently—that is, to the point of monastic asceticism,—much popular morality is an unbalanced combination of self-sacrifice in some regards and ruthless self-assertion in others. It is not "practicable" to carry out the principle of self-denial everywhere; it is reserved for the family life, for special religious duties; in business (which is business, not morals), the proper thing is aggressive and unremitting self-assertion. In business, the end is success, to "make good"; weakness is failure, and failure is disgrace, dishonor. Thus in practice the two conceptions of self-denial in one region and self-assertion in another mutually support each other. They give occasion for the more or less unformulated, yet prevalent, idea that moral considerations (those of self-denial) apply to a limited phase of life, but have nothing to do with other regions in which accordingly the principle of "efficiency" (that is, personal success, wealth, power obtained in competitive victory) holds supreme sway.
Recently, however, there has sprung up a so-called "naturalistic" school of ethics which has formulated explicitly the principle of self-assertion, and which claims to find scientific sanction for it in the evolutionary doctrine of Darwin. Evolution, it says, is the great thing, and evolution means the survival of the fit in the struggle for existence. Nature's method of progress is precisely, so it is said, ruthless self-assertion—to the strong the victory, to the victorious the spoils, and to the defeated, woe. Nature affords a scene of egoistic endeavor or pressure, suffer who may, of struggle to get ahead, that is, ahead of others, even by thrusting them down and out. But the justification of this scene of rapine and slaughter is that out of it comes progress, advance, everything that we regard as noble and fair. Excellence is the sign of excelling; the goal means outrunning others. The morals of humility, of obedience to law, of pity, sympathy, are merely a self-protective device on the part of the weak who try to safeguard their weakness by setting fast limitations to the activities of the truly strong (compare what was said of the not dissimilar doctrine among the Greeks, pp. 120-22). But the truly moral man, in whom the principle of progress is embodied, will break regardlessly through these meshes and traps. He will carry his own plans through to victorious achievement. He is the super-man. The mass of men are simply food for his schemes, valuable as furnishing needed material and tools.[172]
Practical Vogue of the Underlying Idea.—Such a theory, in and of itself, is a literary diversion for those who, not being competent in the fields of outer achievement, amuse themselves by idealizing it in writing. Like most literary versions of science, it rests upon a pseudo-science, a parody of the real facts. But at a time when economic conditions are putting an extraordinary emphasis upon outward achievement, upon success in manipulating natural and social resources, upon "efficiency" in exploiting both inanimate energies and the minds and bodies of other persons, the underlying principle of this theory has a sanction and vogue which is out of all proportion to the number of those who consciously entertain it as a theory. For a healthy mind, the frank statement and facing of the theory is its best criticism. Its bald brutalism flourishes freely only when covered and disguised. But in view of the forces at present, and especially in America, making for a more or less unconscious acceptance of its principle in practice, it may be advisable to say something (1) regarding its alleged scientific foundation, and (2) the inadequacy of its conception of efficiency.
1. The Theory Exaggerates the Rôle of Antagonistic Competitive Struggle in the Darwinian Theory.—(a) The initial step in any "progress" is variation; this is not so much struggle against other organisms, as it is invention or discovery of some new way of acting, involving better adaptation of hitherto merely latent natural resources, use of some possible food or shelter not previously utilized. The struggle against other organisms at work preserves from elimination a species already fixed—quite a different thing from the variation which occasions the introduction of a higher or more complex species. (b) Moreover, so far as the Darwinian theory is concerned, the "struggle for existence" may take any conceivable form; rivalry in generosity, in mutual aid and support, may be the kind of competition best fitted to enable a species to survive. It not only may be so, but it is so within certain limits. The rage for survival, for power, must not be asserted indiscriminately; the mate of the other sex, the young, to some extent other individuals of the same kin, are spared, or, in many cases, protected and nourished.[173] (c) The higher the form of life, the more effective the two methods just suggested: namely, the method of intelligence in discovering and utilizing new methods, tools, and resources as substituted for the direct method of brute conflict; and the method of mutual protection and care substituted for mutual attack and combat. It is among the lower forms of life, not as the theory would require among the higher types, that conditions approximate its picture of the gladiatorial show. The higher species among the vertebrates, as among insects (like ants and bees), are the "sociable" kinds. It is sometimes argued that Darwinism carried into morals would abolish charity: all care of the hopelessly invalid, of the economically dependent, and in general of all the weak and helpless except healthy infants. It is argued that our current standards are sentimental and artificial, aiming to make survive those who are unfit, and thus tending to destroy the conditions that make for advance, and to introduce such as make towards degeneration. But this argument (1) wholly ignores the reflex effect of interest in those who are ill and defective in strengthening social solidarity—in promoting those ties and reciprocal interests which are as much the prerequisites of strong individual characters as they are of a strong social group. And (2) it fails to take into account the stimulus to foresight, to scientific discovery, and practical invention, which has proceeded from interest in the helpless, the weak, the sick, the disabled, blind, deaf, and insane. Taking the most coldly scientific view, the gains in these two respects have, through the growth of social pity, of care for the unfortunate, been purchased more cheaply than we can imagine their being bought in any other way. In other words, the chief objection to this "naturalistic" ethics is that it overlooks the fact that, even from the Darwinian point of view, the human animal is a human animal. It forgets that the sympathetic and social instincts, those which cause the individual to take the interests of others for his own and thereby to restrain his sheer brute self-assertiveness, are the highest achievements, the high-water mark of evolution. The theory urges a systematic relapse to lower and foregone stages of biological development.
2. Its Conception of "Power," "Efficiency," "Achievement" is Perverse.—Compared with the gospel of abstinence, of inefficiency, preached by the self-denial school, there is an element of healthy reaction in any ethical system which stresses positive power, positive success, positive attainment. Goodness has been too much identified with practical feebleness and ineptitude; strength and solidity of accomplishment, with unscrupulousness. But power for the sake of power is as unreal an abstraction as self-denial for the sake of sacrifice, or self-restraint for the sake of the mere restraint. Erected into a central principle, it takes means for end—the fallacy of all materialism. It makes little of many of the most important and excellent inherent ingredients of happiness in its eagerness to master external conditions of happiness. Sensitive discrimination of complex and refined distinctions of worth, such as good taste, the resources of poetry and history, frank and varied social converse among intellectual equals, the humor of sympathetic contemplation of the spectacle of life, the capacity to extract happiness from solitude and society, from nature and from art:—all of these, as well as the more obvious virtues of sympathy and benevolence, are swept aside for one coarse undiscriminating ideal of external activity, measured by sheer quantity of external changes made and external results accumulated. Of such an ideal we may say, as Mill said, that the judge of good, of happiness, is the one who has experienced its various forms; and that as "no intelligent person would consent to be a fool" on account of the pleasures of the fool, so no man of cultivated spirit would consent to be a lover of "efficiency" and "power" for the sake of brute command of the external commodities of nature and man.
Present Currency of This Ideal.—In spite of the extraordinary currency of this ideal at present, there is little fear that it will be permanently established. Human nature is too rich and varied in its capacities and demands; the world of nature and society is too fruitful in sources of stimulus and interest for man to remain indefinitely content with the idea of power for power's sake, command of means for the mere sake of the means. Humanity has long lived a precarious and a stunted life because of its partial and easily shaken hold on natural resources. Starved by centuries of abstinence enforced through lack of control of the forces and methods of nature, taught the gospel of the merit of abstention, it is not surprising that it should be intoxicated when scientific discovery bears its fruit of power in utilization of natural forces, or that, temporarily unbalanced, it should take the external conditions of happiness for happiness itself. But when the values of material acquisition and achievement become familiar they will lose the contrast value they now possess; and human endeavor will concern itself mainly with the problem of rendering its conquests in power and efficiency tributary to the life of intelligence and art and of social communication.[174] Such a moral idealism will rest upon a more secure and extensive natural foundation than that of the past, and will be more equitable in application and saner in content than that with which aristocracies have made us familiar. It will be a democratic ideal, a good for all, not for a noble class; and it will include, not exclude, those physical and physiological factors which aristocratic idealisms have excluded as common and unclean.