So much for the religious motive of humility. Pleonexia, the driving force of the natural man, might be defined as its exact opposite. Etymologically, as an ethical term, pleonexia means simply the reaching out to grasp ever more and more, whether this impulse show itself in the grosser appetite for possessions, or in the ambition to overtop others in rank and honors, or in that universal craving which Hobbes regarded as the state of nature: “A general inclination of all mankind, a perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only in death.” To call this the natural state of man might seem to involve a libel against both nature and man, but by natural, as you see, is meant only the condition of mankind if all those restraints were excluded which we have defined as religious. And such a liberty has never lacked its advocates as being not only the natural but the rational, even the ideal rule of conduct. It would be easy to prove this by abundant citations from modern writers; indeed, the name of Nietzsche leaps to one’s lips; but as I have already trespassed on your patience by the introduction of Greek terms into my definitions, I will presume further by going for my illustrations to the people who coined the expression. In one of the dialogues of Plato, then, you may hear a respectable citizen of Athens rebuking Socrates for his fantastic notions of conduct, and arguing for what was really the popular code of morality:
The makers of laws are the many weak; and they make laws and distribute praises and censures with a view to themselves and to their own interests; and they terrify the mightier sort of men, and those who are able to get the better of them, in order that they may not get the better of them; and they say that dishonesty is shameful and unjust; meaning, when they speak of injustice, the desire to have more (pleon echein) than their neighbors, for knowing their own inferiority they are only too glad of equality.... I plainly assert that he who would truly live ought to allow his desires to wax to the uttermost, and not to chastise them; but when they have grown to their greatest he should have courage and intelligence to minister to them and to satisfy all his longings. And this I affirm to be natural justice and nobility. But the many cannot do so; and, therefore, they blame such persons, because they are ashamed of their own inability, which they desire to conceal, and hence they say that intemperance is base.
This is manifestly the Hobbian view of the natural state of man, thought out long before Hobbes, not to mention the naturalists of our own day. And it was not theory only, but practice. Turn to Thucydides’s History of the Peloponnesian War, which Hobbes translated, and from which, though this is not generally known, Hobbes borrowed the principles that stirred up the seventeenth century as Nietzsche troubled the nineteenth. Read there the famous debate between the envoys of Athens and the magistrates of Melos. The Athenians are advising the Melians, whose racial affinity was with Sparta, to submit their city to the empire of Athens; and to the Melians’ argument from justice they reply with cold-blooded candor:
“We tell you this, that we are here now both to enlarge our own dominions and also to confer about the saving of your city....” “But will you not accept?” plead the Melians, “that we remain quiet, and be your friends (whereas before we were your enemies), and take part with neither.” “No,” reply the Athenians, “for your enmity doth not so much hurt us as your friendship would be an argument of our weakness, and your hatred of our power, amongst those whom we bear rule over.... As for the favor of the gods, we expect to have it as well as you; for we neither do nor require anything contrary to what mankind hath decreed either concerning the worship of the gods or concerning themselves. For of the gods we think according to the common opinion; and of men that for certain, by necessity of nature, they will everywhere reign over such as they be too strong for. Neither did we make this law, nor are we the first that use it made, but as we found it, and shall leave it to posterity forever, so also we use it.”
Such was the philosophy of the natural man in ancient Greece, and such is the philosophy of the natural man to-day, however it may be disguised and glossed over; it is based on the instinctive motive of pleonexia, the “perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only in death.” I need not dwell on the kind of discontent it begets in the soul, a discontent intrinsically and totally opposite to that which accompanies the purely religious motive.
But you will say that these principles of conduct and the feelings that go with them are mere abstractions, fictions of the analytical reason; no man is, or can be, purely religious as I have defined the term, or purely naturalistic. And that is true, is in fact the point at which I am aiming. On the one hand, no man can utterly uproot the natural impulses out of his soul; and if a few men in a generation approach anywhere near it, the saints and martyrs and lonely sages, they are by their virtues cut off from the common life of mankind. Were all men, or even a considerable proportion of men, at any time to overcome the natural discontent that drives us on to seek greater possessions and higher honors and more power, then, surely, all ambition and invention would die, the wheels of progress would slacken and stop, civilization would fail, and society would sink back into barbarism, so far at least as we measure civilization and barbarism by physical standards. Such would be the issue of “content, the bane of industry.”
On the other hand, it will be said, and by none more loudly than by the champions of sentimental naturalism who belong to Mr. Dewey’s school, that the picture of the man controlled by the “perpetual and restless desire of power,” and by that alone, is a pure caricature of human nature. Even a Napoleon, they will say, who might stand for the model of such a monstrosity, yet had thought for the glory of his land, and was a great reformer of laws and institutions. So, too, the Athenian envoys in Thucydides, cynical as were their confessions of the desire of power to rule their own people and all peoples, nevertheless were compelled to mix some honey in their gall, and tried to persuade the Melians that the hegemony of Athens would be prudently exercised and would promote the well-being of her subject states.
Such an objection we readily grant. It is perfectly true that the creature in whom the instinct of greed and the lust of power should reign without modification or mitigation would be no man at all, but a ravening beast of prey. Both the religious man and the natural man, as I have portrayed them, are avowedly abstractions, at least to the extent that no society could exist if composed of either type in its purity. They are abstractions, but they are made such by abstracting one of the two contrasted impulses that do reign together in virtually every human breast, and by showing what would result if one of these impulses were so allowed an unhampered sway over a man’s conduct. And now and then, in some rare individual, the one or the other of these types has been realized almost in its purity, the religious type in a St. Francis of Assisi, with his ideals of poverty and chastity and obedience, the natural type, if not in a Napoleon or an Alexander, yet in certain notorious criminals who have raged through life with the ferocity of a starving wolf.
The truth we must recognize is that both these motives exist in the human heart, and that the conduct of man, not as the saint would see him in the cloister nor as the evolutionist would see him in the jungle, but as we see him in the market-place and the theatre and the courts and the home—that the conduct of man is a resultant from these two contrary impulsions.
Now, it is fair to say that religion has always recognized the legitimacy of another standard of life besides the one peculiarly its own. It has seen clearly that the ideal of poverty and chastity and obedience, which would uproot altogether the natural instincts, is possible for very few men, and that the attempt to enforce such a standard absolutely on society at large would result in a world of hypocrisies, if it did not actually run counter to the command of the Creator. So the Christian Church, even in its most ascetic days, admitted that property and marriage and prestige were the normal condition of life; and Buddhism drew up two distinct tables of law, one for the religious state pure and simple, the other for the mass of mankind who are engaged in practical affairs. But both Christianity and Buddhism held that the natural instincts were ruinous if left to themselves, and that they became salutary instruments of welfare only when limited and softened and illuminated by a law not of themselves.